Searching for Haywood

Part Fifty-One

2008-08-23T08:16:00.004-05:00

Now seems as good a place as any to insert a pointless sidebar about fate, and Preacher Haywood's disbelief in it. Haywood called himself as a "free-will extremist," and said that people who claim free will is an illusion have it completely backwards: "we have more options than we even know," he said.

There was a typical Haywoodian caveat, of course. He said that the combination of history and ignorance can act like fate, and deceive us into believing that we have destinies instead of choices. He said that the concept of fate was like the solar model of the atom: completely false, but a useful fiction for understanding something much more complicated.

His belief in a whole universe of unrecognized choices led to a rather strange email exchange with a Worshiper in Minneapolis, not long before he vanished from St. Michael's. Someone asked him to explain what he meant by options we don't know about, and he said that "I predict that in the future, we will discover that some things we now thing are immutable laws will turn out to be entirely optional. But we have two obstacles: first, we have to figure out that we have a choice, and even if we realize that much, we have to figure out how to exercise it." He then gave a long and convoluted metaphor about voting for president without anyone to tell you how: you had to know you could vote for president, then figure out that it was on one day, every four years, and then figure out where to go, and who the candidates were... So the person in Minneapolis asked him to give examples of the things that we would discover were optional. Preacher said he didn't know, otherwise it wouldn't be a prediction, it would be a fact. But he said they would be surprising to us: "maybe," he wrote, "the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or blastomas, or Avogadro's Number, or the speed of light, or geriatric cell damage, or 9.8 meters per second per second, or something like that."

Preacher was joking. But a fair number of Worshipers have no sense of humor. Which brings me to a sidebar within a sidebar: ril-lit, the especially sad and pathetic version of Worshiper fan-fiction. ril stands for "res ipsa loquitor," and the reason that name got stuck to it is not worth going into. At any rate, there is this subculture of Worshipers who want to be the Worshiper equivalent of Ayn Rand, and write these really bad, preachy, stories with Worshiper code-heroes and heroines. There's lot of sex, and they're usually sci-fi, and quite often the futuristic societies are based on the notion that people can opt out of the speed of light, etc. Not only can I not fathom why one would want to write Worship fan-fiction, I can't fathom why one would want to be considered on a literary plane with Ayn Rand. I am not going to disparage Objectivism -- it's a very useful philosophy for arrested adolescents who need to find an excuse for the fact that they live in a one-bedroom apartment and bag groceries for a living, despite their obvious superlative qualities. Have you ever noticed that no actual Randian is one-16th as successful as the Rand literary heroes? Have you ever met a really successful, accomplished Objectivist? Me, neither. (Then again, I was a drunk living in a flophouse motel, so who am I to make fun of grocery store baggers devouring Ayn Rand and living in one-bedroom apartments?) But I am going to disparage Ayn Rand as an author to be emulated. I mean, please. Have you READ Atlas Shrugged?

OK, let me step back one level of irrelevancy. Preacher didn't believe in fate, but I think it's hard-wired into human beings. The first time some homo erectus was self-aware enough to think about the fact that the erectus standing next to him just got struck by lightening, or eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger, or something like that, the concept of Fate was born. We've had a million years of Fate programmed into us; Preacher's disbelief in it isn't going to change that. But that's not to say that I agree with the "free will is an illusion" crowd. That's just far too... convenient. It's far to easy to let yourself off the hook for your own general shittiness with that attitude.

My philosophy is this: we have some choices, but only the bad ones. We use our free will to fuck things up.

I point to my own examples. Just to name two: it was luck, or fate, or destiny, that I met my wife; it was my volitional acts of drinking and sleeping around that lost her. It was my choice to write a book about Schuyler Colfax, because I had to publish SOMETHING if I wanted a shot at tenure, and Colfax was sufficiently uninteresting that his bones hadn't been completely picked over by other scholars. That was a choice that should have doomed me to obscurity. But if was fate that led to Clinton being impeached right when "Colfax" got published, making me rich and famous (by small college history professor standards).

Consider, then, the antics of Preacher Haywood after leaving the desert. It's still an open question, I think, as to whether leaving the desert was a good thing or a bad thing, and I can't decide if his leaving of the desert was entirely his choice. Having Finch and Harding show up on his doorstep was certainly not his choice, and I suspect that once they did, his departure from Kerith Ravine was inevitable. But I suppose he might have just walked them to the highway and then turned around and gone back... I'm not sure how to categorize this one.

But once he was out, it was one bad choice after another that led him to St. Michael's, which -- in retrospect -- was a bad move. He was offered a choice to return to his old life as the world's happiest itinerant laborer, but when he finished his summer with the tennis-court people, he didn't take that option; instead he went to San Francisco and hooked up with Cassidy Harding. There, he was presented with the option of contented, anonymous domesticity. That could be his beautiful house on the hill; his charming, accomplished children; his sexy, rich, intelligent wife. He chose otherwise.

Then he was in LA and had a chance to be a celebrity guru. Lots of money, lots of sycophants, lots of sunshine and big fake boobs. He could have spread his message to disgruntled Scientologists and bored Kaballahists. I think he actually considered that choice pretty seriously. The fact that he took Finch's motorcyle to San Diego indicates, to me, that he was considering coming back. But he made a different choice, and the motorcycle came back in a moving van.

And even in San Diego he was given another option: he discovered (if Parks is to be believed) that he was rich. Not blind stinking "buy my own island" rich, but rich enough to live comfortably off the interest. But that didn't divert him, either.

Which brings me to his last chance to do something different: Deliah Harper.

Part Fifty

2007-01-18T21:37:00.001-05:00

Gary Parks lied to me. Of that I'm fairly certain.

When I came into his office in San Diego I saw pretty much what I had anticipated. A bland office in a bland building near downtown. Unimaginative in decor. A frame on the wall of his inner office with various Marine badges and medals.

Parks was pretty much what I had anticipated, too. Early sixties, close-cropped hair, military bearing. I was expecting someone a little beefier. He was rather slender.

I already had access to the facts and figures, so I know what Parks did with the Haywood trust while he managed it. He was candid about being more lucky than good. In the late 80s, when he figured Preacher needed income more than growth, he invested in nice stable government bonds, and in those days interest rates were high. Then when Preacher got out of college he figured Haywood would want to cash in the trust, so he moved into nice stable blue chips and not only rode out the recession of the early 90s in good shape, but made a good profit off of the Gulf War. Parks had no problems investing in defense contractors. Then when Preacher started drifting around the country and expressed no interest in getting to the trust income, Parks got really speculative and aggressive and caught the very front wave of the dot-com boom. Then when Preacher emerged from the desert Parks started moving out of the dot-coms and into real estate, and not only dodged the bubble bursting but then started to clean up when the housing market started climbing.

Dumb luck. Parks admitted it. But dumb luck worked in Haywood's favor so often you began to wonder if it wasn't something more.

At any rate, Parks lied to me, not about the money, but about the conversation he had with Preacher when Haywood finally showed up in his office.

Haywood had called Parks from Gesthemane. Assured him he was who he said he was. Assured him he would, eventually, make it to San Diego. Then a few months later Parks got a postcard from San Francisco. Be there soon. Then a phone call from Los Angeles a few months after that. Be there really soon. Then a phone call from a downtown hotel. When they finally were face to face, Haywood summarized the past decade of his life in three sentences; Parks recalled him saying something like "well, you know I traveled a lot, working odd jobs and searching for inspiration. Then I settled down upstate for a few years and waited for inspiration to find me. And, well, here I am."

Parks said to him "it's a good thing you called when you did. Although it cost the school system some money. I was seriously considering having you declared dead."

Preacher chuckled. "The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated," he said. "But why did that cost the school system money?"

"You've got no will and no heirs," Parks told him. "If you die intestate, the local school board gets the money. In fact if they knew how close they were to getting your trust, they might have put a hit on you."

"Whacked by a school safety," Haywood said. "What a way to go. But you know, there are worse things to do with the money."

"There are better things, too," Parks said, picking up the folder he'd prepared with financial statements and the like.

And Preacher said -- according to Parks -- "You know, the truth is, I was going to tell you go just give the whole thing to charity. And I guess the schools are as good a charity as any. I noticed on the way in here that the baseball diamonds are all in bad shape. Could we ask them to use it to fix up the baseball diamonds?"

Parker swallowed hard and said "give all of it to the school board? The whole thing?"

And he claims Preacher said -- and this is the part that makes me think Parks is lying -- "sure. I mean how much could be left in there? A hundred thousand dollars or so?"

And Parks said to him "Preacher, there's around forty million dollars in your trust right now."

See, this doesn't ring true. I would believe that Preacher was inclined to give the money to charity, but I don't believe he didn't know how much money was in there. When he went into the desert there was close to ten million in there. Even assuming he didn't get any information about it between leaving Kerith and getting to San Diego, he had to have know there was more money than that in there. Yes, aside from his stint in Chicago, he didn't access it very often, but he still signed tax returns and other statements from time to time. And Preacher was a guy who never forgot anything. So I can't believe he thought the trust was that small.

Why would Parks lie to me about this? To make Preacher sound good? I don't get it. I dutifully recorded the interview and refrained from calling Parks a liar to his face, but I don't believe him when he says Preacher didn't have any idea how much money was in the trust.

Then Parks compounded that lie with something else that didn't ring true.

After thinking about it for a second, Preacher allegedly shrugged and said, "well, they'll be nicer baseball diamonds. I need $40,000,000 like I need a hole in the head." Preacher did say that queer "hole in the head" saying a lot.

Parks then says he explained to Preacher that the trust could easily generate $150,000 a month in income. And still grow. And so even if he wanted to do something for the local ball fields, he could just dedicate a portion of the income the trust generated and have everyone playing on first-class diamonds. And that while $40,000,000 was a hell of a lot of money, it would just vanish into the operating budget of the school system. (He was right about that. I checked. Roughly 1/10th of the annual budget for the San Diego County public schools. I'm sure they would have appreciated a forty million dollar gift, though.)

Parks said he told Preacher: "Besides, why on Earth would you give away that money? Your parents wanted this to be for you. Young man, you have a chance to do something most people would kill for -- and that is to do anything you want. I'm not talking about living off of the interest and wasting your life. I'm talking about never having to think about salary when you go to work. If you wanted to run your own charity, you could do that and pay yourself. You could go work at something really noble and poorly paid, like being a school teacher or a social worker, and still have a very comfortable living. And let me tell you something, Preacher, while you still look like a young man, you're not. You're over 30. Someday you're going to want to settle down. Sooner rather than later. You're going to have a wife and a family and even if you don't think you want or need this money, you have them to think about. Don't you want your children to have advantages you didn't have?"

In short, according to Parks, he not only had to tell Preacher how much his trust was worth, but he had to teach him about interest income. And then manage to dissuade him from giving it all to charity.

Here's Preacher Haywood as I understood him at that point in his life: he was way smarter about money than he came across, he did not just blindly sign papers without reading them, and if he decided to give away $40,000,000, Gary Parks was not going to talk him out of it.

The fact of the matter is that Haywood didn't give the money away, at least not then and there, which tells me he didn't intend to. But why would Parks lie?

This weighed heavily upon me.

At any rate, according to Parks, Preacher agreed to think about the charity idea some more. Then they went through the portfolio together. And that was how Preacher discovered he had inherited a house in St. Michael's, Maryland.

I know. You're saying to yourself, wait, I thought he didn't have any relatives. Well, he didn't. But if you were paying attention during the whole Miami Beach thing, you would remember that he became friends with an old man named Hank Feldman, who regaled Preacher with stories of the Roaring 20s and his life on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Well, it turns out that he died (no surprise there) and in his will, Haywood got the big old house. In which, it turns out, nobody had lived for nearly a decade, and for a decade before that had been rented out to a series of people who really didn't give a damn about it. It was an abandoned dump in the middle of nowhere, slowly collapsing near where the Tred Avon and Town rivers emptied into the Chesapeake Bay. Parks had sent someone to appraise it recently and was wondering how low he would have to price the land to get rid of it -- it was far too close to wetlands to be commercially developed.

And Preacher said that he knew that area, right across the bay from Annapolis, really, and that he was thinking about heading out to the East Coast, so don't sell it; I want to take a look at it before it goes. He was thinking, I know, of all of Feldman's stories about the literati hanging out there in white duck and straw boaters, with bathtub gin going in and bon mots flying out.

After I interviewed Parks I drove around the city. If I had grown up there, I thought, I would be a much different person. Or maybe I would have opened my wrists in high school. I can't imagine living in a place where it was always sunny and pleasant.

And as I drove around I found myself wondering about Haywood's return. Was he the nostalgic type?

When I was engaged to Sarah we went back to my folks' house for the holidays and she insisted on a tour of what she called "the old neighborhood." I lived in a suburb, which doesn't really have a neighborhood feel. "Come on," she said, smiling, "let me see where you went to school, where you hung out with your friends, where you lost your virginity, that kind of stuff."

The trip took about ten minutes in our rental car. "That was school," I said as we zoomed past. "I hated it. That was where a kid we called Trank lived. He was the closest thing to a friend I had. We hung out in his basement and listened to the Cure. "

"Trank?" Sarah said, laughing.

"Yeah. He picked it out. His real name was Philip Navin."

"I like Trank better."

"Yeah, me too. Anyhow, that's the tour. I lost my virginity in Ocean City, Maryland, which is not anywhere near here."

She looked at me for a moment. I looked back. We both laughed. She was one of the few people who could make me laugh at myself. Sometimes I still miss her.

But was that Preacher? Maybe before the whole desert thing. I could see him going back to all the old haunts. If I had been the Golden Child in high school, I would have more reason to be nostalgic. I understand that. But the post-desert Preacher was so much about living in the present. I wonder.

I do know that he looked up the Abuelas, had dinner with the people who'd taken him in when his parents died. Met his old friend Manny's wife and two toddlers. He was only in town for a few days, though.

I stayed in the same hotel he stayed in. More by coincidence than anything. I mention this because it was while staying there that I got laid for the first time in years. I was sitting at the bar waiting for a table and nursing some soda water and this woman sitting there next to me started talking. She was there for some sort of Human Resources convention. We ended up sharing a table. I've never picked up a woman while sober before. I nearly botched it. At some point I tried to say something suave and suggestive and witty and she gave me a tired smile and said "you're already going to get lucky tonight, unless you screw it up." I kept my conversation to a polite minimum at that point.

She was probably in her early 40s. I'd never been with a woman older than me before. Her body was surprisingly soft and smooth. At the risk of sounding like an old lady, it was good just to feel some weight on the mattress next to me.

I told her she could stay the night but she didn't want to. I thought I caught a glimpse of her when I was checking out. If it was her she didn't make any effort to say anything to me.

Part Forty Nine

2006-05-08T16:11:00.001-05:00

The house, in Beverly Hills, was not all that large. Not really, not like you would think if all you knew about movie stars came from, well, movies about movie stars. It was a beautiful Arts-and-Crafts house with a swimming pool and a high fence and tall hedges all around it but the house itself was, if anything, a hair smaller than your typical suburban McMansion. It was probably considered big when it was built, though.

A few years back, the new owner of the house – a man named Dylan Finch – returned from a meeting during which he made a deal with a major studio so that his production company could make a movie out of a book called Glory Road, which had everything necessary to be a big hit: sword fights, space ships, the Vietnam War, and topless beaches. And Dylan Finch was going to be the star. He had already picked out a director nobody ever heard of, and was going to cast a Filipina actress nobody (outside of the Philippines) had heard of to be the Queen of the Universe. Finch, on that day, hoped that the film would be his “Dances with Wolves,” his “Braveheart” -- one that would be big enough that ever after he could do whatever he wanted. Of course, in the back of his mind was the fear that it could be his “Heaven’s Gate.”

But whatever was in the front or the back of his mind on the way back to his home vanished when he pulled up to the gate that kept the riffraff and stalkers out, and saw Preacher Haywood sitting there on the curb. Haywood was reaching through the closed gate and petting a Rottweiler, who was nestled up against the steel bars to get closer to the man.

“Holy shit,” Finch breathed softly, and stopped his car. His very safe, well-maintained, new car. With GPS. And a survival kit i the trunk. Finch didn’t get out, just looked up at Preacher, the afternoon sun in his face.

“You need better security,” he said to Finch. “Some drifter camps in front of your house and nobody calls the cops?”

“The dogs are my security,” Dylan replied.

“This dog?” Preacher said, rubbing the dog’s stomach. The dog twitched his stump of a tail and one leg shook in the air.

“Yeah,” Finch said, absently, still looking at Haywood. He pushed the button that made the gates open. At the sound the dog jumped up. “Hop in,” he said to Haywood. Haywood got in the car and the dog trotted beside them as they drove up the short drive into the little garage next to the house.

“Nice house,” Haywood observed.

“It’s really great to see you, man,” Finch said. “Cass told me you left there a few days ago, heading south. You should have told me when you were coming! I wouldn’t have left you sitting on the curb.”

Haywood laughed. “I didn’t know when I would make it here,” he said. “Got a ride with some migrant workers heading south. Made good time.”

Finch shook his head in disbelief. “It’s great to see you,” he repeated.

“Good to see you, too, Dylan,” Haywood told him. “You’ve been doing really well.”

“Ehh,” Finch said, noncommittally.

Since the last time the two had been face-to-face there had been a movie called Ravens which had made a lot of money. Finch’s little desert adventure (as he referred to it) helped with the publicity. Funny thing, though – even while pushing the movie, Finch had backed away from it. Saying things like, it’s formulaic, but good formula can be good entertainment. There were a fair number of people who were surprised that Finch even knew the word “formulaic,” let alone would apply it to his latest film. He told Premiere that Ravens was “the end of the beginning” of his film career. Since then he had played a dark, intense role as a villain in a psychological thriller – his agent warned him against playing a villain but he did it, and did it very well. And now Glory Road. About which Haywood knew a little, since Finch and Cass Harding -- until recently Haywood’s landlady (among other things) -- kept in regular contact.

They went into Finch’s house and opened beers and sat beside the pool and Dylan told Preacher all about his ideas for the new movie. And Haywood started laughing.

“What’s so funny?” Finch demanded.

“If I tell you, you’ll get pissed off,” Preacher replied.

Finch raised an eyebrow expectantly.

“This film is an act of worship for you, isn’t it?” Haywood said, the traces of a smile still playing about his lips.

Finch swallowed a grin. “I’ll never confess to that, you bastard,” he said, a little laughter in his own voice.

They both laughed at that point, both happy people, both delighting in being alive. Finch savored another swallow of beer.

“So how long are you going to stay?” he said.

Preacher shrugged. “Until you throw me out, or it’s otherwise time,” he told the actor. “In fact, I can stay somewhere else. I just wanted to see you, say hi, you don’t have to put me up. I haven’t been in LA for a long while.”

“Oh, shit, no, you’re staying here,” Finch said. “You’re going to show me how to make those tortillas you made in the desert. We’re going to hit the nightspots. I’m going to show you off to my friends. We’re going to pick up girls. No, you’re not going anywhere now that I’ve finally got you here.”

“About that...” Haywood said, and paused.

“The girls? I know about you and Cass. Believe me, I’ll be discreet.”

“No, it’s not that, it’s about the desert stuff. Did you tell anyone my name or anything like that? Cass showed me the stories in Time and People and my name wasn’t in either of them. But then again it wasn’t an important detail, really, so --”

“No, it was an important detail, but I didn’t tell anyone,” Finch interrupted. “I figured the last thing you wanted was some People photographer tracking you down. You said you wanted some time to readjust, and being sucked into celebrity gossip pseudo-journalistic bullshit was probably not what you had in mind.”

“A few people in San Francisco know,” Haywood told him. “Friends I made there. Eventually they learned how Cass and I met, and Cass’s name was out there for having been stranded with you, so...”

Finch shrugged. “‘S’all the same to me, man,” he said. “In San Francisco they try to pretend they don’t care about Hollywood celebrity. Down here, it’s all about celebrity. New York is about proximity to money, Washington is about proximity to power, and here it’s about proximity to fame. At the moment, I have a fair amount of celebrity. I’m somewhere between Tom Cruise and Maury Amsterdam on the spectrum of celebrity fame right now. As a result, things that you think are trivial and silly are nonetheless going to be intensely interesting to some people. Just so you know.”

“Too bad that people don’t go to movies just because they enjoy the work of the people involved,” Preacher said. "And that's a hell of a wide range you just described."

“They do,” Finch said, “but I’m going to spend $140 million on this next film, so I need to sell tickets to people who like movie stars, not just people who like actors. Otherwise this won’t be Braveheart, it will be Heaven’s Gate.”

“You know I never saw Heaven’s Gate?” Preacher said.

“Nobody did. That’s the problem,” Finch countered. “But you know what I’ve figured out? On my own? That living right, living in the moment, living as a part of the Whole – that’s its own reward. I feel great. My work has improved. My attitude has improved. My outlook has improved. Yes, I still get drunk and fall down, but it’s an act of worship when I do it now. So I want this project to be a big commercial success, but at the same time, if I’m happy with the process of making it, if I can go to sleep at night knowing we all did the best we could, I will be perfectly content.”

“And if it also makes back its costs in the first weekend?”

“Then everyone in Hollywood will want you as a guru,” Dylan laughed.

“They’ll want you as their guru,” Preacher countered. They were both partially right, as it turned out.

Within a few weeks – same as in San Francisco – there was a group of regulars who started hanging out at Finch’s house. Richard Halethorpe, right before he was Sir Richard Halethorpe, who was too gay and far too elegant to be Rufus so Finch cast him as the villain. Brent Deale, who – at that time – primarily earned a living as a prop master, although he was going to be one of the lead production designers on Glory Road. Sarah Nottingham, who is one of those actresses whose name you don’t remember but every time you see her you think, yeah, I remember her. (She used to always play the slutty little sister, but recently she's started playing the bitter single mom). Mandy Denton, who was an assistant director on Ravens and ended up directing some second unit work on Glory Road. Mark Clinton, a screenwriter who was mostly responsible for the adaptation of Heinlein’s novel. All of them friends of Finch’s before, all of them now involved in Glory Road, and all of absorbing Haywood while the project was getting underway.

And it was a typical day when Mandy showed up after having spent most of the day directing some TV commercial, and Brent was there because he was showing sketches to Dylan, and Mark was there because he and Finch had been working on the script with Steve Streett, the director, all day... and Dickie was there because, well, actually, nobody knew what guided Dickie Halethorpe but he always seemed to be there, and Sarah was there because she wasn’t working and mostly because she wanted to jump Preacher’s bones.

Mandy was there because it was fun. Despite the fact that everyone worked in the industry. It was fun, and there was good food. Free booze.

The kitchen was spacious and tilted towards the afternoon sun and Preacher was standing at that big stainless steel stove and Dickie, Brent, and Sarah were sitting around the room drinking margaritas. The pitcher sat on the counter. Finch made great margaritas.

“Ms. Denton,” Dickie said as she came into the kitchen.

“You’re just in time,” Sarah said, gesturing to the counter. “Finch just made the pitcher.”

“What are we cooking?” Maggie said to Preacher, peering over at the range.

“I’m not sure yet,” Preacher said, “but it will involve chicken.” He was cutting chicken meat into smallish pieces. In front of him a frying pan snapped and popped as hot oil worked its magic on some garlic. He peered at it for a moment and then dumped in some chopped onions.

“Preacher was telling us the secrets of the universe,” Brent said. “It has something to do with chocolate meringue pie.”

“The secret of the universe,” Preacher said, “is absolute simplicity, which Dickie, as our Oxford scholar in residence, should know from having read his David Hume like a good student.” He put the chicken into the hot oil with the garlic and onions, and stirred it around a bit. The snapping and popping flared up for a moment, then subsided.

“You’re barking up the wrong Brit,” Dickie said. “I was always more of a Spinoza man, myself.”

“They were both accused of atheism,” Preacher said.

“Didn’t he say ‘nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few’?” Sarah piped up.

“Goddamn,” Brent said. “Where did you learn that?”

“He did say that,” Preacher said. “But he also tried to refute some of the more philosophical arguments about the nature of God by pointing out that the idea of some unmoving, incomprehensible, irreducible God was tantamount to atheism because such a God had nothing whatsoever to do with the world we inhabit.”

“So how is absolute simplicity the secret of the universe?” Brent asked.

Preacher ground some pepper over the chicken, threw in a little salt, and stirred the chicken around with a spatula.

“Well, it’s a question of perspective,” he said. He put the spatula down and took a sip of his drink. “The universe does not seem simple from our perspective. Lots of moving parts. Lots of chaos. Lots of stuff we don’t understand. But from another perspective, it’s quite simple. It’s one. It’s one universe, one singular reality. One existence. One is a very simple number to understand. Hume also said, one is the greatest number.”

“One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do,” Maggie added helpfully, sitting next to Sarah.

“I’ve always felt that Three Dog Nights’ contribution to theology has been sorely overlooked,” Preacher said, smiling at them. Maggie smiled back. Couldn’t help it. She thought she heard Sarah’s heart skip a beat.

“Three Dog Night I don’t know. But when I was like 13 and saw Apollonia on stage, I knew there was a God,” Brent said.

“Another form of spiritual awakening,” Preacher acknowledged.

“Three Dog Night? Apollonia? How is it you Philistines have come to rule the world?” Dickie said, shaking his head. Preacher grinned at him, too, and began peeling and de-veining shrimp. "You Philistines" was Halethorpe's generic term for Americans.

“Wait a second,” Mark said, speaking up for the first time. “So what does that other stuff have to do with the secret of the universe?”

“Oh,” Preacher said, “well, look, some people have this concept of a singular, indivisible, Divine. And if you think of reality, the universe, as a single, indivisible thing, then you have...”

“Then you’re back to Spinoza,” Dickie said. “God is Nature.”

“Right,” Preacher said, “but what are the implications if you think of that as a single indivisible whole?”

“It means that Margaret Thatcher is God,” Dickie said, rolling his eyes. “Dear Lord. Or should I say, Dear Margaret.”

Preacher took the chicken out and put it on a plate to drain. He dumped the shrimp into the cloudy, garlicky oil. “That’s precisely what it means. It means God made you a pitcher of margaritas a few minutes ago.”

“Thousands of people all over the world pay good money to go into a special darkened room and gaze silently at a 20-foot image of me,” Finch said, entering the room. He gave Maggie a kiss on the cheek. “That sort of makes me a god.” The others jeered and guffawed loudly as he poured himself a drink. “We’re running low on these already? Preacher, your friends are lushes.”

“Having lushes for friends is entertaining. Having lushes for employees is a problem,” Preacher retorted, flipping the shrimp.

“That smells really good,” Sarah commented.

“Well, they’re being cooked by God,” Mark noted.

“More to the point, they’re God, too,” Preacher said. “The difference between us and shrimp is that we’re capable of figuring that out. Or at least of being amazed by it.” He rummaged around in the refrigerator and came out with a lump of pepperjack cheese. “You cheese purists will hate me for saying this, but I love pepperjack cheese,” he said.

“Like I said, Philistines,” Dickie sniffed.

“Excuse me? Kidney pie?” Finch asked. “I don’t ever want to hear one of you people snickering at someone else’s cuisine.”

“You just lack adequate refinement to... oh, who am I kidding?” Dickie said. “I fled the country just to get a decent meal.”

“So how is worshiping shrimp the secret to the universe?” Brent asked.

Preacher grated the cheese into a bowl. “It makes it harder to overcook them,” he said, stopping to take them out of the pan. They were just turning pink. “It’s one thing if you think of shrimp, and the people you’re feeding, as just a few more randomly careening bits of the chaotic Brownian movement of the universe. But if they’re both the indivisible Divine... it sharpens one’s focus.”

“Easy for you to say,” Sarah said. “You’re one of those people who does everything well naturally. For those of us who can’t make toast without involving the fire department, regarding a slice of bread as an aspect of God is just frustrating.”

“It’s OK if you burn the toast,” Preacher said. “The important part is that you recognize that everything you do is, in a way, an act of worship. Whether you know it or not.”

“You mean all you have to do to have firemen over for breakfast is burn toast?” Maggie asked, arching an eyebrow lasciviously.

“I think I’ll jot that down,” Dickie said.

Preacher poured a little vegetable oil in the pan and put a corn tortilla in the hot oil. “All I know,” he said, “is that it works for me.”

“Works for me, too,” Finch said. He shrugged. “Maybe it’s just having something to think about outside yourself. I mean it could be a lot worse. It could be Kabbalah or Scientology or, I don’t know, what’s that thing Mel Gibson does? Opus Dei. This doesn’t have a name, doesn’t cost any money, and doesn’t ask that I go to church on Sundays. And it works for me. What else could I ask for?”

Preacher put some cheese on the tortilla, then a handful of onion-garlic-shrimp-chicken mix, then some more cheese. “This is hard to do without music,” he said, “I don’t know how long to cook anything.” He folded the tortilla over the filling and flipped it over. “If the cheese doesn’t glue the tortilla shut, you get a hell of a mess.”

Brent picked up the stereo remote. “Never let it be said I didn’t contribute to dinner,” he said. Siousxie and the Banshees came on. “Does that have the sort of beat you can cook to?” he asked.

“It’ll do,” Preacher said, putting the first finished tortilla on a plate.

“What are these called, again?” Sarah said.

“Half-assed quesadillas,” Preacher said.

This was the second Circle. The second group of converts.

Sarah didn’t go home that night.

There was a party about midway through his stay. This was when Kabbalah was just starting to get some buzz, before it had really been picked up by the media but the really good trendspotters had picked it up. And at the party Preacher was accosted by a formerly famous singer who started talking about Kabbalah and Finch – who was bored and thinking about leaving for the Viper Lounge – stayed just to hear what followed. But Preacher was polite. “A path is a path,” he said.

Then one day Preacher left, with little in the way of ceremony. He asked Finch if he could take the bike to San Diego to tie up some loose end. Finch had no qualms about that. He was immersed in rewrites for the Glory Road script anyhow. And a few weeks later a truck pulled up in front of the house and a man who had already been paid unloaded the motorcycle.

Finch threw away the note that was taped to it, but remembered the gist of it: “Thanks, heading to Maryland, it’s a nice day, I think I’ll walk.”

It was not exactly a surprise to Dylan. He wished Preacher had stayed – he was good to have around, never got in trouble, defused tense situations, cooked, kept his mouth shut, fit in everywhere, and – rarest of all – Dylan trusted him completely in everything. But at the same time he understood the departure.

He left, Finch reasoned, because his message was catching on a little too facilely. Because there was this nice easy path laid out for him to create the next Est, the next Scientology, the next Kabbalah.

The two ran into one another a few more times, and of course there was the sort of famous time when Finch sort of came out of the Worship closet. But during their one prolonged stay together Finch was distracted putting together Glory Road. Haywood turned a few key players in to Worshipers(although they didn’t realize it at the time). They all admitted – some more cautiously than others – that it helped them work together.

Part Forty Eight

2006-05-01T16:14:00.001-05:00

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.

Part Forty Seven

2006-02-14T13:33:00.000-05:00

From "Preacher Haywood: Library to Desert," in the Journal of Religion and Society, Spring 2004

[...]
Thus it seems evident that Haywood's experience, and all of Worship, is revelatory, not scholastic. What he is and what he is trying to communicate comes from the desert, not the library; it was the direct experience of Oneness and not anything he learned from a book that made him who and what he is. For better and for worse. And so Haywood is praised and criticized for the wrong things.

Too often his supporters credit him for religious scholarship -- credit he himself, characteristically, has not welcomed. He is not a religious scholar. His knowledge is broader than the average lay person's but not particularly deep, and it bears the tell-tale marks of an autodidact -- there are unexpected gaps in his knowledge, and unorthodox, often shaky readings of some of the classic works. Often in reviewing his writings and lectures one sees him struggle with concepts well-covered by others, and miss allusions and references which might seem obvious to the more classically trained religious historian.

But at the same time the charge of syncretism is levelled at Worship and that, too, is unfair. All religious movements historicize themselves, present themselves as a return to the "true" and "original" faith. A fair amount of classical philosophy also presents itself as merely an outgrowth or reimagining of some older tradition. Haywood is, perhaps, more transparent about this than other budding religious leaders -- that sense of ironic detachment, which ordinarily is anathema to faith, is in a way central to Worship, and therefore Worshippers could not do other than recognize its parallels and similarities to other traditions -- but admitting that others have had similar insights does not make one a syncretist.

