Part Thirty Seven

The house they had in Hollywood Beach was right on the beach and a stone’s throw from the Diplomat Hotel. It wasn’t particularly attractive. In fact it was sort of dingy-looking, the roof sagged a bit in the middle, the porch canted to the right, and Preacher – who was meticulous about his kitchens – must’ve had a heart attack at the tiny, grease-spattered kitchen.

But it was right on the beach. Near the action. The sort of place you paid $1,500 a month for even in the early ‘90s. And Haywood’s arrival apparently coincided with a man named Armando Schisler getting arrested (again) for possession of cocaine. Which is not, in and of itself, particularly important, except that Armando was the roommate of a man named Matt Foxwell, and Foxwell was at the time a new Assistant District Attorney for Broward County, and couldn’t have a roommate who kept getting popped for possession. Which meant that Foxwell might have to give up his small, dingy, but right-on-the-beach home for want of a roommate.

Except, of course, Preacher sat down next to Foxwell at the Sea Crest, a small dark and dingy bar in Hallaway, and the next day Haywood advanced Foxwell three months’ rent and moved in to the beach house.

He took a job in Boca Raton working as an orderly at a nursing home. It took him all of three days to find a decent job and a beachfront home. That weekend he bought a 1952 Indian Chief motorcycle, and got laid for the first time in years – for the first time since Seattle, probably, although there are unconfirmed reports that he gave a couple of people at the Bar Nothing the full cowboy experience.

The most depressing thing of all is how…predictable that is. House job transportation sex without effort, whenever he wanted.

I have no idea where he learned how to operate a motorcycle. Matt recalls that he took some sort of mandatory highway safety class but never seemed the least bit unsure or unsteady on it.

Typical.

Matt and I have something in common – when Preacher left Miami he gave Foxwell the motorcycle, just as he’d left me his jeep when he graduated from college. I sold the jeep while I was in grad school, but Foxwell still has the motorcycle. Still in mint condition. Candy-apple red. He’s got a wife and two kids and says that mostly he just rides slowly around the block every couple of weekends and thinks about the six months or so he and Preacher lived together in that beach house.

“Jesus,” Foxwell said, “I am a happily married man, I love my wife, but Jesus, the pussy.”

I gave him my most inscrutable look.

“Right,” Matt said, “you used to live with him, you know what I’m talking about.”

His wife -- Elena Gutierrez-Foxwell -- had, in point of fact, dated Preacher Haywood. In those days she was another ADA in Broward County (she’s a judge now) and Matt decided that his poor roommate really needed to be introduced to someone a little more substantive than the fake-breasted, bikini-clad nymphs he was meeting up and down the Gold Coast. Right. Poor Preacher. So Elena was, Matt said, the best-looking woman he knew with a triple-digit IQ, and so he tried to fix the two of them up.

Three dates. No sex. Elena broke it off. Said he lacked ambition. Said he was the sort of person for whom women did incredibly stupid things, and she thought it was probably smart to run as fast as she could before it was too late. “He was like,” she said, “heroin. People try heroin thinking that they can handle it. And some of them are right. But a lot of them end up hooked. I wasn’t taking any chances, not with a nursing home orderly who didn’t seem to want anything more out of his life.”

They then told me a tedious story about how they got involved afterward, and I feigned interest.

When I walked down the promenade with Foxwell and saw the perfect bodies, the rollerblades, the convertibles, Foxwell told me things were really little changed in the last dozen years. “Everybody knew him,” he said. “The t-shirt vendors, the barmaids, the rich girls, from Boca and Miami. And even over on the Intracoastal – I don’t know how, but when we would go over there he would still keep running into people he knew. Let me tell you, you could drink cheap if you stuck with him on a Friday night.”

I nodded noncommittally, thinking of Ocean City.

