Chapter 1: All You Can Stand

Opening Hymn: “The Pretender,”  Jackson Browne[1]

“I always get to where I’m going by walking away from where I’ve been”.
— Winnie the Pooh, Christopher Robin

From where I stood I could see what felt like a trophy next to I-15, a freeway separating East from West in the Salt Lake Valley. The vision of that trophy, a billboard, might be an invented memory designed to add color to this story. Real memory or not, the billboard, and a few just like it, were out there somewhere.

My perch was the steps of the Utah State Capitol building. Two years earlier good friends of mine threw me a party for turning thirty. I had been laid off from two jobs since then, the third and fourth jobs I lost since graduating from college seven years earlier. I had also been engaged to be married and
disengaged three times since graduation, twice since the birthday party.

When I was at the Capitol building it was just a few months before we would all spend a late afternoon watching the travels of a white Ford Bronco holding a former football hero. The billboard, and there are lots of those along Utah’s freeways so there is always plenty to read, was for a local venue of the overeater’s paradise, Chuck-A-Rama.

The food at Chuck-A-Rama can be pretty good. “Pretty good” at a buffet is comforting, because a few notches in quality below “pretty good” is “all-you-can-stand,” such as what I experienced in Las Vegas at the Circus Circus Hotel, a place we’d regularly stop on drives between where I grew up near Los Angeles and my college campus in Utah.

Stopping at Circus Circus made the most economic sense on those trips. It was not only cheap at 99 cents, the grease and starch content was sufficient to kill an appetite for the rest of the trip. A couple of hours after eating, while traveling through the Virgin River Gorge into Utah, I would realize that what I had for breakfast probably wasn’t going to kill me. However, I knew I wouldn’t feel like eating again until the next day.

You could leave Chuck-A-Rama just as sick as you would from Circus Circus, but only because you overate, not because you ate it at all. 

The billboards and all advertising for Chuck-A-Rama had historically been The choice is yours, meaning no restaurant employee would be bothered if you added an enchilada onto a plate that already had lasagna, creating a fusion that most restaurants were not willing to offer. Chuck-A-Rama, like most buffets, banks on you appreciating that freedom.

The owners of Chuck-A-Rama also must have known that the company’s restaurants were sometimes where “all you can eat” was seen as a challenge: No, I’ll tell you when I’ve had ‘all I can eat.

That reputation was likely off-putting to people who ate verifiable vegetables, and not to the point of vomiting. So they asked my friend Michelle, who ran a small ad agency, to see if she could come up with artwork and a slogan that told people they could overdo it with healthy food if they wanted. She asked me to suggest a few slogans. I gave her about ten and the restaurant owners picked To your heart’s content.

I was paid seventy-five dollars for that work.

For a while, if you drove around Salt Lake City you’d be met with the implication that Chuck-A-Rama had heart-happy fare. My mother was proud of my creation and took a photo of it.[2]

I was seven years out of college and that billboard was probably the most visible marker of all my work since graduation.

* * *

Here comes a spoiler: as I write this I am married, a father of three, live in a place I adore, and I can look back on a career path of more than a quarter-century that has provided joy and purpose. When this story begins, I am none of those things.

So it all kind of works out.

When people speak of a dream life, what I enjoy is probably south of that, but I recognize how privileged I am. I once lived in a South American country as a missionary for Utah’s predominant faith. That did a lot to provide what in one sports-related conversation I had was called “the dreaded disease of perspective.”

When I left for Chile out of the Miami airport, I believed that airport to be a dump. Living in Chile was fine. It took a little bit of adjustment, but I quickly grew used to it. The houses I lived in, with one exception, were clean and sturdy. Almost everyone had a television. Few people had cars, but nearly every street in the Chilean suburbs had at least one neighbor running a tiny convenience store out of a garage. For anything requiring a longer trip the buses were abundant. They didn’t need cars

After sixteen months down there I returned home, again through Miami. It was there, in an airport I once saw as a dump, that it hit me like a soccer ball to the face that here in the United States we are, with obvious exceptions, rich.[3] The Miami airport had carpet, for heaven’s sake, something I only saw a few times in Chile.

We don’t recognize how rich we are because most of our neighbors are rich, too. We struggle, but our lower rungs were, at least when the Go-Go’s were still fresh, a few steps higher than most of what I saw in South America.

