Part Fifty-One

Now seems as good a place as any to insert a pointless sidebar about fate, and Preacher Haywood's disbelief in it. Haywood called himself as a "free-will extremist," and said that people who claim free will is an illusion have it completely backwards: "we have more options than we even know," he said.

There was a typical Haywoodian caveat, of course. He said that the combination of history and ignorance can act like fate, and deceive us into believing that we have destinies instead of choices. He said that the concept of fate was like the solar model of the atom: completely false, but a useful fiction for understanding something much more complicated.

His belief in a whole universe of unrecognized choices led to a rather strange email exchange with a Worshiper in Minneapolis, not long before he vanished from St. Michael's. Someone asked him to explain what he meant by options we don't know about, and he said that "I predict that in the future, we will discover that some things we now thing are immutable laws will turn out to be entirely optional. But we have two obstacles: first, we have to figure out that we have a choice, and even if we realize that much, we have to figure out how to exercise it." He then gave a long and convoluted metaphor about voting for president without anyone to tell you how: you had to know you could vote for president, then figure out that it was on one day, every four years, and then figure out where to go, and who the candidates were... So the person in Minneapolis asked him to give examples of the things that we would discover were optional. Preacher said he didn't know, otherwise it wouldn't be a prediction, it would be a fact. But he said they would be surprising to us: "maybe," he wrote, "the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or blastomas, or Avogadro's Number, or the speed of light, or geriatric cell damage, or 9.8 meters per second per second, or something like that."

Preacher was joking. But a fair number of Worshipers have no sense of humor. Which brings me to a sidebar within a sidebar: ril-lit, the especially sad and pathetic version of Worshiper fan-fiction. ril stands for "res ipsa loquitor," and the reason that name got stuck to it is not worth going into. At any rate, there is this subculture of Worshipers who want to be the Worshiper equivalent of Ayn Rand, and write these really bad, preachy, stories with Worshiper code-heroes and heroines. There's lot of sex, and they're usually sci-fi, and quite often the futuristic societies are based on the notion that people can opt out of the speed of light, etc. Not only can I not fathom why one would want to write Worship fan-fiction, I can't fathom why one would want to be considered on a literary plane with Ayn Rand. I am not going to disparage Objectivism -- it's a very useful philosophy for arrested adolescents who need to find an excuse for the fact that they live in a one-bedroom apartment and bag groceries for a living, despite their obvious superlative qualities. Have you ever noticed that no actual Randian is one-16th as successful as the Rand literary heroes? Have you ever met a really successful, accomplished Objectivist? Me, neither. (Then again, I was a drunk living in a flophouse motel, so who am I to make fun of grocery store baggers devouring Ayn Rand and living in one-bedroom apartments?) But I am going to disparage Ayn Rand as an author to be emulated. I mean, please. Have you READ Atlas Shrugged?

OK, let me step back one level of irrelevancy. Preacher didn't believe in fate, but I think it's hard-wired into human beings. The first time some homo erectus was self-aware enough to think about the fact that the erectus standing next to him just got struck by lightening, or eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger, or something like that, the concept of Fate was born. We've had a million years of Fate programmed into us; Preacher's disbelief in it isn't going to change that. But that's not to say that I agree with the "free will is an illusion" crowd. That's just far too... convenient. It's far to easy to let yourself off the hook for your own general shittiness with that attitude.

My philosophy is this: we have some choices, but only the bad ones. We use our free will to fuck things up.

I point to my own examples. Just to name two: it was luck, or fate, or destiny, that I met my wife; it was my volitional acts of drinking and sleeping around that lost her. It was my choice to write a book about Schuyler Colfax, because I had to publish SOMETHING if I wanted a shot at tenure, and Colfax was sufficiently uninteresting that his bones hadn't been completely picked over by other scholars. That was a choice that should have doomed me to obscurity. But if was fate that led to Clinton being impeached right when "Colfax" got published, making me rich and famous (by small college history professor standards).

Consider, then, the antics of Preacher Haywood after leaving the desert. It's still an open question, I think, as to whether leaving the desert was a good thing or a bad thing, and I can't decide if his leaving of the desert was entirely his choice. Having Finch and Harding show up on his doorstep was certainly not his choice, and I suspect that once they did, his departure from Kerith Ravine was inevitable. But I suppose he might have just walked them to the highway and then turned around and gone back... I'm not sure how to categorize this one.

But once he was out, it was one bad choice after another that led him to St. Michael's, which -- in retrospect -- was a bad move. He was offered a choice to return to his old life as the world's happiest itinerant laborer, but when he finished his summer with the tennis-court people, he didn't take that option; instead he went to San Francisco and hooked up with Cassidy Harding. There, he was presented with the option of contented, anonymous domesticity. That could be his beautiful house on the hill; his charming, accomplished children; his sexy, rich, intelligent wife. He chose otherwise.

Then he was in LA and had a chance to be a celebrity guru. Lots of money, lots of sycophants, lots of sunshine and big fake boobs. He could have spread his message to disgruntled Scientologists and bored Kaballahists. I think he actually considered that choice pretty seriously. The fact that he took Finch's motorcyle to San Diego indicates, to me, that he was considering coming back. But he made a different choice, and the motorcycle came back in a moving van.

And even in San Diego he was given another option: he discovered (if Parks is to be believed) that he was rich. Not blind stinking "buy my own island" rich, but rich enough to live comfortably off the interest. But that didn't divert him, either.

Which brings me to his last chance to do something different: Deliah Harper.

Part Fifty

Gary Parks lied to me. Of that I'm fairly certain.

When I came into his office in San Diego I saw pretty much what I had anticipated. A bland office in a bland building near downtown. Unimaginative in decor. A frame on the wall of his inner office with various Marine badges and medals.

Parks was pretty much what I had anticipated, too. Early sixties, close-cropped hair, military bearing. I was expecting someone a little beefier. He was rather slender.

I already had access to the facts and figures, so I know what Parks did with the Haywood trust while he managed it. He was candid about being more lucky than good. In the late 80s, when he figured Preacher needed income more than growth, he invested in nice stable government bonds, and in those days interest rates were high. Then when Preacher got out of college he figured Haywood would want to cash in the trust, so he moved into nice stable blue chips and not only rode out the recession of the early 90s in good shape, but made a good profit off of the Gulf War. Parks had no problems investing in defense contractors. Then when Preacher started drifting around the country and expressed no interest in getting to the trust income, Parks got really speculative and aggressive and caught the very front wave of the dot-com boom. Then when Preacher emerged from the desert Parks started moving out of the dot-coms and into real estate, and not only dodged the bubble bursting but then started to clean up when the housing market started climbing.

Dumb luck. Parks admitted it. But dumb luck worked in Haywood's favor so often you began to wonder if it wasn't something more.

At any rate, Parks lied to me, not about the money, but about the conversation he had with Preacher when Haywood finally showed up in his office.

Haywood had called Parks from Gesthemane. Assured him he was who he said he was. Assured him he would, eventually, make it to San Diego. Then a few months later Parks got a postcard from San Francisco. Be there soon. Then a phone call from Los Angeles a few months after that. Be there really soon. Then a phone call from a downtown hotel. When they finally were face to face, Haywood summarized the past decade of his life in three sentences; Parks recalled him saying something like "well, you know I traveled a lot, working odd jobs and searching for inspiration. Then I settled down upstate for a few years and waited for inspiration to find me. And, well, here I am."

Parks said to him "it's a good thing you called when you did. Although it cost the school system some money. I was seriously considering having you declared dead."

Preacher chuckled. "The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated," he said. "But why did that cost the school system money?"

"You've got no will and no heirs," Parks told him. "If you die intestate, the local school board gets the money. In fact if they knew how close they were to getting your trust, they might have put a hit on you."

"Whacked by a school safety," Haywood said. "What a way to go. But you know, there are worse things to do with the money."

"There are better things, too," Parks said, picking up the folder he'd prepared with financial statements and the like.

