What follows is pure fiction. It never happened. There are composite characters and recreated conversations and a completely revisionist timeline. In no way is any of the following biographical. The thing with Clarke? I don't remember when it happened, but I doubt it was the night after Preacher was with the budding sociologist. I don't remember if the Pancake Girl night was the same night as Clarke, either, I just mention it here to make myself sound cooler.
The goal is not historical accuracy; it is to point to some non-literal truth. I want to transmit a better understanding of what that summer was like. Better than a strict adherence to fact would allow. I have learned, after writing three biographies and utterly failing a fourth, that facts sometimes obscure understanding.
So: let's say it is sometime in July... Preacher is dancing with someone at Sea Monkeys while I sit at the bar and nurse a beer. The girl he's with is blonde, lithe, cute, and on the beach earlier that day had been able to at least pretend to understand what Preacher was saying about Emile Durkheim. Hence the invite to meet up with us later in the evening - I will say this about Preacher, if forced to choose, he preferred smart to pretty (but usually went for both). At any rate Blondie shows up with a friend - to affirm her judgment that Preacher is worth the effort, and to provide a handy means of escape if he proves to be a big jerk. But Preacher proves otherwise, on that night at least, and so Friend of Blondie and Friend of Preacher (me) end up sitting next to one another at the bar, watching them prepare to mate like some sort of collegiate edition of Wild Kingdom. With me as Marlon Perkins.
FOB tries to talk. "How old is Preacher?" she offers. I get that a lot. I might as well have "19-year-old dumbass" tattooed on my forehead. Preacher... everyone thinks he's older.
"Forty-six," I say. She laughs. I should have said 36, I realize - not so old that she would have dismissed it out of hand, but still old enough to be creepy to her 22-year-old friend.
"Where do you guys live?" she tries again.
"Under the boardwalk," I say. "It sucks when it rains but the price is right."
She laughs again. A little more forced. "Look," she says, "we can sit here and watch them score in silence, or we can try to enjoy ourselves."
I mull this over. Preacher, athletic and graceful and a music lover, did not really enjoy dancing; he told me this earlier in the evening. He danced, he told me, because otherwise all of his pickup lines involved Emile Durkheim and really, how far was that going to get him? Me, I didn't mind dancing. I was used to looking like an idiot. So why not ask her to dance?
No reason. I don't ask her anyway. We sit in silence for another song. Another guy walks up and asks her to dance. She leaves.
I have another beer. I shoot the breeze with Fischer between customers. I can nurse two beers all night. I am blissfully unaware of my future involvement with alcohol. Around eleven Preacher and the girl leave. His arm is around her. She's got a hand in one of his back pockets. He tosses me the keys to the Jeep on the way out the door - Blondie's condo is just a couple blocks away.
I miss the keys he tosses to me and they hit me in the chest.
When I finish the beer I decide to go to Skeeve's. Skeeve is in his early thirties and has a doctorate in mathematics. He is an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University. During the summer months he sponsors a poker game in the Ocean City cottage he inherited from his parents. The game runs from Memorial Day to Labor Day. During that summer I went by Skeeve's house at two in the morning and six in the evening and at twelve noon. I picked up his trash at eight a.m. and I showed up at midnight so loaded I couldn't see my cards. The game was always in session. Skeeve himself sat out from time to time, but the game itself never stopped.
It is a medium night for Skeeve's. Sometimes the only people in the house are a few card players, and other times there is a thumping, raging party going on. But on this fake composite night it's in between; there are five sitting at the card table and Skeeve is standing there waiting for someone to cash out so he can get back in and there are maybe five or six people hanging out, passing a bong around and listening to Depeche Mode.
In a way I wish Preacher was there because I am a better poker player than he is. It's one of the areas in which I can best him regularly - self-pity, chain-smoking, and poker. But a couple of seats open up and I quickly forget about Preacher and Blondie. I do OK - play for two hours, net about twenty dollars. I head home just after midnight.
The alarm goes off at 4:30. I don't even give myself the luxury of whining about it. Just get up on autopilot, make a cup of instant, and toss a laundry bag into the Jeep. I drive down to the truck depot on the south edge of town and wait for a few minutes, listening to whatever crap the Top Forty station is playing. (July of 1986 - "Higher Love" by Steve Winwood, probably, "Papa Don't Preach" by Madonna, maybe Bananarama's version of "Venus") Preacher comes into view, sauntering down the deserted, dimly lit street as if he hasn't a care in the world.
I suppose he doesn't.
"Well?" I say to him as we go to our lockers and pull on the coveralls.
"Well, what?" he says, innocently. I can't even get a vicarious thrill from him, because he rarely kisses and tells.
We are dressed and waiting when Merv shows up in the truck. "Let's go, faggots," he says.
"Good morning, Merv," Preacher says cheerily.
"He's in a good mood today," I note as the truck pulls away.
We don't talk much while we're working. The labor is hard and we work very fast. Every now and then Merv flips a dumpster into the truck and we sweep up what falls while the truck goes through the laborious process of picking up, inverting, and then replacing the heavy bins. One of the first ones we lift reveals a guy about our age passed out behind it. His friends have thoughtfully written "cocksucker" on his face with magic marker. Preacher helps him to his feet and he staggers away.
By this time there is nothing we can see, touch, or smell which will affect us in the slightest. I don't know this yet, but it will serve me in good stead. (Skip ahead a decade. My wife and I had been dating a little while she got sick at a cocktail party and vomited all over me as I walked her to the door. She thought that my nonchalance was born out of an overwhelming concern for her well-being.)
"You go to Skeeve's?" Preacher says at one point. I nod. "Clean them out?"
"I did OK," I respond.
Merv takes the truck out to the county landfill. We walk to the laundry. I read the paper and hand Preacher each section as I finish it. He mostly chit-chats with the other patrons. They are almost all summer workers like us. They almost all know him by name.
Preacher drives on the way home. He puts in a tape - Talking Heads, maybe, or the Dry Branch Fire Squad. I would never admit to him that I have actually come to sort of like the Dry Branch Fire Squad.
When we get back Fischer is just waking.
"He make it home last night?" he asks me while Preacher showers.
I just give him a look.
"Right."
When we've both showered and changed we go out to the beach. We are tired. Preacher says to me "when I'm at somebody else's place I don't sleep at all; otherwise I won't get to work on time."
"So bring them back to our place where you can set the alarm."
He shrugs.
(Here is something I understand now that I didn't understand then. We were nineteen years old. Thirty was ancient to us. But Preacher, in his quest for pretty women who understood at least some of his allusions to Cicero, Beat poets, and the Krebs Cycle, perforce had to expand his age range upwards. Blondie, only a couple of years our senior, was perfectly comfortable hanging out with a college sophomore. Well, freshman-and-a-half.
(But now I understand the 32-year-old divorcee who allowed herself to become enamored of the idea of 180 pounds of well-built, Donne-spouting, green-eyed, 19-year-old between her legs. Sure, it was a nice vacation memory... but then there was waking up in his house and gathering the clothing and sheepishly acknowledging the other 19-year-olds hanging around having Rice Krispies and beer. As young as you'd felt the night before, you would feel ten times older on the way out the door... and while Haywood, himself blinded by the narcissism of youth, would not have known why some of these women seemed uncomfortable in our house, he was sensitive enough to realize that they were and want to avoid it.
(Preacher only wanted to be a memory to these women... but he wanted to be a uniformly pleasant one.)
We pad barefoot down the boardwalk looking for food. The t-shirt salesclerks and umbrella rental operators and even the tram drivers say hi to him as we go by. More than a few of them say hi to me, too. The brunette who works the bicycle rental shop at 38th street - the one who's had a thing for Preacher since our second day there - runs outside to tell us about a party on Virginia Avenue that night. At Sea Monkeys one of the waitresses leans over the deck railing to tell us the same thing.
At the pizza stand Preacher chats up a girl. He asks he where she's from and she tells him Storm Lake, Iowa. Preacher talks to her about living in the Midwest. He tells her after living all over the nation he's decided the federal government should create a Marshall Plan for Midwestern pizza; I don't know what happens to tomato sauce between the Appalachians and the Rockies, he says, but it's something Ed Meese should be looking into. The girl looks at him blankly, then giggles and does a hair flip.
Oh, too bad, I think to myself. Just a second or two too late with the giggle. A perfectly good flirtatious hair flip, gone to waste. He doesn't tell her about the party on Virginia.
(I should point out that he wouldn't care if she didn't find it funny. It was that she didn't know what the Marshall Plan was, nor did she recognize the name of the Attorney General. Me, I was staring at her tits; I wouldn't have cared if she knew what year it was.)
We eat and drive back to the house. Monica Williams shows up. I sit in the back yard and read something and smoke. She has a wet T-shirt competition that night. Preacher tells her about the party on Virginia. She's already heard. She asks him who's self-esteem he helped lower last night. He laughs. "She was a sociologist," I say helpfully. Yeah, and I'm an athlete, she responds. Preacher paints her toenails. That freaky kinetic sense of his - he'd have been a world-class pedicurist.
Monica tells him his aversion to commitment would be sad if it wasn't so cliched.
He says "I'm not commitment-averse, I just don't want a girlfriend."
It's my turn to laugh.
"I'm the closest thing to a girlfriend you have, and that's only because I have no interest in sleeping with you. Nick, is he this way all the time? Or just a summer thing."
"All the time," I say, not looking up from my book. "Except he's not a dyke tyke at school."
Monica snorts Pepsi out her nose at this, and Preacher has to lift up the brush until he stops laughing.
"Seriously," she says, "what did she do to you to?"
"Who," Preacher says.
"Oh, come on," she says. "Somebody -- high school, I'm guessing -- stomped on your heart, and you're punishing the rest of the gender with your relentless pursuit of the one-night-stand, right?"
"Nope," Preacher says. "I had a girlfriend in high school. It went well. We only broke up because we went to opposite sides of the continent for college. It was amicable."
"Well, something sure messed you up, because you have a problem with women, buddy," she says. He blows on her toes.
"It's not women," I interject. "His whole life is dedicated to keeping his options open. I mean he went to a college where there are no majors."
"So did you, asshole," he says, smiling. "Nor do you have a girlfriend."
"Yeah, but that's because I have NO good options," I say. "You have the opposite problem. You have too many options."
"I'd fuck Nick before I'd fuck you," Monica says to Preacher. "Nick would be properly grateful."
"Nick would be far more worthy of that largesse than I," he says. "Why don't you? It would do you both good."
"Nick deserves someone who would appreciate him more than I could," she responds. "Although as a lesbian, I would appreciate the fact that it probably wouldn't take very long with Nick."
"I'm sitting right here," I remind them.
She leaves after her toes dry. I take a nap. Preacher plays miniature golf. When it's getting dark we catch the bus downtown and eat cheeseburgers. Then we go over to the big party. There's already a crowd. I talk to a waitress from the pancake house near our place. Preacher talks to a couple of people who have the night off from Sea Monkeys. With them is a rather frail-looking girl named Melanie Pulaski.
Here is a cautionary tale about enjoying the resort life too much: a couple of summers ago Melanie came down to work at the beach for the summer and never left. She ended up living in a house trailer on the other side of the bridge with this real asshole named Johnny Clarke. Clarke sold marijuana and beat on Melanie. Melanie waited tables and smoked Johnny's marijuana. Both of them couldn't figure out what the fuck happened - one minute they were young and gorgeous and loving life, and the next minute they were living in a shithole trying not to kill each other.
Anyhow Melanie had finally gotten the courage to leave Clarke and while there had been a scene when Johnny showed up at the bar to confront her, her friends had persuaded her that it was time to get on with her life - after all, Mel, you're almost 24, and you've been sitting at home for two weeks now, get out there, girl!
So the party is humming along fine and I am actually making a little progress with Pancake Girl when there is a commotion. Seems that Johnny has arrived, pushed Melanie, screaming, cursing, tears, Melanie is locked in the bedroom. Someone wants to call the cops. Someone else suggests "banking" Johnny.
Preacher intervenes. He hands Johnny a beer (Johnny is already pretty loaded) and they disappear into the backyard. I have seen this before. I suggest that we leave them be. They stand out there talking for awhile.
Remember, Preacher says, in that easy, soothing voice, remember when you were a kid and you imagined what it was going to be like when you were grown up? Remember that? You never imagined yourself showing up at a party furious with some girl who broke your heart. There were going to be parties and pretty girls but you never visualized it being bad. If you thought about where you were going to live it was going to be cool. And the rent was never going to be a problem.
I was going to be a carpenter, Johnny told him. My cousin runs this place out in Anaheim. That's in California. He builds houses. Always said I had a job with him out there.
Preacher drapes his arm over the other man's shoulder and then walk around the backyard talking like this. Then Preacher steers him to the door, gives him twenty bucks for gas and says:
"Remember - don't stop. Don't look back. It's all quicksand, man. Run like a motherfucker. Don't stop until you're in California with a hammer in your hand."
"Absolutely, brother," Johnny says, and gets behind the wheel and drives off.
"Was he in any shape to drive?" I ask.
"Beats any of the alternatives," Preacher answers.
I relate this anecdote in my composite day-in-the-life because, in fact, Johnny Clarke did drive two days straight to Anaheim, get a job with his cousin's construction company, learn to be a master carpenter, marry a pretty local girl, have two kids, and live a comfortable, happy, productive middle-class life. His interview tape is short. He considers himself a Worshipper. He said Preacher changed his life before Preacher himself "ever thought of any of that shit." I asked him how much of what Preacher said in the backyard was in Notes on Worship. "None of it," he said, after thinking about it. "They're two completely different things." Note to posterity: yes, I know that this backyard conversation seems important to those of you anxious to find the roots of Preacher's philosophy. Sorry. He was just good at calming people down. There was no system to what he was saying to Johnny Clarke. Preacher probably didn't believe half of what came out of his own mouth that night. It was just expedient to use his charm to bounce a drunk.
Monica shows up late. She won $100 in the wet t-shirt contest and necked with a barmaid afterwards. So a good night for her.
I make out with Pancake Girl, get to second base, pass out (exhaustion, not drink), and am awakened just before five by Preacher. We're alone in the house except for an obese girl swimming naked in the pool. Preacher and I walk to the depot and get ready for the day.
Monday, January 31, 2005
Sunday, January 30, 2005
Part Ten
I’ve been trying to come up with an apt analogy for having Haywood as a roommate.
Imagine that you are taking a sculpture class. You really, really want to be a sculptor. You sit in your room night after night for an entire semester working on your sculpture project. You work and slave and agonize. Your roommate is there behind you every step of the way, offering support, encouragement, positive feedback, constructive criticism. After pouring your heart and soul into the work for the semester, you finally finish something you’re proud of. And your roommate is filled with praise for your great accomplishment. His support is sincere, heartfelt, and enthusiastic. So you carry your sculpture to the studio to submit for the class. And there sitting off to one side of the room is a full-sized marble figure that makes Michelangelo’s David look like something your kid made out of Play-Doh. It’s your roommate's. He knocked it off in twenty minutes, back in the beginning of the semester.
