It was eight o'clock in the morning and I was standing in a cheap apartment in Leucadia, staring at a wall decorated with the faces of dead Mormon prophets. It had been years since I had seen those faces, and in the meantime it seemed as if I had changed a good deal more than they. There was the aristocraticnosed Joseph Smith, grumpyold Brigham Young, snowybearded Wilford Woodruff, and so on. They were like goblins out of my childhood, and seeing them again scared the living hell out of me.

The apartment, which was inhabited by four Mormon missionaries, was the kind of place where surf rats and teenage runaways stay for a few days until they run out of money or find a better place to live. The carpets smelled. The iridescent green sofas had lost their sheen. Every time the Amtrak train went by, the Sheetrock walls rattled.

I looked around to see if I could find the ten-speed bicycles which, even more than dark suits and black copies of the Book of Mormon, have become the universal symbol of Mormon missionaries. And there they were in the corner — but something was wrong: The twisted pile of greasy bicycle parts looked like the result of a high-speed collision. “What happened there,” Elder Jonathan Hinckley explained cheerfully, “was that we tried to put three broken bikes together to make one good one, but instead we ruined them all. Fortunately, we have a car.”

It was Elder Hinckley’s birthday, and even though he was only 20, I followed the proper protocol and called him “Elder,” as all Mormon missionaries prefer to be called. Besides denoting their rank in the Mormon priesthood (it’s roughly equivalent to a lieutenant), the title serves the elders as a constant reminder that they are not like any other young men of their age.

Elder Loveless, a short young man with eyes as dark and kind as a squirrel’s, walked into the room and shook my hand. Nobody in the world can shake hands quite like a Mormon missionary. I’m sure they must receive training in it. The way they lift their elbow to pump a little more firmness into the grip and look you right in the eye as if scanning your soul for character flaws is truly unique. “Elder Jones is still blow-drying his hair,” he told me sincerely. “He’ll be out in a minute.”

Elder Reyes then came padding into the room wearing a dark suit and beach thongs, which somehow seemed to suit him perfectly. The dark and wiry missionary from the Dominican Republic reminded me of the scrappy little boxers his country produces. He shook my hand in a reasonably good imitation of his American counterparts, then went directly into the kitchen to pour himself a bowl of Rice Krispies. “He doesn’t speak much English,” Elder Hinckley whispered. Elder Reyes didn’t seem to mind at all when his thongs stuck to the kitchen floor (“We just mopped that floor yesterday,” Elder Hinckley said); he sat down at the table, said a quick blessing over his breakfast, then went about reading the back of the cereal box, as happy as a cartoon character.

Finally, Elder Jones made his entrance, and the entire household was present. Elder Jones, a rather shy young man from Maryland, looked as though he must have fallen asleep while holding the blow-dryer on his strawlike blond hair. He had been on his mission for less than three months, and he still had a startled, dazed look, which I assumed to mean he hadn’t quite adjusted yet to his new and somewhat bizarre lifestyle. With his mild case of teenage acne, the young elder didn’t look a day over 16.

Ordinarily, by this time of day the missionaries would have already begun trading — the door-to-door proselytizing which they labor at for 12 hours a day, five days a week, for two years. But it was raining very hard outside, and Elder Hinckley, who is the Leucadia and Olivenhain mission district leader, thought it would be best to wait until the rain had stopped. So we talked about sports for a while. The elders’ knowledge of current sports events was somewhat limited, since they are not allowed to watch TV, listen to rock radio stations, or read the newspaper. “Every now and then we buy the Sunday paper just to see how BYU’s doing,” Elder Hinckley said with a sly smile to show he’s not above bending the rules a bit.

I told them, “I went to BYU for a couple of years, and in those days the football team couldn’t even beat El Paso. Every time it looked like they had some good sophomores coming up, they all got called on missions.”

The elders looked at me suspiciously. I knew what they were thinking. “Are you L.D.S?” Elder Hinckley finally asked.

Mormons almost never use the word “Mormon.” It’s a word which reminds them of the days when they got run out of four states — New York, Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois — before they finally settled in Utah. They now prefer the more formal “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints,” then abbreviated to “L.D.S.” If you know what it means, then you probably are one. Or at least were one, which amounts to the same thing. A Mormon can no more change his heritage than a black man or a Jew. A Mormon who ceases to follow the teachings of his church simply becomes a Jack Mormon, an apostate, which is the religious equivalent of a traitor.

