Part Fourteen

One could charitably call Florence, Kentucky, a suburb of Cincinnati. If there was anything charitable about being called a suburb of Cincinnati. My first teaching job was at Bowling Green, so I feel well qualified to sneer about both Ohio and Kentucky.

What brought me to the Midwest was a woman named Sally Stubbs, a divorced mother of one and the principal of the local middle school. The directions she gave me to her house were for shit and I got lost en route from the airport but eventually I figured out where I was supposed to go. She was one of my first interviews – just worked out that way, I guess – and after that I learned to Mapquest everything before I left.

(I didn’t actually do that, of course. But thereafter when I got lost I blamed myself for being too lazy to check the directions on the computer, instead of the person who gave me the bad directions. OK, I didn’t do that either – I still blamed the person who gave me the directions. But I felt a little sheepish about it afterwards.)

Sally lived in a comfortable little house on the north edge of the town and her son stayed outside in the driveway shooting baskets the whole time I was there. Anyone who listens to the interview will hear the incessant ting ting ting ting ting ting of a basketball bouncing on asphalt.

Very soothing. At one point I wondered the interview would be compromised if I went outside and kicked the fucking ball across the street. But knowing me, I would probably miss and fall on my ass.

I didn’t recognize her at first. The Sally I remembered from college was a tall, raw-boned blonde, with angular shoulders and an overbite. The woman who answered the door had a slightly pear-shaped figure and nice even teeth. If you had to choose between orthodonture and a fat ass, which would you take? But she guffawed as I walked up her sidewalk and instantly I knew I was in the right place.

“Ya’ll look like a fish outta water here, Nicky, I gotta tell ya,” she said, and that’s the last time I will attempt to transcribe her vernacular. Suffice it to say that her Appalachian drawl had intensified since college. That was one of the first things I commented upon, since “gee, you went from bony to dumpy” seemed to be inappropriate. She was supposed to be honest and objective, not me.

She cut loose that loud laugh again. “Yeah, well, once I moved back here, it all kind of came back. When you and I met, remember, I’d already spent two years trying to learn how to talk like a college girl.”

“Were you from Florence originally?”

“Hell, no, Florence was the big city. I was from Spavine. Real hillbilly country.”

“How did you end up back here?”

“I was teaching in Louisville and putting my ex through dental school,” she said. Hence the teeth. “Then… well, like I said, he’s my ex. Tommy” [her son] “and I needed some distance, there was an opening in Boone County for a vice-principal and, well, here I am. Been here five years.”

“I told you why I’m here.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sort of surprised you’re talking to me. I mean we dated for about five minutes, right? But I checked it out and they said you were on the level.”

“They?”

“Those Worship guys in Maryland.”

“How do you know them?”

She laughed and pulled the sleeve back on her Cincinnati Bearcats t-shirt and I could see a small circle tattooed on her upper right shoulder. Christ, I thought, she’s one of them. "Don't exactly know them. Know of them. Worship is the first real Internet religion."

“When did you, ah…”

“Little while after I moved up here. Friend from school was having me over for dinner all the time. After awhile I figured out it was a Worship circle. She told me where I could find the book. When I told her I used to date Preacher in college, she pretended to believe me, but secretly she thought I was full of crap.” She brayed again, and took a sip of diet Coke. “But then we went to see him speak at the Corbett Auditorium and the sonofabitch spotted me in the audience. I mean the place was packed, but he saw me and mentioned me by name. Went to see him backstage with my friend. We ended up going out for a late supper with him and a few other people. Fish sandwiches at Delhi House. One thing about being a Worshipper, you make it a point to eat good food.”

“When was that?”

“I guess two, three years ago,” she said.

“Was that the last time you saw him?”

She nodded. “It was… it wasn’t like seeing an old college friend. I mean it wasn’t like seeing you, for example. You know? See someone from those days and you feel really old and young again at the same time, right? There’s some nostalgia. I mean I had more serious boyfriends than Preacher, guys I was with longer, and there’s a lot of emotions when you see one of them, all wrapped up in the past, right? But it was different with Preacher. He… it wasn’t like seeing an old boyfriend. It… it’s hard to explain.”

