Beyond the Masked Kid

By Dan Neiser

Ride with the Masked Kid in his new white bat-winged Impala as he ventures across the northern prairies through rain, heat and hail to the forests of Olympia on his way to graduate school. Be with him in his chemical adventures and hilarious faux pas as a teaching assistant. The triumphs and disasters continue, as he discovers that once you've put on a mask, it's hard to take it off.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664187016

Dan Neiser

Dan Neiser is the author of 'Who Was That Masked Kid', and 'Return of the Masked Kid'. He lives in Southern California with his wife.

Book preview

Copyright © 2021 by Dan Neiser.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 08/17/2021

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

802749

CONTENTS

Prologue

Chapter 1     Decisions and the Future

Chapter 2     Back to No Future

Chapter 3     Back to Nowhere

Chapter 4     The Batmobile

Chapter 5     The Great Escape

Chapter 6     Back on the Road

Chapter 7     Malting Barley and an Insecure Feeling

Chapter 8     The Winter King

Chapter 9     Lost in Olympia

Chapter 10   Critter

Chapter 11   The Danger of It

Chapter 12   The Warning

Chapter 13   The Warning Voice

Chapter 14   Choosing Lysol

Chapter 15   Get It Right or Get It Wong

Chapter 16   Buried Alive

Chapter 17   The Same Mistake Twice

Chapter 18   Bodies for Bullets

Chapter 19   Teaching Assistant Blues

Chapter 20   The Fork in the Road

Chapter 21   I Go South

Chapter 22   Underwear Strikes Again

Chapter 23   Housing Woes

Chapter 24   Roommate Woes

Chapter 25   Back in Church

Chapter 26   More Disasters

Chapter 27   Rust Bucket Blues

Chapter 28   Go East, Young Man

Chapter 29   Finding What Isn’t There

Chapter 30   We’ve Only Just Begun

Chapter 31   Do You Feel a Draft?

Chapter 32   Deliverance and Stigma

Chapter 33   Depressed Lying Playboys

Chapter 34   Loneliness Part 1

Chapter 35   Loneliness Part 2

Chapter 36   The Last Metaphorical Lap

Chapter 37   White Scrapes

Chapter 38   Wyoming Interview

Chapter 39   Showdown at the Graduate Corral

Chapter 40   Winding Things Up

PROLOGUE

The Masked Man and his faithful Native American companion have been watching the Kid for some time now, and have for the most part been pleased with him, although there were some things he could have done a lot better.

Hmmm, Tonto said in his Native American guttural. Perhaps people won’t understand where the Kid has been or what he is doing now unless somebody brings them up to date.

Well, Tonto, the Masked Man said in his soft Clayton Moore voice, having long ago abandoned the deep bass of Brace Beemer, he went to college, and many people were running and screaming.

Unnnhhh, Tonto said. Him sometimes a menace.

Well, he doesn’t mean to be, Tonto. But he will learn.

Let’s hope so, Kemo Sabe. Him graduated and going to graduate school, Tonto said, gazing down at the Kid, who was preparing to leave college and make the long trek across the wild west desert to his new place of higher education. Because if he doesn’t . . .

Tonto shook his head then wheeled Scout about and started to ride away.

The Masked Man grimaced as he saw the Kid put on his flat cap and gown, the tassel hanging down on his left side.

Wheeling his great white horse about, he followed his faithful Native American up the cactus-strewn hill.

He will, Tonto, he said.

Together they galloped off into the sunset, leaving a great cloud of dust that threatened to obscure them forever.

CHAPTER 1

Decisions and the Future

Part 1: Staying Out of Utah

The last year of my college education was coming to an end, and I’d finished up the semester with the lowest GPA of my career, a 2.5. Overall, it wasn’t too bad though. I was graduating with a 3.2—down from the 3.8 I had at Plateau College, had five job offers—all of which I’d turned down, and three acceptances into grad schools.

