Part Eleven

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.