That’s what it was like being Haywood’s roommate. And the thing is he didn’t even realize it. He was quite guileless. There was nothing forced or artificial about his support. It truly never occurred to him to compare himself to anyone else, or vice versa. He liked you on your own terms.
It could be incredibly irritating.
So we made it into Ocean City just a day after the semester ended. We needed money – at least I did – because we had, with one other guy, made arrangements to rent a house and live off-campus the next academic year. The problem with most resort jobs, though, is that they’re break-even propositions. You bust your ass waiting tables or selling T-shirts for a pittance, and every dime goes into overpriced resort housing expenses. But Preacher swore he’d found a way to work there all summer and have a lot of money in the bank at the end of the season. He kept repeating: it’s the best job in Ocean City.
But he wouldn’t tell me what it was. You’ll say no instinctively, he said, and I’m trying to save you from your own worst instincts. But it pays well, the hours are great, and you’ll be able to spend every day hanging on the beach.
He did tell me how he solved the cost-of-living problem. It was the way he solved most problems, actually: he knew a guy. (I’m the wop from Jersey. But he was always the one who knew a guy.) Actually, I sort of knew the guy too. His name was Mark Fischer. Some of what’s in this little reminiscence I got from interviewing him for the archive.
Fischer’s parents were silent partners in what was then one of the hottest spots on the boardwalk, a bar and restaurant called Sea Monkeys. They had a house on 89th Street and the bay. Preacher was friends with Fischer (he was a senior) and Fischer was going to be working at the bar all summer before heading to Wharton in the fall and he invited Preacher (and, by extension, me) to live at this house all summer in return for a third of the groceries and utilities.
Fischer was the sort of person – we all know somebody like this – whose first name never seemed to be used. He was not “Mark.” He was always “Fischer.” When I tried to track him down to do these interviews I had to look at an alumni directory to remember his first name.
Over the course of three months (and two weeks) it cost me about $250 in food and electricity. Like I said, standing next to Preacher tended to bring good luck in its own right.
But the job…he was right, I would have said no. And, damn it, he was right again: it was the best job in Ocean City.
From October through April, Ocean City is a tiny Eastern Shore town of maybe 10,000. Maybe. But starting in mid-May and lasting until mid-September the population swells to a few hundred thousand. Crammed into hotels and condos strung along about two miles of beach. On a barrier island, meaning it’s all one good hurricane away from being a shipping hazard. This creates an unusual strain on the infrastructure… which required some unusual solutions.
After we dropped out stuff at Fischer’s house Preacher herded me back into the Jeep and drove me downtown. It was the Wednesday before Memorial Day weekend and the city was already starting to fill up. He took me to the Town Hall (which was not, then, where it is now) and into the basement of Town Hall and past some filing cabinets and storerooms and knocked on an unmarked door and tried his best to be charming to a secretary who was not at all impressed by his twinkling eyes and easy grin.
But eventually she deigned to tell her boss that we were there. Her boss was a man named Peter Washington and since she was a withered old Eastern Shore battle-axe and her boss was an ebullient black guy from Philadelphia I’m not sure how much of her shitty attitude was her regular personality and how much was native racism. The Eastern Shore, at least in the ‘80s, served as a reminder that Maryland was indeed part of the South.
At any rate, Peter greeted Preacher like his long-lost son, shook his hand, shook mine, told Preacher how glad he was there, and gave us some papers to sign.
That’s how I found out I was going to be a garbage man.
And, goddamn it, Preacher was right. It was the best job in Ocean City.
Look, the waiters worked their asses off for tips, and unless you got into one of the few high-end restaurants, the tips weren’t much. Plus you worked every night, just about. The lifeguards? So many people wanted the job that the tryouts were modeled after Navy SEAL tests just to winnow the applicants down to manageable numbers. The work was long, hot, and boring. The pay was shit. The t-shirt stands and other retail jobs were even worse – long hours, day AND night, for minimum wage.
But garbage man…
You got paid per route. Paid well, I should add, at least for a college kid – I couldn’t support a family on $120 a day, but – at least in 1986 dollars – it was a great summer job. We worked six days a week, but here was the best part: when you finished your route, you were done. We got started between five and five thirty in the morning and after the first couple of weeks we could get the day’s route finished by ten. Sometimes earlier. Back to the house, wash up, and then a nap on the beach… sometimes we just stayed out until three, slept for two hours in the parking lot (yes, two guys can sleep in a Jeep CJ) and went to work.
We were assigned to a driver named Merv Hodges, who was a local and who despised us and every other “tourist.” Notwithstanding the fact that virtually everything in his life was dependent upon our existence – Worcester County, Maryland, was essentially devoid of meaningful economic activity outside of the beach resort. Merv much preferred the winter, when the DPW staff was one-third the size and the trashcans not nearly so full.
It must be said that by the end of June, when we had proven to him that we would always be on time, busting our asses, and getting him to the neighborhood bar by one, he lightened up a little. Peacher’s nickname was changed from “dickhead” to “faggot,” and I was upgraded from “dumbfuck” to “other faggot.” At least we considered them upgrades. I think Hodges did, too.
As had been the case in Annapolis, Preacher was soon one of those people who always knew where the good party was. Except in Ocean City there was a good party every night.
Early on Preacher took a second job. An unofficial one. A sort of… Chamber of Commerce job. Apparently, some women considered getting schtupped by a tanned, green-eyed beachgod to be as integral to their OC trip as a box of saltwater taffy and caramel popcorn. And so Preacher took it upon himself to make sure that during the next winter some nursing assistant or paralegal or hairdresser would think about what to do for her vacation, and recall the previous summer, and get a faraway look in her eyes, and decide: I’m going back to Ocean City.
I don’t want to oversell this. He spent most nights as alone as me. But we didn’t have routes on Sundays which meant he rarely spent Saturday nights in an empty bed. And he was certainly not above disappearing into someone’s condo for a few hours mid-day.
He mostly avoided the locals and other seasonal workers that he would run into again and again. He didn’t ENTIRELY avoid them. But he was emphatically not looking for a girlfriend and he was too nice a guy to, as Fischer so poetically put it, “hump ‘em and dump ‘em.”
Outside of me and Fischer Preacher had one other close friend that summer, and her name was Monica Williams. And to understand Monica you need to understand another slightly unusual Ocean City summer job.
Every bar in town sponsored some variation of the weekly Wet T-shirt/Bikini/Best-Body-On-The-Beach competition. Because most tourists are only in town for a week or two, at the most, and because even the most sexist and depraved tourist rarely attends more than one or two of these events, most people don’t realize that the “contestants” in these lecherous farandoles are mostly the same women each night.
Monica was one of them. She was a year-round resident and worked as a teacher’s assistant in a Snow Hill kindergarten during the cold months (kindergarteners are utterly unconcerned with my rack, she explained) and sometime in mid-May she would drop a significant amount of money on a bathing suit. During the summer months she would strut around various bars and clubs in Ocean City and earn more in three months of exhibitionism than she earned in nine months of child care.
I could not find her to interview her. Sorry. She quit the booby circuit (her expression) a few years later at the ripe old age of 26. The next year she got fired because the school board found out she was a lesbian. I only learned that by looking at newspaper archives.
She used to call Preacher "the most affable misogynist I've ever met." To her credit, by the end of the summer, Preacher had started to understand why that was true.
Imagine that you are taking a sculpture class. You really, really want to be a sculptor. You sit in your room night after night for an entire semester working on your sculpture project. You work and slave and agonize. Your roommate is there behind you every step of the way, offering support, encouragement, positive feedback, constructive criticism. After pouring your heart and soul into the work for the semester, you finally finish something you’re proud of. And your roommate is filled with praise for your great accomplishment. His support is sincere, heartfelt, and enthusiastic. So you carry your sculpture to the studio to submit for the class. And there sitting off to one side of the room is a full-sized marble figure that makes Michelangelo’s David look like something your kid made out of Play-Doh. It’s your roommate's. He knocked it off in twenty minutes, back in the beginning of the semester.
That’s what it was like being Haywood’s roommate. And the thing is he didn’t even realize it. He was quite guileless. There was nothing forced or artificial about his support. It truly never occurred to him to compare himself to anyone else, or vice versa. He liked you on your own terms.
It could be incredibly irritating.
So we made it into Ocean City just a day after the semester ended. We needed money – at least I did – because we had, with one other guy, made arrangements to rent a house and live off-campus the next academic year. The problem with most resort jobs, though, is that they’re break-even propositions. You bust your ass waiting tables or selling T-shirts for a pittance, and every dime goes into overpriced resort housing expenses. But Preacher swore he’d found a way to work there all summer and have a lot of money in the bank at the end of the season. He kept repeating: it’s the best job in Ocean City.
But he wouldn’t tell me what it was. You’ll say no instinctively, he said, and I’m trying to save you from your own worst instincts. But it pays well, the hours are great, and you’ll be able to spend every day hanging on the beach.
He did tell me how he solved the cost-of-living problem. It was the way he solved most problems, actually: he knew a guy. (I’m the wop from Jersey. But he was always the one who knew a guy.) Actually, I sort of knew the guy too. His name was Mark Fischer. Some of what’s in this little reminiscence I got from interviewing him for the archive.
Fischer’s parents were silent partners in what was then one of the hottest spots on the boardwalk, a bar and restaurant called Sea Monkeys. They had a house on 89th Street and the bay. Preacher was friends with Fischer (he was a senior) and Fischer was going to be working at the bar all summer before heading to Wharton in the fall and he invited Preacher (and, by extension, me) to live at this house all summer in return for a third of the groceries and utilities.
Fischer was the sort of person – we all know somebody like this – whose first name never seemed to be used. He was not “Mark.” He was always “Fischer.” When I tried to track him down to do these interviews I had to look at an alumni directory to remember his first name.
Over the course of three months (and two weeks) it cost me about $250 in food and electricity. Like I said, standing next to Preacher tended to bring good luck in its own right.
But the job…he was right, I would have said no. And, damn it, he was right again: it was the best job in Ocean City.
From October through April, Ocean City is a tiny Eastern Shore town of maybe 10,000. Maybe. But starting in mid-May and lasting until mid-September the population swells to a few hundred thousand. Crammed into hotels and condos strung along about two miles of beach. On a barrier island, meaning it’s all one good hurricane away from being a shipping hazard. This creates an unusual strain on the infrastructure… which required some unusual solutions.
After we dropped out stuff at Fischer’s house Preacher herded me back into the Jeep and drove me downtown. It was the Wednesday before Memorial Day weekend and the city was already starting to fill up. He took me to the Town Hall (which was not, then, where it is now) and into the basement of Town Hall and past some filing cabinets and storerooms and knocked on an unmarked door and tried his best to be charming to a secretary who was not at all impressed by his twinkling eyes and easy grin.
But eventually she deigned to tell her boss that we were there. Her boss was a man named Peter Washington and since she was a withered old Eastern Shore battle-axe and her boss was an ebullient black guy from Philadelphia I’m not sure how much of her shitty attitude was her regular personality and how much was native racism. The Eastern Shore, at least in the ‘80s, served as a reminder that Maryland was indeed part of the South.
At any rate, Peter greeted Preacher like his long-lost son, shook his hand, shook mine, told Preacher how glad he was there, and gave us some papers to sign.
That’s how I found out I was going to be a garbage man.
And, goddamn it, Preacher was right. It was the best job in Ocean City.
Look, the waiters worked their asses off for tips, and unless you got into one of the few high-end restaurants, the tips weren’t much. Plus you worked every night, just about. The lifeguards? So many people wanted the job that the tryouts were modeled after Navy SEAL tests just to winnow the applicants down to manageable numbers. The work was long, hot, and boring. The pay was shit. The t-shirt stands and other retail jobs were even worse – long hours, day AND night, for minimum wage.
But garbage man…
You got paid per route. Paid well, I should add, at least for a college kid – I couldn’t support a family on $120 a day, but – at least in 1986 dollars – it was a great summer job. We worked six days a week, but here was the best part: when you finished your route, you were done. We got started between five and five thirty in the morning and after the first couple of weeks we could get the day’s route finished by ten. Sometimes earlier. Back to the house, wash up, and then a nap on the beach… sometimes we just stayed out until three, slept for two hours in the parking lot (yes, two guys can sleep in a Jeep CJ) and went to work.
We were assigned to a driver named Merv Hodges, who was a local and who despised us and every other “tourist.” Notwithstanding the fact that virtually everything in his life was dependent upon our existence – Worcester County, Maryland, was essentially devoid of meaningful economic activity outside of the beach resort. Merv much preferred the winter, when the DPW staff was one-third the size and the trashcans not nearly so full.
It must be said that by the end of June, when we had proven to him that we would always be on time, busting our asses, and getting him to the neighborhood bar by one, he lightened up a little. Peacher’s nickname was changed from “dickhead” to “faggot,” and I was upgraded from “dumbfuck” to “other faggot.” At least we considered them upgrades. I think Hodges did, too.
As had been the case in Annapolis, Preacher was soon one of those people who always knew where the good party was. Except in Ocean City there was a good party every night.
Early on Preacher took a second job. An unofficial one. A sort of… Chamber of Commerce job. Apparently, some women considered getting schtupped by a tanned, green-eyed beachgod to be as integral to their OC trip as a box of saltwater taffy and caramel popcorn. And so Preacher took it upon himself to make sure that during the next winter some nursing assistant or paralegal or hairdresser would think about what to do for her vacation, and recall the previous summer, and get a faraway look in her eyes, and decide: I’m going back to Ocean City.
I don’t want to oversell this. He spent most nights as alone as me. But we didn’t have routes on Sundays which meant he rarely spent Saturday nights in an empty bed. And he was certainly not above disappearing into someone’s condo for a few hours mid-day.
He mostly avoided the locals and other seasonal workers that he would run into again and again. He didn’t ENTIRELY avoid them. But he was emphatically not looking for a girlfriend and he was too nice a guy to, as Fischer so poetically put it, “hump ‘em and dump ‘em.”
Outside of me and Fischer Preacher had one other close friend that summer, and her name was Monica Williams. And to understand Monica you need to understand another slightly unusual Ocean City summer job.
Every bar in town sponsored some variation of the weekly Wet T-shirt/Bikini/Best-Body-On-The-Beach competition. Because most tourists are only in town for a week or two, at the most, and because even the most sexist and depraved tourist rarely attends more than one or two of these events, most people don’t realize that the “contestants” in these lecherous farandoles are mostly the same women each night.
Monica was one of them. She was a year-round resident and worked as a teacher’s assistant in a Snow Hill kindergarten during the cold months (kindergarteners are utterly unconcerned with my rack, she explained) and sometime in mid-May she would drop a significant amount of money on a bathing suit. During the summer months she would strut around various bars and clubs in Ocean City and earn more in three months of exhibitionism than she earned in nine months of child care.
I could not find her to interview her. Sorry. She quit the booby circuit (her expression) a few years later at the ripe old age of 26. The next year she got fired because the school board found out she was a lesbian. I only learned that by looking at newspaper archives.