Why I didn’t just apply to State University, I don’t know. I think it was the fact that the last two years had been so spiritually debilitating, and it had too many memories of friends . . . and one particular friend who was more than a friend who had driven off to Michigan to marry somebody else. Now I sat contemplating my three graduate school offers that came with teaching assistantships.

Somebody, maybe it was Fred Wingly, who in my mind was chemist extraordinaire, told me that the way to choose a graduate school was to be interested first in the research of one of the professors in it, write to him, then offer to join his research group.

The school he teaches in is immaterial, Fred said, it’s your interest in him and his work that is the important thing.

Good advice, but I didn’t do it that way (surprise, surprise). Aside from the fact that I didn’t have the grades to get into a top-level school like Cal Tech or Berkeley, the schools I was interested in, as usual, resided in states with Western mystique.

The first was the University of Utah, which, as I have previously mentioned, had the Mormon mystique . . . the pioneers pushing carts across the desert running from Eastern persecution, and the romance connected with gazing across the prairie toward the setting sun.

Riders of the Purple Sage by, as you may know, Zane Grey, didn’t give exactly a glowing account of the Mormons of the early west. Cultists pursued the protagonist Lassiter and his girlfriend into the Rainbow Ridge National Monument to kill him.

He escaped by hiding in the rocks.

However, I had not been inspired by this classic western only, I was also still under the spell of The Everlasting Fire, a little-known best seller about Mormon pioneers.

I had not yet learned my lesson about being in the center of God’s will if you expected to triumph over evil.

This truism was no better illustrated by the effort of Jack Barns, my roommate and coconspirator in our attempted evangelical blitz of Faker Hall and attempt to convert a couple of Mormon missionaries . . . which nearly sank Barns because of my arrogance. Let’s go convert a couple of Mormon missionaries, I said one morning when I had nothing to do except my homework and prepare a couple of reports that were due the next day which I had put off until the last moment.

What’s so big about Mormon missionaries? Barns said, glancing up from cleaning his fingernails. Barns was a fastidious individual who ironed his shirts daily, wore creased slacks, and kept his shoes shined, as opposed to me, who had a difficult time keeping my laces tied.

I’ve had some great evangelistic discussions with them, and I think we’ll hone our apologetic skills by talking to them about Christ.

Now, what I meant by apologetic skills was not that I meant to go apologize for the Gospel but rather defend it according to some of the more triumphant moments I’d had on the steps of the Hallelujah Pentecostal Church against individuals such as Terry Idiom, who had visited our church and had gotten me so excited with the debate that I couldn’t sleep and had been chewed out by my mother at 3:00 a.m. for getting too wound up at the evangelistic meetings.

Barns, not the most eloquent of roommates, muttered, Okay, so I dialed the local LDS institution and got somebody who identified himself as Mark Sampson on the phone.

I allowed as how my friend and I wanted to come talk to them and encountered dead silence punctuated by heavy breathing, quickly converted into something that sounded like gurgling, which may have been saliva flooding into the receiver on the other end.

Of course. Somehow those two words had a distinctly predatory quality. When would you like to be eaten? I mean meet?

I set a time at which we found ourselves in an office in the east wing of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints in town.

We shook hands with the man dressed in a thin black tie, white shirt, and black slacks who introduced himself as Mark Sampson, a Germanic-looking blond with pale-blue eyes; and another elder identically dressed, with longish black hair and black-rimmed glasses that magnified his brown eyes. He introduced himself as Joseph Herman.

It wasn’t exactly Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, but they did dress exactly alike.

We sat down around a table in the study, and Joe took the lead.

So, what do you know about the Mormon Church? he said. When, to my shock, Jack said, Next to nothing, I could almost see them rub their hands in glee, and I had a seriously sinking feeling in the pit—the place where you always get a sinking feeling when you know you’ve screwed up—in the pit of my pituitary gland.

