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.