Somehow I didn’t have the heart to tell the elders that I was an apostate. It wasn’t that I cared what they might have thought of me, it was just that I knew there would be a lot of wasted time while they tried to fulfill their obligation to reconvert me, to bring me back into the fold. Mormons, I knew, never give up on the lost sheep. So I told them, lied really, “No, I’m not Mormon. I just went to BYU for the skiing.” And to my relief they seemed to buy that.

I looked back up at the wall decorated with the faces of the Mormon prophets. No doubt about it, they looked annoyed. The pinched face of Joseph Fielding Smith, the great-grandson of the founder of Mormonism, looked particularly unforgiving. At BYU I once heard him stand up in front of 10,000 students and tell them they should have sexual intercourse with their spouses only as often as they wanted to have children (which for most Mormons seems to be quite frequently), and that if at all possible the intercourse should be negotiated with the clothing still on. As near as I could tell, I was the only student in the field house who didn’t stand up and cheer him. Judging by the look he was now giving me, he still hadn’t forgiven me for that.

It wasn’t the only time the church and I had disagreed. Ever since I had been old enough to think for myself, we’d had our problems, the church and I. Like all Mormon males, I had been groomed from infancy to someday become a missionary, but I always knew in my heart it would never happen. I had known so many of them — brothers, cousins, best friends — and it had always seemed like such a useless waste of talent, a kind of ritual sacrifice of male virgins. Still, it could have been my fate to become one of them; and now, every time I see two elders somberly pedaling their bicycles through the streets of my neighborhood, I find myself strangely fascinated by them. I want to talk to them, see how they’re holding up under their selfinflicted torture, and if possible, find out how they can endure it, while I would never even consider it.

I offered to take Elder Hinckley and his companion Elder Jones to breakfast. One thing I knew about Mormon missionaries is that they’re usually broke and hungry, and if you want to get them to talk about something other than the Book of Mormon, you have to feed them. Naturally, they accepted my invitation.

On the way to the coffee shop in Encinitas, I prodded them into talking about how they came to be missionaries. Elder Jones seemed to be struggling with his shyness. Or was he embarrassed to talk about it? “I’ve wanted to go on a mission since I was seven or eight,” he told me. “When I got to be a little older I realized if I really wanted to go, I would have to save my money. I worked every summer, mostly in construction, and one summer in a drugstore.”

“Are you paying your own way now?” I asked, and he nodded that he was. “Doesn’t the church ever help pay for some of it?”

Elder Hinckley answered, “The church says that if a young man wants to go on a mission, the lack of money shouldn’t stand in the way. Some of the elders from the poorer countries, like Elder Reyes, can’t afford to pay, and in those cases the church helps out. The rest of us pay our own way.” He went on to explain that the missionaries in the San Diego area lived on about $300 per month; they reimbursed the church $125 per month for rent, and $25 per month for use of the car; that left about $150 per month for food and clothing, which wasn’t enough. They depended on the generosity of local church members to see them through. They figured their many invitations to dinner saved them about $100 per month on food. They were truly “going forth with neither purse nor script,” as old Joe Smith had commanded the original Mormon missionaries to do.

Listening to them, I found myself oddly envious. I realized my mother would approve of them in a way she hasn’t approved of me since adolescence. To this day, whenever my mother calls me from Utah, before the conversation has ended, she will manage to slip in, “The greatest regret in my life is that you never went on a mission for the church.” She has a way of saying “the church” which is intended to remind me there is no other. She has learned not to push the point too much, but for many years she hounded me relentlessly about my falling out of the fold.

After I turned 26 and passed the age of eligibility for a Mormon male to go on a mission, my mother quit trying so hard. She could see that my indifference toward being a saint — latter-day, early-day, or otherwise — was a chronic condition and not just a phase I was going through. Her regret then calcified into one of those long-term motherly disappointments, as calm and everlasting as a kidney stone. Fortunately, my father stayed out of the whole mess. He probably remembered the pressures placed on him to go on a mission when he had been my age; he hadn’t wanted to go any more than I had, and didn’t.

