2 Fast 2 Furious: Mormon University Parkway

“Is there a problem, officer?”

Officer Allen is a big man. In all the wrong places. He wheezes like a man perpetually finishing a long run. He breathes as though he were snoring awake.

Officer Allen is a distrustful man. He furrows his brow as he does inventory: East Coast license plate (Massachusetts), subversive reading materials in the passenger seat (the Sunday New York Times), peculiar attire (a Jason Heyward Atlanta Braves jersey). All the hallmarks of an outsider, an East Coaster, probably a liberal, definitely not a Utahn.

Officer Allen is a besieged man. His squad’s under fire for a recent security breach along University Parkway. Some homophobe but technophile hacked into one of the construction roadside signs. Instead of bracing motorists of impending I-15 construction delays, the sign warned drivers to “Follow Detour” and:

Officer Allen’s squad pounced on the affront soon enough. The sign was scrubbed clean by 5:30 AM, KSL news reported. But not before Provo resident  Annie Frewin uploaded a clip to YouTube. The video Skyped, tweeted, updated, upvoted, pinned, Tumblr’d its way around cyberspace until the Huffington Post scooped the story into the blogosphere. And then the rest of the mainstream “liberal media” snapped the sign up under snarky headlines alluding to Mormonism’s furtive bigotry.

Officer Allen couldn’t have any more slip-ups. Not on Mitt Romney’s old college drive. Not in an election year. And, especially, not on his watch.

Officer Allen wheezes again, “License and registration.”

Officer Allen glowers at the Georgia driver’s license. He sneers at me, the DMV photo, the iPhone in my lap, me again. He snores.

“Why aren’t you in church, sonny?”

“Are—are you serious?”

“I ASKED YOU A QUESTION, SONNY. WHY AREN’T YOU IN CHURCH?!?”

“You realize this is illegal, right? Probable—”

“WHY. AREN’T. YOU. IN. CHURCH?”

Officer Allen is an angry man. The Lord Of His Domain-type, ever-vigilant over his God-forsaken North Provo slab of PF Changs, white Mormon steeples, Papa Johns, more white Mormon steeples. And Officer Allen will be damned if he has to repeat himself to some smart-alecky twenty-something from back East.

“I. DON’T. READ. FICTION.” I smirked. This would not help matters.

“WHAT DID YOU SAY TO ME?”

Officer Williams whips out his walkie-talkie from the holster. “I got a 10-38 (code for: Stopped a suspicious vehicle), [wheeze] a possible 10-95 (Mental subject), at State Street and [wheeze] University Parkway.”

“10-4,” (Copy that) the walkie-talkie chirped back. “Jeff’s on the way.” (I would not make the first couple innings of that Braves game).

Rule #4,127: Don’t bother with radio in Provo, Utah.

Especially the hip-hop channels.

KUUU 92.5 blares Lil Wayne urrrrrs, Lil Wayne prepositions and pronouns, Lil Wayne long staticky censored bursts, and more Lil Wayne urrrrrs, prepositions, and pronouns:

Over on KSL 102.7, gravelly-voiced commentators coo over the bullet points of Utah State Senate’s recently passed bill HB363 19-10:

-Public high schools can now choose between abstinence only sex-ed classes, or no sex-ed classes at all. (“The way it should be!” Jeff from Ogden calls in.)
-Any classroom discussion of homosexuality is now illegal, even if a student asks. (Effectively rendering any talk of the lives and themes of Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Federico Garcia Lorca, W.H. Auden, Tennessee Williams, Michel Foucault, Marcel Proust, and Gore Vidal—among others—a state crime.)

Enraged listeners grumble why polygamy is not legal in New York if gay marriage now is. (“Where’s the fetching line? Next thing you know New Yorkers’ll be marrying dolphins!” Mary Pat, a concerned marine biologist from Lehi, rants.)

“You got a point there, Mary Pat”, the hosts growls before taking a time-out for KSL’s sponsor.

