Part Forty Eight

After I was finished and putting all this shit together and trying to figure out what it all MEANT even while telling my cynical post-modern self that it didn’t MEAN anything, there was one person I had trouble explaining away, and that was Graeme Wagner.

Graeme was the editor of a hipper-than-thou Oakland alt-weekly called There There, which I have to admit is a pretty good name for a hipper-than-thou Oakland weekly. Graeme’s partner was a high school English teacher named Michael Rutledge. That’s how he met Preacher – Preacher was a substitute history teacher for two weeks at Rutledge’s school.

I interviewed Graeme when I interviewed everyone else in San Francisco. Telephone pre-interview and then an in-person interview and all of that is catalogued and taped. But when I was thinking about the San Francisco stuff I kept getting stuck on Graeme’s example, and so – because the Worshipers foolishly gave me an open-ended expense account – I flew back out there to speak with him again.

He let me into his office. It was messy by Worshiper standards, which is to say, it was immaculate by newspaper standards. He didn’t have to move any stacks of anything for me to sit down. And we sat there and stared at one another across the desk for a moment.

“You flew out here to remember what I looked like?” Graeme said bemusedly.

“Here’s the thing,” I said to him. “You and I have something in common, and that is a sense of irony that has been tempered and honed into our primary defense mechanism. People like us, we don’t join things. We stand on the outside and criticize. It’s what we’re here for. It’s an important job. It’s what we do. If you think about it, in fact, our careers are based on our ability to stay detached.”

“Your point being...?”

“So how did you become a Worshiper? I mean it doesn’t fit. Joining, like that. If you told me that after you met Preacher you wrote a long feature about him spending five years in the desert, that I would understand. If you told me that you had a good time at a dinner party at Harding’s condo, that I would get completely. But to tell me that you signed on to all this, that... that doesn’t match anything else I know about you.”

He looked at me with little in the way of expression for a few seconds, and then said “you don’t really know me that well.”

“Well enough. I mean enough to get a sense that this isn’t like you.”

He took a deep, ruminative breath, held it, let it out.

“I guess the first thing is,” he said, musingly, “that there was no such thing as Worship then. I mean if one of my staff came in here with Notes on Worship – which has happened – and I started seeing college kids with circles tattooed on their biceps I would probably assign someone to do a story on the cultural phenomenon of Worship. Which, in fact, has also happened. But I probably wouldn’t have become interested in it if I was just exposed to it now after it’s already a, a, movement. A phenomenon. The thing is, though, there was nothing to join back then. There was no sense of joining anything, of creeds and jingoism and group-think. Because you’re right, I wouldn’t have touched that.

“Here’s what it was, though,” he continued. “It was going to this place in Nob Hill where this incredibly interesting, fun, warm, laid-back couple made great food and told funny stories and there were all these other really interesting people around. I mean I’m a big fan of unbridled cynicism but they made it really hard. The first time... Michael had gone on and on about how cool Haywood was, and we ride all the way into the city, and Cass answers the door, laughing, and there was another straight couple there, and Preacher is in the kitchen chopping porcini mushrooms and telling some anecdote that had everyone laughing, and it was just so... it was always warm and smelled of good food and there was music and just this sense of ease.

"And on the way back home that night Michael and I talked about how good a time we’d had in a low-key sort of way. We sat on the train and it was late and we were tired and a little drunk and I kept hearing Violent Femmes in my head because that had been on the stereo before we left. We sort of slouched against one another and the train was rocking along the tracks...” he trailed off, not really looking at me, and I could almost feel it, not quite, but almost, that feeling when you were on your way back home after Christmas dinner at your grandparents and you were tired and full and warm in the back of the car and there wasn’t much sound but the whir of the tires. I tried to imagine feeling that way as an adult. But I couldn’t.

“The conclusion we reached,” Graeme said, after a pause, “was that Preacher had his shit so together that he radiated this sort of aura of competence. Like, stand next to Preacher long enough and you began to think that you, too, could do everything and anything without seeming remotely stressed.

“It was just so... comfortable to be there. There was no sense that Preacher was proselytizing. He was just being Preacher. And Cass, Cass was perfectly matched with him – pretty, funny, relaxed but not lethargic. Warm. It was just so great being around them. Being in their place. It was like... I can’t describe it. Well, I mean I could say it was like being embraced but that makes it sound way too saccharine. It was just like being... home for Thanksgiving, without the co-dependency and homophobia and neuroses that I generally associate with going home for Thanksgiving.

