by Mark Crimmins
Davis called him at the beginning of the month to tell him the bad news.
“You’re not gonna like this any more than I do, Schultz, but Prez has decided we all need to ask a hundred golden questions a week from now on. I know the Lord put Prez in charge of everything, but that still sounds like a lot of GQs.”
A golden question or GQ was quite simple: the missionary had just to march up to a stranger on the street and ask them if they had heard of the Mormon church and would they like to hear more. It had been proven over and over to be the least effective way to find people interested in the church, and many missions had abandoned it altogether for just that reason. Moreover, golden questions were an intrusive and abrasive way to approach strangers—people who got GQed often complained about being harassed. Some people got angry, and the technique also occasionally brought forth threats of violence against the missionaries. For this reason, in addition to being unpopular with the citizenry at large, the technique was also deeply unpopular with the missionaries themselves. Schultz thought glumly about this optimistically named way of wasting missionaries’ energy and time, beginning with the thought that a golden question was a lie: it was two questions, not one. Even when someone was interested, he reflected, you took their phone number, and then, when you called them, they backed out quickly. When missionaries knocked on people’s doors, they were often taken for salesmen, sometimes for Jehovah’s Witnesses, occasionally for the FBI, but when missionaries set about GQing people, they were sometime taken for madmen.
No one in the South Tacoma District was happy about the new directive, but Elder Schultz did his best—like everyone else—to keep the numbers coming in. While many missionaries dreaded Tuesday mornings because this was when they called in their numbers and made their weekly report, Schultz enjoyed making the weekly call that quantified his efforts in the cause. The first week after the new directive, however, he ran into a rare snag.
Davis called him at nine on the Tuesday morning. The District Leader usually began in the same way.
“Hey Schultzy, you’re the man! Let’s have those number of yours! Why don’t we start with knocking on doors?”
“Thirty hours.”
“You guys knocked on doors for thirty hours! That’s insane! The mission minimum is only ten hours! I respect you guys for exceeding the work norms, but maybe you need to slow down a bit. What about teaching?”
“Twenty hours.”
“You’re making me feel like a layabout here, Schultzy! Just tell me you didn’t spend any hours checking referrals!”
“Ten hours.”
“Holy smokes! What can I say, Schultzy? I got me one of the best teams in the whole Seattle mission down there at Thirty-Eighth and Thompson. Flip! You know something, Schultzy, if all of us worked as hard as you guys, we wouldn’t need to come on missions in the first place, ha ha! The whole world would be Mormons, and we could all just go home and hang out with our girlfriends. Hey! One last thing—what about the golden questions? How many did you guys ask—a thousand?”
“A hundred and eleven.”
“Whoa! A hundred and eleven, huh? Er, Schultzy, that is kinda low. You know the new rule about a hundred a week means both of you must ask a hundred, right?”
“You didn’t tell us that. You just said a hundred a week. You meant two hundred? If you’d have made it clear, Davis, we’d have done that.”
“I thought I did make it clear, but maybe I forgot, Schultzy. Hmm. Prez is gonna be pissed about this. He said at the last leadership meeting that he was personally gonna kick every missionary in the ass that didn’t get a hundred GQs. He’s gonna kick ’em in the ass with his size-seven shoe! Those were his exact words. We’re lucky the mission president is a little guy. At least, he has small feet. Hmm. What was the problem? Communication, I guess. You guys must’ve been tired from all the other stuff you were doing. Maybe you should knock on a few less doors and ask a few more GQs. Jeez. This is a problem for me, Schultzy. Look, I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do. I can’t tell Prez you guys only asked a hundred and eleven. That’d be my ass right there. I’d be busted outta my district leadership and shipped out to Yelm to try and convert all the crazies that live out there. They haven’t had a convert in ten years. So, I’m gonna write in the report that you guys reached the target of two hundred, okay? Just make sure that you ask them next week, Schultz, so it all averages out. Let me see—what is that? That makes two hundred and eighty-nine. A hundred and forty-four each for you and Perez. I’ll let you two decide who asks the extra one, ha ha! Well, just go out there and get ’em, Schultzy. The Lord’ll count ’em all up just the same anyhow. Ours is not to question why, Schultzy! Ours is just to get out there and bust our asses! Sounds like I’d better let you guys go out to work!”
