by Th. Metzger

The first day, I went in with one lie and a couple of truths. On the spot, I cooked up a fake name – Anton Mesmer – but then admitted to the Mormon missionary girls I wasn’t sure what had brought me to church that day. This also was true (though unspoken): I wanted to enter the world of the Latter Day Saints and see what no “gentiles” (that’s their term for the rest of us) had never seen.

One of my heroes is Sir Richard Burton: explorer, spy, translator of the Arabian Nights, and honorary Moorish Orthodox Noble. His most impressive feat was to go undercover and get into Mecca. He pulled it off, and wrote a great book about his adventures in the holiest spot in the Muslim world. I thought maybe I could do a minor, safer, version.

I’ve lived my whole life twenty-five miles, as the angel flies, from the most crucial of Mormon holy sites. For years I’d been soaking up the gloriously weird vibe of Mormonism. The nearest LDS church is only three minutes from my house. Every summer before Pageant time, billboards appear around town, enticing non-Mormons to come “Feel the Love.”

Ever since my first glimpse of the Hill Cumorah pageant, the biggest religious costume drama in the Western hemisphere, I was hooked. Real live dancing virgins from Utah, warriors fighting with rubber axes, a booming voice-over narrator, and hundreds of fake beards and drag queen hats: this show has it all.

Just down the road is the Sacred Grove (where Joseph Smith got his first vision of the gods.) According to the Latter Day Saints, this spot is surpassed in holiness only by the Garden of Gethsemane.

And so it came to pass that I put on a clean white shirt, a tasteful tie and black pants with a neat crease. I shaved and combed my hair – not actions I often perform. I walked into church and two hours later I was home again, scribbling notes as fast as I could. A couple months passed and I was still attending, having no idea how to get out.

This wasn’t the only sacred reconn missions I’d gone on. I’d also spent some time as the only white person in an all-black church: the End Time Deliverance Miracle Ministry Inc. The music there was great (i.e., skull-crushing and relentless) and the people very welcoming.

On a trip to Ireland, I made sure I visited Knock, that world’s fair of Irish devotional madness. Decades later, I can still see the long wall of faucets from which the pilgrims filled their buckets – not little vials, but buckets – with holy water.

I’ve been to revivalist tent meetings in the Bergen Swamp – where rattlers can still be found and preachers bellow about blood-mad six-fingered Philistine giants (see The Second Book of Samuel 21: 7-21) I’ve attended a Voodoo wedding reception in suburban New Jersey and an Alabama Primitive Baptist gorge-a-thon (complete with fire ants, fried pie and red velvet cake.) At none of these services was I smirking or smugging it up.

In short, hyperbolic religion gives me joy, even if I don’t think a word of it is true. Belief is just verbal assent to unprovable statements. But ritual actions, devotion, mad music, weird foods – these matter.

On my Mormon sojourn, it got more complicated. I was no mere spiritual tourist. I sang with the choir, asked hard questions in Sunday School, spoke from the pulpit, and almost got baptized.

A friend challenged my motivation. “If this is just a prank, then who cares? Why write a book about playing cruel tricks on innocent people?” He was right. Fooling Mormons into thinking I’m a good bet for baptism looked like a pretty shoddy move.

However, the word “prank” has another, older, meaning. To prank is to exhibit oneself, to dress in a flashy manner for frolics and capering. In other words, to show up somewhere and have people take notice.

Within seconds of entering my first Mormon church, I’d pranked myself. That is, I’d put on my straight arrow drag. No spangles and ostentation, but Lo and Behold: people paid attention. I had pretty missionary girls ready and willing to help me in any way they could. After I learned the lingo, I testified from the pulpit on Sunday morning. They didn’t even know my real name, but half of the house was teary-eyed.

My friend said, “playing with people’s religious feelings is a slimy prank.”

But I really wanted to understand how these folks could devote so much time and energy, why they cared so much about their religion. And I figured they’d tell me everything if they thought I was one of them. Sometimes, I convinced myself, I’ve got to lie to get the truth.