Jack, his slack jaw elongating the pockmarks on his cheeks, a quasi-vacant look in his light-blue eyes that always looked a little vacant, and a shock of brown hair obscuring a prematurely lined forehead, was taking it in like a sponge. If that was obvious to me, I knew it stood out like a neon sign to them.

And when they came to their description of Joseph Smith receiving the golden plates from the angel Moroni, his visit by the Father and the Son, two out of three in the Godhead, Joe said, And this proves that the Father is a corporeal being and not a spirit.

How did they know that? I said. Did Smith pick up a rock and throw it at him? And did it bounce off? I was becoming belligerent out of the growing fear that Jack was being taken in.

Silence descended on the room like a shroud on a corpse, and Joe’s eyes became twin lasers radiating beams of hate. We sat there in silence while the clock on the wall ticked. Finally, Joe broke it by ruffling the pages of the book of Mormon in front of him.

Well, I think this discussion is at end. He pushed the chair back and got to his feet. Mark, why don’t you escort our friends to the door?

We found ourselves outside standing on the porch admiring the fall colors of birches and aspens gearing up for the winter. Well, you certainly enraged him, Jack said. I thought he was going to kill you.

Yeah, I guess I did, I said, not really grasping exactly what had happened.

Barns laughed. I wouldn’t go back there if I were you. I shrugged. The Masked Kid had done it again, and we had barely escaped the figurative robbers’ roost with our, uh, valuables intact.

For weeks after that, though, we got calls from the dynamic Mormon duo.

Can I talk to Jack? came Mark’s voice.

‘Uh, he’s not here. Something I can help you with?"

No, the voice dropping to about forty degrees below zero, I want to talk to Jack.

And so Tonto, as portrayed by Jack Barns, having followed me, the Lone Ranger, to the robbers’ roost to break up Butch Cavendish’s outlaw gang, was once again being routinely beaten up every week.

Oh, well. At least the Masked Kid was finally doing his school homework, which is what he should have been doing in the first place.

Part 2: You Can Go with Them, If You Like

It was burnout time. Most of the gung ho students that I had known in the Rabbit Crusade for Christ, the evangelistic organization I had joined when I first came to this school, had left the crusade to finish up their degrees.

Most notably Stewart Steel, the Man of Steel, who had disappeared from our group. When asked about it, he said he had decided to spend that time on getting his PhD instead of handing out tracts.

The traitor, we all agreed. Finish his degree? How dare he come to school to do anything except evangelize for the Campus Rabbits?

By now I was disillusioned by the Robert Rabbit fiasco, a fellow Crusader who had lied through his teeth about leading hundreds to Christ; I had the distinct impression that I was regarded as a second-rate wimp by the macho staff. (If you don’t remember that, he was a guy who lied about massive conversions to Christ in CRC meetings. He’d given us all an inferiority complex.)

It’s a male-dominated organization, one of the female staff had said regarding the State U CRC.

Why do you say that? I asked.

The men always take precedence, and the women are treated with contempt.

Hmmm, really never noticed.

Well, for one thing, the women always have to sit on the floor.

Never noticed.

Next time, she said with a smile, notice.

But it wasn’t just the women. Any males that fell short of president of a fraternity or failed to have a letter in football or didn’t hunt panthers in Brazil (as one of the staff bragged in evangelistic presentations) were looked upon as second-rate and used for whatever CRC could get out of them.

The operative word was used—and discarded—when whatever passed for life was completely sucked out of them.

One of the most active student leaders, a lifetime Christian that had been raised in the Dutch Reformed Church, became an atheist. It was hard to imagine Huck DeVries as an atheist, but the atmosphere of the school had gotten to him.

Rick, our CRC leader, verbally lamented it.

The fact was, there was something wrong.

Campus Rabbits claimed to be an arm of the church, and that appendage wasn’t quite achieving what it thought it was achieving, and as time went by, that fact became more and more glaringly obvious.

By the end of my senior year, I was mentally and spiritually exhausted. In that state I ran across Bob Dinkson, the leader of Pan Christian Bible Fellowship.