By the time I went to the Utah State Capitol building I had lost most of that perspective. My apartment, like the Miami airport, had carpet and predictably functional plumbing. It was nicer than most of the homes I saw in Chile, but I certainly didn’t feel rich. Friends of mine my age were years into marriages and decent careers. I was wandering, with nothing but hopes for a career and marriage.

I went to the Capitol building to solidify a decision to do something about that. It’s what I do. When a big decision is afoot, I find a high place looking down on the world below.

By that night I had been living a self-imposed extended stay in Utah. I had moved there almost eleven years earlier when my father and I loaded up my 1969 Ford Falcon and drove 627.4 miles from my original home in West Covina, California to Casa de Hombres, my first BYU college apartment in Provo, Utah.[4]

Shortly after starting college it became clear to me that once I graduated from BYU with a journalism degree, I would leave the state to go report on evildoings, shenanigans and wonders somewhere else. My final three months of college were spent in Washington, DC, as an intern reporter for a national newspaper chain. I figured when the internship was over, the worst that could happen was I would leave DC without a job and return to California.

In the middle of that last semester, however, my parents made a 655.3-mile drive of their own from West Covina to their new home in Midway, Utah, a sleepy town about twenty miles away from Provo through a canyon on the quiet side of the Wasatch Mountains.

Midway is beautiful, pristine even. If you were writing something flowery you might call it “bucolic.” It’s not the place, however, from where I thought I would be attempting to launch my post-college life. I thought I might be living with my parents for a few months after graduation. I didn’t think it would be in Utah.

I was happy for my parents. I am not my parents, however, and I knew that to get a job somewhere else it would be easier if I already lived somewhere else. I wasn’t miserable about my own situation at first because I had just graduated from college, and research shows that getting a college degree can be scientifically labeled “not nothing.” I was confident that I was good enough to make something work in a “somewhere else” more to my liking.

The more weeks that passed, though, the more my confidence waned. And before that moment on the steps of the Capitol, I had only ever passionately pursued one thing in my adult life that began with the odds squarely against me. That was when I came home from Chile intent on marrying someone I had known before I left. That had failed, as had other pursuits where the odds of success ranged from You’ll get there with some work to Here, take this.

When I went to my parents’ new home after a couple of years of mostly great success at the college newspaper and capping that with the real-world experience provided by the internship, I made efforts to get journalism work outside of Utah. I sent résumés to employers on both coasts and made one trip to the Los Angeles area to make contacts. That did lead to an invitation to interview for a newspaper job there, but the phone rang with that offer a day after I had pretty much made it impossible to accept it.[5]

Life over seven-plus years between graduation and that night on the Capitol steps wasn’t misery, by any means. Eventually whatever nagging sense I had that I should be somewhere else became bearable, the same way ear hair starts as something you never considered you’d ever encounter on your own body and eventually becomes part of who you are.

In Utah I always had a place to live. I had friends, good ones. In one job I traveled almost every weekend, so I saw most of the country. My parents and one of my brothers lived in Utah, and they wanted the best for me. I loved being close to them.

However, after I walked the graduation stage at BYU’s Harris Fine Arts Center in front of my parents, my brother, his wife and boys, my aunt and uncle and their daughters, the life I led wasn’t the life I had imagined for myself. I thought I would soon be complaining to a wife about how little journalism pays while we both held kids whose noses were running or diapers were full, or both.

Standing above Salt Lake City, I owned my predicament. I didn’t blame any of the women I dated, or the employers I chose. I had made several choices that seemed easy, but didn’t work. But I really thought it was time for Utah and me to break up from a relationship neither of us seemed to want.

Whatever romantic and professional failings I had, I still held a conviction that I would eventually figure it out and make it work. The evidence up to then said otherwise, and there were many days before that journey to the state Capitol Building that left me feeling like a loser. If “bottom” can be used for people who don’t have substance-abuse issues, I was there.

In my most optimistic moments I counted all my failures as experience. I feared, though, that at thirty-two years old I was approaching a moment in which the book of my entire life story would be titled Failure: a ‘What Were You Thinking?’ Case Study. 