At breakfast I was reminded that the elders were still growing boys, even though they did wear threepiece suits. They ate voraciously. “We don’t get a chance to eat out often,” Elder Hinckley said through a mouthful of food.

They both had their copies of the Book of Mormon beside them on the table. They were the missionary editions, full of handy references. My mother had given me an identical copy on my 16th birthday. I had tried several times to read it, but always found it impossible. The book is absolutely stupefying in its monotony, a real blockbuster of boredom. Most of my youth was spent listening to people babble incoherently about the book. Week after week they would stand up in church and testify how it had changed their lives. I finally decided that their relationship to the book was similar to the affection captives come to have for their captors after several weeks of being locked up in a dark closet. I had to agree with them that such severe sensory deprivation could indeed change their lives. My dog finally chewed up my copy one day, for which I rewarded him with a package of hot dogs. I was very careful not to ask the elders about the Book of Mormon.

While the elders ate, they brought me up to date on the church’s vital statistics. There are now six million Mormons around the world, 50,000 of them living in the San Diego area. There are 28,000 Mormon missionaries worldwide, and each year they bring about 200,000 converts into nally damned if you don’t go,” he said. “Sometimes the people at church will give a guy a hard time if he doesn’t go, but you’ve got to understand our point of view. We’ve come to understand that this gospel is true, and we want to share it with the world.” Perhaps I was looking at Elder Hinckley in a strange way, because he quickly added, nervously, “We’re just ordinary guys.”

For some reason I found myself thinking of an old friend of mine from BYU whom I hadn’t seen in years — since he left for his mission. Dale had been born into a Mormon family, but like me, he didn’t have much use for any of it. Also like me, he was at BYU because it made his family happy — and because some of the best skiing in the world was within 30 minutes of the campus. Another year or two at BYU and Dale would have been among the best skiers in the country. But then he was called on a mission. No one in our circle of friends thought he had a chance of passing the interview, since he was no more “worthy” than the rest of us. We were shocked when he passed; if they took him, it meant they could take any of us. After the church service held in honor of his going away, after he had been paraded around in front of the congregation like a sacrificial calf, we all met back at Dale’s house, and there, after a few beers, he broke down and wept in rage. “Why do we let them do this to us?” he cried. “Why can’t we tell them no?”

None of us had an answer for him. Why does the colt let the man with the knife make a gelding out of him? Is it ignorance? Fear? Trust? Cowardice? When I left that day, Dale said to me, “I’m scared to death. I don’t want to go.” I remember how much it scared me just to hear him say it.

The first time it occurred to me that there was something strange about this missionary stuff was when I was ten years old and saw my brother’s close friend, Jack, return from France in disgrace after serving one and a half years of what was supposed to have been a two-year mission. Before he went away on his mission, Jack had been a handsome young man who always had a few dollars in his pocket and a certain way with the girls. The term “sexual abstinence” didn’t mean anything to me at the time, but if somebody had explained what it meant, even I could have concluded that Jack was an unlikely candidate to tolerate two years of it.

I first became aware that Jack’s mission was going badly for him when my mother and the other church ladies seemed incapable of talking about anything else during their long phone conversations. I found out what Jack’s problem was when he showed up at the airport with a very lovely, and very pregnant, Parisian girl. I couldn’t understand why nobody seemed to share his obvious joy in having found a wife. Far from joyful over the situation, the church promptly excommunicated him.

My cousin Roger fared a little better. He completed his two-year mission in Guatemala, but then had only been back for a few days when he withdrew his life’s savings from the bank and bought a plane ticket back to Guatemala. When he returned home the second time, he was accompanied by the prettiest little brown-skinned girl the state of Utah had ever seen. Of course the family ostracized him — what had been going on down there for two years? My grandfather’s comment was, “Don’t you know Mexicans can’t get auto insurance in this state?” Roger and his bride finally had to move to Kansas to get away from them.