Yes, Haywood demonstrates a knowledge of philosophy and religious history superior to that of the average (Western) layperson when he speaks at length about the teachings of al-Suhrawardi, but that does not make him a theologian. He himself scoffed at such suggestions, referring to himself simply as "an avid reader," and that is probably more accurate.

(In fact comparison to al-Suhrawardi is apt in many ways. Suhrawardi, too, created an inclusive religious and philosophical system rooted in the language and folkways of his native country. Suhrawardi underwent a mystical experience of the Divine and then brought prodigious intellectual and scholarly intellect to bear upon the phenomenon. However, Suhrawardi is one of the greatest thinkers the world has yet produced, and so it is perhaps unfair to Haywood to point out Worship's shortcomings compared to al-Ishraqi. Suhrawardi's system was immensely more complex and, historically, more significant to the world than anything Worship has yet produced. There can be no comparison between The Wisdom of Light and Notes on Worship; it is akin to comparing Hamlet to a half-hour sitcom script. This is not to belittle Worship but rather to praise the magnitude of Suhrawardi's accomplishment.)

When Haywood uses a metaphor of divine light in Notes, he invokes Suhrawardi, and St. Symeon, and George Fox, and Mulla Sadra -- he acknowledges that they have trod this path before him and, indeed, all used the metaphor of a Light of Lights. But each of them fit their message firmly within a specific faith tradition. In Fox's case, while he was founding a new sect -- the Quakers -- he was still firmly in an established Protestant Christian tradition, rooted entirely in the text of the Bible and not looking elsewhere for guidance. Worship quite deliberately eschews that single-mindedness. In fact at times Haywood seems to go out of his way to cite examples from a wide array of faiths, underscoring the deliberately non-sectarian nature of his message. "He does not," as one critic sniffed, "even call God, God."

[...]
Interestingly, Haywood's reflexive habit of appealing to authority from various faith traditions has caused various traditional faith groups to claim him as their own. "I have been told," Haywood claimed in an interview once, "that I am a Roman Catholic; a Shi'a Moslem; a Baptist; a Buddhist; a Bahai missionary; a Wiccan; and once, most interestingly, a Jew. Reformed, one supposes..." That so many different and diverse religious traditions can claim Worship for their own most likely means that Worship will in short order atomize and disappear. There is a chance, however -- slight though it may be -- that in the process of co-opting Worship, these other groups may well legitimize it and allow it to endure indefinitely.

Part Forty Six

2006-01-20T16:40:00.001-05:00

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.

Part Forty Five

2005-12-05T11:17:00.002-05:00

When they got into the little dusty town, all three of them placed telephone calls. Dylan to his agent, Cass to her office manager, Preacher to the Major. The two who had been missing a week spent longer on the phone explaining the situation than the one who'd been missing for five years. All of them had money wired to the local bank. Even though their rescue would arrive in a few hours. But neither Harding nor Finch had any ID, and the bank wouldn't give them their money (although the teller recognized Finch well enough to ask for his autograph.) Haywood, with his expired Florida license, was able to get his money when the two multi-millionaires could not. He rented a motel room so they could all take long hot showers and he went to the town's only barbershop for a haircut, and shaved his beard off. The three of them sat in the town's only diner and ate cheeseburgers and Preacher made them laugh with a story about being a gunslinger at a dude ranch.

It takes roughly six hours to get to Gethsemane from LA, maybe seven from San Francisco. There is no place in Gethsemane to rent a car, that's for damn sure, and no municipal airport or even a usable landing strip. Fresno is probably the nearest big city, as the crow flies, but because there's no good highway through the Sierra National Forest it takes almost five hours to drive there. It's only about two and a half hours to Tonopah, Nevada, however. Cass Hardesty's office manager was smarter than Dylan Finch's agent. She chartered a flight to Tonopah, went to Cass's apartment, packed a bag for her boss, watered her plants, flew into Tonopah, rented a car, drove to Gethsemane, and got there two hours before Finch's people arrived from LA in his agent's new Land Cruiser.

Haywood politely declined her heartfelt entreaties to return to San Francisco with her, but promised that he would visit her soon.

He had a couple of beers with Finch after that and then politely declined both Finch's, and Finch's manager's, heartfelt entreaties to return to Los Angeles; in fact, much to the chagrin of Finch's manager, Preacher requested that neither his name nor his face be associated with the story that the manager had shopped to People Magazine all the way up the road from LA. Even more to his chagrin, Finch agreed -- you can milk the story, he said, and even mention that I was rescued by a hermit, but his name and face stay out of it.

For the five hours back they worked on their client, tried to get him to relent. He didn't. The story made headlines for a little while -- there are a lot of clippings in the archive -- and Haywood isn't mentioned by name in any of them. An intrepid tabloid reporter tracked down both the teller and the waitress in Gethsemane but since Haywood paid cash for the motel room there was nothing with his name on it there.

For the next few months Preacher drifted slowly southwest toward San Diego -- the same trip he ostensibly began when he left Virginia four years earlier -- working a few days here and there as a day laborer or a busboy or a janitor. He later recounted that he was uncertain about jumping back into human society. He said "I slept alone, said little, kept my head down, and avoided crowds." He also spent a lot of time in libraries, reading voraciously, not just trying to make sense of what had happened to him in the desert but also -- and this is so typically him -- catching up on the pop culture he missed. ("Do you realize," he told someone much later, "that while I was... absent, Uncle Tupelo disbanded?") He was in no particular hurry, which is why it took him until late April of 1999 -- almost eight months -- to show up just 250 miles to the southwest. In Bakersfield, California.

Bakersfield, California, is the Richmond, Virginia, of the West. Without all the flash and glamour. I would never have been there voluntarily except that I had to speak to the men and women of Pacific Athletic Surfaces. To take their life stories and turn them into footnotes in the biographical archive of Preacher Haywood.

Their life stories were no more tedious than mine. Certainly they deserved to better than footnote status. The Glassings and the Clarks had turned a failed tennis court repair company into a successful business. And I'm sure the story of Marvin Clark's and Keith Glassing's inter-racial friendship, dating back to the first grade, could form the basis of some inspiring movie-of-the-week story in its own right. But neither of them managed to escape Kern County for long and both of them now work on other people's tennis courts all day. In the end that doesn't get you your own biopic. If it wasn't for the accidental hiring of Preacher Haywood it wouldn't even get them this footnote.

At the end of the day Haywood's primary appeal was that he was a legal US resident. That's the beginning and the end of it. And now I find myself having to do what I'd hoped to avoid, which was discussing the Pacific Athletic Surfaces business model.

So, with a sigh: most of their work came from working on country clubs and public courts, schools, parks-and-rec fields, things like that. From Bakersfield north, because there was a lot of competition from LA south. Which meant (a) they had to be low bidder and (b) much of their work came when school was not in session, which in turn meant (c) it had to be done fast, because summer was when people wanted to play tennis. So they had a hard time handling contracts more than an hour's drive from Bakersfield. Which meant there wasn't enough business. So Sandy Glassing, Keith's wife and the brains of the operation (she had an AA in business from Bakersfield College), developed this plan wherein a series of contracts moved the operation from one job to the next, day after day, all summer long. They could cover the entire northern and central state in one long road-trip that lasted all summer. Keith and Marvin (whom everyone but his wife and mother called Boom, a nickname from his days as a fullback at Stockdale High School and later as a defensive end at UCLA) would take Keith's brother Jimmy and an equipment operator and in each new town they would hire a few day laborers and get the job done, then move on to the next contract where Sandy would have everything from motel rooms to diesel fuel ready and waiting for them.

That was the plan and it worked well for a few years and then the state started cracking down on using illegal immigrants to perform state contracts. Which meant that the school districts and recreation departments suddenly wanted all kinds of paperwork for the day laborers. Who didn't have it. The State of California's insistence that its tennis courts could only be properly patched by people born in the U.S. threatened to sink the little American success story that was Pacific Athletic Surfaces.

But everyone had to rebid under those rules, and they got their contracts, and Sandy (who apparently is some sort of logistical idiot-savant) put together a road-trip, and all that remained to be done was to hire enough legal laborers to haul around with them from job to job. Wanted: people willing to engage in back-breaking work for long hours in the summer sun, living out of motels and not seeing their families for three months. Mediocre pay, no benefits. US citizens only, please.

Haywood wandered into Bakersfield, a few weeks after leaving the desert, two days before the P.A.S. road trip was supposed to start. Saw the want ad. Walked to the industrial park where PAS was located, into the low cinder block building, and got the job. Boom drove him to the DMV so he could get a valid California driver's license. They were that desperate. They were so desperate they rehired a drunk named Roger Michaels, who had been their equipment operator a few years earlier. Michaels promised to stay sober the length of the road trip. Neither they nor Michaels actually believed that he would. They also had Robert Redcloud, a Yokuts Indian (he hates the term "native American," for reasons he probably would have explained if I'd cared enough to ask him.) With Jimmy and the two principals that was six men, when they needed (and budgeted for) eight, and had hoped for a minimum of seven.

So they rolled out of Bakersfield and started working on these jobs. Note for prosperity: having a bodhisattva on your construction crew boosts productivity in the short term, but in the long term leads to some East Coast intellectual like me turning your life into a footnote.

While all this was going on, I should note, Dylan and Cass were back in Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively, trying to make every act an act of worship. With limited success, although they apparently phoned and e-mailed one another often for support in their spiritual quests.

Anyhow, Jimmy Glassing was a little bantam-rooster of a man who, at one time, was a big fan of hair metal and Federal Schedule I, II, and IV Controlled Substances (he skipped Schedule III entirely. I don't know why.) Now he's still a small, wiry man, but he's renounced his prior devotions and instead focused his attentions upon his wife and the Lord Jesus Christ. Not necessarily in that order. When Haywood was in the crew, Jimmy was going through what his sister-in-law refers to as a "phase" with a roll of her eyes. That "phase" entailed trying to convert everyone he met to his particular brand of born-again nuttiness. It had gotten so bad the year before that Redcloud had threatened to split his head open with a shovel, so Keith had forbidden him from proselytizing on company time.

Thus when this road trip started Redcloud asked to share a room with Michaels, leaving Preacher and Jimmy as road roommates. That Robert Redcloud would specifically ask to bunk with a racist drunk as indifferent about his hygiene as Roger Michaels told Preacher that there was something even worse about Jimmy Glassing.

The second day on the job he was working next to Redcloud. "How was your night with Reverend Jimmy?" Redcloud smirked. Haywood chuckled and shook his head. "He try to convert you all night?" Redcloud pressed.

Haywood laughed out loud. (By this time he'd been out in the real world long enough that he was, apparently, able to carry on a normal human conversation). "All day long yesterday I was trying to figure out what was wrong with Jimmy that nobody wanted to room with him," he said. He never stopped working as he spoke. "So I came out of the shower with a towel wrapped around me and he's sitting on the edge of the bed with a Bible in his hand and he says to me, 'have you accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior?'"

Redcloud laughed at this, having endured the same thing the summer before.

"So I took the towel off," Haywood continued, "because in my experience nothing discombobulates an evangelical like the sight of a penis. But it didn't work. He just sat there patiently waiting for my answer."

"There's nothing you can do to shut him up," Redcloud said, laughing. "Each night he would kneel there praying at the top of his lungs, mostly things like 'Jesus, help Robert Redcloud find you.'"

"Yeah, well," Preacher said, "I figured as much, so I tried to circumvent all that. I said to him 'don't you really mean, have I found the oneness with God that Christ promised we could attain through him?' He wasn't expecting that. So we talked about the Bible for a little while and he calmed down some." Preacher shrugged. "It'll take him awhile before he figures out there's a difference between agreeing with him and not disagreeing with him."

That conversation is mostly second-hand fiction, I should point out. Redcloud told it to me pretty much the way I related it to you. I doubt he remembered it verbatim. But then again he's not the sort who would use the word "discombobulates" on his own. In fact that sounded more like something I would say.

So they toured middle- and upper-California, fixing tennis courts and discussing pantheism. And today they all agree (except for Roger Michaels, who is dead, which is a pity, because I wanted to get a fellow drunk's perspective on Haywood), when asked years later, that Preacher Haywood was a hell of a nice guy and worked his ass off and...

Keith told me: "You know, there was something about the way that guy thought, something about the way he approached life... you just felt a little better being around him. I mean you wanted to work harder. I didn't think anybody worked harder than me and Boom, I mean, hell, it was our company, but Haywood never seemed to get tired and always did everything so... effortlessly. Like it wasn't even work. Like it was... it was..." He couldn't finish the thought, but told me that he got everyone on the crew working harder and faster and better by the end of the trip.

Boom told me: "He used to say that working a shovel was like cooking a meal, which was like singing a song, which was like saying a prayer of thanksgiving. That sounds kind of dumb when I say it but it sounded pretty good when he said it, and dumb or not, it's something I've always carried with me since."

Of course. While I am always studiously objective and clinical and detached when I interview people, I was extra-careful not to let any of my personal feelings about Haywood show when interviewing Boom Clark, because twenty years after his playing days were over he still looked like he could have snapped me like a toothpick. I understand -- from those who follow such things -- that Clark was very good and would have gone to the NFL except that he blew out his knee in his senior year at UCLA. It was while rehabbing his knee that he met his future wife, another college athlete of some renown, a basketball player for the University of Tennessee. She teaches high school history now. She read two of my books. She said.

And she said "they were... different, somehow, when they got back. I couldn't really put my finger on it. More relaxed. A little... gentler, in a way that only someone who knew them really well would notice. Marvin had lost weight, something I could never get him to do at home. Keith was reading The Mapmaker's Dream. I'd never seen him read anything more philosophical than the technical specs for composite compound before that."

Haywood was 32. They all thought he was in his 20s.

Close enough.

He worked with his shirt off on some of those hot summer days and I relate this not to add a homoerotic air to the whole tale but to point out that none of his coworkers recall there being a scar from when he was shot.

Part Forty Four

2005-10-11T16:32:00.003-05:00

OK, so I begin recounting Finch’s visionary experience with some… trepidation. This is really where it begins, not with the story of the tree in Virginia, which I can chalk up to fatigue and hunger and the sort of bullshit for which Preacher apparently became famous. But when I get to these otherwise sincere and rational people uttering this kind of crap I don’t know whether to simply ignore it as raving or dutifully record it without comment and let its absurdity speak for itself.

The former would be unfaithful historiography and the latter would be far too subtle for the likes of me. Hence the trepidation.

Keep in mind that what I’ve been writing about – Finch and Harding and the desert and everything – is garnered from two primary sources, namely, Dylan Finch and Cassidy Harding. Both of whom seem like eminently normal human beings. They're both rich, but I don’t hold that against them. Finch went on to do some good work after he got out of the desert – dying, or at least thinking you’re dying, apparently sharpens one’s artistic sensibilities. Harding was proven prescient in the way she avoided the dot-com collapse and she is still making a fortune designing software interfaces. They both credit Worship in a modest, off-hand way, although it is certainly clear that both of them had achieved success in very competitive industries long before they fell into the clutches of a deranged desert hermit with a degree from St. John’s.

So when they tell me soberly and casually of miracles…

At any rate, back to the desert.

Finch groused about wanting to go home even as he hobbled around the little shack, and Harding floated about the green patches with a beatific smile as if she was on drugs, and Preacher continued almost as if they weren’t there – working his garden plot, patching a hole in the roof of the shack, pounding out cornmeal with a stone mortar and pestle. And he said to Finch: not tonight, but the next night, we will walk out of here.

Finch snorted. “Which one of you is going to carry me? I couldn’t make it to the end of the ravine without resting right now.”

Preacher squinted up at the sky. It was late afternoon. “I want to show you something,” he said. “Come on.” He stood and started walking toward the hills at the end of the caldera, opposite the entrance.

Finch just watched him for a moment, but curiosity got the better of him and he started hobbling after Haywood. Cass looked up from where she was teaching herself how to roll out a tortilla from his stone-ground meal.

“I want to take a bath,” she said.

Finch raised an eyebrow and prepared a caustic remark.

“Use the trough,” Preacher said. “You know where the soap is.” It was homemade liquid soap that Preacher concocted from boiled pine boughs and carrion. It smelled like ammonia and probably had twice as much lye as was safe. “The trough needs to be cleaned out anyhow. When you’re finished scrub it out with sand.”

She nodded and went back to rolling the tortilla. She had already, Finch noticed, picked up Preacher’s deliberate, thorough approach to the chores of the place. He didn’t know what she was like before the desert. Maybe she was always like that. But he suspected not, and he understood that part – even he, who was much more skeptical of Haywood than she was, found himself unconsciously emulating Preacher’s silences. Mimicking his easy, diligent approach to simple tasks would be an obvious next step.

“So what is this thing you want me to see?” he said, struggling to keep up. Even before he said it he knew Haywood would ignore him. He said it more out of defiance than anything, the words coming on the heels of his unwelcome recognition that he had been reflecting Preacher’s Zen silences.

They went into the low hills and the terrain grew rockier and harder to navigate and the incline grew rapidly steeper.

“Wait up,” Finch gasped after a bit. Haywood ignored that, too, angering the actor, and he struggled with the cane, stomping it down harder than necessary to make his point. “Wait up,” he said again, “my leg is killing me, and I have to drag this fucking thing.”

Haywood kept on walking.

When they were about three-quarters of the way up the mountain that marked that boundary to the caldera Preacher led them out onto a ledge and sat down. Finch stumped up to him shortly thereafter, panting, sweaty, furious. “What in the fuck are you trying to prove, Haywood?” he demanded. “My leg hurts. I’m not used to this desert nomad bullshit anyhow. It’s hotter than hell. Christ, there’s no way I’ll be in shape to make that walk tomorrow night now. I don’t even know how I’m going to get off the mountain tonight. And isn’t it going to be dark before we’re down? I don’t know about you but I’m not in the mood to get bitten by another snake. I…”

Preacher just pointed to the spot next to him on the ledge.

“What?” Dylan demanded.

“Sit. Quiet. Watch,” Haywood said softly.

Finch sat down, more clumsily and noisily than he really had to, just to make a point. The caldera stretched out below them, unobstructed. The sun was almost at the peaks to their right, and shadows stretched almost to the shack. Peering closely, he could see Harding sitting in the tub. At that distance, it was hard to tell she was naked.

“All that just to watch her take her clothes off?” Finch said. “Jesus, Haywood, I know you’ve been out here a long…” and his voice trailed off.

The sun touched the ridgeline to the west and golden twilight was suddenly refracted around and down into the little canyon. It was as if the light trickled down the mountainside and into the valley, filling it from the bottom up as slowly as the sun sank; golden light covered the valley floor, so that the ground vanished into a golden haze, and then slowly the squash vines vanished under the tide, then the water trough and with it, Cassidy; the cornstalks went away, the roof of the cabin sank beneath the slowly rising tide of gold and fire. And as Finch peered wordlessly into the optical illusion it seemed to him that he saw currents in the light beneath his feet, and within the currents things moving and taking shape. He peered into the caldera, fascinated. The shapes and eddies and specks within the light took form before his eyes and the light – sun-lava, he called it later – filled the valley until it was just below his feet, and then suddenly the effect ended and it was just a dark desert night.

He was aware of a pressure on his arm and suddenly realized that he was leaning far, far over the ledge, the better to peer into the light. Haywood was holding onto his arm to keep him from plummeting over the ledge.

Finch turned his head and looked at Haywood, and moved his mouth a few times, but nothing came out. Nothing seemed right.

“Did… did you see…?” he gasped, finally.

“Nice sunset,” Haywood answered.

“No, no… In the light. I saw – I mean there was a…”

“Just an optical illusion,” Preacher said, dismissively, and started back down the hillside.

Years later, in a Beverly Hills coffee shop, Dylan Finch said to me “He didn’t want me to say what I was in that scrying-tank. It was for me alone, I suppose. And I haven’t told it to anyone, and I’m not going to tell you. But it was something I had to see. Things I wanted to see and things I didn’t want to see. Wonderful and terrible and welcoming and horrifying. And I’ve tried to tell myself that it was fatigue and hunger and that maybe Preacher even hypnotized me but I don’t think it was any of those things.”

“What was it?” I asked him.

And he just smiled, quietly, powerfully. As if possessed of secret knowledge. I report this here because him smiling doesn’t come across on the taped interview that’s in the archives.

I should have used video, I suppose.

At any rate, Finch followed Preacher back down the mountain, moving carefully in the dark, and it wasn’t until they were back amongst the green growing things and a newly washed Cassidy was smiling at them that he realized he’d left his cane up on the mountain. And that his leg didn’t hurt at all.

That night Preacher disappeared after they ate. Fire-roasted peppers and black beans in the tortillas that Cass had made. The discussion they had seems silly, even to them, safe and secure in the civilized world, but they both recall that they were dead serious about it at the time – whether their speedy recovery from their injuries was from Preacher or from the water. She thought the former. He thought the latter. He tried to tell her about what had happened on the mountain. She said the same thing had happened to her when Preacher stood with her in the garden at dawn and showed her a bean blossom opening to the first light. He was certain that what he’d seen was nothing like that at all.

“When we get back to the world,” she said, suddenly tired, “how much of this is going to stay with us?”

“Nothing, I hope,” Finch said. “I will never set foot in the outdoors again.” He laughed.

“Seriously,” she said. “I mean if we had never met Preacher – if a rescue helicopter had found us instead of Preacher – we would have gone home, and we would have talked about the effects of a near-death experience, and after a few days or weeks it would have worn away and we would be back to the same old bullshit that we did day-to-day before all this happened. But will it be different with Preacher? I mean… can I still make everything I do a prayer, the way Preacher does? Will the sight of a blossom opening suddenly give me an insight on the nature of God? Will watching the sunset erase any phantom pains and obstacles that are plaguing you? Or will all of this fade away?”

“Fade away,” Dylan said, thinking he was being honest.

She looked at him. “You wish,” she said. “I think that the next time you are in a film we’re going to see you praying. I think you’re as impressed with him as I am, only you don’t want to admit it.”

Finch looked into her eyes and said nothing for awhile. Then, slowly, he answered her.

“I think,” he said, “I need to be away from him and you and all of this for awhile before I can answer that question. Because I don’t know how much of it is him, and how much is me, and how much is just the situation.”

They talked about Preacher and the things he’d said and the way he acted until they could no longer keep their eyes open. Finch insisted that she have the cot, now that he was feeling fine.

When he awoke at first light, on the porch, Haywood was sitting next to him in the lotus position with his eyes open. Finch hadn’t felt a board tremble, hadn’t heard a squeak.

The rest of the day Finch set about preparing the place for his absence. Banking the embers, he called it – being ready for the next unlucky traveler who stumbled across it, whether it was two weeks or twenty years later. He stripped down the entire windmill turbine, slathered a thick coat of axle grease on everything, and put it back together. Put good seed stock in bags in the metal footlocker in the shack. Made sure the handles on his tools were in good shape, and that there was cornmeal in a rat-proof ammo box, and before they left he restocked the tiny woodpile with sticks and logs he scavenged from a deadfall up in the mountains.

They ate well. Preacher was, for him, loquacious. They were laughing at his stories as the sun sank and they all headed out of the caldera. Haywood, Finch noticed, didn’t even glance over his shoulder; just walked out nonchalantly. For his part Dylan couldn’t help but look back as the sun his the peaks to the west, wondering what it was like to see the caldera fill from the bottom. But he didn’t see anything but deepening shadows.

They walked for a few hours, keeping the ridge to their left. With plenty of water and their feet wrapped tight it didn’t seem nearly as difficult, but Cass again wondered how Haywood had managed to carry Finch all that way. At one point they stopped and there was a metal canister of water half buried in the sand.

“You put that here last night,” Finch realized.

“I hated to take it out of the valley,” Preacher said. “The next person might need it. But we need it now.” He refilled their canteens – more army surplus – and carried the canister with them until it was empty. The ridgeline was, at long last, easing back down to the desert floor.

“How far have we walked?” Cass asked. “In miles?”

Haywood shrugged. Dylan had no idea. I do. I told you, I found the place. They walked twenty miles that night. Something there was no way they could have been strong enough to do. So I’m not sure who’s bullshitting me on this one.

When the ridge faded to nothing, Preacher made a left and they walked for another twenty minutes before finding something Dylan and Cass had despaired of ever seeing again – asphalt. With telephone poles strung out along side it. They walked on the interstate for maybe fifteen minutes before getting a ride in the back of a pickup truck filled with migrant workers. Haywood chatted with one of the men in Spanish, and started laughing suddenly and loudly and – judging by the startled reaction of the man he was speaking to – inappropriately.

“What’s so funny?” Finch demanded.

“I just asked him the name of the nearest town,” Haywood said. “It’s Gethsemane.”

The Worshipers will be pissed that I revealed the name of the town, but it is pretty funny that Preacher spent time there before going back into the world.

Part Forty Three

2005-08-19T14:30:00.004-05:00

Worshipers search for Kerith Ravine like it’s Brigadoon or something. Preacher purposefully kept its location a secret, not wanting a bunch of ersatz pilgrims in there trashing the place. But it’s not really that hidden. A little bit of leg work, a little bit of research, and anyone could find it using public documents. I found it without too much difficulty. And I went there just to satisfy myself that Preacher didn’t go back there when he vanished. I didn’t think he would – it’s not like him to retrace his footsteps – and he hadn’t. I do think one or two others have found the place since Preacher left, though, because when I got there the windmill was still running smoothly, seven years since Preacher had serviced it last.

Kerith is in the Sierra Nevada Mountains on the Nevada-California line. And it’s not, technically, a ravine – it’s a caldera, a small geological bowl marking the spot where a volcano blew millennia ago. In the 1950s and early 1960s the US Geological Survey and the Agriculture Department sponsored a joint project on desert farming there. There was a tiny spring – not much more than a spot of damp ground – which had probably saved a few Indians foolish enough to get caught in the desert, and which had supplied water for a few other passers-by, too, miners, trappers, outlaws, whatever.

So the feds sank a pipe into the floor of the caldera and built a windmill to pump water the with state-of-the-art 1959 technology, and built a little shack for the research scientist assigned to that lonely duty, and for a few years they tried to prove that the desert could be made to bloom.
It apparently didn’t work and the post was abandoned early in the first Nixon administration. Tricky Dick had other things to worry about, one assumes.

Shortly after that a Korean War vet named David Valdez took up residence there. He was from a nearby town and had, apparently, been one of the local workers hired to set up the base. When it was empty Valdez happened to be sort of between homes – his ex-wife had thrown him out of his last abode some years back, and his veteran’s disability check was entirely committed to fortified wine, leaving no other discretionary income for housing. But when the Princeton-educated, government-employed, clip-board toting farmer moved out of the caldera, Valdez moved in. He showed up in town periodically after that but his benefits check mostly sat in the bank, as the desert seemed to have burned away his taste for alcohol. He would buy a new pair of boots every once in awhile. Some canned goods. Axle grease for the windmill. But he liked going into town less and less and so his visits got pretty sporadic. And then they stopped altogether. And by that time there was nobody left who really remembered where that caldera had been, anyhow.

So now you know what you need to know to find it. Or wait a few decades until the archive is opened, because the specific location is in there, too.

Since most of us have seen Dylan Finch films since 1998, that last blog entry didn’t really create much of a cliffhanger effect, did it? And if you are even a cursory reader of People or US or Entertainment or Premiere, you knew about him getting lost in the desert. You might not have known how close he came to dying, because – to his credit – he didn’t really milk the episode for as much publicity as he could have.

At any rate, when he woke up he was still hot and thirsty and everything still smelled like sand. But he didn’t think for a moment that he was dead because he didn’t think that Cass Harding would be in Hell with him, putting wet rags on his forehead.

“You’re awake,” she said, looking into his eyes. He tried to speak, failed, tried to cough, had a little more success.

“You need to drink,” she said. She helped him sit up and then she put a tin cup to his lips. He grabbed it with both hands and took a few weak swallows. It felt good running down his throat and expanding coolly in his stomach.

“Much better,” he croaked softly, looking around. He was in a small wooden shack and sunlight filtered through the spaces between the planks. The floor was wooden, too.

“We’ve been trying to give you water through a wet rag,” she said, holding onto the one that she’d been putting on his forehead.

“Where the hell are we?” he said. “And, um, where are my pants?"

“We’re in a canyon called Kerith Ravine,” she said, “and your pants are over there.” She pointed with her head and he saw his pant – the legs cut off just above the knees – draped over a dusty metal box that looked like an army footlocker. The footlocker and the green canvas cot were the only items of furniture in the dim shack.

“No offense, but this is the shittiest hospital room I’ve ever seen.” He took another gulp of water, his hands a little steadier on the cup at this point. It struck him that his right hand felt OK. He stretched it out and peered at it in the shadowy room.

She laughed. “You’re in the only bed for many miles around,” she said, “so relatively speaking, you’re in the lap of luxury here. No roads, no telephone, no radio, no electricity. Haywood says that when you’re strong enough to walk for eight hours, he’ll lead us to the highway where we can probably get a ride.”

“Haywood?”

“The man who’s bed you’re in. The man who saved our lives, too.”

“I was bitten by a snake.”

“He told me. Your arm was red and puffy before, but it looks OK now. How does it feel?”

“OK,” he said, surprised. But there was a pulsing ache in his right leg just above the ankle. A pain he was only then aware of. “But the leg still hurts.” He looked down. There were bruises and an ugly-looking scab where the bone had jutted through the skin. But in the gloom he couldn’t see the large bump where the break was.

As he looked at his leg the shack door opened, letting in a square of bright white daylight that hurt Finch’s eyes. He squinted at the figure who came in and the door closed quickly, quietly behind him.

“You must be Haywood,” Dylan said, proffering his hand and waiting for his eyes to readjust.
There was a pause and the other man hesitantly, clumsily took Finch’s hand and shook it. It was as if, Finch said, he’d never heard of shaking hands before. As if it was something he’d read in a book once a long time ago and wasn’t entirely sure how to execute.

“Dylan Finch,” Finch said into the silence.

The dazzle of daylight faded and Preacher Haywood came into Finch’s view. He was a little under six feet, rather thin, but not in a starved-hermit sort of way; just thin. His hair was long but he was beardless and looked reasonably clean and well-groomed. At the time Finch didn’t think anything of this, but later it struck him as incongruous.

“Preacher Haywood,” the man said, after a slight pause. To Dylan it again seemed as if Haywood had to struggle to remember the words, as if he hadn’t spoken English very recently.

“Thank you so much for… for bailing us out,” Finch said, feeling a little awkward at the way Haywood’s eyes searched his. Haywood stared at him a moment later, and then bent to look at the leg. He ran his callused hands lightly across the skin.

“There are still some bruises,” he said. “Don’t bang it when you get up.”

“I’m not planning on getting up anytime soon,” Finch said, lying back down on the cot. “It hurts like hell. I mean I saw it, before. I saw the bone coming through the skin.”

“Preacher set it while you were still out in the desert,” Cassidy offered.

“That needed a – what’s it called – a – I had a friend who broke his leg. Not nearly as bad. Something Reduction and Fixation,” Finch said. “Pins holding it together. X-rays to make sure it’s positioned right. No offense, Haywood, but the longer I wait to have that operation, the more work they’re going to have to do to get set right. I don’t want it healing crooked. I don’t want a limp.”

“It’s set right,” Preacher said, rather distractedly, tipping the tin cup up to Finch’s mouth. Dylan swallowed reflexively to avoid drowning.

“Are you an orthopedist?” Finch said, when he could breath again. “I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but the sooner I can get this looked at, the better.”

Haywood shrugged. “Soon as you can walk to the road, I’ll show you the way.”

“How far is that?”

Preacher paused on this longer than usual. As if, Finch recalled, he was not only trying to recall the words, but also the concept of time.

“About as long the moon stays up,” he said finally.

“A night?” Finch said, sarcastically. To be fair, there is a difference -- moonrise to moonset can be less than an entire night.

Haywood shrugged again.