She used to call Preacher "the most affable misogynist I've ever met." To her credit, by the end of the summer, Preacher had started to understand why that was true.
Friday, January 28, 2005
Part Nine
Digital recording 005675 – 05/15/04 Santa Fe, New Mexico. File with: 1985-1987. Cross-index: lovers, People, college, Seth Greene, Moira Callahan, Nicholas D’Alessio, music, Thanksgiving
[Subject]: My name is Rachel Carver – it was Rachel Walsh when I was at St. John’s.
[Interviewer]: When was the last time you had any contact with Preacher Haywood?
[Subject]: I never really thought about Preacher after I left there. I saw his name in People magazine a couple years ago. I guess I wouldn’t say that I forgot about him, either. But I never really thought about him one way or the other.
[Interviewer]: Are you a Worshipper?
[Subject]: No. [laughs.]
[Interviewer]: Did you ever read Notes on Worship?
[Subject]: No. I’m not a… I’m not at all religious. Or spiritual. Or anything like that. Well… actually, when you called and said you were going to be in Santa Fe and wanted to talk to me about Preacher, I went to the main Worship web site. Just out of curiosity. But that sort of thing really isn’t for me.
[Interviewer]: Do you recall when you first met Preacher Haywood?
[Subject]: [laughs]. Well. A few days after you, I suppose. What year did we start… 1985, I guess? The first semester of my freshman year. Yeah. 1985. September, I suppose.
[Interviewer]: What do you remember about him then?
[Subject]: I remember… I remember that you and Seth didn’t really like him all that much. Remember Seth Greene? God, I can’t believe I used to go out with him. Are you going to talk to him, too? Right, I guess you won’t talk about that. OK. Well, I remember he was too pretty to be that smart, or vice-versa. [Laughs]. I remember he had a ton of tapes. Remember that? He had like four or five milk crates overflowing with tapes at the foot of his bed. When we would come by your dorm room I would rummage around through them. He had all kinds of stuff. Country, classical, rock, jazz, you name it. I remember he had a spooky memory of his own. What did he call that? Something memoria. I remember in class he could quote long passages from memory.
I remember he… can we stop the tape for a minute? Thanks. Look, Nick, there’s something you don’t know about me from back then. I mean I guess you knew that I was there on a scholarship. That I was some scruffy kid from Seattle. I didn’t exactly blend in with those super-smart preppy girls. I hung out with people like, well, like you, and Seth. And Preacher… I always figured he was one of Them. And you and Seth had me convinced of that, too, even though he was always perfectly nice to me when we came by your room. Then…
[Interviewer]: Can I turn the recorder back on?
[Subject]: No. I want to say something to you first. Listen. I never graduated from high school. When I was fourteen I got tired of being molested by my asshole stepfather and I ran away from home and lived on the street in Seattle. Panhandling, at first, but then I was… then I was a whore. No other word for it. I made enough to keep myself fed. There is a certain breed who will pay a little extra if you’re under 16, you know? Anyhow, when I was about 16 I got knocked up. And I… I didn’t get off the bus at the abortion clinic. I kept on riding until the bus was empty and when I got off I was damn near in Tacoma. And I got off right in front of a shelter called Orion Center. I took it as a sign. I… I got clean, gave my baby boy up for adoption, got a GED. And… and look, St. John’s has all these really eccentric alumni. If you look at all the funds and foundations associated with the place, there are scholarships for all kinds of goofy shit. Including a scholarship for high school dropouts, oddly enough. You had to have certain SAT scores… when I got to St. John’s I had never, in my life, heard people discuss a book over dinner. I had never met anyone who lived a life of the mind. It was scary and exciting and it made me, for the first time, more proud of my brain then my tits. And I didn’t tell anyone about my past, and nobody asked. I was just the tough girl with the short hair and the nice rack. People actually wanted to know what I thought. Seth. Seth sat down next to me in the dining hall and started conversing with me about the Unmoved Mover. It was an unlikely aphrodisiac, but that’s how I ended up with him. So I regarded everything, everything at St. John’s as something new and alien and wonderful. And scary. Things that everybody else took for granted. So that’s where I’m coming from.
[Interviewer]: You had a baby?
[Subject]: And I’m not stupid, either. I see that the light never went off on that machine. Promise me you’ll delete this.
[Interviewer]: OK.
[Subject]: So I remember that Seth disliked Preacher and Preacher, for the most part, seemed only dimly aware of Seth’s existence, which only served to piss Seth off all the more. You know, Seth was this nice Jewish boy from Long Island who went away to college and got to act like some tough punk from New York. But he wasn’t at all. My guess is that he ended up going to law school and joining his father’s tax practice. But he thought he was this rebel intellectual. He wanted to be Rimbaud, or Jack Kerouac, or at least Lou Reed.
But about halfway through the first semester I was starting to realize that, in fact, he was a bit of an asshole. Then again I’d never had an actual boyfriend before and I wasn’t sure about whether they all turned into assholes or not. I suspected that they did. Time has not entirely proven me wrong, I might add.
I remember stopping by your dorm room to get you one night and Preacher came in from taking a shower wearing nothing but a towel and I guess Seth noticed that I was not looking at Preacher’s cassettes anymore. Seth began some tirade about how Preacher had no taste in music and I remember Preacher really got the better of him, saying how he, Preacher, had listened to whatever he liked and didn’t feel obligated to like or dislike something because of the social statement it made about him, while Seth chose music based solely on the reaction his listening would elicit in others. Which was absolutely right, and I think that might have been the moment I realized that I was like a Sonic Youth album to Seth – he was only with me because it would reinforce this image of himself that he wanted the world to have. That he was only with me because Rimbaud would have taken up with some smart but rough-edged streetwalker. Except, of course, a boy. [Laughs].
Then at Thanksgiving Seth didn’t even invite me home. I mean he knew I had no place to go. He should have at least offered one of those I’m-asking-but-please-say-no sort of invitations. But if he had shown up with his two-fisted little schiksa girlfriend it would have killed his mother. Plus when he was talking about the girl he was boffing at college I could be taller and blonder if I wasn’t actually there in the room with him.
I later learned that he never even smoked around his parents. What a pussy. What a phony, posing, pussy.
So anyhow I ended up at the Island of Misfit Toys. I went both Thanksgivings I was in Annapolis.
In retrospect I don’t know how Preacher did it. He convinced the administration to let us use the dining hall AND kitchen. They made him have a faculty chaperon and he got that visiting professor from Yugoslavia, what was his name? The mathematics guy. He thought he spoke English, but I don’t know anyone who ever understood a word he said. Anyhow, that guy was there as our chaperon and Preacher handed him a bottle of brandy and the guy was unconscious before we even served dinner. There were a bunch of us in the kitchen. Until I was married, it was the best Thanksgiving I ever had. In fact in some respects it’s still the best. Everyone was in a good mood, we were all laughing, Preacher was cooking – he was a good cook – and we had a videotape of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer we watched after dinner. Preacher and I cleaned up. He could be kind of anal retentive about cleaning up. I guess, as his roommate, you know all about that. I helped because, well, because I was warm and well-fed and happy and didn’t want to sleep alone that night. And I guess in the back of my mind I knew that the best way to indicate my unhappiness with Seth was to screw his arch-enemy. Even if Preacher didn’t realize he was Seth’s arch-enemy. Seth knew it, that was what was important.
But mostly I just found him so easy to talk to. You were his roommate. You know what that was like. People who didn't know Preacher thought he was this real extrovert because everywhere he went he ended up becoming friends with people, ended up having these long heartfelt conversations with them... but really he didn't say that much. It was the other people who started talking to him. If you never met him it's hard to describe.
So spent a long time talking and then we went back to your dorm room – I guess you were with your folks? – and he played fado music for me. I guess that was Preacher’s lasting contribution to my life, actually. I still like fado. And we started making out, and… how much biographical detail do you want? [Laughs].
[Interviewer]: As much as you can give.
[Subject]: Well, I remember he was taking his time. I appreciated that. Seth tended to fuck like I was still on the clock. I remember my shirt was on the floor and so was his and we were hot and heavy but also light and airy – we were laughing and making out at the same time -- and I made the mistake of giggling and saying, “this will kill Seth.”
And that put the brakes on everything. He stopped, and put his arms around me, and looked close into my eyes, and started talking. He told me about how great I was and that I needed someone who would worship me and that if even the tiniest part of me thought that this had anything to do with Seth then it would be all wrong. That I deserved to be wanted for me, and me only.
Despite my best efforts I couldn’t get things started up again, which was both physically and emotionally disappointing to me. But we had a good long talk that night and I told him all about my life in Seattle, the things I just told you and more things, too, and he never said a word to anyone.
He was the first guy who’d ever declined to sleep with me when given the opportunity. I couldn’t decide if I liked that or not. I’m still not sure, actually.
Anyhow I dumped Seth without a second thought when he got back from Long Island. Not because I liked Preacher more – although I did – but because Preacher had helped me understand something I’d already started to realize about myself. That I deserved better. Or at least different. I have to tell you, I’m the only one of my friends who’s never been divorced, and in part it’s because with everybody I ever dated I would ask myself if he met the sort of worthiness test Preacher laid out for me that night. So I guess in that sense Preacher has been an influence on me, even if I didn't think of him specifically. And Bob and I went to Portugal on our honeymoon -- I guess that's Preacher's fault, too, right? But I married Bob because he was the person who passed that test.
Preacher didn’t even try to pass it. He couldn't have. He would have been the first to admit this. He was meant for... something else. What exactly wasn't clear, but something big. But he and I stayed friends for the next couple of years. I left for the Santa Fe campus in my junior year and kind of lost track of him after that. Although there was a rumor all the way in Santa Fe that he was having an affair with one of the professors – was that true? Right, I guess you won’t say. Anyhow if you see him tell him I said hi. You know thinking about him, seeing that website – I might go read his book now.
[...]
[Editor’s note: Rachel Walsh is now a senior trial attorney with the New Mexico Attorney General’s office. As always, I lied about turning off/erasing/deleting recordings. This is cross-indexed with “lovers” due to my somewhat expanded definition of “lover” and due to the fact that, at least while I was in college, everybody thought he’d nailed her that Thanksgiving weekend. There are at least three other interviews wherein Haywood’s former classmates give lists of people they thought he slept with, and Rachel Walsh is mentioned on two of them.]
[Subject]: My name is Rachel Carver – it was Rachel Walsh when I was at St. John’s.
[Interviewer]: When was the last time you had any contact with Preacher Haywood?
[Subject]: I never really thought about Preacher after I left there. I saw his name in People magazine a couple years ago. I guess I wouldn’t say that I forgot about him, either. But I never really thought about him one way or the other.
[Interviewer]: Are you a Worshipper?
[Subject]: No. [laughs.]
[Interviewer]: Did you ever read Notes on Worship?
[Subject]: No. I’m not a… I’m not at all religious. Or spiritual. Or anything like that. Well… actually, when you called and said you were going to be in Santa Fe and wanted to talk to me about Preacher, I went to the main Worship web site. Just out of curiosity. But that sort of thing really isn’t for me.
[Interviewer]: Do you recall when you first met Preacher Haywood?
[Subject]: [laughs]. Well. A few days after you, I suppose. What year did we start… 1985, I guess? The first semester of my freshman year. Yeah. 1985. September, I suppose.
[Interviewer]: What do you remember about him then?
[Subject]: I remember… I remember that you and Seth didn’t really like him all that much. Remember Seth Greene? God, I can’t believe I used to go out with him. Are you going to talk to him, too? Right, I guess you won’t talk about that. OK. Well, I remember he was too pretty to be that smart, or vice-versa. [Laughs]. I remember he had a ton of tapes. Remember that? He had like four or five milk crates overflowing with tapes at the foot of his bed. When we would come by your dorm room I would rummage around through them. He had all kinds of stuff. Country, classical, rock, jazz, you name it. I remember he had a spooky memory of his own. What did he call that? Something memoria. I remember in class he could quote long passages from memory.
I remember he… can we stop the tape for a minute? Thanks. Look, Nick, there’s something you don’t know about me from back then. I mean I guess you knew that I was there on a scholarship. That I was some scruffy kid from Seattle. I didn’t exactly blend in with those super-smart preppy girls. I hung out with people like, well, like you, and Seth. And Preacher… I always figured he was one of Them. And you and Seth had me convinced of that, too, even though he was always perfectly nice to me when we came by your room. Then…
[Interviewer]: Can I turn the recorder back on?
[Subject]: No. I want to say something to you first. Listen. I never graduated from high school. When I was fourteen I got tired of being molested by my asshole stepfather and I ran away from home and lived on the street in Seattle. Panhandling, at first, but then I was… then I was a whore. No other word for it. I made enough to keep myself fed. There is a certain breed who will pay a little extra if you’re under 16, you know? Anyhow, when I was about 16 I got knocked up. And I… I didn’t get off the bus at the abortion clinic. I kept on riding until the bus was empty and when I got off I was damn near in Tacoma. And I got off right in front of a shelter called Orion Center. I took it as a sign. I… I got clean, gave my baby boy up for adoption, got a GED. And… and look, St. John’s has all these really eccentric alumni. If you look at all the funds and foundations associated with the place, there are scholarships for all kinds of goofy shit. Including a scholarship for high school dropouts, oddly enough. You had to have certain SAT scores… when I got to St. John’s I had never, in my life, heard people discuss a book over dinner. I had never met anyone who lived a life of the mind. It was scary and exciting and it made me, for the first time, more proud of my brain then my tits. And I didn’t tell anyone about my past, and nobody asked. I was just the tough girl with the short hair and the nice rack. People actually wanted to know what I thought. Seth. Seth sat down next to me in the dining hall and started conversing with me about the Unmoved Mover. It was an unlikely aphrodisiac, but that’s how I ended up with him. So I regarded everything, everything at St. John’s as something new and alien and wonderful. And scary. Things that everybody else took for granted. So that’s where I’m coming from.
[Interviewer]: You had a baby?
[Subject]: And I’m not stupid, either. I see that the light never went off on that machine. Promise me you’ll delete this.
[Interviewer]: OK.
[Subject]: So I remember that Seth disliked Preacher and Preacher, for the most part, seemed only dimly aware of Seth’s existence, which only served to piss Seth off all the more. You know, Seth was this nice Jewish boy from Long Island who went away to college and got to act like some tough punk from New York. But he wasn’t at all. My guess is that he ended up going to law school and joining his father’s tax practice. But he thought he was this rebel intellectual. He wanted to be Rimbaud, or Jack Kerouac, or at least Lou Reed.
But about halfway through the first semester I was starting to realize that, in fact, he was a bit of an asshole. Then again I’d never had an actual boyfriend before and I wasn’t sure about whether they all turned into assholes or not. I suspected that they did. Time has not entirely proven me wrong, I might add.
