Part Forty One

Talk given at the second Worship convocation, St. Michael’s, Maryland.

When Ramakrishna touched the Divine, he sat in a speechless trance for six months. When he had a vision of Jesus, he wept for three days.

Ramakrishna had spent his life working in the temples of Kali and being trained by priests and pilgrims alike; he’d been on a spiritual trail for decades before Tota Puri shoved him that last little bit into the arms of the Divine.

And still, a six-month trance. Three days of weeping.

I am telling you this because it is possible that you might someday have your own experience of the Divine.

I doubt it. In all candor, the fact that you are here tells me that you are striving hard to know the Divine and that means you probably will not be able to master the final lesson, which is humility – that to know the Divine you must first give up seeking to know the Divine. It is downright un-American to do anything with the idea that you’re not worthy, and if you subtract humility from the equation then the idea that to find you must stop seeking just becomes New Age babble.

But let’s assume that I’m wrong and you’re right and you stop seeking and become as a child. And you have that transcendent experience we’re all here talking about.

What then?

In modern English the term “ecstasy” implies unadulterated pleasure, but the ecstatic experience of touching the Divine is not pleasurable. It is terrible. It is wrenching. It is… well, transcendent. I’m not sure how else to put it. It will strain your mind to the breaking point. By definition the Truth that you encounter will be beyond your ability to comprehend it. Even though you are that Truth, our intellects are far too limited to grasp 99% of what we are exposed to in that timeless moment that we see the fundamental reality of the Divine.

It will, to be blunt, screw you up almost beyond repair. As much work as you put into seeing and following the path to the Divine you can never be fully prepared for it. There are hermitages and monastery cells all around the planet filled with gibbering anchorites who found the Divine and went mad as a result. You will be speechless for a time afterwards because what you have encountered cannot, for obvious reasons, be put into words. There was a time when people were more accustomed to divine madness, and were better able to deal with it, culturally. We're not those people. In modern America, there's really just one kind of insane; that your particular mental illness was caused by the Divine and not by too little lithium in your blood is really not relevant. Nuts is nuts.

Think about it – once the direct experience of something has passed, then the way we know that something is by the use of symbols. Right? These symbols may not be words – they may be physical sensations, or notes, or colors, or images, or smells, or tastes – but they exist in our minds, as symbols of what has passed. And the only symbols our minds understand are those rooted in the physical world. All symbolic thought – which is to say, all of our conscious thought, all that makes us sentient beings, self-aware and aware that we are aware – is rooted in the five senses. This is something that philosophers like Locke figured out centuries ago. People like Noam Chomsky rephrase it in terms of semiotics, but it’s not a new concept. Conscious thought is expressed in symbols that depend upon the notion of a physical reality to have meaning. This is something the Buddhists, in particular, understood well.

But the Divine transcends the physical. Therefore you have no symbols with which to describe it. No words, no images, no notes. No touch, taste, smell. Your mind is left struggling with this experience which has overwhelmed it and for which it has no… no process, no tools for processing.

You will be able to suppress the memory somewhat. But just barely. It’s too powerful. Psychiatrists tell us that repressed childhood traumas express themselves in strange ways during our adulthood. Well, whatever childhood trauma you’ve experienced, the conscious awareness of the Divine is more traumatic. And more powerful. And when you try to deny it and squelch it and pretend it didn’t happen, it festers. It gnaws. It corrodes your mind like an acid volcano; you can let it explode, or you can keep a lid on it, but either way it’s going to rip you apart.

Let me tell you what doesn’t work to fix this problem.

Drugs, including alcohol, don’t work. You might be able to manage brief moments of weightlessness, where you don’t CARE that there’s an acid volcano stripping away your sanity, but the drugs will be increasingly ineffective until you’re back to making a joke of the whole thing by killing yourself.

Flight doesn’t work. It sounds odd, but everyone has the impulse to run. You associate what happened with where it happened, or who was with you when it happened, and you have this irrational urge to just get away from the scene of the crime in the hopes that a little distance will fix things. It doesn’t, for obvious reasons: the thing you’re running from is you, after all.

There are only two things that seem to work, and they both have their pros and cons.

One is to immediately resume walking upon the path that led you to the Divine to begin with. This can be very hard to do, and it seems counterintuitive – you want some distance between you and that awful crushing Truth that you stumbled upon. But if there are rites and rituals that have become habit to you, returning to them will be soothing. And the circling of the Divine that the path necessarily entails will help sort of step you down from the ledge; you wean yourself instead of dropping it cold turkey.

Like I said, this is hard for most people to accept. They want it out of them, they don’t want to start the non-search again.

Which brings me to the second option, one which I discovered sort of by accident but which explains the abundance of inaccurate roadmaps to the Divine that we have.

You can talk the damn thing to death.

When it happens to you, you will reflect upon what I just said and laugh derisively. Because… well, because of what I said earlier. The symbols we use are so utterly inadequate to describe something which transcends the physical that every attempt seems like a caricature, at best. You are taking the square pegs of that Divine experience and trying to fit them into the round holes of your conscious, symbolic thought.

Do it anyhow. Hammer on those square pegs until you force them into those holes. It will stretch the holes out some and at the same time shear the sharp edges off of those pegs.

It doesn’t have to be words. Whatever form of expression you’re most comfortable with. Dance. Sing. Paint. Whatever. Do it, and start doing it right away.

