“It’s Not About the Sex” My Ass (3 page)

Someday my prince will come

In the millennium

And then he will say to me

Will you be my number three?

We were being facetious. Or, in my case, sort of facetious.
I knew my church had banned polygamy 70 years before I was born and rigorously
quashed speculation about its return. But I couldn’t repress the thought,
I bet that’s going to happen to me.
At
times it seemed to me that the only way I would catch a man would be if God
reinstated polygamy. Or maybe after I died a merciful God would add me to a
righteous dead Mormon man’s collection in the hereafter. Such a cheery thought.

Sometimes friends set me up on blind dates. There was never
a second date.

Spinsterhood loomed as I neared college graduation. I
fretted about dying an old maid—which in Mormondom starts at around 21
years old—and ending up a plural wife to a stranger in heaven. Once, not
quite half-joking, I said to my unjustly cute roommate at BYU, “If I never get
married, can I be a plural wife in your family?” She declined to half-joke
back, much less full-joke back.

I finished BYU in 1982 with a degree in interior design and
found work in the interior design department of the Temples Division of the
Mormon Church in downtown Salt Lake City. Thanks to surgery, the hyperhidrosis
was gone, but the schnoz and the IBS remained. And I was still 6 feet tall.

Perhaps you can understand why after our initial blind date,
all Jeff had to do to sweep me off my feet was show up for a second date.
Hallelujah, he did.

I didn’t care that he had an ex-wife and two kids. I didn’t
care that he was a chiropractor. He was available. He had a career. He had his
own place and a car. He wasn’t a total creep. He stood six inches taller than I
did. (I could wear heels!) He was a catch by many standards. Compared with no
man at all, he was a beyond-belief catch.

Ten days after our first date, we were engaged. Two months
after that, in August 1987, we were married. Mormons aren’t known for letting
prenuptial grass grow.

I felt … cherished? No, that wasn’t quite it. Blessed? Not
really.

Rescued?

Ah. That was it.

I think Jeff knew it, too. I made it no secret that he was
not just the best prospect to come along, but the only prospect. We seemed
agreed on the point that I was damned lucky he paid any attention to me at all.

Why he did was beyond me. Jeff was a tall, good-looking man
with a taste for gorgeous women. Based on the number of gorgeous women who
flirted with him, wedding ring aside, they seemed to have a taste for him, too.
As you may have picked up on by now, I didn’t feel I belonged in the Beautiful
Women category. I grew accustomed to feeling inferior to every woman who walked
by.

One day I asked Jeff what made the unabated flow of flirting
women so much prettier than I was. “It’s your nose,” he said. Well, that could
be solved easily enough.
If God had
intended for me to endure life with a big honker,
I thought,
he wouldn’t have created rhinoplasty.

I still felt inferior after the nose job. But with a
prettier nose.

We had been married for five years and had three small
children when Jeff attended a 1992 meeting of the Utah Association of
Chiropractic Physicians. There, one of his fellow chiropractors raved to him
about a set of videotapes. He said that they revealed secret knowledge about
the Second Coming of Christ. Jeff was intrigued. A few days after the meeting,
he purchased a set of the tapes.

We popped the first tape into the VCR and sat back to watch.
Weaving together passages from the Bible, Book of Mormon and other Mormon
scriptures, the nerdy fellow peering out at us from inside our TV demonstrated,
step by step and diagram by diagram, that he knew when the Second Coming of
Christ would happen. It wasn’t just soon. It was alarmingly soon.

If you’re thinking, “But of that day and hour knoweth no
man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only,” be serious. Yeah, sure,
Jesus said that. But he was speaking to the masses. As the apostle Paul
explained to the Corinthians, masses are better suited to milk than to meat. By
telling them that the date was unknown, Jesus was giving them milk and
withholding the meat for their own good. The meat was only for those who could
take it.

Since we understood and believed the nerdy man on the tube,
it followed that Jeff and I ranked among those who could take it. We could
handle meat. We were among the Chosen. We were the Elect.

