Truly Like Lightning Read online

  Twenty-four-year-old Joseph Smith, whose very name could be a synonym for “everyman,” had somehow authored a true declaration of Emersonian spiritual independence and a religious companion to its 1776 political precursor. Bronson read somewhere that Thomas Jefferson had crossed out all the miracles in his copy of the New Testament, leaving only the teachings and parables of Jesus. But where was the fun in that? Essentially Jefferson had cut all the movie-worthy moments in the old book, leaving no place for a stuntman to turn water into wine, cast out demons, touch lepers, or return from the dead. What was a movie stunt but the performance, through painstaking preparation, of a miracle? These macho magic tricks had been the heart of Bronson’s calling, and now it thrilled him that Smith had rightly turned the overly rational Jeffersonian trend on its head. Smith seemed hell-bent on effacing everything but the stunts and miracles; his soundtrack, Jesus Christ’s greatest hits. Joseph Smith was the magic, Bronson’s spiritual father and new lifestyle guru. It was Smith’s improvised, vital worldview, more than the dubious events described in his bible, that whispered truth to Bronson: one of presence, not absence, of here and now, not there and then.

  Bronson’s conversion was not as out of the blue as it might have seemed at first. A few years earlier, he’d already been softened up for God by attending 12 Steps of Narcotics Anonymous meetings. A girlfriend, upon finding him one last time passed out in his car on a neighbor’s lawn, left Bronson with a note on the cracked windshield: “You need a shrink, or a meeting, or a mother.” Bronson had no patience for the slow psychobabble of therapy. No, talk was not for him, action was, and that’s what the 12 Steps promised, decisiveness, not chatty hand-holding and procrastination—taking bold steps into a future, not reclining languidly on a couch staring at the ceiling. The presence in the “rooms” of a higher power had back-doored a notion of God into his brain, and the parabolic slogans functioned like touchstone precepts from Christ’s lost sermons as dictated to one Bill W. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s 1944 prayer on all the anonymously abstinent lips—“God, grant me the serenity…”—was the wide gateway to Christ. A stubborn, animal-loving Bronson had first quietly muttered and transposed the serenity prayer to “Dog, grant me the serenity…,” but the steps baptized him, gradually priming this agnostic for belief. Forsaking chemical transcendence, he knelt down to God the drug.

  Though Bronson, in Step 2, “came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity,” that higher power had no face, and consequently lacked immediacy, intimacy. So, first, Bronson configured this higher power as Yoda for a while, then Mr. Clean (in that Bronson himself was a toilet to be scoured), then a kind of pulsating, glowing, orgasmic, androgynous blue-eyed orb, but nothing stuck—no imago pierced him through, and this was a serious problem of scale and reverence, getting in the way of his recovery. Ultimately, he began to feel like a fraud in those rooms because he was still taking his Prozac, and that was a drug, wasn’t it? His commitment felt half-assed and hollow. By the time he was on the sixth step, he was using again and on the verge of quitting the program, or quitting quitting.

  But as Bronson read more deeply into Joseph Smith, his nascent shape-shifting, inoffensive 12 Steps God started to come into focus. Bronson began to see Smith’s semiliterate biblical retread as America’s true origin story, and accepted that its core thesis could be his birthright of original vitality and an antidote to the entropy of belatedness—that miracles are not over, but still happening. Freud looked backward to Mom and Dad, Hubbard looked even further back to past lives, the 12 Steps wallowed so long in past wrongs and amends, only Smith looked forward: cowboys could still be cowboys on wild horses in Anywhere, America: “a voice of the Lord in the wilderness of Fayette, Senneca County … The voice of Michael on the banks of the Susquehanna.”*

  This proximity to the divine, both geographical and temporal, engendered in Bronson an organic rebirth. Why couldn’t Bronson Powers, sure-handed shortstop, college dropout, righteous pain pill abuser, in his late prime as a stuntman, hear the voice of an angel on Hollywood and Vine or Fairfax and Highland? As his spirituality blossomed, it sparked a ranging curiosity he had never known. His new faith made him thirsty for knowledge.