What happens is this: the inadequate, inaccurate, misleading caricature of the experience that you create symbolically will start to supplant the real thing in your mind. Even as you recognize that this symbolic version is little more than a parody of the real thing. But this symbolized version of Truth is something your mind can handle. And you will slowly neutralize that acid.

At the same time your reformed, easier-to-swallow version of events will serve as both a guidebook and a barrier to having the experience all over again. A guidebook, because now you’ve done it once and so you have a better idea of what the journey entails. But a barrier, because now your mind has this misleading, dumbed-down idea of the Divine that it clings to like a life preserver.

You might re-encounter the Divine later. That’s so strange to say. As if you would run into God walking down the street, hey, God, haven’t seen you in awhile. You never stop encountering the Divine. Let's say, then, you might again have a full realization of the Divine. That’s better. And after your brain can’t take it anymore and you are spit back into ordinary limited consciousness you will have to go through the same exercise. And you’ll come up with a different inaccurate rendition of the experience. But now you can use the two different flawed symbolic versions of Reality to help you triangulate on the Truth.

This is, really, all that Worship is. We take the flawed symbolic renditions of Truth that other survivors of the Divine have left behind, and we use them to try to figure out where we’re supposed to be looking. Lots of people find the Divine just by using the Bible, or the Koran, or, hell, the Sermon of the Flower. No one source did it for me -- I needed a little bit of everything to find my way.

Part Forty

Let me just say this, before continuing: I am not THAT heartless. The whole Kara/Karen name-game? Neither one of them is her actual name. This is probably the only part of this memoir where I will quite deliberately falsify someone’s identity. Her real name is, of course, in the archives, but I trust Harkin and the rest of them to keep that sealed until it doesn’t make any difference. And who knows? In this culture, tomorrow Kara/Karen might publish her own tell-all, making all this secrecy meaningless.

But Kara’s husband was the president of a small local bank, which made it ridiculously easy to find them. And she was active in her community and in her church bulletin, which was conveniently posted on the Internet, which made it even easier to find them.

I sent her a letter, carefully worded: I am doing some research regarding a number of people who lived in Chicago in the early 1990s, could I please just have a few moments of your time.

It was ignored.

But I was in Kentucky anyhow, to interview Sally Stubbs, and I’d seen both pictures of Kara as a model (very pretty, Grayson understated things) and as a mom (still very pretty, and only heavy compared to the fashion model she used to be), I knew where she lived, where she went to church, where her husband worked…

I was face-to-face with her at a church bake sale and I said – when no one was around to hear – “did you used to know Preacher Haywood?”

She bit her lip, every blood cell drained from her face, and she shook her head no. This was not a “no I didn’t know him.” It was a “no don’t talk about it.” I told her it was important that we talk about it, that I could promise her complete confidentiality, and then some moron wandered up to buy coconut cake and that was the end of our conversation. I gave her my card.

The next day I followed her as she dropped the kids off at a church-run preschool and then went to the grocery store. She saw me walking down the aisle toward her and she looked around as if she was seriously contemplating running away. Instead she just hunched behind her cart and kept it between us.

“You sent me that letter, didn’t you,” she said so softly I could barely hear.

“Yes,” I said. “I work for the Worshipers, and they’re trying to figure out what happened to Preacher when he lived in Chicago, and that’s led me to you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, so haltingly and unconvincingly that I laughed out loud.

“You don’t understand,” she said, and tears welled up in her pretty blue eyes.

“Try me,” I said. “I was serious about complete confidentiality. We’re not going to publicize any of this. This is just academic research.”

“Maybe to you,” she said. “It’s not academic to me. I have to live in this town. My church… my husband… my kids…”

“Look,” I said, “make me understand, then. Why can’t we talk? In complete confidence?”

“Is Preacher in some sort of trouble?” she asked.

“Not to my knowledge,” I told her. “But you do know what happened to him eventually, right? He became the founder of…”

“I know all about Worship,” she said. “At my church, Worship is one of those things like communism, and witchcraft, that they use to scare children straight.”

Really? I thought. One of those? Were they snake-handlers, too? I have to admit that this made me more, not less, interested in her story. Finally, someone who not only wasn’t a Worshiper, but actively worked against the group.

“I think it’s not so bad, really,” she said, dashing my hopes, “but if I even admitted that I read the book online they would probably want to kick me out of the women’s auxiliary. Let alone if I tried to defend it. Or admit that I knew him. Even if… I mean even if I didn’t tell them about…”

“I learned about you from a number of people in Chicago,” I lied. “The story, and your name, have stayed private thus far. I don’t know how long that might last. Don’t you want to make sure your version of things is down beforehand? And I think that if I got it straight from you, probably that would mean less turning things over in Chicago. Which would probably help you stay anonymous, in the long run.”

She was scared enough, or dumb enough, to buy that. She left and said she would think about it but the next day she called me on her cell phone and arranged to meet with me in a Burger King about twenty miles from her house – so that, she said, nobody she knew could possibly stumble upon her having lunch with a strange man.

When I got there she was, dear Lord, wearing a hat and sunglasses.

“Listen,” she said, nervously nibbling at a French fry, “I want you to know that this doesn’t have anything to do with you or those Worshipers.” Her Kentucky drawl was rather pronounced, her voice soft and high. “I am doing this for my family. I will do anything to protect them. I took that release you gave me and erased a few words and had a lawyer friend look at it. He told me that if you release this tape, and I can show real damages, I can sue you and Worship for everything you’ve got.”

I shrugged. Everything that I had? I had nothing. And I didn’t care what happened to the Worshipers any more than she did.

