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.