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.