“So I’m counting on you to keep this confidential, but with one exception, and that’s this – if I ever come out about this, if I ever make statements about what happened with me and Preacher in Chicago, I want you to release the whole tape publicly.”

“What?” That didn’t make any sense.

She sighed. “Look, I don’t care about the Worshipers, but there are people – you know this – people who think the Worshipers are about the worst thing that ever happened, and think Preacher’s the Devil himself. You know we had a guest pastor who gave a sermon and called him the Beast from the Sea? Can you imagine that? Preacher Haywood, the Beast from the Sea.” She shook her head sadly. “Like you said, if you can find me, anyone can. Including someone like that, someone who will lie, cheat, and steal to take Preacher down a few pegs. I let Jesus into my heart a few years ago and I’ve tried to avoid doing anything to jeopardize my soul after that, but if they force me to lie to spare my family – to tell an, an altered story, or an incomplete story, to make Preacher look bad – I’ll do it if they threaten to go public. You know? I can see one of those old boys telling me I can tell the story the way they want it, and remain anonymous, or else risk having everyone in my family, my children, my church – everyone know what I was and what I did in Chicago. And I’m just a sinner, Jesus knows – I am weak, and I will do what I have to for my family. And if that means lying about Preacher, I’ll do it. So this,” and she gestured at the tape recorder, “this is just… this is an insurance policy. This is to keep me honest. And to keep them away. If they come and ask me to lie, I will tell them about this tape and that you will release it. What I’m going to tell you is the complete and unvarnished truth. So I won’t be tempted to lie to someone else, knowing this is out there to show me as a liar. And someone else won’t be tempted to ask me to lie, either.”

This made only a small amount of sense to me. Once I heard her story I understood why she didn’t want her kids and fellow Women’s Auxiliary members hearing the story, but I think she was maybe excessively paranoid about being exposed by one of her fellow Christians. It’s certainly true that there is a certain fundamentalist core that fears and loathes the Worshipers in general, and Preacher Haywood specifically. They raise a lot of money by invoking him like some sort of New Age bogeyman. The Family Research Council has a whole video on what to do if you kid goes away to college and comes back sounding like a Worshiper. And I am certain these people wouldn’t hesitate to exploit someone like Kara, no matter what it did to her, if they thought it would help them in their jousts against Preacher’s particular windmill. But I think Kara had, perhaps, an inflated idea of the value of her story to these people. Facts never seemed to be an obstacle to them in any other endeavor. They didn’t need Kara because they were perfectly content with inventing whole elaborate paranoid fantasies about Preacher on their own. And if they did track her down and decide that there was some benefit to be gained from modifying her story, they wouldn’t care that there was a recording somewhere that refuted their version.

But I wasn’t there to explore her motives for talking. If her calculations were off, I didn’t care. As long as she talked.

“When I was 12 I got paid for my picture for the first time,” she said. “A poster for the Pulaski County fair. I was in love with the idea of all those people looking at me. I babysat to earn money for modeling lessons. Did a few things around town, and sent headshots and a resume to a lot of agencies. Went to talent searches. In May of 1992, a week before I graduated from high school, I got offered a one-year contract by Central Modeling – one of the biggest and best agencies in Chicago. Oh, I was so excited. My mom and dad drove up to Chicago with me. Took almost eight hours each way, by car. Met the folks at the agency. They were real nice. They helped get me an apartment with one of the other girls.”

She stuck a French fry in her mouth and sort of tongued it, as if it didn’t count as food if it wasn’t chewed. “I remember the day before I left we had a party. Everybody was laughing and saying it was the last piece of cake I could eat until my birthday.” She laughed herself, then, but not a nostalgic echo of the girlish laughter from 13 years ago. It was something bitter and humorless and unlike anything I’d heard from her before.

“My feet, my ears, my wrists. My face, a few times – make-up ads. Never fashion. Never my whole body. I was always overweight and undertall. I did everything I could to lose enough weight. I remember sitting down at a restaurant and saying that we should just take our plates and scrape them directly into the toilet, and cut out the middleman. I was skinny. But there was no diet that would make me 5-8. I tried exercising to keep the weight off but they don’t want women who are toned and fit, they want bones with skin over them.”

I tried to act interested. But I was thinking, just get to the Preacher part.

“I had definitely been there more than a year, so it must have been late summer or early fall of 1994 when I met Preacher. I think he was dating one of the other models at the agency for a little while. I’m not sure. Just one day he was… he was there.

“I know we’d been there more than a year because when my contract was about up and I was desperate and depressed and disgusted, my roommate taught me the secret to staying thin and upbeat as a working mid-level model: methamphetamines. I was so afraid of not renewing my contract and slinking back to Kentucky. So afraid that the highlight of my career was going to be a few wristwatch photos in the Spiegel catalog. Afraid, and 19, and a long way away from home. And those little red pills did the trick. Didn’t want food. After awhile, of course, I needed little blue pills to get to sleep after a long hard day and night of little red pills. And after I started on the blue pills I had to start taking the red pills when I woke up in the morning. And then there were other pills for all the states in between. By that time my roommate had moved onto Vitamin H – heroin, which was supposed to be the perfect model weight-loss supplement and mood stabilizer. I was never able to get the courage to try that.

“Anyhow to ensure a steady supply of the pills I started going to the parties that I’d mostly ignored before. There were these parties in Chicago which were mostly models and rich people. I don’t know how else to describe it. There are a lot of both in Chicago. And lots of pills and other things available at the parties. That was probably the first time I met Preacher, at one of those parties. And I know it was either late summer or early fall because I already knew Jeremy Richards when I met Preacher.

