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.