“He even played cool music.

“So after awhile it was only natural that some of it rubbed off. You just... you just wanted to be more like that, wanted to keep that feeling even after you left. After awhile Michael’s lesson plans were edgier and more personal like Preacher’s had been. After awhile I found myself walking right past the frozen food aisle and standing in the produce section buying red, yellow, and green bell peppers. It kind of crept up on you. And with some prying Preacher would talk a little about spiritual issues. Not much. Not really. But drop hints here and there. And we came to understand that his centeredness had a spiritual component. Cass, really, was the one to talk about doctrine. Such as it was. I mean there was no such thing as Worship, we didn’t have that word. We didn’t label anything. But I remember after we’d known them for awhile, having this late-night, beery conversation with Cass where she talked about the concept of the Divine and how it related to the way she and Preacher lived. And by that time I was already a convert without knowing it. I mean...”

“But how can that be?” I interrupted. “What were you converting to if you didn’t know about all that One Indivisible Divine business? You were converting to home cooking and smart conversation? That’s what I don’t understand.”

He pursed his lips for a second. “The thing is,” he said, “the problem with joining a church or a self-help group or anyone else who promises you the keys to the universe is that you have to take on faith that they can back up that promise. In Preacher’s case he didn’t ask us to join anything. He pulled up driving the universe , let us in, burned rubber around the parking lot a few times, then slid over so we could drive. We didn’t need faith in him, or his, his method. He showed us what the promise was. I know, that metaphor sucks. But we were already convinced he had the keys to the universe long before there was any understanding that we could have them, too, by listening to what he had to say. We sort of subconsciously started picking up on Preacherisms – the focus, the grace, the fearlessness – and that started opening up doors to secret places and so when we learned that there actually was a system behind it we were only too ready to sign on.”

“You told me you’re not a ritual Worshiper,” I said.

“Yeah, I think that stuff’s a lot of hippie bullshit. The whole contrived ceremony thing. I mean if I wanted to celebrate the solstices I would live in San Francisco. I live in Oakland. June 21 is just another day to us.”

“He didn’t talk about that when he was here?”

“Oh, hell no. In fact I couldn’t believe it when I saw that stuff about the different rituals, the solstices, the naming ceremony... the food circles, that I understood completely, but none of that other bullshit. Then I read his comments on it and I understood a little better. He is making fun of those people. I mean he says it. Not in so many words. But he says, basically, for those of you who are so dependent on form and ritual and outward display, here is a bunch of silly crap we just made up so that you would feel satisfied.”

I thought about this some more.

“Was this contagious?” I asked. “I mean after you joined the Worshipers did you go out and join a bowling league or work on some political cause or anything like that?”

He laughed. “Not even close,” he said. “Look, Worship doesn’t really change who you are. I mean a little around the edges, I guess, but mostly you’re the same person. I had a friend who went to law school and he said that going to law school doesn’t change your opinions but it changes the way you justify them. Worship is sort of the same way. I’m the same detached cynical asshole now I was then. Just that now I’m a better cook.”

He saw the skepticism in my eyes.

“Look,” he said, “you’re right – we’re a lot alike in that regard. Our reliance on ironic detachment. Believe me, I understand that. And if I was in your position I would be highly skeptical about all this. Finding flaws from the outside. It sounds like we all lost our --”

“Being happy all the time is not normal,” I interrupted. “It sounds unspeakably dull and tedious, frankly. If you’re never upset, if you never do anything stupid, if your shit is ALWAYS together, then you have no way to distinguish good times from bad. Life becomes a constant immersion in a warm, thick, flavorless, goo. And I still don’t get you jumping into the tank.”

He looked at me without saying a word. Not really offended. Just sort of... thoughtful.

“How long have you been working on this project?” he said to me.

“Almost a year.”

“Did you think of yourself as a Worshiper before you started?”

“Hell, no.”

Another thoughtful look. “Before when I stubbed my toe I said fuck. Now when I stub my toe I say fuck, and laugh. It still hurts. But I can laugh, too. That’s not flavorless goo. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not flavorless goo. Worship doesn’t mean sanding down the sharp edges. It doesn’t mean avoiding the sharp edges. It means accepting the cuts that you’re going to get once in awhile.”

I tried to be expressionless – this was getting nowhere – but my inability to suspend disbelief in the horseshit must have shown through.

“Why are you really here?” he said. “You didn’t fly out here just to tell me you didn’t understand me. What’s really going on?”

I didn’t have an answer for that.