I remember stopping by your dorm room to get you one night and Preacher came in from taking a shower wearing nothing but a towel and I guess Seth noticed that I was not looking at Preacher’s cassettes anymore. Seth began some tirade about how Preacher had no taste in music and I remember Preacher really got the better of him, saying how he, Preacher, had listened to whatever he liked and didn’t feel obligated to like or dislike something because of the social statement it made about him, while Seth chose music based solely on the reaction his listening would elicit in others. Which was absolutely right, and I think that might have been the moment I realized that I was like a Sonic Youth album to Seth – he was only with me because it would reinforce this image of himself that he wanted the world to have. That he was only with me because Rimbaud would have taken up with some smart but rough-edged streetwalker. Except, of course, a boy. [Laughs].
Then at Thanksgiving Seth didn’t even invite me home. I mean he knew I had no place to go. He should have at least offered one of those I’m-asking-but-please-say-no sort of invitations. But if he had shown up with his two-fisted little schiksa girlfriend it would have killed his mother. Plus when he was talking about the girl he was boffing at college I could be taller and blonder if I wasn’t actually there in the room with him.
I later learned that he never even smoked around his parents. What a pussy. What a phony, posing, pussy.
So anyhow I ended up at the Island of Misfit Toys. I went both Thanksgivings I was in Annapolis.
In retrospect I don’t know how Preacher did it. He convinced the administration to let us use the dining hall AND kitchen. They made him have a faculty chaperon and he got that visiting professor from Yugoslavia, what was his name? The mathematics guy. He thought he spoke English, but I don’t know anyone who ever understood a word he said. Anyhow, that guy was there as our chaperon and Preacher handed him a bottle of brandy and the guy was unconscious before we even served dinner. There were a bunch of us in the kitchen. Until I was married, it was the best Thanksgiving I ever had. In fact in some respects it’s still the best. Everyone was in a good mood, we were all laughing, Preacher was cooking – he was a good cook – and we had a videotape of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer we watched after dinner. Preacher and I cleaned up. He could be kind of anal retentive about cleaning up. I guess, as his roommate, you know all about that. I helped because, well, because I was warm and well-fed and happy and didn’t want to sleep alone that night. And I guess in the back of my mind I knew that the best way to indicate my unhappiness with Seth was to screw his arch-enemy. Even if Preacher didn’t realize he was Seth’s arch-enemy. Seth knew it, that was what was important.
But mostly I just found him so easy to talk to. You were his roommate. You know what that was like. People who didn't know Preacher thought he was this real extrovert because everywhere he went he ended up becoming friends with people, ended up having these long heartfelt conversations with them... but really he didn't say that much. It was the other people who started talking to him. If you never met him it's hard to describe.
So spent a long time talking and then we went back to your dorm room – I guess you were with your folks? – and he played fado music for me. I guess that was Preacher’s lasting contribution to my life, actually. I still like fado. And we started making out, and… how much biographical detail do you want? [Laughs].
[Interviewer]: As much as you can give.
[Subject]: Well, I remember he was taking his time. I appreciated that. Seth tended to fuck like I was still on the clock. I remember my shirt was on the floor and so was his and we were hot and heavy but also light and airy – we were laughing and making out at the same time -- and I made the mistake of giggling and saying, “this will kill Seth.”
And that put the brakes on everything. He stopped, and put his arms around me, and looked close into my eyes, and started talking. He told me about how great I was and that I needed someone who would worship me and that if even the tiniest part of me thought that this had anything to do with Seth then it would be all wrong. That I deserved to be wanted for me, and me only.
Despite my best efforts I couldn’t get things started up again, which was both physically and emotionally disappointing to me. But we had a good long talk that night and I told him all about my life in Seattle, the things I just told you and more things, too, and he never said a word to anyone.
He was the first guy who’d ever declined to sleep with me when given the opportunity. I couldn’t decide if I liked that or not. I’m still not sure, actually.
Anyhow I dumped Seth without a second thought when he got back from Long Island. Not because I liked Preacher more – although I did – but because Preacher had helped me understand something I’d already started to realize about myself. That I deserved better. Or at least different. I have to tell you, I’m the only one of my friends who’s never been divorced, and in part it’s because with everybody I ever dated I would ask myself if he met the sort of worthiness test Preacher laid out for me that night. So I guess in that sense Preacher has been an influence on me, even if I didn't think of him specifically. And Bob and I went to Portugal on our honeymoon -- I guess that's Preacher's fault, too, right? But I married Bob because he was the person who passed that test.
Preacher didn’t even try to pass it. He couldn't have. He would have been the first to admit this. He was meant for... something else. What exactly wasn't clear, but something big. But he and I stayed friends for the next couple of years. I left for the Santa Fe campus in my junior year and kind of lost track of him after that. Although there was a rumor all the way in Santa Fe that he was having an affair with one of the professors – was that true? Right, I guess you won’t say. Anyhow if you see him tell him I said hi. You know thinking about him, seeing that website – I might go read his book now.
[...]
[Editor’s note: Rachel Walsh is now a senior trial attorney with the New Mexico Attorney General’s office. As always, I lied about turning off/erasing/deleting recordings. This is cross-indexed with “lovers” due to my somewhat expanded definition of “lover” and due to the fact that, at least while I was in college, everybody thought he’d nailed her that Thanksgiving weekend. There are at least three other interviews wherein Haywood’s former classmates give lists of people they thought he slept with, and Rachel Walsh is mentioned on two of them.]
Thursday, January 27, 2005
Part Eight
I stuck in that transcribed bit of Haywoodism because it occurred to me that there should be some context to all this. Knowing a little something about Worship might help bring a little relevance to some of the other crap I’m putting up here.
Anyhow Preacher and I ended up in the same dorm room and I took some small satisfaction in the fact that I wasn’t the only person who found him incredibly annoying. Which isn’t to say he was ostracized (which would have delighted me -- I freely admit to an unhealthy amount of schadenfreund where Preacher is concerned.) But he was certainly not the Big Man On Campus I imagined (correctly, mostly) he was in high school.
The fact of the matter was, though, that he was not, as I’d hoped, an idiot, or a jerk. He was in fact pretty intelligent, and a pretty nice guy. And somewhere during that first semester – hard to say when – I started to realize that those of us who disliked him for being one of the cool kids were really behaving just like the people who’d picked on us for being a dorks.
He even got two of the other freshmen on our floor to try to practice “ars memoria” after a few scintillating displays of it in one of our tutorials. Anybody who can remember the names of all the guests at the Symposium AND the order in which they spoke…
That first semester I also found out about two things he rarely discussed: first, about his parents being dead, and second, about his freakish muscle-memory.
He dismissed the muscle-memory as a parlor trick, but to this day I’ve never even read about it in any other person. It was a sort of kinetic total recall. He could physically remember and repeat any kind of movement. Ever try to measure something by holding two fingers apart? Imagine if, six months later, you could precisely recreate that same measurement. It’s what made him such a good athlete, I suppose – a perfect swing every time.
(Preacher told me that his grandmother thought Grandpa Frechette had the same uncanny ability. Thus the marginal relevance of feats as a pilot.)
Preacher almost never mentioned this strange physical gift. At least not while I knew him. When I talked to some of his former lovers I heard about it, of course.
Midway through the semester he and I were actually friendly. He always knew where there was some off-campus party, and he would drag me along, and I would have a good time despite myself. And during the day I would sit with my friends in the dining hall and sometimes they would make fun of my roommate (they called him the Ken Doll) and after awhile I stopped laughing with them and eventually I was sitting with Preacher and his friends instead.
He was quiet and self-deprecating and could be funny in a dry, gentle way. Some might feel that I think it’s funny to be sarcastic and insensitive to others. They would be correct. But I could appreciate his slightly softer, subtler approach.
When I went home for Thanksgiving my mother asked about my roommate and when I told her that his parents were dead and he didn’t have anyplace to go on Thanksgiving she berated me soundly for not bringing him home and insisted that he return with me for Christmas. And I was not repulsed by the idea.
That Thanksgiving he started what he called the Island of Misfit Toys – a Thanksgiving dinner he threw for the students who, for various reasons, had no place else to go on Thanksgiving. It should have been rather pathetic and sad but apparently a good time was always had by all. He sponsored it all four years he was at St. John’s and I understand that the tradition continues today.
When he came home from Christmas Jen developed a huge and quite obvious crush on him. It was nice to be home picking on my little sister again. Of course my parents loved him. My asshole brother mostly ignored him, which was significantly better than the treatment DJ had meted out to my few high school friends. (I’ll note that Preacher rarely was inclined to speak badly of anyone… and yet he agreed that my brother was an asshole. Lest anyone should think I am being unduly hard on the asshole.)
Preacher spent three of those four Christmases with us. Of course he always gave the most thoughtful gifts. He was nothing if not predictable that way.
That Spring he told me that he had lined up great summer jobs for us in Ocean City, Maryland. He refused to tell me what they were. Just that they were great. By this time I had learned that Preacher had a gold horseshoe up his ass and that just by standing next to him one tended to enjoy the fruits of his good luck. Plus the alternative was going back to Jersey and unstopping the toilets of suburban Philadelphia with my dad.
(I am actually a pretty good journeyman plumber. Don’t tell anyone. It might ruin my image as an elitist intellectual dickweed.)
I realize I’m leaving out a lot of details about Preacher’s freshman year, but in the end, who the hell cares? It’s in the archive. He was smart and good-looking and popular. He was the only guy I knew then who actually had sex LESS frequently than he could have. His feeling was that St. John’s was a pretty small place and it would take very few women with hurt feelings for him to become a social pariah. Which perversely meant that the more you liked Preacher, the less willing he was to fuck you. Mostly he stuck to boffing townies of easy virtue. (See, e.g., the aforementioned off-campus parties.) He played intramural softball and was on the croquet squad…
Right, I forgot about the croquet. When I said that St. John’s had no intercollegiate athletics, I omitted one significant exception. Every year St. John’s had a big day-long croquet tournament against the Naval Academy, perched right on the other side of College Creek in Annapolis. The Navy guys would show up in their dress whites and the St. John’s people would show up in T-shirts and cut-offs, half-crocked from sampling the kegs they toted with them to the match site. I’m not sure how the tradition got started, but I suspect it was the brainchild of St. John’s coeds looking for an excuse to spend the afternoon with polite, muscular men in uniform.
But with the semester over and one-fourth of the Western Canon beneath our belts we got into Preacher’s Jeep and went down Route 50 to Ocean City and the great mystery jobs he’d lined up.
I remember that he had The Pretty Things on the tape deck the whole way down. I couldn’t complain because if I did he would play Django Reinhardt or Wilma Lee Cooper or someone else even worse.
Anyhow Preacher and I ended up in the same dorm room and I took some small satisfaction in the fact that I wasn’t the only person who found him incredibly annoying. Which isn’t to say he was ostracized (which would have delighted me -- I freely admit to an unhealthy amount of schadenfreund where Preacher is concerned.) But he was certainly not the Big Man On Campus I imagined (correctly, mostly) he was in high school.
The fact of the matter was, though, that he was not, as I’d hoped, an idiot, or a jerk. He was in fact pretty intelligent, and a pretty nice guy. And somewhere during that first semester – hard to say when – I started to realize that those of us who disliked him for being one of the cool kids were really behaving just like the people who’d picked on us for being a dorks.
He even got two of the other freshmen on our floor to try to practice “ars memoria” after a few scintillating displays of it in one of our tutorials. Anybody who can remember the names of all the guests at the Symposium AND the order in which they spoke…
That first semester I also found out about two things he rarely discussed: first, about his parents being dead, and second, about his freakish muscle-memory.
He dismissed the muscle-memory as a parlor trick, but to this day I’ve never even read about it in any other person. It was a sort of kinetic total recall. He could physically remember and repeat any kind of movement. Ever try to measure something by holding two fingers apart? Imagine if, six months later, you could precisely recreate that same measurement. It’s what made him such a good athlete, I suppose – a perfect swing every time.
(Preacher told me that his grandmother thought Grandpa Frechette had the same uncanny ability. Thus the marginal relevance of feats as a pilot.)
Preacher almost never mentioned this strange physical gift. At least not while I knew him. When I talked to some of his former lovers I heard about it, of course.
Midway through the semester he and I were actually friendly. He always knew where there was some off-campus party, and he would drag me along, and I would have a good time despite myself. And during the day I would sit with my friends in the dining hall and sometimes they would make fun of my roommate (they called him the Ken Doll) and after awhile I stopped laughing with them and eventually I was sitting with Preacher and his friends instead.
He was quiet and self-deprecating and could be funny in a dry, gentle way. Some might feel that I think it’s funny to be sarcastic and insensitive to others. They would be correct. But I could appreciate his slightly softer, subtler approach.
When I went home for Thanksgiving my mother asked about my roommate and when I told her that his parents were dead and he didn’t have anyplace to go on Thanksgiving she berated me soundly for not bringing him home and insisted that he return with me for Christmas. And I was not repulsed by the idea.
That Thanksgiving he started what he called the Island of Misfit Toys – a Thanksgiving dinner he threw for the students who, for various reasons, had no place else to go on Thanksgiving. It should have been rather pathetic and sad but apparently a good time was always had by all. He sponsored it all four years he was at St. John’s and I understand that the tradition continues today.
When he came home from Christmas Jen developed a huge and quite obvious crush on him. It was nice to be home picking on my little sister again. Of course my parents loved him. My asshole brother mostly ignored him, which was significantly better than the treatment DJ had meted out to my few high school friends. (I’ll note that Preacher rarely was inclined to speak badly of anyone… and yet he agreed that my brother was an asshole. Lest anyone should think I am being unduly hard on the asshole.)
Preacher spent three of those four Christmases with us. Of course he always gave the most thoughtful gifts. He was nothing if not predictable that way.
That Spring he told me that he had lined up great summer jobs for us in Ocean City, Maryland. He refused to tell me what they were. Just that they were great. By this time I had learned that Preacher had a gold horseshoe up his ass and that just by standing next to him one tended to enjoy the fruits of his good luck. Plus the alternative was going back to Jersey and unstopping the toilets of suburban Philadelphia with my dad.
(I am actually a pretty good journeyman plumber. Don’t tell anyone. It might ruin my image as an elitist intellectual dickweed.)
I realize I’m leaving out a lot of details about Preacher’s freshman year, but in the end, who the hell cares? It’s in the archive. He was smart and good-looking and popular. He was the only guy I knew then who actually had sex LESS frequently than he could have. His feeling was that St. John’s was a pretty small place and it would take very few women with hurt feelings for him to become a social pariah. Which perversely meant that the more you liked Preacher, the less willing he was to fuck you. Mostly he stuck to boffing townies of easy virtue. (See, e.g., the aforementioned off-campus parties.) He played intramural softball and was on the croquet squad…
Right, I forgot about the croquet. When I said that St. John’s had no intercollegiate athletics, I omitted one significant exception. Every year St. John’s had a big day-long croquet tournament against the Naval Academy, perched right on the other side of College Creek in Annapolis. The Navy guys would show up in their dress whites and the St. John’s people would show up in T-shirts and cut-offs, half-crocked from sampling the kegs they toted with them to the match site. I’m not sure how the tradition got started, but I suspect it was the brainchild of St. John’s coeds looking for an excuse to spend the afternoon with polite, muscular men in uniform.