Schultz hung up the blue phone and broke the news to Perez. Fernando Perez was a cruiserweight boxer from Tijuana who joined the church in jail while he was doing time for armed robbery. Tacomans tended not to tell him to get lost, even if he did GQ them.
“Two hundred and what? It’s impossible, Schultz! That’s worse than training for a big fight. Who’re we gonna ask these questions? We’ve already stopped everyone who walks anywhere in this part of town. It’s all cars! Everybody drives everywhere in all this rain. Then there’s the pollution. Who wants to breathe in the Tacoma Aroma? Only us! Where’re we gonna find all these people? Plus, when you ask a lotta GQs, you start to forget who you’ve already asked after a coupla days. I stopped the one guy three times last week. The guy on Lake Street with the hat? How was I supposed to know I’d already stopped him earlier in the week? He looked different. He was wearing different clothes. He blew up at me. Told me I was fucking crazy—his words, not mine! I’m just quoting. He said he’d call the cops if I stopped him one more time. He said it was harassment, and to be honest, I kinda agree with him. I don’t like it, Schultz. This new directive is bad news. We’re gonna be freaking a lot of people out. People are gonna think we’re Moonies!”
It was true enough. The very paucity of pedestrians made the missionaries seem a bit desperate in their eagerness to talk to people they found walking on the streets. The previous week had been hell for them. They’d made more enemies in those six days than they had in the previous three months, all because of the golden questions. The new quota devised by Davis broke down to about twenty GQs per day for each of them, for the next seven days straight. That might not sound like much, Schultz thought gloomily, but that was twenty episodes of daily discomfort they hadn’t had to deal with two weeks earlier.
They made their morning preparations in sullen silence. Before they left, the boxer went into the back room, telling Schultz he needed to pray for help not to be furious at the mission president. When he returned, however, he was buoyant.
“The Lord’s given me an answer, Schultz! We ask people in groups! That way, they can all tell us to get lost at the same time, but each of them counts as an individual GQ! That’s what I call inspiration!”
Perez’s idea sounded good to Schultz, and the two of them headed out onto Thompson Street to start the day’s work. Their appointment was up on Gerard, so they took the Thirty-Eighth Street bus. Just before their stop, Perez turned to Schultz.
“Watch this, Schultz. I’m gonna get my quota for the day right now!” The boxer’s head nodded gently as he scanned the bus and counted the passengers. “Okay, that’s thirty-three people on this bus. No. Wait. I counted us as well. Thirty-one.”
The driver announced Gerard. They got up and walked to the front of the bus. Schultz was in front. When he reached the line behind the driver, Perez spun around on his heels, spread his arms wide, smiled, and addressed the passengers.
“Excuse me! Everybody! Everybody! Good morning! Hey, look—we’re Mormon missionaries, and we wanna know if anyone on this bus wants to know about our church?”
Perez kept smiling, having gotten the attention of the weary passengers. It was nine thirty. Most people were heading to work. Nobody said a word. An old lady smiled. Perez quietly counted out ten seconds before he spoke again.
“Okay, everybody! Thanks very much! Maybe next time! Have a good day!”
The bus pulled over to the curb and they got off. Perez couldn’t contain himself.
“Thirty-one GQs before the count! Those are some numbers I can live with! I’m home free for the whole day, Schultz, and I’ve even got—let me see—eleven to carry over to tomorrow! I’m ahead of the game!”
They went about their work: teaching, getting referrals from member families they hit up, checking referrals, knocking on doors. Schultz kept forcing himself to ask the golden questions, mostly to individuals, occasionally to a couple. He wasn’t quite ready to hold up an entire bus full of people. The week raced by as they built up their numbers, and, by the end of Friday, they had popped the question to two hundred and thirty people.
But then Davis called them on Saturday morning to tell them they had to meet all their numbers targets by Saturday night because of the missionary Zone Conference on the Sunday. They needed to reach their weekly targets by the end of the day. Plus, there was another problem. Their schedule on Saturday was booked from morning till night with consecutive teaching appointments with a family who wanted their teenager to be baptized on Sunday night. All the preparatory lessons had to be taught one after the other. Schultz and Perez were not even scheduled to be outside that day.