My brother’s case was less romantic. For two years he sent home letters from Marseilles, France, calling it “one of the most wicked cities in the world.” That was enough to fire my imagination, and I kept hoping he would be more specific about the French temptations. But he never was. Not even after he returned. In fact, I never heard him talk about his mission again. He spent long hours alone at his desk, staring out the window. I had to conclude that it had been an awful experience for him.

And what purpose could it have possibly served? Why is the Mormon church so determined to convert the entire world to their way of thinking? I put this question to the young elders there at breakfast, and got the standard response, the one I’d been hearing all my life, the one Mormon children are taught to recite in Sunday school as soon as they are old enough to speak. “We know this gospel to be true.”

Of course, I thought. What else would I expect them to say? “But why do you insist that everybody else believe in it, too?” I asked.

“We want to share it with the world,” Elder Hinckley replied, and I could tell by his expression there was no point in discussing it further. At Provo, Utah, before the missionaries are sent out into the field, they are trained in a kind of circular dialectic. They could respond to almost any imaginable question about the church in a way that would lead the potential convert from Lesson One to Lesson Two, and so on. Nothing could divert them.

I knew the answer to my own question, anyway. The reason the Mormons are trying to convert the world to Mormonism is that their history has taught them they can’t trust anybody who isn’t a Mormon, and in the long run it’s a lot easier to convert the Gentiles than it is to fight them. When the Mormons fled Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1846, their homes had been burned by the Gentiles, their farms and businesses destroyed, their families molested, and their prophet assassinated by an angry mob. When Brigham Young led them across the plains to Utah, it was the fourth time they had been forced to resettle. Brigham Young’s intention was to gel as far away from the United States as he could get, and start his own country in the Rocky Mountains, which he did, calling it the Kingdom of Deseret. At that time the entire Great Basin was inhabited by only a few impoverished Indians and a couple of hundred shiftless white men pursuing their passion for rape, violence, and wanderlust under the pretension of trapping for furs. If the Mormons had any hope of backing up their claim to the Kingdom of Deseret, they had to settle and populate it, meaning they needed to add thousands to their meager numbers. Mormon missionaries were sent to Europe, where times were hard and people were looking for a way to immigrate to America. The Mormons chartered ships and offered cheap fare to America for anyone who would accept the gospel and be baptized. Once in Utah, the converts were offered free farmland, in locations where everybody in the community had emigrated from the same homeland. The missionaries, of course, had a phenomenal success and converted thousands of people to Mormonism.

An interesting footnote to this story is that Brigham Young originally conceived of his kingdom as extending as far west as California, though he knew little about that territory. In the winter of 1846, when the Mormons were camped at Winter Quarters, Iowa, waiting for the spring thaw so they could push on to Utah, war broke out between the United States and Mexico. The United States Army conscripted 500 Mormon men (and ten women cooks) to go fight in California. Though Brigham Young had no desire to aid the United States, which had been very unkind to the Mormons, he saw an opportunity to establish his people in California — his kingdom’s outlet to the sea! — and he gave his consent for the men to go. Their brutal winter journey to San Diego is said to have been the longest infantry march in the history of the U.S. Army. Many of the Mormons ended up staying in California, and in fact started a colony of sorts in San Bernardino.

There isn’t any farmland to give away in Utah anymore, and the Kingdom of Deseret became part of the United States after all. But the Mormons never quite overcame their suspicions of the Gentiles. It’s as though they’re still afraid the angry mob will show up again some dark night to run them out of town, and they’re trying desperately to avert that tragedy by converting the mob one by one, making believers out of them, bringing them into the fold, before it’s too late.

No harm in that, I thought. If the elders are persuasive enough to get somebody actually to read the

Book of Mormon, then they deserve the right to claim their souls. Salesmen — that’s what they really are, door-to-door salesmen. “Okay,” I said to the elders, “so you want to share the gospel. And how successful have you been here in San Diego?”

“We get a lot of doors slammed in our faces,” Elder Hinckley said. “A lot of people seem to have disgust for us. It takes a lot of hard work and handshaking to make a convert here.”