“Jeremy was this rich guy who ran an ad agency in Chicago. Lots of money. He was probably 30 years old than me, but he was really nice, and supportive of my career, and he always had the best little pills. And he didn’t even want to sleep with me, not much, not at first, even though I was more than willing to. I knew he was married but I didn’t really care because it didn’t seem to matter to him.” She closed her eyes, here. “He found work for me. His A-D asked for me specifically a couple of times. That always helps you with your agency, you know, when A-Ds start asking for you by name. And Jerry found me a better apartment. Helped me with the rent. Always had the best pills. He was so nice to me… I remember that he never particularly liked Preacher. Which was kind of surprising because most everybody liked him. Preacher was smart and funny and… and wild, open for anything, the riskier the better. But at the same time he had this gentle streak. He would do anything so long as the only person he was endangering was himself. I don’t think he was talent, and I’m not sure if he was really rich or not, but he could have passed for both, and so that’s also part of why he was so welcome. And by the time I met him, at least, he was already using heroin. And cocaine. And just about anything else he could get his hands on. But even then he was a strange sort of drug addict. How many junkies do you know who ran five miles each day and worked out at the gym? Who spoke fluent French? I remember him talking to this model from Paris…

“Preacher was always sort of around that fall and into the winter. I guess that’s what I’m saying. But I wasn’t paying much attention to him. It’s not like we were friends. We knew each other and I liked him the way most people liked him and I think we’d had a few conversations about nothing in particular. He said he knew some girl from east Kentucky when he was in college. That was about all I remember. But I wasn’t focusing on much of anything then. I had gotten to the point where pretty much every minute of every day had to be regulated by some kind of drug, and increasingly Jeremy was the only person I would talk to outside of work. And even then I was mostly focused on what sort of chemical I needed to feel right. Except, of course, “right” never came. I need to the coke to get right, but there was a little too much so I needed a perc to take the edge off, but that made me feel lethargic so I tried something else to give me some energy… you get the picture.”

That, I thought, was the beauty of bourbon – one size fits all.

“The first time I had roofies I don’t know if Jeremy gave them to me himself or if it was one of his friends. He watched while three of them took advantage of me. I remembered it all afterwards because by then my system was so fu…” She caught herself. For a moment her vocabulary was going to switch back to 1994, just as her Kentucky accent had faded in the course of her narrative when her mind took her back to the time when girls said “fucked up” and didn’t have a strong drawl.

“My system was so out of whack from the drugs,” she went on. “We didn’t even have much of a fight about it afterwards. It was the bill coming due.” She shrugged it off again, physically, her small shoulders going up and down there in the Burger King as she related this part of the story. She took a long pull on her diet Coke.

“So on New Year’s Eve, 1994, I went to a big party at Jeremy’s house. I met his wife for the first time. She looked a lot like me. Just ten years older. There were a lot of people there. A lot of drugs. A band. His house was gorgeous, this gigantic thing on the north shore. I don’t know if Preacher was already there when I arrived or not. A lot of that night is still a blank to me. But I remember Lila – Jeremy’s wife – leading me upstairs at one point. Then the others started coming in the room. Sometimes one at a time, sometimes two at once. Jeremy was there watching some of it. Lila, too, I think. It’s…”

She looked down at her pile of cold French fries and fingered one. A tear rolled down her cheek.

“I don’t remember it clearly, and I wish I didn’t remember it at all. Sometimes I throw myself out of bed at night, while I’m asleep. I just yell “No” and vault out and wake up on the floor. Bruised myself pretty good a couple of times. Scares my husband half to death. I don’t remember the nightmare I have that makes me do it. But I have a pretty good idea it takes place in that room in Jeremy Richards’ house.

“Finally there was no one in the room except Lila. She put a glass of champagne on the night stand. Said ‘Happy New Year’ to me. Walked out. I lay there in that bed and looked at the nightstand and saw a bottle of pills there next to the glass of champagne. And I knew…”

For the first time a sob became audible. I didn’t know what to do. What to say. I slid one of my napkins across to her. She blew her nose noisily into it. You can hear that on the archive, too.

“I was supposed to take the pills. I knew that. And I knew that everything in that room had been videotaped. That me killing myself with pills was supposed to be the conclusion of the film. So Jeremy, that dirty old impotent man, could watch me get gang-raped and then die on film. All for his amusement.” She shuddered and her jaw set and I saw firmness there that must have been missing in Chicago. And I would feel sorry for Jeremy Richards if he ever crossed her path again.

“And I would have done it,” she said, the tears starting again. “I wanted to do it. I longed to do it. I tried to call Lila back to see if she would help me. Because I couldn’t move my arms. Whatever I’d been taking, it was hitting me pretty hard and I was stuck there in the bed, looking at that bottle like it was my only hope and crying, not because I was about to die, but because it was going to be awhile before I could move enough to do it myself. I was frustrated because I couldn’t kill myself right away.

“And after I lay there crying for a few minutes, crying softly, I should say, very softly – the door opens again and I croaked out “help me,” thinking it was Lila and she would open the pill bottle for me.

“And I heard Preacher say Jesus, Kara, what the hell happened.”

More than a decade later Karen sat in a Burger King and closed her eyes and drew a deep breath, remembering the moment.

