Craig and the Missionaries
by Sian Evans
My college boyfriend, Connor, and his roommate, Craig, used to wake up at 7 a.m. on St. Patrick’s Day to start drinking. I was usually thoroughly unimpressed with Connor by noon.
During our sophomore year, he moved into an apartment building that was a mere baby step from a dormitory. Just down the hill from the main campus, the grungy building was inhabited primarily by boys between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. In retrospect they were not so much boys as dudes. Oddly enough, considering my nose ring and pixie cut at the time, I had a lot of dude-friends in college. You know the type: tattered Che Guevara poster on the wall, hanging precariously above a human-sized bong and a dying plant.
One balmy September afternoon, two Mormon missionaries crept up the stairs of this pseudo-frat house, side-stepping the dreadlocked kid smoking pot out of a beer can on the second floor stairwell and 
knocking on Craig and Connor’s door. Connor was raised Catholic and loved to argue. Excitedly, he invited the Mormons in for tea and a chat.
He would continue to do so every week for the next few months. I can’t imagine what the missionaries must’ve thought as Connor played house—making tea and biscuits, feigning maturity, and pontificating about Descartes. Their relationship was at once unnatural and symbiotic. The Mormons tried their best to convert their freshly minted atheist host as Otto, Connor’s turtle, swam back and forth in a scummy tank that was lodged in the fake fireplace, in front of a relic of a television that played Pulp Fiction on repeat, distorted through the water. I imagine the Mormons wondered whether or not a turtle was capable of developing epilepsy.
During these visits, Craig was almost always shirtless or in a wife-beater; his family crest displayed prominently on one shoulder and a shamrock on the other. Craig was a former wrestler, a small but sturdy dude who almost always had a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. He’d offer the Mormons a swig of whiskey straight from the bottle at two in the afternoon. When they inevitably declined, he would grumpily listen to the theological debate, quietly smoking his Camel Reds in the corner and eying the visitors with suspicion. Something about their relationship felt like a tall tale of the Old West: the cowboy and the clerics ever watching each other, at an impasse, across a room thick with the smell of whiskey and tobacco. Craig, who grew up in Brooklyn, always imagined himself a bit of a cowboy.