Not a very fruitful vineyard, I gathered. Wickedness and sin are out of control here; men in three-piece suits are not held in esteem as highly as they are in other parts of the world; and the competition is vigorous from the human-growth potentialists, the new-age gurus, and all the other oddball religions in San Diego. The missionaries have no choice about where they are sent, but if they did, San Diego wouldn’t be their first choice. Like most missionaries, Elder Hinckley would have liked to go to Europe. But at least the climate is agreeable here, and compared to much of the world the health facilities are good — so good in fact, that when missionaries sent to places like Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Peru contract local diseases, they are sent to San Diego to recuperate.

Outside it was still raining, and I could see the elders weren’t ready to go tracting quite yet. A young woman in a red dress passed by our window, tiptoeing gracefully around the puddles on the sidewalk. I couldn’t help but notice how she caught the elders’ attention. They looked at her longingly, but secretively, as though neither wanted the other to catch him looking. It seemed like a good time to bring up the subject of sexual abstinence. “So every worthy young man should go on a mission,” I said, drawing them back to reality. They nodded to show they were with me. “Tell me then what you have to do to be considered ‘worthy.’”

“There’s three things they ask you in the interviews,” Elder Hinckley recalled. “First, there’s the Word of Wisdom — do you use alcohol, tobacco, or coffee?”

“And if you do, are you automatically out?” I wondered.

“No, I had friends in high school who were out in the parking lot smoking and drinking, and they’re on missions now. We do believe in repentance.”

“Good,” I said.

“Second, they want to know if you’re living by the Ten Commandments — everybody knows what they are. And third, there’s chastity; they’re really tough on that.”

“And how do they define chastity?” I asked.

“No necking, no petting, no premarital sex,” Elder Hinckley said, counting them off on his fingers.

“No girls, in other words.”

“I guess kissing’s no sin,” Elder Hinckley said with a sly smile intended to let me know he had personally explored the outer limits of worthiness.

“Do you guys have girlfriends at home waiting for you?” I asked.

Elder Jones leaned forward as if to let us know he had something to say on this subject. “Neither of us has girlfriends waiting at home, but a lot of missionaries do. Most guys get a ‘Dear John’ letter after about six months of being away. You hardly ever hear about a young lady waiting longer than that. Two years is a long time. That’s why I didn’t want a girl waiting for me.”

“I wanted one. I just couldn’t get one,” Elder Hinckley said, a bit sullenly.

“Well,” I told him, “if it’s any consolation, while I was at BYU, I noticed the returned missionaries had a definite advantage with the girls.”

“I certainly hope so,” Elder Hinckley said.

It was true. At BYU most girls will steer clear of a young man who isn’t wearing the garments of an elder. (The garments, which look like silk long johns cut off at the elbows and knees, are worn as underwear, and have a bulky hem which can sometimes be seen through clothing at the collar and thighs.) The reason the young women at BYU look for returning missionaries — other than the pleasure of rejecting ineligible males, a pleasure which the otherwise unempowered females will recall with delight all their lives — is the obvious advantage of not having to wait two years for a man to complete his mission before he can get married. During those two years anything might happen: he might fall in love with some exotic brown-skinned girl in another land; he might contract some horrible Nigerian skin disease; or worst of all, she might complete her degree in child development and family relations and have to go back to Panguitch, Utah, to live with her parents and wait faithfully for her betrothed to return from his mission. No, like women everywhere, Mormon women play the odds, and the odds favor a returned missionary.

While I was at BYU, some of the more devious males who hadn’t been on missions had taken to wearing rubber bands under their trousers in imitation of the hem on the elders’ garments; that way, while they were sitting on the steps of the student union, waiting for innocent young girls to beguile, they would at least appear to be returned missionaries. Like men everywhere, they knew how to play the odds, too.

“Something bothers me about this ‘worthiness’ stuff,” I told the elders. “It seems as though the church is asking you to live by impossible standards. There’s something almost abnormal about telling a young man he can’t have anything to do with young women.”

“It causes a lot of missionaries problems,” Elder Hinckley admitted. “A lot of them get sent home because of it. While one guy’s in the shower, his companion will be running upstairs to visit the girl living in the apartment above them — that kind of thing.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You’re not telling me you’re supposed to take showers together so you can keep an eye on each other?”

“We don’t have to take showers together,” Elder Hinckley said. “But we are supposed to be in the company of our companion at all times, and never alone in the company of a young lady.” I must have been looking at Elder Hinckley strangely again, because he quickly added, “We’re just ordinary guys. We think all the same things you do. We’ll go to a party and talk to all the girls — and we’ll shake their hands, but that’s all that will come of it.