“We sat there and talked for about an hour,” she said. “I told him everything. Everything I’ve just told you, and more. Worse stuff. And when it was finished he told me he would help me escape if I promised him that I would never come back to Chicago. I told him, absolutely, I never want to see this city again in my life.

“He picked up the telephone and called a cab, and then he called information, and then he called Frankfort, Kentucky, and then he called a train station. He might have made a few other calls, I don’t know. I remember that he after he hung up the last time he picked up the lamp on the table and smashed it through the mirror across from the bed. There was a camera. Preacher pulled the video cassette out and pulled all the tape out of the box and set it on fire in the trashcan. Wrapped the comforter from the bed around me – I still couldn’t move right, and I had no idea where my clothes were – and carried me out of the house like I was a feather. Down through the crowd and into the cab. We went to the train station and he bought me sweatpants and a Cubs t-shirt while we waited for the train. He bought clothes for himself, too. He sat there with me and held me until my train arrived and then he put me on it. Told me there was someone waiting for me in Frankfort. And to please not get off the train for any reason, not to use anything stronger than soda pop for the whole ride. I kept my promise, although it was hard. When I got off in Frankfort there was a very unfriendly woman there from Cristobel Home just outside of town. Rehab.”

She went on and on for a long time about rehab and all the other crap that happened to her afterwards. It’s not particularly interesting. She cleaned up, found Jesus, and married someone in the Kiwanis. What else do you need?

But she told me this little tidbit – she said that Preacher planned on taking his new clothes and a bag of junk food and locking himself in a Motel 6 for two weeks and quit cold turkey. “I don’t expect I’ll want to wear these after two weeks of cold sweats and junkie vomit,” he told her, plucking at the fashionable New Year’s Eve party clothing he was wearing.

I have no reason to think that he did anything any different.

Part Thirty Nine

Chicago. Late summer. Hot, I assume. But regardless of the weather Dalton Maynard engaged in a monthly ritual, a bit of an affectation for a rich, well-traveled man – he went to a rather run-down barbershop a few blocks from the Interglobal building, the headquarters of the Fortune 100 corporation he’d built himself.

The barbershop had – still has, in fact – wooden floors, and a white-and-red striped pole out front, and three chairs, and an old barber and a middle-aged barber and a young barber. It was the sort of place one would call, with only a little irony, a “tonsorial parlor.”

My guess is that they all take two steps to the left when the oldest one dies, and hire a new one from wherever one hires new barbers these days.

(Reform school. I read somewhere that they teach barbering (if that’s a word) to the young worthies in juvie hall nowadays. Like that’s who I want next to my throat with sharp objects.)

Anyhow, Maynard sat down and made small-talk with the oldest barber and submitted to his monthly haircut. Yes, it’s hot. Yeah, those damn White Sox, but that kid Thomas looks great this year. I heard someone call him the Big Hurt. He hasn't been around long enough for a nickname, in my book. They don't make nicknames like they used to, anyhow. We need to bring some PeeWees and Lefties back into baseball.

The bells around the doorknob clicked and clattered and Dalton looked in the mirror to see who had walked through the door behind him and nearly lost an ear when he whirled around in his seat.

Preacher Haywood. Goddamn.

Haywood sat down and the middle-aged barber gave him a haircut and they soon had the barbers laughing when they told a few stories about the Cowboy Experiences of the Bar-Nothing ranch. Haywood gave a very brief synopsis of his post-New Mexico existence – I worked on a farm in Georgia for awhile, then lived on the beach in Miami. He omitted mention of Dare College. Nor did he broach the subject of the Eumenides that chased him from Virginia to Chicago, not even when he and Dalton left the barber shop and went to a greasy little diner nearby, empty that long after the lunch rush. Haywood would not have realized, I don’t think, how difficult it was for someone like Dalton Maynard to leave the office in the middle of the day for several unanticipated hours, and back at Interglobal Materials Maynard’s assistant was juggling appointments and making apologies.

From every appearance, Haywood had just shown up randomly at Maynard’s doorstep. He had, it seemed, drifted to Chicago with the same random Brownian movement he’d drifted everywhere else.

I think that’s a lot of crap. I think Preacher Haywood showed up because even as a putative adult, he hadn’t made enough mistakes in his life to understand that you can’t go back in time to fix things.

In Preacher’s mind – and this is rank speculation, mind you, the sort that would never go into a Preacher biography, but which is perfectly fine in my own memoir – in Preacher’s mind, I think, there was a direct connection between his decision to turn down Maynard’s job offer and the feeling of rats gnawing on his sanity. If he says yes to that job, then there’s no Sappho Farm, no Miami Beach, and thus no Dare College. No mental breakdown/seizure/epiphany/whatever brought on by too much reading, too little sleep, and an overactive imagination. Already, I think, he was comparing himself to Swedenborg – not because Preacher was planning on founding a religion back then, but because he would have known that Swedenborg also suffered a mental breakdown after cramming his head full of theological nonsense. As did Martin Luther, by most accounts. As did St. Augustine. Haywood would never compare himself to Luther or Augustine, and only in a disparaging way to Swedenborg, but I’m not afraid to make the comparison – not because he did anything so eloquent or enduring or useful as any of them, but like all of them, too much religion made him mentally unwell.

At any rate, Preacher appeared to be his usual charming self, so much so that – as, on some level at least, Haywood had known he would – Maynard renewed the job offer. Be my factotum. My right-hand man. My trouble-shooter, my eyes-and-ears, the one I can trust to work any job in any capacity and have the perception and smarts to figure out where the problems are.

