Part Forty Six

I have to say that it was on the West Coast that my patience for Worshipers was most sorely tested. Even though I compiled the archive (and wrote most of this memoir) from their headquarters in St. Michael's, they were more annoying out there. Because here I ignore them, and vice-versa, whereas in California I had to track them down and talk to them. And for the most part they're just so... so... so fucking typical. I don't know how to put it any better than that. Every stereotype you ever had about the Worshipers is reinforced every damn second you spent with people like Cass Harding.

She lives in this breathtaking, beautifully restored Victorian in Pacific Heights. Her husband is some sort of architect; she told me the details, they're in the archive, I didn't give a shit. Two point three children -- she was pregnant when I talked to her. Pictures of the other two. Cute. Probably all going to graduate from Harvard at age 12 and do all sorts of wonderful gifted things. Probably all going to be little Preacher Haywoods, God save us all.

Harding still runs her business, too; she owns the converted warehouse that houses it, just minutes from her home. They're richer than I can contemplate and -- of course -- she looks great. I'm quite certain she manages to easily juggle her demanding career with her home life such that neither her business nor her family is ever slighted, I'm quite certain she can cook like a gourmet chef, I'm quite certain she sees to it that Mr. Architect has nightly orgasms that temporarily erase part of his frontal lobes.

You get the picture.

At any rate, here's what happened after the whole desert episode: Preacher Haywood went off and did his construction worker thing, she went back to work, and in fairly short order life resumed what passed for normal for a beautiful young dot-com millionaire in the late '90s. Haywood emailed her a couple of times from Internet cafes he encountered on the road. And she stayed in touch -- to her surprise, and to his -- with Dylan Finch. Telephone calls every couple of days. They went out on the town -- purely platonically, she assured me -- when she was in LA on business. And both of them were living like Worshippers, even though that term hadn't been invented yet.

But they were doing it anyhow. Every act an act of worship, awareness of the ubiquity of the Divine, blah blah blah. It was difficult, she said. It had seemed effortless in the desert around Preacher but in the real world where there was so much stuff and so many things going on it was hard to remember "the simple truths" -- which I took to mean the mystical bullshit that Haywood had fed them in the desert. Fidelity of thought was, in part, why she stayed in touch with Finch -- they kept one another on track in this endeavor. They (she and Finch) both learned how to cook. She said something that virtually every Worshiper said to me, in different ways -- making a meal out of a raw ingredients, making it and sharing it with people you love, became an intensely religious experience for her, every single time. Which was a two-edged sword, she acknowledged, laughing, because it meant that no matter how tired she was, she was almost congenitally incapable of just 'waving a frozen burrito as she would have done before.

Beyond that she basically bided her time until Haywood arrived. She knew he would because he said he would. Of course I know now what she didn't know then, which was Haywood's promises to be somewhere were based upon a sense of time not shared by those of us with real lives and real jobs. How many years did it take him to make the trip from Chicago to San Diego? But Haywood assured her that after his summer job -- his "acclimatization," his "repressurization," he wrote in his emails -- he would be showing up in San Francisco.

And damn if he didn't. She swears up and down, even when confronted with my most cynical eyebrow raise, that she dreamt of his arrival the night before it happened and so wasn't surprised at all when, one September morning, her office manager buzzed her and said that a man named Haywood was out front.

She said thank you calmly, hung up the phone calmly, then catapulted herself out of her office, yelling out his name. He stood there with that soft grin on his face, and she hadn't even made up her mind to kiss him inappropriately before she did it. And he didn't pull back a bit.

He looked, she recalled, good. A little heavier, buff where he had seemed a bit scrawny in the desert. Clean-shaven, his hair cropped short. She stood there with her arms around his neck and his hands holding the small of her back and stared at him after their lips parted. Assured herself that he was actually there.

After a long silence the office manager said "Do you have an appointment, sir?"

(The office manager was a drily funny, very practical woman named Elizabeth Oshrine. She wasn't the office manager by the time I arrived to interview Haywood's San Francisco contacts. Harding's profit-sharing program had allowed her to retire and move to Washburn, Texas, to be closer to her daughter and grandkids. I talked to her by telephone. When I asked her if she was a Worshiper she said she was too old for such foolishness. I liked her. Until she said that Haywood was a priest in the order of Melchizedek. Damn.)