“Try,” I urged. I mean that’s what I’m there for, right?

“Well, for one thing, he looked… exactly the same. You know how he always seemed a little older, a little more mature than the rest of us? Well, in fifteen years it looked like he’d aged maybe five. Maybe not even that. So that was kind of odd. You didn’t notice it at first, right, you saw him, and you thought, well, that’s Preacher – he looks exactly the same. And then you think about it. How can he look exactly the same? He’s in his mid-30s, how can he look like he’s in his mid-20s still? But he did. And the other thing is that there’s something about him now, something… peaceful. Something… maybe it’s because I’d spent the last hour listening to him talk, listening to him say all those wonderful things. And because I’d already started reorienting my life along the path he’d shown… I mean maybe there was a little bit of hero-worship there. But I don’t think that’s it. Because I also remembered him getting drunk and puking in the bushes after that Halloween party over on West Street. So I wasn’t as awestruck as a lot of others. So it had to be more than that. There was something qualitatively different about him. There was this great… wisdom. And a sense of connection, of groundedness. Just being around him made you more comfortable, made you more confident that everything was going to be OK. The story is that he spent five years plugged into the Divine, no distractions, and I was a little skeptical before that night. I mean I figured he’d written a pretty good self-help book, not much more than that. But after hearing him speak and especially after spending a little while with him afterwards I realized that there was something real to this. That he really was plugged in to some other frequency. I got that tattoo the next day.” She pointed toward her shoulder with her chin.

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“And nothing since?”

“Nothing. One thing I did understand was that Preacher didn’t want any of this to be about him. And it’s a good thing, too. I mean if he wanted to be cynical about this, exploit what had happened to him for his own gain… if he had asked us each to sell our belongings and follow him from town to town, we all would have done it. I would have, anyhow.”

She paused and took another sip. “Is it true? That he refused to sleep with other Worshippers?”

“I… part of this is that I don’t answer any of those kind of questions,” I said. “I don’t want to influence what you say.”

“Well,” she shrugged, “on the other hand, I suppose if he had been the exploitative type he wouldn’t have exuded the same… wouldn’t have been… so effective.”

We chatted for a bit more about her trip to see the speech. The talk itself, like all of his public speeches on that tour, is recorded and in the archive. I watched part of it. She was right. Physically he was little changed from college. But whatever right-hand-of-God vibe he was putting out was not conveyed by the rather shaky digital video footage.

I suppose you had to be there.

“Tell me how you met him the first time,” I said.

“I was standing outside the Market House down by the City Dock,” she told me. “Have you been back there? Did you know they put a statue of that Roots guy there?”

I nodded.

“It was… it must have been fairly early in the semester. It was still real warm out, I remember that. And he was stopped at the light on the bottom of Main Street, and he was driving that Jeep of his, remember that thing? And I was waiting for the light to change, and he had his radio playing, and he was playing bluegrass. I looked over because, well, frankly, once I left Kentucky, I didn’t hear much bluegrass. It was… I think it was the Country Gentlemen. I don’t remember for sure. But I said “ya’ll have bluegrass out here?” and he said “you want a ride back to campus?” and I got in."

I tried to visualize this -- a warm afternoon, Preacher, the jeep, the hick music. A tall, skinny blonde girl in shorts and a tanktop. Seemed about right. “He knew who you were?”

“He didn’t know my name. Just recognized me from school. But I’d spent the first two years in Santa Fe. I had only been in Annapolis for a couple of weeks. You know how that was -- St. John’s was a small school and everybody kind of knew everyone else. I knew him, too. I mean I recognized him.”

“So how did you start dating?”