“I’m supposed to walk an entire night on a broken leg? Can’t you just walk out yourself and… and…” and he stopped talking. Then gasped. “Oh, hell, I have to…”

Preacher grabbed him under one arm and Cassidy grabbed him under the other and got him two steps out the door before his bladder let go. He didn’t pee much but it burned and it looked dark and cloudy running down his leg.

“Good thing I’m not the… modest sort,” he said, looking away from Cassidy. His good leg wobbled underneath him. He kept his bad leg bent up.

Around him he saw Kerith. It was a bowl set in the mountains, with a small garden plot and a windmill near the shack. Farther from the windmill the desert mingled back in with the green and the mountains around them seemed sere and lifeless. Finch had a sense of concentric circles going from green to brown, radiating out from the spring in the center.

The sky was blue and cloudless and hot.

“How long have you lived out here?” Finch said, as Preacher marched him wordlessly back to the shack.

“Not sure,” Haywood said slowly. “Cass said it was August of 1998. As near as I can tell, I got here in January of 1995.”

“Three and half years? What’s the nearest town?”

Haywood shrugged and eased Dylan back onto the couch.

“You don’t know?”

“Never been there,” Haywood said.

“Where do you go for supplies?”

Haywood said nothing, and Cass laughed. “I already had this conversation with him,” she said. “We’ve been saved by a genuine old-fashioned hermit. Hasn’t talked to another human being in over three years.”

“Horseshit,” Finch snapped.

“Solid food,” Haywood said. “When you’re strong enough, you can leave.”

Finch did suddenly feel exhausted. “Steak and eggs,” he said. “And… orange juice. And a latte. Skim milk.”

With that he fell asleep as if he’d been drugged.

Haywood drank from the tin cup.

“He’s not usually like that,” Harding apologized. Not that she would know. “But… I mean, he’s a movie star.”

Preacher said nothing.

“More water for him?” she said.

Two days earlier: she’d collapsed a hundred yards from the shack, and Preacher had scooped her up and carried her effortlessly to the trough – a 55-gallon drum cut in half, lengthwise. She had tried to tell him about Finch but he didn’t seem to hear her. Just carried her to the steel basin and dumped her in. The water was sun-warmed but clear and she could feel it rehydrating her one pore at a time. He took a crude clay cup from a hook on the nearest leg of the windmill and drew some cooler water from the spout, and helped her drink it. She gulped it greedily and then told him about Finch as the stomach cramps hit her. She struggled and managed to keep from vomiting and when the spasms passed he gave her another cup of water. Then he carried her into the shack, her dress sopping and clinging to her. He deposited her onto the cot in the welcome shade and disappeared. He returned a moment later with a ewer of water – made from the same unglazed red clay of the cup – and put it on the footlocker next to the cot.

“He’s by a tower of rocks,” she wheezed, referring to Finch. Haywood – although she didn’t know that was his name, yet -- turned and walked out without saying a word. It occurred to her that he hadn’t said anything at all the entire time.

If it was a hallucination, she thought, it came with the sweetest, clearest water she’d ever had.
She slept, and was awakened by the sound of a splash outside. It was still daylight, but the sun seeped through the chinks in the shack at a longer, lower angle. She sat and felt lightheaded, took another drink, and stood. She felt weak and thirsty and famished but all-in-all, much better. Her dress was dry, her long, dark hair was dry. How long, she thought, was I asleep? How long would it take me to dry out in this desert air?

She took a few steps toward the door and the man who’d saved her burst into the room with a soaking wet Dylan Finch in his arms. Even though Finch was the same height, and probably 20 pounds heavier, than the long-haired man, he carried the actor as if he were light as a feather.

“How…” she said, trying to decide which question to ask first. “Is he OK? How did you get him back here? Where are we? Who are you?”

The man placed Finch gently on the cot.

“He’ll… be… OK,” the man said, his voice even more halting and uncertain than it would be when Finch spoke to him later. “I… carried him back. You are in a caldera I call Kerith. And my name is Preacher Haywood.”

“You’re a preacher?” she said. She didn’t know why this was the first thing that popped out. Certainly she was more curious about how he’d managed to carry a man weighing 180 pounds across the desert – an expanse of desert that she’d nearly died crossing, unburdened.

There was a long pause. “No,” the man said. “That’s my name.”

She looked over his shoulder. Preacher had pushed up Finch’s pants leg and was running his hand along the black-and-blue expanse of his shin.

“How’s his leg?”

“Bad break,” Preacher said. “I reset it out there while he was still unconscious. Less… screaming that way.” He didn’t look as if he was making a joke.

“What happened to his arm?”

“Snake bite,” Preacher said. He stood. “Take his pants off.”

He came back in with a knife and cut the legs out. “Keep out of the sun,” he said to her. “I’ll bring you some food. Soak these rags and keep his skin moist. Use this bit of cloth to let him drink – keep it saturated, and he’ll suck on it reflexively.”

“How will I know when to stop?”

“When he wakes up, or stops sucking,” Preacher said.

And so the last two days. She nursed Finch, and Haywood seemed to keep to his own schedule – tending the garden, making food, and disappearing entirely for short periods.

“Is he going to be OK?” she said to him after Preacher shook his head “no” in response to her watering question.

“Yes. Leg and hand are fine, kidneys are working. He’s drinking on his own. A little food for strength, he’ll be fine.”

Cassidy was a little nervous still around Haywood. They hadn’t spoken much while nursing Finch. Initially, he said so little she wondered if he had some sort of mental disability. Later, she realized that he only spoke if he felt there was some important and non-obvious piece of information to give her – he would respond to direct questions, tersely, and usually with the most obvious and narrow answers imaginable.

But as time had gone by Haywood had seemed to remember the art of, well, if not conversation, at least speaking to other human beings. She had spent most of the time in the shack, and he had spent most of the time out of it; nights she spent sleeping on the floor with a rag pillow, days she spent keeping Finch as hydrated as possible. He worked in the rather dense and tangled garden mornings and evenings, avoiding the midday heat, and prepared two meals a day, and what he did at night was a mystery to her. She was aware of him sitting on the tiny plank deck in front of the shack – about three feet wide and uncovered, it was exaggerating to call it a porch, although he referred to it as such – when she woke up in the middle of the night the first night. And she was aware of his absence when the same thing happened the next night.
But she’d managed to get some information out of him when their paths crossed. That he was born in 1967. That he’d been there since 1995 without any outside contact. And sometimes – rarely – he spoke on his own. About living in the desert. About tending to his garden. About a growing awareness of being just a small link in a big chain.

Even about cooking. Her first night there he gave her a tamale that was exquisite. He showed her the stones he used as a mortar and pestle. She could see the corn stalks behind him. The twining vines of pumpkins and squash. Bean plants on trellises made of steel rebar, leftover from one of the prior occupants.

He told her his story of arriving at Kerith. An abbreviated version. He said, “I left Chicago with some demons. Decided to go back to San Diego. The closest thing I have to a home town. Catch up with some old friends, you know, try to figure out where things went wrong. Hitchhiked my way to a rest stop in Nevada and decided, what the hell, I’d take a little hike in the desert. Couple days later and I woke up face-down in about two inches of water in the trough. Leaky pipe. Saved my life. Of course I fixed it later. Probably shouldn’t have. Anyhow I got the hand-pump working – the windmill was nearly frozen – and went into the shack and found the previous owner. Been dead awhile, I guess. A few years. Pretty well mummified by the desert.” He stated this very matter-of-factly. Cassidy recalled that she had slept on that cot – the cot upon which, apparently, some guy had died, the cot upon which his remains had dry-rotted for a couple of years – and had a strong urge to go writhe in the sand until the cooties got off of her.

“At any rate,” he said, “there were some canned goods. All gone now, but enough to keep my alive then. And lots of seeds. And a garden gone wild, pretty parched. At one point there was some sort of drip-irrigation system to keep everything alive, which probably worked until the windmill seized up. I strip it down and lube it pretty good every six months or so, but I imagine that it ran for a year or two after the last guy died.”

“Lube it with what?”

“That other shed on the other side of the garden has all kinds of stuff. Most of it government issue, but not all of it. The axle grease is plain old Mobil, but none of the cans are dated. I think the last person here probably had a little more contact with the outside world than I do. Maybe not, because nobody came looking for him when he died... but I think he was getting supplies from somewhere.”

There was more. About living in the desert. About feeling connected to the natural world, and at the same time being acutely aware of his intellect – of self-awareness setting him apart qualitatively from everything around him, even as he felt so physically interconnected with it. I can’t tell you, he said, why the corn grows, or how. It is a sort of natural miracle. But the corn wouldn’t be planted at all if I wasn’t here to do it. It wouldn’t get the water it needs to sprout if I didn’t direct it there. When it sprouts and produces kernels of its own its genetic survival is not ensured unless I agree to help – and the trade-off is, I will eat most of the kernels it produces. So do I exist because of the corn? Does the corn exist because of me? Both. But I am aware of this. The corn isn’t.

The next morning Finch awoke with the sunrise, just as Cassidy did. She brought him a thin corn gruel.

It wasn’t bad, Dylan had to admit. The gruel, that is. There were little bits of fire-roasted squash in it, and salt, and some sort of desert sorrel. Plus, he said to Harding, I am so damn hungry that I am ready to start eating the cot.

But within 30 minutes he has Cassidy and Haywood help him hobble to the little lean-to outhouse a couple hundred feet from the house.

Haywood insisted that Finch’s leg was fine. Finch just needed food and water for a couple of days to get his strength back. Finch disagreed. His leg had been badly broken and he needed professional medical help. Haywood didn’t argue with him. But he didn’t give in, either. Just walked away. Came back with a bent piece of rebar that was left from the windmill construction. “Cane,” he said. “Use it, if you want.”

Finch spent his first awake-day inside the shack. Gruel for breakfast, panbread for lunch, some sort of tamale for dinner. He was convinced that it wasn’t actually delicious. That its deliciousness was an illusion caused by his hunger.

Harding was a little more accepting. “This guy,” she said, “is like the hermit Wolfgang Puck. He’s got a cast iron skillet, a big stew pot, and his garden. That’s it. I don’t know how he does it. But everything he makes has been delicious.”

“He’s full of shit,” Finch opined as he finished dinner. “There is salt in that. And some sort of seasoning. Where does he get salt unless he goes into town? Leftover salt from three years ago?”

“Salt lick in the hills, over there,” Haywood said. They hadn’t known he could hear them. “All natural. Got a little potassium in it, I suspect.”

He sat down on the narrow deck with them outside the shack.

“So how do you stay out here for three and a half years without getting completely nuts?” Finch said, rather accusingly. He figured if he was obnoxious enough, Haywood would go get help just to be rid of him.

“Do you know if you’re nuts?” Haywood countered. “If I was really nuts, I probably wouldn’t realize it. For all I know, you two are hallucinations.”

Finch and Harding looked at each other nervously and Preacher laughed. It was the first time either of them had heard it, a full, deep, cheerful laugh. Rather infectious; Cassidy laughed with him, and even Finch smiled.

“The truth is that I was worried about that when I got here, too,” Haywood said. “I thought about the fact that there are two types of hermits – the ones who get wiser and the ones who get crazy. I wasn’t so much searching for wisdom as I was trying to avoid psychosis. And it occurred to me that the ones who didn’t go nuts had one thing in common, which was a very disciplined, tightly scheduled approach to each day. You know, latins, matins, vespers, nones – the religious hermits worked hard, had prayers at regular hours, adhered to a strict rule. And it seemed to help them keep from getting nuts. At least I thought it did.”

“Are you religious?” Finch said. “I thought you said Preacher was just your name.”

“No, I’m not particularly religious,” Haywood said. “But I admired that discipline. So I adopted my own schedule. Gardening, washing, cooking, things like that. And time for meditation during the day. I tried to stick to the schedule and it helped. It helped keep me focused on the tasks at hand and… and it didn’t keep the demons at bay so much as it forced them to approach in single file. Where I had a better chance against them.”

Finch wasn’t sure they were all defeated. Haywood seemed more than a little weird.
The next afternoon he opened the footlocker and found Haywood’s wallet. There was a dust outline around it. Inside was an expired Florida driver’s license and $120 in small bills. None of them were dated later than 1993.

No photos. An expired insurance card from the federal government.

Almost against his will he started to be convinced.

When Preacher said they would be walking out to the road in two days neither of them believed him, because Finch was still leaning heavily on the cane. And both Finch and Harding remembered the desert too vividly. Feared it too much, still.

But the night he said that, he and Harding sat up talking until the moon was high overhead, and whatever they spoke about changed her mind. When Finch awoke and came outside he found Cass wandering around the entire valley in a sort of euphoric daze that he found more than a little unsettling.

“Did she find some peyote or something?” Finch asked, as he and Haywood ate a breakfast of beans and corn tortillas.

“It’s an epiphany,” Haywood said, not paying much attention to her. “I’m going to take the windmill down and service it. It’s a few weeks ahead of schedule but it should be done before I go.”

“You can do it when you get back. We don’t want to mess up your sanity-saving schedule.”

There was a pause.

“I might not come back,” he said. “It’s time. It’s time to go.”

Finch didn't know how to respond to that. So he looked out across the caldera. Cassidy walked languidly between the cornstalks, letting her fingers trail upon the leaves. They could hear her laughing.

“Seriously, what’s wrong with her?”

“It’s an epiphany,” Haywood repeated. “A sudden awareness of the presence of the Divine. She doesn’t have that one-ness, yet, but she can sense that it’s nearby. All around her. It’s good. She’s not ready to understand that she’s it, too.”

“What the hell are you babbling about?” Finch said.

Haywood laughed. “Nothing,” he said. “Just babbling.”

He went out into the garden while the morning sun was still manageable and gently hoed away weeds and let the irrigation tubes drip small amounts of water onto the plants before the scorching sun was high enough to evaporate it instantly. Finch sat there in front of the shack looking at them both suspiciously. I think, he thought, that I need to get better fast, or Cassidy will be as crazy as he is.

Finch’s classical education was… well, lacking. For a graduate of Akron’s public school system it wasn’t too bad, I suppose, but it wasn’t good enough for him to instantly think of the lotus-eaters. He thought, instead, wasn’t there that story, about that Greek guy, where they ate something and wanted to stay on the desert island?

Close enough.

Cassidy sat down next to him with a beatific smile.

“What are you so delighted about?” Finch asked her.

“Everything,” she said. “Let me tell you, I don’t know if it was the near-death experience, or the fresh air, or the healthy diet, but I am seeing things a lot more clearly now.”

“I can tell,” Finch said. “Haywood thinks you can see God.”

“No,” she said, “but I can feel Him holding me at the moment. I mean… I mean look. Look.” She pointed at what seemed to be random spots around the caldera.

“I think your sunstroke has returned,” Finch said.

In the end the best she could explain it is this:

“Preacher says,” she said, “that when you realize that there is no distinction between the Divine and the non-Divine, then you realize that your every action should be an act of worship. And right after he said it I took a breath and then suddenly all this was obvious.”

I double-checked this. Dylan Finch distinctly remembers that she told him that. She remembers telling him that, and remembers that Preacher told her that. The semi-official motto of the Worshipers is “let every act be an act of worship,” and as near as I can figure, that started with a throw-away line he laid on Cassidy Harding when she was still under the effects of dehydration and sunstroke back in 1998.

For what it’s worth, I guess this makes Cassidy Harding was the first Worshipper. Before anyone called it that.

Finch was the second, of course. Much more reluctantly.

Part Forty Two

2005-08-10T22:12:00.005-05:00

In Las Vegas, Nevada, in August of 1998, there was a lavish party to mark the premiere of a big-budget heist picture.

One of the people there was Dylan Finch. He had finished shooting a big-budget thriller of his own, called Ravens. Ever seen it? Sucks. But in August of 1998 nobody knew that yet. Well, Finch might have suspected, but he was paid handsomely to appear in the picture so he didn’t admit that it sucked. Plus, it was still in editing at the time of the party, so one could always argue that he didn’t yet know it sucked.

(Right. The Magnificent Ambersons was ruined in editing. Ravens was doomed from the beginning.)

At any rate, appearing at film premieres was a sort of pre-promotional effort on behalf of Ravens. He wasn’t officially plugging the film yet. It was scheduled for release the day after Thanksgiving. He was just sort of… reminding people that he existed. It had been a year since he was named one of People’s Sexiest and almost two years since his last picture. Of course it had been five years since he did work he could be proud of, but that’s another story entirely.

I’m an alcoholic ex-history professor, not a film critic. What the hell do I know?

At any rate, Finch went to be photographed and he went to get out of LA. And he went to get away from his ever-swelling entourage. He only told two people where he was going – his manager and his personal assistant. And he swore them both to secrecy, saying, if anybody I know shows up at this thing, I will know you told, and you might as well not even be here when I get back.

He drove.

It takes about four and a half hours to get from Malibu to Las Vegas. The easiest part is also the longest, that big stretch of I-15. Finch noticed a little hesitation in his Range Rover when he was moving out of traffic heading east-north-east on the highway. It struck him then that it was a bit absurd for him to have four cars. He thought that he might get rid of everything but the Porsche when he got back. Movie star with the Carrera, he thought. What a cliché. But then again so was the SUV and the entourage. Those he would gladly give up. The Porsche… he liked driving the Porsche too much.

He arrived. Got his picture taken. No starlet on his arm, this time.

At the party – before Finch’s fashionably late entrance – was a woman named Cassidy Harding. She was there on time – which is to say, early – because she didn’t know any better. She was there, period, because she had done some work for the studio, designing specialized software, and they were so happy with her work that they offered her the trip and an invitation to the premiere.

She knew nothing at all about the film, and didn’t care to.

It was unlike her to be at a party in Vegas wearing a little black dress. All three of those things were unlike her – party, Vegas, dress. She worked too hard, she never went away (her home and office were in San Francisco), she favored jeans and tee-shirts.

She was petite and very pretty with fair skin from her Irish father and jet-black hair and eyes from her Argentine mother. She was 28 and in 1998 (as now), a dot-com millionaire. Several times over. Despite the fact that she had an annoying habit of mostly refusing to work for stock options, and when she did accept them, she almost always turned around and sold them within a few months.

Finch saw her early. She pretended she didn’t recognize him. Then she allowed that she might have seen Dogs Of War, a film he’s made five years earlier, the one that put him on the map, the last real bit of acting he did before doing three successive high-paying “blow things up” films. Including Ravens.

He pretended to understand her when she said she designed user interfaces for software applications. Which was sort of like saying that Bobby Orr ice-skated.

Anyhow they talked and they flirted and she made him work harder than he usually had to, which he appreciated.

She knew that he would.

And it turned out that they both like blues music, or at least she did and he was willing to fudge it a little bit, and so around midnight they took it into their heads to leave the party and hop in his car and drive all the way to Bakersfield, California, to see BB King.

All the while silently patting themselves on the back for being wild and impetuous and free. Finch was just glad to finally be by himself, and was all the more determined to purge himself of a few hangers-on when he got back.

Harding just wanted a little more time before deciding if she wanted to sleep with him or not.

They stopped at a Circle K and bought bottled water and she got a Snickers bar. And Finch asked the night clerk for “back country” directions into California. He felt self-conscious about the fact that he’d driven a car that got 10 miles to the gallon from Malibu to Vegas. She didn’t say anything but he thought that she thought that…

Dylan Finch, the actor, the movie star, had done a lot of scenes that were rewritten even as the cameras were being positioned. And he paid careful attention to the directions the night clerk gave him. So I don’t think he got the directions wrong. I think the night clerk at the Circle K on Boulder and Sahara Avenue was just an idiot.

But regardless, country highways turned into country roads turned into dirt roads turned into mining access roads turned into, by the time the sun came up, a broad expanse of arid wasteland marked by the occasional tire track. The occasional skinny tire-track of an ATV, not even genuine wheel-ruts.

They both knew he was lost.

Just before noon, he admitted it. “I’ll just follow the GPS west until we find a highway, or a fence, or a building,” he said.

The Foo Fighters were in the CD player. She took another pull on her bottle of water, smiled, tapped her fingers to the music, said nothing. She thought to herself “too bad they don’t put longitude and latitude on Texaco roadmaps,” but she said nothing.

Just after noon, as the big SUV lumbered down an incline, the engine suddenly revved higher while the vehicle slowed down. Finch pushed down on the gas pedal and the engine roared but the car continued to freewheel. They drifted toward the bottom of the hill.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

He frowned at the dashboard. “Don’t know,” he said. “Think it’s the transmission. The engine’s running but the wheels aren’t getting any power." He thought back to that little hesitation he’d felt in the car when pulling out of traffic on I-15 earlier.

They rolled to a stop. He downshifted into both low settings, turned off the four wheel drive – nothing.

“Put it in reverse,” she said. “My father used to have an old truck and when the transmission got so bad we couldn’t climb hills anymore, he used to put the thing in reverse to get going.”

Finch moved the gearshift to “R” and stepped on the gas gingerly. The wheels engaged for perhaps two revolutions and then stopped, and the engine revved higher again.

They sat, motionless, and watched the shimmer of the midday heat bounce off the hard-pack around them.

“Now what?” she said.

“Now we use the cell phone and the GPS and get someone out here,” he said. He took out his cell phone.

“I can’t get a signal,” she said, staring at hers. His was to his ear. “Anything?” she asked.

After a second or two he shook his head. He was just the kind of person who would try it even when it showed no signal. She, on the other hand, was the kind of person who wouldn’t even try if the display showed no signal.

Incongruously and utterly inappropriately, it was at that moment she realized she wasn’t going to sleep with him, no matter how soon they were picked up.

“I’m going to try the top of that hill,” he said, gesturing with his head to the top of the incline they’d just rolled down.

“Take mine, try them both,” she said, handing him her cell.

He left the engine running and was gone longer than she would have guessed. Long enough that she got nervous and climbed out on the running board and squinted up to see him.

Jesus, it was hot.

When he made it back she said, “well?”

“Nothing,” he said. They sat in silence for another moment.

“So now what,” he said to her.

She liked the fact that he asked her opinion. Not that she wouldn’t have given it anyhow.

“So we sit here with the AC running and wait for someone to come along. There were tire tracks not far back. If nobody’s here before it gets dark, we put out your emergency flares. They should show pretty far from the top of the hill, out here in the desert.”

“No flares,” he said. “I had a flat tire on the freeway a couple of weeks ago.” It was more like six months ago. He’d just never bothered to replace them.

The Gin Blossoms were playing on the CD player.

“Well, then, when it gets dark we walk out of here. Like you said, if we walk in a straight line we’re bound to hit something sooner or later.”

He looked over at her in her little black dress and fuck-me pumps.

“How far can civilization be?” she said, reading his mind.

“I guess we’ll find out,” he said. “You might want to save the last of that water.”

“Nope,” she said. “So long as I don’t drink so much I have to pee. Hydrated is hydrated. I’d rather carry it inside me than in the bottle.”

Later, before the sun had dipped below the horizon, she went into the back of the SUV and pulled out the little tool-kit and used a screwdriver to pry the heels off of the shoes. They weren’t really her style anyhow. Her friend and office manager Desiree had helped her pick them out. While she was back there she picked up a baseball cap.

“Ravens,” she read aloud. “Is this from the football team?”

“No,” he said. “It’s a film I just finished.”

“What’s it about?” she asked, mostly because the silence was unbearable.

“There’s this… secret security force that works for the UN,” he said, “and we have to stop a plot to blow up the UN buildings in New York and The Hague. And, um, Geneva.”

“That must have been fun, working in Europe,” she said.

He shrugged. “Sure.” He hadn’t had a lot of time to be a tourist. Short shooting schedule.

“Let me guess,” she said, “it turns out there’s a traitor in your midst.” She laughed and he glowered at her. He hadn’t even read the script in advance. Big-name action director and big-time paycheck. And his name above the title.

“It must be hard,” she said, trying to make amends, “to have to co-star with explosions all the time.”

“I co-star with Mira Sorvino in this one,” he said, snapping a bit more than he’d intended.

“No,” she said, “I meant that as a compliment. I mean…”

“Most of the time I’m not even there when stuff blows up,” he admitted. “I have to spend a lot of time throwing myself through the air and landing on mats. But sometimes I’m there when it happens. It takes a really long time to set it all up.”

She finished prying off the heels on the shoes. “How are we doing for gas?”

“It will run out right around the same time as nightfall,” he said, looking at the gauge.

“Even with the AC going it’s hot as hell in here,” she said. “Good thing it was just the transmission.”

“I guess,” he said.

He felt like it was his fault. Ignoring the bad transmission. Deciding to drive across the desert. No flares.

She never really thought that. Even when things got bad she didn’t blame him. It was just an accident. Accidents happened.

It got dark and the engine sputtered out and they got out of the truck wordlessly. The water was gone by then.

“Which way?” she said when they met in front of the ticking grille. It was still hot as hell – the air was cooler but there was still a lot of warmth coming up from the desert floor.

“We’re pointing straight west,” he said. “We know it’s too damn far to go back the way we came. Might as well keep going. There might be a Howard Johnson’s right on the other side of the horizon.”

“Might be,” she admitted. She looked to her right. “That’s the Big Dipper,” she said. “That’s the north star. Keep it right there in the sky.”

He looked at where she was pointing, and then looked at her. A little surprised. A little impressed. He wrote a note on a scrap of paper and turned the headlights on. “Just in case,” he said.

At first, things went well. They were both in pretty good shape. They were really inappropriately dressed, of course. Removing the heels from those sandals hadn’t made them any more comfortable. The little black dress didn’t have much fabric but it wasn’t really meant for hiking. And he was wearing long pants and Gucci loafers. Again, not optimal hiking gear.

So the night wore on and they both grew exhausted and sore and they couldn’t see the truck anymore. Whether it was from distance or a dead battery, they didn’t know.

When they got to the pile of rocks it was a welcome relief from the monotonous terrain. They were dimly aware of mountains ahead and to the right but they didn’t seem to be getting much closer despite a lot of walking. The pile of rocks told them that they were actually making progress, that the landscape could and would change. The pile of rocks gave them a little hope.

“Let’s take a break,” he said, and she was happy to agree. They squatted and rested and then he straightened and began to climb the rocks.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“If there’s anything ahead – anything man-made – I might be able to see it if I get a little higher,” he said.

She looked at the rocks doubtfully. “Be careful,” she said, “there could be rattlesnakes in there.”

He looked down at her. “Thanks,” he said, after a moment. “I wasn’t nervous enough.”

He kept on climbing and then something shifted – his foot? A rock? Whatever it was, he pitched backwards off the pile, not very far, just three or four feet, and came down hard on his left leg, which broke with an audible pop.

He screamed and clutched at it as he rolled onto his side, as she raced over to him.

For a moment he couldn’t say anything, just held his leg about two inches above the ankle and writhed, his forehead pressed into the grit and sand.

“Shit,” he panted when he could. He felt hot and cold at once, clammy and nauseous. He breathed hard through his mouth and concentrated on not throwing up. Can’t lose the water, he thought to himself fiercely. Can’t lose the water.

“Let me see,” Cass said, but didn’t try to touch him until he stopped writhing, sat upright, and nodded his OK.

She eased his pant leg up gingerly. The moon was fairly bright. Bright enough that she could see a large bulge in the lower part of his shin, an extra joint in his tibia that hadn’t been there before.

“Shit,” he said again, rocking slightly. “It’s broken, right?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I think so.”

“Oh, Christ it hurts,” he said. He looked down at it. “And I tore my pants.” She laughed despite herself. He chuckled, too, and then winced as even that slight vibration made the leg hurt worse.

“This isn’t funny,” she said. “How are we going to walk out of here now?”

“We aren’t,” he said. “You are. This is the only damn landmark for ten miles. You’ll be able to find me again. Go get help and come back for me. I’ll be OK.”

“I don’t like leaving you here,” she said.

“You don’t have any choice. The best hope for both of us is for you to keep walking until you find somebody. Because if we’re still out here when it gets hot again, we’re both screwed.”

He was right.

“Take my shoes and socks,” he said.

“What?”

“Take my shoes and socks. The socks, at least, will help your feet some. Maybe the shoes. I’ve got little feet. They’ll still be too big but you can decide if they’re better than those sandals you’re wearing.”

It made sense. She put on his socks and stepped into his shoes. They were way too big. But not as uncomfortable as the pumps.

“Now get going,” he said, hissing a little around the pain. “I thought I saw something straight west from here. We’re going in the right direction.” That was a lie. She knew it, and didn’t press him on what he saw.

“I promise I’ll get back here,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “I’m too famous to die in the desert. So get going. If someone happens along, I’ll know to send them straight west. So don’t change directions.”

“I won’t,” she said. She glanced up at the North Star, looked at him again, and set out.

Finch dragged himself over to the rocks and leaned against them and tried to focus on the pain shooting up his leg. It was a distraction from the thought that he was likely to die alone in the desert, famous or not.

Dehydrated, terrified, exhausted, and slipping in and out of shock from the injury, somehow he managed to sleep when he could no longer see her moonlit form receding away from him. And he had no idea what time it was when he screamed himself into wakefulness, hurling his body away from the rocks and swinging his hand away from the fire that shot through it.

Rattlesnakes are reptiles. They can’t control their body heat in the desert. So they hunt at dusk and at dawn, and look for rocky, shady places that can protect them from the sun during the day, and that offer some residual heat during the night. They look for places like that pile of rocks. The surprising thing is not that Finch was bitten as he slept there. It was that it took him that long to be bitten.

As he rolled away from the stones he heard the rattling, too late, and his leg shot a fire up that touched his belly and the little bit of moisture left in him stained the front of his pants. The bone that had bulged against his skin broke through with this frenetic movement and he could do nothing but scream wordlessly, almost soundlessly, paralyzed by the agony in his left hand and left leg.

Calm, he told himself. Calm. You get scared, your pulse races, your blood pressure goes up, you just spread that venom through your system faster. Lie still. Still. You’re motionless. It doesn’t hurt.

It was the best bit of method acting he’d done in a long time. But he convinced himself, at least enough that he could feel his pulse rate slow and the pain seemed to float outside his body.

He lay on his side on the hard-packed earth, motionless, and wondered where the snake was.

Not all that far away -- not all that far, considering how long she’d been walking, and how tired she was – Cass Harding shuffled in a line that was surprisingly straight and true west. She wondered, not for the first time, if splitting up had been a mistake. If she should have stayed with him. If he got picked up, of course, he would tell them which way she had gone. So she had to stay straight west. If he didn’t get picked up, then it was up to her to save them both. But if he was unconscious when someone found him, he wouldn’t be able to tell them which way she went. Or that someone had even been with him. Nobody knew that they’d left together. Not that she could think of. Should she have stayed with him?

This looped thinking was interrupted by her first fall. The oversized loafer caught on something and she fell straight forward and landed on her face.

For a moment she lay there, stunned, tired, thirsty. She heard her father’s voice in her ear. “Get up, Cassidy,” he said. It was just like when she was a kid, after her mom died, when her father would get her up for school. “Get up, Cassidy.” It was a gentle voice but one that did not allow for defiance.

She got up and continued walking. Were the mountains a little closer? The mountains looked a little closer.

Right when the sun came up she fell the second time. The shadow she cast, with the sun at her back just peeping over the horizon, made the ground look uneven and she took a false step and she fell again.

This time her mother was there. “Just get some rest,” her mother said.

Cass struggled to her feet. “You’ve been dead for 15 years,” she muttered.

“You know I’m an hallucination,” her mother said. Or the voice said. She didn’t actually see her mother. Just heard her, just to her left. But she resisted the urge to turn her head.

“Yes,” Harding said aloud, through clenched teeth.

“So why go and ruin it with all of this, this… objectivity?” her mother said. Cass didn’t answer and there was no follow-up from her mother.

The mountains were definitely closer. Jesus, she was thirsty. She knew she was bleeding, her knees and palms and forehead, from the falls. The sun was already fierce and it wasn’t completely above the horizon yet.

What if they’d found Dylan, but he wasn’t able to speak?

No, it was just a broken leg. That doesn’t render you mute.

The sun went higher and she grew hotter and she could feel her skin reddening. She tried not to think about water. For some reason oranges were stuck in her head. A cool, sweet, perfectly ripe orange. The flesh beneath her teeth. The juice on her tongue. That acrid smell when her fingernails broke through the peel.