Over coffee I told him how I felt.

Well, it doesn’t surprise me, he said, regarding me solemnly.

Why’s that?

You can’t base your Christian life on evangelism alone. You need to be studying and memorizing the Bible and going to church. If all you do is ‘put out’ and never ‘receive anything,’ you’re going to ‘burn out.’ He nodded and scrutinized me. And that looks like what you’ve been doing.

"Well, what do you do?" I asked. By you I meant his organization.

We let evangelism take care of itself. We study the Word, fellowship together, and attend Church. We keep our spiritual reservoir full, and that is what the world sees and wants.

So, you don’t try to convert people.

He smiled. We let that take care of itself.

I liked what I heard, so I set up a second meeting with him.

And got busted.

I can only surmise that Rick Holladay took it as an act of disloyalty that I was sitting across from the head of Pan Christian. He and his sidekick Pat were out in the general area and saw me with Bob. With one accord, they turned and stared at us, shock and disbelief clearly written on Rick’s face.

These emotions were quickly replaced by an expression that conveyed et tu Brute? or, more likely, betrayeth the Son of Man with a kiss?. I finished up with Pan Christian Bob and left.

All I can say on my behalf was that I’d only been at State U for two years, and in that time, I hadn’t investigated everything, and I didn’t know what the alternatives were. I was just beginning to discover them in my senior year, which, in some respects, was in fact my sophomore year, as far as time spent on this campus was concerned.

Be that as it may, I was sitting next to Rick discussing things in general when we both saw Johnny Talon, the Hallelujah Pentecostal preacher’s son, standing out in the same foyer in animated conversation.

You can go with them if you want to, Rick said.

I was shocked, and subsequently hurt.

And, I thought, since you seem to regard me in the same light as excrement stuck to your shoe, why not?

But I didn’t say that.

No, I’ll stick with you, Rick.

He seemed to deflate, like somebody receiving unwelcome news about his stock options.

And as things ultimately turned out, sticking with Rick Holladay was like hanging on to the slick metal surface of a railway locomotive roaring through a rainstorm.

It wasn’t easy or always pleasant, but the destination would prove to be worth it.

Part 3: Big Ideas

Still propelled by Campus Crusade fervor to fulfill the Great Commission, I decided to throw my body on the pyre of self-sacrifice and fulfill Paul’s encouragement to present your body as a living sacrifice, wholly acceptable to God as your just and reasonable service and join the Crusader Rabbits as a full-time staff member.

The notion was fraught with purpose, the way sitting behind a desk in an office in a skyscraper wouldn’t be: trying to figure out how to market toilet paper (my latest job offer).

Even though the interviewing management of my latest job prospect, TP, Inc., was impressed with my kill two birds with one stone reasoning for increasing the shelf life usefulness of their flagship product NoseEx by imprinting on the box images acceptable at both Christmas and Easter, they didn’t buy my idea.

They did, however, nod to each other as one of the managers said, "Now see, that’s what a college education can do for you.

It teaches you to think.

Still proud of my innovation after I returned to State from the interview, I mentioned it to Brian Ketch, a fellow chemistry buddy I sat next to in an advanced organic class. Well, that’s a good idea, he said, but I can’t imagine blowing my nose on a picture of Christ.

That observation did indeed let some of the air out of my balloon and brought to mind the possibility that even though all the middle management had seemed pleased with the idea at the time of the interview, in reality, they had thought it was ridiculous.

Which brought up one of my salient flaws: that while I could come up with good ideas, it was also almost impossible to let go of them even when they were shown to be less than, uh, practical.

In any event, my next idea seemed to lend more purpose to my life than merely making money in a corporate environment. I would join Rabbits and become a staff member.

Part 4: So Send I You?

With the words of the great evangelical protestant song ringing in my ears, So send I you to labor unrewarded, I called up Rick. My announcement to join the Rabbits was met with dead silence. Well, let’s get together in the tower and talk about it. How about 9:00 a.m. tomorrow?