“I remember this one time,” he said, “we met these three girls from Monaco. Perfect bodies. Preacher talks to them in French, and one thing leads to another, and eventually we’re out on the beach and these women are taking off their tops and insisting on a moonlight swim…” his voice trailed off, and I knew that at that moment he couldn’t have picked Judge Gutierrez-Foxwell out of a lineup.

The Vista Del Rey Assisted Living Community was called the Vista Del Rey Nursing Home when Preacher worked there. My guess is that a few new coats of coral and turquoise paint have been slapped on the place since then. It’s actually pretty nice, as such places go – big, modern, clean, quiet. Not surprisingly, there aren’t any residents left who remember him. It’s where old people go to die, after all. There are probably a few people on the staff who worked with him, but when I spoke to the director of HR no names were volunteered. I ran ads in the newspaper but there were no takers.

Most of the higher-ups have been replaced since then, not a few of them because of the circumstances surrounding his departure. Fortunately for posterity, Haywood came to Foxwell with the whole matter because of Foxwell’s legal expertise.

Seems that, for one thing, Preacher and the residents got along well. That’s not surprising. But over the course of a few months Haywood began to see signs of abuse. The patients were initially afraid to say anything but Preacher caught one of the other orderlies – a veteran of the place named Maurice Clarke – in the act of breaking an old man’s hand.

Brittle bones. Muscular orderly. Tight squeeze. And another resident punished for soiling his bed, or demanding a better meal, or refusing to leave the TV room… whatever.

Preacher did what he was supposed to do, which was report it up the chain, but nothing happened, and the abuse continued.

One of the residents was a man named Hank Feldman, who had grown up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and who was, in fact, rather wealthy. Haywood and Feldman got along particularly well and sometimes when Preacher’s shift was over he would change into his civies and sit with Feldman and listen to stories about parties in the 1920s, about the Fitzgeralds and the Menckens and the Harrisses coming down from Baltimore to drink and carouse at his house near the mouth of the Tred Avon River.

I had to look up who RP Harriss was. My guess is that Preacher already knew.

At any rate, Preacher persuaded Feldman and one or two others – at personal risk – to support the abuse complaint against Clarke, in the naïve hope that this would somehow lead to the problem being addressed. It did not, and Feldman was denied food for a day as punishment – no marks that way, and Feldman was a diabetic… what Clarke and the other close-the-ranks assholes hadn’t counted on was Haywood leaving a warm bed with some 21-year-old roller-blader to go into work on his day off and check on a few old geezers.

And the next day he went to an alphabet soup of state agencies, and the DA’s office, and families of the victims, and unleashed a royal shit-storm. Backed up by his roommate, a prosecutor looking for a case that would get him some attention.

At that point Haywood’s days on the staff were numbered, of course. Officially, though, he was fired for gross misconduct.

It was a few weeks after the place was filled up with inspectors and regulators and police and prosecutors and all of the higher-ups were talking about how shocked, SHOCKED they were to learn about all this, and they just wish that Preacher had told someone before going public. The first one fired was Clarke, of course, and after picking up his last paycheck he walked up to Preacher and tried to punch him in the head.

I can so perfectly picture this that I don’t care that there aren’t any eyewitnesses. Anyone who knows Preacher can picture this. Preacher has a towel or something else in his hand – he’s too smart to punch someone with an open hand, even when it’s someone he’s wanted to punch for months – and he sees Clarke stride up to him purposefully and he stands there calmly, arms at his side, because he can’t believe that even an animal like Maurice Clarke would actually intend violence toward HIM, because he was just doing the right thing, and Clarke throws a well-telegraphed roundhouse punch that even one of the octogenarians could have ducked, and then without any change of expression at all Haywood throws a short, graceful left hook and Clarke hits the ground like a sack of potatoes.

I haven’t been in a fistfight since I was eight, and I am one of those people that nuns and crossing guards want to punch in the face just on general principles. Preacher Haywood was the nicest guy I ever met, he abhorred violence of all kinds, yet he was involved in at least four assaults after leaving high school – by all accounts not the aggressor in any of them, but not exactly turning the other cheek, either. Five assaults if you count the assassination attempt, but we haven’t gotten there yet.