She was thinking about oranges when she came to the cliff wall. Doddering, blank-eyed, just a few stages shy of heat-stroke, she came to the cliff wall like a zombie, as if she walked simply because she’d forgotten to stop.

But the wall stopped her. It was sheer and rose sharply perpendicular to the desert floor, and stretched north and south as far as she could see in either direction. She stood in front of it, just a few feet away, and blinked at it stupidly. A wall. How could there be a wall in the middle of the desert? She looked up and saw that she’d reached the edge of the mountains, reached them at a point where there were no foothills and gradual slopes but just this giant upthrusting of rock.

A wall.

She collapsed.

When the sun came up Finch awoke. His throat was dry and sore. His leg was a throbbing horror. His hand was numb and when he looked at it he saw that it was swollen and purple and that the swelling was reaching toward his elbow.

And yet it was the sun that awakened him. It touched one bare foot with an almost-gentle, almost warm probe and he saw the red lip of it above the horizon and he was afraid.

Shock? He thought. Dehydration? Snakebite? No, the sun will kill you quicker than those other things. He watched the sun rise, watched his shadow move a little.

Might as well make a race of it, he thought. Dying of snakebite seems somehow a little more… fitting than dying of thirst or shock or sunstroke. Yes, I think I should work to let snake venom win the contest. Then that fucking snake will try to eat me and choke and die.

He tried to say something out loud but couldn’t. Too dry. He worked his mouth a few times and then settled for glaring at the rock pile. Hear that, fucking snake? Eat me.

With an inaudible groan he tried to use his right arm and leg to drag himself into the shade of the rocks. Every pebble, every grain of sand sent exquisite bolts of pain shooting up his leg and from his arm across his shoulders. It seemed as though he’d dragged himself a hundred yards by the time he got into the shade, but when he looked back across the sand he saw that it had only been six feet or so.

Fuck you, snake, he thought, settling in close to the rocks. We’re just going to have to share.

The sun rose up behind him.

Thirst – a distant third behind the pain in his leg and the pain in his arm – began to move up in the standings and before too long it stood proudly in first place. To distract himself from that desire he stared at his arm and was disappointed when he could see no further progress from the snake venom. Fucking snake, he thought again. Wasted all your venom on some rabbit before you hit me. Could’ve had a movie star for dinner. Wasted it on some rabbit. Come here and finish the job.

The sun was almost directly overhead when he finally understood, really understood, that he was going to die. He’d told himself before that he was going to die but some part of him hadn’t really believed it. Hadn’t quite accepted it. But now it was right there. Tomorrow the sun would rise, and he wouldn’t see it. Everywhere on earth people would go on living their lives, his friends and family would get up and do things and new movies would come out and someone else would drive his Porsche and there would be, be, current events, people would become President and just life, life would go on and he wouldn’t be there. It would go on without him.

He felt utterly insignificant. Had he the moisture, tears would have flowed. It was so… unfair. Unfair. That everything would continue just fine without him. Maybe he would be remembered for Dogs of War. And the fact that he died would sell a few more tickets to Ravens. But the fact that there would be a Ravens premiere after he died…

Selfishness, he realized. That was really it. The urge to live, fighting death – it was just self-centeredness. It was an inability to accept the fact that the sun would continue to rise and set long after you were dust.

When you freeze to death, he recalled, you stopped feeling cold as you drifted off to sleep. Maybe he would stop feeling thirsty.

It was the last thing he thought.

On the ground in front of the cliff wall Cass heard her parents arguing.

Let her sleep, her mother said.

It’s time for school, her father replied.

What difference does that make? She’s going to be dead soon.

She has perfect attendance, her father sputtered. Why should she throw that away? She made a commitment to finishing this. No excuses.

“Perfect attendance” she whispered, and opened her eyes, and got to her knees, and stood, weakly, tottering.

Her parents were nowhere to be found.

She stood there for a moment, her feet spread wide apart for balance, her eyes closed, until things stopped spinning. Then she looked at the cliff wall. North, or south?

She turned north, thinking, it’s cooler up north.

After about a hundred yards she went down again. She lay on her side, facing the cliff, her eyes closed, waiting for her father to get her up again. But she heard nothing. Felt nothing. Just a tiny puff on her face, the hint of a breeze. And then a faint, faint squeak of metal.

Her eyes snapped open. A breeze from the cliff? A metallic squeak? She listened intently but didn’t hear anything else. Felt no more breeze. Her eyes scoured the cliff wall in front of her and then she saw it pop into view, like one of those 3D images that she’d gone cross-eyed trying to make out.

An opening. A path. Maybe three or four feet across. Camouflaged perfectly by the coloring of the rocks and the angle of the sun… an opening all but invisible unless viewed at exactly the right angle.

When she tried to stand she found that she was now too weak to do it at first. Even the idea of a passage through, the squeak of metal that said “humans,” the breeze – her arms and legs trembled and wobbled and would not lift her up. She had to crawl to the opening and then grabbed hold of the rocks and pulled herself up.

She took a step inside. There was a word painted in something dark on a rock. Kerith. It meant nothing to her. She staggered onward, leaning on the rocks for support, and followed the thin defile through the cliff wall and navigated a dogleg and then the rocks on either side of her were gone and she was standing in a small box canyon, one that seemed green to her eyes grown used to the barren brown waste of the desert. And ahead of her was a deeper, fuller green, and she heard the metallic squeak again. Her eyes focused on the windmill and she staggered toward it, and as she fell for the last time she became aware of a figure rushing toward her very fast.

Part Forty One

2005-07-22T12:00:00.001-05:00

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

2005-07-17T21:25:00.001-05:00

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

2005-07-01T14:02:00.002-05:00

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.

Part Thirty Eight

2005-06-08T18:33:00.001-05:00

When I finished the interviews in Florida I flew to Dulles and made the mandatory pilgrimage to Dare College.

I went more out of a sense of duty than anything. There was no first-person witness for me to interview (although I tried), no tangible documents. It just seemed like something I was supposed to do – go see Preacher’s Tree.

You know what? It’s just a goddamn tree. In front of a college library. If you didn’t know better, you’d never know there was anything special about it… except that every so often someone, usually some hippy wannabe, shows up and stands there and stares at the fucking thing. Oh, and periodically the campus police arrest couples for fornicating beneath its spreading boughs.

Castanea dentata, the American chestnut. It was supposed to be little more than a shrub, an object lesson, if you will – the American chestnut was once one of the most common and economically useful hardwood trees in North America, but in 1904 an Asian fungus was introduced with some imported trees and by the 1920s the species was essentially wiped out in North America. Instead of a tree five or six feet in diameter and over a hundred feet tall, your average American Chestnut gets to be no more than 10 or 20 feet tall and less than a foot in diameter before the fungus eats through the bark and kills it.

Originally this chestnut was no different from the rest. Botany professors and environmental studies students at Dare College would occasionally look at the tree and get all nostalgic for something they never knew.

Haywood showed up at Dare just as the spring semester was letting out, and for whatever reason – maybe he was just bored – took a job on campus helping to computerize the school library’s card catalog system. It was a pretty big project, because rather than relying upon the existing card catalog, Preacher and a fistful of other temporary workers were supposed to actually enter the data directly from the books themselves, thus (hopefully) correcting any mistakes that might have already crept into the system. There was a program that would then check their entries against the old cards, and where there were discrepancies, the errors could be corrected.

The temps were housed in a dorm on campus that would otherwise have been closed for the summer. They worked long shifts and made decent money, because they didn’t have any place to spend it.

Dare College was a fairly typical small East Coast liberal arts school, although being in Virginia they tried to come up with euphemisms to keep the word “liberal” out of their description – a “complete learning environment” was one good one I saw in a catalog from that era, as well as “classical curriculum.”

Preacher and I both would have told them: No. You don’t have a classical curriculum. St. John’s had a classical curriculum. You have a liberal arts program.

At any rate, if you’ve ever seen an East Coast liberal arts school, you can picture the place. The gently rolling tree-lined campus, the mixture of old and new buildings, the fights over parking, the paved walkways and the occasional worn dirt path where students found a particular shortcut to be useful. There is a fountain. An old stone building. An ugly concrete administration building.

And the chestnut in front of the library, doomed to grow for a few years, die for a few years, and then sprout again. Never to achieve sexual maturity.

Preacher worked with five other temps and he was assigned, fortuitously, to entering data from the philosophy and theology sections, among others. In typical Preacher fashion I am sure he was an excellent employee, at least at first, setting the pace for entering data. And in fact initially he worked so far ahead of the others that he found himself stopping to actually read passages from the books. As he told the story years later, he would set aside particularly interesting titles, or books he’d heard of but hadn’t read, and after meeting (or, knowing him, slightly exceeding) his quota for the day he would sit and read.

There he was, then, all that summer, with his ars memoria and the fast reading that he’d perfected a few years earlier, and virtually unlimited access to a decent-sized library. Able to take in the French and a fair amount of the Greek and Latin texts, as well as the English (and this was Dare College, not the Sorbonne – the collection was overwhelmingly written in English).

He would fall behind in his quota. He would spend sometimes two or three days straight in the library. He absorbed information like a sponge.

He overdid it.

And one fine summer day he left the library, unsure how long he’d been in there, unsure of the time of day (it was early afternoon) or what day of the week it was (it was August 2nd) and his head was swimming with Thomas Aquinas and Rene Descartes and Lao Tzu and everything else, and he walked out of the library blinking and rubbing his tired eyes, and he caught sight of the chestnut tree, towards the end of its life cycle, standing about 15 feet high but pockmarked all along its trunk by the blight.

And then… even Preacher was incapable of putting it coherently later.

“Suddenly,” he wrote, years later, “I was intensely aware of the web that connected me to the tree – to the point where there was no separation between Tree and Haywood. I felt roots in the soil and sun overhead and the blight gnawing at the bark. I was not the Tree – I still had my conscious mind – but it was as if I had suddenly expanded, like a balloon suddenly blowing up, so that I enveloped and encompassed the tree, and from the tree everything else, and there was this horrible, wrenching understanding of my own insignificance and at the same time my own fundamental one-ness with everything else. The experience lasted no more than 30 seconds but I stood there, dumbstruck, paralyzed, in front of that tree for over an hour. I was incapable of any kind of conscious thought as my mind struggle to make sense of what I had just experienced, of what had just been thrust upon me. The first sensible thought that I had was that I had to reduce the experience down to a pale meaningless shadow in my mind, if I was to have any hope of regaining my sanity. And I played it over in my mind until I was able to reduce it. The act of putting it into language ripped the guts out of the experience, truth be told. It was so… ineffable that any attempt at description – such as, for example, everything I’ve just said above – could only obscure and reduce the reality of it. I should say, Reality with a capital R, real in a way that nothing had been before, fundamentally real, an overcoming of… samsara, I suppose, is one way to put it, one that is no more or less wrong than any other word.”

Pardon me if I roll my eyes and say, right.

Eventually he found himself hanging onto the tree for dear life, trying to convince himself that he’d just had some sort of epileptic seizure.

Frankly, I think there’s still a lot of merit to that seizure theory. He never got it checked out. A brain scan of some sort would have proven, or disproven, that. Too late now. How convenient for him.

But what the hell – a religion based on one over-educated guy’s grand mal seizure wouldn’t be so bad. I mean I’m sure religions have been founded over worse than that.

The thing is – and this is one of those stupid ass coincidences that keep Worshipers in line – that American Chestnut is still there. It’s about 50 feet tall now, and about three feet in diameter, and is now threatening to crack the walkway with its roots. And to make matters worse, Worshipers have started showing up there like it’s the fucking bodhi tree.

It’s just a tree, people.

Look in the archives – the campus botany department had inoculated that tree with a hypovirulent strain of the blight to try to protect it against the fungus. It must have worked, because the fungus is gone and the tree is still standing. And Preacher himself laughed at the notion that he had become some sort of divine tree surgeon.

But if you’re looking for metaphor, there’s also this – it’s the only mature American chestnut. Which means while it’s achieved sexual maturity, there aren’t any other trees for cross-pollenization.

Preacher proceeded to go back to the dorm and get absolutely shitfaced on vodka. His co-workers came home and found him drunk to the point of incoherence.

He went back to the library the next day and didn’t read any more books. Just keyed in his data and kept his head down. When he wasn’t working he was drinking, and soon he found it easier to just lose himself in the mindless repetition of the data entry. He worked for days straight and left after finishing his last section. On time, having made up for all the hours he wasted reading.

And he left without collecting his final paycheck.

So I tried to talk to someone at the temp agency, and they hid behind “employee confidentiality.”

Dare College had a spokesperson, a thin, slightly nervous woman with stiff blonde hair.

“We don’t,” she said to me, off the record, “comment about Worship, or the tree, or Preacher Haywood.”

Why not?

“We don’t,” she said, in the same stilted way, “want to encourage those people.”

I was down with that.

“You have no idea what it’s like,” she said conspiratorially, it being obvious to her that I was not one of “those people.” She leaned forward a little. “They just show up and stare at it. For hours. And sometimes they start… doing it, right there. It’s disgusting.”

Doing what? I asked, just to make her face turn red. It did.

“It,” she said, in a near whisper.

Of course. It.

“Ever consider a plaque?” I said. “Turning it into a tourist attraction? Charging admission?”

“The less attention paid to it,” she said, “the better. This will all fade away soon enough.” She didn’t sound too sure of that last part.

“What about chopping it down?” I said.

She looked horrified. “That tree put our forestry department on the map,” she said. “We have one of the only mature American chestnuts anywhere. The only one in Virginia, so far as anyone knows.”

“Did they ever replicate their results with any of the other American chestnuts around here?”

She launched into a very long and convoluted answer which I will summarize as:

“No.”

Of course not.

I went back to the library and there was this intense, good-looking couple standing a few feet apart and staring at the tree. Jesus. I stood under the tree and stared back at them, arms crossed, until they blinked.

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

They looked peeved, very briefly, and then smiled politely. Sure. I was God, just like them. Have to be polite to an avatar of the Divine.

“How do you ward off a vampire?”

They looked at each other. “Holy water,” the girl said. She had long red hair in a ponytail. Pale, freckled legs.

“Hold up a crucifix,” the boy said. He was darker, Latino maybe, with short hair.

They looked at each other and smiled warily. Either I was nuts, or this was just the set-up for some sort of joke.

“Ever wonder how that got started?” I said.

They shrugged. “Not really,” the girl said.

“It got started because people confused a symbol for the actual thing it was supposed to represent,” I said.

They looked at me, a little bewildered. I looked at the tree meaningfully, and then back at them. Realization slowly dawned on their faces.

“Plus,” I said, “Haywood was full of shit.”

Part Thirty Seven

2005-05-23T11:03:00.001-05:00

The house they had in Hollywood Beach was right on the beach and a stone’s throw from the Diplomat Hotel. It wasn’t particularly attractive. In fact it was sort of dingy-looking, the roof sagged a bit in the middle, the porch canted to the right, and Preacher – who was meticulous about his kitchens – must’ve had a heart attack at the tiny, grease-spattered kitchen.

But it was right on the beach. Near the action. The sort of place you paid $1,500 a month for even in the early ‘90s. And Haywood’s arrival apparently coincided with a man named Armando Schisler getting arrested (again) for possession of cocaine. Which is not, in and of itself, particularly important, except that Armando was the roommate of a man named Matt Foxwell, and Foxwell was at the time a new Assistant District Attorney for Broward County, and couldn’t have a roommate who kept getting popped for possession. Which meant that Foxwell might have to give up his small, dingy, but right-on-the-beach home for want of a roommate.

Except, of course, Preacher sat down next to Foxwell at the Sea Crest, a small dark and dingy bar in Hallaway, and the next day Haywood advanced Foxwell three months’ rent and moved in to the beach house.

He took a job in Boca Raton working as an orderly at a nursing home. It took him all of three days to find a decent job and a beachfront home. That weekend he bought a 1952 Indian Chief motorcycle, and got laid for the first time in years – for the first time since Seattle, probably, although there are unconfirmed reports that he gave a couple of people at the Bar Nothing the full cowboy experience.

The most depressing thing of all is how…predictable that is. House job transportation sex without effort, whenever he wanted.

I have no idea where he learned how to operate a motorcycle. Matt recalls that he took some sort of mandatory highway safety class but never seemed the least bit unsure or unsteady on it.

Typical.

Matt and I have something in common – when Preacher left Miami he gave Foxwell the motorcycle, just as he’d left me his jeep when he graduated from college. I sold the jeep while I was in grad school, but Foxwell still has the motorcycle. Still in mint condition. Candy-apple red. He’s got a wife and two kids and says that mostly he just rides slowly around the block every couple of weekends and thinks about the six months or so he and Preacher lived together in that beach house.

“Jesus,” Foxwell said, “I am a happily married man, I love my wife, but Jesus, the pussy.”

I gave him my most inscrutable look.

“Right,” Matt said, “you used to live with him, you know what I’m talking about.”

His wife -- Elena Gutierrez-Foxwell -- had, in point of fact, dated Preacher Haywood. In those days she was another ADA in Broward County (she’s a judge now) and Matt decided that his poor roommate really needed to be introduced to someone a little more substantive than the fake-breasted, bikini-clad nymphs he was meeting up and down the Gold Coast. Right. Poor Preacher. So Elena was, Matt said, the best-looking woman he knew with a triple-digit IQ, and so he tried to fix the two of them up.

Three dates. No sex. Elena broke it off. Said he lacked ambition. Said he was the sort of person for whom women did incredibly stupid things, and she thought it was probably smart to run as fast as she could before it was too late. “He was like,” she said, “heroin. People try heroin thinking that they can handle it. And some of them are right. But a lot of them end up hooked. I wasn’t taking any chances, not with a nursing home orderly who didn’t seem to want anything more out of his life.”

They then told me a tedious story about how they got involved afterward, and I feigned interest.

When I walked down the promenade with Foxwell and saw the perfect bodies, the rollerblades, the convertibles, Foxwell told me things were really little changed in the last dozen years. “Everybody knew him,” he said. “The t-shirt vendors, the barmaids, the rich girls, from Boca and Miami. And even over on the Intracoastal – I don’t know how, but when we would go over there he would still keep running into people he knew. Let me tell you, you could drink cheap if you stuck with him on a Friday night.”

I nodded noncommittally, thinking of Ocean City.

“I remember this one time,” he said, “we met these three girls from Monaco. Perfect bodies. Preacher talks to them in French, and one thing leads to another, and eventually we’re out on the beach and these women are taking off their tops and insisting on a moonlight swim…” his voice trailed off, and I knew that at that moment he couldn’t have picked Judge Gutierrez-Foxwell out of a lineup.

The Vista Del Rey Assisted Living Community was called the Vista Del Rey Nursing Home when Preacher worked there. My guess is that a few new coats of coral and turquoise paint have been slapped on the place since then. It’s actually pretty nice, as such places go – big, modern, clean, quiet. Not surprisingly, there aren’t any residents left who remember him. It’s where old people go to die, after all. There are probably a few people on the staff who worked with him, but when I spoke to the director of HR no names were volunteered. I ran ads in the newspaper but there were no takers.

Most of the higher-ups have been replaced since then, not a few of them because of the circumstances surrounding his departure. Fortunately for posterity, Haywood came to Foxwell with the whole matter because of Foxwell’s legal expertise.

Seems that, for one thing, Preacher and the residents got along well. That’s not surprising. But over the course of a few months Haywood began to see signs of abuse. The patients were initially afraid to say anything but Preacher caught one of the other orderlies – a veteran of the place named Maurice Clarke – in the act of breaking an old man’s hand.

Brittle bones. Muscular orderly. Tight squeeze. And another resident punished for soiling his bed, or demanding a better meal, or refusing to leave the TV room… whatever.

Preacher did what he was supposed to do, which was report it up the chain, but nothing happened, and the abuse continued.

One of the residents was a man named Hank Feldman, who had grown up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and who was, in fact, rather wealthy. Haywood and Feldman got along particularly well and sometimes when Preacher’s shift was over he would change into his civies and sit with Feldman and listen to stories about parties in the 1920s, about the Fitzgeralds and the Menckens and the Harrisses coming down from Baltimore to drink and carouse at his house near the mouth of the Tred Avon River.

I had to look up who RP Harriss was. My guess is that Preacher already knew.

At any rate, Preacher persuaded Feldman and one or two others – at personal risk – to support the abuse complaint against Clarke, in the naïve hope that this would somehow lead to the problem being addressed. It did not, and Feldman was denied food for a day as punishment – no marks that way, and Feldman was a diabetic… what Clarke and the other close-the-ranks assholes hadn’t counted on was Haywood leaving a warm bed with some 21-year-old roller-blader to go into work on his day off and check on a few old geezers.

And the next day he went to an alphabet soup of state agencies, and the DA’s office, and families of the victims, and unleashed a royal shit-storm. Backed up by his roommate, a prosecutor looking for a case that would get him some attention.

At that point Haywood’s days on the staff were numbered, of course. Officially, though, he was fired for gross misconduct.

It was a few weeks after the place was filled up with inspectors and regulators and police and prosecutors and all of the higher-ups were talking about how shocked, SHOCKED they were to learn about all this, and they just wish that Preacher had told someone before going public. The first one fired was Clarke, of course, and after picking up his last paycheck he walked up to Preacher and tried to punch him in the head.

I can so perfectly picture this that I don’t care that there aren’t any eyewitnesses. Anyone who knows Preacher can picture this. Preacher has a towel or something else in his hand – he’s too smart to punch someone with an open hand, even when it’s someone he’s wanted to punch for months – and he sees Clarke stride up to him purposefully and he stands there calmly, arms at his side, because he can’t believe that even an animal like Maurice Clarke would actually intend violence toward HIM, because he was just doing the right thing, and Clarke throws a well-telegraphed roundhouse punch that even one of the octogenarians could have ducked, and then without any change of expression at all Haywood throws a short, graceful left hook and Clarke hits the ground like a sack of potatoes.

I haven’t been in a fistfight since I was eight, and I am one of those people that nuns and crossing guards want to punch in the face just on general principles. Preacher Haywood was the nicest guy I ever met, he abhorred violence of all kinds, yet he was involved in at least four assaults after leaving high school – by all accounts not the aggressor in any of them, but not exactly turning the other cheek, either. Five assaults if you count the assassination attempt, but we haven’t gotten there yet.

So they fired Preacher for knocking Clarke out cold. Clarke filed assault charges, a worker’s compensation case, and a civil lawsuit against Haywood. The criminal charges were dismissed almost immediately, the worker’s compensation case was thrown out because it happened after the firing, and Haywood’s trust gave the man $5,000 to go away, against the advice of the lawyers, who told Preacher not to pay a nickel.

Picture a late-night conversation right after Preacher was fired. Sitting on the deck in the twilight, drinking beer and watching the moon rise over the Atlantic, are Matt and Preacher, Elena and a woman named Karen Adder (I couldn’t find her, but apparently she was the closest thing to a real girlfriend that Preacher had, although according to Matt and Elena she was little more than a semi-regular booty caller; she was, at the time, a stripper).

And Elena, who by this time had left the DA’s office and was dating Matt, is telling Preacher: you weren’t going to be a nursing home orderly the rest of your life anyhow. It’s time for you to grow up and do something with your life.

Preacher says, duh.

Seriously, dude, Matt says. He was the sort of lawyer who said “dude,” but it was starting to sound increasingly forced. You keep talking about opening a restaurant. We’ll find someplace here on the beach. I’ve seen you in action, man, you’ll be able to raise all the capital you need.

Karen nuzzles his neck.

This place is not right for me, Preacher answers, not looking at them, looking out across the water. Everything is a little too effortless down here.

You’ve made that choice, Elena says. Doesn’t have to be that way. Go back to school. What about med school? You talked about that once. That’s not effortless. That’s something even you would have to work hard for. And something that would bring you some satisfaction, some sense of accomplishment.

You would look so hot in a lab coat, Karen says to him, and he smiles and kisses her. Matt and Elena roll their eyes.

I actually signed up to take the MCAT, he says to them. I have to read up on the science stuff. It’s not that long a test, really. So each question carries a lot of weight.

I think that’s a great idea, Matt says. I think that you would be a fantastic doctor. Would you go into gerontology?

Haywood shrugs noncommittally. Most of the doctors I’ve met, he says, tell me that they always had a burning desire to be a doctor, that it was all they really wanted to do, that you had to really love it to put up with all the bullshit they put you through to make you a doctor. I don’t have any of that. I’m not sure it’s for me. I don’t want to get halfway through it and decide I made the wrong choice.

Not making any choice, Elena said, is worse. Right now you’re not making any choices, but one day the frat party is going to end.

You seem sad, baby, Karen said. Let’s go see if I can cheer you up.

According to Matt, Preacher said he liked Karen because she had an uncomplicated view of life and a surprising amount of self-knowledge.

Right.

He took the MCAT. Some nauseatingly high score. It’s in the archive. But that was as far as it went. Afterward they threw an insane beach party that was broken up by the police twice, and the second time involved chasing away cops who’d never left after responding to the first call. And after the beach party he gave the Indian Chief to Matt and stuck out his thumb and disappeared.

Elena and Matt are both Worshipers. Low-key about it, but they’re in a Circle and their house has that look, that feel of a place where running the vacuum cleaner helps them commune with God and it always smells like lavender and fresh-baked cookies. It really, sometimes, just makes you want to scream. She’s a judge and he heads the felony trial division in the prosecutor’s office. Who the fuck has time to make the beds and bake cookies? And look after their perfect non-video-game-playing children? The Worshipers all want for a little sloth, in my opinion.

But given how truly bizarre Haywood’s life got after leaving Miami Beach, even I find it hard to begrudge him a few months of hedonism.

No, I take that back. I begrudge him that. I was married, with a non-tenure-track job at Bowling Green and working on my Ph.D, starving and desperate and contemplating law school, or suicide. As if there was a difference. And he was nailing European fashion models on the beaches of south Florida. I begrudge the hell out of him.

Part Thirty Six

2005-05-10T12:35:00.001-05:00

Preacher got a helicopter ride to Atlanta. The state police arrived Frank was violating parole by possessing a handgun. The trespass was irrefutable, the attempted arson was pretty self-evident, and so the three men went to the hospital in Macon with an armed escort, and then to jail. The cops looked at Arthur’s rabies certificate and declared themselves satisfied.

Everyone gave a statement. Which, I learned, you can get with an FOIA request. They’re in the archive. The women heard noises, screaming, Arthur, they saw lights in the driveway, they raced outside, and… bang. None of the three men suffered any life-threatening injuries in the melee, although in the transcript of his sentencing hearing Michael’s lawyer notes that he required two surgeries to put his hand back together, and had some second-degree burns.

Preacher and Cassie were summonsed to court as witnesses, but the three men pleaded out, and they never had to testify. The prosecutor asked them if they wanted to give a “victim impact statement.” Preacher just laughed. Cassie said, “the impact of my foot on his balls was my statement.”

As for Preacher, he spent a couple days in a hospital and came home to the farm. Anna told the people at Emory that she was his wife so she could stay in his room. Karen told them – slightly more plausibly – that she was his lawyer, so his chart was kept in immaculate form. Donna told them, laughably, that she was his sister, but nobody at the hospital wanted to challenge this assertion after looking her in the eye.

Arthur continued to sleep, morosely, in the goat shed while Preacher was gone.

I have a picture taken late that summer, after Preacher was home. Karen took it. Preacher is standing in the back of a wagon, his shirt off, wearing cut-offs and work gloves. There are hay bales stacked around him. You can see the scar from the bullet, on the right side, about four inches above the nipple. It went between two ribs and nicked the top of his lung and came out the other side near his shoulder blade. Nice, clean, in-and-out. He was lucky.

They baled hay, they sheared sheep, they discussed re-entering the goat dairy market. They sold organic corn and soybeans. Cassie could handle all the machinery, and keep it in good repair, too. Donna got almost as good as Preacher at shearing sheep. Ellen showed a knack for carpentry. Anna – things grew in Anna’s footsteps, so she took care of all things green and growing. Karen managed the whole show, handled accounts, wheedled and bargained and kept the operation in the black.

In the wintertime he watched videos in the house with them at night, but always went back to the goat shed to sleep. He had a space heater. Plus, he said to them, it’s Georgia. I used to work in Alaska. How cold can it get?

The Spring arrived and they were busy again, but not as bad as the year before. Attribute that to both more experience and better winter upkeep. And to Preacher, who was as indefatigable as ever. Fields were plowed. Crops were planted. Lambs were born.

And after the first shearing and hay-cutting, with the crops in the ground, Cassie and Anna came to Preacher and said:

“We have a favor to ask.”

“Ask,” he said, caulking the seal on a window at the farmhouse.

Anna said to him, “you know that we’ve been putting money away.”

“For the baby,” he said. They wanted a baby. He would certainly have known that after a year there.

“And Karen thinks that our carrier will cover fertility treatments,” Cassie said.

“Great,” Preacher said warmly. “Can you hand me that putty knife?”

Anna handed him the knife. The two women looked at one another.

“So… we were sort of wondering,” Anna said, wondering why he was making them go through such efforts for such an obvious question.

Preacher said nothing, just kept on working in that oblivious way he has. Had. Has. I’m assuming he’s still mostly ignorant about the way real human beings act in awkward situations.

“We, um,” Anna said, and looked at Cassie for help.

“We want you to come to Atlanta with us and whack off in a cup,” Cassie said, helpfully. “It works better when it’s fresh.”

Preacher looked at them, then, and raised one eyebrow with a bemused smile. “Aren’t you supposed to at least buy me dinner first?”

They laughed, nervously. Preacher put down the caulking gun and wiped his hands on his pants, and turned to face them.

“Can’t,” he said, regretfully.

“What?”

“I want you to have a baby, and I’ll do anything I can to help you, but I won’t do that,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because I couldn’t have a baby and not be a part of its life, and I couldn’t be a part of this baby’s life,” he said.

“We’re not going anywhere,” Cassie said, “the baby would be right here with us.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” Preacher said, “but someday I might be.”

The women looked at each other, and then back at him. “What?”

“I’m not going anywhere tomorrow,” Preacher said, “I’m not going anywhere next week, but one of these days I’m going to be moving on, and that would be very hard to do with a baby here.”

They talked about it for a bit more but it was clear his mind wasn’t going to be changed.

That night after he was back in the goat shed the women discussed this turn of events. Donna opined that it had now been at least a year since the man had gotten laid, and that he would be much more favorably inclined toward staying if he got off the farm and had some sort of social life once in awhile.

Ellen pointed out that he lived in a goat shed and was reminded each night that he was just a hired hand.

Karen said, if you had just gotten him drunk and fucked him like I suggested, it would have saved us a lot of time and money.

Cassie said, when it’s your turn, do it however you want.

Anna said, we don’t need him anymore. That doesn’t mean I want him to go. He’s a part of this now. We should make that clear to him. It’s not a question of needing an extra pair of hands, or having him serve as a go-between with the local idiots. I mean there’s five of us, we have a better idea of what we’re up against now, we could probably manage OK now. But losing him would be like losing one of you. It would… it would change everything. Change the balance.

Karen said, we can make him a partner. Will that make him stay?

No, Donna and Cassie said together.

Why does he stay now? Ellen wondered.

Because he likes it here. Because he feels safe here. Because he likes us, and the work, Cassie said. The same reason we stay here. Except we have something he doesn’t have, which is a future here. I mean look at him. He is young and strong and beautiful. Smart, funny, kind. His future is not a lifetime of celibacy, growing old with a bunch of dykes. I mean, Karen’s single, but if she met someone nice, we could easily make a place for her here – Elizabeth fit, mostly. But even assuming Preacher met someone, what then? Bring her back to live in the goat shed? I mean, let’s be realistic. Karen met that woman in Atlanta and the four of us did a pretty good job of scaring her off last year.

My brothers, Anna said slowly, used to screen my boyfriends. It’s one of the reasons I became a lesbian. He’s like our baby brother, and you’re right – if I was straight, I wouldn’t want to move into this. Even if he had hot water in the goat shed.

And, Karen said, speaking from experience, his options are pretty limited in Barlow, Georgia. I mean not as limited as mine, but limited nonetheless. But Preacher knows all this. So why has he stayed this long?