Eight forty-five found me in the elevator on my way to what was known as the Tower in the student union building. The top floor of the five-story edifice consisted of a small coffee shop, filled with tables and a bar in one corner where a server dispensed cups of coffee at twenty-five cents a cup.

The price had radically increased over the ten cents you got it for down on the main floor, maybe because of the effort it took to carry the coffee beans up ten flights of stairs (two flights per landing).

I sat down at one of the empty tables and waited for Rick to show up. It wasn’t a long wait. The elevator doors opened, and he stepped out accompanied by Pat, the staff member who hunted leopards in Africa. Both practically had to duck as they got out of the elevators, being well over six feet tall. They sat down in the two chairs opposite me without a word and opened the newspapers they carried.

In dead silence I sat staring at the identical headlines proclaiming that President Johnson had sent more troops into Viet Nam. Underneath it was a report of the body count of North Vietnamese as compared to that of American soldiers. The secondary headline proclaimed that we were winning. The pages rattled as Rick and Pat turned them and continued to rattle as they ignored me to read the no doubt vital news of the day.

I gave up expecting them to say anything after what might have been ten minutes and, at one point, thought about getting up and leaving. When they finally would put their papers down, they would find nothing in front of them but empty air. It was a thought, but I decided that was probably not the mature thing to do.

I cleared my throat. I, uh, thought I’d talk about the possibility of joining CRC staff when I graduate. Both papers slowly lowered, revealing equally contemptuous looks. They glanced at each other, Pat smiling under his Clark Gable mustache.

Now there’s an idea, Rick said.

And? I said.

I think we have somewhere else we need to go to.

Both stood up and walked out.

I sat there thinking it would be a cold day in hell before I ever had anything to do with Campus Rabbits for Christ again. Utterly humiliated, I made the decision to go to grad school and get a PhD in chemistry.

And let the Great Commission take care of itself.

Part 5: Graduation and a Decision

Graduation was assured, and having turned down all job offers, including one exciting offer with the United States Geological Survey, which would have sent me into the mountainous back country with a team of geologists manning a spectrometer used for analyzing samples, I sat on my bed in my empty dorm room contemplating my graduate school offers.

One, as I said, was from the University of Utah, which had the highest yearly stipend, $3,500. The second was from Critter State University in Oregon (yes, the place I’d almost killed myself with that organic mercury compound) for $2,500; and the third was from the University of British Columbia for $1,800.

For some reason, I had not applied to the state graduate school, probably thinking that I had fallen into such state of spiritual destitution after two years I could no longer continue to put up a pretense of being a spirit-filled Christian if I did.

A Christian serves a living speaking God. I’d heard Him audibly once, when I was four, but since then, the still small voice heard by Elijah in the Old Testament now came from within.

As I sat on my bed, I asked the question, directed at God, Why do I have such a rough time here? Why am I running on empty, not having the peace or seeming guidance of the Holy Spirit, continually ‘hanging on by my fingernails’ trying to remember what it was like to be filled with the Spirit with peace, joy, and power?

It had been the very antithesis of a joyful Christianity—dragging around looking (and feeling) like a mournful basset hound unable to so much as tree a squirrel.

The answer came, silently but as clear as a bell on Easter morning, You are out of My will.

And that was it. I had tried to twist God’s arm into giving me what I wanted. What had flown past my eyes was the worldly prize of a degree at a school with a prestigious chemistry department.

Along with this had come a dark-eyed, raven-haired Irish beauty on my arm and a meteoric rise to the top of the world of science, accompanied by the fantasy of becoming a famous, Nobel Prize–winning scientist known and respected throughout my field—discoverer of the ultimate secret of the universe that would unlock everything, giving mankind the ultimate key to life, health, and the pursuit of happiness.

Or something like that.

I had beguiled myself with this vision and reached for the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, wandering from the perfect will of