If that sounds a little weird to you, well, I agree. But we
had grown up Mormon, which meant growing up with a tolerance for cognitive
dissonance, that is, for living peacefully with things that don’t quite add up.
Polygamy was just one of them. To us, it was a short leap from approved Mormon
teachings to unapproved ones. Nutty ideas felt familiar, even exciting.

Indeed, the nuttiness of Elect-ness resonated. No less than
the Book of Mormon says, “…it is given unto many to know the mysteries of God.”
It seemed reasonable to us, then, that it could be given unto the nerdy guy on
the video to know a mystery or two. And if it could be given unto him, it
seemed reasonable that it could be given unto us, too. Besides, Elect-ness was
exciting, intoxicating. There’s nothing like a meek, humble awareness of the
fact that you’re better than everybody else to confirm the rightness of your
course.

By the end of the final video, we were convinced.

Psyched as I was, I was also scared. The Mormon Church
advises—warns—members not to speculate about the Second Coming.
Taking literally the part about “of that day and hour knoweth no man,” it urges
members to avoid obsessing on exactly what day Jesus will come and instead to
remain worthy on general principle. We were teetering on the brink of apostasy
from the Mormon Church, and I knew it.

Apostasy
isn’t a
word you hear every day, but people in Mormon circles bandy it about with
gusto. It refers to renouncing one’s belief or breaking away from a group. For
Mormons, apostasy is serious, excommunication-worthy stuff. Straying from core
Mormon teachings is right up there with committing a felony or having a tryst
with someone who isn’t your lawfully wedded spouse. Do any one of those things,
and your church leaders will likely invite you to be tried in what they
famously refer to as a “court of love,” where they will excommunicate your ass.

Fear prevailed. We chucked the videos.

But before long, morbid curiosity and the lure of Elect-ness
returned and took over, this time to stay. We replaced the videos, devoured
books on the subject, and searched out clandestine meetings with the
like-minded.

“To prove yourselves worthy of God’s kingdom on earth, you
will be required to live the law of plural marriage.” There it was. Out in the
open at last.

While women around me recoiled in horror, I accepted it as a
challenge. It was the sort of challenge that a stalwart member of the Elect
such as I could handle.

A small part of me truly felt like a valiant servant of the
Lord. Yet, looking back, I think a bigger part of me felt sad, resigned. That
part of me thought,
Why not? I’ve never
been special to anyone. Other women routinely covet my husband. I’m used to
sharing him, at least mentally. This way, they can covet him with my knowledge
and blessing. I can feel like I’m in control.

Yup. I could accept polygamy. I could even plaster on a
happy face and tell myself I wasn’t a wimp, but a stalwart who was willing to
do “whatsoever the Lord God shall command.” Perhaps the other women in the room
thought I was nuts. In my burgeoning delusion, they admired me.

And it shall come to pass among the wicked, that every
man that will not take his sword against his neighbor must needs flee unto Zion
for safety.

—Doctrine and Covenants 45:68

Zion is Manti, Utah.

—James Dee Harmston, prophet, who happened to live
in Manti, Utah

Ask anyone who works in a restaurant: The surest way to get
customers to burn their hands is to say, “Don’t touch this plate. It’s hot.”

Likewise, when a Mormon official publicly warned church
members to stay away not just from polygamist cults in general, but in
particular from a Manti, Utah, cult under the leadership of a fellow by the
name of James Dee Harmston, it only served to fan our already-smoldering
curiosity. We found Harmston in a Manti phone book. A few days later, our kids
enjoyed a brief stay with Grandma and Grandpa while we headed 82 miles south to
Manti. The year was 1993.

Manti (rhymes with “anti” by, I think, pure coincidence) has
a little over 3,000 residents and sits about dead center in Utah. We stayed in
our second home in the nearby town of Mount Pleasant. We had bought the
charming, 100-year-old bungalow a year earlier when our study group leader
convinced us that Mount Pleasant was the “safe place.” That is, it was the
place where the Elect would gather to enjoy God’s protection from the wars,
famine, and pestilences that were going to usher in the Second Coming.