“He told me that he hadn’t met anyone else at school who appreciated old men singing through their noses. And we went back to that house you guys lived in off campus and I saw all those cassettes he had. And… I don’t know. It turned out that we both liked old film noir, too. And he could make you laugh. I mean all of you guys were pretty funny. I liked hanging out at your house. You guys were slobs, but you were a lot of fun. And he was… well, like I said. Mature for his age. I never would have guessed that he was a sophomore. I was a junior then, remember. The difference between 19 and 20 seems really insignificant now, but it was a big deal at the time.”

She stared contemplatively at the ice melting in my own relatively untouched glass of Coke. “You know, I remember all of these conversations with him back then. I remember he was like the best boyfriend in the world for conversation. But I have a hard time remembering what we talked about. It wasn’t about realizing the Divine, I can assure you. I remember he told me about moving all over the place when he was a kid, and I told him about growing up in Spavine, Kentucky. Population 743, except now I was away at college, so someone had to change the sign to 742. He said, see, nobody went out and changed a sign when I left San Diego.”

“Did he talk much about growing up?”

“Not really. He told me that when you’re always the new kid you look for some sort of in. That was what he liked about having that goofy name – he said just by introducing himself he could get a conversation going. And he told me that was part of what drew him to baseball, too. He said he could always find a game somewhere and by the end of it, he wasn’t really the new kid anymore. I guess other kids might turn to music or theater or something like that. For him it was baseball.” She thought about it for a moment. “I found out about his parents from you, I think. I remember being a little… I don’t know if mad was the right word. A little surprised that he would hold that back. I said to him, why didn’t you tell me that your parents were dead? And he said, you didn’t ask.”

That sounded like him. “What was your first date?” I said.

“The same day I met him, he asked me to go see the Johnson Mountain Boys with him the next weekend. I’d never even heard of them then. This was right when they were getting big. Big by bluegrass standards, anyhow. He told me about living on the West Coast and how hard it was to find bluegrass out there. And he told me about WAMU, which played tons of bluegrass.”

That’s the American University public radio station. They set aside a big hill at American to build an observatory when the school was founded, but the light pollution from the city rendered it unusable before the telescope could be built. Because by law nothing in DC can be taller than the Washington Monument, the radio transmitter they put on that hill reaches for miles and miles. You can pick up the station virtually anywhere in Maryland or Virginia. They don’t, in case anyone cares, play nearly as much bluegrass as they did in the ‘80s.

The things you learn working at a place.

“So we went to see the Johnson Mountain Boys at some little place near D.C., and the next weekend we went to see the Maltese Falcon at the Senator in Baltimore, and before I knew it we were, like, a steady couple.”

“Tell me about that.”

“We were meant to be friends, but not boyfriend and girlfriend,” she said. “I mean, there was no… electricity. Maybe we got too comfortable with each other. Too quickly. We went right from relative strangers to a comfortable old couple with no hot-and-heavy in between. I remember the first time we kissed I practically forced myself on him. And the sex always seemed a little… I don’t know. Forced. Awkward. A little… mechanical. It sounds gross to say it, but I think we were more like brother and sister than a real couple. So after awhile we decided, you know what? Let’s just be friends. I was the one who sort of brought it out into the open, but he could feel it too. Preacher can be very stubborn but I think he was relieved to hear me say it.”

“And you stayed friends?”

“The ultimate test of the friendly breakup is if you see your ex out on a date later and don’t care. And that was absolutely us. As opposed to my ex-husband, for example; even after all this time if I saw that asshole out with his new wife it would really piss me off. I hate him, and it still bothers me. Preacher I liked. I wanted him to meet the right girl. Too bad it wasn’t me.”

I looked around her house. It was immaculate. Tasteful. There was something… effortless about it. She was a working single mom; there should have been unwashed dishes, a pile of laundry waiting to be folded, something like that. She didn’t come across as particularly anal or compulsive, and I didn’t remember her that way from college, either.

Then it hit me, the easy, effortless grace. That fucking Preacher.

“...and Ellen,” she said to me, and my attention came back.