And Preacher said -- according to Parks -- "You know, the truth is, I was going to tell you go just give the whole thing to charity. And I guess the schools are as good a charity as any. I noticed on the way in here that the baseball diamonds are all in bad shape. Could we ask them to use it to fix up the baseball diamonds?"

Parker swallowed hard and said "give all of it to the school board? The whole thing?"

And he claims Preacher said -- and this is the part that makes me think Parks is lying -- "sure. I mean how much could be left in there? A hundred thousand dollars or so?"

And Parks said to him "Preacher, there's around forty million dollars in your trust right now."

See, this doesn't ring true. I would believe that Preacher was inclined to give the money to charity, but I don't believe he didn't know how much money was in there. When he went into the desert there was close to ten million in there. Even assuming he didn't get any information about it between leaving Kerith and getting to San Diego, he had to have know there was more money than that in there. Yes, aside from his stint in Chicago, he didn't access it very often, but he still signed tax returns and other statements from time to time. And Preacher was a guy who never forgot anything. So I can't believe he thought the trust was that small.

Why would Parks lie to me about this? To make Preacher sound good? I don't get it. I dutifully recorded the interview and refrained from calling Parks a liar to his face, but I don't believe him when he says Preacher didn't have any idea how much money was in the trust.

Then Parks compounded that lie with something else that didn't ring true.

After thinking about it for a second, Preacher allegedly shrugged and said, "well, they'll be nicer baseball diamonds. I need $40,000,000 like I need a hole in the head." Preacher did say that queer "hole in the head" saying a lot.

Parks then says he explained to Preacher that the trust could easily generate $150,000 a month in income. And still grow. And so even if he wanted to do something for the local ball fields, he could just dedicate a portion of the income the trust generated and have everyone playing on first-class diamonds. And that while $40,000,000 was a hell of a lot of money, it would just vanish into the operating budget of the school system. (He was right about that. I checked. Roughly 1/10th of the annual budget for the San Diego County public schools. I'm sure they would have appreciated a forty million dollar gift, though.)

Parks said he told Preacher: "Besides, why on Earth would you give away that money? Your parents wanted this to be for you. Young man, you have a chance to do something most people would kill for -- and that is to do anything you want. I'm not talking about living off of the interest and wasting your life. I'm talking about never having to think about salary when you go to work. If you wanted to run your own charity, you could do that and pay yourself. You could go work at something really noble and poorly paid, like being a school teacher or a social worker, and still have a very comfortable living. And let me tell you something, Preacher, while you still look like a young man, you're not. You're over 30. Someday you're going to want to settle down. Sooner rather than later. You're going to have a wife and a family and even if you don't think you want or need this money, you have them to think about. Don't you want your children to have advantages you didn't have?"

In short, according to Parks, he not only had to tell Preacher how much his trust was worth, but he had to teach him about interest income. And then manage to dissuade him from giving it all to charity.

Here's Preacher Haywood as I understood him at that point in his life: he was way smarter about money than he came across, he did not just blindly sign papers without reading them, and if he decided to give away $40,000,000, Gary Parks was not going to talk him out of it.

The fact of the matter is that Haywood didn't give the money away, at least not then and there, which tells me he didn't intend to. But why would Parks lie?

This weighed heavily upon me.

At any rate, according to Parks, Preacher agreed to think about the charity idea some more. Then they went through the portfolio together. And that was how Preacher discovered he had inherited a house in St. Michael's, Maryland.

I know. You're saying to yourself, wait, I thought he didn't have any relatives. Well, he didn't. But if you were paying attention during the whole Miami Beach thing, you would remember that he became friends with an old man named Hank Feldman, who regaled Preacher with stories of the Roaring 20s and his life on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Well, it turns out that he died (no surprise there) and in his will, Haywood got the big old house. In which, it turns out, nobody had lived for nearly a decade, and for a decade before that had been rented out to a series of people who really didn't give a damn about it. It was an abandoned dump in the middle of nowhere, slowly collapsing near where the Tred Avon and Town rivers emptied into the Chesapeake Bay. Parks had sent someone to appraise it recently and was wondering how low he would have to price the land to get rid of it -- it was far too close to wetlands to be commercially developed.

And Preacher said that he knew that area, right across the bay from Annapolis, really, and that he was thinking about heading out to the East Coast, so don't sell it; I want to take a look at it before it goes. He was thinking, I know, of all of Feldman's stories about the literati hanging out there in white duck and straw boaters, with bathtub gin going in and bon mots flying out.

After I interviewed Parks I drove around the city. If I had grown up there, I thought, I would be a much different person. Or maybe I would have opened my wrists in high school. I can't imagine living in a place where it was always sunny and pleasant.

And as I drove around I found myself wondering about Haywood's return. Was he the nostalgic type?

When I was engaged to Sarah we went back to my folks' house for the holidays and she insisted on a tour of what she called "the old neighborhood." I lived in a suburb, which doesn't really have a neighborhood feel. "Come on," she said, smiling, "let me see where you went to school, where you hung out with your friends, where you lost your virginity, that kind of stuff."

The trip took about ten minutes in our rental car. "That was school," I said as we zoomed past. "I hated it. That was where a kid we called Trank lived. He was the closest thing to a friend I had. We hung out in his basement and listened to the Cure. "

"Trank?" Sarah said, laughing.

"Yeah. He picked it out. His real name was Philip Navin."

"I like Trank better."

"Yeah, me too. Anyhow, that's the tour. I lost my virginity in Ocean City, Maryland, which is not anywhere near here."

She looked at me for a moment. I looked back. We both laughed. She was one of the few people who could make me laugh at myself. Sometimes I still miss her.

But was that Preacher? Maybe before the whole desert thing. I could see him going back to all the old haunts. If I had been the Golden Child in high school, I would have more reason to be nostalgic. I understand that. But the post-desert Preacher was so much about living in the present. I wonder.

I do know that he looked up the Abuelas, had dinner with the people who'd taken him in when his parents died. Met his old friend Manny's wife and two toddlers. He was only in town for a few days, though.

I stayed in the same hotel he stayed in. More by coincidence than anything. I mention this because it was while staying there that I got laid for the first time in years. I was sitting at the bar waiting for a table and nursing some soda water and this woman sitting there next to me started talking. She was there for some sort of Human Resources convention. We ended up sharing a table. I've never picked up a woman while sober before. I nearly botched it. At some point I tried to say something suave and suggestive and witty and she gave me a tired smile and said "you're already going to get lucky tonight, unless you screw it up." I kept my conversation to a polite minimum at that point.

She was probably in her early 40s. I'd never been with a woman older than me before. Her body was surprisingly soft and smooth. At the risk of sounding like an old lady, it was good just to feel some weight on the mattress next to me.

I told her she could stay the night but she didn't want to. I thought I caught a glimpse of her when I was checking out. If it was her she didn't make any effort to say anything to me.

Part Forty Nine

The house, in Beverly Hills, was not all that large. Not really, not like you would think if all you knew about movie stars came from, well, movies about movie stars. It was a beautiful Arts-and-Crafts house with a swimming pool and a high fence and tall hedges all around it but the house itself was, if anything, a hair smaller than your typical suburban McMansion. It was probably considered big when it was built, though.

A few years back, the new owner of the house – a man named Dylan Finch – returned from a meeting during which he made a deal with a major studio so that his production company could make a movie out of a book called Glory Road, which had everything necessary to be a big hit: sword fights, space ships, the Vietnam War, and topless beaches. And Dylan Finch was going to be the star. He had already picked out a director nobody ever heard of, and was going to cast a Filipina actress nobody (outside of the Philippines) had heard of to be the Queen of the Universe. Finch, on that day, hoped that the film would be his “Dances with Wolves,” his “Braveheart” -- one that would be big enough that ever after he could do whatever he wanted. Of course, in the back of his mind was the fear that it could be his “Heaven’s Gate.”

But whatever was in the front or the back of his mind on the way back to his home vanished when he pulled up to the gate that kept the riffraff and stalkers out, and saw Preacher Haywood sitting there on the curb. Haywood was reaching through the closed gate and petting a Rottweiler, who was nestled up against the steel bars to get closer to the man.