Harmston told us that we had the right idea but were 22
miles off target. The
real
safe place
wasn’t Mount Pleasant, but Manti. Imagine our chagrin.

That was just the beginning of what we learned from
Harmston.

Former real estate agent Jim Harmston looked a little like
actor Bob Hoskins. He was fiftyish and heavyset. What remained of his hair had
turned to salt and pepper. He dressed and groomed himself well. And he was a
charmer.

Wielding a marker in front of a whiteboard, Harmston spent
two days filling our and other visitors’ heads with the mysteries of God’s
kingdom. We learned about the war in heaven before the world was made, God’s
true plan of salvation, government conspiracies, the eventual role that We The
Elect would play in saving the U.S. Constitution, the corruptness of the Mormon
Church, that 666 as the “Mark of the Beast” referred to implantable
identification computer chips (no one thought to ask if 664 referred to the
Next Door Neighbor of the Beast), the world’s impending doom, and more.

To spare the Elect when the impending doom came to pass,
Harmston explained, God was going to place a protective dome of sorts over
Manti. The town would become a latter-day Shekinah, that is, a place protected
by the divine presence, as were the tabernacle and other holy sites of yore.
Sentries would guard the gates to keep out the unworthy. Funny how a God
powerful enough to keep out calamities needed armed polygamists to keep out
trespassers.

When the armies of the world attacked us—as you can
bet those jealous infidels were sure to do—no problem. Armed only with
faith as a grain of mustard seed, all the righteous men of Manti needed to do
was command a mountain or two to bury the attackers. The mountains would drop
whatever else they had going on and hop to. Think of the money excavation
companies could save with just a little faith.

It was wondrous, what God had in store. And he was willing
to do it just so that, while the rest of the world did its best to
self-annihilate, the men living in the Shekinah could keep on hopping from bed
to bed.

That Harmston’s nonsense held us rapt instead of weirding us
out shows you just how far down the delusional path Jeff and I had ventured by
then. We would never have jumped directly from our prior life to that level of
nuttiness. It happened one baby step at a time. The umpteenth crazy idea doesn’t
seem so crazy when it’s only one more pebble on a mound you’ve been building up
over time.

Returning to our home in Orem, Utah, some 40 miles south of
Salt Lake City, we made up our minds to move to Manti and become polygamists.
Our children were one, two, and four years old, ideal ages for adjusting to a
new home.

The only inconvenience was that Jeff would have to sell his
chiropractic practice in Orem. That, and we’d have to sell our Mount Pleasant
home and buy one in Manti instead. We could have commuted the 22 miles, but
what if an apocalyptic calamity did away with cars? Or roads? Or gasoline? The
sane choice was to live in Manti. Any lingering doubts I might have harbored
were quelled when we purchased our lovely Victorian home there. My inner interior
designer went giddy with joy. I took it as a sign that we were where we were
“supposed to be.”

Besides the newly deluded like us, Harmston began attracting
a ragtag community of disaffected members from other cults. Having decided
their respective prior cult leaders du jour were impostors, they moved to Manti
in hopes of finding in Harmston the real deal.

They brought with them an intact belief in polygamy. When we
arrived, however, Harmston had been all talk but no do in the plural wives
department. Married only to Elaine, his wife of 30 years, Harmston’s stable was
conspicuously empty. If Harmston didn’t get with the program and soon, the
other-cult refugees were bound to move on to a bona fide, practicing polygamist
prophet.

Harmston most likely had other reasons for wanting to get on
with polygamy. Though I suspect he truly believed to a point that he was under
orders from God, there’s no denying that Harmston was the proud owner of a
fully functioning libido. At least, that was the impression I received from the
way he would put an arm around my shoulder and make small talk while
dry-humping my leg. Oh yes he did. And not just with me.

God came through by telling Harmston it was time to promote
Elaine from Only Wife to First Wife. Elaine handled the news fairly well,
possibly because their sex life had been over for some time anyway, and
possibly because the new arrangement gave her power. First Wife was a desirable
position in a polygamist family. First Wife of the prophet was even better. It
brought status and power, which Elaine lost no opportunity to wield.