* * *

Since graduating from BYU I’d held four jobs, only one of them faintly connected to journalism. I was laid off from all of them. “Laid off” might be a generous description for the first one, but technically it was true. I’d also failed at romance several times, so I was still single, which in Utah made me a suspicious character to many. I know of at least one father who warned his twenty-one-year-old daughter about dating me when I was twenty-nine. I don’t know what he said specifically, but I did break up with her, so maybe he was onto something.

Still, I believed in myself. I refused to think that I wasn’t a catch, or at least with a promising career would be. I had squandered most of my privilege to date, for sure, but I believed in me.

During the most recent serious relationship, one that failed so spectacularly that a few months later we decided to fail spectacularly again, I fell in love with Portland, Oregon. She sold me on it. A visit there closed the deal. We were committed to moving there one day. Despite the breakup, I still wanted to go.

The idea didn’t make sense on its face. When you’re a member of Utah’s predominant faith[6] and living by the rules of Utah's predominant faith, and you want to find someone else of Utah's predominant faith to share your life with, logic tells you your best bet of finding that someone else is where there are a lot of those someone elses.

All but one piece of data said I was in as much the right place for me as it was for the pioneers 147 years earlier, when Brigham Young explicitly said, “This is the right place.” That one piece of data functioning as a counterpoint: the almost eleven years of living there without getting what I wanted. I was far from the person I wanted to be and was becoming convinced that I would never get “there” by staying “here.”

It may have been that in Utah there would always be plenty of better guys to choose from for a woman living within the rules of Utah's predominant faith. Former girlfriends of mine moved quickly to someone elses, because there were lots of someone elses there. The woman I failed spectacularly with twice less than two years earlier had already married her next someone else.

I began to think that maybe the best way to stand out in a crowd was to reduce the size of the crowd. I knew life in Utah wasn’t working, that I loved the Pacific Northwest, and that I had hopes and a feeling that life might be better for me there.

I went to the Capitol building because I wanted to be in a grounded, quiet place before I made my choice. Up there I had a chance to take the literal long view as I considered challenging myself to something that for me was legitimately monumental. As I stood above the valley I made my decision and felt great about it. I was hoping I would have that great feeling, because given all my years in mostly adhering to the rules and teachings of Utah’s predominant faith, I interpreted those feelings as a sign that God approved. With God’s confirmation, I set out to make it so.

The choice was mine to live to my heart’s content.

Looking over the Salt Lake Valley, I committed to finding a job in Oregon, moving there and staying there the rest of my life.

Closing Hymn: “Don’t Dream It’s Over,” Crowded House

[1]Sacrament meetings, the main Sunday meetings for members of Utah’s predominant faith, include an opening hymn and a closing hymn. I’m providing that in each chapter of this book. While we’re at it, let’s also include a quote.

[2]The new slogan lasted about a year before the company went back to “The Choice Is Yours.” Either enough health nuts got the message, or the new slogan drove off some of the regulars.

[3]The soccer ball to the face is an example based on a real experience from an indoor game in Lota, Chile. It’s not a recommended strategy, but even if deployed accidentally it works.

[4]“Casa de Hombres” translates to “House of Men” in English. The building was a large, old Spanish-style (what I imagine to be “Spanish-style” anyway) house on a corner of University Avenue, a busy road running through Provo. The building is still there, but the “Casa de Hombres” sign is gone. Because the sign was there then, one afternoon my roommates were watching television in the living room just inside the main entrance when a man and two women entered through the front door without knocking. They stood inside for a few seconds, looked at the surroundings and then asked, “This isn’t a restaurant?” Rumors of incidents like this had circulated before, but until that happened I figured it was apocryphal.

[5]Details to come. I’m sure that’s a relief.

[6]“Utah’s predominant faith” is how I refer to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints throughout this book. I was a member during the events of this story. I no longer am but will not address why here. If I addressed it, then this book would be about that. You probably know the church by its nickname. While I was writing this, church members didn’t want to be called that anymore, but I didn’t want to spell out the church’s name over and over. I took a cue from the Salt Lake Tribune and in this book called it “Utah’s predominant faith.” As I was preparing to publish, there were indications the nickname was gaining acceptance again from church members, but I decided to stick with my original decision. Consider this a time capsule.