If Where You’re Going Isn’t Home

Book 2

Of the World

Max Zimmer

What people are saying about

If Where You’re Going Isn’t Home

Books 1 and 2

“Much as Harper Lee did when she took us down South in To Kill a Mockingbird, or J.D. Salinger did when he put us into Holden Caulfield’s head, Max Zimmer immerses us in 1960s Mormon America. Shake Tauffler is as conflicted as any character we might encounter. While harboring passions for jazz, the trumpet, fast cars, and a beautiful young woman, he has been groomed his whole life for something else: life as an emissary for the Mormon Church that could, if he passes the ulti-mate test, culminate in his own godhood in everlasting life. The artistry of this novel goes beyond the story line to paint us a picture, sing us a song with words that skip, spin, jump and slide from scene to scene. Zimmer continues to take us on a journey we can’t wait to complete.”

– Diane Cole, book reviewer and former editorial writer, Salt Lake Tribune

“Max Zimmer is an exceptionally talented writer and storyteller. Readers from their teens on up, regardless of religion, will identify with Shake as he begins to challenge everything he has been brought up to believe. The beauty of the book’s prose carries the tale almost flawlessly through the highs and lows of Shake’s life. Zimmer presents an exquisite story about a believably complex young man approaching adulthood. Journey is a thoroughly enjoyable book that satisfies from the very first page. And at the end, it leaves readers begging Zimmer to deliver on his promise, ‘to be continued.’”

– Cheryl M. Hibbard, ForeWord Clarion Five Star Review of Journey

“Max Zimmer writes beautifully. His prose has a natural rhythm and grace that is testimony to his having honed his craft for a long time so that it's no longer just craft but real art. There are many scenes that will stick with me forever.”

– Markus Hoffmann, literary agent, Regal Literary, New York

“Max Zimmer has written an extraordinary revelation of life in a Mor-mon community in a way no one else has ever done. He allows Shake to discover both the good and the bad – the sublime and the evil – of the Mormon church and Utah society as he struggles to define himself in terms of his passion for the instrument God has given him. This is not

the stuff of Big Love pyrotechnics; this is the real, compelling, and re-vealing look into the demands of the faith as Shake and his young friends take their first steps into adulthood. But the great craft of this book is that it neither demonizes nor sanctifies its characters. And it neither demonizes nor sanctifies the Mormon church and faith. Zimmer presents his wonderful, quirky, and often hilarious cast with affection for all their foibles and strengths.”

– Rolf Yngve, novelist, Any Watch They Keep, San Diego

“Shake’s observations reveal the absurdity of fundamentalist logic, the deep-seated racism in Mormon history, and the extraordinary way music can transport us to a different time, mindset, or spiritual state.”

– Kirkus Reviews

“Other authors create a world and then expect me to believe in it. What makes Zimmer unique is that he writes his story and uses my world to tell it. I didn't want the book to end.”

– John Murray, artist and novelist, New Jersey

“I love . . . love the music lessons. The way Zimmer writes about jazz theory, modality, notes versus tones, numbered notes instead of letters, just wonderful stuff. I want to go back to school for a degree in music.”

– Paul Mossberg, rock and blues guitarist, New Jersey

“I want to play Mr. Selby in the movie.” – Ed Selby, professor and jazz trumpet player, New Jersey

“I wanted to read sections again – slowly – just because the writing is so good I wanted to live in them. Zimmer’s detail is unrivaled. Shake’s story so perfectly shows the unresolvable nature of inhumanity.”

– Nikolaus Tea, musician and poet, Red Bandana, Vermont

“Jazz indeed. There is a certain and deadly grace about Zimmer’s writ-ing now that is hard to put down.”

– Robert Smart, professor and author, The Nonfiction Novel, Connecticut

“As a musician, I felt that the pulse of music in Shake’s life, as well as his whole world as created by Zimmer, were so compelling – so real, I forgot I was reading fiction. There’s such delight in the details, it was impossible to look away.”

– Fred Simpson, poet and musician, New York

The Story and its Making

Of the World follows Journey as the second book of the trilogy If Where You’re Going Isn’t Home, a story that chronicles ten years in the growth of a boy to manhood. Journey brings him four years from the age of almost twelve to almost sixteen, where Of the World picks his story up and takes it through his nineteenth birthday. The third book, Instrument of the Lord,

takes his story the distance to the age of twenty-two.

The genesis of what has evolved into this project is a love story I wrote in the summer of 1978. The story haunted me for several years. What I eventually came to recognize was that its psychic and dramatic setting – what it was like to grow up Mormon in America – had never been put

on the map of our collective consciousness in a universal way that read-ers everywhere, from all walks of life, all religions, all cultures, could

reach and experience from the familiar territory of their own lives. To create that setting, I put the original story aside, and began where the story needed to begin – with a boy at the beginning of his duty to his

father’s faith and his dream to play jazz trumpet. His story – the three-book chronicle of his ten-year odyssey – has been in the making now

for more than two decades. It is a story still guided and informed by the beacon of that love story that gave it life that summer.