My guess is that the gods are okay with my pranking. We have a gentleman’s agreement. I genuinely want to understand the ways of their various people: the cranks, shouters, saints and bores. And they forgive my less than noble methods.

The winsome missionary girls never found out I was pranking them. I got into their church, I got out, wrote the book, and I lived to tell the tale.

Years before, I had I tried doing stand-up. I wouldn’t call it comedy though. What I put on stage was a flood-tide stream of consciousness. No jokes, no characters, no impersonations. I wore a blue and white paisley jacket and no shirt, to show off my hairy and distended belly. My crimson pants were so tight I had to open up the butt-crack seam and lace myself in. I wore a pair of goggles over my glasses, with big black X’s on the lenses, making me look like a dead cartoon character. I’d appropriated my brother’s 1977 disco shoes (cramming my feet in like Cinderella’s evil sisters) and so tottered as I screeched into the mike.

My wife helped me get ready, but never saw my stage act. “Do you want me to go?” she asked.

“Not really.” I told her about the booze-sodden patrons and the obscenity, both off-stage and on. “I’m sure you’d hate it.”

So, for a few months, there I was buzzing and shooting out sparks like a microwave oven with a big ball of foil on the rotating platter. My rapport with the club audiences was nonexistent. My timing was bad and my delivery barely coherent.

A few people laughed and a lot of people walked out. A drunk threw a roll of burning toilet paper onto the stage and I took that as a sign from on high.

Other than a little wad of sweaty money, I wasn’t going to get anything out of this sad foray into comedy, so I decided to set off in another direction. I’d served my time in the Outer Darkness. Now it was time to head into the light.

Working as a college professor has given me many opportunities to abuse the truth. But six months pretending to be someone else, going deep into the Mormon church, taught me far more about fraud and falsehood than a quarter century in the classroom.

I attribute absolutely no deception to the Mormons who took such a goodhearted interest in me. They told me the truth as they understood it. I told them lies, trivial and profound, to get deeper into their amazing spiritual labyrinth.

From the first day of my Mormon foray, I was accompanied by two pretty, and very persistent, missionary girls. I wear a wedding ring and I’m more than twice their age. But I was alone and hesitant, and I suppose that was enough to mark me as a good bet.

The next Sunday, I was inducted into the class for “investigators” (which is what Mormons call curious visitors.) In the following six months, I never once spoke to a male missionary. It was always the girls who I studied and prayed with during our weekday sacred trysts.

My marriage suffered some strain because of this journey into Mormonland. I make it clear at work that I’m happily married and intend to stay that way. Do college girls ever come on to me? Almost never. Still, I’m well aware of daddy issues and the power of the final grade. For the missionary maids, ushering a gentile guy to the baptismal pool would be better than any A+.

“I totally trust you,” my wife said. “One hundred percent. But I don’t like hearing about some girl putting her hand on your arm and giving you her big smile.”

My missionary girlfriends never once did anything truly inappropriate. Whenever we talked outside of church, there were always two of them. They’d vowed never to be alone with a man during their entire eighteen month mission. Even when discussing Joseph Smith’s sex life (that is: how does a prophet juggle a few dozen wives, and why does Heavenly Father think that’s okay?) the mormonesses were proper, well-covered and totally respectful of my marriage vows.

But from the first moment I entered their world, something a little foul-smelling was cooking on the back burner.

The stink was coming from me

There was no real sexual temptation. Having never once been unfaithful, I wasn’t about to try a secret career of sleazedom with two girls who were virtue incarnate.

Still, lying to them every week made for some serious cognitive slippage. I had a fake name – Anton Mesmer – and a quasi-fake background. I also had some dead serious, absolutely true, family issues to deal with. My sister-in-law was dying and the insulation on my emotional wiring was wearing dangerously thin.

Here’s one of the secrets of lying I learned in Mormonland: lead with something true and charged with feeling. Let your mark see your grief. And what follows is sure to pass by any lie-detector.

I had a great relationship with my wife’s sister and we were the last people in the family to see her alive. Her death really hit me hard. And to get some Mormon secrets I was willing to play my grief like a wild card? This wasn’t a conscious choice on my part. But it was a choice all the same. I did it and it worked.