But with the semester over and one-fourth of the Western Canon beneath our belts we got into Preacher’s Jeep and went down Route 50 to Ocean City and the great mystery jobs he’d lined up.
I remember that he had The Pretty Things on the tape deck the whole way down. I couldn’t complain because if I did he would play Django Reinhardt or Wilma Lee Cooper or someone else even worse.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Part Seven
From a speech delivered by Preacher Haywood on 10/16/2002 in College Station, Texas:
[...]
And people say to me, why don't you call God "God"?
The trouble with the word "God" is that it evokes this image of a white-bearded, white-robed man sitting on a cloud somewhere. When I say "God" people instantly think of an Other, and that is not at all what I am refering to.
So I say "the Divine." The Divine is omnipresent and indivisible. It is not some Other to which we can direct our prayers. It is right here.
What I just said -- the Divine is omnipresent and indivisible -- that's pretty much the only thing I have to tell you. Are you disappointed? Look, how much did you pay for your ticket? Because I'll gladly refund your money.
So the idea of an omnipresent and indivisible Divine is obvious and unoriginal and one of those things that's easy to say but hard to know. It is not something that can be literally proven and ours is a culture dedicated to literal proofs. But you have to feel it. When you feel its truth, you will understand just how... inappropriate and irrelevant an attempt at logical proof would be.
So the next obvious question is, how do you get to feel it? If logic and reason won't uncover this for you, what will?
Go to church. Go to your mosque. Go to your synagogue. Sit zazen. There are a lot of well-trod paths that will lead you to at-one-ment, that paralyzing, terrifying, ecstatic moment of union with the Divine. You don't have to be here listening to me. People have been walking these other paths to the Divine for centuries. Shoo! Leave! I'm redundant!
But none of those paths worked for me. They weren't WRONG paths. They are good paths. Most of those paths were designed for Iron Age Middle-Eastern goatherders. The fact that they have translated so well to 21st century America is a testament to just how right and true and timeless those messages and paths are. But they didn't work for me. Maybe because I've never herded a goat; maybe because I've never been to the Levant; maybe I'm just an idiot. But they didn't work for me.
This is what works for me: "Let every act be an act of worship."
Hence the name.
[...]
[...]
And people say to me, why don't you call God "God"?
The trouble with the word "God" is that it evokes this image of a white-bearded, white-robed man sitting on a cloud somewhere. When I say "God" people instantly think of an Other, and that is not at all what I am refering to.
So I say "the Divine." The Divine is omnipresent and indivisible. It is not some Other to which we can direct our prayers. It is right here.
What I just said -- the Divine is omnipresent and indivisible -- that's pretty much the only thing I have to tell you. Are you disappointed? Look, how much did you pay for your ticket? Because I'll gladly refund your money.
So the idea of an omnipresent and indivisible Divine is obvious and unoriginal and one of those things that's easy to say but hard to know. It is not something that can be literally proven and ours is a culture dedicated to literal proofs. But you have to feel it. When you feel its truth, you will understand just how... inappropriate and irrelevant an attempt at logical proof would be.
So the next obvious question is, how do you get to feel it? If logic and reason won't uncover this for you, what will?
Go to church. Go to your mosque. Go to your synagogue. Sit zazen. There are a lot of well-trod paths that will lead you to at-one-ment, that paralyzing, terrifying, ecstatic moment of union with the Divine. You don't have to be here listening to me. People have been walking these other paths to the Divine for centuries. Shoo! Leave! I'm redundant!
But none of those paths worked for me. They weren't WRONG paths. They are good paths. Most of those paths were designed for Iron Age Middle-Eastern goatherders. The fact that they have translated so well to 21st century America is a testament to just how right and true and timeless those messages and paths are. But they didn't work for me. Maybe because I've never herded a goat; maybe because I've never been to the Levant; maybe I'm just an idiot. But they didn't work for me.
This is what works for me: "Let every act be an act of worship."
Hence the name.
[...]
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Part Six
OK, enough foot-dragging.
If I had a little more technical savvy I would post a sepia-toned map of the United States and show an little animated red line that zig-zagged from placed to place to the sounds of moving trucks and baseball games. This would represent that the Haywoods moved all around the country for the next 14 years. The only constants in Preacher's life were moving trucks and Little League baseball.
Our happy triumvirate settles down, finally, in San Diego, with the expressed intention of staying in one place long enough for Preacher to have just the one high school. They seem happy there. Do you care to whom he lost his virginity? Her name was Hedda Bruno, she was two years his senior and captain of the volleyball team, and -- as the name implies -- she looked like a character from the Nieblunglied. Do you care about his high school baseball career? Apparently he was very good. He was smart and good-looking and popular and possessed of a certain quiet easy-going charisma that served him in good stead.
So we come to July 4, 1984. His senior year is about to begin. Does he take one of the baseball scholarships (Stanford and LSU, chiefly)? Sign with one of the pro clubs (the Cardinals and the Brewers made offers)? His SATs are high enough that the Ivy League is a possibility. Then there's the gorgeous ballerina girlfriend, a rich kid from La Jolla whose parents disapprove of him greatly. By all reports Preacher Haywood is the only person on earth who can make her laugh.
His parent decide they're going to ride out into the country for an old-fashioned Fourth. Preacher stays in town. He goes to a picnic and plays softball, then back to his house to ball the gorgeous ballerina girlfriend, then down to the harbor to see the fireworks. All in all a good day for young Haywood. He is awakened just after midnight by the California Highway Patrol telling him that his parents are dead. Car accident. Hell of a thing.
He is taken in by the parents of his best friend, a kid named Manny Abuela, who I suppose is my prototype in the skinny Mediterranean sidekick department. There is some life insurance and a hefty lawsuit settlement (if you're parents are going to be killed in an auto accident, see to it that it's from an Exxon tanker crossing the center line). Major Gary Parks, USMC (Ret.) -- yes, that Gary Parks, Joe's old roommate -- now runs a little investment firm that specializes in ex-military, and he takes care of running the Preacher Haywood Residual Trust. Eduardo Abuela -- Manny's father, a lawyer -- grudgingly helps Preacher gain emancipated minor status. He breaks up with the gorgeous ballerina girlfriend and insists on moving back into his parents' now-empty house for his senior year of high school.
(They reconcile in time to go the prom together. I saw the pictures. Beautiful couple. Preacher is smiling. Sheyda looks as if she's about to devour him.)
After moving back into the house he gets a part-time job as a waiter at the local Friendly's. After moving back into the house his interest in music spikes from casual to fanatical. Someone, it seems, had problems with the empty, lonely silence of that house.
And he turns down the baseball scholarships and the pro contracts, resists Parks' relentless lobbying for the Naval Academy, and picks out a school where baseball and charm are not going to get him anywhere.
And that's how he ended up in my dorm room.
At the time I, of course, knew none of this. I just knew that I was stuck in a room with someone who seemed to embody everything I'd tried to avoid by coming to St. John's.
That first night, when I got back from dinner with my parents and pretended not to notice the tear in my mother's eye, I sat down on my bed and tried to do my own reading. The Symposium, of course; what else for a freshman coming into the Western Canon? Preacher was now listening to the Police and he offered to switch to headphones but I told him I could endure it. So we sat there in silence reading (he was wearing a shirt by now) and I had to struggle with the urge to bludgeon him with my desk lamp.
Because of the annoying way he read in silence.
I know, you're laughing. That Nick. What a pistol. Trust me, he was as annoying as shit. He would read a few pages, then close his eyes and tip his head back for a few seconds. Read a few pages, close his eyes. Read a few pages, close his eyes. Finally I couldn't stand it any longer.
"What the fuck are you doing?" I said. (I can put that in quotes because I am quite sure this conversation is verbatim correct).
"Reading Descartes," he said slowly, as if he wasn't sure what I was getting at.
"No, I mean with the closing the eyes!"
He grinned. I'm sure others found it disarming. "Ars memoria," he said.
"Our what?"
"Ars memoria."
"What the fuck is ars memoria?"
"The art of memory. It's a way of remembering things. You imagine a room, see, and --"
I cut him off with a wave of my hand. "You're memorizing all the reading?"
"Just the high points."
I contemplated this for a moment. Then I got up and left the room to do my reading in the quad.
If I had a little more technical savvy I would post a sepia-toned map of the United States and show an little animated red line that zig-zagged from placed to place to the sounds of moving trucks and baseball games. This would represent that the Haywoods moved all around the country for the next 14 years. The only constants in Preacher's life were moving trucks and Little League baseball.
Our happy triumvirate settles down, finally, in San Diego, with the expressed intention of staying in one place long enough for Preacher to have just the one high school. They seem happy there. Do you care to whom he lost his virginity? Her name was Hedda Bruno, she was two years his senior and captain of the volleyball team, and -- as the name implies -- she looked like a character from the Nieblunglied. Do you care about his high school baseball career? Apparently he was very good. He was smart and good-looking and popular and possessed of a certain quiet easy-going charisma that served him in good stead.
So we come to July 4, 1984. His senior year is about to begin. Does he take one of the baseball scholarships (Stanford and LSU, chiefly)? Sign with one of the pro clubs (the Cardinals and the Brewers made offers)? His SATs are high enough that the Ivy League is a possibility. Then there's the gorgeous ballerina girlfriend, a rich kid from La Jolla whose parents disapprove of him greatly. By all reports Preacher Haywood is the only person on earth who can make her laugh.
His parent decide they're going to ride out into the country for an old-fashioned Fourth. Preacher stays in town. He goes to a picnic and plays softball, then back to his house to ball the gorgeous ballerina girlfriend, then down to the harbor to see the fireworks. All in all a good day for young Haywood. He is awakened just after midnight by the California Highway Patrol telling him that his parents are dead. Car accident. Hell of a thing.
He is taken in by the parents of his best friend, a kid named Manny Abuela, who I suppose is my prototype in the skinny Mediterranean sidekick department. There is some life insurance and a hefty lawsuit settlement (if you're parents are going to be killed in an auto accident, see to it that it's from an Exxon tanker crossing the center line). Major Gary Parks, USMC (Ret.) -- yes, that Gary Parks, Joe's old roommate -- now runs a little investment firm that specializes in ex-military, and he takes care of running the Preacher Haywood Residual Trust. Eduardo Abuela -- Manny's father, a lawyer -- grudgingly helps Preacher gain emancipated minor status. He breaks up with the gorgeous ballerina girlfriend and insists on moving back into his parents' now-empty house for his senior year of high school.
(They reconcile in time to go the prom together. I saw the pictures. Beautiful couple. Preacher is smiling. Sheyda looks as if she's about to devour him.)
After moving back into the house he gets a part-time job as a waiter at the local Friendly's. After moving back into the house his interest in music spikes from casual to fanatical. Someone, it seems, had problems with the empty, lonely silence of that house.
And he turns down the baseball scholarships and the pro contracts, resists Parks' relentless lobbying for the Naval Academy, and picks out a school where baseball and charm are not going to get him anywhere.
And that's how he ended up in my dorm room.
At the time I, of course, knew none of this. I just knew that I was stuck in a room with someone who seemed to embody everything I'd tried to avoid by coming to St. John's.
That first night, when I got back from dinner with my parents and pretended not to notice the tear in my mother's eye, I sat down on my bed and tried to do my own reading. The Symposium, of course; what else for a freshman coming into the Western Canon? Preacher was now listening to the Police and he offered to switch to headphones but I told him I could endure it. So we sat there in silence reading (he was wearing a shirt by now) and I had to struggle with the urge to bludgeon him with my desk lamp.
Because of the annoying way he read in silence.
I know, you're laughing. That Nick. What a pistol. Trust me, he was as annoying as shit. He would read a few pages, then close his eyes and tip his head back for a few seconds. Read a few pages, close his eyes. Read a few pages, close his eyes. Finally I couldn't stand it any longer.
"What the fuck are you doing?" I said. (I can put that in quotes because I am quite sure this conversation is verbatim correct).
"Reading Descartes," he said slowly, as if he wasn't sure what I was getting at.
"No, I mean with the closing the eyes!"
He grinned. I'm sure others found it disarming. "Ars memoria," he said.
"Our what?"
"Ars memoria."
"What the fuck is ars memoria?"
"The art of memory. It's a way of remembering things. You imagine a room, see, and --"
I cut him off with a wave of my hand. "You're memorizing all the reading?"
"Just the high points."
I contemplated this for a moment. Then I got up and left the room to do my reading in the quad.
Monday, January 24, 2005
Part Five
Joseph Haywood was – I’ve seen pictures – not a handsome man. He was short and thick-fingered and his eyes were too far apart. His hair was jet black, his eyes were watery brown, and his skin alternated between too pasty and too ruddy.
He was born in 1942 in Eugene, Oregon. His mother disappeared soon after, and thus his father – an auto mechanic – was exempted from military service.
Joe Haywood had a macerating mind. It chewed slowly through problems. He was quiet and intense and relentlessly logical. He went to Syracuse and got an engineering degree and needed ROTC to pay for it all… so when he got his diploma he promptly did a stint in the Navy.
What he did, exactly, remains classified. My FOIA responses were mostly useless. It seemed to have had something to do with base security; it's not really important. At any rate, in 1965 he was at the Pentagon and sharing a little apartment in northwest D.C. with a Marine lieutenant named Gary Parks. And each morning on his way to work he would walk past a skinny blond girl sweeping the sidewalk in front of a florist shop a little further down his block.
Ellen Frechette was not particularly attractive, either, I must say. Her nose was sharp and her forehead was too high and she had angles where one would expect to see curves. By all accounts she was witty and impulsive and outgoing. And like Joe I never found anyone who knew her who had anything bad to say about her.
Also like Joe, she was raised by one parent; her father had been a fighter pilot (she was conceived during a bereavement leave) and he was killed in the Pacific two days before she was born. And just six weeks before the end of the war.
(It wasn’t even combat. He had 16 kills – there was no enemy pilot who could touch him, it seems. His plane exploded on the deck of an aircraft carrier as he was taking off. Some sort of mechanical failure. Frank Frechette's ace status will be marginally relevant later, trust me.)
So when she turned 18 she moved from her mother’s house in Virginia to work in her aunt’s flower shop in Washington. And somehow this quiet engineer found the courage to talk to her; somehow she was drawn to the fine-grinding intellect and subtle sense of humor of the young navy officer; within three months of their first date they were married. Lieutenant Parks was their witness at the courthouse.
The year 1967 found them in Falmouth, Massachusetts. Joe had finished his military obligation and the Department of the Navy promptly hired him back as a civilian contractor and sent him to Woods Hole. Ellen was very pregnant by then.
Keep in mind that what follows is complete fiction. I am relating from memory a story Preacher told me almost 20 years ago, which his mother had related to him almost ten years before that. Since this is NOT a biography I am perfectly sanguine about using quotation marks below, despite the fact that the quotes themselves are entirely fabricated:
In 1967 childbirth meant two weeks of laying in, so on a cold March afternoon, the first day of spring just around the corner, Ellen Haywood wandered into a big used book store to find something to read during her forced seclusion.