“Holy shit,” Finch breathed softly, and stopped his car. His very safe, well-maintained, new car. With GPS. And a survival kit i the trunk. Finch didn’t get out, just looked up at Preacher, the afternoon sun in his face.

“You need better security,” he said to Finch. “Some drifter camps in front of your house and nobody calls the cops?”

“The dogs are my security,” Dylan replied.

“This dog?” Preacher said, rubbing the dog’s stomach. The dog twitched his stump of a tail and one leg shook in the air.

“Yeah,” Finch said, absently, still looking at Haywood. He pushed the button that made the gates open. At the sound the dog jumped up. “Hop in,” he said to Haywood. Haywood got in the car and the dog trotted beside them as they drove up the short drive into the little garage next to the house.

“Nice house,” Haywood observed.

“It’s really great to see you, man,” Finch said. “Cass told me you left there a few days ago, heading south. You should have told me when you were coming! I wouldn’t have left you sitting on the curb.”

Haywood laughed. “I didn’t know when I would make it here,” he said. “Got a ride with some migrant workers heading south. Made good time.”

Finch shook his head in disbelief. “It’s great to see you,” he repeated.

“Good to see you, too, Dylan,” Haywood told him. “You’ve been doing really well.”

“Ehh,” Finch said, noncommittally.

Since the last time the two had been face-to-face there had been a movie called Ravens which had made a lot of money. Finch’s little desert adventure (as he referred to it) helped with the publicity. Funny thing, though – even while pushing the movie, Finch had backed away from it. Saying things like, it’s formulaic, but good formula can be good entertainment. There were a fair number of people who were surprised that Finch even knew the word “formulaic,” let alone would apply it to his latest film. He told Premiere that Ravens was “the end of the beginning” of his film career. Since then he had played a dark, intense role as a villain in a psychological thriller – his agent warned him against playing a villain but he did it, and did it very well. And now Glory Road. About which Haywood knew a little, since Finch and Cass Harding -- until recently Haywood’s landlady (among other things) -- kept in regular contact.

They went into Finch’s house and opened beers and sat beside the pool and Dylan told Preacher all about his ideas for the new movie. And Haywood started laughing.

“What’s so funny?” Finch demanded.

“If I tell you, you’ll get pissed off,” Preacher replied.

Finch raised an eyebrow expectantly.

“This film is an act of worship for you, isn’t it?” Haywood said, the traces of a smile still playing about his lips.

Finch swallowed a grin. “I’ll never confess to that, you bastard,” he said, a little laughter in his own voice.

They both laughed at that point, both happy people, both delighting in being alive. Finch savored another swallow of beer.

“So how long are you going to stay?” he said.

Preacher shrugged. “Until you throw me out, or it’s otherwise time,” he told the actor. “In fact, I can stay somewhere else. I just wanted to see you, say hi, you don’t have to put me up. I haven’t been in LA for a long while.”

“Oh, shit, no, you’re staying here,” Finch said. “You’re going to show me how to make those tortillas you made in the desert. We’re going to hit the nightspots. I’m going to show you off to my friends. We’re going to pick up girls. No, you’re not going anywhere now that I’ve finally got you here.”

“About that...” Haywood said, and paused.

“The girls? I know about you and Cass. Believe me, I’ll be discreet.”

“No, it’s not that, it’s about the desert stuff. Did you tell anyone my name or anything like that? Cass showed me the stories in Time and People and my name wasn’t in either of them. But then again it wasn’t an important detail, really, so --”

“No, it was an important detail, but I didn’t tell anyone,” Finch interrupted. “I figured the last thing you wanted was some People photographer tracking you down. You said you wanted some time to readjust, and being sucked into celebrity gossip pseudo-journalistic bullshit was probably not what you had in mind.”

“A few people in San Francisco know,” Haywood told him. “Friends I made there. Eventually they learned how Cass and I met, and Cass’s name was out there for having been stranded with you, so...”

Finch shrugged. “‘S’all the same to me, man,” he said. “In San Francisco they try to pretend they don’t care about Hollywood celebrity. Down here, it’s all about celebrity. New York is about proximity to money, Washington is about proximity to power, and here it’s about proximity to fame. At the moment, I have a fair amount of celebrity. I’m somewhere between Tom Cruise and Maury Amsterdam on the spectrum of celebrity fame right now. As a result, things that you think are trivial and silly are nonetheless going to be intensely interesting to some people. Just so you know.”

“Too bad that people don’t go to movies just because they enjoy the work of the people involved,” Preacher said. "And that's a hell of a wide range you just described."

“They do,” Finch said, “but I’m going to spend $140 million on this next film, so I need to sell tickets to people who like movie stars, not just people who like actors. Otherwise this won’t be Braveheart, it will be Heaven’s Gate.”

“You know I never saw Heaven’s Gate?” Preacher said.

“Nobody did. That’s the problem,” Finch countered. “But you know what I’ve figured out? On my own? That living right, living in the moment, living as a part of the Whole – that’s its own reward. I feel great. My work has improved. My attitude has improved. My outlook has improved. Yes, I still get drunk and fall down, but it’s an act of worship when I do it now. So I want this project to be a big commercial success, but at the same time, if I’m happy with the process of making it, if I can go to sleep at night knowing we all did the best we could, I will be perfectly content.”

“And if it also makes back its costs in the first weekend?”

“Then everyone in Hollywood will want you as a guru,” Dylan laughed.

“They’ll want you as their guru,” Preacher countered. They were both partially right, as it turned out.

Within a few weeks – same as in San Francisco – there was a group of regulars who started hanging out at Finch’s house. Richard Halethorpe, right before he was Sir Richard Halethorpe, who was too gay and far too elegant to be Rufus so Finch cast him as the villain. Brent Deale, who – at that time – primarily earned a living as a prop master, although he was going to be one of the lead production designers on Glory Road. Sarah Nottingham, who is one of those actresses whose name you don’t remember but every time you see her you think, yeah, I remember her. (She used to always play the slutty little sister, but recently she's started playing the bitter single mom). Mandy Denton, who was an assistant director on Ravens and ended up directing some second unit work on Glory Road. Mark Clinton, a screenwriter who was mostly responsible for the adaptation of Heinlein’s novel. All of them friends of Finch’s before, all of them now involved in Glory Road, and all of absorbing Haywood while the project was getting underway.

And it was a typical day when Mandy showed up after having spent most of the day directing some TV commercial, and Brent was there because he was showing sketches to Dylan, and Mark was there because he and Finch had been working on the script with Steve Streett, the director, all day... and Dickie was there because, well, actually, nobody knew what guided Dickie Halethorpe but he always seemed to be there, and Sarah was there because she wasn’t working and mostly because she wanted to jump Preacher’s bones.

Mandy was there because it was fun. Despite the fact that everyone worked in the industry. It was fun, and there was good food. Free booze.

The kitchen was spacious and tilted towards the afternoon sun and Preacher was standing at that big stainless steel stove and Dickie, Brent, and Sarah were sitting around the room drinking margaritas. The pitcher sat on the counter. Finch made great margaritas.

“Ms. Denton,” Dickie said as she came into the kitchen.

“You’re just in time,” Sarah said, gesturing to the counter. “Finch just made the pitcher.”

“What are we cooking?” Maggie said to Preacher, peering over at the range.

“I’m not sure yet,” Preacher said, “but it will involve chicken.” He was cutting chicken meat into smallish pieces. In front of him a frying pan snapped and popped as hot oil worked its magic on some garlic. He peered at it for a moment and then dumped in some chopped onions.

“Preacher was telling us the secrets of the universe,” Brent said. “It has something to do with chocolate meringue pie.”

“The secret of the universe,” Preacher said, “is absolute simplicity, which Dickie, as our Oxford scholar in residence, should know from having read his David Hume like a good student.” He put the chicken into the hot oil with the garlic and onions, and stirred it around a bit. The snapping and popping flared up for a moment, then subsided.

“You’re barking up the wrong Brit,” Dickie said. “I was always more of a Spinoza man, myself.”