And Haywood said, OK. OK to a new VP position being created for him and a six-figure salary despite the lack of any obvious qualifications for the job. OK to a real career with a real future. OK to a job that not only would he be perfect for, but which was perfect for him.

He said OK.

Maynard had to get the board to approve the new vice-presidency, and then had to get them to approve Haywood for the spot, both of which they would do purely on Dalton’s say-so; it was, after all, his company. But it would take two weeks. Haywood gave Maynard a phone number where he could be reached. And they agreed that he would be in Maynard’s office first thing Monday morning, two weeks hence…

The Human Resources Department at IM tried to call him a few days before that. Just to come in and get some paperwork out of the way. The phone number was to a motel on the south side. The desk clerk volunteered that Haywood had checked out two days earlier.

The appointed Monday morning came and went, and Preacher never appeared.

Maynard told the board he was rethinking the position.

If it had been anyone else he would have been livid. Because it was Preacher Haywood he was worried. I have to agree with Maynard on this. If Preacher had to wheel himself in on a gurney, with an IV in his arm, he would have been there on the appointed day. Ten minutes early.

After a few days Dalton checked hospitals. Well, he’s the chairman and CEO of Interglobal Materials, so my guess is that he had someone check for him, but still. Nothing. He checked (again, had someone check) jails. Nothing.

After two weeks he does what rich men do when they are curious about something. He hired someone to find the answer. Someone being a discrete and thorough private detective agency in Naperville.

The detective agency put together a very thorough dossier that told Maynard little he didn’t already know. The only surprise being the existence of Gary Parks and the mostly forgotten trust fund back in San Diego. The agency had tried various methods to learn the last time Haywood had accessed it, hoping that would give them a lead as to his whereabouts, but Parks was ex-military and ran a tight ship. No security lapses.

The dossier is in the archive, actually. It contains, in addition to a short biography and his yearbook photo, a copy of his senior thesis at St. John’s. A letter he wrote to the editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on an incorrect allusion to Plato in one of its Op-Ed pieces (go ahead, roll your eyes – I did). And a receipt for a Carl Butler CD that he ordered from Germany but which arrived in Florida after he’d left.

Lots of minutiae that might cause one to overlook the fact that the discrete and thorough private detectives had no idea what happened to Haywood after he checked out of that motel.

To be fair… even when Preacher resurfaced a long time later, nobody really knew what he’d done after meeting Dalton Maynard in Chicago. Not until the desert, anyhow. Because Preacher wouldn’t talk about it, other than a few allusions to the fact that he was trying to erase what he’d seen in Virginia, trying to drown it with words, trying to outrun it.

Of course there were false leads.

Once Worship became a phenomenon, people cropped up claiming that they’d been with Preacher before, during, and after his time in the desert. They were, mostly, frauds. Some more transparent frauds than others. But I tracked down exactly one person who didn’t seem to be so obviously full of shit, and he put me in touch with someone else, and…

Well, let me just say that while these two people, Mark Grayson, a Chicago photographer, and Kara Drover, a Kentucky housewife, corroborate one another’s stories, I can find no external evidence to back them up. No documents of any kind, no photographs, credit card receipts, postcards, police records, nothing. But the timing works. And they both say things about Preacher that someone who hadn’t met him probably wouldn’t know to say – he pets strange dogs, he can juggle, he had a scar near his shoulder that he claimed was from getting shot. That sort of thing. Suffice it to say that I believe these two, despite the lack of proof to support their claims. Kara, at least, has no reason to lie, in fact has every reason to pretend none of it ever happened, so…

Anyhow, it was Grayson who popped up on the Worship chat sites every now and then and claimed that he’d met Preacher in Chicago and that Preacher and he had “run with a pretty fast crowd” for a few months before Preacher disappeared. And that in retrospect this was right before Preacher’s time in the desert. And Grayson was treated with the same sort of semi-polite, semi-sneering skepticism which (properly) greeted everyone in cyberspace who claimed they knew Preacher. But I tracked the guy down while I was in Chicago interviewing Maynard, and he gave me an address where we could meet, and so at 7 in the evening I found myself getting out of a cab in front of a church not far from the Navy Pier.

And I knew what the place was even as I walked down the sidewalk – a meeting. NA, AA, GA, whatever one’s vice of choice, I recognized the grubby side-entrance to a church basement and the people walking out and lighting cigarettes.

I hate 12-step meetings. Aversion to 12-step meetings keeps me sober. I was supposed to go to them after getting out of the inpatient gulag in Long Island but after three I stopped. They made me want to drink MORE, not less. I would have left except the cab had already pulled away. So I went in.

Fortunately, the meeting was over and there wasn’t another one coming in. I recognized the pot of bad coffee and the sweaty, musty smell of old folding chairs and unburdened sins. And Mark Grayson was there wearing a pair of jeans and a Michael Jordan t-shirt. He was a stocky, balding man with curly hair and pinkish skin. Very short fingernails.

Soon enough I had a Styrofoam cup of the bad coffee and we sat on the rickety chairs and the tape recorder glared with its red cyclopean eye between us, and he told me what he knew about Preacher Haywood in those days.

I..." Grayson said, staring into the coffee, and then he stopped, and stared silently, and then started again.

"This is a story I don't care to repeat," he said. Another long pause. "I don't like going back to the past because when I think about those days it makes me want to use again. I've been clean for seven years now. Well, technically, two and a half, but I've been in a program and wrestling with this for seven years, with just a couple of... slips."