“What?”

“I said, like you and Ellen. I remember you broke up with her later that year and it was the same way. Both of you stayed friendly, neither of you particularly minded when the other started dating. I mean St. John’s was a small school. Everybody knew everybody’s business. The real reason they had the two campuses on opposite sides of the continent was to accommodate broken hearts. Everybody knows that.”

“Is that why you came to Maryland?”

“Naw, I was just tired of the desert,” she said.

“Do you remember anything else about him?”

“He was a good cook. He could beat the tar out of those Navy guys in croquet. He used to listen to rap music back before I knew anyone who listened to rap music. He tried to get me to enjoy it, but I couldn’t. He swore it was the same as bluegrass. That’s what he said. The same as bluegrass. People expressing themselves musically with the instruments they had handy, he said. I told him, musically? Scratching a record and cursing? How is that music?” She guffawed again. “Lord, I sound just like my mother.” She thought for a moment. “I remember that he dated that little quiet girl… what was her name? She didn’t go to school with us.”

“Lisa Howe,” I said, forgetting my pledge not to answer questions.

“Right, Lisa. Have you talked to her yet?”

I didn’t answer.

“You know,” she said, “it’s funny in a way. I mean Preacher and I weren’t really much of an item. A few dates, a few times in the sack… as a boyfriend he’s had pretty much no influence on me whatsoever. But fifteen years after we broke up I picked up a book he wrote and that changed my life entirely. Even improved my sex life.”

With that she must have noticed the skeptical look on my face, the one I didn’t do a very good job of hiding under the best of circumstances.

“I see that look,” she laughed. “Look, what he writes about is real, whether you believe it or not. Whether you use one of the paths he points out, or a different one. The Divine exists, and there are ways of being one with It. And oneness with the Divine is the…” she trailed off, seeing the blank hard stone of my face.

“Well, when you’re ready,” she shrugged. “And if you’re never ready, well, that’s our loss, I guess.”

When she walked me to the door she gave me a quick hug. And for a fleeting instant I could feel the skinny 20-year-old I remembered, the girl whose ribs showed and who was afraid to get her ears pierced and who beat me armwrestling one night when we were both stoned and Preacher insisted on playing Skitch Henderson records. We were armwrestling to see who got to throw the damn things out the window.

She hadn’t remembered that at all.

Which leads me to Lisa Howe, who remembered everything, EVERYTHING. Believe it or not, what follows is somewhat edited to eliminate some of her more… graphic remarks.

“I was in my clinical at Anne Arundel Hospital when I met him,” she said. We were sitting in a trendy Italian place called Alonzo’s. I remembered when it was a dingy neighborhood bar called Alonzo’s. Preacher had dragged us all the way up to Baltimore one night just so we could try their enormous hamburgers and listen to their great juke box. The jukebox was gone. They still had hamburgers on the menu but I was afraid of what they might have done to them. So I nursed a ginger ale and poured merlot into Lisa. Which is why her tape gets much more interesting toward the end. That’s why I’m not using quotation marks here, by the way: to get the complete story I have to cut and paste parts of the beginning of the interview, when she was positively hostile, with the end of the interview, where she was downright maudlin.

The reason we were at Alonzo’s was that she was a nursing supervisor at Keswick Nursing Home in Baltimore. She agreed to meet me after work, after much wheedling on my part.

In those days I would get up early in the morning and go for a run, go home, shower, and ride my bike to work.

(I remembered how exhausting she had been that way. Preacher said that dating her was like competing in a decathlon every day.)

So one morning I ran around the corner and bam, right into Preacher. This was toward the end of January in 1987. I remember it was the day after the Superbowl. I have no idea who played in it.

(Giants beat the Broncos. I looked it up. It’s utterly irrelevant.)