“They were both accused of atheism,” Preacher said.

“Didn’t he say ‘nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few’?” Sarah piped up.

“Goddamn,” Brent said. “Where did you learn that?”

“He did say that,” Preacher said. “But he also tried to refute some of the more philosophical arguments about the nature of God by pointing out that the idea of some unmoving, incomprehensible, irreducible God was tantamount to atheism because such a God had nothing whatsoever to do with the world we inhabit.”

“So how is absolute simplicity the secret of the universe?” Brent asked.

Preacher ground some pepper over the chicken, threw in a little salt, and stirred the chicken around with a spatula.

“Well, it’s a question of perspective,” he said. He put the spatula down and took a sip of his drink. “The universe does not seem simple from our perspective. Lots of moving parts. Lots of chaos. Lots of stuff we don’t understand. But from another perspective, it’s quite simple. It’s one. It’s one universe, one singular reality. One existence. One is a very simple number to understand. Hume also said, one is the greatest number.”

“One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do,” Maggie added helpfully, sitting next to Sarah.

“I’ve always felt that Three Dog Nights’ contribution to theology has been sorely overlooked,” Preacher said, smiling at them. Maggie smiled back. Couldn’t help it. She thought she heard Sarah’s heart skip a beat.

“Three Dog Night I don’t know. But when I was like 13 and saw Apollonia on stage, I knew there was a God,” Brent said.

“Another form of spiritual awakening,” Preacher acknowledged.

“Three Dog Night? Apollonia? How is it you Philistines have come to rule the world?” Dickie said, shaking his head. Preacher grinned at him, too, and began peeling and de-veining shrimp. "You Philistines" was Halethorpe's generic term for Americans.

“Wait a second,” Mark said, speaking up for the first time. “So what does that other stuff have to do with the secret of the universe?”

“Oh,” Preacher said, “well, look, some people have this concept of a singular, indivisible, Divine. And if you think of reality, the universe, as a single, indivisible thing, then you have...”

“Then you’re back to Spinoza,” Dickie said. “God is Nature.”

“Right,” Preacher said, “but what are the implications if you think of that as a single indivisible whole?”

“It means that Margaret Thatcher is God,” Dickie said, rolling his eyes. “Dear Lord. Or should I say, Dear Margaret.”

Preacher took the chicken out and put it on a plate to drain. He dumped the shrimp into the cloudy, garlicky oil. “That’s precisely what it means. It means God made you a pitcher of margaritas a few minutes ago.”

“Thousands of people all over the world pay good money to go into a special darkened room and gaze silently at a 20-foot image of me,” Finch said, entering the room. He gave Maggie a kiss on the cheek. “That sort of makes me a god.” The others jeered and guffawed loudly as he poured himself a drink. “We’re running low on these already? Preacher, your friends are lushes.”

“Having lushes for friends is entertaining. Having lushes for employees is a problem,” Preacher retorted, flipping the shrimp.

“That smells really good,” Sarah commented.

“Well, they’re being cooked by God,” Mark noted.

“More to the point, they’re God, too,” Preacher said. “The difference between us and shrimp is that we’re capable of figuring that out. Or at least of being amazed by it.” He rummaged around in the refrigerator and came out with a lump of pepperjack cheese. “You cheese purists will hate me for saying this, but I love pepperjack cheese,” he said.

“Like I said, Philistines,” Dickie sniffed.

“Excuse me? Kidney pie?” Finch asked. “I don’t ever want to hear one of you people snickering at someone else’s cuisine.”

“You just lack adequate refinement to... oh, who am I kidding?” Dickie said. “I fled the country just to get a decent meal.”

“So how is worshiping shrimp the secret to the universe?” Brent asked.

Preacher grated the cheese into a bowl. “It makes it harder to overcook them,” he said, stopping to take them out of the pan. They were just turning pink. “It’s one thing if you think of shrimp, and the people you’re feeding, as just a few more randomly careening bits of the chaotic Brownian movement of the universe. But if they’re both the indivisible Divine... it sharpens one’s focus.”

“Easy for you to say,” Sarah said. “You’re one of those people who does everything well naturally. For those of us who can’t make toast without involving the fire department, regarding a slice of bread as an aspect of God is just frustrating.”

“It’s OK if you burn the toast,” Preacher said. “The important part is that you recognize that everything you do is, in a way, an act of worship. Whether you know it or not.”

“You mean all you have to do to have firemen over for breakfast is burn toast?” Maggie asked, arching an eyebrow lasciviously.

“I think I’ll jot that down,” Dickie said.

Preacher poured a little vegetable oil in the pan and put a corn tortilla in the hot oil. “All I know,” he said, “is that it works for me.”

“Works for me, too,” Finch said. He shrugged. “Maybe it’s just having something to think about outside yourself. I mean it could be a lot worse. It could be Kabbalah or Scientology or, I don’t know, what’s that thing Mel Gibson does? Opus Dei. This doesn’t have a name, doesn’t cost any money, and doesn’t ask that I go to church on Sundays. And it works for me. What else could I ask for?”

Preacher put some cheese on the tortilla, then a handful of onion-garlic-shrimp-chicken mix, then some more cheese. “This is hard to do without music,” he said, “I don’t know how long to cook anything.” He folded the tortilla over the filling and flipped it over. “If the cheese doesn’t glue the tortilla shut, you get a hell of a mess.”

Brent picked up the stereo remote. “Never let it be said I didn’t contribute to dinner,” he said. Siousxie and the Banshees came on. “Does that have the sort of beat you can cook to?” he asked.

“It’ll do,” Preacher said, putting the first finished tortilla on a plate.

“What are these called, again?” Sarah said.

“Half-assed quesadillas,” Preacher said.

This was the second Circle. The second group of converts.

Sarah didn’t go home that night.

There was a party about midway through his stay. This was when Kabbalah was just starting to get some buzz, before it had really been picked up by the media but the really good trendspotters had picked it up. And at the party Preacher was accosted by a formerly famous singer who started talking about Kabbalah and Finch – who was bored and thinking about leaving for the Viper Lounge – stayed just to hear what followed. But Preacher was polite. “A path is a path,” he said.

Then one day Preacher left, with little in the way of ceremony. He asked Finch if he could take the bike to San Diego to tie up some loose end. Finch had no qualms about that. He was immersed in rewrites for the Glory Road script anyhow. And a few weeks later a truck pulled up in front of the house and a man who had already been paid unloaded the motorcycle.

Finch threw away the note that was taped to it, but remembered the gist of it: “Thanks, heading to Maryland, it’s a nice day, I think I’ll walk.”

It was not exactly a surprise to Dylan. He wished Preacher had stayed – he was good to have around, never got in trouble, defused tense situations, cooked, kept his mouth shut, fit in everywhere, and – rarest of all – Dylan trusted him completely in everything. But at the same time he understood the departure.

He left, Finch reasoned, because his message was catching on a little too facilely. Because there was this nice easy path laid out for him to create the next Est, the next Scientology, the next Kabbalah.

The two ran into one another a few more times, and of course there was the sort of famous time when Finch sort of came out of the Worship closet. But during their one prolonged stay together Finch was distracted putting together Glory Road. Haywood turned a few key players in to Worshipers(although they didn’t realize it at the time). They all admitted – some more cautiously than others – that it helped them work together.

Part Forty Eight

After I was finished and putting all this shit together and trying to figure out what it all MEANT even while telling my cynical post-modern self that it didn’t MEAN anything, there was one person I had trouble explaining away, and that was Graeme Wagner.

Graeme was the editor of a hipper-than-thou Oakland alt-weekly called There There, which I have to admit is a pretty good name for a hipper-than-thou Oakland weekly. Graeme’s partner was a high school English teacher named Michael Rutledge. That’s how he met Preacher – Preacher was a substitute history teacher for two weeks at Rutledge’s school.

I interviewed Graeme when I interviewed everyone else in San Francisco. Telephone pre-interview and then an in-person interview and all of that is catalogued and taped. But when I was thinking about the San Francisco stuff I kept getting stuck on Graeme’s example, and so – because the Worshipers foolishly gave me an open-ended expense account – I flew back out there to speak with him again.