She had just picked up a book about Cotton Mather when the proprietress of the shop – “old and scary-looking,” is how Ellen described her to Preacher, years later – said “he’ll be such as that.”
Ellen jumped. The old woman was pointing at her swollen belly. “A preacher,” she said.
Ellen didn’t quite know what to say to that. As near as I can determine neither Ellen nor Joe ever attended any religious service of any kind, aside from the occasional wedding or funeral. So the prospect of her child becoming a preacher was not particularly appealing.
“Or a soldier,” another woman said behind her, and Ellen jumped again. This one was older and scarier looking that the first.
“Well,” Ellen said, trying not to freak out, “I, ah…”
“A preacher or a soldier, right,” the third old woman said. “He’ll be a preacher or a soldier. Long-lived, too, don’t worry.” Ellen remembered vividly that the third one had a pair of scissors.
At this the pregnant woman gave up any pretense at aplomb. She dropped the book and fled into the street and waddled as fast as she could down the cramped streets of Falmouth and up to their second-floor apartment and hid in the bathroom.
Joe, of course, was too much an engineer to be very sympathetic. But she was completely shaken by the three old ladies making prophesies about her unborn child. When dismissing it as senile babbling didn’t soothe his wife, Joe took a more creative approach.
“No man of woman born…” he said.
“What?” Ellen said. It was very unlike Joe Haywood to quote Shakespeare.
“Wasn’t that a famous prophesy? They made us go see this play in the eleventh grade, and…”
“It’s from Macbeth,” she said. “’none of woman born shall harm Macbeth.’”
(See, here I have her correct the quote. Because I can look it up. I have no idea if she got it right or not. I just know that -- according to Preacher -- she later told Preacher that his father brought up the Macbeth example.)
“Because that Macduff guy was born by c-section, right?”
“Are you saying our son is going to be king of Scotland?”
“No, my point is, these things are never that straightforward. They’re never as obvious as they sound. So just because they say he’s going to be a preacher or a soldier doesn’t mean that it’s what you think. Even if you think they’re not just a bunch of senile old biddies, which is my personal opinion.”
“What else could it mean?”
“He could be an actor. You know, he wins his first Academy award for playing a preacher, his second for playing a soldier.”
Ellen thought about this for a moment. “I wouldn’t mind having a movie star in the family.”
“Me neither. I could retire.”
“Maybe it means he’s going to be president. You know, commander-in-chief is a soldier. And he has the bully pulpit.”
“I’d rather he be a movie star than president.”
“Why?”
“Because I’d rather retire to Beverly Hills than to Washington.”
This tactic seemed to mollify Ellen somewhat. Keep in mind that it was 1967. Vietnam. Protests in the street. Being a soldier, being a preacher – neither one of these appealed to her at all.
One assumes that Joe thought his wife had put all this behind her by the time the baby was born a few days later. It was March 21, 1967. At 7:26 a.m., if the paperwork is to be believed.
Groggy from the gas, weirded out by the old ladies, and (by most accounts) a bit of a flake, Ellen was handed her beautiful baby boy and she insisted – demanded – that he be named Preacher Haywood. Thus, in her mind, both fulfilling the prophesy and keeping the kid’s future career options open.
She told Preacher that, in fact, she wanted to make his middle name Soldier, but was overruled by Joe. So he had no middle name. But when I was putting the archive together I would occasionally find something with “Preacher S. Haywood” on it – he used the S as his unofficial middle initial sometimes, one supposes either in homage to his mother’s thwarted wishes or as a sort of tribute to Harry Truman.
Jesus, all this typing and I’ve only described how the Navy brat got his name. I haven’t come close to explaining how he happened to be sharing a dorm room with me.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Part Four
One of the things that paralyzed me on the Gerry book was overthinking the concept of objectivity.
The fact of the matter is that there is no such thing as an objective biography; every choice I make about what to put in and what to leave out, every turn of phrase or word choice that shows up in my prose, is a reflection on me and my biases, my agenda.
I got around this problem in the first two and a half books by pretending it didn’t exist. Halfway through Racketeer I decided instead to embrace it. Which is why the thing reads like a cross between an NEH grant application and a Sports Illustrated profile.
Being objective about Preacher Haywood is even harder, since I’m in the story – a supporting role, on and off the stage early, but I’m there nonetheless.
Of course I’m not allowed to write a biography at all – that’s the deal, right? What I’m writing is NOT a biography of Preacher Haywood. It’s about how I prepared the archive that someone else will use to write a biography, if the insanely improbably occurs and someone gives a damn about Preacher Haywood a century from now.
So I can throw all objectivity out the window absolutely qualm-free, and talk about how Preacher and I came to be at the same place at the same time. It provides me with a rhetorical device to sneak in otherwise utterly irrelevant genealogical data about Preacher, too.
Let’s see:
I hated high school.
The classes, the teachers, the other students. The buildings. The schedule. The athletic teams, the student organizations, the clubs, the parties, the pep rallies.
In retrospect I see that there was an element of self-loathing in there, but when I was a teenager in south Jersey I wasn’t nearly so self-aware. I thought I hated high school purely on the merits.
The fact that my troglodyte older brother excelled at high school did not endear me to it any, either. DJ – Donald D’Alessio Junior – certainly wasn’t the guy you wanted to sit next to when taking a chemistry exam, but he was absolutely the guy you wanted next to you on your Friday night beer run. He was the best lacrosse and second-best football player at Brightfield High and managed to (just barely) maintain his academic eligibility.
He was a senior when I was a freshman. Abuse at his hands was somehow more reassuring than the abuse I suffered after he left. He was big and dumb and popular and I was scrawny and smart and a geek. The fact that he excelled at high school reinforced my disdain for it.
The fly in the ointment was that Jen was also good at high school. Jen is eleven months younger than me, so she was one year behind. Thus there was never a time when my teachers were not comparing me (unfavorably) to one of my siblings.
But DJ was – is – a cretin. Jen is smart. DJ is an asshole. Jen is a decent human being. Jen was also good-looking and popular. Jen was even a good tennis player. She possessed an innate grasp of the high school social milieu; she always knew the right outfit, the right haircut, the right hangout.
I could never figure those things out, and even if I did, I probably wouldn’t have followed through on them.
And to make matters worse, Jenny was always nice to me.
So anyhow the two of them were great at high school, and I sucked at it, and I hated high school.
I had maybe three friends. We smoked cigarettes and scowled a lot. We dressed in black and listened to The Smiths and The Cure. We weren’t goth, per se, mostly because we’d never heard of it; this was the early ‘80s, and goth hadn’t yet found our tiny South Jersey suburb.
(To add insult to injury two of my three friends started dating each other our senior year, and had the gall to seem really happy about it. The selfish bastards.)
There was exactly one adult there I didn’t despise.
My sophomore year I was sent to see the guidance counselor, Mr. Goldberg, by my English teacher, Ms. Pritzger.
He looked at her note and told me that she felt I wasn’t working up to my full potential.
Like I’ve never heard that before.
I remember that there were no windows and almost no sound at all in his office. I can’t imagine working in a place that deathly still.
Without looking him in the eye, I pointed out that Ms. Pritzger had a BS in Education from Fairleigh Dickinson – meaning she was barely qualified to compete in the Special Olympics, and certainly not qualified to evaluate anyone's "full potential."
He took out my “Tale of Two Cities” worksheet. The first question was ‘What is Madame DeFarge knitting?’ and I had written ‘this is the best of worksheets, this is the worst of worksheets.’ It was the only question I answered.
He asked if I thought one needed a masters in psychology to see that I could do a little better than that.
My guess is that I gave the typical articulate teenager response – I shrugged and stared at the floor.
Then he did something unexpected – he asked me to defend the answer. He saw that there was some truth to it, I suppose. So I told him: it was the perfect high school English worksheet – blue mimeo ink, no thought required, no room for nuance, very easy to grade while eating Cheetos and watching the Barbara Mandrell show.
For some reason – then, as now – I associate eating Cheetos with intellectual deficiency. The Barbara Mandrell thing speaks for itself.
And for the same reason, I said, it’s the worst of worksheets. It exists solely to prove that we’ve done the reading.
And, he wanted to know, had I done the reading? If so, prove it.
Now I was a sullen, insolent little prick. But I really had done the reading.
I told him that Dickens was a hypocrite. He considered himself a social reform but plainly had no true sympathies with the revolutionaries. Far more Edmund Burke than Thomas Paine. His sympathies are with the gentry, not the proletariat. Beautiful, sweet, long-suffering Lucie, versus certified sociopath Tatrese Defarge. Who, in the end, is killed by Lucie’s maid. The rich don’t even have to do their own killing in Dickens’ world.
Dickens talks progressive and but his heart is conservative, I concluded. He really doesn’t care about the politics, as long as the British upper-middle-class comes out on top.
I felt pretty smug. I’d proved that I read the book and I proved I was smarter than Ms. Pritzger at the same time. Of course I’ve had bowls of chili that were smarter than Ms. Pritzger.
Goldberg thought about it for a moment. He told me he was supposed to give me an IQ test and an MMPI, but he wasn’t going to, because he already knew what they would reveal: that I was a smart kid, but a giant pain in the ass.
That wiped the smirk off my face. I wasn’t used to teachers talking to me like that.
He asked me if I had any chores around the house. A lot, I said. In retrospect, not really. I had to empty the trashcans and carry the bags to the curb each week.
But going to English class shouldn’t be a chore, I said, thinking I saw where he was going.
He said, sometimes the trash bag breaks and garbage spills all over the floor, right? Making that chore a lot more difficult than it should be.
I repeated, why should going to English class be like taking out the garbage?
And he said – I remember it distinctly -- “Jesus, don’t be so self-centered.”
He meant Ms. Pritzger, he said. Every time you pull something like this, you’re the human equivalent of a broken trashbag in her classroom. I want you to just sit there, keep your mouth shut, and smile pleasantly. “Be a good little trashbag,” he said. And in return I didn’t have to do any of her worksheets, turn in any of her papers, take any of her tests. Just do the assigned reading and be quiet in class.
I jumped at the chance. The downside was that Mr. Goldberg was going to develop his own tests on the same material. Just for me. I went to his office to pick up the test packet after each unit. They were take-home exams. It sometimes took me a week of research and outside reading to complete them.
More than two decades and a Ph.D. later, I’ve never yet taken a class as difficult as my 10th grade English class. But having a guidance counselor bust my balls while taking repeated graduate-level English literature exams was (sadly) the best time I had in high school.
So anyway, hating high school as I did, I was determined not to go to a college that was at all like high school… and from my perspective, most of them were EXACTLY like high school, only bigger. DJ was at Penn State, warming the bench for the football team and doing OK on the lacrosse team and struggling with the challenging dual majors of Binge Drinking and AIDS Jokes. And Penn was just high school writ large – you filed into a room to have someone spout information at you, and at the end of the semester you dutifully regurgitated it back into a blue book. The beautiful people formed cliques and didn’t talk to the likes of me. And everyone cheered at the pep rallies.
It took me awhile to find out about St. John’s College. This was a college that was sort of an anti-high school. You read the Great Works of the Western Canon and then you formed small groups led by professors they called “tutors” and you talked about them. You didn’t have to master Latin or Greek but it helped. The hard sciences were taught in hands-on labs. There were no “majors.” Everyone graduated with a Bachelor’s of Liberal Arts. There were no grades; you moved on when the faculty decided you’d mastered the material.
There were no intercollegiate athletics of any kind. Now, years later, I have a hard time expressing just how important that was to me.
My parents – a plumber and the daughter of a plumber – were a little hesitant at first, but the St. John’s people helped persuade them. They pointed to the enormous percentage of graduates that went on to graduate school (without dwelling on the reason why: your St. John’s bachelor’s degree didn’t provide you with much in the way of marketable skills, so you sort of HAD to go to graduate school unless you were independently wealthy). And we went to Annapolis to see the campus and it looked like my parents thought a college should look – big old buildings, grassy expanses, thick-boled trees.
So in the fall of 1985 I found myself there on the banks of College Creek, ready to put all of the unpleasantness of high school behind me.
All I knew about my roommate was that his name was P. Haywood and he was from San Diego, California.
So I get there on the first day and my parents and I walk into my third-floor room with armloads of crap and there, sitting on the other bed, reading Descartes and listening to what I later learned was Webb Pierce, was Preacher Haywood.
The fact of the matter is that there is no such thing as an objective biography; every choice I make about what to put in and what to leave out, every turn of phrase or word choice that shows up in my prose, is a reflection on me and my biases, my agenda.
I got around this problem in the first two and a half books by pretending it didn’t exist. Halfway through Racketeer I decided instead to embrace it. Which is why the thing reads like a cross between an NEH grant application and a Sports Illustrated profile.
Being objective about Preacher Haywood is even harder, since I’m in the story – a supporting role, on and off the stage early, but I’m there nonetheless.
Of course I’m not allowed to write a biography at all – that’s the deal, right? What I’m writing is NOT a biography of Preacher Haywood. It’s about how I prepared the archive that someone else will use to write a biography, if the insanely improbably occurs and someone gives a damn about Preacher Haywood a century from now.
So I can throw all objectivity out the window absolutely qualm-free, and talk about how Preacher and I came to be at the same place at the same time. It provides me with a rhetorical device to sneak in otherwise utterly irrelevant genealogical data about Preacher, too.
Let’s see:
I hated high school.
The classes, the teachers, the other students. The buildings. The schedule. The athletic teams, the student organizations, the clubs, the parties, the pep rallies.
In retrospect I see that there was an element of self-loathing in there, but when I was a teenager in south Jersey I wasn’t nearly so self-aware. I thought I hated high school purely on the merits.
The fact that my troglodyte older brother excelled at high school did not endear me to it any, either. DJ – Donald D’Alessio Junior – certainly wasn’t the guy you wanted to sit next to when taking a chemistry exam, but he was absolutely the guy you wanted next to you on your Friday night beer run. He was the best lacrosse and second-best football player at Brightfield High and managed to (just barely) maintain his academic eligibility.
He was a senior when I was a freshman. Abuse at his hands was somehow more reassuring than the abuse I suffered after he left. He was big and dumb and popular and I was scrawny and smart and a geek. The fact that he excelled at high school reinforced my disdain for it.
The fly in the ointment was that Jen was also good at high school. Jen is eleven months younger than me, so she was one year behind. Thus there was never a time when my teachers were not comparing me (unfavorably) to one of my siblings.
But DJ was – is – a cretin. Jen is smart. DJ is an asshole. Jen is a decent human being. Jen was also good-looking and popular. Jen was even a good tennis player. She possessed an innate grasp of the high school social milieu; she always knew the right outfit, the right haircut, the right hangout.
I could never figure those things out, and even if I did, I probably wouldn’t have followed through on them.
And to make matters worse, Jenny was always nice to me.
So anyhow the two of them were great at high school, and I sucked at it, and I hated high school.