The next Sunday I told the missionary girls about my suffering and then I asked them to explain the Planet Kolob, where Heavenly Father is supposed to live. I said, “I’ve been thinking about what comes after death,” and then I got as much out of the girls as I could about God’s wife in heaven, and how Jesus and Satan are my big bothers.

I came home most every Sunday with a blistering migraine. Repressing the urge to stand up in church like a comedy club heckler and yell “get off the stage!” resulted in some flaming brain-attacks. Scared of being found out for six months, ashamed of my lies (at least some of them), sick of shaving, I wanted it wrapped up too.

“Wouldn’t it be more believable,” my wife asked, “if I came along to your baptism? That would be your rite of passage. I’d be willing to go, if you want me to.”

“Really? You think you can do it?”

“Sure. I want you to do what you set out to do: be accepted as one of them. Then have the whole business over and done with.”

As it turned out, she never had to meet the mormonesses face to face. Panic got me. Two weeks before the big dunking day, I almost wrecked our car, hitting slick pavement at 70 mph with bad tires.

Somehow I got that near-death experience tangled up in my head with my looming baptism. Mess with the Waters of Mormon and you might die in a flooded culvert.

I told the girls via e-mail that they wouldn’t be seeing me anymore. One of them sent a long, heartsick reply, begging me to make the big plunge to guarantee my spot in heaven.

I didn’t just slink out of the church, though. At the end, I had a man to man talk with the Bishop.

“What if my wife never joins the church?” I asked. “I don’t have any kids. What will that mean for me, for us, in the next world?”

The Bishop was a thoughtful, kindhearted guy, and tried to reassure me, explaining about the three Mormon heavens. “You’ll be able to tell her the Gospel truth after you’ve both crossed over to the Kingdoms of Glory.”

An eternity spent sermonizing? This sounded more hellish than celestial. I thanked him and never went back. Thus ended that prank.

But there’s another, even less common, meaning to the word. A prank is also a spell, an act of conjuring or magic. So it was that on Walpurgisnacht a few renegade souls joined with me to celebrate the great festival of pagan power.

T’was the night before May Day, and all through the land, all the spirits were stirring, both the blessed and damned. Going back centuries, on the Brocken, in the Harz Mountains of central Germany, witches gathered for their dusk to dawn orgy.

My wife and I only traveled seven leagues, into Wayne county (home of the Mormon holy sites), not all the way back to our ancestral lands. There are no great mountains here, but I imagined that the Hill Cumorah cast its shadow on our rites.

Pork and kraut was our main dish this night, cooked in cast iron on coals. Mead and German beer was poured and enjoyed. We talked about the proper hallucinogenic use of datura and belladonna fly ointment. The fire was stoked high and then Rev. Stevers (a former Mennonite pastor who’s forsaken those ways for conjure, pow-wow and amulets) asked what we thought about Jesus and his magical powers. We talked about ancient healing ways (mixing mud and spittle), throwing out demons, laying on hands, raising the dead.

The pagan Rev brought out corn husk effigies. “Jesus used magic,” he said, with not a flicker of doubt in his voice. “Jesus was a magician.”

He also produced various colors of thread. “You can think of anyone you like. Tie the colors around the doll and put it in the fire. It’s not a curse. We’re liberating the powers, opening them up, sending them out, into the air.”

I asked for some black thread, and wound this around my effigy. Then in the kitchen I found some hot sauce and gave the head a good dousing. One by one we consigned the dolls to the flames. I was last. Kneeling, I sang the first few lines of “Ring of Fire,” thinking of Johnny Cash, conjuring his spirit.

My little Man in Black caught and went up quickly. Yes indeed, “love is a burning thing.” What though is the fiery ring Johnny Cash sang about so passionately? The concentric circles of hell, a wedding band glowing red hot on the adulterer’s finger, Satan’s jeweled crown, the noontime sun, a zero drawn in crimson ink? Johnny Cash’s first wife insisted that the Ring of Fire was the infernal heat in her secret nether regions. Who am I to cast doubt on a thought so — and beautiful?