He let me into his office. It was messy by Worshiper standards, which is to say, it was immaculate by newspaper standards. He didn’t have to move any stacks of anything for me to sit down. And we sat there and stared at one another across the desk for a moment.

“You flew out here to remember what I looked like?” Graeme said bemusedly.

“Here’s the thing,” I said to him. “You and I have something in common, and that is a sense of irony that has been tempered and honed into our primary defense mechanism. People like us, we don’t join things. We stand on the outside and criticize. It’s what we’re here for. It’s an important job. It’s what we do. If you think about it, in fact, our careers are based on our ability to stay detached.”

“Your point being...?”

“So how did you become a Worshiper? I mean it doesn’t fit. Joining, like that. If you told me that after you met Preacher you wrote a long feature about him spending five years in the desert, that I would understand. If you told me that you had a good time at a dinner party at Harding’s condo, that I would get completely. But to tell me that you signed on to all this, that... that doesn’t match anything else I know about you.”

He looked at me with little in the way of expression for a few seconds, and then said “you don’t really know me that well.”

“Well enough. I mean enough to get a sense that this isn’t like you.”

He took a deep, ruminative breath, held it, let it out.

“I guess the first thing is,” he said, musingly, “that there was no such thing as Worship then. I mean if one of my staff came in here with Notes on Worship – which has happened – and I started seeing college kids with circles tattooed on their biceps I would probably assign someone to do a story on the cultural phenomenon of Worship. Which, in fact, has also happened. But I probably wouldn’t have become interested in it if I was just exposed to it now after it’s already a, a, movement. A phenomenon. The thing is, though, there was nothing to join back then. There was no sense of joining anything, of creeds and jingoism and group-think. Because you’re right, I wouldn’t have touched that.

“Here’s what it was, though,” he continued. “It was going to this place in Nob Hill where this incredibly interesting, fun, warm, laid-back couple made great food and told funny stories and there were all these other really interesting people around. I mean I’m a big fan of unbridled cynicism but they made it really hard. The first time... Michael had gone on and on about how cool Haywood was, and we ride all the way into the city, and Cass answers the door, laughing, and there was another straight couple there, and Preacher is in the kitchen chopping porcini mushrooms and telling some anecdote that had everyone laughing, and it was just so... it was always warm and smelled of good food and there was music and just this sense of ease.

"And on the way back home that night Michael and I talked about how good a time we’d had in a low-key sort of way. We sat on the train and it was late and we were tired and a little drunk and I kept hearing Violent Femmes in my head because that had been on the stereo before we left. We sort of slouched against one another and the train was rocking along the tracks...” he trailed off, not really looking at me, and I could almost feel it, not quite, but almost, that feeling when you were on your way back home after Christmas dinner at your grandparents and you were tired and full and warm in the back of the car and there wasn’t much sound but the whir of the tires. I tried to imagine feeling that way as an adult. But I couldn’t.

“The conclusion we reached,” Graeme said, after a pause, “was that Preacher had his shit so together that he radiated this sort of aura of competence. Like, stand next to Preacher long enough and you began to think that you, too, could do everything and anything without seeming remotely stressed.

“It was just so... comfortable to be there. There was no sense that Preacher was proselytizing. He was just being Preacher. And Cass, Cass was perfectly matched with him – pretty, funny, relaxed but not lethargic. Warm. It was just so great being around them. Being in their place. It was like... I can’t describe it. Well, I mean I could say it was like being embraced but that makes it sound way too saccharine. It was just like being... home for Thanksgiving, without the co-dependency and homophobia and neuroses that I generally associate with going home for Thanksgiving.

“He even played cool music.

“So after awhile it was only natural that some of it rubbed off. You just... you just wanted to be more like that, wanted to keep that feeling even after you left. After awhile Michael’s lesson plans were edgier and more personal like Preacher’s had been. After awhile I found myself walking right past the frozen food aisle and standing in the produce section buying red, yellow, and green bell peppers. It kind of crept up on you. And with some prying Preacher would talk a little about spiritual issues. Not much. Not really. But drop hints here and there. And we came to understand that his centeredness had a spiritual component. Cass, really, was the one to talk about doctrine. Such as it was. I mean there was no such thing as Worship, we didn’t have that word. We didn’t label anything. But I remember after we’d known them for awhile, having this late-night, beery conversation with Cass where she talked about the concept of the Divine and how it related to the way she and Preacher lived. And by that time I was already a convert without knowing it. I mean...”

“But how can that be?” I interrupted. “What were you converting to if you didn’t know about all that One Indivisible Divine business? You were converting to home cooking and smart conversation? That’s what I don’t understand.”

He pursed his lips for a second. “The thing is,” he said, “the problem with joining a church or a self-help group or anyone else who promises you the keys to the universe is that you have to take on faith that they can back up that promise. In Preacher’s case he didn’t ask us to join anything. He pulled up driving the universe , let us in, burned rubber around the parking lot a few times, then slid over so we could drive. We didn’t need faith in him, or his, his method. He showed us what the promise was. I know, that metaphor sucks. But we were already convinced he had the keys to the universe long before there was any understanding that we could have them, too, by listening to what he had to say. We sort of subconsciously started picking up on Preacherisms – the focus, the grace, the fearlessness – and that started opening up doors to secret places and so when we learned that there actually was a system behind it we were only too ready to sign on.”

“You told me you’re not a ritual Worshiper,” I said.

“Yeah, I think that stuff’s a lot of hippie bullshit. The whole contrived ceremony thing. I mean if I wanted to celebrate the solstices I would live in San Francisco. I live in Oakland. June 21 is just another day to us.”

“He didn’t talk about that when he was here?”

“Oh, hell no. In fact I couldn’t believe it when I saw that stuff about the different rituals, the solstices, the naming ceremony... the food circles, that I understood completely, but none of that other bullshit. Then I read his comments on it and I understood a little better. He is making fun of those people. I mean he says it. Not in so many words. But he says, basically, for those of you who are so dependent on form and ritual and outward display, here is a bunch of silly crap we just made up so that you would feel satisfied.”

I thought about this some more.

“Was this contagious?” I asked. “I mean after you joined the Worshipers did you go out and join a bowling league or work on some political cause or anything like that?”

He laughed. “Not even close,” he said. “Look, Worship doesn’t really change who you are. I mean a little around the edges, I guess, but mostly you’re the same person. I had a friend who went to law school and he said that going to law school doesn’t change your opinions but it changes the way you justify them. Worship is sort of the same way. I’m the same detached cynical asshole now I was then. Just that now I’m a better cook.”

He saw the skepticism in my eyes.

“Look,” he said, “you’re right – we’re a lot alike in that regard. Our reliance on ironic detachment. Believe me, I understand that. And if I was in your position I would be highly skeptical about all this. Finding flaws from the outside. It sounds like we all lost our --”

“Being happy all the time is not normal,” I interrupted. “It sounds unspeakably dull and tedious, frankly. If you’re never upset, if you never do anything stupid, if your shit is ALWAYS together, then you have no way to distinguish good times from bad. Life becomes a constant immersion in a warm, thick, flavorless, goo. And I still don’t get you jumping into the tank.”

He looked at me without saying a word. Not really offended. Just sort of... thoughtful.

“How long have you been working on this project?” he said to me.

“Almost a year.”

“Did you think of yourself as a Worshiper before you started?”

“Hell, no.”

Another thoughtful look. “Before when I stubbed my toe I said fuck. Now when I stub my toe I say fuck, and laugh. It still hurts. But I can laugh, too. That’s not flavorless goo. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not flavorless goo. Worship doesn’t mean sanding down the sharp edges. It doesn’t mean avoiding the sharp edges. It means accepting the cuts that you’re going to get once in awhile.”

I tried to be expressionless – this was getting nowhere – but my inability to suspend disbelief in the horseshit must have shown through.