  Back when his fascination with physical bravery and defying death had announced itself, he had sought out the best in that world and managed to apprentice himself to the legendary stuntman Dar Robinson. Dar had instantly seen potential in Bronson and had drilled into the impulsive younger man the importance of nurturing a passion for methodical preparation to undergird the preternatural kinesthetic sense that he’d discovered on the Pepperdine trampoline—the catlike genius for always knowing where your body is in space. But Bronson needed another mentor now of a more ethereal falling art to teach him a kinesthetic-spiritual sense, as his soul tumbled head over heels through its own eternal quintessence. Yet Bronson was ever impatient and could identify no immediate, living guru to provide that mystic guidance. Always in a hurry, like a man convinced he would die young, Bronson did not wait for the teacher to appear; he taught himself. This is when his true education, a rabid autodidacticism, commenced. He took to his literal heart the audacity of Smith’s oration at the funeral for Elder King Follett, “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens. That is the great secret.” He looked for kindred spirits through the Holy Books of humanity and the lightning-bolt conversion stories from Saul of Tarsus, Aquinas, Bunyan, Milton, Merton, Niebuhr, Malcolm X. He ingested the Western canon like a third-year graduate student cramming for orals. He embraced as living contemporaries in no chronological order—Plato, Foucault, Rousseau, Donne, Shakespeare, Melville, Whitman, Blake, Rabelais, Kierkegaard, Stevens, and Girard. He whimsically created batting orders out of his intellectual heroes: Emerson, a speedy, aphoristic singles hitter, led off, Nietzsche pitched (mostly curveballs and change-ups), and Dickinson was always trying to draw a walk or get hit by a pitch and leave no mark on the box score. The greats were speaking a language he understood now, whispering bons mots, a chorus singing in his ear. This omnivorous hunger to know the best that had been thought or said acted like a natural amphetamine, his brain on the mind trampoline literally bursting through its bone-bound, finite skull to touch the infinite. This was no half-assed quest or passing fad. Bronson rarely slept and was never tired.

  He had no use for Freud, he had Marx. He was suddenly in love with the world as an organism, really, America as a being, not the self as a thing; enthralled with the macrocosm without, not the microcosm within. He devoured American history textbooks, cottoning initially to Richard Hofstadter before being further radicalized by Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States as a continuation and companion to the Mormon bible, the Pearl of Great Price.

  He visited Delilah’s legacy and surreptitiously built a shed the exact size of Thoreau’s cabin. No one ever saw him on the land, no one cared to. He’d spend undistracted solitary weeks there when he didn’t have a gig, filling his trunk with five-gallon gas cans of LA tap water and subsisting on Skippy’s peanut butter and apples, just reading, reading, writing notes in the margins. For the first time, he recognized the inchoate restlessness in himself for what it was—a rage for order that his father had identified in his own mother, seemingly having skipped a generation, alive in him through Delilah. Like his father, Bronson had been born a man of prodigious gifts and energy, but outside a system or timely mentor that could harness those energies. Fred Powers had died, broken over the years by the wayward lightning strikes of his own untethered demon, but his son had found the sticking place where his grandmother had led him from beyond the grave. Bronson felt the holy authenticity, a calm descend like the holy spirit, but it was an energetic calm, a wild, ambitious calm.

  By the time it came for Bronson to sit for his “show of good faith” test with a church elder and chief executor of Delilah’s will (actually named Elder) to prove his Mormon bonafides, he was more than ready f
or this “worthiness interview.” Hoping to throw Bronson off, Elder began by asking if he’d ever met his grandmother Delilah. “Not that I can remember,” Bronson answered, “maybe when I was very little.”

  “Well, you must’ve made an impression on her. She loved you quite fiercely.”

  “Yeah, I was a supercharming three-year-old,” Bronson joked.

  “She was your secret benefactor. She paid for Pepperdine, you know?”

  “I didn’t know that,” Bronson replied, and immediately felt off balance. Why hadn’t he ever wondered how he afforded Pepperdine? He had accepted his father’s explanation that he was paying tuition. Transparent bullshit, of course, from the deadbeat dad, but Bronson had never looked deeper.