So they fired Preacher for knocking Clarke out cold. Clarke filed assault charges, a worker’s compensation case, and a civil lawsuit against Haywood. The criminal charges were dismissed almost immediately, the worker’s compensation case was thrown out because it happened after the firing, and Haywood’s trust gave the man $5,000 to go away, against the advice of the lawyers, who told Preacher not to pay a nickel.

Picture a late-night conversation right after Preacher was fired. Sitting on the deck in the twilight, drinking beer and watching the moon rise over the Atlantic, are Matt and Preacher, Elena and a woman named Karen Adder (I couldn’t find her, but apparently she was the closest thing to a real girlfriend that Preacher had, although according to Matt and Elena she was little more than a semi-regular booty caller; she was, at the time, a stripper).

And Elena, who by this time had left the DA’s office and was dating Matt, is telling Preacher: you weren’t going to be a nursing home orderly the rest of your life anyhow. It’s time for you to grow up and do something with your life.

Preacher says, duh.

Seriously, dude, Matt says. He was the sort of lawyer who said “dude,” but it was starting to sound increasingly forced. You keep talking about opening a restaurant. We’ll find someplace here on the beach. I’ve seen you in action, man, you’ll be able to raise all the capital you need.

Karen nuzzles his neck.

This place is not right for me, Preacher answers, not looking at them, looking out across the water. Everything is a little too effortless down here.

You’ve made that choice, Elena says. Doesn’t have to be that way. Go back to school. What about med school? You talked about that once. That’s not effortless. That’s something even you would have to work hard for. And something that would bring you some satisfaction, some sense of accomplishment.

You would look so hot in a lab coat, Karen says to him, and he smiles and kisses her. Matt and Elena roll their eyes.

I actually signed up to take the MCAT, he says to them. I have to read up on the science stuff. It’s not that long a test, really. So each question carries a lot of weight.

I think that’s a great idea, Matt says. I think that you would be a fantastic doctor. Would you go into gerontology?

Haywood shrugs noncommittally. Most of the doctors I’ve met, he says, tell me that they always had a burning desire to be a doctor, that it was all they really wanted to do, that you had to really love it to put up with all the bullshit they put you through to make you a doctor. I don’t have any of that. I’m not sure it’s for me. I don’t want to get halfway through it and decide I made the wrong choice.

Not making any choice, Elena said, is worse. Right now you’re not making any choices, but one day the frat party is going to end.

You seem sad, baby, Karen said. Let’s go see if I can cheer you up.

According to Matt, Preacher said he liked Karen because she had an uncomplicated view of life and a surprising amount of self-knowledge.

Right.

He took the MCAT. Some nauseatingly high score. It’s in the archive. But that was as far as it went. Afterward they threw an insane beach party that was broken up by the police twice, and the second time involved chasing away cops who’d never left after responding to the first call. And after the beach party he gave the Indian Chief to Matt and stuck out his thumb and disappeared.

Elena and Matt are both Worshipers. Low-key about it, but they’re in a Circle and their house has that look, that feel of a place where running the vacuum cleaner helps them commune with God and it always smells like lavender and fresh-baked cookies. It really, sometimes, just makes you want to scream. She’s a judge and he heads the felony trial division in the prosecutor’s office. Who the fuck has time to make the beds and bake cookies? And look after their perfect non-video-game-playing children? The Worshipers all want for a little sloth, in my opinion.

But given how truly bizarre Haywood’s life got after leaving Miami Beach, even I find it hard to begrudge him a few months of hedonism.

No, I take that back. I begrudge him that. I was married, with a non-tenure-track job at Bowling Green and working on my Ph.D, starving and desperate and contemplating law school, or suicide. As if there was a difference. And he was nailing European fashion models on the beaches of south Florida. I begrudge the hell out of him.