“Why are you really here?” he said. “You didn’t fly out here just to tell me you didn’t understand me. What’s really going on?”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

Part Forty Seven

From "Preacher Haywood: Library to Desert," in the Journal of Religion and Society, Spring 2004

[...]
Thus it seems evident that Haywood's experience, and all of Worship, is revelatory, not scholastic. What he is and what he is trying to communicate comes from the desert, not the library; it was the direct experience of Oneness and not anything he learned from a book that made him who and what he is. For better and for worse. And so Haywood is praised and criticized for the wrong things.

Too often his supporters credit him for religious scholarship -- credit he himself, characteristically, has not welcomed. He is not a religious scholar. His knowledge is broader than the average lay person's but not particularly deep, and it bears the tell-tale marks of an autodidact -- there are unexpected gaps in his knowledge, and unorthodox, often shaky readings of some of the classic works. Often in reviewing his writings and lectures one sees him struggle with concepts well-covered by others, and miss allusions and references which might seem obvious to the more classically trained religious historian.

But at the same time the charge of syncretism is levelled at Worship and that, too, is unfair. All religious movements historicize themselves, present themselves as a return to the "true" and "original" faith. A fair amount of classical philosophy also presents itself as merely an outgrowth or reimagining of some older tradition. Haywood is, perhaps, more transparent about this than other budding religious leaders -- that sense of ironic detachment, which ordinarily is anathema to faith, is in a way central to Worship, and therefore Worshippers could not do other than recognize its parallels and similarities to other traditions -- but admitting that others have had similar insights does not make one a syncretist.

Yes, Haywood demonstrates a knowledge of philosophy and religious history superior to that of the average (Western) layperson when he speaks at length about the teachings of al-Suhrawardi, but that does not make him a theologian. He himself scoffed at such suggestions, referring to himself simply as "an avid reader," and that is probably more accurate.

(In fact comparison to al-Suhrawardi is apt in many ways. Suhrawardi, too, created an inclusive religious and philosophical system rooted in the language and folkways of his native country. Suhrawardi underwent a mystical experience of the Divine and then brought prodigious intellectual and scholarly intellect to bear upon the phenomenon. However, Suhrawardi is one of the greatest thinkers the world has yet produced, and so it is perhaps unfair to Haywood to point out Worship's shortcomings compared to al-Ishraqi. Suhrawardi's system was immensely more complex and, historically, more significant to the world than anything Worship has yet produced. There can be no comparison between The Wisdom of Light and Notes on Worship; it is akin to comparing Hamlet to a half-hour sitcom script. This is not to belittle Worship but rather to praise the magnitude of Suhrawardi's accomplishment.)

When Haywood uses a metaphor of divine light in Notes, he invokes Suhrawardi, and St. Symeon, and George Fox, and Mulla Sadra -- he acknowledges that they have trod this path before him and, indeed, all used the metaphor of a Light of Lights. But each of them fit their message firmly within a specific faith tradition. In Fox's case, while he was founding a new sect -- the Quakers -- he was still firmly in an established Protestant Christian tradition, rooted entirely in the text of the Bible and not looking elsewhere for guidance. Worship quite deliberately eschews that single-mindedness. In fact at times Haywood seems to go out of his way to cite examples from a wide array of faiths, underscoring the deliberately non-sectarian nature of his message. "He does not," as one critic sniffed, "even call God, God."

[...]
Interestingly, Haywood's reflexive habit of appealing to authority from various faith traditions has caused various traditional faith groups to claim him as their own. "I have been told," Haywood claimed in an interview once, "that I am a Roman Catholic; a Shi'a Moslem; a Baptist; a Buddhist; a Bahai missionary; a Wiccan; and once, most interestingly, a Jew. Reformed, one supposes..." That so many different and diverse religious traditions can claim Worship for their own most likely means that Worship will in short order atomize and disappear. There is a chance, however -- slight though it may be -- that in the process of co-opting Worship, these other groups may well legitimize it and allow it to endure indefinitely.

Part Forty Six

I have to say that it was on the West Coast that my patience for Worshipers was most sorely tested. Even though I compiled the archive (and wrote most of this memoir) from their headquarters in St. Michael's, they were more annoying out there. Because here I ignore them, and vice-versa, whereas in California I had to track them down and talk to them. And for the most part they're just so... so... so fucking typical. I don't know how to put it any better than that. Every stereotype you ever had about the Worshipers is reinforced every damn second you spent with people like Cass Harding.

She lives in this breathtaking, beautifully restored Victorian in Pacific Heights. Her husband is some sort of architect; she told me the details, they're in the archive, I didn't give a shit. Two point three children -- she was pregnant when I talked to her. Pictures of the other two. Cute. Probably all going to graduate from Harvard at age 12 and do all sorts of wonderful gifted things. Probably all going to be little Preacher Haywoods, God save us all.

Harding still runs her business, too; she owns the converted warehouse that houses it, just minutes from her home. They're richer than I can contemplate and -- of course -- she looks great. I'm quite certain she manages to easily juggle her demanding career with her home life such that neither her business nor her family is ever slighted, I'm quite certain she can cook like a gourmet chef, I'm quite certain she sees to it that Mr. Architect has nightly orgasms that temporarily erase part of his frontal lobes.

You get the picture.

At any rate, here's what happened after the whole desert episode: Preacher Haywood went off and did his construction worker thing, she went back to work, and in fairly short order life resumed what passed for normal for a beautiful young dot-com millionaire in the late '90s. Haywood emailed her a couple of times from Internet cafes he encountered on the road. And she stayed in touch -- to her surprise, and to his -- with Dylan Finch. Telephone calls every couple of days. They went out on the town -- purely platonically, she assured me -- when she was in LA on business. And both of them were living like Worshippers, even though that term hadn't been invented yet.

But they were doing it anyhow. Every act an act of worship, awareness of the ubiquity of the Divine, blah blah blah. It was difficult, she said. It had seemed effortless in the desert around Preacher but in the real world where there was so much stuff and so many things going on it was hard to remember "the simple truths" -- which I took to mean the mystical bullshit that Haywood had fed them in the desert. Fidelity of thought was, in part, why she stayed in touch with Finch -- they kept one another on track in this endeavor. They (she and Finch) both learned how to cook. She said something that virtually every Worshiper said to me, in different ways -- making a meal out of a raw ingredients, making it and sharing it with people you love, became an intensely religious experience for her, every single time. Which was a two-edged sword, she acknowledged, laughing, because it meant that no matter how tired she was, she was almost congenitally incapable of just 'waving a frozen burrito as she would have done before.

Beyond that she basically bided her time until Haywood arrived. She knew he would because he said he would. Of course I know now what she didn't know then, which was Haywood's promises to be somewhere were based upon a sense of time not shared by those of us with real lives and real jobs. How many years did it take him to make the trip from Chicago to San Diego? But Haywood assured her that after his summer job -- his "acclimatization," his "repressurization," he wrote in his emails -- he would be showing up in San Francisco.

And damn if he didn't. She swears up and down, even when confronted with my most cynical eyebrow raise, that she dreamt of his arrival the night before it happened and so wasn't surprised at all when, one September morning, her office manager buzzed her and said that a man named Haywood was out front.

She said thank you calmly, hung up the phone calmly, then catapulted herself out of her office, yelling out his name. He stood there with that soft grin on his face, and she hadn't even made up her mind to kiss him inappropriately before she did it. And he didn't pull back a bit.

He looked, she recalled, good. A little heavier, buff where he had seemed a bit scrawny in the desert. Clean-shaven, his hair cropped short. She stood there with her arms around his neck and his hands holding the small of her back and stared at him after their lips parted. Assured herself that he was actually there.

After a long silence the office manager said "Do you have an appointment, sir?"

(The office manager was a drily funny, very practical woman named Elizabeth Oshrine. She wasn't the office manager by the time I arrived to interview Haywood's San Francisco contacts. Harding's profit-sharing program had allowed her to retire and move to Washburn, Texas, to be closer to her daughter and grandkids. I talked to her by telephone. When I asked her if she was a Worshiper she said she was too old for such foolishness. I liked her. Until she said that Haywood was a priest in the order of Melchizedek. Damn.)