I had maybe three friends. We smoked cigarettes and scowled a lot. We dressed in black and listened to The Smiths and The Cure. We weren’t goth, per se, mostly because we’d never heard of it; this was the early ‘80s, and goth hadn’t yet found our tiny South Jersey suburb.
(To add insult to injury two of my three friends started dating each other our senior year, and had the gall to seem really happy about it. The selfish bastards.)
There was exactly one adult there I didn’t despise.
My sophomore year I was sent to see the guidance counselor, Mr. Goldberg, by my English teacher, Ms. Pritzger.
He looked at her note and told me that she felt I wasn’t working up to my full potential.
Like I’ve never heard that before.
I remember that there were no windows and almost no sound at all in his office. I can’t imagine working in a place that deathly still.
Without looking him in the eye, I pointed out that Ms. Pritzger had a BS in Education from Fairleigh Dickinson – meaning she was barely qualified to compete in the Special Olympics, and certainly not qualified to evaluate anyone's "full potential."
He took out my “Tale of Two Cities” worksheet. The first question was ‘What is Madame DeFarge knitting?’ and I had written ‘this is the best of worksheets, this is the worst of worksheets.’ It was the only question I answered.
He asked if I thought one needed a masters in psychology to see that I could do a little better than that.
My guess is that I gave the typical articulate teenager response – I shrugged and stared at the floor.
Then he did something unexpected – he asked me to defend the answer. He saw that there was some truth to it, I suppose. So I told him: it was the perfect high school English worksheet – blue mimeo ink, no thought required, no room for nuance, very easy to grade while eating Cheetos and watching the Barbara Mandrell show.
For some reason – then, as now – I associate eating Cheetos with intellectual deficiency. The Barbara Mandrell thing speaks for itself.
And for the same reason, I said, it’s the worst of worksheets. It exists solely to prove that we’ve done the reading.
And, he wanted to know, had I done the reading? If so, prove it.
Now I was a sullen, insolent little prick. But I really had done the reading.
I told him that Dickens was a hypocrite. He considered himself a social reform but plainly had no true sympathies with the revolutionaries. Far more Edmund Burke than Thomas Paine. His sympathies are with the gentry, not the proletariat. Beautiful, sweet, long-suffering Lucie, versus certified sociopath Tatrese Defarge. Who, in the end, is killed by Lucie’s maid. The rich don’t even have to do their own killing in Dickens’ world.
Dickens talks progressive and but his heart is conservative, I concluded. He really doesn’t care about the politics, as long as the British upper-middle-class comes out on top.
I felt pretty smug. I’d proved that I read the book and I proved I was smarter than Ms. Pritzger at the same time. Of course I’ve had bowls of chili that were smarter than Ms. Pritzger.
Goldberg thought about it for a moment. He told me he was supposed to give me an IQ test and an MMPI, but he wasn’t going to, because he already knew what they would reveal: that I was a smart kid, but a giant pain in the ass.
That wiped the smirk off my face. I wasn’t used to teachers talking to me like that.
He asked me if I had any chores around the house. A lot, I said. In retrospect, not really. I had to empty the trashcans and carry the bags to the curb each week.
But going to English class shouldn’t be a chore, I said, thinking I saw where he was going.
He said, sometimes the trash bag breaks and garbage spills all over the floor, right? Making that chore a lot more difficult than it should be.
I repeated, why should going to English class be like taking out the garbage?
And he said – I remember it distinctly -- “Jesus, don’t be so self-centered.”
He meant Ms. Pritzger, he said. Every time you pull something like this, you’re the human equivalent of a broken trashbag in her classroom. I want you to just sit there, keep your mouth shut, and smile pleasantly. “Be a good little trashbag,” he said. And in return I didn’t have to do any of her worksheets, turn in any of her papers, take any of her tests. Just do the assigned reading and be quiet in class.
I jumped at the chance. The downside was that Mr. Goldberg was going to develop his own tests on the same material. Just for me. I went to his office to pick up the test packet after each unit. They were take-home exams. It sometimes took me a week of research and outside reading to complete them.
More than two decades and a Ph.D. later, I’ve never yet taken a class as difficult as my 10th grade English class. But having a guidance counselor bust my balls while taking repeated graduate-level English literature exams was (sadly) the best time I had in high school.
So anyway, hating high school as I did, I was determined not to go to a college that was at all like high school… and from my perspective, most of them were EXACTLY like high school, only bigger. DJ was at Penn State, warming the bench for the football team and doing OK on the lacrosse team and struggling with the challenging dual majors of Binge Drinking and AIDS Jokes. And Penn was just high school writ large – you filed into a room to have someone spout information at you, and at the end of the semester you dutifully regurgitated it back into a blue book. The beautiful people formed cliques and didn’t talk to the likes of me. And everyone cheered at the pep rallies.
It took me awhile to find out about St. John’s College. This was a college that was sort of an anti-high school. You read the Great Works of the Western Canon and then you formed small groups led by professors they called “tutors” and you talked about them. You didn’t have to master Latin or Greek but it helped. The hard sciences were taught in hands-on labs. There were no “majors.” Everyone graduated with a Bachelor’s of Liberal Arts. There were no grades; you moved on when the faculty decided you’d mastered the material.
There were no intercollegiate athletics of any kind. Now, years later, I have a hard time expressing just how important that was to me.
My parents – a plumber and the daughter of a plumber – were a little hesitant at first, but the St. John’s people helped persuade them. They pointed to the enormous percentage of graduates that went on to graduate school (without dwelling on the reason why: your St. John’s bachelor’s degree didn’t provide you with much in the way of marketable skills, so you sort of HAD to go to graduate school unless you were independently wealthy). And we went to Annapolis to see the campus and it looked like my parents thought a college should look – big old buildings, grassy expanses, thick-boled trees.
So in the fall of 1985 I found myself there on the banks of College Creek, ready to put all of the unpleasantness of high school behind me.
All I knew about my roommate was that his name was P. Haywood and he was from San Diego, California.
So I get there on the first day and my parents and I walk into my third-floor room with armloads of crap and there, sitting on the other bed, reading Descartes and listening to what I later learned was Webb Pierce, was Preacher Haywood.
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Part Three
I met them for lunch at Vine. Getting a lunch table at Vine on short notice was impossible. Either they set this up in advance or they had fantastic connections. I was just grateful for the opportunity to spend $40 (of someone else’s money) for a tiny steak.
I got there a few minutes late. As always. I didn’t know what they looked like but once I got in the door a young waiter came up to me, called me “Mr. D’Alessio,” and led me straight to their table.
The waiter was one of them, I would learn later. A Worshipper. Figures. All of the really good waiters are Worshippers.
Waiting for me were John Harkin, a tall, thin, former Anglican priest who'd resigned and/or been fired so he could become part of Preacher's flock, and David Levy, a short, stocky financial analyst whose computer hobby had led to him handling both the books for, and computer systems of, the Worshippers.
After a few moments for introductions and chit-chat the young waiter reappeared to take our drink orders.
A glass full of ice and a bottle of 21-year-old Loch Morar, I thought. In fact, forget the glass. Just the bottle and a straw.
I ordered an iced tea.
I told them that in a hundred years -- hell, ten years -- nobody would give a damn who Preacher Haywood was. I told them that he was my generation's equivalent of Werner Erhard. At best maybe a modern-day Ann Lee.
I told them that, frankly, while I wasn't surprised that Haywood became the head of a sex cult, I was a little surprised that his ego had reached the point where he was commissioning biographical research.
That's when they told me that Preacher didn't know about the project, would almost certainly have objected to the project... and that he'd disappeared from Worship headquarters over a year ago, and nobody had heard from him since.
They told me they agreed that the odds were greatly against Worship standing any test of time. But then again, they said, there were over 13,000,000 copies of Notes On Worship in circulation, counting the downloads.
When I heard that sales figure I did a spit take. Even though they sell the books at cost, that's a lot of units.
In the end, though, it was the money that convinced me to say yes. They were offering essentially a year's salary for what I figured would be three months' work -- mostly tracking down some of Haywood's old drinking buddies and getting them to talk into a tape recorder. With the balance I could go back to Boston and redo the Gerry research, and wait for a decent job opening.
Still, I undertook one last effort to wreck the deal. I pointed out that my last communication with Preacher involved me trying to punch his lights out. And that before that we were best friends. And so either way, in a hundred years, no biographer worth his salt was going to accept my archive as an unbiased record of Haywood's life.
Or at least the first thirty-some years of it.
They were, however, both fully aware and fine with that. They wanted me because they thought -- correctly, in my opinion -- that my own ego would demand that I be as scrupulously fair as possible. I was enough of a scholar to recognize that an obvious -- even a subtle -- hatchet job might backfire, while a hagiography would be instantly dismissed. If I wanted to debunk the Preacher Haywood myth (and I did), I would do it best by being honest.
There was one other caveat -- I couldn't publish my findings. All of the interviews and information-gathering was to be archival only. They even had a lawyer draw up releases for my interview subjects, promising them that they wouldn't publish anything in the archive for at least 50 years.
That’s the part of the deal I’m breaking by writing this. Actually, it occurs to me that nothing I’ve written so far violates the agreement. But that will probably change.
I got there a few minutes late. As always. I didn’t know what they looked like but once I got in the door a young waiter came up to me, called me “Mr. D’Alessio,” and led me straight to their table.
The waiter was one of them, I would learn later. A Worshipper. Figures. All of the really good waiters are Worshippers.
Waiting for me were John Harkin, a tall, thin, former Anglican priest who'd resigned and/or been fired so he could become part of Preacher's flock, and David Levy, a short, stocky financial analyst whose computer hobby had led to him handling both the books for, and computer systems of, the Worshippers.
After a few moments for introductions and chit-chat the young waiter reappeared to take our drink orders.
A glass full of ice and a bottle of 21-year-old Loch Morar, I thought. In fact, forget the glass. Just the bottle and a straw.
I ordered an iced tea.
I told them that in a hundred years -- hell, ten years -- nobody would give a damn who Preacher Haywood was. I told them that he was my generation's equivalent of Werner Erhard. At best maybe a modern-day Ann Lee.
I told them that, frankly, while I wasn't surprised that Haywood became the head of a sex cult, I was a little surprised that his ego had reached the point where he was commissioning biographical research.
That's when they told me that Preacher didn't know about the project, would almost certainly have objected to the project... and that he'd disappeared from Worship headquarters over a year ago, and nobody had heard from him since.
They told me they agreed that the odds were greatly against Worship standing any test of time. But then again, they said, there were over 13,000,000 copies of Notes On Worship in circulation, counting the downloads.
When I heard that sales figure I did a spit take. Even though they sell the books at cost, that's a lot of units.
In the end, though, it was the money that convinced me to say yes. They were offering essentially a year's salary for what I figured would be three months' work -- mostly tracking down some of Haywood's old drinking buddies and getting them to talk into a tape recorder. With the balance I could go back to Boston and redo the Gerry research, and wait for a decent job opening.
Still, I undertook one last effort to wreck the deal. I pointed out that my last communication with Preacher involved me trying to punch his lights out. And that before that we were best friends. And so either way, in a hundred years, no biographer worth his salt was going to accept my archive as an unbiased record of Haywood's life.
Or at least the first thirty-some years of it.
They were, however, both fully aware and fine with that. They wanted me because they thought -- correctly, in my opinion -- that my own ego would demand that I be as scrupulously fair as possible. I was enough of a scholar to recognize that an obvious -- even a subtle -- hatchet job might backfire, while a hagiography would be instantly dismissed. If I wanted to debunk the Preacher Haywood myth (and I did), I would do it best by being honest.
There was one other caveat -- I couldn't publish my findings. All of the interviews and information-gathering was to be archival only. They even had a lawyer draw up releases for my interview subjects, promising them that they wouldn't publish anything in the archive for at least 50 years.
That’s the part of the deal I’m breaking by writing this. Actually, it occurs to me that nothing I’ve written so far violates the agreement. But that will probably change.
Sunday, January 16, 2005
Part Two
So four weeks drying out with the rich and famous (lucky for me, my sister made a buttload of money) and then the next two months looking for work while mooching off of her and her husband.
I opted for a somewhat unconventional approach to finding a new job. Mostly it involved sitting on my ass playing my nephew's Xbox for six, eight hours a day. But nobody ever started a professional Halo oldtimer's league (I could kick me some Covenant ass) and so occasionally I would also try a more traditional job-hunting approach.
Which was no more successful than the Xbox approach, frankly. I would get the Chronicle of Higher Education each week, search the want ads, and mail out obsequious letters with my c.v. But apparently I was still persona non grata in the academic world.
To begin with, apparently flipping off McCullough has broader ramifications than one might think. I mean OK, it was national TV, but it was PBS for chrissakes.
Then I discovered it was probably a bad idea to send a resume to any school I'd visited during my last book/lecture tour. That SOB at Vanderbilt called me up just to laugh at me, and to remind me I still owed them four hundred bucks for puking on the carpet in their guest residence. I told them that if they served better Scotch I wouldn't have been obligated to return it so... violently, and that they were lucky I wasn't suing them for trying to poison me.
Jen pointed out that this conversation probably didn't increase the odds of me being hired. I disagreed. I was a prick before I was a drunk, I said to her. People need to know the old Nick D'Alessio is back.
I even tried getting back into the punditry business. I figured a nice one-year fellowship with Cato or Brookings or some think-tank like that would help pad the resume and give people time to forget about some of my more excessive excesses. But when I had been making the talking-head rounds I was equally hostile to liberals and conservatives. The Republicans won't tolerate dissent, and the Democrats only wanted people who could help them get back into power, and plus --
"You gave David McCullough the finger on national television!"
Oh, please, get over it, people.
Rumors of my unemployed status reached far afield, however, and after two months I was contacted by someone to whom I'd not sent a c.v. My guess is it was that asshole at Vanderbilt who forwarded it down there.
Touche, asshole.
He said his name was... I don't know, Cletus or something. He was the head of a community college outside Mobile, Alabama, and he was willing to offer me a one-year contract position teaching American history to the paralegals and nursing assistants of tomorrow.
Jen pointed out that it was, in fact, a paying gig. Look, she said, you'll be on the beach, you'll be a big fish in a very small pond, you'll have time to start writing again.
I reminded her that all of my icebreaking jokes involved Southerners and/or community colleges. "I wouldn't know what to say," I said.
She didn't push. She could have threatened to tell Mom, but she said nothing.
But anyhow after two months she called me at (her) home one day and said "I just talked to someone about a great job for you."
"How great?" I said.
"Well..." she paused. "Look, you're going to say no. So just say it now, so we can get it behind us, and then I'll explain to you why you should change your mind."
"How do you know I'm going to say no? Is it at another deep South community college?"
"It's about Preacher Haywood."
I rolled my eyes, even though she couldn't see them. "No."
She laughed. "OK, now let's get serious. They're going to offer you a lot of money to do something pretty easy. And you won't have to actually see Preacher at all, if you don't want to."
"They?" I asked. "Worshippers? Jen, what's a good Catholic girl like you doing mixed up with them?"