He looked up at me as if expecting me to give a damn. I just looked at him.

"The fact of the matter is that I would be a Worshiper if I never met Preacher Haywood. In fact I was a Worshiper before I knew he had anything to do with it. It took Worship to make sobriety work for me. That whole higher power business. When I found some NA meetings that took a Worship approach, that's when things finally clicked. Cleaned up. Joined a circle. Read Notes On Worship. It wasn't until then that I knew my old friend had anything to do with it.

“On the other hand,” he said, pausing again. “It’s possible that I might not have been able to clean up if I’d never met Preacher. I mean I think I would have. But still he was an example to me. Of someone who got away.

"So even though I don't want to talk about it, I figure I owe Worship something. I read about this thing you're doing. It seems like nobody knows what I know. Well, I mean nobody else will admit to it. And if I thought you were out to do a hatchet job on him, or Worship, I wouldn't be telling you this. But it's a part of the story and it should come out. Even though... I mean some of what I have to say is... bad."

Finally, I thought. What the hell did he and Preacher do? Rob a liquor store?

"I met Preacher," he said, "when he showed up at a shoot with some flavor-of-the-month talent. Sharon... something. She lost a few pounds and went on to New York later, and died in a car accident. Sad. Anyhow, it must have been late summer, early fall, because we were shooting springwear. I knew he wasn't talent -- his hair was all wrong, and he didn't have a model's sneer -- but he could have been, with a little work. Anyhow, he kept his mouth shut, mostly, stayed out of the way, seemed genuinely curious about what we were doing. None of that condescension that you usually get when people wander into a modeling shoot. He didn't leer at the models, either. He was straight, but he said there was so much artifice to the whole process that it felt like ogling a department store mannequin.

"At any rate, a bunch of us went out afterwards, and we all got really loaded, and after that I just started seeing him around."

The photographer took a big gulp of his coffee.

"See, this is the part that's hard to talk about. Sort of violates the code. But in Chicago, and in New York, and in LA, there is this... this other world that involves beauty and money. You have to have a lot of one or the other to get in. I was just a hanger-on, but I got to see it pretty close-up. Preacher started out as an onlooker, too, but he was beautiful, and he must have had money, because he never seemed to work, and soon he was a full-fledged part of that other world. And he did it in spades. I mean in the span of a month he went from being a curious guy at a catalog shoot to being the center of attention at all the parties, and hip-deep in a lot of bullshit that..."

Here he broke off again.

"OK, so Preacher is out there at the parties and just, just making the scene, right? The man's capacity for narcotics was just astounding. He..."

At this I had to break in. I'd never seen Preacher do anything more than take a few puffs on a joint.

"Preacher Haywood?"

"Yeah."

"What narcotics?"

He laughed. "Lotta blow, at first, plus speed, and 'luudes. Didn't like anything hallucinogenic, stayed away from acid. A little X now and then, that was it. But he was not the least bit shy about heroin, either. Mostly coke and heroin, I guess."

I honestly thought I had missed a pronoun somewhere, and the conversation had turned to someone else. "Preacher Haywood," I said, to clarify.

"Yeah."

"Heroin." I was having trouble moving my jaw back into position.

"Yeah. And, I mean, most people ease into heroin. Every one's a little afraid of it at first. Then they try it and like it and start off pretending they're stronger than it. They smoke a little. Then they rationalize skin-popping. And it takes them awhile to work up to mainlining. But Preacher was like, let's start off in a big way. The first time he tried it was IV. A tiny dose -- you have to work up some immunity -- but straight in. I mean this isn't back-alley shit. Everything was sterile and clean. But yeah, he loved heroin. He told me that he didn't like acid or anything like that because, he said, he'd already had the doors of his consciousness blown open, and now he was working on slamming them shut again. He said horse doesn't erase the bad stuff, it just prevents you from caring about it."

I didn't know what to say. Actually, I strongly suspected the guy was full of shit. There was no way Preacher Haywood was running around Chicago doing heroin with models and rich kids. Although that whole doors of consciousness stuff did sound like him.

Grayson then related a few anecdotes, the details of which are unimportant (they're in the archive) but suffice it to say that they certainly seemed like the sort of thing Preacher would do. And there were little things that you wouldn't know about if you hadn't spent some time in his company -- the way he tightened around his left eye, the ghost of a shadow of a wink, when he was teasing someone. The way he tilted his head uncomfortably to the right when someone complimented him in public. His predilection for white Oxford shirts. It was Preacher Haywood, alright, but he was painting a portrait of someone out of a Bret Easton Ellis novel – beautiful, dissolute, drug-addled. It wasn’t a party until Preacher showed up, and Preacher didn’t show up unless there was cocaine and heroin available for abuse, and…

He was, Grayson reported, both the most and least enthusiastic junkie ever – he never evinced the slightest hesitation about using anything, to excess, but at the same time he didn’t seem to derive a whole lot of pleasure from it.

Frankly, I have a few questions about Grayson’s trustworthiness. Oh, I don’t doubt that he knew Preacher and that during the missing months Haywood was, in fact, in Chicago, hanging out with the beautiful people and trying to blot out Virginia with hedonism. But I suspect that Grayson’s devotion to Worship and to Preacher have… colored his recollections.