So began Haywood' six months in San Fran. In the real world Cass didn't find Preacher the spooky, somewhat intimidating, spiritual figure she'd known in the desert. Instead she found a smart, good-looking, charming, gentle man. She still insists that the fact that she almost literally worshiped him as a holy man had nothing to do with her attraction to him, that if he hadn't had a spiritual bone in his body she still would have fallen for him, that his (as she saw it) position as a tour-guide of the Divine was, if anything, an obstacle to their relationship, not the impetus for it.

Haywood was an unemployed construction laborer and she ran one of the most successful and profitable small software companies in San Francisco. He was a recovering heroin addict and she was revolutionizing the way humans interacted with their computers. But she insists that the fact that she fell for him had nothing to do with the pseudo-intellectual pseudo-theology with which he'd brainwashed her when she stumbled, exhausted, dehydrated, and sun-addled, into his little desert lair. No, it was all purely on his merits as a human being.

Right.

Anyhow, she took him home and took him to bed and Preacher Haywood got laid for, as far as I can tell, the first time in almost four years. Which was the longest he'd gone since junior high, I suppose. And I won't repeat all of the crap that Cass Harding told me about it. It's in the archive if you're curious. Take the writings of Denys the Areopagite, the Whole Earth Catalog, and a few issues of Penthouse Forum, throw them into a blender, and you'll get a sense of what she has to say about it. Here's the condensed version: they lit some candles, undressed, and did it for hours.

She talked about the candle thing, which I heard others use, but since she was sort of at ground zero for all this I will assume this was the first demonstration. After they managed to survive that first night and she was basking in her post-orgasmic, post-epiphanic reverie, she wondered idly about the nature of what she felt had been a transcendent experience and Haywood took one candle and snuffed it out, then took another candle and tipped it toward the smoking wick of the darkened taper. The flame jumped from one candle to the next. I think I learned that trick in the third grade, but it was, to Cassandra Harding, the equivalent of the Sermon of the Flower. Haywood didn't say anything, but she understood what he meant. The Divine, she said, is a flame within us, but sometimes we can't see it or feel its warmth, and then another flame is brought near and our sense of the Divine jumps back into being. This sentence was followed by several lengthy paragraphs about how that metaphor is as inaccurate as all other attempts at describing the Divine in human language, because the flame never goes out, we just don't see it, and the Divine isn't a flame inside us, but really we're nothing but flame.

Whatever.

She went on to tell me that subsequent sexual experiences with Preacher -- I got the impression that there were at least two a day, every day -- were not all realizations of the Divine but sometimes just plain old sex. Which was fine in its own right. What a relief. She told me that Haywood refused her offer of a job, saying that he would feel like a kept man. Which, of course, he was. He worked as a substitute teacher -- in San Francisco, at least back then, substitute teachers just needed college degrees, not teaching certificates. I don't know what the rule is on that now.

At any rate, they formed what, in retrospect, was the first Worship circle, too. Not that they called it Worship. It was just some friends who started coming over for informal dinner parties once a week. Lured by Preacher's cooking, they apparently stayed for his philosophizing. I spoke with them. They universally remember having to drag it out of Haywood, that he was the most reluctant proselytizer ever. That's the way they remember it... but funny how somehow he managed to convert all of them anyhow.

I'm being hard on them. Even allowing for the rose-colored haze they all had when they remembered Preacher in those days, it does seem that Haywood's chief tactic was to be a missionary by example. It worked when we were at St. John's and all he was converting anyone to in those days was ars memoria. So I'm not surprised that it worked in San Francisco when he was converting people to great sex and fantastic cooking. The fact that he was living the life of a rich man didn't hurt. It's easy to want to emulate the guy with the beautiful home (it was a condo in Nob Hill in those days, the house in Pacific Heights didn't come along until after she got married) and the beautiful girlfriend and all the expensive stuff around him. It would have been different, I think, if he'd been living in a trailer park outside Oakland. Notwithstanding the fact that his first two converts had found him in a shotgun shack in the middle of the desert.

Anyhow, after awhile the others started taking turns with the Moveable Feast, as they called their weekly supper. (Funny how quick Worshipers are to co-opt the terminology of other faiths.) And when they were all good and converted he gave Cass a variation on the speech he gave Sarah back in Seattle, years earlier. The whole "this is not my future" business. Cass claims she knew this all along, too, knew it was just temporary with him, was OK with that.

He left in March, six months to the day from his arrival.

Part Forty Five

When they got into the little dusty town, all three of them placed telephone calls. Dylan to his agent, Cass to her office manager, Preacher to the Major. The two who had been missing a week spent longer on the phone explaining the situation than the one who'd been missing for five years. All of them had money wired to the local bank. Even though their rescue would arrive in a few hours. But neither Harding nor Finch had any ID, and the bank wouldn't give them their money (although the teller recognized Finch well enough to ask for his autograph.) Haywood, with his expired Florida license, was able to get his money when the two multi-millionaires could not. He rented a motel room so they could all take long hot showers and he went to the town's only barbershop for a haircut, and shaved his beard off. The three of them sat in the town's only diner and ate cheeseburgers and Preacher made them laugh with a story about being a gunslinger at a dude ranch.

It takes roughly six hours to get to Gethsemane from LA, maybe seven from San Francisco. There is no place in Gethsemane to rent a car, that's for damn sure, and no municipal airport or even a usable landing strip. Fresno is probably the nearest big city, as the crow flies, but because there's no good highway through the Sierra National Forest it takes almost five hours to drive there. It's only about two and a half hours to Tonopah, Nevada, however. Cass Hardesty's office manager was smarter than Dylan Finch's agent. She chartered a flight to Tonopah, went to Cass's apartment, packed a bag for her boss, watered her plants, flew into Tonopah, rented a car, drove to Gethsemane, and got there two hours before Finch's people arrived from LA in his agent's new Land Cruiser.

Haywood politely declined her heartfelt entreaties to return to San Francisco with her, but promised that he would visit her soon.

He had a couple of beers with Finch after that and then politely declined both Finch's, and Finch's manager's, heartfelt entreaties to return to Los Angeles; in fact, much to the chagrin of Finch's manager, Preacher requested that neither his name nor his face be associated with the story that the manager had shopped to People Magazine all the way up the road from LA. Even more to his chagrin, Finch agreed -- you can milk the story, he said, and even mention that I was rescued by a hermit, but his name and face stay out of it.

For the five hours back they worked on their client, tried to get him to relent. He didn't. The story made headlines for a little while -- there are a lot of clippings in the archive -- and Haywood isn't mentioned by name in any of them. An intrepid tabloid reporter tracked down both the teller and the waitress in Gethsemane but since Haywood paid cash for the motel room there was nothing with his name on it there.

For the next few months Preacher drifted slowly southwest toward San Diego -- the same trip he ostensibly began when he left Virginia four years earlier -- working a few days here and there as a day laborer or a busboy or a janitor. He later recounted that he was uncertain about jumping back into human society. He said "I slept alone, said little, kept my head down, and avoided crowds." He also spent a lot of time in libraries, reading voraciously, not just trying to make sense of what had happened to him in the desert but also -- and this is so typically him -- catching up on the pop culture he missed. ("Do you realize," he told someone much later, "that while I was... absent, Uncle Tupelo disbanded?") He was in no particular hurry, which is why it took him until late April of 1999 -- almost eight months -- to show up just 250 miles to the southwest. In Bakersfield, California.

Bakersfield, California, is the Richmond, Virginia, of the West. Without all the flash and glamour. I would never have been there voluntarily except that I had to speak to the men and women of Pacific Athletic Surfaces. To take their life stories and turn them into footnotes in the biographical archive of Preacher Haywood.