“Actually,” Elder Hinckley said, trying to change the subject, “I think this is good for us. It’s a character builder. I think being with a missionary companion all the time prepares you for marriage. You learn how to live with somebody. You learn all their little mannerisms, all their problems. It’s the hardest part of being on a mission for me. Actually, it’s sickening sometimes.”

“Not just that,” Elder Jones said. “Sometimes we get too close to the local church members.”

“Meaning?” “Too close to the young ladies,” Elder Jones conceded.

“Girls will be girls,” I said.

“And we’re just ordinary guys,” Elder Hinckley shrugged.

Nobody said much for a while. I finished my tea, while the elders chomped on their ice. Finally I said, “You know what I’ve always wondered? The church says every worthy young man should go on a mission. But what about every worthy young woman? Why don’t they have to go?”

Elder Hinckley looked perplexed, “They can go if they want,” he said. “The church encourages them to get an education and try to get married.”

That was about as much as I had ever heard said on the subject. While it is true there are some female Mormon missionaries, their numbers are insignificant when compared to males (about 12 percent are females). The truth is — do I dare say it? — that the female missionaries are generally the old maids, the BYU lasses who completed their degrees before they could find a husband. So, like Catholic nuns, they resign themselves to a lifetime of serving the Lord — the only man who would have them. For this reason, the age limit for female missionaries is extended beyond the age 26 limit for males, to 65, even 70, to accommodate their long spinsterhood.

After a while the rain stopped, the sun came out, and from our booth in the coffee shop we could see it would be a wonderful day for proselytizing. “Almost 10:30,” Elder Hinckley said, looking at his watch. “We’ve got to get to work.”

We drove to Neptune Avenue in Leucadia. It was a neighborhood of half-million-dollar homes overlooking the ocean. It also had a reputation for a pretty fast beach life. I had to consider the elders’ choice a gutsy one. I couldn’t imagine a neighborhood more challenging to a couple of Mormon missionaries.

I was excited as we got out of the car. I was finally going to see firsthand just what it was I had missed. I watched the elders’ faces closely as we got out of the car, expecting to see their teenage innocence glaze over as they hardened themselves against the cruel-hearted Gentiles. But to my surprise, their expressions brightened, as though they were laughing about some private joke. They straightened their ties and unruffled their suits as happily as if they were going on a double date.

We had some difficulty finding our way to the front door of the first house we approached. “I’m convinced architects in California are designing houses these days so Mormon missionaries won’t be able to tell which door to knock on,” Elder Hinckley said, bearing the hardship cheerfully.

“Sometimes we end up in the back yard looking through the patio window at someone lying on the couch in their underwear,” Elder Jones said. “Either that or we run into the attack dogs. Elder Hinckley’s been bit a couple of times.”

Elder Hinckley said, almost happily. “A lot of people driving by yell things at us.”

“Once we got yelled at by an 89-year-old lady who said we were invading her privacy,” Elder Jones recalled.

“What did you say to her after that?” I asked.

“We told her to have a nice day,” he said.

After a half dozen houses with nobody home, we finally met a man coming out his front door just as we were coming up the walk. He tried to backpedal but could see it was too late. We had him cornered. “Good morning,” Elder Jones said. “We’re representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.” (He said it slowly, and it seemed to take forever for him to get it all out.) “We have a message we’d like to share with you.”

The Gentile, in his mid30s, was unshaven, scraggly haired, and looked as though he had been up all night indulging in wickedness. Still, he managed to smile at them. “I really don’t feel like talking right now,” he said. Just then he spied his next-door neighbor coming out of his house, and with a flash of inspiration he said, “But that guy over there really likes to talk to missionaries. Hey, John!” he called. “These guys want to talk to you!”