  “I don’t know that she loved me so much as hated my father. Her son,” Bronson said, and that felt like an apt epitaph both for this mysterious and suddenly powerful old woman he would never know and for his long-dead dad.

  Elder Elder squinted and tried to intimidate Bronson, asking him to identify scripture from the Mormon bible by rote. Before answering, as if to undercut memorization and blind adherence as faith, Bronson quoted Smith word for word, “I am not learned, but I have as good feelings as any man.” And then he nailed, chapter and verse, each citation Elder floated, from the most obvious to the most obscure.

  By the end of the first hour, he had the elder Elder backpedaling, made dizzy by the antiestablishment heresies Bronson revealed hiding in plain sight beside the orthodoxies. This Elder, like so many modern-day Latter-day Saints, preferred to dismiss polygamy as the religion’s equivalent to the appendix—a useless relic, a toothless anachronism and fringe belief, but Bronson attacked that shifting line, claiming it was Smith’s core tenet and a restoration of the polygamy practiced in the Old Testament. All exalted beings must be sealed to an eternal spouse, Bronson proclaimed, so a man had a duty to seal, to make a marriage; for a single woman would not, could not be exalted. It was a spin on the apostle Paul’s “it is better to marry than to burn” that equated sexual singlehood with damnation, or in Mormon cosmology, at least another round of reincarnation and terrestrial prison, heaven still waiting. The celestial nature of marriage far outweighed the nineteenth- and twentieth-century squeamishness with the concept of multiple partners. This was a matter of your eternal soul, Bronson asserted, not of sex and schoolboy snickering and political gerrymandering.

  “I’d rather be a polygamist than a hypocrite and adulterer,” he said.

  Bronson had the facts at his once nicotine-stained fingertips: “1852—Brigham Young tells the world about the until now secret practice of polygamy. Brigham displays the depth of his belief by having fifty wives. This catches people’s attention. 1856—the Republican National Convention denounces polygamy and slavery as ‘twin relics of barbarism.’ 1862—the government passes the first Federal legislation, the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, signed by none other than Abraham Lincoln. More antipolygamy federal laws passed in 1882—like the Edmunds Act, and in 1889, we welcome the Penrose manifesto, approved by LDS brass, that denies the Church has any right to overrule any civil court, also denies the doctrine of blood atonement. 1890—the fourth LDS president, Wilford Woodruff, reveals a manifesto that informs the Saints plural marriage is no longer commanded by God. Huh. Time cut six years, to 1896—presto chango, Utah becomes the forty-fifth state with a ban on polygamy written into its constitution. Funny coincidences.”

  Bronson gradually became aware, during the interview, that he was also preaching to himself, as he had never preached to anyone else before; this was his first time articulating his new beliefs and his passion to a stranger. He was cognizant of a certain sadistic satisfaction in making Elder squirm; it was undeniably enjoyable to watch this complacent, establishment fat ass shift about in his temple garments, but more than that, Bronson the seeker had split off into Bronson the preacher. In a kind of unplanned performance art, Bronson was consecrating his own personal conversion, boldly anointing himself before the elder man had the chance. He was performing for Elder, in real time, the daring act of a man converting himself.

  Elder tried to move on, he was more than ready to sign off on the deal fifteen minutes into Bronson’s exhaustively footnoted harangue, but Bronson, growing in confidence by the minute, began to push the old man on the Church’s treatment of people of color and the indigenous of this continent. After listing some atrocities perpetrated upon Native Americans as the Mormons pushed westward in the nineteenth century, which Elder framed as merely a competition over resources, Bronson quoted from memory a letter from Joseph Smith to Noah Saxton, January 4, 1833, where Smith describes “Indians” as covenant Israel, and America as their promised land, which gentiles can join if they accept the Mormon gospel.

  “It’s their land,” Bronson said, “and where the Puritans from Plymouth Rock used the bible to steal that land, Smith gave us the Mormon bible as our only way to share in this land, our only way to be as holy as the natives of the Americas, the Lamanites. Smith is an antidote and divine correction, not a continuation of manifest destiny.” Elder began to sweat. Bronson began pushing harder, sweeping out the weirder, less canonical corners of Smith’s vision and the possibility of secret teachings that were not only polygamous but achingly polytheistic. There was an abundance to Smith—a plurality of wives and gods and men becoming gods—that inspired Bronson and scared the Mormon leaders who publicly kept a lower profile on the fringe teachings in the hopes of quietly folding into and alongside the American Christian establishment. He goaded Elder by alluding to rumors that Smith had tried to negotiate with Mexico and France as a Mormon nation apart from the United States.