"They called me trying to find you," she said. "And..."
"What?" I said, after the pause got too long.
"Nothing," she said. "Look, you're having lunch with them tomorrow."
"Tomorrow's no good for me," I said. "Besides, you don't want me to look desperate."
"Tomorrow," she said, and hung up.
I took her car and twenty dollars and got a haircut. Went through the clothes that Sarah sent up to me and found a decent suit. Might was well make them feel bad about not being able to hire me.
I opted for a somewhat unconventional approach to finding a new job. Mostly it involved sitting on my ass playing my nephew's Xbox for six, eight hours a day. But nobody ever started a professional Halo oldtimer's league (I could kick me some Covenant ass) and so occasionally I would also try a more traditional job-hunting approach.
Which was no more successful than the Xbox approach, frankly. I would get the Chronicle of Higher Education each week, search the want ads, and mail out obsequious letters with my c.v. But apparently I was still persona non grata in the academic world.
To begin with, apparently flipping off McCullough has broader ramifications than one might think. I mean OK, it was national TV, but it was PBS for chrissakes.
Then I discovered it was probably a bad idea to send a resume to any school I'd visited during my last book/lecture tour. That SOB at Vanderbilt called me up just to laugh at me, and to remind me I still owed them four hundred bucks for puking on the carpet in their guest residence. I told them that if they served better Scotch I wouldn't have been obligated to return it so... violently, and that they were lucky I wasn't suing them for trying to poison me.
Jen pointed out that this conversation probably didn't increase the odds of me being hired. I disagreed. I was a prick before I was a drunk, I said to her. People need to know the old Nick D'Alessio is back.
I even tried getting back into the punditry business. I figured a nice one-year fellowship with Cato or Brookings or some think-tank like that would help pad the resume and give people time to forget about some of my more excessive excesses. But when I had been making the talking-head rounds I was equally hostile to liberals and conservatives. The Republicans won't tolerate dissent, and the Democrats only wanted people who could help them get back into power, and plus --
"You gave David McCullough the finger on national television!"
Oh, please, get over it, people.
Rumors of my unemployed status reached far afield, however, and after two months I was contacted by someone to whom I'd not sent a c.v. My guess is it was that asshole at Vanderbilt who forwarded it down there.
Touche, asshole.
He said his name was... I don't know, Cletus or something. He was the head of a community college outside Mobile, Alabama, and he was willing to offer me a one-year contract position teaching American history to the paralegals and nursing assistants of tomorrow.
Jen pointed out that it was, in fact, a paying gig. Look, she said, you'll be on the beach, you'll be a big fish in a very small pond, you'll have time to start writing again.
I reminded her that all of my icebreaking jokes involved Southerners and/or community colleges. "I wouldn't know what to say," I said.
She didn't push. She could have threatened to tell Mom, but she said nothing.
But anyhow after two months she called me at (her) home one day and said "I just talked to someone about a great job for you."
"How great?" I said.
"Well..." she paused. "Look, you're going to say no. So just say it now, so we can get it behind us, and then I'll explain to you why you should change your mind."
"How do you know I'm going to say no? Is it at another deep South community college?"
"It's about Preacher Haywood."
I rolled my eyes, even though she couldn't see them. "No."
She laughed. "OK, now let's get serious. They're going to offer you a lot of money to do something pretty easy. And you won't have to actually see Preacher at all, if you don't want to."
"They?" I asked. "Worshippers? Jen, what's a good Catholic girl like you doing mixed up with them?"
"They called me trying to find you," she said. "And..."
"What?" I said, after the pause got too long.
"Nothing," she said. "Look, you're having lunch with them tomorrow."
"Tomorrow's no good for me," I said. "Besides, you don't want me to look desperate."
"Tomorrow," she said, and hung up.
I took her car and twenty dollars and got a haircut. Went through the clothes that Sarah sent up to me and found a decent suit. Might was well make them feel bad about not being able to hire me.
Part One
This blog is, of course, just another example of my self-destructive behavior. John Harkin and the rest of those pious little shits in St. Michaels will probably try to demand their retainer back when they find out I'm releasing the results of my work without their permission.
But fuck 'em; they won't want the publicity of a lawsuit. And it's not like anything I could post here would undo the work I did for them. Good work. Quality work. Work I didn't want to do at all.
I did it for the money, same as everybody else.
There was a time when I wouldn't have needed their money and I would have laughed in their faces if they'd even suggested I work on a project involving Preacher Haywood. I had published three books -- two of them pretty good -- and I was tenured and the speaking circuit alone was enough to keep the liquor cabinet full.
But if you're Stephen King and you write a shitty novel (Dreamcatcher comes to mind) you still sell a zillion copies and cash in on the film rights. You write biographies and it only takes one clunker to bring down the whole house of cards. Everybody liked Alexander Hamilton. The Schuyler Colfax thing started as a joke ("I'll write a book about someone NOBODY cares about!") but it came out right when the Clinton impeachment heated up and made me a pundit overnight.
OK, so The Racketeer tanked. First off, I should have just called it Smedley Butler, like my publisher wanted. But I was tired of using my subject's name as the title. Second off, I was drunk off my ass for most of the research and all of the writing. For a biography largely written while loaded, it's not that bad.
So strike one, I put out a mediocre (OK, bad) book.
Strike two, apparently when Dylan Thomas comes to speak at your college and is an inebriated lecher, it's cool, but when some two-bit historian tries to pull the same thing, it's "you're paying for the damage to your hotel room" and "step back from the podium, you disgusting drunk" and "she's only 19!"
Somewhere in there I was on an NEH discussion panel with David McCullough and gave him the finger. That probably didn't help.
Then there were all the bridges I burned being a cocky shithead at dear old A.U. It's true -- the people you piss upon on the way up will be there waiting for you to piss on them on the way back down. Turns out that if you don't show up for half your classes -- and you're wasted when you do make an appearance -- they can fire you, even if you're tenured. Although I stand by what I said at the "peer council" hearing when they put me on trial and revoked my tenure -- I was a better professor drunk than most of them were sober, and any student who couldn't stand to see his instructor barf into a trashcan during the lecture wasn't American University material anyway.
In between the shitty book and the firing was the divorce, and I won't make light of that. I more than deserved it.
So what to do when you've lost everything? And the fuckers that run your publishing company are screaming for the return of their advance on Eldridge Gerry (they gave up screaming for an actual manuscript months earlier)? And you have no home, no job, no wife, no nothing, because you drank it all away, because you're an asshole?
That's right -- you go to a bar. Let me tell you, there's nothing even remotely glamorous about being a drunk. It smells of piss and vomit, and after while you don't even taste it anymore. It's just pathetic.
I had twenty-seven dollars. Plus I had my secret reserve -- a sealed bottle of Johnny Walker that I found when emptying out my office. It was cold out -- the saying about Washington having northern charm and southern efficiency applies to the climate in the District, too, it's rarely pleasant and sunny or crisp and clear, it's either muggy and oppressive or bitter and raw. I'd been living out of a motel out on New York Avenue for the past month, and the funds for that had run out a week ago. So I needed to make those twenty-seven dollars last. I hoped the bartender wasn't expecting a generous tip.
Maybe it was the rare effort of drinking slowly; maybe it was the prospect of me and my Ph.D. actually spending the night in a Washington D.C. homeless shelter; maybe I just pussied out. Anyhow I called Jenny.
My sister knew nothing of what was going on in my life, of course. I mean she knew that Racketeer blew, but she didn't know I was broke, divorced, homeless, jobless. And when she answered the phone (for her sake I'll leave the name of her giant New York firm out of it, but that's where I called her) I didn't know where to begin. So I tried to make idle chit-chat. Hi. How are you doing. How's (pause -- blanked for a moment on her husband's name) Bryan?
She saw right through that. Ernest Hemingway once said that every writer needs a built-in, shock-proof shit detector, and for me it was Jenny.
So she wanted to know what was going on, and I said, well, I'm in this bar, right across the street from the National Cathedral, and it made me think of you.
There was a moment's silence. It's 11 a.m., she said.
It's four o'clock somewhere, I said, trying to sound witty.
Yeah, London, she said. What's going on?
I hung up then. Big mistake. My sister is one of those bulldog sort of attorneys. She called my office and found out that I no longer worked there, and called Sarah, my ex, and got a brief synopsis of my self-destruction, and she rented a car and left work at noon and drove from Manhattan to Washington to get me.
When she pulled up a little after four I was actually across the street shooting the breeze with a priest. Not in the cathedral itself. He was standing on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette and I had finally gotten thrown out of the bar after five consecutive hours of loyal patronage. Twenty-seven dollars doesn't buy as much Scotch as it used to.
"This," I said to the priest, without showing a flicker of surprise at the unannounced arrival of my sister from 250 miles away, "is who you want to be talking to. An actual faithful Catholic, all the way from the Big Apple, my sister, Jennifer D'Alessio!" I started clapping. My sister threw me in the car and drove away (after, I'm quite certain, apologizing to the priest, although I don't really remember that).
I told her the whole story all the way up the Jersey turnpike. And when we stopped so she could eat pancakes in Maryland (if I don't stretch my legs I'll get an embolism, she said). She listened and made a few phone calls of her own and she hand-delivered me to an inpatient program for rich boozehounds on Long Island.
Do you know what keeps me sober nowadays, more than anything? It's the fear that if I start drinking again, I'll end up back in treatment. Twenty-eight days of treatment -- of group therapy, of working through "the steps," of making amends -- was almost as bad as being a drunk.
Jesus, I'm tired of writing, and I haven't said anything about Preacher, or Worship, or my connection to any of that.
But fuck 'em; they won't want the publicity of a lawsuit. And it's not like anything I could post here would undo the work I did for them. Good work. Quality work. Work I didn't want to do at all.
I did it for the money, same as everybody else.
There was a time when I wouldn't have needed their money and I would have laughed in their faces if they'd even suggested I work on a project involving Preacher Haywood. I had published three books -- two of them pretty good -- and I was tenured and the speaking circuit alone was enough to keep the liquor cabinet full.
But if you're Stephen King and you write a shitty novel (Dreamcatcher comes to mind) you still sell a zillion copies and cash in on the film rights. You write biographies and it only takes one clunker to bring down the whole house of cards. Everybody liked Alexander Hamilton. The Schuyler Colfax thing started as a joke ("I'll write a book about someone NOBODY cares about!") but it came out right when the Clinton impeachment heated up and made me a pundit overnight.
OK, so The Racketeer tanked. First off, I should have just called it Smedley Butler, like my publisher wanted. But I was tired of using my subject's name as the title. Second off, I was drunk off my ass for most of the research and all of the writing. For a biography largely written while loaded, it's not that bad.
So strike one, I put out a mediocre (OK, bad) book.
Strike two, apparently when Dylan Thomas comes to speak at your college and is an inebriated lecher, it's cool, but when some two-bit historian tries to pull the same thing, it's "you're paying for the damage to your hotel room" and "step back from the podium, you disgusting drunk" and "she's only 19!"
Somewhere in there I was on an NEH discussion panel with David McCullough and gave him the finger. That probably didn't help.
Then there were all the bridges I burned being a cocky shithead at dear old A.U. It's true -- the people you piss upon on the way up will be there waiting for you to piss on them on the way back down. Turns out that if you don't show up for half your classes -- and you're wasted when you do make an appearance -- they can fire you, even if you're tenured. Although I stand by what I said at the "peer council" hearing when they put me on trial and revoked my tenure -- I was a better professor drunk than most of them were sober, and any student who couldn't stand to see his instructor barf into a trashcan during the lecture wasn't American University material anyway.
In between the shitty book and the firing was the divorce, and I won't make light of that. I more than deserved it.
So what to do when you've lost everything? And the fuckers that run your publishing company are screaming for the return of their advance on Eldridge Gerry (they gave up screaming for an actual manuscript months earlier)? And you have no home, no job, no wife, no nothing, because you drank it all away, because you're an asshole?
That's right -- you go to a bar. Let me tell you, there's nothing even remotely glamorous about being a drunk. It smells of piss and vomit, and after while you don't even taste it anymore. It's just pathetic.
I had twenty-seven dollars. Plus I had my secret reserve -- a sealed bottle of Johnny Walker that I found when emptying out my office. It was cold out -- the saying about Washington having northern charm and southern efficiency applies to the climate in the District, too, it's rarely pleasant and sunny or crisp and clear, it's either muggy and oppressive or bitter and raw. I'd been living out of a motel out on New York Avenue for the past month, and the funds for that had run out a week ago. So I needed to make those twenty-seven dollars last. I hoped the bartender wasn't expecting a generous tip.
Maybe it was the rare effort of drinking slowly; maybe it was the prospect of me and my Ph.D. actually spending the night in a Washington D.C. homeless shelter; maybe I just pussied out. Anyhow I called Jenny.
My sister knew nothing of what was going on in my life, of course. I mean she knew that Racketeer blew, but she didn't know I was broke, divorced, homeless, jobless. And when she answered the phone (for her sake I'll leave the name of her giant New York firm out of it, but that's where I called her) I didn't know where to begin. So I tried to make idle chit-chat. Hi. How are you doing. How's (pause -- blanked for a moment on her husband's name) Bryan?
She saw right through that. Ernest Hemingway once said that every writer needs a built-in, shock-proof shit detector, and for me it was Jenny.
So she wanted to know what was going on, and I said, well, I'm in this bar, right across the street from the National Cathedral, and it made me think of you.
There was a moment's silence. It's 11 a.m., she said.
It's four o'clock somewhere, I said, trying to sound witty.
Yeah, London, she said. What's going on?
I hung up then. Big mistake. My sister is one of those bulldog sort of attorneys. She called my office and found out that I no longer worked there, and called Sarah, my ex, and got a brief synopsis of my self-destruction, and she rented a car and left work at noon and drove from Manhattan to Washington to get me.
When she pulled up a little after four I was actually across the street shooting the breeze with a priest. Not in the cathedral itself. He was standing on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette and I had finally gotten thrown out of the bar after five consecutive hours of loyal patronage. Twenty-seven dollars doesn't buy as much Scotch as it used to.
"This," I said to the priest, without showing a flicker of surprise at the unannounced arrival of my sister from 250 miles away, "is who you want to be talking to. An actual faithful Catholic, all the way from the Big Apple, my sister, Jennifer D'Alessio!" I started clapping. My sister threw me in the car and drove away (after, I'm quite certain, apologizing to the priest, although I don't really remember that).
I told her the whole story all the way up the Jersey turnpike. And when we stopped so she could eat pancakes in Maryland (if I don't stretch my legs I'll get an embolism, she said). She listened and made a few phone calls of her own and she hand-delivered me to an inpatient program for rich boozehounds on Long Island.
Do you know what keeps me sober nowadays, more than anything? It's the fear that if I start drinking again, I'll end up back in treatment. Twenty-eight days of treatment -- of group therapy, of working through "the steps," of making amends -- was almost as bad as being a drunk.
Jesus, I'm tired of writing, and I haven't said anything about Preacher, or Worship, or my connection to any of that.
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