The neighbor raced for his car as we raced out the gate. But he beat us. The elders just smiled, almost taking courage from this little farce. “Looks like a tough neighborhood,” I said. “It is,” Elder Hinckley agreed with a sigh. “The Spanish-speaking commu-

Nobody was home at the first house, so we moved on. “We got an orange thrown at us during Elder Jones’s first month here,” nities are a lot easier. Their customs are different. They’ll always let you in the house, and once you get inside that door [the elder’s eyes brightened], then you have a big advantage.” He went on to explain that their roommates, Elders Reyes and Loveless, work just the Latino neighborhoods in North County, and they have been very successful in making converts. Also, there are five elders who speak Laotian working the Southeast Asian neighborhoods in San Diego, and they are making about 25 baptisms per month, as compared to Elders Hinckley and Jones’s one baptism in three months.

At the next door there was a brief but encouraging conversation through the mail slot. “Have a nice day, boys,” the middle-age female voice said.

“Boys,” Elder Jones said, shaking his head as we walked away. After you’ve been called “elder” for a while, “boy” just won’t do.

We knocked on several more doors, but nobody wanted to invite us in.

“I can’t believe you guys do this 12 hours a day,” I said. “Don’t you ever get bored?”

“Sure,” Elder Hinckley said. “We get bored sometimes. We have little games we play to get us through.”

“Like what?”

“We like to play the ‘word game.’ You give your companion a word, say ‘sugar,’ and he has to use it in his next door approach. When the person at the next door tells us he doesn’t want to hear our message, I might say, ‘Please, with sugar?’ ” The two elders began laughing uncontrollably at this corny example. They seemed to turn into unruly children right before my eyes.

At the next house there was a No Solicitors sign on the gate. The elders ignored it. “One time this woman got really mad at me,” Elder Hinckley said. “‘Can’t you read the sign? No Solicitors!’ I told her, ‘Ma’am, I come from Utah, and they don’t teach us how to read too well back there.’”

At a run-down house buried in shrubbery, an attractive young woman engaged us in a conversation. “I’d like to invite you in,” she said after a while, “but I’m leaving for work pretty soon. I want you to know I appreciate what you’re doing. I’m a member of a local church myself.”

“Oh? What church is that?” Elder Hinckley politely inquired.

“S.R.F.”

Elder Hinckley looked at me.

“Self-Realization Fellowship,” I translated.“There’s a lot of them around here.”

“Never heard of it,” Elder Hinckley shrugged. I could almost hear him thinking: “For there shall arise false Christs and false prophets....”

“Perhaps we could make an appointment to come back another time,” Elder Jones offered.

The young woman considered it. She obviously loved to talk religion, particularly with handsome, clean-cut young men. “No,” she finally said. “I’m following a different path than you. Perhaps we should leave it at that.”

As soon as we were out of hearing range I said to the elders,“She looked lonely.”

“Yeah,” Elder Jones agreed. “We have to be careful. Sometimes the young women just want a man to talk to.... But the old ladies do it, too, Sometimes we’ll come back and give them all seven lessons; then when we ask them if they’re ready to be baptized they say no, but they sure enjoyed our company.”

We walked on for a while. “Well,” I said. “We haven’t done too well so far.”

“Sometimes we go all day — maybe 100 doors — before anybody invites us in,” Elder Jones said, not in the least discouraged. “Then other days the spirit is different and it seems like we can get inside every other door.”

As we moved along to the next house, I dropped behind the elders to watch them. They were in an expansive mood now, both lighthearted and serious, like kids playing grown-ups. I found myself envying their innocence. Fifteen years ago they might have been my brothers, my cousins, my best friends...even me.

We walked up a flight of white stairs and found a door waiting open for us. The elders peeked in curiously. The back door, as well as all the windows in the house, were open. We could see to the ocean, and clear to the horizon, for miles and miles. A strong wind was blowing through the house and into our faces. Loud rock music was coming from somewhere. A young man greeted us warmly.

Then it made sense to me. I knew why the elders seemed so happy. For two years they were on a reprieve from responsibility — no money, no work, no career, no cars, no clothes, no women. They spent their time peeking into peoples’ houses, seeing how people lived behind closed doors, smelling their odors, tasting their cooking, eyeing their daughters (but nothing more), listening to their confessions, their fears, their delusions, their hunger and obsession for anything true and pure. The elders were like teenage holy men. It was their sacrifice — all the things they had given up — which gave them their purity, their happiness, their holiness.