So began Haywood' six months in San Fran. In the real world Cass didn't find Preacher the spooky, somewhat intimidating, spiritual figure she'd known in the desert. Instead she found a smart, good-looking, charming, gentle man. She still insists that the fact that she almost literally worshiped him as a holy man had nothing to do with her attraction to him, that if he hadn't had a spiritual bone in his body she still would have fallen for him, that his (as she saw it) position as a tour-guide of the Divine was, if anything, an obstacle to their relationship, not the impetus for it.

Haywood was an unemployed construction laborer and she ran one of the most successful and profitable small software companies in San Francisco. He was a recovering heroin addict and she was revolutionizing the way humans interacted with their computers. But she insists that the fact that she fell for him had nothing to do with the pseudo-intellectual pseudo-theology with which he'd brainwashed her when she stumbled, exhausted, dehydrated, and sun-addled, into his little desert lair. No, it was all purely on his merits as a human being.

Right.

Anyhow, she took him home and took him to bed and Preacher Haywood got laid for, as far as I can tell, the first time in almost four years. Which was the longest he'd gone since junior high, I suppose. And I won't repeat all of the crap that Cass Harding told me about it. It's in the archive if you're curious. Take the writings of Denys the Areopagite, the Whole Earth Catalog, and a few issues of Penthouse Forum, throw them into a blender, and you'll get a sense of what she has to say about it. Here's the condensed version: they lit some candles, undressed, and did it for hours.

She talked about the candle thing, which I heard others use, but since she was sort of at ground zero for all this I will assume this was the first demonstration. After they managed to survive that first night and she was basking in her post-orgasmic, post-epiphanic reverie, she wondered idly about the nature of what she felt had been a transcendent experience and Haywood took one candle and snuffed it out, then took another candle and tipped it toward the smoking wick of the darkened taper. The flame jumped from one candle to the next. I think I learned that trick in the third grade, but it was, to Cassandra Harding, the equivalent of the Sermon of the Flower. Haywood didn't say anything, but she understood what he meant. The Divine, she said, is a flame within us, but sometimes we can't see it or feel its warmth, and then another flame is brought near and our sense of the Divine jumps back into being. This sentence was followed by several lengthy paragraphs about how that metaphor is as inaccurate as all other attempts at describing the Divine in human language, because the flame never goes out, we just don't see it, and the Divine isn't a flame inside us, but really we're nothing but flame.

Whatever.

She went on to tell me that subsequent sexual experiences with Preacher -- I got the impression that there were at least two a day, every day -- were not all realizations of the Divine but sometimes just plain old sex. Which was fine in its own right. What a relief. She told me that Haywood refused her offer of a job, saying that he would feel like a kept man. Which, of course, he was. He worked as a substitute teacher -- in San Francisco, at least back then, substitute teachers just needed college degrees, not teaching certificates. I don't know what the rule is on that now.

At any rate, they formed what, in retrospect, was the first Worship circle, too. Not that they called it Worship. It was just some friends who started coming over for informal dinner parties once a week. Lured by Preacher's cooking, they apparently stayed for his philosophizing. I spoke with them. They universally remember having to drag it out of Haywood, that he was the most reluctant proselytizer ever. That's the way they remember it... but funny how somehow he managed to convert all of them anyhow.

I'm being hard on them. Even allowing for the rose-colored haze they all had when they remembered Preacher in those days, it does seem that Haywood's chief tactic was to be a missionary by example. It worked when we were at St. John's and all he was converting anyone to in those days was ars memoria. So I'm not surprised that it worked in San Francisco when he was converting people to great sex and fantastic cooking. The fact that he was living the life of a rich man didn't hurt. It's easy to want to emulate the guy with the beautiful home (it was a condo in Nob Hill in those days, the house in Pacific Heights didn't come along until after she got married) and the beautiful girlfriend and all the expensive stuff around him. It would have been different, I think, if he'd been living in a trailer park outside Oakland. Notwithstanding the fact that his first two converts had found him in a shotgun shack in the middle of the desert.

Anyhow, after awhile the others started taking turns with the Moveable Feast, as they called their weekly supper. (Funny how quick Worshipers are to co-opt the terminology of other faiths.) And when they were all good and converted he gave Cass a variation on the speech he gave Sarah back in Seattle, years earlier. The whole "this is not my future" business. Cass claims she knew this all along, too, knew it was just temporary with him, was OK with that.

He left in March, six months to the day from his arrival.