And I had a bad knee. Wrecked it in high school playing tennis. When we collided it went out again and I went down on the ground. Preacher felt really bad. Kept apologizing. It wasn’t his fault, actually. I wasn’t watching where I was going. But I guess I gave him a little bit of a hard time. I mean I was hurt and annoyed. He kept trying to help me up and I kept waving him off. But I couldn’t get my leg under me. Finally he said to me look, it’s freezing out here. Your sweat is going to freeze and you’ll be cemented to the sidewalk until June. Let me help you up. And I did. Grabbed hold of his arm. Good definition. Lifted me up like I weighed nothing.

(She did weigh nothing. Lisa Howe was maybe 5’2” and looked smaller than that. She was very athletic and there was nothing frail about her, but she was built like a jockey. All wire and gritted teeth. Almost twenty years later and she was unchanged. I remember she had very short dark hair when we were in college and she had long dark hair now. She was married and had two kids. My guess was that her abdomen was still better muscled than my entire body.)

He walked me to the Emergency Room, she continued. That was kind of embarrassing. I was a nursing student at Anne Arundel Community College, and I was doing my clinical there. So I knew some of the nurses and the doctors on duty. Once Preacher saw that I was OK he left for class. But the next day he came to the hospital to make sure I was OK. I was working. Had a knee brace on. That knee used to go out on me sometimes, but I could wear the brace for just a few days and be fine. After I had my first baby, though, it went out and didn’t come back. Had to have a UKA. I guess we were all a lot tougher then.

(She gave me a look that indicated that then, as now, she didn’t think of me as particularly tough. This line came late in the interview. I wanted to point out that I used to wake up in the morning with a higher blood alcohol content than she was currently sporting, and yet her speech was getting slurred. But I said nothing.)

I don’t mind saying it, she said, Preacher Haywood was a good-looking man. The corners of her mouth twitched slightly in what passed for a wistful smile. And I thought it was kind of sweet, she added, how concerned he was about me. So I asked him to take me out to dinner to make it up for me, and he did. He took me to the Griffin. I’m very particular about what I eat. I was even more so then. But I had a good time. I wanted to show him that my knee was OK. So I took him out to eat the next time – I reserved a racquetball court back at AACC and trounced him pretty good before supper. I don’t like men feeling superior, you know? Turns out it was the first time he’d ever played racquetball. Your housemate was a hell of an athlete. I mean you wouldn’t have known, I guess, at that school, but Preacher was one of the best pure athletes I ever met. He showed me how to row. I never went to a place that had crew, right? So he would take me to the boathouse and he taught me how to do it. One morning I saw him beat the Navy single scull champion in three straight heats. But since he was at St. John’s, nobody knew. Or cared, for that matter. You were all busy learning Greek. When they finished racing Preacher wasn’t even that winded.

We did lots of stuff together. I mean we were together all the time. Rock climbing, hiking, bicycling. Tennis. We would go to this batting cage in Millersville He could really hit. Once we went camping up at Elk Neck in Cecil County.

And I used to hang out at your house all the time. It was so convenient to the hospital. The trouble was that all the sports and everything covered up the fact that Preacher and I… we had nothing to say to each other. I mean not much in common at all. I was studying to be something, to be a nurse, and he was studying just to study. Just to be smarter than he already was, which was pretty smart. But he… he didn’t want to do anything with it. Nothing in particular, anyhow. I would see him reading like German philosophy or studying French or something and I would say to him, what kind of job is that going to get you? And he would just laugh.

This is really locked up, right? I mean nobody’s going to hear any of this for, what did you say? Fifty years, right. Maybe not ever. That might be best. I mean my husband… The fact of the matter is that Preacher and I stayed together for as long as we did because of the sex. I hate to say it now. Don’t get me wrong -- I am a happily married woman. I love my husband. But the sex, with Preacher… it was... I mean… the thing is, I got like addicted to it. You know what it is about addicts? I used to see this when I worked at the ER at Harbor Hospital. Addicts hate their drug. Did you know that?

(I looked at the mostly empty bottle of merlot when she said that. But said nothing.)