On the way over to the Browns’ residence to teach Christopher his marathon session, Perez nabbed another busload of unsuspecting people and hit his own target. But Schultz just couldn’t do it. He couldn’t bring himself to take another bus, ride one stop, and make a fool of himself in front of all those passengers, just to satisfy this absurd desire for arbitrary figures that had suddenly blossomed inside the ferret-like head of Bernard W. Boggs of Hemet, California, President of the Seattle Mission.
To make matters worse, the Browns gave them a ride home at the end of the exhausting marathon of teaching. It was after ten when Mr. Brown dropped them off at the corner. Schultz climbed the exterior steps up to their tiny third-floor dive above the chiropractor’s offices that were above the doughnut shop on the ground floor. Schultz climbed the long staircases in a fury of failure. A legendary worker across the mission, he had been defeated by the new directive. It was too much. It was unreasonable. Unsustainable. Perez, on the other hand, was effervescent. He wouldn’t say anything, but there was always a rivalry between missionaries assigned to work together. But the fact remained: Perez, with his bus gimmick, had hit his target; Schultz, the senior partner, had not. Davis would call at ten thirty, as he’d said he would, and Schultz would have to explain.
Schultz himself might get busted out to Yelm, where half the population were bikers and everyone was armed to the teeth. Even being mistaken for FBI was dangerous out there. Every missionary dreaded that gig, and it tended to be reserved for “problem” people who weren’t delivering the goods: converts and baptisms, or, barring those, numbers that represented an intense determination to produce them. How was he going to tell Davis he had now let him down a second time?
Boggs would blame Davis for the unsatisfactory stats. It was Davis’s job to make the Tacoma missionaries perform. He needed the numbers as much as Schultz did. It was almost like a pyramid scheme. Maybe it went all the way up the chain of command—all the way to Salt Lake, where some grand poobah had dreamed up this pea-brained notion that everyone suddenly needed to hysterically flag people down on the streets. Who knew?
Schultz lay on the sofa and closed his eyes, contemplating the public humiliation he would be subjected to at the Zone Conference the next day. He imagined the thoughts of the other missionaries in the Tacoma Zone when they heard that Schultz had underperformed. The silent satisfaction of enemies too blind to recognize themselves as such. Shocked whispers, even among his admirers and friends: Schultz didn’t reach his numbers targets! Schultz, the rock, is beginning to crack! Maybe Schultz is kicking against the pricks! Schultz is kicking!
Outside, he heard men’s voices. Shouting and cursing. Then shattering glass. He sat up and looked from the window at the two large gangs fighting in the parking lot behind their building, the one to which their entrance stairs led.
“Perez, get out here! There’s a gang fight outside!”
Perez lumbered over and they watched the commotion together.
Suddenly Schultz put on his suit jacket.
“I’m heading out there, Perez. It’s my last chance. The Lord came through for me!”
“We shouldn’t interfere, Schultz. Those guys are badasses. They’re gang members. They got weapons. And they’re probably all high on badly cut angel dust.”
“All twenty-six of them, Perez. I’m heading down there!”
No one in the mob noticed the man in the suit walking down the wooden fire-escape stairs in the darkness behind them. Perez watched intently from the window.
Schultz strode across the asphalt and inserted himself between the warring factions. He held up his arms and told them, with some authority, to listen to him. The gang members couldn’t be sure he wasn’t some kind of federal agent. There was some sort of ID gleaming on the man’s jacket pocket. But, seeing that he didn’t produce or display a gun, the men started cursing him. Over the chorus of curses and threats, Schultz announced that he was a representative of the highest authority. The gangs were again confused by who he might be. There was something unnatural in the man’s utter lack of fear. Schultz shouted that he had a few questions to ask them. But as soon as he mentioned the word religion, one of the men rushed forward with a broken bottle and drove it into Schultz’s face. His hands over his eyes, Schultz sank to the asphalt. Both groups set into him with their weapons and their feet. By the time he was unconscious, Perez was cracking skulls with his giant fists, his arms like iron rods. It was a while before he, too, went down.
Up in their apartment, the blue phone kept ringing.