If Where You’re Going Isn’t Home

Book 2

Of the World

This work of fiction is modeled in various ways on the author’s youth. As in all fiction, while the perceptions and insights are based on experience, the names,

characters, places, and incidents portrayed in this work are either products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious way. Except with regard to known historical and religious figures and musicians, no reference to any real

person should be taken as literal or factual. Max Zimmer

Copyright © 2013 by Max Zimmer All rights reserved

Cover photograph of moonrise over a desert highway adapted and used by permission of Suncruiser Publishing at www.suncruisermedia.com.

Cover executed by Kevin Young

The religious teachings and customs portrayed in this book are accurate. Based on actual experience, verified by research, they are true to the doctrine and authentic in rendering the culture of the Mormon Church as taught, practiced, and lived in

Utah in the early 1960s.

Occasional scriptures cited in this work are taken from the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants. Both books are official scripture of the Church of

Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

The author is grateful to the writers, composers, and performers of the following songs, lyrics from which are cited in this book.

“Summertime” by George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” performed by Louis Armstrong

“All the Things You Are” by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II “My Funny Valentine” by Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart

“Teen Angel” by Jean Dinning and Red Surrey “When Sunny Gets Blue” by Jack Segal and Marvin Fisher

“Embraceable You” by George and Ira Gershwin “Since I Fell for You” by Buddy Johnson

State Street still runs straight and almost endless through the long heart of Salt Lake City. As anywhere, most all of the clubs where you could once hear jazz and dance are gone, like most of Route 40 West through the desert towns of Nevada and across the Sierras into California. They are brought back to life in these pages

because without them Shake Tauffler’s story could not be continued.

ISBN 978-0-9854481-5-8

“Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot.

This will always be so.”

Brigham Young Journal of Discourses

Yes, sometimes I feel like a motherless child. Why?

Why? Cuz nothin ever happens. Nothin?

Well, nothin good. So what’s good?

You know, to have a ball, man. You sick?

No. Hungry?

No, man! I just had myself a whole mess of black eyed peas and rice! See what I mean?

I did! I am a long ways from home! But things could be worse, sure could.

Louis Armstrong

Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child

In 1978, through divine revelation, the Mormon Church acknowledged that Negro men were finally fit to bear the Priesthood. In the meantime, generations of children had been taught to believe that the Negro race was a cursed and inferior race, and that it wasn’t wrong to believe this

way, but necessary, a necessary matter of their faith in the word of God.

For my Mother and Father

Contents

Part 1

Motherless Child

Part 2

Boys of Summer

Part 3

Valentine’s Day

Part 4

State Street

Part 5

Soldier Boy

Part 6

Coming Home

Part 7

The Highway Now

Part 8

Since I Fell for You

Part 9

Where You’re Going

Part 1

Motherless Child

Chapter 1

Louie Armstrong. Lester Young. All of them. The gallery of their framed and autographed photos arranged on the wall that Mr. Selby’s staircase climbs from the living room where he teaches trumpet to the rooms upstairs. Along the way you’ve heard there’s something wrong with them. Sometimes in the questions your father answers like you’ve asked him something else. And sometimes just this sense, at church, there among your father’s army, this sense of something silent shared, not shared like knowing two plus two is four, but more like this rock hard silent understanding at the heart of some necessary mystery. Cootie Williams. Charlie Parker. Coleman Hawkins. There’s the lesson you know is coming down the road where you’ll hear how the story goes from its beginning to what its end will someday be. The official version. The version you’ll accept as the word of God. The closest anyone’s come to saying anything about it for real is your buddy Yenchik. There was the speech in the General Priesthood Session where the Second Counselor to the President of the Church talked in these broken angry rambling pieces Yenchik had to show you how to fit together. If they talk about Cain, he said, they mean niggers. Or who gets to have the Priesthood and who don’t. They mean niggers. Or not everyone being equal or from the same estate or having the same intelligence. They mean niggers. Or passing the Priesthood from father to son. They mean niggers. Because if one nigger got it, pretty soon they’d all have it, because they’re all related. John Coltrane. Red Garland. He didn’t mean the word niggers bad. He was just telling you. Cain. The first of them. Who all the rest of them came from. Fence Sitters. Spirits who didn’t fight in some big war in Heaven before Adam or Eve or anyone came to Earth. Spirits who sat on some fence instead. You’ve remembered the fence you sat on in La Sal, the weathered gray velvet of

