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.