It was 1990. I was twenty-two, already married, and drowning myself in Bacardi and Coke like it was my goddamn job. Not just a casual drinker. I was the kind of professional who measured consumption by the gallon, the kind who woke up with the shakes and started pouring before the sun had the decency to set. I was making my wife’s life a slow-burning hell and telling myself it was just a good time.
She was beautiful, young, and patient. Too patient. Looking back, I don’t know if she thought love meant endurance, or if she was just too young to know that men like me were a trap. But she stayed.
One night, we ended up at Sunset Cliffs. A rugged, beautiful place where you have to earn the view, climbing down a rope because there are no easy steps. We drank, we laughed, the sun bled all over the horizon. A perfect evening. So, naturally, I had to ruin it. I started flirting with some other woman, right there in front of my wife. The details are a blur of booze and my own shitty character, but the tension was real. The air got thick with things neither of us knew how to say.
We climbed back up that rope in a cold, hard silence. Overheard someone say the “rich people’s church,” the big Mormon temple, was open for tours. I’d watched them build that pristine, white fortress over the years, right off the freeway, its spires gleaming. What the hell was inside that thing? I suggested we go check it out. Maybe to smooth things over. Maybe just to keep the night from ending.
We arrived to a surreal religious carnival. Tents, crowds, well-dressed families shuffling through guided tours like cattle. It was a well-oiled propaganda machine, each stop a carefully curated story about Joseph Smith and how this church was better than all the rest. We had to take off our shoes, put on little white booties. Everything was immaculate, glowing, sterile. A perfection so absolute it felt like a lie.
The tour led us to the baptismal font, perched on the backs of twelve stone oxen. I stood there, half-drunk, staring at it all.
“This is bullshit,” I muttered, not bothering to keep my voice down.
My wife elbowed me in the ribs. But I wasn’t impressed. It was all too perfect, too plastic, no sign of real life anywhere. As we were leaving, a stunning blonde stood at the exit, holding a Book of Mormon. I turned on the charm, flirted, made her blush. It was a game. Always a game. My wife appeared at my side, and the blonde’s smile snapped shut. She held out the book, all business now. “Would you like a copy?” she asked.
“Sure,” I smirked, and took it.
Weeks passed. The drinking got worse. I’d become a lead man down at the shipyard, a guy who ruled by being louder and meaner than the rough men I managed. I brought that same energy home. My wife bore the weight of it all. One night, drunk and alone, I saw a commercial for the Mormon Church on TV. Some soft-spoken bullshit about family and building a good foundation. Maybe it was the booze, maybe it was the exhaustion, maybe it was the thought of my wife sleeping in the next room, wondering what kind of monster she’d married. But something in me broke.
I picked up the phone. “Send me the video,” I grunted, and hung up.
I’d forgotten all about it until a knock came a few weeks later. I opened the door to six clean-cut young men on my porch. Missionaries. The lead one looked like he’d stepped out of a J.C. Penney catalog. They handed me a VHS tape and another Book of Mormon. “We brought what you requested,” they said, smiling. I glanced back at the beer bottles and the cigarette smoke hanging thick in my living room, where a party was still raging. “Not a good time,” I said. They just nodded and left.
But they came back. And they came back again. They weren’t pushy. They were just… patient. And for some goddamn reason, I started listening. One night, they noticed the liquor bottles were gone from the top of my fridge. I’d hidden them. “You didn’t have to do that,” one of them said. I shrugged. “Don’t get too excited.”
But they saw their opening. “Brother,” the lead one asked, “will you accept the Word of Wisdom and stop drinking?”
I don’t know why I said it. Maybe to prove I could. Maybe because I was just so goddamn tired of the mess I was.
“Yeah,” I said. “Fine.”
And just like that, for nine years, I stopped drinking.
I became a true believer. I devoured every book they gave me. I was baptized in that warm water, my wife watching. Then, in a moment of perfect, twisted irony, I baptized her. Then her mother. Then her father. I went all in. I became a pillar of the church, a leader. For a while, it felt like I had finally built something real. A family. A purpose. A faith.
It was the beginning of the white picket fence.
But the cracks? The cracks were always there, deep in the foundation. They were just waiting for the right time to show themselves.
Author’s Note:
It’s the kind of story that looks good on paper, isn’t it? The drunk finds sobriety, the asshole husband becomes a pillar of the community. A real goddamn fairytale.
But you and I both know it wasn’t about God. It was never about God. It was about trading one obsession for another. You were addicted to the chaos of the bottle, so you swapped it for the rigid, clean, predictable chaos of a religion. You didn’t become a new man; you just put on a new uniform. The white shirt and tie were just as much of a costume as the punk rock mohawk. You just went from being a professional drunk to being a professional saint. But it was still a part you were playing.
The truth is, you don’t know how to do anything halfway. You drink by the gallon, or you join a church and try to baptize the whole goddamn neighborhood. It’s the same all-or-nothing engine, just pointed in a different direction for a while.
So my thoughts are this: that whole chapter, it’s about a man building the most beautiful, perfect, well-constructed cage imaginable. He convinces everyone, especially himself, that it’s a paradise. The story ends there, at the high point.
But we both know what happens next. The cracks always show. Because a wolf is still a wolf, even if you dress him up in a choir boy’s robes. And sooner or later, he gets hungry again.
