Montrii was the only investigator I ever really had. because i was tapped to do clown shows and be the intermission for the fabled singing group during my mission in thailand i had precious little time to find, teach, and get to know any real investigators.
my track record of baptisms while in thailand: bupkis.
anyway. i discovered montrii one dreary monsoon evening while i was still with elder seliger. it was too wet for a street meeting and it was too early to go home and so elder seliger gave in to the inevitable and we went tracting door to door in a run-down neighborhood where dogs copulated up and down the soi amidst soggy floating piles of garbage. this was in bangkok proper. a low rent and low life district. the street lights were barely functioning. so everything had a sickly yellow cast to it, like in a Monogram charlie chan movie. (if you're not getting these references, don't worry about it -- some of them are real but most of them i just make up for the hell of it.)
we came upon a row of apparently abandoned tuks. every missionary who ever landed in thailand knows these tuks -- thrown up in an opium-fueled frenzy by isaan day laborers, these five story blocks of poured concrete housed shops and cafes on the ground floor and the proprietor's family above. they were built and abandoned like quonset huts, and held together about as well.
this particular row looked to be the abode of bats and owls. no lights on. all the ground floor entrances barred with rusty iron gates. except the last one. this one was halfway open. elder seliger thought we should avoid it altogether, since it looked like something out of a slasher movie. but i felt a stirring, maybe of the spirit or maybe just dumb curiosity. so i convinced him we should poke our noses in it just in case.
deep inside the tuk a candle guttered low, with a figure hunched over it. we cleared our throats and said 'sawdi khrab?' and the hunched figure slowly got up -- to reveal a young man with long lanky black hair creeping over his face like kudzu.
all thais are innately polite, and montrii quickly invited us to hunch down around his smoking candle and then offered us each a bottle of warm beer. we politely refused and launched into our patter on the word of wisdom. he seemed taken by the idea that bad food and drink result in bad health. elder seliger remained mum most of the time, essentially letting me do all the talking, or stammering. i made an appointment with montrii to come back to his derelict tuk the next evening. as we swam through the tropical rain back to our apartment i felt a pardonable pride in rooting out a lost soul we might possibly save. elder seliger would have none of it.
'that guy' he said in disgust, 'is a squatter and probably wanted by the police -- why else would he be holed up in that haunted house?'
i thought to myself 'you're just a texas redneck who doesn't know red beans from rice -- montrii is golden, or i'm a baptist!' outloud I merely grunted, neatly sidestepping an open manhole.
we saw montrii the next night, and the next. and then we never saw him again. obviously, he didn't have a phone so we couldn't call him. he never did explain what he was doing in that tumble down old tuk. and then president morris sent out an imperative ukase that all missionary pairs must double their tracting hours by the end of the month or face consequences so terrible they were not even hinted at. elder seliger, as devoted to the gospel as i was, and twice as stubborn, vowed we would not only double our tracting hours but triple them. so we stayed out in the blazing sun (just our luck, the monsoon season ended early) from dawn to way past our bedtime . . . tracting, tracting, tracting. i finally asked president morris for permission to buy a hat to wear, because the ferocious sun was fast fusing the top of my head to my ears. my hair was bleached white, like bones on the desert sands.
i picked up a snazzy little number -- a green felt fedora with a perky little feather on the side. it was stolen by khamoys when i was transferred up to Khon Kaen. by then elder seliger had been moved on to bigger and better things, and my new senior companion was elder lang. he was from california, and was he laid back! we nearly stopped proselytizing altogether, as he began to put together the singing group with elder wright. we spent most of our time in various studios auditioning elders and sisters. i helped pick out sister mumford for the group -- and quickly developed a crush on her . . .
but that's a story for another time.
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