They looked at each other without an answer.

Karen went to him the next day, after he finished helping Donna worm sheep.

“Preacher, you scared the hell out of us with that ‘I’ll be leaving someday’ comment yesterday.”

“That wasn’t my intention. I just meant that, you know, this isn’t going to last forever.”

“Why not? Why can’t it last? The five of us plan on it lasting. Cassie and Anna plan on raising a child here.”

“It’s different for you guys,” he said, rinsing worming paste off his hands at the faucet.

“Because we have equity? We talked about that. We want to make you a partner. Give you a full stake.”

But not, she thought, a bed in the house. And he knew that, but didn’t say it.

“It’s not that. This is your thing. I’m just the hand.”

“Oh, that’s crap, and you know it. You’re a part of this place, now, just like we are. A part of our family. And you’ve put as much of your sweat into this as we have.”

“Do you need the capital?” he said, wondering for a moment if this was a business venture disguised as something else. “Because you don’t have to sell me a stake. I can just loan you some money.”

“No, it’s not about money.” She wondered what a 1/6 interest in the place was worth. “It’s about the whole… the whole… ecosystem here, for want of a better word. The equilibrium. You’re a part of this place. We depend on you, the whole place depends on you to run properly, just like it depends on me and everyone else. We were afraid that taking you on was going to upset the balance, remember that? But instead it balanced us. It stabilized the whole place, made everything run better. And the thought of losing you…I don’t know what it would do.”

“You really don’t need me,” he said. “Not that much. Having an extra body is helpful but not critical. And the balance – look, if that’s the metaphor we’re going to use, I didn’t balance this. I just stopped the wobble. It will run fine without me. But unless you’re kicking me out – unless my choices are partnership, or leaving – I’m fine with things the way they are. For now. All I’m saying is that at some point, I know, I need to leave this beautiful little oasis and go back to the real world.”

She said nothing. He finished cleaning up. “I need to go help Anna over in the truck garden,” he said.

“Donna thinks this is about you getting laid,” Karen blurted out.

He laughed. “Is that why she keeps telling me to ask that girl at the lumber yard out?”

“Yeah.”

“The girl at the lumber yard says ‘supposably,’” Preacher said. “I keep telling Donna, I’m not that desperate. Yet.”

“But you know you don’t have to spend all your time with us. You could go out and socialize once in awhile.”

“I could say the same thing about you.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

“If and when I leave,” he said, “it won’t be to get laid, or because I want to get married, or anything like that.”

“Then what will it be?”

“It will be because it’s time,” he said. “And I’ll know it when it happens.”

It happened in October of that year. There were tears all around. They visited him in pairs, en masse, individually, to ask him to change his mind, but they all knew it wasn’t going to happen. He gave a short speech that sounded suspiciously like the one he’d uttered in Seattle before leaving, destiny, blah blah blah, and he left. Arthur trotted down the driveway after him until Preacher knelt, said something to him, and sent him back to the house.

The man walked out to the highway, stuck out his thumb, and headed south.

Part Thirty-Five

2005-05-06T18:37:00.001-05:00

So, there’s not much to report except that he lasted there longer than at just about any other job he ever had. Nineteen months.

He fixed the barn roof, first, in the tentative spring sunshine, cutting up his hands pretty good on the sheets of tin.

He sheared the sheep – turns out he had a knack for getting the coat off quickly and in one piece. [“You should see him work a brassiere,” I mumbled when they told me this. They laughed.]

He brought in a hay cutting and handed Cassie tools when she fixed the tractor. He repaired fences. Helped Karen plant their truck garden and helped Anna vaccinate the sheep and when the money crops – organic corn, soy, and sunflowers – started coming in he watched over the seedlings like they were his kids.

One thing he didn’t do was live in the barn. Not for long, anyhow.

He came to Karen and said, walk this way.

They walked down the gently sloping front yard to the driveway and stopped at the far edge. There was a drop-off of about five feet right past the drive and then the lower fields, green but still a bit patchy. The sheep wintered there.

Haywood turned and pointed to the tottering remains of the goat shed, just off the drop-off from the driveway. “What’s that?”

It was a goat shed. Actually, it was a workshop for my grandfather, but when we got here we were going to start a goat dairy, and that was where the first goat lived.

[The goat died. And was a male anyhow. An early lesson on getting into agriculture when you didn’t know what you were doing.]

It’s got an electric line that ties in there, Preacher said, pointing to the cable. And running water. Most of the lumber’s still in good shape. It looks like hell, but there’s a lot to be salvaged there. I was thinking that I could rebuild it.

You want to live in the goat shed?

I want to see if I can replaced the goat shed with a shack for the hired hand.

A tenant shack? I don’t know if we want those sorts living that close to the house.

Beats the barn. You never know when one of them will get drunk and pass out with a cigarette in his hand.

I’ve never seen you drink or smoke.

I might start.

What would you need?

A lot. But you’d have something nice for the next hitchhiker you take in.

She thought about it. Making him sleep in the barn always made her feel a little guilty. OK, give me a list, she said.

He gave her the list. And worked on the place before, during, and after his other chores around the farm. They all remember him talking about it as his “Thoreauvian folly.” Karen remembers that when she came to see him working on it the first week, when he was just dismantling the thing and sorting the lumber into “usable” and “firewood” piles, he said this to her:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the mourning to where the cricket sings; There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet's wings. I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart's core.

She remembered distinctly that he recited the whole thing, softly, not really looking at her. Just pulling nails out of the boards while he worked. When he was finished he told her they should think about adding honeybees to the mix.

I sat on their front porch and looked past the tight, cozy little cabin down the hill, and at the white boxes in the field below, and the black specks that darted in and out of them. I thought about him memorizing Yeats and spitting it back out like that. For the first time in… for the first time ever, I missed him. Even as I recalled why I wanted to punch him in the face.

While he worked on the house the dog lay in the tall grass and watched him impassively. Occasionally Arthur would stir himself enough to chase a rabbit, but mostly he just watched.

The house went up. He dug a shallow foundation, just about a foot deep, and lined it with cinderblock. Anchored the house to treated 6x6s set deep in the ground – he dug the holes by hand, and Anna recalled that when he worked the posthole diggers with his shirt off it made her recall her heterosexual days with some fondness.

[At this Cassie glared at her. They all then laughed. They all swore they never touched him. I suppose I believe them.]

He put in a small window that peered across the surface of the driveway and two others that looked out into the fields. A Dutch door. The faucet turned into a shower head (cold water only; he said it was a simple, elegant solution to living with five lesbians) that stood above a concrete pad he poured. A little field drain below it.

No toilet. It was easier to just walk up to the house. Or use the weeds down near the stream.

The hay was cut; the sheep were sheared; the crops were planted, and grew, and the people who certify that things are “organic” were kept happy. Preacher’s cheerful, relentless approach to the hard work proved infectious and they started looking for things to do, buildings to repair, fields to tend.

Preacher offered to quit as the summer turned ungodly hot. You only needed me short-term. You’re caught up. I’m an unnecessary expense.

Do you want to leave?

No.

Then shut the hell up and get back in the kitchen. We’d keep you here just to cook.

Too bad, Ellen said, we can’t keep him barefoot and pregnant, too. Think about it. We underpay him, work the hell out of him, and take him for granted. In every other respect, he’s a perfect Georgia farmer’s wife.

I heard that, he said from the kitchen.

On a piece of yellowed paper in their kitchen they have his recipe for chocolate meringue pie. Every time he made it he gave them a lecture on the “spiritual symmetry” of chocolate meringue pie. The egg, he said, represents the soul. The chocolate takes three egg yolks. The meringue takes three egg whites. When you are shoveling down a piece of chocolate meringue pie – or two, if you’re Cassie – you are symbolically reuniting your soul.

They rolled their eyes and he would laugh delightedly. And he would scramble an extra egg and put it in Arthur’s feed dish, so the dog could have a treat, too.

And each night the dog went down the steps (he cut steps into the drop-off by the driveway, lined with railroad ties) behind Preacher and slept across the doorway.

They remember the one night very vividly, of course.

In August they got a check for their wool. Sort of. They had a deal with a Navajo co-op that used their wool and paid them, not for the wool, but a percentage of the proceeds they got from the sale of the blankets. After a year without getting any money at all Karen had decided they were either being robbed or had hooked up with the least-successful Navajo blanket-weavers of all time, and then suddenly there was a check in the high four figures sitting there in the mailbox.

That called for a celebration, and they were all tired of looking for things to do anyhow, so they piled in the pickup and went into Macon. Yes, where they live, Macon is the big city.

This was a day they all remembered vividly, and clearly, and their versions were enough alike that I wondered if they had rehearsed it. Usually if I ask five people to describe the same event – the same event from a dozen years ago – I get five different versions but here… here the only difference was in who came in second when they played miniature golf. Some said Cassie. Some said Donna.

Ellen had brought her softball bat and they went into the pitching cage and hit. She was impressed with Preacher’s stroke. She asked me if it was true that he was scouted by the majors. I broke my rule and told her: yes. I’ve seen the scouting reports.

She wasn’t surprised.

They went to the mall and ate pizza and (half-)jokingly tried to fix him up with the girl who worked at the record store. And then it was time to go home, and they were tired, and happy, and he rode in the back with Anna and Karen and Donna and they sang John Mellancamp songs.

They are all just old enough to still think of him as John Cougar, of course.

So they arrived home and tended to the livestock and gave Arthur a rawhide bone they’d bought. Then they retired to their respective locations, and Arthur took up his position in front of Preacher’s door, gnawing happily on the rawhide.

Arthur, not Preacher. One assumes.

Part of what happened next was related by Preacher to Anna to me, so allow room for error regarding his internal monologue. But late – around 2 a.m. – Arthur gave a low, guttural cough that roused Haywood. And he heard, over the sound of peepers and crickets, the faint squeak of worn brakes.

The pickup truck easing up the driveway, its headlights out, bore the three men from Southern States. For purposes of posterity their names were Gus, Michael, and Frank, but that’s not really important. Look at the archive, all the particulars are in there.

All three were pretty loaded. Whenever they got drunk Gus started thinking about the time the dyke bitch broke his nose, and they would talk about their revenge, and generally get too drunk to actually execute any of their intricate revenge fantasies. Generally, but not this time. This time beer money ran out too soon, and so Frank was piloting his truck up the driveway with the headlights out, while Gus and Michael giggled nervously in the front seat.

Both of them held Mason jars filled with gasoline, with a bit of tee-shirt sticking out from under the cap.

Preacher heard the faint pop of a stone under a truck tire and slipped out of the cabin with the softball bat in his hand. Saw the silhouette of the truck pass by above. And he said later that at that moment there was this terrible, frightening calmness that came over him, and in his head – and this part is so weird that it has to be true – he heard the opening notes of “Beyond Belief” by Elvis Costello. He said that everything he did for the next three minutes was perfectly timed with, choreographed to, that song, which played in his head like some ridiculously inappropriate soundtrack.

He climbed up the embankment onto the driveway and saw two figures standing outside the truck, bent over something. Then there was a flare of light and one of the men – Gus, as it turns out – screamed “Hey, Bitch,” and cocked back to throw the molotov at the nearby barn. And Preacher (as calmly and effortlessly, I’m sure, as he would swing at a 3-1 fastball) stepped into his swing and shattered the bottle, and the man’s hand, with one motion.

Gus screamed again, this time wordlessly, both at the searing agony in his mangled hand and at the burning gasoline that sprayed across him. Michael – still too drunk to make good decisions – stood there with his burning bomb still in his hand, but before Preacher could make a decision, Arthur launched himself from the shadows and latched onto the man’s arm. He dropped the bottle, which amazingly did not break, but simply rolled down the driveway, leaving a trail of burning gasoline from its leaky lid.

Light snapped on in the house and out of the corner of his eye Preacher saw Cassie running across the front yard. Michael ran down the driveway trying to shake the dog loose, and Preacher saw the cabin light come on in the truck as Frank started scrabbling madly through his glove compartment. Preacher advanced on the truck, Frank climbed out of the truck, Arthur was growling like a hellhound, Gus was still screaming, rolling on the ground to extinguish the flames, and the sound of the pistol cracked into the night sky. Preacher did a half-turn, then kept on advancing, but Cassie got there first. She slammed the truck door on Frank, he dropped the gun, she kicked it away, kicked his balls halfway through the roof of his mouth, then picked up the weapon.

She heard Preacher say “Arthur” loudly, commandingly, and Arthur gave Michael one last shake and then trotted back.

Cassie looked triumphantly over at Preacher as the others came down from the farmhouse, and saw him lying in the driveway. Karen cradled his head.

“Oh, fuck,” Ellen said softly. Anna reached into the truck and turned on the headlights. His blood looked black in the glare.

Part Thirty Four

2005-04-24T08:12:00.001-05:00

When I got out there to interview these women it was about 100 degrees in the shade, and about 85% humidity. Lots of sheep, lots of green growing things, lots of bugs. There are six of them now, a new one was added a couple of years after Preacher left – she’s an inspector for an organic food co-op who used to visit to make sure that the farm wasn’t using any pesticides. All six of them are Worshipers, of course.

I could see that it was the kind of place that Preacher would love. I could also see that it was the kind of place that I would hate.

They let Karen do most of the talking, but they had this annoying habit of finishing one another’s sentences. I separated them to interview them individually but when I did that they seemed to be struck dumb. It wasn’t until they were all sitting in the same place that they became articulate.

Anyhow, that first day Preacher got a tour of the farm and put his back into a few routine chores and late in the afternoon Karen said to him, very bluntly: we’re going to talk about you for a few minutes, so why don’t you take Arthur (the dog) and go… over there, somewhere.

He laughed and did so. The dog had padded silently behind him everywhere they’d gone that morning. Whether Arthur was acting as the farm’s guardian or simply showing his devotion to Preacher was, at that time, unclear. He threw a stick for Arthur to fetch, then they wrestled on the ground like idiots.

What about him, Karen asked the other women.

What do you mean, what about him, Donna said.

She means as a hired man, Anna says. Like we talked about last week.

I don’t know, Cassie said, looking at him and raising an eyebrow. We don’t know him at all. He could be some psycho.

Arthur’s a better judge of character than that, Ellen said, also looking at the man. He usually doesn’t like anybody. Preacher and dog were playing tug-of-war with the stick.

Look, Karen said, we agreed we need someone. At least for a few weeks. We let the winter maintenance get way ahead of us. We have a cutting of hay to bring in, the shearers will be here in two days, we’ve got seed to put in the ground, and the barn roof is leaking like a sieve. If we knew what the hell we were doing, five of us would be plenty for all that, but we don’t. We’re better off than we were last year, but we’re still not there. Plus, Preacher can go into town for us – as hateful as some of these people are, they’ll respond better to him, I bet. And he’s got one advantage over anyone else we could hire locally.

What’s that, Cassie said.

He’s not a local, Donna said.

Exactly, Anna said.

They stood in silence for a moment, contemplating him, contemplating the risk they were taking. As a group they were still searching for their balancing point, and as a group they were still not sure that their little agricultural venture was going to last another year. Elizabeth’s departure had shaken their already rickety structure. And now to add some guy…?

Where would he live? Ellen said. Not the house.

I thought we could stick him in that old tack room in the loft, Karen said. It’s warm and dry, or at least it will be when we get the roof fixed. It’s got electricity. Right now it’s holding nothing but cobwebs and a few rusty old tools.

They looked at each other.

I would vote yes, with one provision, Cassie said. Which is that any of us can veto this at any time. We don’t know this guy at all. He might turn out to be a real asshole.

The others agreed.

What makes you think he’ll take it? Donna said.

He said he was looking for work, Karen said. In town. We can offer him a job and a place to stay. And not nearly as much abuse.

OK, Preacher, we’re finished talking about you, Anna yelled in his direction. Preacher got to his feet and he and Arthur ambled toward them, bits of grass and hay stuck to them in various places, and what looked like identical grins on their faces.

Do you know anything about roofing a barn, shearing a sheep, cutting hay or planting seed? Karen asked him.

Nope.

Neither do we, Donna said. How would you like a job?

They told me that he’d been hesitant to accept, at first. Not because he didn’t want it. But because he seemed to have the same idea that he had the potential to be a great big penis-bearing turd in the punchbowl of their little hippie experiment. But he liked the farm, he liked them, he liked Arthur… so he let them convince him.

Part Thirty Three

2005-04-18T13:39:00.001-05:00

From Preacher Haywood’s Internet Message #27:

When EVERYTHING you do is an act of worship, the concept of crowding into a church one day a week to worship seems kind of… pointless and redundant. There is much to be said for worship, and if it takes setting aside a particular hour of a particular day for you to do it, then by all means go to church or synagogue or mosque or whatever, but ask yourself: if you need a specific building and a worship-specialist standing at the front of the room to worship properly, aren’t you by extension excluding the Divine from the rest of your life?

If you need something specific to focus your mind on the real presence of God, might I suggest dinner?

The act of preparing a meal for yourself and others just gives you so many opportunities to caress the cheek of the Divine. First off, nothing recognizes the sacredness of others so much as feeding them – you are, in a sense, keeping them alive. Second, the ingredients themselves put you in communion with the Divine. You are handling all these formerly living things, fruits and vegetables and (if that’s your thing) animals who all lived and all carry the breath of the Divine in them, and you are transforming them, rearranging their molecules so that others can consume their essence and live themselves.

Surrounded, then, by life, doing Divine work of providing for life, how can you not feel the Divine around you? How can you avoid knowledge of the Oneness in such an activity?

Of course. It’s easy. We just have to willfully close our eyes and minds to it. But once you managed to force open just a little crack in that armor, nothing will make you feel closer to the Divine than standing in your kitchen with loved ones nearby, chopping vegetables and smelling bread rising in the oven.

(I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: when the messenger is a washed-up waiter, the message is going to take a definite culinary slant.)

So Worshipers – some of them, at least – don’t go to church. Instead they have Circles, Worship-Circles, and that suffices to focus them on the tangible, inescapable Divine. Once a week – Thursdays, usually, just out of habit – they meet at someone’s house and fresh food is prepared and they eat and talk and laugh and they have at least three different chances to feel that piezoelectric spark of God being squeezed to life inside – first, from the food they eat; second, from the humans around them; third, from the nurturing act of preparing food for others.

If you have four couples in your Worship Circle, you’re having people over once a month. Much more than that and you start to lose a sense of community. It works fine if you only have one other person in, but we’ve found that much more than four families and things start to break down.

And bring your kids to the Circles. It will keep them from building up that God-proof armor that you’re working so hard to tear down. I mean, they’ll still acquire it – that’s what the world does – but hopefully you can make it be Whiffle-armor, Swiss-cheese armor, with lots of dinner-shaped holes for the Divine to penetrate.

Yes, cooking for and visiting with kids can be a pain in the ass, but keep in mind also that your kids are an embodiment, not just of the Divine, but of a moment when you and another person tried to touch the Divine in yourselves.

Great, now I’m going to get sued by the Whiffle people. Bad enough that Pat Robertson wants me whacked, now Wham-O’s lawyers are going to be after me.

Part Thirty Two

2005-04-12T20:28:00.001-05:00

OK, I’m going to temporarily suspend my little exercise in letting people speak for themselves about things I didn’t witness. That’s because to tell this next part would involve rambling and largely (but not entirely) duplicative interviews with at least eight different people.

So I’m going to reintroduce all my own prejudices and angles and agendas into this part of the story. Or at least put them out in the open for awhile.

In the spring of 1992 a man from Michigan, driving a blue Porsche, picks up a hitchhiker on a winding highway in Arkansas. The hitchhiker is Haywood, who had quit the job in New Mexico for ill-defined reasons and meandered his way eastward. In Texas he was hit by a bottle thrown out of a passing pickup and spent the day in a hospital, having glass picked out of his thigh and O-Neg blood pumped into him. Otherwise nothing too eventful happened – at least nothing that would, years later, cause anyone to get in touch with Preacher or the Worshipers once he became better known.

If the story of how the Michigan man in the midnight-metallic 944 came to be driving from Arkansas to Georgia was at all interesting, I would have just put his long and meandering interview in here instead of this summary.

At any rate, the guy – his name is Gary Ross, which is unimportant for our purposes – the guy picks up Preacher and they go hurtling through the heart of the Confederacy together, paralleling Sherman’s March and talking about music, food, and everything else. Ross recalled later that he, Gary, had done most of the talking. That there was something about Preacher which somehow drew things out of you, in a friendly, unhurried way. “It was like,” he said to me, “having a… a personal confessor. Not just kneeling in a booth but sitting there with someone who you could really unburden to, someone who understood where you were coming from and was able to offer insight and empathy, not penance.”

Ross is now a Worshiper. He’s probably not bullshitting about giving Haywood a ride – apparently he found Preacher by googling his name, years later, and sending him a “hey remember me” email. Preacher responded, and confirmed that Gary Ross did indeed give him a ride that spring day a decade ago.

Ross told me he became a Worshiper after reconnecting with Preacher. “I read some of the articles about him. To tell you the truth, there wasn’t anything particularly holy about him when I met him; he was just a good-natured kid. And a good listener. But I started reading up on it, and got the book, and then my oldest came home from college with one of those circle pendants…”

OK, so that’s another one in Preacher’s win column.

Anyhow they’re just outside the town of Barlow, Georgia, when Ross stops to get gas before heading into Athens. And Preacher gets out to stretch his legs, and he tells Gary, hey, it’s a beautiful Spring day, thanks for the ride, but I’m going to walk for awhile.
Ross tries to talk him out of it, but Haywood is insistent, and so they part company. Just a few hours out of Gary Ross’s life, that somehow stuck with him for years to come.
Preacher, then, starts walking down a road heading toward the tiny farming village. And he passes a flatbed truck on the road, and sees two women changing the front tire. He offers to help. They glare at him and tell him no. He shrugs and ambles on his merry way. Halfway into town the truck passes him.

He saunters into the town center. Inquires about a “Help Wanted” sign at the lumberyard; they don’t want him, it seems. Inquires about a “Help Wanted” sign at the diner; they don’t want him either. “It was,” he recalled later, “about the unfriendliest town I’ve ever been in.” He begins to regret whatever impulse, instinct, or intuition caused him to walk off the highway into Barlow. He wonders how long it will take him to hike all the way into Athens, a good 20 miles down the road. He knows that he always does well in college towns.

His footsteps lead him pass the Southern States, where he sees the same flatbed backed up to the loading dock and the two women loading sacks of feed and seed. There are three rather seedy-looking men standing nearby, doing nothing to help. Preacher assumes that their offers of assistance were treated the way his was. But as he draws near he overhears the comments made by the men; their exact wording is lost to posterity, but they are sufficiently vile that even Preacher – Mr. Live-And-Let-Live – is moved to exhibit his personal brand of low-key chivalry.
He starts helping the women load the truck. One of them hisses at him that they don’t need his help. He says, “clearly,” but continues working. The men aim a few comments at him, to the effect of (a) the women are lesbians, (b) lesbians and straight men cannot interact, therefore (c) he must be a homosexual himself. Haywood is not moved by this redneck syllogism.

As Preacher and one of the women – a short blonde woman – lash the stakes in place on the sides of the truck bed, the other woman – a tall, well-built brunette – argues with the manager of the Southern States, who comes out to tell them that they’ve blocked the loading dock for too long. The brunette points out that the seed was supposed to have been delivered, and over a week ago, and that they have nearly missed sowing season as a result of their delivery problems. The Southern States manager is unsympathetic.

Referring to them by their hair color is demeaning, isn’t it? Even though at the time, Preacher didn’t know their names. The brunette’s name is Cassie Shields, and the blonde’s name is Anna Peppersack.

Finally Preacher and Anna finish with the siderails. He asks for a ride back to the highway, and Anna nods once, curtly. Cassie signs for the seed and walks off the loading dock to get in the truck. Anna sits in the passenger seat. Preacher stays on the bed.

And one of the men put his hand on the door of the truck, and refuses to let Cassie in.
Cassie tells him to move. He refuses. She tells him to move again. He makes a vulgar suggestion. The other two men giggle. Preacher suspects he’s about to see some testosterone-fueled stupidity and stands up, to see if it’s too late to do that hand-on-the-shoulder, come-talk-to-me thing that he does so well. But before he can get off the truck Shields has the man’s wrist in a vise grip twisted behind his back and he’s trying not to scream. She marches him a few steps away from the truck and then pushes him away and turns to walk back to the cab. The man lunges toward her and she steps to the side, grabs the back of his head, and slams his face into the door of the truck as she whips it open. Then she jumps in and starts the engine, looks out the window at the man with the bloody nose sitting in the parking lot, and leaves.

Preacher hears a hearty “fuck you, bitch,” as they leave. He makes eye contact with the man but manages to avoid laughing. Barely.

A few miles outside of town – near where they had stopped to fix the flat – Cassie pulls the truck off the road with a cloud of gravel and gets out of the truck, screaming, cursing, and stomping. She marches away from them, up the shoulder, yelling at no one in particular. Anna hops out of the truck and starts to go after her.

Leave her be, Preacher says from his perch on the pile of canvas sacks. Anna jumps. She’s forgotten he’s there. She looks up at him.

Leave her be, Preacher repeats. She’s got a lot of adrenaline right now after all that. Back there in the parking lot she wanted to kick three asses, at least, and only got to kick one, so now she’s got a lot of unused ass-kicking energy to burn off.

Anna starts to go after her anyway, then stops and thinks better of it.

Thanks, by the way, she says to Preacher.

Don’t mention it.

No, really. Sorry we were rude to you before. It’s just that… she shrugs, words failing her. But Haywood understands. Fifteen minutes in Barlow and he understands.

He starts to climb off the truck. I’ll just hoof it the rest of the way to the highway, he says.

No, stay, Anna says. The least we can do is get you something to eat. She looks at him. He looks skinny. He is skinny.

Please. The others might want to meet you, anyway. Plus those assholes from Southern States might decide to ride down the highway later on, and you don’t want to be alone if they find you.
I imagine, Preacher says, I’d want to have her there. He points with his chin toward Cassie, who is still kicking up clods of weeds on the shoulder.

Anna laughs. That’s Cassie, she says. She used to be in the Army. I’m Anna.

Preacher, Preacher says.

Peter? the girl says, wrinkling her brow.

No, Preacher. That’s my actual name. What can I say, I grew up in California.

After awhile Cassie sits down on the shoulder and tries to act like she’s not crying. Like she hasn’t worn herself out. And Preacher says, now go get her. And Anna does.
When they walk back awhile later Preacher is still lounging comfortably on the seed bags.

Thanks, Cassie says. Her face is red.

Thank you, Preacher tells her, for beating that guy up. Where were you in the fourth grade and one of his spiritual cousins was taking my lunch money?

Long Island, she says to him, smiling a little. Assuming we were in the fourth grade at the same time.

She is actually a year or so older than Preacher.

They drive back to the highway and then down the highway and then down another side road and then they turn into a rutted driveway that was probably gravel at one time. They bounce under some tree branches and cross a little creek and then ride through fields waiting to be planted and fields holding sheep. Around a bend and through another stand of trees and there is a run-down and empty goat-shed on the right hand side of the driveway as the lane curves up to the big barn just pas that. A large white farmhouse sits on a pretty green lawn farther up the hill, on the left.

As the truck pulls in two other women come out of the barn. Their names are Ellen Smith and Donna Maith. And in the house is a woman named Karen Poole.

Cassie backs the truck into the barn and Preacher notices that the other women are looking at him with skepticism. Mixed with hostility.

“Was white boy on the list?” Donna asks Anna.

“It’s a long story,” Anna says.

Preacher helps them unload the truck. There are introductions all around. Anna tells them what happened. Karen has wandered down by this time; she is a very small, almost elfin woman. They are all in their mid- to late-twenties.

And a dog trots up, a big mutt with a lot of German Shepherd in him. He sniffs Preacher for a moment, and then head-butts the man’s hand. Haywood crouches and strokes the dog’s head good-naturedly, roughly. The dog wags his tail and sits down for more.

He doesn’t take to strangers, Ellen observes.

And I’m pretty strange, Haywood concedes.

The name of the place is Sappho Farms. Of course.

Karen Poole inherited the entire spread from her grandparents in her last year of law school at Emory. Donna was an undergrad there. Ellen was her significant other, an unhappy school-teacher who’d graduated with a history degree from University of Georgia a year earlier. In those days Karen had a lover named Elizabeth, a barista and aspiring poet. Cassie had gotten kicked out of the Army for the reason you would guess she was kicked out of the Army, went to Georgia Tech and majored in engineering, and met Anna – who had decided, a semester shy of graduating, that she didn’t want to be a software engineer.

Anyhow they pooled their money, fixed up the place, and tried to put their political and spiritual and cultural ideals to work in their own six-person agricultural cooperative. A year later Elizabeth left; farming life wasn’t for her. All of them found it much harder than they’d expected. And a few months after that… a few months after that, Anna and Cassie came home with Preacher.

Most of this – except for the part about Elizabeth – was explained to Preacher while they washed up and prepared for lunch. While the others prepared for lunch; they had Karen take him aside and pump him for information, mostly because there wasn’t room for six people in the kitchen at once.

Karen recalls that he was at once quite forthcoming and quite vague about what brought him to Barlow, Georgia. “He said he’d graduated from St. John’s a couple of years back, that he’d been knocking around the country looking for whatever it was he was supposed to do ever since,” she would recall later. “I remember thinking he was polite, articulate, and utterly indifferent to our little social experiment.”

They eat. Preacher entertains. He does that well. He tells them a funny story about Alaska. He asks them about the farm. He tells them that he looked for work at the diner and the lumber yard and neither of them would give him the time of day.

“Where,” Donna asks him – she’s very practical – “were you going to live if they’d hired you?”
Preacher shrugs. “Something would have come up,” he says. “It always does.”

“And why?” Ellen said, “why would you suddenly decide to look for work in Barlow, Georgia, of all the godforsaken places?”

He shrugs again. “When you have absolutely no reason to be anywhere in particular, it’s easy to act on the vaguest of impulses,” he said. “I lived in a town called Barlow once, and liked it.”

That would have been Barlow, Texas, where he lived for about six months when he was a kid. In case you’re keeping score at home.

Part Thirty One

2005-04-11T17:29:00.000-05:00

Dalton Maynard said:

I got where I am by being a good judge of people. So when I say I offered Preacher a job – twice – it wasn’t because I was taken by his boyish charm. It was because I thought he could do the job I had in mind for him. In fact, I thought that he was one of the few people on Earth who could do it. And if he walked through that door right now I’d probably offer it to him again.

When my son Joey was a kid, about the only time we had together was Sunday mornings. I was busy building a company then. Hell, I still am, but you notice the time away more when your kids are little. But we had Sunday mornings together, and we would spend them watching old Westerns on the TV. So I guess that’s where he got it – the thing for cowboys, I mean. And he passed it on to his daughter Kelly. I remember when she was little – our first grandchild – she would come spend the night with us and she and I would spend Sundays watching Westerns, just like her dad and I used to.

Anyhow, that’s how I met Preacher. The summer Kelly graduated from high school she, Joey, and I spent two weeks at the Bar Nothing Ranch in Greenville, New Mexico. Playing cowboy with the rest of the rich folks. And Preacher was working there as a teacher and guide and cook and – toward the end of our stay, anyhow – a gunfighter.

In fact I remember the first time I ever laid eyes on him – not for him so much as for something funny Kelly said. We’d just gotten to the ranch and he was coming back from a trail drive, driving that wagon down the dusty track between the men’s and women’s bunkhouses. The three of us were heading to the mess hall and stepped aside for the trail riders and Preacher looked straight at us and nodded and touched the brim of his hat for Kelly. And – you know, Preacher was a good-looking guy, I guess, and so when the wagon went by Kelly turned to us and her eyes were wide and she had this big grin on her face and she said “I LIKE cowboys!”

Anyhow, we spent the next few days getting our cowboy diplomas, proving we could stay on a horse, proving that we could throw a lariat without choking ourselves – although I never once saw any of us dudes actually rope something. Takes more than four days to learn, I guess. And then it was our turn for the trail ride, four days and three nights, walking a hundred head of cattle around the ranch. There were two real cowboys, plus Preacher driving the chuck wagon, plus six dudes.