Motherless Child 3

the top log, you and Jimmy Dennison and David White watching the cowboys cut cattle into the chute, the sheepherders cut sheep, calves get branded, and every Saturday morning waiting with your carved spears while a steer got shot and then hung upside down and gutted. Ahmad Jamal. Art Farmer. Their albums. Albums Mr. Selby lets you take home in your leather pouch to set on your portable record player in the garage. Albums you learn how to play along with. In the ceiling of the closed garage the bare bulb is frosted with smoking dust. Its reflected light is a thin spear of bright fire along the gold brass pipe out toward the dented bell of your trumpet. Dizzy Gillespie. Bud Powell. Some reason deep in their bones why they can’t have the Priesthood. Why you could have its power starting when you first turned twelve and they could live to be a thousand and still not be close to having it. The men who taught you everything you know about the way you play. Sometimes you’ve wondered if you’re one of them. A white nigger. A white nigger kid with his white nigger band. Eddie and Jimmy and Robbie. If that’s what your father sees when he comes home from work and finds you standing there. Clifford Brown. Sonny Rollins. There was the photo Blackwell showed you in National Geographic magazine. The Negro girl with the high school face and the big bundle on her head and her naked breasts out there for anyone to look at. You could tell she was high school because if her breasts were white they were the breasts you imagined high school breasts would look like. Who her mother was. Motherless Child. A slave song. Your father’s favorite song. Dexter Gordon. Thelonius Monk. Men you’ve never met except in the stories Mr. Selby tells you. Men who were always there. Before you heard that sound on the radio in the cattle truck. Before Mr. Hinkle. Before Mrs. Harding. Sometimes you’ve wondered if they were there through that secret winter in the sandpit in the hills behind your house, when you had to play alone through all the questions, when all the questions tore through you like wind and went away unanswered. Giants in the sky around you watching over you. If they took the shapes of clouds. If the hard bright points of the early stars as the sunset lost its color into night were their eyes or the diamond rings some of them wore in Mr. Selby’s photos. If you could have seen them in the constellations. But you didn’t know them then. That they were even there for you to look for. Before Mr. Selby. Sometimes when he’s in the kitchen getting milk and cookies, when he’s in the bathroom, you’ll stand in front of the wall and look at them. Duke Ellington. Count Basie. In the end they’re men you only know through sound, like someone blind, the

4 Of the World

sound the needle lifts off the grooves of their albums. Men you play along with deep inside their songs. Men from whose solos you lift and give flight to your own. Not so they know. But there you are. There where they stand like giants around you and back a step or two away to give your solos room to fly. Eubie Blake. Fats Waller. Eric Dolphy. Fence Sitters. Sometimes shame makes you look away from the blind way they look at you out of the sightless eyes of their photos. Sometimes shame makes you glad you’re blind yourself while you play along with them in the garage. Roy Eldridge. Stanley Turrentine. Buck Clayton. They came to Earth with skin that looked like it had been baked pitch brown in the ovens of Hell. They came to Earth as Negroes. So they could be recognized. So you’d know who they were. So you could pity them. So you wouldn’t give them the Priesthood by mistake. So you wouldn’t lie down with one of their girls, or marry one, because if you did, even by accident, you’d be struck dead on the spot. She only had to have one drop of negro blood to draw down lightning. Wayne Shorter. Clark Terry. Ornette Coleman. All of them. Spirits who came to Earth as Negroes. Negroes who came to America as slaves to sing their slave songs. The pretty Negro girl in the National Geographic magazine. You could look at the photo of her face, and even touch the photo where her breasts were, but you couldn’t see or touch her real ones. Oscar Peterson. Cannonball Adderley. Somewhere along the way you’ve heard they’re not responsible enough to know how to handle the sacred power of the Priesthood. You’ve wondered what that means. You’ve wondered what they’d do with it. Drive it like a runaway train off a railroad bridge across a canyon. Set fire to their houses or make their heads explode. You’ve heard the time will come when God will decide they’ve finally proven they’re responsible enough. You’ve wondered when. What they’ll need to do to prove themselves. If all of them will become responsible together, at the same time, in the same hour or day or year, like a kind of graduation. If you can touch a Negro girl then and not be killed. All you know for sure is that when that time arrives, when God decides, he’ll tell the Prophet of the Church through a revelation. Miles Davis. In a few weeks, when you turn sixteen, your father will advance you from the rank of Teacher to the rank of Priest. Your new power will authorize you to bestow the Aaronic Priesthood on those who are worthy of its power. You’ll have your buddies there to help you. They’ll all be Priests this summer too. You’ll have one of them hold his trumpet. In a vacant classroom you’ll move back the metal folding chairs and leave one

Motherless Child 5

chair standing in the clearing in the center. You’ll have him sit down. You’ll take your place behind him. Keller and West and Doby and Jasperson and Lilly and Yenchik will form the rest of the circle around him the way your father’s friends did you. You’ll put your hands on his head and look for traction on his short thick hair, and your buddies will stack their hands on top of yours, and then, unable to see the proud black unforgiving fierceness concentrated in his face, you’ll be ready to do the ordaining prayer the way your father did for you. You start with his name. “Miles Dewey Davis the Third.” Because that’s what Mr. Selby said his whole name was.