Their life stories were no more tedious than mine. Certainly they deserved to better than footnote status. The Glassings and the Clarks had turned a failed tennis court repair company into a successful business. And I'm sure the story of Marvin Clark's and Keith Glassing's inter-racial friendship, dating back to the first grade, could form the basis of some inspiring movie-of-the-week story in its own right. But neither of them managed to escape Kern County for long and both of them now work on other people's tennis courts all day. In the end that doesn't get you your own biopic. If it wasn't for the accidental hiring of Preacher Haywood it wouldn't even get them this footnote.

At the end of the day Haywood's primary appeal was that he was a legal US resident. That's the beginning and the end of it. And now I find myself having to do what I'd hoped to avoid, which was discussing the Pacific Athletic Surfaces business model.

So, with a sigh: most of their work came from working on country clubs and public courts, schools, parks-and-rec fields, things like that. From Bakersfield north, because there was a lot of competition from LA south. Which meant (a) they had to be low bidder and (b) much of their work came when school was not in session, which in turn meant (c) it had to be done fast, because summer was when people wanted to play tennis. So they had a hard time handling contracts more than an hour's drive from Bakersfield. Which meant there wasn't enough business. So Sandy Glassing, Keith's wife and the brains of the operation (she had an AA in business from Bakersfield College), developed this plan wherein a series of contracts moved the operation from one job to the next, day after day, all summer long. They could cover the entire northern and central state in one long road-trip that lasted all summer. Keith and Marvin (whom everyone but his wife and mother called Boom, a nickname from his days as a fullback at Stockdale High School and later as a defensive end at UCLA) would take Keith's brother Jimmy and an equipment operator and in each new town they would hire a few day laborers and get the job done, then move on to the next contract where Sandy would have everything from motel rooms to diesel fuel ready and waiting for them.

That was the plan and it worked well for a few years and then the state started cracking down on using illegal immigrants to perform state contracts. Which meant that the school districts and recreation departments suddenly wanted all kinds of paperwork for the day laborers. Who didn't have it. The State of California's insistence that its tennis courts could only be properly patched by people born in the U.S. threatened to sink the little American success story that was Pacific Athletic Surfaces.

But everyone had to rebid under those rules, and they got their contracts, and Sandy (who apparently is some sort of logistical idiot-savant) put together a road-trip, and all that remained to be done was to hire enough legal laborers to haul around with them from job to job. Wanted: people willing to engage in back-breaking work for long hours in the summer sun, living out of motels and not seeing their families for three months. Mediocre pay, no benefits. US citizens only, please.

Haywood wandered into Bakersfield, a few weeks after leaving the desert, two days before the P.A.S. road trip was supposed to start. Saw the want ad. Walked to the industrial park where PAS was located, into the low cinder block building, and got the job. Boom drove him to the DMV so he could get a valid California driver's license. They were that desperate. They were so desperate they rehired a drunk named Roger Michaels, who had been their equipment operator a few years earlier. Michaels promised to stay sober the length of the road trip. Neither they nor Michaels actually believed that he would. They also had Robert Redcloud, a Yokuts Indian (he hates the term "native American," for reasons he probably would have explained if I'd cared enough to ask him.) With Jimmy and the two principals that was six men, when they needed (and budgeted for) eight, and had hoped for a minimum of seven.

So they rolled out of Bakersfield and started working on these jobs. Note for prosperity: having a bodhisattva on your construction crew boosts productivity in the short term, but in the long term leads to some East Coast intellectual like me turning your life into a footnote.

While all this was going on, I should note, Dylan and Cass were back in Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively, trying to make every act an act of worship. With limited success, although they apparently phoned and e-mailed one another often for support in their spiritual quests.

Anyhow, Jimmy Glassing was a little bantam-rooster of a man who, at one time, was a big fan of hair metal and Federal Schedule I, II, and IV Controlled Substances (he skipped Schedule III entirely. I don't know why.) Now he's still a small, wiry man, but he's renounced his prior devotions and instead focused his attentions upon his wife and the Lord Jesus Christ. Not necessarily in that order. When Haywood was in the crew, Jimmy was going through what his sister-in-law refers to as a "phase" with a roll of her eyes. That "phase" entailed trying to convert everyone he met to his particular brand of born-again nuttiness. It had gotten so bad the year before that Redcloud had threatened to split his head open with a shovel, so Keith had forbidden him from proselytizing on company time.

Thus when this road trip started Redcloud asked to share a room with Michaels, leaving Preacher and Jimmy as road roommates. That Robert Redcloud would specifically ask to bunk with a racist drunk as indifferent about his hygiene as Roger Michaels told Preacher that there was something even worse about Jimmy Glassing.

The second day on the job he was working next to Redcloud. "How was your night with Reverend Jimmy?" Redcloud smirked. Haywood chuckled and shook his head. "He try to convert you all night?" Redcloud pressed.

Haywood laughed out loud. (By this time he'd been out in the real world long enough that he was, apparently, able to carry on a normal human conversation). "All day long yesterday I was trying to figure out what was wrong with Jimmy that nobody wanted to room with him," he said. He never stopped working as he spoke. "So I came out of the shower with a towel wrapped around me and he's sitting on the edge of the bed with a Bible in his hand and he says to me, 'have you accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior?'"

Redcloud laughed at this, having endured the same thing the summer before.

"So I took the towel off," Haywood continued, "because in my experience nothing discombobulates an evangelical like the sight of a penis. But it didn't work. He just sat there patiently waiting for my answer."

"There's nothing you can do to shut him up," Redcloud said, laughing. "Each night he would kneel there praying at the top of his lungs, mostly things like 'Jesus, help Robert Redcloud find you.'"

"Yeah, well," Preacher said, "I figured as much, so I tried to circumvent all that. I said to him 'don't you really mean, have I found the oneness with God that Christ promised we could attain through him?' He wasn't expecting that. So we talked about the Bible for a little while and he calmed down some." Preacher shrugged. "It'll take him awhile before he figures out there's a difference between agreeing with him and not disagreeing with him."

That conversation is mostly second-hand fiction, I should point out. Redcloud told it to me pretty much the way I related it to you. I doubt he remembered it verbatim. But then again he's not the sort who would use the word "discombobulates" on his own. In fact that sounded more like something I would say.

So they toured middle- and upper-California, fixing tennis courts and discussing pantheism. And today they all agree (except for Roger Michaels, who is dead, which is a pity, because I wanted to get a fellow drunk's perspective on Haywood), when asked years later, that Preacher Haywood was a hell of a nice guy and worked his ass off and...

Keith told me: "You know, there was something about the way that guy thought, something about the way he approached life... you just felt a little better being around him. I mean you wanted to work harder. I didn't think anybody worked harder than me and Boom, I mean, hell, it was our company, but Haywood never seemed to get tired and always did everything so... effortlessly. Like it wasn't even work. Like it was... it was..." He couldn't finish the thought, but told me that he got everyone on the crew working harder and faster and better by the end of the trip.

Boom told me: "He used to say that working a shovel was like cooking a meal, which was like singing a song, which was like saying a prayer of thanksgiving. That sounds kind of dumb when I say it but it sounded pretty good when he said it, and dumb or not, it's something I've always carried with me since."

Of course. While I am always studiously objective and clinical and detached when I interview people, I was extra-careful not to let any of my personal feelings about Haywood show when interviewing Boom Clark, because twenty years after his playing days were over he still looked like he could have snapped me like a toothpick. I understand -- from those who follow such things -- that Clark was very good and would have gone to the NFL except that he blew out his knee in his senior year at UCLA. It was while rehabbing his knee that he met his future wife, another college athlete of some renown, a basketball player for the University of Tennessee. She teaches high school history now. She read two of my books. She said.

And she said "they were... different, somehow, when they got back. I couldn't really put my finger on it. More relaxed. A little... gentler, in a way that only someone who knew them really well would notice. Marvin had lost weight, something I could never get him to do at home. Keith was reading The Mapmaker's Dream. I'd never seen him read anything more philosophical than the technical specs for composite compound before that."

Haywood was 32. They all thought he was in his 20s.

Close enough.

He worked with his shirt off on some of those hot summer days and I relate this not to add a homoerotic air to the whole tale but to point out that none of his coworkers recall there being a scar from when he was shot.