We didn’t know Preacher’s name, of course. We called him Chuck Wagon. Those guys did a good job of staying in character, and teaching you at the same time.

Anyhow, we rode around the ranch, and Preacher had coffee and biscuits for us each morning. And each night, a fire and some more filling grub at our camp site. He was qualitatively different from the other two real cowboys – more in the way he talked. You could tell he was an educated young man. Smart, and hardworking. I asked him, what’s a college boy doing out here making biscuits and gravy for a bunch of rich pretend cowboys? I figured he was working his way through school or something, but he told me he had graduated and was still trying to figure out where his niche was. He didn’t mind hard work, his brain was always engaged, and he knew how to keep his mouth shut and his eyes open. A rare combination in a college graduate.
So we all got to like Chuck Wagon on the ride, and I remember telling Joey that I’d take five Chuck Wagons over the last fifteen MBAs we’d hired at IM.

Anyhow, we survived the trail ride and made it back to the ranch. We still had a few days left there, but we’d book rooms at the Desert Rose in Greenville itself. Running water. Better food than the trail. From the outside the town, like the ranch, was 1885, but there were some modern comforts tucked away in the corners.

And Preacher was there in town. He did three trails rides in 21 days, and then had a week “off” – which wasn’t really off at all, but he got to sleep in a bed instead of in a wagon. In his off week he played a gambler in the Lodestar Saloon. Which is where I spent most of that remaining time, while my son and granddaughter learned how to churn butter and refill cartridges and work in a livery stable.

They let you gamble with this special scrip, which looked like 1885 paper money. I don’t know how it was legal, but apparently it was. Maybe one of the Greens was part Indian.

In town every other day there was a staged showdown in the middle of the town. A hired gun versus the aging sheriff. The latter was Big Pete, who owned the place. They told me that he got to be the sheriff because at 60 he was still the fastest draw on the ranch. Seems there was a standing bet, in fact – any staffer could put his week’s wages up against the 1885 gold piece that Pete Green kept in his hatband. Outdraw him two out of three, and you got the gold piece and his job as sheriff. But if he outdrew you, you worked for free for the next week.

His son, Little Pete, told me that he outdrew his dad once, but that nobody else had even taken one out of three, let alone two. I believed it.

Anyhow, over a couple days of poker I got to know Chuck Wagon better. Enough to know that his real name was Preacher Haywood, that he had a degree from some obscure East-Coast liberal arts college, and that he was a pretty unique guy. I ended up doing a lot more talking than I usually do. He was very good at that, at putting you at ease and, I don’t know, just sort of soaking things up. A listening sponge. And when he did speak up, it wasn’t just noises. He understood what I was talking about and got right to the heart of problems.

So I had already decided to offer him a spot in our executive trainee program. I knew he could more than hold his own against those business-school boys.

But before I could bring it up – the day before we left – we got word that someone was going to challenge Big Pete for the sheriff’s spot. All the workers were talking about it. We went over to the firing range and sure enough, there was Preacher with a six-gun on his hip, standing and waiting quietly.

He didn’t act like someone who had a week’s salary resting on a bet that nobody had ever won before. Didn’t act like someone who was in front of a pretty big crowd of his co-workers and a bunch of tourists. He stood there like he was waiting for a bus. Big Pete wasn’t exactly jumpy, either, but Haywood had icewater in his veins.

The way they did these things was pretty clever. They put two coffee cans up on fence posts. The duelists stood about a dozen feet away. When the judge said “draw” they both shot at their coffee cans. First can off the post, wins.

Little Pete was the judge.

The first round Preacher’s can jumped a half-second before Big Pete’s, and that got a big reaction from the crowd. Then they drew a second time and Pete won, and I could tell that the older man had held back a little that first round just to see what the kid was bringing. I remember thinking that Haywood had misjudged his opponent, had thought that he had been seeing Pete’s “A” Game all along.

Then they drew the third time and Preacher beat him clean.

There was actually a moment of silence as the staff tried to drink in what they’d seen. The guests didn’t know what a big deal it was, so we were cheering loudly right away, while the staff mostly stared in disbelief.

And I realized that Preacher had held back, too.

That night I offered Preacher the spot. I told him I didn’t know how much he was making as a cook, but I would double it if he came to work for Interglobal Materials.

Preacher knew who I was, and what IM was about. My old man died in 1958 when I was a year shy of graduating from the University of Chicago. I quit school and came home to take over his bankrupt scrap-iron company, and over the next 20 years I’d turned it into a multinational worth billions, mostly by making high-end, high-quality synthetic composites out of recycled metal and plastic. People paid me to haul away their trash, and then paid me again to get their trash back in a new form. God bless America. Anyhow, he knew about the company. I told him, we are getting bigger and richer every year, and there is nothing but potential for you at IM.

And he told me he was flattered, but that he couldn’t take it. He said, it’s very tempting – it sounds like interesting work – but I could only do it if I could commit 100%, and I’m not ready for that yet.

Joey and I tried to talk him out of it, but he wouldn’t be persuaded. What the hell. If he’d taken that job… I mean, who the hell knows, but I could see him being COO by now. No MBA, no engineering degree – I had a million of those. Preacher could learn what they knew without learning to think like them. That’s what I was looking for.

Anyhow – should I mention the second time? OK, we’ll do that later.

Part Thirty One

2005-04-06T07:18:00.001-05:00

Dalton Maynard said:

I got where I am by being a good judge of people. So when I say I offered Preacher a job – twice – it wasn’t because I was taken by his boyish charm. It was because I thought he could do the job I had in mind for him. In fact, I thought that he was one of the few people on Earth who could do it. And if he walked through that door right now I’d probably offer it to him again.

When my son Joey was a kid, about the only time we had together was Sunday mornings. I was busy building a company then. Hell, I still am, but you notice the time away more when your kids are little. But we had Sunday mornings together, and we would spend them watching old Westerns on the TV. So I guess that’s where he got it – the thing for cowboys, I mean. And he passed it on to his daughter Kelly. I remember when she was little – our first grandchild – she would come spend the night with us and she and I would spend Sundays watching Westerns, just like her dad and I used to.

Anyhow, that’s how I met Preacher. The summer Kelly graduated from high school she, Joey, and I spent two weeks at the Bar Nothing Ranch in Greenville, New Mexico. Playing cowboy with the rest of the rich folks. And Preacher was working there as a teacher and guide and cook and – toward the end of our stay, anyhow – a gunfighter.

In fact I remember the first time I ever laid eyes on him – not for him so much as for something Kelly said. We’d just gotten to the ranch and he was coming back from a trail drive, driving that wagon down the dusty track between the men’s and women’s bunkhouses. The three of us were heading to the mess hall and stepped aside for the trail riders and Preacher looked straight at us and nodded and touched the brim of his hat for Kelly. And – you know, Preacher was a good-looking guy, I guess, and so when the wagon went by Kelly turned to us and her eyes were wide and she had this big grin on her face and she said “I LIKE cowboys!”

Anyhow, we spent the next few days getting our cowboy diplomas, proving we could stay on a horse, proving that we could throw a lariat without choking ourselves – although I never once saw any of us dudes actually rope something. Takes more than four days to learn, I guess. And then it was our turn for the trail ride, four days and three nights, walking a hundred head of cattle around the ranch. There were two real cowboys, plus Preacher driving the chuck wagon, plus six guests.

We didn’t know Preacher’s name, of course. We called him Chuck Wagon. Those guys did a good job of staying in character, and teaching you at the same time.

Anyhow, we rode around the ranch, and Preacher had coffee and biscuits for us each morning. And each night, a fire and some more filling grub at our camp site. He was qualitatively different from the other two real cowboys – more in the way he talked. You could tell he was an educated young man. Smart, and hardworking. I asked him, what’s a college boy doing out here making biscuits and gravy for a bunch of rich pretend cowboys? I figured he was working his way through school or something, but he told me he had graduated and was still trying to figure out where his niche was. He didn’t mind hard work, his brain was always engaged, and he knew how to keep his mouth shut and his eyes open. A rare combination in a college graduate.

So we all got to like Chuck Wagon on the ride, and I remember telling Joey that I’d take five Chuck Wagons over the last fifteen MBAs we’d hired at IM.

Anyhow, we survived the trail ride and made it back to the ranch. We still had a few days left there, but we’d book rooms at the Desert Rose in Greenville itself. Running water. Better food than the trail. From the outside the town, like the ranch, was 1885, but there were some modern comforts tucked away in the corners.

And Preacher was there in town. He did three trails rides in 21 days, and then had a week “off” – which wasn’t really off at all, but he got to sleep in a bed instead of in a wagon. In his off week he played a gambler in the Lodestar Saloon. Which is where I spent most of that remaining time, while my son and granddaughter learned how to churn butter and refill cartridges and work in a livery stable.

They let you gamble with this special scrip, which looked like 1885 paper money. I don’t know how it was legal, but apparently it was. Maybe one of the Greens was part Indian.

In town every other day there was a staged showdown in the middle of the town. A hired gun versus the aging sheriff. The latter was Big Pete, who owned the place. They told me that he got to be the sheriff because at 60 he was still the fastest draw on the ranch. Seems there was a standing bet, in fact – any staffer could put his week’s wages up against the 1885 gold piece that Pete Green kept in his hatband. Outdraw him two out of three, and you got the gold piece and his job as sheriff. But if he outdrew you, you worked for free for the next week.

His son, Little Pete, told me that he outdrew his dad once, but that nobody else had even taken one out of three, let alone two. I believed it.

Anyhow, over a couple days of poker I got to know Chuck Wagon better. Enough to know that his real name was Preacher Haywood, that he had a degree from some obscure East-Coast liberal arts college, and that he was a pretty unique fellow. I ended up doing a lot more talking than I usually do. He was very good at that, at putting you at ease and, I don’t know, just sort of soaking things up. A listening sponge. And when he did speak up, it wasn’t just noises. He understood what I was talking about and got right to the heart of problems.

So I had already decided to offer him a spot in our executive trainee program. I knew he could more than hold his own against those business-school boys.

But before I could bring it up – the day before we left – we got word that someone was going to challenge Big Pete for the sheriff’s spot. All the workers were talking about it. We went over to the firing range and sure enough, there was Preacher with a six-gun on his hip, standing and waiting quietly.

He didn’t act like someone who had a week’s salary resting on a bet that nobody had ever won before. Didn’t act like someone who was in front of a pretty big crowd of his co-workers and a bunch of tourists. He stood there like he was waiting for a bus. Big Pete wasn’t exactly jumpy, either, but Haywood had icewater in his veins.

The way they did these things was pretty clever. They put two coffee cans up on fence posts. The duelists stood about a dozen feet away. When the judge said “draw” they both shot at their coffee cans. First can off the post won.

Little Pete was the judge.

The first round Preacher’s can jumped a half-second before Big Pete’s, and that got a big reaction from the crowd. Then they drew a second time and Pete won, and I could tell that the older man had held back a little that first round just to see what the kid was bringing. I remember thinking that Haywood had misjudged his opponent, had thought that he had been seeing Pete’s “A” game all along.

Then they drew the third time and Preacher beat him clean.

There was actually a moment of silence as the staff tried to drink in what they’d seen. The guests didn’t know what a big deal it was, so we were cheering loudly right away, while the staff mostly stared in disbelief.

And I realized that Preacher had held back, too.

That night I offered Preacher the spot. I told him I didn’t know how much he was making as a cook, but I would double it if he came to work for Interglobal Materials.

Preacher knew who I was, and what IM was about. My old man died in 1958 when I was a year shy of graduating from the University of Chicago. I quit school and came home to take over his bankrupt scrap-iron company, and over the next 20 years I’d turned it into a multinational worth billions, mostly by making high-end, high-quality synthetic composites out of recycled metal and plastic. People paid me to haul away their trash, and then paid me again to get their trash back in a new form. God bless America. Anyhow, he knew about the company. I told him, we are getting bigger and richer every year, and there is nothing but potential for you at IM.

And he told me he was flattered, but that he couldn’t take it. He said, it’s very tempting – it sounds like interesting work – but I could only do it if I could commit 100%, and I’m not ready for that yet. He made it clear that he understood how important the company was to me, how -- how personal it was for me to offer him this job, and said that all of his jobs so far had just been play, and that he respected me and what I'd accomplished too much to come and just play at Interglobal.

Joey and I tried to talk him out of it, but he wouldn’t be persuaded. What the hell. If he’d taken that job… I mean, who the hell knows, but I could see him being COO by now. No MBA, no engineering degree – I had a million of those. Preacher could learn what they knew without learning to think like them. That’s what I was looking for.

Anyhow – should I mention the second time? OK, we’ll do that later.

Part Thirty

2005-03-21T11:49:00.001-05:00

My pop, Pete Green Senior, was a real cowboy. Everybody here called him Big Pete – he wasn’t that big, kind of wiry actually, but they called him that to distinguish him from me. Me, they still call Little Pete, even though… well, look at me. Six-two and a few too many cheeseburgers.

But Big Pete grew up in Oklahoma in the 40s and was a cowboy early, because everybody else was busy fighting World War II. The war ended when Pop was 15. Soldiers started coming back, and ranching was already sort of a marginal proposition, and so Pop said he was hard pressed to see much of a future in Oklahoma for himself.

I think there was a girl, too. You know how that goes.

So anyhow he goes out to Hollywood because he had an uncle, Uncle Gee, they called him, who was a horse wrangler for a movie studio. And Uncle Gee gave Pop a job. You know, the late 40s, early 50s, they were still making a lot of westerns. And Pop started hanging out with some of the stuntmen, and they started having him show the actors how to look a little more like a cowboy. How to sit a horse, get the rig right, things like that. One of the stuntmen showed him how to do a quick draw and Pop had a real aptitude for it. And by 1955, 1956, Big Pete was working as a sort of cowboy trainer. Movies and then TV shows. He showed James Arness how to draw for Gunsmoke.

He met my mom. She was an actress. You never heard of her. She was in half-a-dozen pictures. She tended to play the ex-girlfriend or the pretty but dimwitted sister.

She died when I was little.

After while they weren’t making many Westerns. I was getting to be a teenager and my Pop decided he didn’t want me growing up in LA. So he took the money he’d saved and bought this place, 20,000 acres of scrub in southwest New Mexico. He was going to go back to cattle ranching. Called the place the Bar Nothing, and that’s still our brand – a bar and a zero.

But it wasn’t any more profitable then. I went to high school and he taught me how to be a cowboy and I went to college and he tried to sell the place. But nobody else was crazy enough to buy it.

Then in like 1980, 1981, something like that, a bunch of guys from Germany decided to make a Western. And they came out here and rented some land and built a little clapboard town, one with a surprising amount of historical accuracy, actually. Called it Greenville, after us. And they hired Pop to train all their actors, and actresses, too. We put them up in the bunkhouse. And that was the only year the ranch made any money – the year we hosted those Germans. So that got Pop to thinking that maybe he could sell the place to one of his old Hollywood pals, because, like he said, they all had more money than sense. So he worked a few of his old connections.

And what happened was that these old directors and writers and actors would come out, and say the same thing, in different ways: good to see you again, Pete, nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live here.

Still, it paid off in one way, because everybody saw the little town and all this empty space with no power lines and we got used in some other films. Couple of mini-series, a few other foreign films; whenever someone wanted to do a Western, they would think about shooting at the Bar Nothing. And hire Big Pete to train them. Once I got out of school I would pick up some money working as a wrangler and an extra.

I was teaching high school history over in Darby. That’s the nearest real town.

Anyhow, we’re losing money raising cattle and making money playing nursemaid to a bunch of pretty-boy actors who want to learn how to look like a cowboy in two weeks. And renting out Greenville, and after each film the town is a little bit bigger, a little bit more fully fleshed out. And one day it hits my old man – dude ranch. Actually, he read an article in Reader’s Digest about Williamsburg, Virginia, and that was his inspiration. He wanted to build, not just a dude ranch, but a cowboy Williamsburg. He called some of the same rich Hollywood types and they backed him, and the Bar Nothing has been very, very profitable ever since. I quit teaching and went back to school – studied hotel and restaurant management at UNLV – and when Big Pete died a couple years ago I took charge of the Greenville/Bar Nothing Historic Resort.

My pop was, in his own way, a visionary, I guess.

So, right, Preacher Haywood. I met him when my first wife and I went to Seattle on vacation. And we stopped by this restaurant being run by one of my old friends from UNLV, Sarah Douglas. Have you ever met him? Preacher? I mean, how could you not like the guy? Smart, personable, funny, hard-working. I told him, you ever want to get out of the rain, come down to New Mexico with me and I’ll have a job for you.

And damned if he didn’t show up on my doorstep a few months later.

Part Twenty Nine

2005-03-14T12:08:00.001-05:00

They buy the diner. Susan puts together sketches and schemes and color swatches, just as she does each time they redo the Wine Dark Sea. And Sarah and Preacher are properly impressed and deferential and do exactly what she hoped they would do: proceed to tear it apart and present their own ideas. They want to avoid nostalgia industry. They want something timeless. They want something that evokes history but has a modern stamp.

Preacher programs the juke box. Bob Marley. The Clash. Robert Johnson. Bruce Springsteen. Marvin Gaye. A fistful of old Sun records. Sleepy LaBeef. Bo Diddley. Leadbelly. Woody AND Arlo Guthrie. Bob Dylan. The Boomtown Rats. The Motels. The Cars. Nirvana, of course. And Soundgarden. And the Flying Burrito Brothers. And Small Faces. Rolling Stones. Marshall Crenshaw. Eagles. Aerosmith, somewhat incongruously. The Pretty Things. The 13^th Floor Elevators.

There is a sandwich on the menu called the Haywood: two slices of rye bread, buttered and lightly salted, with thick slices of Edam cheese covered by a few apple slices, grilled on both sides.

The music is always loud there, the colors vibrant; the food is hot and greasy and filling.

The cheeseburger is called the Gus.

The margins are thin -- they keep menu prices deliberately low -- but the place is always packed, mostly with U-Dub students.

The houseboat is another world to them. They keep it quiet; Preacher may sometimes listen to music on the tiny stereo (bluegrass, when she’s not present; she can’t abide it), the volume turned down low. No TV. It is a little cramped, and quiet, and after a very short time he, too, cannot sleep if he cannot hear the lap of waves and the creak of old wood.

When they come home they peel off their clothes as soon as they are below. They want to leave the smell of smoke and french-fries behind. They go into the shower together and soap one another -- they have different soaps, each grabs the other's. The shower on a houseboat is not really large enough for the two of them, certainly not large enough to accommodate the two of them in any activity other than showering, but they steal a few kisses along the way. They emerge feeling as if they have put their work far away.

This ablution is important to them; they are born again each time, baptized from their public selves to their private selves, from employer-employee to lovers. She puts on whichever half of her pajamas is at hand; Preacher has boxers he might wear, or gray sweatpants that say Dulaney on them if it is colder. She brushes her hair and Preacher climbs into bed. They talk about things, not work-things, other-things; he might just tell her how beautiful she is, something she has not heard often in her life, or he might tell her about a place he lived; she might tell him about an old friend she'd not thought of in years, or a song she heard on the radio. This is a form of fore-foreplay for them, even more so than the shower. They don't analyze this.

He is the type who could, but she is not the type to whom he would, quote Rilke, “See how in their veins all becomes spirit;/into each other they mature and grow”; she is not the type who would even be comfortable knowing that her lover thought in that way. She clambers into the smallish bed with him and turns out the light and presses her face against his chest and breathes in; Ivory soap is part of the smell of him, and something faintly like cinnamon, and... aspen leaves? She cannot describe it, but she finds it heady. He strokes her hair; this is how it always begins, when he strokes her hair in that way. Every strand is familiar to him. She suffers a brief, sensation of being a violin, her pegs turned a hairsbreadth before the bow is drawn.

Her mouth strokes the soft skin of his belly; he draws his other hand across her skin, lightly, and she feels fine hairs rise on her forearms. And she straightens to bring her mouth closer to his. There is something about his kiss that pulls; she cannot describe it any other way, it pulls something from her, it draws her into him. He has said to her, in the past: you penetrate me, too. But she is not sure about this. This is why she always turns out the lights. When she can see his eyes she sometimes thinks she sees something... close down. Like closing the door to a furnace; the heat is still there, but the light goes out. But with the room dark out she does not notice this. She notices instead the script his fingers trace on her skin; she notices instead the warmth and fullness and closeness of him; by the time he is inside her the taste of his skin and the sound of his breath alone are almost more than she can bear. On this night he is slow and deliberate and his hand strokes her cheek and the curve of her jaw as he kisses her, and the first time she comes it is sharp and sudden, and the second time it is slow and shuddering, and finally she struggles to draw enough breath to give voice to the cascading chords her body sounds, taut then unbound in rolling succession like the slurred pop of the waves against the boat. When her arms begin to ache from squeezing him and the tiny implosions are too much to bear and his kisses have pulled her all the way into him he lets go, and she feels that release, too, and they have done it right because each has felt the other.

He's the sort who doesn't even mind sleeping in the wet spot.

In the morning they do it again, just because. When the sunlight fills the cabin, though, she opts for something that takes his eyes from her view; he calls it “Aibha,” but she doesn’t bother to learn the fancy names he has for these things. She just knows she likes it.

In case you’re wondering: he has told her he loves her. And she has returned the sentiment.

He still works the occasional shift at the Wine Dark Sea; he has refused title or promotion, although he is a de facto assistant manager of both facilities. He earns more in tips at the Sea, of course. Jimmy is teaching him more about cooking, about the difference between cooking in your kitchen and cooking in a restaurant. He picks up some basic technique, chopping, sautéing, that sort of competent sure-handedness in the kitchen that makes even an indifferent chef appear to know what he's doing.

The businesses thrive. They laugh at a man who comes to see them about franchising Gus’s; it won’t work as a franchise, they tell him. How do you franchise keeping the place loud when it should be loud, quiet when it should be quiet? How to describe the right volume for the music? How do you write a manual about the waitstaff bickering with the grill cook, loudly, in front of the guests? The food is “sophisticated diner” but served at truck-stop prices, so the joint only makes money if it stays packed. It stays packed in part because the kids know it’s one-of-a-kind, authentic, not just another TGIFridays. Because it is controlled chaos. Because the staff learns everyone’s names. Because they keep enough vegetarian stuff on the menu. Because they are open (after the first month) 24/7. You can go there late in the morning for beignets and coffee and get some reading done; you can go there late at night and yell to be heard.

You can’t franchise it. The Douglases won’t admit it, but they aren’t sure if it would be at all possible without Haywood; he remembers everyone’s name, the regulars ask for him, he brings them food they haven’t ordered and they eat it and pay for it because Preacher wouldn’t steer them wrong.

(Some of the girls and a few of the boys flirt with him; he flirts back; to her own surprise, Sarah finds this funny, not threatening.)

In March of 1991 Preacher and Sarah both take off at the same time and go visit one of her cousins in Redland. There’s a new baby in the house. Preacher makes all the appreciative noises. Plays with abandon with their three-year-old. Sarah is not surprised that he’s good with kids; she’s just a little surprised that she couldn’t recall him ever showing any interest in one at all before that time.

They don’t discuss it. But a few days later she comes home and he says to her: I need to talk to you about something important.

She is dripping from the shower. OK, she says. She thinks she knows where this is going.

I have been so happy, he says. Here. With you. I love you, and my work, and your folks, and even this rainy city.

I love you, too, she said, and you’ve made me happy, too.

There’s really nothing else I could want, he said, except…

She hopes it is a giant rock, the sort of thing that will put her cousin’s 1 karat, off-color thing to shame.

Except that there is more, there is more for both of us, and there’s no sense in putting that off another minute.

She wonders where he is hiding it. Will he get on one knee? She hoped not. That was so… clichéd.

So, he says, his face wet, I have to leave.

There is a long silence, in which she almost says “yes.”

What, she says. There is no question mark at the end.

I feel so… so bad, he says to her, looking her in the eye. That I am not able to be… that I can’t be your… I wish that our future was together, I wish that I could give you all the things that you should have, a family and a future and… and everything. But I can’t. This is not my future. It should be, I want it to be, but it’s not.

What? There is a question mark that time. A threatening one.

I wish I could explain it better, he said. I can’t. I wish you could talk me into staying. You can’t. I don’t want to have to go. But I do.

He stood.

I hate the fact that you’re going to hate me now. I hate the fact that I have wasted your time and… and… I hope that there is a time when you are finished hating me, a time when you are with someone else and happy and glad, in fact, that I left to open the way for all that. And after that happens, if you are finished hating me, I hope that you can remember some good things about this time.

She grabs his arm, she cries, she threatens, she curses. Desperate, she demands two weeks’ notice. He leaves with the same knapsack he had when he moved in – a couple shirts, jeans, toothbrush, alternative shoes.

Years later she is married with kids and happy. Gus’s faltered a bit but picked back up again. Preacher’s prediction seems to have come true – once she stopped hating him, she remembers those days fondly. Susan, however, won’t mention his name. Just glares when asked about him. Kevin… Kevin won’t admit it, but on some level he keeps thinking this was just a phase and Preacher will be back.

Sarah and her husband and child are ritual Worshippers. Kevin and Susan have read the book.

Part Twenty Eight

2005-03-11T14:02:00.002-05:00

It is the summer of 1990.

Kevin stares at the ceiling while she gets ready for bed. And he says to Susan: I miss my restaurant.

Susan says to him, I knew you would.

Kevin handles the kitchen, including all the food, all the wine, and Jimmy. Sarah handles the front – waiters, tables, busboys, personnel. Susan handles finances (an artifact of the days when her parents fronted the money) and “atmosphere,” which includes everything from the lighting to the design of the menus. Either Kevin or Sarah or both are in the restaurant virtually every hour it is open, greeting guests, glaring at runners, keeping the waiters sharp. Sarah has proven that she is perfectly capable of handling things. Kevin doesn’t know what to do with his newfound time. Doesn’t know how to react to a waiter he hasn’t hired.

Kevin says to Susan: I can’t believe Preacher has been here less than a year. He’s good.

Susan agrees that he is good, and wonders what her husband is plotting.

Do you think he’s going to marry our daughter?

Would you have married me if my parents hadn’t made you?

Eventually. He laughs

Liar, she laughs back. Do you think it’s that serious?

He shrugs. You’re her mother. What does she say?

Nothing, she says. Why would she tell her mother? She got into bed next to him.

Think there’s a subtle way I can ask him what his… intentions are?

Don’t you dare, she says, turning to him and frowning.

Nothing obvious, Kevin protests, just, maybe, I could ask him…

Kevin, I swear to God, if you even HINT at anything like that I will kill you. The last thing your daughter needs is to have her father leaning on one of his employees to marry her.

He is silent to a moment. I guess you’re right.

Don’t even THINK about it, she says, arching one eyebrow. What’s got into you?

I’m thinking about… remember Gus’s?

That horrible little diner next to the campus?

Yeah.

Didn’t we used to call that place Chez Ptomaine?

Yeah, that’s the place.

What about it?

Gus died.

Recently? Jesus, he was a hundred when WE were in college.

If there was a way to make Pepsi fried and greasy, Gus would have done it. He wore the same stained white tee-shirt beneath his apron every day. When he cooked he slammed the food on the plate angrily. His daughter Myrna, an enormous woman who shared Gus’s disposition, would slam the plate on the counter in front of the customer just as angrily.

When we were in college, he was the same age we are now, Kevin says. Remember Myrna? Myrna’s daughter inherited the property.

Susan closes her eye in a half-wince. Thanks. I didn’t feel old enough.

Anyhow, what would you think about opening a second restaurant?

There? At Gus’s?

Something fun and hip. Someplace where the kids can get affordable real food. Someplace with a juke box.

Someplace where you can send Sarah and Preacher so you can have the Wine Dark Sea back.

I hadn’t really thought of it like that.

Liar.

No, really.

Big fat liar, she says, kissing him.

That would be perfect for them, though, he says thoughtfully.

Like this just occurred to you now. She slips her hand under the covers.

He laughs and reaches for the light.

No, she said, leave it on. Otherwise I’ll keep imagining getting humped by old Gus.

He chuckled at the memory of the sour-faced man standing at his grill, flipping cheeseburgers, with his crew-cut and ubiquitous Lucky Strikes.

And left the light on. And afterwards she curls up against his chest and coos:

Oh, Gus.

Part Twenty Seven

2005-03-09T15:41:00.001-05:00

In 1964 Kevin Douglas knocked up his girlfriend, an art major at U-Dub named Susan Frey. Kevin was a poli-sci major himself.

Kevin was more devoted to not being drafted than to Rousseau, it’s safe to say. The arrival of little Sarah Ruth Douglas on the scene accomplished the same thing and the moment he held her in his arms he decided it was something he should have done a long time ago.

Now if he could just find a job…

Susan said to him, baby, do what you want to do. Follow your heart. But also put food on the table for your little girl. Since she’d let him override her choice of names (Burning Freedom Douglas had such a nice ring to it, she thought) he figured he’d better listen to her.

What he wanted to do… what he wanted to do… he walked around campus and through Seattle and realized that the thing he enjoyed most at school – aside from Susan – was cooking dinner for his friends. Nobody had any money for restaurants and besides, their hair was getting longer and their clothes scruffier as the Sixties progressed, and so it was getting harder and harder to get served…

He looked up and he was in a part of Seattle that consisted largely of warehouses and longshoreman’s bars. And there just a few hundred feet from the Sound was a ramshackle building whose owner was trying to sell it before the city condemned it.

Susan and Kevin went to her parents and negotiated a compromise: they would get married, if her parents would pay for a big wedding… except they would get married at the courthouse and use the wedding money for the down payment on their new restaurant.

For some reason the Freys went for it, and the Wine Dark Sea was born. The building’s owner even threw in the about-to-sink houseboat foundering at the pier behind the about-to-be-condemned warehouse. And thought he had put one over on the young couple, who (he thought) would now get stuck with the bill for having the wreck hauled away.

But somehow they got the building fixed up. And the boat, too. And Susan created a whole visual experience for the restaurant to go with the menu, which was heavy on seafood and other regional ingredients, and always had plenty of vegetarian dishes. At first the Wine Dark Sea served an uneasy mix of stevedores and college students but eventually the mix got easier. They moved out of the houseboat and it became the home of the first chef they hired who wasn’t Kevin. And the neighborhood changed throughout the Seventies, and ever few years Susan would completely remake the look of the place, and the menu got more sophisticated, and the dockworkers stopped coming around as much, and so did the college students, both replaced by a lot more people with a lot more money…

Kevin and Susan pretended for the longest time that they were still, at heart, just cooking dinner for their long-hair friends. But when Sarah came back from college and her internship at a three-star restaurant in France she pointed out to her parents that they did, in fact, own and operate a fancy restaurant.

Kevin’s first impulse was to sell his Mercedes, but he sublimated that into a practice of hiring vagrants for non-existent jobs, which is where Preacher Haywood comes into the story.

It is a crisp (for Seattle) fall day in 1989 and at first light Kevin goes to the fish market and meets up with Jimmy Raines, the current head chef at Wine Dark. They inspect the day’s options. And both of them notice that there is young man standing there, drinking a cup of coffee, and just watching. They don’t recognize him, he’s not with any restaurant or vendor, he’s just… there. And he’s there the next day, too, standing and watching and doing nothing, just drinking it all in. And something about the young man reminds Kevin of… well, of a young him, and he starts talking to him.

What, he asks, is the story? What brings you here this early in the morning?

And Preacher says to him: I’m practicing my only job skills.

What are those?

“I can wait,” he says, with a trace of a smile, “I can think, and I can fast.”

Quoting Herman Hesse to an ex-hippie like Kevin Douglas is pretty much like dangling a steak in front of a lion; Douglas hires him on the spot, forgetting that he has promised his daughter (now the manager of the restaurant) that she will be making the hiring decisions from now on.

When he returns to the restaurant Sarah is just emerging from the recently re-renovated houseboat and heading into the restaurant. She is tall and loose-hipped; her nose is a little large for her face, her hair is dark and elegant. A bit icy; at 25 she knows she would have trouble getting the staff to take her seriously, to take her as anything but a kid playing in her parents’ sandbox. But she has a degree in restaurant management from UNLV and a head for business and she is convinced (correctly, as it turns out) that she can do the job, and do it well.