“Mr. Mac Starter Kits. Perfect for the LDS Missionary!” a joyous pitchman shells, “One Luca Rossi suit coat with two matching slacks, one waterproof Rockport walking show, four wrinkle-free shirts, three stain resistant polyester ties. For a one-time price of $395. But wait, there’s more, call now and—”

I buzz back to KUUU 92.5 hip-hop station for the static’ed Name That Tune game when that frenetic blue light sizzles behind me.

Picture Jerusalem, Rome, Mecca. The magnificent sepulchred and domed sacred cities of the world’s great religions.

Now picture Provo, Utah. The steepled and Applebee’s-ed sacred city of the world’s quirkiest. Where Mystique is the name of the cute brunette who works Fridays at Madison’s, Provo’s only bar.

It is a tale of two Provos.

North Provo is a quixotic blend of faith, family, and sawed-off shotguns. A dreary slab of Strip Mall Americana, foreboding white steeples, Papa John’s adorned with BYU stickers, weather-beaten bowling alleys, more foreboding white steeples.

Car dealership-type blowups of white guys in white shirts and ties flutter atop Missionary clothing storefronts. Rusted pickup trucks screech out of weathered gun shops luring beefy, soul-patched white men in army camo hats with free pistols for $15 purchases. Dad’s dented Ford F-150s and Mom’s Crayola-crayoned Toyota Sienna minivans park bumper to bumper festooned with BYU decals and the sticker du jour:

But cross Center Street, into South Provo, and into a 1950s Walt Disney cartoon movie.

Enter a sleepy church town nestled in the bucolic hinterlands of the craggy Wasatch range. Doe frolic in the beaded early morning dew. Fox Sparrows and Belted Kingfishers chirp in dappled sunlight atop minty evergreen branches.

There are no crosses in their church. No painful reminders of an emaciated Jesus Christ’ sacrifice for our sins. This would be unseemly. Instead, their Jesus is a wholesome, well-fed Jesus, cast in marble statue.

Rosy-cheeked boys and girls croon ring-around-the-rosy before beds of lilac and lavender. White-shirt and black-tied young men whistle in lockstep out of white steeples ready to burst into song if the right breeze sweeps down from the Wasatch range.

Mothers and grandmothers titter around park bench knitting circles, sewing birth gowns for the next blessed baby. Cherubic elders impart the Book of Mormon’s wisdom in manicured gardens to young couples awash in the spiritual afterglow of the morning’s service.

And Jews are unwelcome.

Diversity in Provo is the stuff of glossy BYU college brochures: token Asian girl entranced in conversation, white male cheerfully draping his arm around her shoulder, token Native American female nodding pensively, and token African-American male carrying an economics textbook.

The 2010 U.S. Census paints a less colorful portrait: White, 84.8%; Asian 2.5%; Native American, .8%; and African-American, .7%. African-American owned businesses: N/A.

In truth, the census may have rounded up its numbers. I have spotted two African-Americans in Provo, Utah to date. One was a very confused power-forward for the Utah Jazz. The other was a charming but petrified woman named Lisa desperately in need of directions back to Salt Lake City airport.

Lisa veered a hard left onto I-15 North. She knew the history. African Americans are cursed in the Book of Mormon, stricken with darker skin because they turned away from God. According to Moses 7:5-8,

“the Lord shall curse the land with much heat, and the barrenness thereof shall go forth forever; and there was a blackness came upon all the children of Canaan, that they were despised among all people.”

And so it was until June 1, 1978 when the president of the Church of LDS announced that God had changed his mind about black people.

There would be no further discussion on the matter. Church leader Bruce McConkie explained, “It doesn’t make a particle of difference what anybody ever said about the Negro matter before the first day of June 1978.”

Picture the hang-dog faced cast of Napoleon Dynamite (written and directed by a BYU grad). Now picture the pudgier actors with none of the awkward charm nor dance moves that didn’t make the final cut. And you have the people of Provo, Utah.

And they are a deeply distrustful lot. Weary of Blue Staters, atheists, and especially skate-boarders. Utahans espouse their own pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-ski-boots ideology. They don’t ask for much. They keep it simple: a 5% flat tax, a couple ski runs on Saturday, church and the Broncos game come Sunday after church.

