Joseph Smith, what are you doing here?
My 11th grade boyfriend was probably my favorite to this day. He was a tall Mormon with huge curly blondish-brown hair, he played guitar and sang in a band, and he worked at the planetarium putting on laser light shows for the stoner kids, a.k.a. my friends. Our favorite was Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and I thought I was the coolest kid in school because my boyfriend could make the stars appear indoors (I’m sure pot was somehow involved in this amazement). Did I mention he was Mormon? His dad had disappeared the summer before we started dating, which made him dark and disturbed and made me want to hug him all the time. Thus begins my lifelong desire for the broken ones I can fix.
Our first date he picked me up in his green Jeep wrangler, took me to see “The Little Mermaid” and bought me Swedish fish. To this day I can’t eat a Swedish fish without thinking about him and his curly hair and his mother yelling at us to turn off “South Park” because it was the devil’s television show. We thought we were a walking version of the nonexistent joke, “A Mormon and a Jew are dating…” and he broke up with me after he caught me sneaking a small bottle of alcohol into a Monster Truck Rally. I later found out he was on fairly heavy drugs for the last 3 months of our relationship, and he actually quoted what I believe was the Book of Mormon when he sent an apology letter from his Mission trip in Germany, saying something about glass castles and stones.