Her father tells her that he just hired a new busboy, some guy he found wandering down by the docks; she rolls her eyes, she sighs, but this isn’t the first time, and she can always find room for another busser, because the turnover’s so high, and if he’s anything like the other hobos her dad keeps hiring, he won’t last a week.

That night Haywood shows up, clean, shaved, appropriately dressed, polite, articulate… and a hard worker.

Three nights later Kevin is walking across the floor and hears his new busboy recite the very lengthy specials list at a table. He collars Haywood and asks him why he was doing that.

They asked, Preacher says.

And how did you know it? You’ve only been on 20 minutes.

I memorize the specials board each night.

You’re a busboy.

But sometimes it comes up. Like right there.

A week later he is waiting tables.

Sarah doesn’t like him – let’s be clear about that. A little too smooth. Plus, she didn’t hire him. Plus, her father too clearly likes him. But he is a hell of a waiter. And the kitchen staff likes him, too. He shows up early and talks about food with Jimmy Raines. Jimmy wants to hire him as a prep cook. Sarah steps in – he is too good with the tables. Keep him out front.

At first he lives in a rooming house uniformly described as “horrid.” Then he rooms with a couple of other busboys – “an opportunity to brush up on my Spanish,” he says. Then after a misunderstanding involving the sister of one of his roommates, he finds new quarters near the University of Washington campus with a couple of graduate students.

Reluctantly Sarah gives him more responsibilities. She uses him as an expediter. He does some prep work. Discusses menus with her and Kevin and Jimmy.

(Jimmy Raines grew up in the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago and learned how to cook from his grandmother, and then from Uncle Sam when he did a stint in the Air Force. When he got discharged he kept on cooking. And he got his job when Kevin and Susan were on vacation in Charleston, dined at the little hotel grill where he worked, and had the best crab cakes on earth. Outside of Maryland. He was a big, ebullient man, and his kitchen was always immaculate.)

Sarah decides Haywood is OK. Dependable and hardworking. Still a little too cocky. Looks her in the eye a little too long. In fact he’s just a little unsettling all around. She calls the restaurant in Annapolis to check his reference. They confirm it, ask about him, tell her how great he is. She’s still not entirely comfortable around him. Maybe he’s not OK. He keeps trying to make her laugh. And, damn it, he keeps succeeding, which is not the way to keep the staff in line.

After he’s worked there a few months he helps her lock up and asks her out on a date. She declines. He asks her again a few weeks later. She declines. A few days later she overhears a bosomy blonde waitress named Claire Elliott waxing rhapsodic about going to see the BoDeans and Treat Her Right with Preacher the night before..

The next night she has him busing tables again.

He doesn’t complain, doesn’t say a word. Works just as he always did. Jimmy complains to Kevin but he, wisely, defers to his daughter in this. At the end of the night Haywood asks her out again.

She says, lips that touched Claire Elliott’s will not touch mine.

Who said anything about lips? he says, with that wry grin that she always echoes and then scowls away, embarrassed.

Seriously, she says. I can’t be with someone if I don’t respect his taste in women; I mean what does that say about me?

Yeah, yeah, I’m a big disappointment, he agrees dismissively. I’m off tomorrow. Take the night off yourself and I’ll take you to see the original King Kong.

Didn’t you hear me? she says.

No lips. I heard you. I promise. No lips.

She glares at him. They are both silent. She searches his eyes intently.

Where – she starts to say, and Preacher interrupts her mid-syllable.

The Egyptian.

OK, I’ll meet you there.

The next evening, after three outfit changes, it occurs to her that she could just ditch him. But she shows up.

They go for drinks afterwards. She likes being the driver. Gives her a feeling of control. Haywood tells her that he’d had a jeep but that he’d given it to his college roommate when he came out to Alaska. She tells him about the year she spent in Lyons for her restaurant apprenticeship. He tells her about his summer there. His French is better than hers. Late in the evening when she returns from the ladies’ room she gives him a long, slow, gentle kiss.

I thought no lips, he says.

Changed my mind, she says.

She decides the unsettled feeling he elicits is a good one.

A month later he’s spending most evenings on the boat.

She complains that she has no sleeping attire that was suitable for having a housemate. Lingerie is too uncomfortable. Sweats too unbecoming. A long t-shirt nightgown was neither comfortable nor attractive. She is the sort of person who will obsess over this.

He shows up at her door with a pair of men’s flannel pyjamas. This is sexy? she says.

You have so little imagination, he tells her. If you alternate between the tops on one night and the bottoms on the other…

(She will learn over the years that, in fact, virtually every man polled agrees that alternating halves of pajamas are far more… inspiring to them than the sexiest of frilly lingerie. And she finds it quite comfortable, after some initial awkwardness about going topless. In fact she will tell someone, years later, that she attributes three of her four children to her choice of sleepwear and its effect on her husband.)

Part Twenty Six

2005-03-08T21:45:00.001-05:00

All of this can be documented, except for the wholly fabricated conversations.

"Haywood!” Darby yelled.

A muscular young man straightened from the group of men loading trucks and began walking toward them

“You owe me, Gus,” Darby said to the man next to him.

Gus Avery nodded. “’Preciate it.”

“Well, you married my sister. The least I can do is toss you a spitrat every now and then.”

Haywood reached them.

“Haywood, this is Gus Avery. He captains the Bristol Bay. Gus, Preacher Haywood. The only spitrat worth a damn when there’s work to be done.”

Preacher shook the other man’s hand. Avery was tall, thin, with long hair and a patchy beard. “Mr. Avery.”

“Haywood,” Gus said. “You ever do any fishing?”

“Nope.”

“Ever been on a boat?”

“Yep.”

Avery looked at his brother-in-law. “Well, that’s half the battle. Look, my opening comes up in two days and I’ve lost half my crew. No offense, but I’ve never been desperate enough to hire a spitrat before, and you need to know how important this is. Nowadays we only get two openings during the season. Two 48-hour periods to haul as much fish as humanly possible. My first opening was a bust. That’s part of why I’m desperate. We fish shares, here, which means that you get a percentage of the net. A small percentage, as the juniormost, but if we have a good haul you still can make more in two days than you can make in two weeks at the cannery.”

“I understand.”

“I don’t know that you do. I was a college kid like you when I first came up here. This is pocket money for you. The men you’ll be sailing with – this is an important part of their income for the year. When we hit our spot we’re going to be running long lines and working 48 hours straight through. You let a 200 pound drop in the water, it’s like taking food from their children, understand? We work hard, and fast, and if you get tangled up in a skate we will drag your ass across the ocean rather than stop to haul you back in.”

“I understand. Bust my ass, two days straight.”

Avery looked at his brother-in-law. “He understands.”

Darby shrugged and said nothing.

“OK, like I said, I’m desperate. Come on, I’m going to give you a crash course in how to not drown.”

They walked down to the dock where the Bristol was being provisioned. Avery told him about the change from a few years ago; before, they’d be out a couple weeks at a time, but now -- “balls to the wall. Ten times as dangerous for the fisherman, too. And risky – if we don’t set in the right spot, we come back with the hold empty and that’s it for the year. We barely caught enough last time to cover the expenses.”

On the deck he showed the kid how to set lines, showed him where things were, showed him how to stay out of the way when necessary. “I’ve only been a captain for two seasons,” Avery said. “And everybody knows me as the outsider. And everybody’s waiting for me to fall on my ass. Last year we set records for hauls. But this year… shit. I don’t set where the others do. I have my own ideas about where to find fish. When I’m right, they love me. But when I’m wrong…”

“Shit,” Preacher repeated.

“Exactly.”

When the ship was in position it would set long lines called skates, up to 100 fathoms each. A hundred or so hooks were spaced along it, baited with frozen herring – except that one of Avery’s quirks was that he used fresher fish, which was harder to put on a hook but drew better. The lines were strung between buoys and covered miles. After they set for a few hours, a hydraulic winch on the ship started pulling them back in. A halibut could weight as much as 400 pounds. The work setting the lines was fast and you risked getting your arm caught in a hook or in the line itself and pulled overboard. The work pulling them back in was slower but harder, grappling with the huge, struggling flatfish and pulling them on board to be gaffed and tossed into a refrigerated locker.

Years later Avery would have the following observations about Haywood’s performance on his maiden voyage: first, that he saw through every practical joke the other crewmembers set for him; second, that he always had a smile on his face (they nicknamed him “Twinkle,” in fact,) and third, that he could work them all to death. He was slow setting lines at first but mastered the knack of it very quickly, and once he got it down he was like a machine. And when they started hauling in he threw his back into every fish, and didn’t once slow down or complain for two days straight.

And the haul filled the locker almost to the top. Avery would later reflect that he caught more fish in that 48-hour period than in any two-week span before or since. He caught enough that it made up for the bad catch earlier in the summer. Because his crew was short, the shares were going to be big, too.

They got back to Homer and Preacher staggered down to the Spit and stood in the public shower for a long time, trying in vain to get the smell of fish out. Then dragged himself to his tent and slept for twelve hours straight. Got up and took another shower, which seemed to do a better job. Put on the one pair of jeans and the one shirt that had never been on the boat or in the cannery, and went to the Iceberg Inn to rejoin his crewmates and find out how much they’d earned.

When he got there – the last one to arrive – Avery told him that the rest of the crew had decided to let him take a full share, not the half-share usually given to first-timers. “Hell, Twinkles, you worked it like you’d been doing it all your life,” the mate said. He didn’t add what they all were thinking – you worked it like your livelihood depended on it. Like one of us.

They were thrilled with the take; they drank all night; Haywood ended up sweet-talking the half-Inuit barmaid who had sworn never to go home with a fisherman; everything was going fine until one of the Bristol’s crewmen threw a punch at a crewman from another, less fortunate ship called the Russian Lark, and the bar dissolved into a free-for-all.

Avery swore, later, that Haywood tried to avoid getting involved. He took the barmaid by the hand and started edging for the door. But the Lark’s second mate, a beefy man named Roger, blocked his escape and threw a roundhouse punch that knocked Preacher into a table; Roger took another step toward Haywood with his fist raised and Preacher threw a left-right-left just as the police came through the door. The Lark’s mate dropped like a sack of potatoes right at the feet of the cops.

Preacher got to spend the night in a cell with the rest of the crew; he even made up with the man he’d punched, complaining that his hands hurt far worse than Roger’s head. Avery bailed them out. And he had his doubts; Preacher didn’t seem to favor his hands at all, but Roger’s eye was swollen shut for a week.

The magistrate was used to fishermen getting in drunken brawls, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. He suggested that Haywood just get out of the county.

“What the hell,” Preacher said, “the season’s over anyway.”

He caught a ride to Anchorage and then a ferry south and arrived in Seattle on September 23, 1989.

Years later Haywood wrote: "There was an allure to that life. No stress. Didn't take your work home with you. Just good, honest, back-breaking work. You didn't even notice the smell after awhile. Mostly. But in that jail cell I had a sudden vision of myself 30 years down the road, doing the exact same thing -- busting my ass to keep food on the table, and getting locked up after a beer brawl to celebrate another voyage without drowning, freezing, or both. I decided I had better leave before it became a habit."

Part Twenty Five

2005-03-07T12:53:00.001-05:00

This is why we were all – “we” being everyone who cared a bit for Preacher, “we” being a fairly large number of St. John’s students – more than a little annoyed with Preacher that last year:

Spit Rats.

That what they call the college kids who go to Alaska to work in the canneries during the short, frenzied summer fishing season. Spit Rats live in tent cities down by the bay in places like Homer and Valdez. They promised them $20,000 for three months’ work; of course, a loaf of bread costs $5, but still, $20,000. In return you stand up to your knees in fish guts 10 hours a day, six days a week, all summer long.

And this was what Preacher decided to do.

When the rest of us took the MCATs and LSATs and GREs and applied to graduate schools, Preacher decided to go live in a fish camp.

Now, this was St. John’s. If Preacher had spurned g-school for the Peace Corps or to spend a year in Tibet or to backpack across South America following the trail of Che Guevara, nobody would have been too surprised. These are all acceptable post-graduate voyages of self-discovery. An internship at some company’s junior executive program would have been OK; sneered at, but OK. Going to work for your family business would be similarly tolerated.

But to go stand in fish guts?

He was resolute.

Look, I said, at least take the GREs. Then go to Alaska. Take a year off. Once you’ve decided you’re tired of fish, you can apply to graduate school for next year.

He just laughed.

This is going to be your life? This is going to be your career? I said to him.

You sound like your mother, he replied.

Oh, that’s low. Listen, I’m just trying to understand this. Don’t you think this is a waste?

A waste of what, he wanted to know.

A waste of you. Of your mind. Of… of everything. Hell, you could have done this right out of high school. Don’t you think you’re capable of a lot more than this?

Yes, he said. But I don’t have any more specifics than that. You tell me. What do you think I’m supposed to do? Law school? Medical school? Go get an MBA somewhere and make a million dollars? Academia? I’m open to suggestions.

You could do any of those things, I said to him. That’s why this is such a waste. If you didn’t have any particular abilities, then OK, but…

But I have to pick one, he said. I have to pick one and live with it. What if I pick wrong? What if I wake up in 20 years as a, I don’t know, as a lawyer, with a wife and mortgage and everything, and realize with a start that I was supposed to be an English professor? What if I get the MBA and make a million dollars and spend the bulk of my life regretting I wasn’t a writer? I’ve spent my whole life with people – like you – telling me that I can do anything. Everything. But I can’t do everything. I know I have something I’m supposed to do. But I don’t know what it is, and I’m… if I make the wrong choice now I might miss it entirely.

So instead, I said, you’re going to do nothing.

“I can think,” he said. “I can wait. I can fast.”

Herman Hesse? You’re quoting fucking Siddhartha to me?

He shrugged.

I know that all of us had this conversation with him at one point or another our senior year. What made it so irritating was that he himself didn’t particularly want to go to Alaska. He was paralyzed by indecision. Overwhelmed with options.

But I guess it worked out for him. Sort of.

At any rate, he turned in his thesis and rang the bell with the rest of us. Defended it orally, and I’m certain he did a fine job.

Me, during my oral defense I ended up making a series of sarcastic comments belittling one of my panel members, but that’s just me. I took the GREs with all the fervor of someone escaping a job at his father’s plumbing company and got accepted in the American History graduate program at Kent State.

And Preacher prepared for Homer, Alaska, the Halibut Capital Of The World.

Ellen was our valedictorian. No surprise there. My parents were coming down from Philly with my sister to see us graduate. I remember the weather was nice.

So the night before graduation there were a few different graduation parties and I went to one of them with Marc and Drew but got bored early and came home. Preacher had promised to catch up with us later.

When I came back I came in through the kitchen door – that’s what we did – and the house was dark except for the light over the kitchen sink and the tiny lamp that was always on at the bottom of the stairs. But I could hear Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds playing on the downstairs stereo, which told me (a) Preacher was home, and (b) he was entertaining.

Only Preacher would put on Nick Cave. “Kicking Against the Pricks,” played without a trace of irony, I’m sure.

OK, that’s maybe a little harsh. Preacher had a sense of irony. He was just a little ashamed of it.

So I figured I would go into the living room, turn off the stereo, watch a little TV. Maybe once the sex noises died down I could go upstairs and clean my room for the first time in two years – after all, my parents were going to be there the next day.

Maybe not.

But when I sauntered out of the kitchen and into the living room I saw that Preacher and his guest hadn’t quite made it upstairs. They were there on the landing and hadn’t heard me over the stereo and their own heavy breathing. And I didn’t want to look but I wasn’t anticipating them, wasn’t prepared to avert my eyes, and the light at the foot of the stairs made an almost perfect golden pool for them, and I saw. Ellen astride him, her hair long and black and straight and reaching almost to her waist. If her eyes had been open she might have seen me. I couldn’t move. I stood there like a deer in the headlights for what felt like an hour and was probably 30 seconds. Heard the sounds from her. Saw Preacher’s hands on her hips.

Then I stumbled back into the kitchen, mind reeling.

Ellen and I had been over for more than a year. We’d both dated other people. I was fine with all that. There was no reason for me to be upset. She could be with whoever she wanted to be with.

I sat there at the kitchen table wondering if I was furious or just shocked. Now that my ears were tuned to it, I could hear them over and under and through the music. After about 45 minutes of unrelenting cries from my former girlfriend I decided that he had seen me, somehow, even though I was never in his field of view out there, he had seen me, he had known I was coming back early, he had planned this whole thing, and he was just showing off. Just… just taunting me. I'm better looking that you; I'm smarter than you; and I can fuck your girlfriend fifty times better than you ever did. Never screamed like that for you, did she, roomie?

Even as I thought it, I knew it was ridiculous. But still, 45 minutes? Nonstop? I got up and opened the freezer and pulled out the bottle of Stoly that we kept in there. It was mostly full. I poured some into a juice glass. Cold and pure and clear.

The CD ended eventually, and Preacher decided to stop tormenting the poor girl, and the screams died down, and then I heard giggling, and they scampered up the steps. It sounded like he put the Smithereens on upstairs. Green Thoughts. Perfect.

By the time he came downstairs I’d finished about half the bottle. I felt nothing, no effect at all, but I also figured I probably shouldn’t stand up too quickly. He came into the kitchen wearing the same ratty white shorts he’d had on the first day I met him.

Jesus, he said, jumping, I didn’t know anybody was here. What happened to the party?

Got bored, I said. Company?

Yeah, he said, unexpected. Listen, it’s…

Don’t keep her waiting on my account, I said. Let me guess. Out of Seven-Up.

Gave the mini-fridge to a freshman, he said. Most everything’s packed up.

Marc and I were going to be there for another two weeks or so, but he was leaving the day after graduation.

I think there’s still some in there, I told him, nodding toward the refrigerator. When I did so I felt my brain slosh forward in my skull and nearly pull me over.

You OK? he said.

Thrilled, I told him. Go upstairs and finish giving your farewell address to the troops.

He looked at me with concern and fished a couple of bottles out of the refrigerator. Are you sure you’re all right? Do you want to talk…?

Get the fuck upstairs and don’t leave whoever it is waiting any longer, I said.

The thing is, he was serious. He knew something was bothering me and he was perfectly prepared to give up a nice warm bed and a nice warm girl in the bed to help me with… whatever.

I was overcome with disgust for him for that, more than for who was upstairs. And I knew that he wanted to tell me it was Ellen, and at the same time didn’t want to tell me – not because of me, but because of her. He never named names, not without their prior approval. So it was easy for me to keep him from saying it out loud.

He stood in the doorway, half naked, bottles shining in his hands. You sure?

Go, have your last bang as a collegian, I said.

He looked at me a minute longer and then went upstairs. Shortly thereafter I heard more creaking bedsprings and headboard-thumping.

I had some more vodka and then stood and walked into the living room, thinking I would use the TV to drown them out. That journey proved more difficult than I had imagined, but I made it there. I turned on a light and could see a pink bra draped over the arm of the couch and matching pink panties on the floor by the TV. I didn’t have the strength to look around for Preacher’s clothes-pile.

Great, I said out loud, now I have to sit on a sticky couch. I turned the TV on and sat on the sofa and tried not to think about them humping away on it before I got there. I clutched the bottle against my chest and the chill soaked right through me.

The next morning I awoke to the smell of eggs and bacon. The television was still on – Joan Lunden was babbling something about Michael Jackson – and the empty bottle of vodka was on the floor next to me.

I remember thinking, did someone hit me on the head with that bottle? How many times? And why was the TV turned up to 150 decibels? And who the fuck is cooking bacon in my presence?

Then I heard Ellen’s laughter coming from the kitchen. Slowly I sat up, keeping the contents of my stomach in place by sheer force of will.

Light streamed through the front windows.

“OK, you win the bet,” Ellen said (screamed, to me) over her shoulder to where Preacher was making breakfast. “He’s still alive.” She laughed. She was wearing a baseball jersey that said “Conquistadors” and her hair was still unbound.

There were so many sarcastic comments running through my brain that they formed a logjam in my mouth and kept me from uttering a word. I just looked at them and concentrated on not vomiting.

“You want something to eat?” Preacher called out to me.

She came into the living room and gathered up her clothes. "This isn’t weird for you, is it?" she said. "I mean, believe me, this was just a one-time thing."

"No," I said, holding my head in my hands, "it’s the happiest day of my life, you kidding me?"

"Seriously," she said. "I mean it’s not like we both haven’t…"

“I’m fine with it,” I said, as loudly and strongly as I could muster.

Preacher appeared in the doorway with a frying pan in his hands. “Your parents are going to be here in less than an hour,” he said. “Let’s put something in your stomach and get you looking respectable.”

I looked at him and opened my mouth to deliver a withering retort, then clamped it shut again, then raced upstairs to the bathroom.

They ate; Ellen, I assume, found pants; she sauntered back home to prepare for the ceremony with that same loose-limbed stride and cat-plus-canary grin that she’d sported around the house.

Nothing like having your bell rung a few dozen times to relax you before a big speech, I suppose.

Preacher cleaned up the breakfast dishes, came upstairs, tossed me in the shower while I cursed at him, cleaned me up, left me in my room to get dressed, came back downstairs, made coffee, greeted my parents, had Marc start entertaining them, came back upstairs, poured some coffee in me, helped me tie my tie, helped me back down the stairs. I said little, except “leave me the fuck alone” a few times.

We graduated. I made it across the stage without falling. By this time I was more sick than drunk anyhow.

(Don’t read too much into this. I told you, I wouldn’t become an alcoholic for years yet.)

And we stood around at the little outdoor reception later and everyone was chatting and everyone was nice and Ellen came over and met my parents and gave Preacher and me the exact same peck on the cheek and I had a few more drinks at the reception, which helped ease the hangover, and everything was wonderful and perfect and fine and I couldn’t stand it any more. I staggered up to where Preacher was introducing my parents to the Dean, handshakes all around…

“You know what your problem is?” I demanded. It came out a little louder than I had intended, because I was dimly aware of other conversations stopping and people turning to look at me.

Preacher looked surprised. “I just have one?” he said. “Let’s walk over…” he started, and I yanked my arm away from him.

“Your problem is that you are too fucking perfect. You know what happens when you are too fucking perfect? You become too fucking perfectly BORING. Your problem is that you are PERFECTLY BORING. You do everything perfect, you fuck perfect – right, Ellen? -- of that there’s no doubt, you’ll probably cut fish perfectly, too, you piece of shit, and you have even taken boringness to new heights of perfection. You are fucking boring, Mr. Perfect, Mr. Fucking Boring Perfect Ken Doll, and when I open a can of sardines and see a perfectly gutted fish, I’ll know you’re still off somewhere being Mr. Fucking Perfect, you fucking asshole.”

My vocabulary deteriorates when I’m loaded.

There was a deafening silence. Everyone looked at one another. Preacher didn’t. Preacher just looked at me. Without any anger at all, the perfect bastard. He tried to put his hand on my shoulder. “Perfectly true,” he said. “Let’s go for a little walk and talk about it, huh?”

I wasn’t looking at him. I was looking at my parents, who were looking at me disdainfully and at Preacher like he was a saint. And I snatched my arm away from him again.

“Get. The Fuck. Away. From Me,” I enunciated, and rolled my hand into a fist and threw a roundhouse punch with everything I could muster.

Preacher didn’t really even have to duck. I misjudged the distance between us, missed, whirled around, fell into a table, and knocked a bunch of ice cubes and crab puffs into the grass. There was a low roar from the crowd and people scrambled out of the way of the flying crudités and I lay on the ground next to the overturned table, too drunk to get back up and too embarrassed to continue breathing.

My father and Marc and Drew helped me up. I heard Preacher say “I’m the last one he wants helping him right now.”

That was the last time I saw Preacher Haywood. And the last time I heard his voice. He sent me a couple of postcards from Alaska. I never responded.

College was officially over.

Part Twenty Four

2005-03-03T21:13:00.001-05:00

While I spent the summer in Santa Fe digging up Anasazi ruins (don’t ask), the little bastard waited tables and actually started working on his senior thesis.

Which wasn’t due until January.

“Poetry and the Semiotics of Identity.” I remember the title to his paper as vividly as my own – “History, Pop Culture, and Will Durant.”

Mine was about the mass-marketing of scholarship to lay readers. Preacher had lots of passages from Aristotle and Hank Williams in his.

That’s not important.

This was part of Mark’s story: “One time that summer he gave me a twenty dollar bill – I forget what for, maybe groceries – and there was a telephone number written on it. Apparently this was fairly routine for him – he’d work a table and when he got his tip, some woman would have left her phone number for him. He never called any of them, of course.”

Preacher suffered from Groucho Marx syndrome for awhile, I think – he couldn’t be interested in anyone who would actually want to date someone like him. Maybe it was more than that.

Mark took him clubbing occasionally just to get him out of the house. Gay bars, or at least places where gay men could reasonably be expected.

“He was a good sport about it,” Mark recalled. “In fact, he had the same nonchalance about men and women.”

“You used Preacher as your wingman in gay clubs.”

“Sort of, yeah.”

“Was he any good at it?”

Mark seesawed his hand. “Whatever it was that straight women saw in Preacher,” he said, “gay men mostly did not. He would talk me up, he would intercept the losers, and if there was a group of people there together he would get us into their midst like we were all old friends… but he wasn’t exactly a guy magnet.”

Interesting.

And apparently when they went to places where they might both meet someone, Preacher was supremely disinterested. Mark said it was quite remarkable to watch, actually. He wasn’t standoffish, or rude, or morose; neither did he flirt, pursue, or invite. He just… was. And at the end of the night he always went home alone. And never returned phone calls.

“To my knowledge,” Mark said, “he had no intimate contact of any kind with anyone that summer. Not even himself, for all I know.”

Our senior year Ellen was back for poker nights. She was the same old Ellen – smart, cute, driven. Actually rather wearying.

And Preacher’s intentionally dateless streak continued. Oh, he would talk to girls at parties and he couldn’t help but flirt a little around campus but he was just not interested. Which, apparently, made him all the more desirable.

He came home with me at Christmas. He had ridden me like a $10 mule after Thanksgiving to get my senior paper finished. So we were the only two seniors not busting our asses to get it done over the Christmas break. I wanted to wring his neck at the time, but of course he was right.

Bastard.

I didn’t have any real girlfriends, per se, that year. But the few times a girl tiptoed out of the house early in the morning with her underpants in her pocket… it was my room she was leaving, not Preacher’s.

Until the croquet match against Navy that Spring. Preacher still ran and rowed and did all that sweaty stuff, and yet the only competitive sport at the school – croquet – required roughly the same amount of athletic conditioning as tying one’s shoes. Without the bending down part. Still, he played, and with that muscle memory thing he had going, he really cleaned up. This was a man who knew as much Sun Tzu and Clausewitz and Musashi as any of these Navy guys. I don’t know if that helps you prepare croquet strategy. Doesn’t hurt, I suppose.

So our senior year they were gunning for him; he’d kicked their asses twice (he didn’t play his freshman year). But – as usual – the drunks from St. John’s (costumed that year as pirates, if memory serves) carried the day, and Haywood led the way.

Which brings me to Captain Debbie Feder. I actually met her at the L&N Seafood Grill at the Pentagon City Mall. She was in uniform. Captain Feder had something to do with logistics for the Navy; an abbreviated CV is in the archive. She’s married with three kids. But the first time I met her, her name was Debbie Kupek, and she wasn’t married, she was a senior company commander at the US Naval Academy.

It was after the party had broken up; Preacher was nowhere to be found, but some of the rest of us went to an after-party party that took up two floors of one of the dormitories and I kept expecting him to show up there, but he never did. It made me a little angry, at the time. Him sitting there at our house alone. I thought that the whole broken-hearted thing had gone on long enough.

And thus my first introduction to Debbie Kupek – I got home, the house was dark, and just as I was tiptoeing up the stairs to my room, the two of them came tiptoeing back down towards the kitchen.

She was wearing his pirate shirt and that familiar dazed smile. Short strawberry blonde hair and freckles.

“Good timing,” Preacher said to me. Kupek had the decency to look sheepish.

“Because I missed the whole wounded-goat phase?” I said. I was thinking: I hope they’re finished, because I need to get some sleep.

Kupek turned beet red.

“No, because I need your help,” he said.

We sat in the kitchen and drank Seven-Up and Preacher concocted an elaborate plan for sneaking her back into the Academy when her pass had, technically, expired at midnight. It involves a security flaw which I suppose has been patched since then – we stole a crew hull from the St. John’s boathouse and the two of them slipped silently across College Creek. My job was to serve as lookout at the boathouse so he wasn’t caught returning the shell.

So that was the first question I asked her, after the pleasantries were out of the way: did you get caught that night?

“Not officially,” she said. “My conduct officer knew. I mean I showed up three hours late, soaking wet. And I think my cheeks were still… you know, flushed. Because she took one look at me and guessed everything.”

Best friends will do that.

“No,” she said to a later question, “I am not a Worshipper. I’m a Presbyterian. But I read his book. My husband doesn’t… this is all kept sealed for 50 years, right?”

“At least,” I promised for the umpteenth time.

“Nobody knows about us. I mean Sarah – my roommate, the conduct officer – she knew, but she’s dead. I mean it was just one night, a million years ago, but… still.”

I understand, I told her.

Sarah died of breast cancer. Satisfied? Try to stay focused on the relevant stuff.

I told her that Preacher had been, quite deliberately, celibate that entire year, that she was the first girl after his heart had been broken the previous June. And she said:

“Well, to be honest, it was his butt first, and it was another woman who pointed it out to me. That got me looking at him. Then it was the way he walked – with that sort of unconscious grace. That had me looking at him closer. And, of course, no Navy haircut – that was a plus, too. So after the match I talked to him. And he was smart, and funny, and nice, which had me talking to him more… and at one point I said something to him that was supposed to sound coy and sexy but it came out a little forced and he looked at me with this little half-smile and I made the mistake of looking deep into his eyes. It was like… how can I put this? When you looked there they went a mile down. And for the first half-mile he was a pussycat. Then for the next quarter-mile you saw a glimpse of mountain lion. Wild and a little scary. And if you could look down long enough, that last quarter-mile there was something so lonesome and sad and… and maybe I’m remembering more than there actually was. But either way, once we shared that look, that was all she wrote. I mean it wasn’t like me to just pick up some guy like that. And to be honest I kind of made fun of you Johnnies back then. Bunch of long-haired… well, you know. Although someone told me later that Preacher was an all-around athlete… anyhow. After the Navy spent three and a half years making me tough as nails, I looked into those eyes and I was torn between the desire to put my arms around him and the desire to wrap my legs around him, if you know what I mean. But… but I fought it off for awhile. We talked about music. And he was shocked that I had never heard of the Plimsouls. So that was the excuse. I went back to his place to listen to the Plimsouls. Although we both knew that wasn’t why I was going back to his place.

“But when you tell me I was the first one in a year… you know, I thought something was funny. About the way he acted. Especially afterward. But he… You know what I mean. You made that crack about the wounded goat. I wanted to punch you. Plus I was past my curfew. I didn’t have much time to spend trying to figure it out.”

At the time, I hadn’t thought for a heartbeat about the fact that the Navy mascot was a goat, but it finally hit me there in the restaurant. Sometimes it takes me 16 years to catch up. I told her that the wounded goat thing hadn’t been a Navy crack. It was something we said about all the women he brought up there.

She gave me an icy, withering glare. “Funny how that doesn’t make it any nicer.”

I said nothing, ducking – cringing, you might say – behind my objectivity.

“But the thing was,” she said, “I had this distinct feeling that I had… that he had left the room, in some way. Once we sort of got… once we started… it was like someone turned something off in his eyes. I mean… there was a reason I never called him again afterwards. He called me – he was a gentleman – but I brushed him off. I wanted something more than just sex. And I was definitely not a one-night-stand kind of girl; I never would have gone with him if I hadn’t thought he was special. I mean I had every intention of making it the first night of many. But all that went out the window sometime that night. I’m not sure when.”

I bit my tongue. I swallowed hard. I listened to her prattle on about her career. I was going to be objective, damn it! I wasn’t going to taint the interview!