  “That would be treason,” Elder said.

  “Only if you believe in countries,” Bronson replied. “Do you think God organized the world with the United States and its laws in mind?”

  Elder didn’t know that this was going to be his test, his worthiness interview. His mind kept wandering for some reason to the placement of his season seats at BYU’s Marriott Center for the upcoming basketball campaign. He kept flashing on the silly mascot, Cosmo the Cougar. He was panicked. He had to pee. He tuned out. Bronson held forth uninterrupted for another excruciating eighty-five minutes.

  By the end of the interview, Elder nearly begged Bronson to exile himself to his plot of land and please stay there where he would not make any waves in the faith he was now welcome to join. He didn’t want to kick this loose cannon any further up the Church’s chain. Elder certainly recognized that though Bronson knew more about Mormonism than most any Mormon, it was a very personal and idiosyncratic version of the faith, almost his own religion. The Church of Latter-day Saints had fought a long, strategic battle to be accepted in the mainstream of the American separation of church and state, from downplaying polygamy in order for Utah to attain statehood (as Bronson had pointed out), to the previous generation’s validation of trusted national figures like George Romney, Mitt’s dad. At each inflection point where the Mormon Church had soft-pedaled the antiestablishment aspects of Smith’s vision in order to gain American acceptance (polygamy, baptism of the dead, blood atonement), Bronson would not back down. There was no compromise in the man, no tact. Elder didn’t want to tussle with this fiery iconoclast any more than Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor welcomed the appearance of Christ Himself. Bronson was no more of a traditional Mormon than Christ was a traditional Christian. He was that most dangerous man, an originalist and a true believer.

  Elder gave Bronson the LDS stamp of approval that Delilah had demanded from the great beyond and wished him well far off in the desert. Bronson accepted his inheritance, and this friendly banishment, and moved, sometime after the millennium, after a period of homesteading and building, to his birthright. He would raise a family free of the wounds an unjust society of men had inflicted upon his father and that his father had inflicted upon him. He would finally meet himself unadorned out there in Joshua Tree, an honest-to-goodness, real, working cowboy/Indian. He wou
ld order a desert in which to raise free souls that would return to heal the world. He would turn inward first so his legacy could turn outward.

  Could it be fifteen years ago now? More? Must be. There was no way of telling time like that anymore. He owned no watch or clocks or calendar. The day began when the sun rose and ended when it sank. The desert had seasons, but they were subtle and resistant to the calendar mind. It felt like he’d been here forever. Born in the saddle, incubated among the hot rocks, suckled on rattlesnake venom. Years of living off the grid with his books, solar and wind power, his own well, chickens, cows, sheep, snake meat, making his own cheese and tending his own garden, had killed time itself; he’d been wandering this desert forever and he’d got here just yesterday.

  Bronson rarely went into “civilization”—tiny Pioneertown (population: 574), or the “city” of Joshua Tree (population: 7,414), or the “big city” of San Bernardino (population: 209,924)—but when he did, when he needed seeds, or canned goods, livestock, gas or parts for “Ol’ Unreliable,” his ’68 Ford F100 truck, or one of his seven “Frankenbike” motorcycles that he had cobbled together himself over the years, or a solar panel repaired or replaced, he tried as best he could to stop up his ears and hear nothing of how the world was spinning. He knew the Twin Towers had come down, but his was a cloistered, timeless world where the “internet” was not a word and the cell phone did not exist, America had never had a Black president, and Donald Trump was nothing but a laughable comb-over and failed Realtor. And yet somehow, without this seemingly vital knowledge, he continued to draw breath. His land was the world to him, a physical and mental landscape; he lacked for no other. He christened it “Agadda da Vida” after the muscular and mysterious Iron Butterfly song.