They are a people still awash in the glow of BYU basketball phenom-turned Sacramento Kings bench-warmer Jimmer Fredette. A people now befuddled by the national ridicule for Mitt Romney.

Their best and brightest enroll at BYU, serve a two year Mission in Korea or Guatemala or the South of France (Mitt Romney), before coming home again to Novell, Adobe, or Microsoft or some other tech behemoth mining for cheap talent and cheaper real estate in the “Silicon Mountains”. They raise four to six kids, tithe 10% to the church, and holster a handgun at all times. They unload at Get Some shooting range on Friday lunch breaks, bowl Saturdays, and are in bed by 9 for Sunday.

Picture legions of corn-fed white men in white shirts and black ties. Door-to-door salesmen in training, but they peddle a more fantastical creation than Mary Kay cosmetics or Cutco knives: the Book of Mormon.

Odd as they hold sacred a Book of Mormon that (as Mormons tell it) blessed prophet Joseph Smith translated with golden plates and a top-hat. Or (as independent researchers tell it) that notorious treasure-hunter and criminal Joseph Smith plagiarized from the King James Bible and a fictional manuscript about Native American burial grounds.

They dutifully quote the Book of Abraham that (as Mormons tell it) spans God’s covenant with Abraham to the creation of man. Or, (as PhD Egyptologists tell it): “It may be safely said that there is not one single word that is true in these explanations,” Dr. W.M. Flinders Petrie of London University.

Mormons devote themselves to lives of sobriety even if Joseph Smith owned a tavern in Far West, Missouri. They excommunicate women who have abortions even in cases of rape and incest—citing ‘Thou shalt not . . . kill, nor do anything like unto it’ (Doctrine & Covenants Section 59, Verse 6). Never mind that Joseph Smith commissioned his personal doctor John C. Bennett to perform abortions for Smith’s thirty-something wives.

But where I see irony, they see enlightenment. When I suspect a convicted criminal who made up a religion as he went along, they revere an exalted prophet who tests his followers to do as he says, not as he does. When I scoff at a plagiarized Bible with an M.Night Shyamalan-esque twist that Jesus will come back in Missouri, they tremble at the word of God.

And what I perceive as an illegal road-stop without probable cause, Officer Allen deems a noble duty to save the faithful from a non-believer destined to the Telestial Kingdom and a millennium in Spiritual Prison.



Officer Allen is not a man for small-talk.

The criminal check comes up clean. But Jeff is still down by Bulldog Avenue. So Officer Allen hems and haws, buying time until back-up arrives.

“So, uh, did you go to BYU?” Officer Allen tries.

“No. I went to a good school.”

Officer Allen grunts. He paws the dirt. Pretends to check his walkie-talkie until the other Provo Sheriff car rumbles up the gravel.

Jeff is a scrawny man. Hang-dog faced, buck-toothed. He could have been an extra in the Napoleon Dynamite save for his voice. A nasally whine that drones over from his car.

“Daaang, Tim. Does this kid have a Georgia driver’s license?”

“Yes, sir,” Officer Allen wheezed. “Got a new one for Provo County today.”

“Holy cow. Did you check his phone?”

“His phone? Why?”

“Oh fetch,” Jeff quivered. “Devin pulled the kid over two Sundays ago. He’s clean. He’s just not of the church.”

He lumbers over the gravel to my window, Jeff in fearful tow. Officer Allen whips his brow, wheezes, “Sonny, can I see your phone?”

Officer Allen cradles the iPhone. He furrows his brow at the time 32 minutes 17 seconds. He hears a foreign laugh on the other line. A Brooklyn laugh.

“Oh yeah,” I smirk. “So we’ve been on speaker the whole time. My bad.”

Officer Allen is a confused man. He turns back to Jeff, turns back to me. He hands back the phone.

“On behalf of Utah county, [wheeze] we would like to apologize for the misunderstanding. Uh, enjoy the rest of your day.”

“What did you say to me?”