And it was that way with Preacher. He would listen to that god-awful crap he used to listen to and sort of brag about the fact that he had no hope of finding a job with any of the stuff he learned at St. John’s and I would want to kill him. But then his shirt would come off. I mean I would tell myself that I was going over to his house to break up with him and never even get that conversation started. I would tell myself I just wasn’t going over anymore and I would get up in the middle of the night and come over because I couldn’t stand it anymore. I wanted… it was pathological, really. I mean I found myself having desires I never had before or since. To be… to say and do things. To have things done to me. Sexual things. We did things that nobody… that I would never do in a million years. I used to make him… from behind. It was like, when I was pregnant with Sandy, all I wanted to eat was Kentucky Fried Chicken mashed potatoes. No reason for it. Never really liked them before, and the smell makes me nauseous now. But for a few months there I couldn’t get enough. It was the same with Preacher. I mean if my husband suggested doing half the things I was begging Preacher to do to me, I’d send him to a psychiatrist. But for those few months…

Finally I had to tear myself away. I mean cold turkey. That was the only way to do it. There was something about the way he… smelled. Tasted. Felt. I can’t describe it, really. Pheromones, I guess. I used to bite him. I mean hard. I mean I drew blood on more than one occasion. There is probably still a scar on his collarbone that is a perfect impression of my bottom teeth.

(Our nickname for her was the Screaming Mouse. Yes, I thought it up. She was remarkably uncommunicative most of the time, but once Preacher’s door closed it was another story. The wordless moaning and wailing was bad enough, but the screamed vulgarities went beyond funny straight to unsettling. One night Jerry and I made a tape so that Preacher could hear it from our perspective. “Shove it in my cunt. Call me a fucking whore. Gimme your cock. Fuck my pussy. Fuck your whore.” This from a woman who looked, dressed, and acted like a rather dour librarian most of the time. We hoped it would embarrass Preacher into dumping her. Unlike Sally, whom we liked, we both hated Lisa. But Preacher just laughed when we played it for him. Then trashed the tape. Said it was caddish.)

I remember, she continued, toward the end, I would time my breaks so that I could run up to the house while Preacher was there. So he could nail me during my lunch break. In those days nursing students had to wear a real nurse’s uniform. White dress, white shoes, white stockings. No hat until you graduated… Sometimes I wouldn't even take it off. Once when I was working nights on a real quiet floor I had him come to the hospital and do me in an empty room. Had him hold his hand over my mouth. I bit him so hard that time that he probably should have had stitches. That was really when I knew I had to end it, although it took me awhile longer to actually go through with it. The thing was that I knew Preacher had long since stopped getting any… had long since stopped taking any pleasure from the relationship. We really didn’t like each other. But he was the sort who would never admit defeat. It was up to me to be the sensible one. Some secret part of him thought that if he stuck it out long enough eventually we would have a healthy, sane relationship. But of course that was never going to happen.

I’ll give him credit for this, though. A few weeks after we split up my resolve weakened and I called him. I mean it was for no reason other than to get laid. My parents were gone for the weekend – I was still living at home then, did I mention that? – and I just wanted him to come over and… and he said no. Politely. Not a lot of guys would turn down a sure booty call like that.

(Jerry said that the noises she made sounded like if you put a puma and a timber wolf in a small cage and then dangled a goat just out of reach overhead. Bleating, growling, snarling, howling, and the occasional meow. She would stagger out of his bedroom in the morning and seem really embarrassed if anyone saw her limp into the shower. I remember thinking, bitch, you kept me awake all night like they were filming the pornographic sequel to the Exorcist next door, and now you get pissy if I see you limp into my bathroom wearing one of Preacher’s t-shirts?)

No, she insisted, I’m not a Worshipper. I go to church every Sunday. No, I’ve never looked at his book, or his website, or anything like that. I think that college of yours ruined him. That’s what I think.

(I called her a cab. From the smoldering looks I saw once she got soused enough to describe her sex life, I imagine that her husband was in for a hell of a night.)