For example, this story: Once, Grayson said, someone proffered a designer drug and promised that it would “show you the face of God,” and Preacher remarked “I thought we were doing this to forget the face of God.” Grayson remembered this because it was an odd thing to say, although once he became a Worshiper it made more sense to him. I was suspicious of this anecdote. The Preacher Haywood I (and everyone else) knew said a lot of weird things. To the point where few of them stood out.

And of course there weren’t many people who were going to confirm that they spent the early '90s in a sea of drugs and sex. Grayson gave me a few names. They ignored my requests for interviews. With one exception, and that’s because I had to resort to trickery, and that was Kara Drover.

Which was not the named she was using when I met up with her.

Oh, I suppose first I should relate Grayson’s version, which was in response to the question “when was the last time you saw Preacher?”

“We were at a party in this big-ass house up on the North Shore. The guy’s name was Richards. He’s still there. Old guy. I mean he was old then. Ancient now. Young wife. Wives, I should say. Ton of money. Owns a big advertising agency. Good blow. You know, part of what I hate about this trip down memory lane is that it’s making me want to use again, so we’re going to cut this short I think. And I’m going to go across town to another meeting, if you want to go with me.”

I just stared at him silently, expressionlessly.

“Right. Anyhow, Preacher was there. With a guy named Philip Something, another rich kid, who worshiped Preacher. He drove his Porsche off a bridge about five years ago, or I’m quite certain he would have been happy to talk about his times with Haywood. And there were a lot of models, excellent booze, a pharmacopoeia that defies description. The three of us, Preacher, Philip, me, stood around getting absolutely blanked and making smart-ass comments and…”

He trailed off. A little too wistful for someone who professed to be delighted at his sobriety.

“Isn’t that a great expression? Blanked? That’s what Preacher called it. Time to get blank. And there was this girl there name Kara that Preacher and I knew a little bit. I’d shot her a few times. Very pretty, but a little too short. Good parts. She did a lot of jewelry. I suspect she also did some… private work for Richards, our host. You know, these rich guys, especially the old ones, they get so jaded they aren’t even interested in sex the way you and I would understand it. They make home-made porn to whack off to. They pay people to fuck their trophy wives while they stand in the corner and play with themselves. It’s…”

“Did Preacher do any of that?”

Grayson shrugged. “Possible. I know he had offers for, you know, paying gigs. He always seemed to have money and never seemed to work. And it’s not like we spent every day together. Sometimes it would be a couple of weeks before our paths crossed. But… I don’t know. For some reason I don’t think so. I mean he was a junkie like the rest of us, and if some old pervert wanted to fuck him up the ass, or videotape him nailing his wife, Preacher might have done it for the right price. After awhile, you know, the only thing that matters is scoring. But it wasn’t a party until Preacher showed up, and so he was in demand at places where there were always plenty of free drugs, and again, he always seemed to have money anyhow… it’s how he fit in both camps, you know, the rich and the beautiful, and with the hangers-on like me, too.”

He poured himself some more lukewarm coffee. There was a faint tremor in his hand.

“Anyhow, Kara. She liked Preacher. More so than most. He was smart and funny and charming and… and surprisingly gracious, for that crowd, anyhow. Polite. Kara had this sweet southern accent and even though she was just another model running on Vitamin H and pipe dreams, there was a certain naïveté about her that prevented her from becoming quite as soul-dead as the rest of us. Oh, it was steadily being blotted out by the life she was living, but there was still some little bit of country girl in her. So we’re at this party and there is music playing and people talking and laughing and it’s pretty noisy and all of the sudden Preacher gets this strange look on his face and just walks away from us. Walks upstairs, where there was a different type of pleasure-seeking going on in a few different rooms. Some or all of which were being videotaped, at least according to Richards’ reputation. I didn’t think much more of it – I was a little surprised, as always, that Preacher was able to maintain so well, was able to walk up those stairs so easily, given what was flowing in our veins – and mostly forgot about Preacher. But then – I mean my sense of time is kind of skewed, but I would say it was an hour or so later, maybe longer – Preacher came back down the stairs with this big bundle in his arms. An expensive quilt. And I saw an arm jut from the quilt, a moving arm, not a limp arm, and I recognized the arm, because I’d shot about a thousand pictures of it wearing a variety of bracelets a few months earlier. It was Kara’s arm. I tried to get to him to find out what the hell was going on, and to ask Preacher about the look on his face – angry, red-eyed, still stoned – but he just stormed out past us all. Got in a cab that he must have called from upstairs, and that was the last time I saw him.”

“How about the girl? Kara?”

“I didn’t see her again either, not for years. But a couple years ago after I cleaned up I took some freelance jobs and one of them involved me covering a basketball came in Louisville, Kentucky. Around halftime I took a leak and when I came out of the men’s room who did I see but Kara Drover. Pregnant, wearing a wedding ring and holding the hand of a kid that couldn’t have been more than two or three years old. She looked good. Clean. A little heavier than I remembered. I said hello, surprised, and she answered, equally surprised, and looked around nervously while I tried to make small talk. ‘Have you seen him?’ she said, and I knew who she meant. Preacher. I told her I hadn’t. Then some phony-looking guy with slicked-back hair and expensive shoes walked up and said “Karen, honey, they’re getting ready to start up.” He looked at me expectantly and I was quite sure he said Karen because she shot me a “keep quiet” look.

“So I shook the guy’s hand and he introduced himself as Mark Hubert and I told him I wanted to take his daughter’s picture and he agreed. The kid’s name was… I don’t know. But he called Kara Karen a few times.”

That was the end of the useful information I got out of Mark Grayson.