I couldn’t help it.

“You didn’t tell him to stop.”

“Excuse me?” she said.

“That night. He’s a nice guy, he’s got dreamy eyes, whatever. Then you start getting down to it and you decide all that has gone away. That something about having sex has shut him down in a way you don’t like.”

“Something like that,” she said.

“But you didn’t tell him to stop. You didn’t try to go back a few steps and see if you could bring that back.”

“We weren’t really in a position to stop, just then,” she said.

“I know my roommate,” I said, “and I know that whatever you did took hours, and happened more than once.” I watched myself talking. In horror. I took myself by the shoulders and shook myself, hard. I demanded to know what the hell I was doing, defending someone who didn’t need defending and screwing up an interview at the same time. I threatened to slap myself. But I didn’t shut myself up. “I mean, let’s be real, Captain. This is supposed to be historically accurate. You started out the night hoping for a relationship AND orgasms. But once you had a little taste of the latter, you decided they were worth forgoing the former. Rather than stopping to figure out what was wrong with him.”

She pursed her lips. Stared at me for a moment. Got up and left.

Why is it that my every impulse is counterproductive?

Part Twenty Three

2005-03-01T11:17:00.001-05:00

Ordinarily the fall semester ended a few days before Christmas and the spring semester began in late January. That year DJ had his own place and Jen was spending all of her time with her boyfriend and I was bored as hell. So shortly after New Year’s I went back down to Annapolis and begged Ilona to come back early, too. She relented toward the end of the break and we had a few very nice days to ourselves in that old house. Then we had a few so-so days. Then we had a couple of days when we were ready to kill one another, and it was with some relief that we greeted Preacher and Moira, returning to Annapolis a couple of days before classes resumed.

I was sitting in the living room in sweats watching cartoons and eating cereal and Ilona was in the dining room trying to get some reading done and wishing she had some other place to stay when they came in laughing and shaking a few snow flurries off. I hadn’t even noticed it was snowing. Moira was wearing jeans – the first time I ever saw her in pants – and a cowboy hat. Preacher’s coat still had a lift pass on the zipper. Cold air billowed through the door around them and rifled to the back of the house, fluttering papers and stirring Ilona and I out of our cranky stupors.

This is a cozy domestic scene, Moira said, looking at us. Ilona managed a smile. I was about to say the same thing, she said. Where have you two been all month?

Hither and yon, Moira said. Preacher took off his jacket. I didn’t expect to see you guys here, he said.

New Jersey in January, I said, and I shrugged. What more could I add?

Tell me about your trip, Ilona said, thirsty for someone else to talk to.

Moira took off her coat while Preacher took a suitcase upstairs. She told us about Nashville and Memphis and New Orleans and Galveston and Austin and Albuquerque and, finally, Telluride, where he learned to ski for the first time.

I rolled my eyes as I suffered a mental image of Preacher Haywood staggering about for thirty seconds, and then qualifying for the Olympics by the end of the day. Because that’s just the way he was. And I suspected Moira was the same way. If you took away Preacher’s self-deprecating air and replaced it with ball-busting, and made him way better looking, you had Moira.

They talked about the music they’d heard and Moira expressed her disappointment at real live cowboys and Indians both; give me, she said, a nice superficial Hopalong Cassidy movie any day. Preacher made a fire in the fireplace and brewed some tea (I had instant coffee) and I forgot to be annoyed with Ilona, I was so busy being annoyed with them. The worst time to encounter two people in love is not when you are lonely, but when you have just realized how irritating your significant other actually is.

Ilona wasn’t nearly so analytical. She was just grateful to have someone else she could talk to.

Later in the afternoon they left for Moira’s place. Don’t wait up, Preacher said to me as he left, which was supposed to be a reassuring way of telling me that Ilona and I would still have the place to ourselves for the night. Instead it made me want to hit him.

When the semester started up again Ilona and I gratefully parted company. It was too soon, she said to me. We needed a few more months of living apart.

Live and learn, I said.

Preacher and Moira seemed to have found a new equilibrium, too. Preacher wasn’t over there as much. And when he did go, they sometimes would leave the house and engage in meaningful social interaction with the rest of the world. While the entire student body knew they were sleeping together by the second day of classes, the only way the administration found out about it was because different faculty members began to report seeing them together in restaurants and at the movies.

I didn’t know, at the time, about Moira’s sexual tutelage of my housemate. But I now know that it continued that semester, despite the fact that they had finally admitted to something other than a teacher-student relationship. Maybe that means Moira was serious about all the “training your natural gifts” crap she was spreading back at the beginning. But not necessarily. I never underestimate anyone’s capacity for self-delusion. Including my own.

We started up the poker nights again. It wasn’t the same without Ellen, but we still had a good time. Preacher was a slightly cagier poker player, I must say. If learning every possible human sexual position makes you a better poker player… then life is just too fucking unfair for words.

Moira insisted – INSISTED – that Preacher do something without her during Spring Break. She told me, when I interviewed her, that she didn’t want Preacher to completely miss out on the “ordinary debauchery” of a student’s life that year.

“As opposed to the extraordinary debauchery he was experiencing under your mentoring?”

“Precisely,” she said. “I had read a review of Lolita. I remember it distinctly. It said the book was about the Old World debauching the New, until suddenly you realized it was the other way around. And I thought, my god, that’s us.”

“Lolita.”

“Not Lolita per se, but… all of the sudden it hit me that not only was I not in charge of the relationship, but Preacher had so deftly taken control of the situation that he was able to still let me believe I was in charge even when he was the one running things.”

I said nothing. He could do that, I knew.

“So I wanted him to go out and be a normal college kid, so I could have a couple weeks to become a normal college teacher, and we could go back to where we started out. With me in charge.”

“Did it work?”

“Of course not. I missed him terribly. When he came back I told him that I loved him.” She laughed at the memory of it, pushed her hair back, laughed again. “What a sorry, sorry debaucher I was. I mean up until he left I told myself it was just… it was just sex. Oh, sometime during that Christmas holiday together I admitted to myself that I liked him, that there was something there outside of the sexual relationship, but when he left…” She shook her head. “It wasn’t even the whole two weeks. I called your place after a week to see if you or the other one – Mark, was it? – knew where he was or how I could get in touch with him. I kept having these mental images of him cavorting with these bikini-clad co-eds.”

I knew that in her worst nightmare, she still imagined herself better looking than any of these phantom rivals.

“And instead he answered the phone,” she said. “On the first ring. He said he was getting ready to pick up the phone and call me. He was probably lying. But anyhow, he came over, and that was when I told him. Before I told him I forbade him to say it back to me.”

“So what did he say?”

“He said, I was wondering how long it would take you to admit that you feel the same way. Cocky bastard.”

“And that was the end of the sex training?”

“Yes,” she said. “Actually… I sort of left some details out. Details that you will find when you go through those notebooks, so I might as well tell you now. Shortly after I was called on the carpet at the dean’s office – this was before I told him to go away for Spring break – we had gone into another… phase of his training. We got a hotel in Baltimore for a weekend. I had made some discrete inquiries. We went to a certain pub near the hotel and invited a gentleman back with us. Preacher did… as he’d been trained, I suppose. He wasn’t enthusiastic about it, but exploring your homosexual side and dealing with multiple partners were both a part of the program. And once I tried women I had become a firm believer in bisexuality and I suppose I figured Preacher would react the same way.” She looked up, rather wistfully, if someone like Moira is capable of a wistful look. “But he just… he just detached himself. Which was part of what he was supposed to be learning anyhow – transcending desire. I thought he had done it before, but he did it even more that night. But performed admirably. We did all the things I set out to do.”

I was getting my head around Preacher having sex with another man. A three-way with Moira – that I found very easy to believe. But Moira watching while he put on… an exhibition, essentially, with some guy they found in a swingers’ bar?

“Anyhow,” she continued, mistaking my shock for a studied silence, “a couple of weeks later we went back, and to the same bar, and this time I picked out this darling dark-haired girl. I figured this would help him understand better. And the same thing happened. He just… removed himself, even farther than usual. Technically, he was flawless. That girl should have just entered a convent the next day, because the rest of her sexual life was going to be disappointing by comparison.” She laughed. If Preacher had told the story, it would have been a self-effacing laugh. That was one of the principle differences between Moira and Preacher.

“So you stopped?”

“So he’d graduated,” she said. “I mean, we weren’t studying tantra. Not in any meaningful way. I guess that’s important to clarify, what with Preacher’s future occupation as a guru. Real tantra Buddhism takes a lifetime, and the sex part is just a small part. He was no tantric yogi. But he’d learned what I set out to teach him. The technical skills plus the… distance. When I first met him I told him he liked the person better than the act. But those two weekends – he didn’t give a damn about either one, he wasn’t particularly attracted to either one, and I think in both cases he didn’t like seeing me with them. But he did what his training taught him to do. And did it superbly, I must say. It was the act, not the person. That was, in the end, the goal.”

I didn’t tell her what Preacher thought about all that. I didn’t tell his line about the importance of unlearning what she’d taught him. I didn’t even tell her about my one long talk with him about her, shortly after she left.

“And after that?”

“After that – we only had a couple of months after that, and I unabashedly gave him my heart,” she said. “And vice-versa. He told me he would transfer to Oxford, can you believe that? I told him I would look for a job in the States. We were both horrible liars. And the year ended, and I got on the plane. And just like before, after a week I couldn’t stand it and I called the house. Left a message. He never called back. Which… he was right. It was best to just not try to communicate at all; a broken heart heals faster that way. It’s not that he didn’t call me back that bothers me now. It’s that he was, in the end, stronger than me.”

Which brings me to my one and only prolonged conversation with Preacher Haywood on the subject of Moira Callahan. It was right after she left.

The setting was McDermott’s; Preacher had been moping for two days and Mark and I decided to take him to our favorite local watering hole to drown his sorrows. We sat at a table and ordered beer and Mark and I both tried to be sympathetic.

“Let me tell you,” I said, “what worked for me.” My only real experience as the dumpee was when Ellen and I split up, and I recovered pretty quickly, but I had milked the experience for all it was worth at the time. “First, you need at least two weeks in the same sweatpants. Second, you can’t eat anything other than Fruity Pebbles and Pop-Tarts for a month. Third, you have to play the Cure’s Disintegration album at least 250 times.”

“You can just play Fascination Street over and over again,” Mark suggested.

“What flavor Pop-tarts?” Preacher said, and gulped down his beer.

“Brown sugar and cinnamon,” I said.

“Chocolate frosted,” Mark said.

“I thought only women used chocolate after being dumped,” I said.

“Maybe it's a gay thing,” Mark replied, shrugging and downing his beer, too.

“And you should start smoking,” I said, lighting a cigarette. Preacher took it out of my hand and took a big drag. Then he started hacking.

“Can’t miss someone if you’re coughing your lungs out?” he gasped.

“Something like that,” I said, taking it back and puffing away happily.

About eight rounds later the bartender wouldn’t serve us anymore, so we bought a big bottle of Jim Beam and staggered for home. Yes, we sang “Fascination Street” along the way – what of it?

We got home and Preacher found three highball glasses because I had returned a little of the beer to the Annapolis soil on the way home and he wasn’t about to let me drink from the bottle. We sat down at the table and he put The River – both disks – in the CD player and Mark poured the first round.

We sat there in silence for a moment. “To Bruce Springsteen,” Mark said, and we all raised our glasses. “To Bob Dylan,” I added. “To Woodie Guthrie,” Preacher noted.

I refilled the glasses. “Who comes before Woodie Guthrie?” Mark said.

“Jimmie Rodgers,” Preacher and I said simultaneously. Son of a bitch, I thought. Now he’s ruined me, musically.

“To Jimmie Rodgers,” Mark said.

“To Ginger Rogers,” I said.

“To Ginger Baker,” Preacher said. He refilled the glasses.

I don’t remember what came after that. I do remember that later Mark was sitting in the chair with a glazed look in his eyes, his drink sitting untouched before him.

Serves you right, you know, I said to Haywood.

What?

Serves you right, I repeated. It might not have sounded that clear.

How you figure? Preacher said.

The bottle of JB was mostly empty.

You were… that guy.

What guy?

That guy. You know. That… guy.

He refilled our glasses. I doubted that would help me be MORE articulate. I considered my options, shrugged, and picked up the glass.

What guy? Preacher said. In those days he could hold his liquor better than me. At least he could maintain better. Now, of course, the remnants of my liver would make a mockery of his. But even Preacher had reached the point where he couldn’t feel his lips anymore.

The guy with… the wings. Brueghel guy.

Icaraus.

Yeah, him. You were him. Flew too fuckin’ close to the sun, man.

No, Preacher said. Not Icarus. Phaeton.

Mark arced his hand through the air and made a whistling sound that ended with a crash.

Right, Preacher nodded at him.

What’s the difference? I said, a little angry. They both didn’t listen to their fathers. They both crashed and burned.

Technically, Mark said, they burned and crashed.

Preacher laughed and took a big swallow. Icarus was just careless. Phaeton was trying for… arête, he said.

That’s what you were doing? Striving for excellence?

Yep.

I took a swallow and mulled on it. Mark tried to raise his glass.

Reach for the one in the middle, man, I told him. We watched him carefully raise the glass. Arête, he said in toast, and we repeated it and all drank again.

I don’t see it, I said after a pause. Then I raised my glass. Parrhesia, I said. We managed another swallow.

Another long pause. I was supposed to be… getting skills, Preacher said. Agape, he toasted, and we all drank again. The woman knew everything there was to know about sex. I mean we did some… some kinky shit, he said. I mean… you know how long I can go without coming?

Whoa, Mark said, trying to decipher that combination of verbs.

Me neither, Preacher said. Not anymore. As long… as long as it takes. I make the little map, and I find the little buttons, and just… wind me up and press play.

What the fuck are you talking about, I said to him, laughing.

It’s like… he said, and stopped. I learned how to fuck. I learned how to fuck so good that I don’t really actually even want to fuck anymore.

Wore you out? I said. Come on.

No, not that, he said. He looked over at Mark, who by this time was resting his head on the table. I just… there’s no more mystery. No more uncertainty. No more fun. Just… technique. I mean. Don’t get me wrong. It was… some of it was… wow. But the thing is that knowing how to do all those things made it like…

I understood. Mostly because I was as drunk as he was.

And the thing that bothers me the most is that I love her, man, he said to me. That absolutely wasn’t supposed to happen. And she… I mean, sex was supposed to be this, this thing, over here – and he gestured with his hand – this separate thing, like playing the violin or making eggplant parmesan, and… And I got that. I really got that. I didn’t fall in love with her because of all the sex. I fell in love with her despite the sex. I fell in love with her for the times when we were clothed and upright and… but you can’t love a woman that… that’s so… what’s the word? For her?

Hot, I said.

Right. Hot. You can’t love a woman that hot and not want to have sex with her. But when we had sex it was… it pushed us apart. It was… It was fucked up. That’s what it was. Except at the end when we both could admit what we felt. What had happened. Then we had, we only had, we only had two goddamn months to try to fix it. Two months to learn a whole new way to do it, a way where you loved the person more than the act. Two months to enjoy it… in our… hearts.

I looked at him closely. If he started to weep, I would have hit him in the face with the bottle. But he didn’t. Just sat there staring at his now-empty glass.

We finally put down those stupid sex journals and put aside everything else and just… just tried to touch each other. And I finally… she finally closed her eyes. We both did. We both finally just let go and looked for something else, something… that wasn’t just nerve endings. And… it was much harder, and we had to stop because she had to go back to Ireland, even though she could have stayed another two weeks, she left right on schedule like she said she would before we had enough time to make it right.

Let me get this straight, I said, splitting the last two fingers from the bottle with him. You’re pissed off because all you had was an entire school year of mind-blowing sex with the hottest woman you’ve ever seen? Is that really what’s bothering you?

He finished his drink. That’s what’s bothering me, he said. She could have ruined either sex or love, but instead I think she’s ruined both for me.

Now, finally, you’re drunk enough to sound just like everybody else who’s ever been dumped, I said. I’m going to go throw up and then we can put the Cure back on.

When I woke up in the bathroom the house was quiet. I stumbled into my room and slept until noon and then the three of us sat very, very quietly in the living room, trying to figure out which variation of the fetal position was most effective. Late in the afternoon Haywood made an emergency phone call and a townie he knew named Greg showed up at our door with a bag full of Burger King hamburgers. The grease treatment was timed just right, and we slowly rejoined the living, and Preacher never mentioned her to me again.

Part Twenty Two

2005-02-24T13:59:00.001-05:00

This part I can tell in the first person. Why should Preacher have all the fun?

Late in the semester I said that Kafka was the Lenny Bruce of his era, or vice-versa, and I preferred to live in the former world. And Ilona Volkov laughed, and knew exactly what I meant, and I was smitten.

Ilona was from Chicago. Her parents were Russian émigrés. She was yet another in the line of depressingly gifted people I met at St. John’s. Her thing was languages. To this day she is the only person I knew who actually became fluent in a foreign tongue based upon the instruction she received in an American public school – when she got to St. John’s she spoke English, Russian, German, and Hebrew. At St. John’s she learned ancient Greek and French with the rest of us, plus Latin. She picked up Italian and Arabic later. I understand she works as an interpreter at the UN.

My primary talents involved sarcastic comments and lighting one cigarette off the end of another. In retrospect, I should have anticipated a future as an unemployed alcoholic.

(In keeping with my usual habits, I didn’t go see Ilona for this. I can’t go see ex-girlfriends. When I go to see someone we sit down in a restaurant and they give me a business card and we chat. How can I take your business card when I can still remember the smell of your hair? I interviewed her by e-mail. She now works as a translator at the UN. No surprise there.)

Before Ilona and I started dating I believe I described her as a bosomy sausage, and Preacher had corrected me with the more charitable “zaftig.” Rubenesque would have been an overstatement. She had a waist. “Voluptuous” is what I’ll use.

She had crystalline blue eyes and dark hair that she usually wore in a ponytail and she had no aversion to wearing tight clothes. Our first date was to a Cecylia Barczyk concert (most assuredly Ilona’s idea) and we sat on a bench outside her dorm and we made each other laugh and she took my hand and said “OK, you can cop a feel.”

I did.

Our second date was at party off of Union Street and we sucked face and she made sure I kept my hands outside her clothing. Because she was the sort of girl you could say anything to, I told her I’d never been so torqued up in my life.

It’s the tits, isn’t it? she said, looking up at me with those steel blue eyes and smiling with the serene confidence of a hot woman holding a four aces.

That’s just part of it, I said.

Take me to the movies next week and maybe you can touch ‘em, she replied, and winked. She bit her lower lip a bit to keep the smile from eating her face.

What if I buy dinner?

“You can still feel me up, but I won’t eat as much of your popcorn while you do it,” she said.

She quite deftly kept me out of her pants. For awhile. It got to the point where I would suffer a debilitating priapism if she so much as touched my arm. I don’t know that I’ve ever been as hot for anyone in my life as I was for Ilona Volkov.

Every year the school sponsored a three-day weekend in New York, right before the end of the semester. It was a hundred bucks and you got a bus ride to and from Manhattan, and two nights sharing a passable hotel room with another Johnnie. Ilona and I signed up that year. Also her idea. I figured it had to be more fun than the cello concert. She insisted on paying my way. We actually quarreled over it, until at last she said “look, I’m planning on putting out while we’re there, and if I pay, it won’t make me a whore.”

I promptly withdrew my objections. Instead I spent the next week worrying that there would be some freak blizzard or bubonic plague epidemic or nuclear catastrophe that would keep us from going on the trip.

OK, now we get to the part about Preacher. The day after we signed up for the trip I came home from class and Preacher was in the kitchen making Kurbispastete. The room smelled like fresh-cooked pork chops.

By this point in the semester, it was rare to see him doing anything like that. Classes, a little reading, and then he’d disappear until late at night. He was one of those people who only needed about four hours’ sleep (I compensated for him by needing twelve) and so he’d be up running or rowing or doing whatever other sweaty pastime he’d set for himself long before I was out of bed.

What are you doing? I asked him. I mean it looks like pumpkin vivisection.

At the moment, I’m trying to make a pumpkin pie with ground pork. But if you had been here a minute ago you would have heard me pissing off your mother.

My mother called? And, gross.

Yeah. I told her you were off nailing your hot Jewish girlfriend.

That would piss her off. Seriously, pumpkin and pork?

No, she seemed relieved you weren’t gay. What pissed her off was when I told her I wasn’t coming home with you for Christmas.

I watched him pour bits of pumpkin into a pot of water and add vinegar.

That’s a joke too, right? I said after a pause.

The Kurbispastete, or telling your mother you weren’t gay?

Not coming home for Christmas.

No.

But the pie is, right?

No. But I was kidding about the other thing. In fact I assured your mother that you were still gay.

I sighed. You have come back with me, I said. Otherwise I have to talk to my asshole brother.

DJ had gotten a job selling mobile phones. He attacked it like it was a six-pack of Genesee Cream Ale. I guessed – correctly, I might add – that the only thing I was going to hear about from DJ were the wonders of the mobile phone industry.

Can’t, he said. He was rolling out dough.

I’ve yet to actually copulate with Ilona Volkov, I said to him. I’m telling you this because it is the only thing you don’t know about me.

He gave me a puzzled look.

So now you’re going to tell me what the fuck’s been wrong with you all semester, I said.

He sighed. There’s nothing wrong with me.

Bullshit. You’ve been disappearing for longer and longer periods. This is the first afternoon I’ve seen you in… weeks. Which wouldn’t be so bad except that you’re becoming more and more of a pill when you are around. What the hell is going on? You don’t… you, of all people, you, Mr. Popularity, you have no social life at all. When I have a better social life than you, something has gone terribly awry.

There will be a time, he said, a long time in the future, when I can tell you. And when I tell you you’ll understand why I can’t tell you now.

I lit a cigarette and told him the three leading theories about his disappearances

First, you’ve taken some horribly demeaning job to make ends meet, and are ashamed to tell anyone.

He furrowed his eyebrows deeply. What kind of job could that be? he asked. And don’t get ashes in my pie.

Yeah, I don’t like that theory either, I told him. You could be working as a crack whore and you would be telling us about the ennobling qualities of gainful employment. The second theory is that you’re having an affair with a married townie.

Her husband must work some insane hours, he pointed out.

Right, that’s just one of the holes in that theory – you’re gone days and nights. Plus, while I wouldn’t put it past you to sleep with a married woman, I certainly can’t see you getting serious about one.

But clearly those two theories cover the entire universe of possibilities, he said, smiling as he lined the dish with his pie dough. So which is it?

No, there’s my personal favorite: you’ve been recruited by the CIA, I told him.

That is a good one, he admitted, nodding.

Sure, I said. You’re doing your training now. Your cover stays intact as a mild-mannered if slightly priapic college student. When you graduate you become an exchange student somewhere behind the Iron Curtain, and nobody suspects a thing.

Behind the Iron Curtain? he laughed. You’re the one dating a Russian.

The beauty of that theory, I continued, ignoring him, is that it automatically dispenses with any explanation you might come up with. You could have photographs and affidavits showing that you were spending all this time building housing for the homeless of Eastport, and we could dismiss it as nothing more than an Agency attempt at keeping your identity hidden.

And the trip to France last summer, just a training mission. It all seems so obvious now, he said.

Of course. You told me yourself you didn’t go to any of the classes in Paris.

And that would explain the miniature camera in my toothbrush, he continued, nodding sagely.

And the truth serum you gave Mark to uncover who drank all your Seven-Up.

He had a date over, Preacher said. Otherwise I would have given him my special CIA Touch Of Death. He sprinkled bread crumbs into the pan.

I was cool with Mark having sex with other men. In our house. While I was there. So long as I didn’t think about it too much.

Seriously, I said. What’s the story.

I can’t say, he told me, looking as if he wished otherwise.

Come to New York with us, I said out of the blue.

Right now?

The school’s sponsoring another one of those three-day excursions to New York. Bus ride, couple nights in a cheap hotel, do all the tourist crap with the millions of other people who show up during the Christmas season… how about it?

He mulled.

C’mon, I said. You told me once that you’d never been to New York City. Man of the world, been everywhere, done everything, never been to New York. Ilona and I are going. You need to buy my mom something nice to soothe her hurt feelings. You need to buy me about three keys of heroin to survive four weeks with my brother. Let’s go to New York. Whatever the hell you’re doing, you deserve a weekend off. The CIA can give you a three-day pass. Tell you what, you can bug the East German consulate while you’re there.

How can I turn down an opportunity like that? he concluded.

He signed up.

And god damn it, I hate to admit it, but Kurbispastete isn’t bad.

Morning of the trip he dragged me, blinking and stumbling, to the gathering point and we all got on the bus. There were maybe thirty of us, including three non-students: the director of admissions and her husband, and our scary preceptorial tutor, Moira Callahan.

(Preacher had given his oral performance a few days earlier. A passage from Finn McCool. He was, as always, a hell of a storyteller. But Callahan was, in my opinion, even harder on him than on the rest of us. At the time I attributed it to his choice of an Irish story.)

We were surprised by her presence. But she said she wasn’t about to spend a year in America without seeing New York. Fair enough. And on the way up she was actually pretty nice. Talked with us and not at us. Laughed a lot. I remember that I was able to realize how beautiful she was, something that was usually obscured by how intimidating she was.

But Dr. Callahan’s presence created an obstacle to my primary objective for the weekend, which was a prolonged visit between Ilona’s wondrous thighs. Originally a friend of Ilona’s had signed up as her roommate for the trip. We figured we could persuade her to go do… something. At the last minute she canceled, which seemed even better; Ilona would have a room to herself.

But then Moira took the open spot, and now we were back to having to evict a roommate. Namely, Preacher, who would certainly go along with it (he owed me big time in that regard, after our freshman year), but my hopes had been raised about the possibility of a room to ourselves and…

And so I had a good rant during the bus ride about the patent unfairness of it all. Because there were two gay guys who could room together, but straight couples couldn’t.

Moira interrupted my rant halfway up the Jersey Turnpike. You knew this was the policy when you signed up, right?

Right.

You and your lady-love are both over the age of consent, right?

Yeah.

There was nothing stopping you from buying your own train tickets to New York and getting your own room, right?

Except that it costs three times as much, I said.

So really your problem isn’t with the rules. You agreed to them up front, and they’re the price of the subsidized trip. Your problem is just that you can’t afford to do this on your own.

Well…

Your problem is that there’s no school subsidy for shagging your girlfriend in New York, right? I mean that’s what you’re looking for.

Preacher – who had headphones on and who was not, I thought, listening to any of this, sort of came to my rescue.

You’re ruining a good rant with logic, he told her. I’ve learned to just let him go until he’s spent.

My mistake, she laughed.

Well, I’ll let it slide this time, I said. I think it was the first time I’d addressed her without stammering.

I didn’t know then what I know now. But even in retrospect I saw absolutely no indication of anything between her and Preacher.

So we get to New York and proceeded to have a good time. If you are ever in a strange city, I highly recommend going with Preacher Haywood. People talked to Preacher Haywood. He found out about things, after-hours clubs, out-of-the-way stores, things like that. He took a bunch of us to this jazz club and we saw some old man playing a guitar – Tiny Something – and Preacher went back and talked to him after the set and he sat down with us and told a story about someone named Charlie Christian.

It was probably impressive if you knew anything about jazz. I didn’t.

Preacher said to Moira, that’s storytelling. That’s oral history. She didn’t argue with him.

When we got back to the hotel Dr. Callahan said that she couldn’t stand to see two horny kids kept apart by fate, so she was going to book another room and I could spend the night with Ilona. She and Preacher and a girl named Dana and a guy named Alex weren’t as exhausted as the rest of us and went off to some after-hours dance club and Ilona and I went up to the room and…

Now here I find myself in a quandary.

Modesty forbids waxing rhapsodic about the incredible night. Yet I had to go on and on about Preacher Haywood’s unparalleled heights of sexual ecstasy under his Page-3-model-turned-sensei, Moira Callahan. Do I succumb to temptation?

I had feared, truth be told, that after a month or two of anticipation there was no way the real thing could be anything but a disappointment. My fears were unfounded. But still, I should be discrete…

If I wasn’t discrete I would mention, for example, that Ilona gave me the first real blowjob of my life. Is that indiscrete? To date I have not encountered any other woman who could use her teeth so skillfully in that enterprise. There’s something about the fear of imminent amputation combined with intense stimulation… let’s just say it didn’t take very long. (In retrospect, that was probably why she started that way. It meant we were able to proceed at a much more measured pace subsequently.)

But I’m too discrete to write about that.

If I wasn’t such a liberated post-feminist modern man I would be tempted to use all sorts of vegetable imagery, too. Lots of different kinds of melons come to mind. But we know that’s demeaning to women. But let me just say that there’s something about a woman with an actual bottom, an actual honest-to-god soft bottom… I am not one to fetishize any particular body parts, I am not a butt man or a boob man or a leg man, per se, but in the case of Ilona it is difficult not to fetishize ALL of her body parts. She was... succulent.

OK, to balance the whole (admittedly indiscrete) thing about her teeth, let me talk about the sensation of having those two round knees plunk down on either side of my head. About her fingers in my hair, pulling hard enough to make my eyes water. When she came she couldn’t help but squeeze with those big thick thighs and I didn’t know if I was going to die from skull fractures or asphyxiation or delight.

And all this was during the warm-up phases.

Fortunately, I’m not the type to mention the fact that we went at it six times that night. But I will say that by the time I fell asleep I had sworn to myself I would never again so much as glance at a skinny woman. I wanted hips, not ribs.

(Sarah, my ex, was built like a pixie. I am trying to figure out when and where I deviated from that well-intentioned Ilona-inspired oath.)

In the morning I woke up before Ilona – sore – and tiptoed across the hall to my room for a change of underwear. When I slipped in the door I saw two lumps under the sheets and wondered if it was someone we came with or someone he’d met in New York. Then Moira raised herself up on one elbow and blinked at me from under a tousled mass of red hair.

I crouched there next to my suitcase like a deer in the headlights, underpants in my hand and chin on the floor.

You can breathe, if you want, she said, using one pale smooth flawless arm to push the hair back. Preacher sat up next to her.

Welcome to the CIA, he said.

Moira took a shower. He told me… well, not everything, but enough. He left out the tutorial aspects of their relationship. I kept repeating something while he spoke. I think it was “holy shit,” but it might have been something different. But equally profound.

That’s why I couldn’t tell you, he said. But she surprised me herself with the trip. Didn’t say a word, just showed up on the bus yesterday morning. And she’s why I’m not coming home with you for Christmas. I promised her cowboys. We’re driving to Texas, maybe other places.

But you have to keep this under your hat, he concluded.

That reminded me of Ilona, still (I hoped) sleeping across the hall.

Of course, I said.

Moira came out wearing only a towel. I fled.

When I got back to the room the sound of the door closing woke Ilona, and she told me I was going to come scrub her back, and pulled the sheets down to reveal that magnificent front, and I managed a half-hearted leer even as I sat on the edge of the bed, still dumbfounded.

And she had a really sneaky way of getting it out of me.

She touched my arm and said, “What?”

And I told her: I went across the hall and found Moira and Preacher together.

She did a double-take. Must’ve been some party they found last night, she said, eyes wide.

Apparently they’ve been having an affair all year, I added, completing my betrayal of the secrets. What the hell, I’d kept it to myself for almost 45 seconds.

Ilona wasn’t as shocked as I was. She was shocked, don’t get me wrong; she gasped, she gaped, she laughed. But she said she thought she’d seen something between them last night.

She was imagining things. There hadn’t been anything to give it away.

I swore Ilona to secrecy, too. I didn’t tell anybody else, myself. Except Mark. I mean he was sharing a house with us. Ilona later admitted she told her roommate, who also happened to be in Callahan’s class. By the time we returned for the Spring semester, everyone knew.

When I interview Moira, years later, she said that sometime in February the Dean had called her in to discuss the matter. "All he really wanted," she said, "was for me to deny it, and be a little discrete. But I decided, the hell with that. We'd been discrete half the year. I wanted to be able to eat in restaurants. So instead I mentioned the names of a few of my male colleagues whom I knew had been with students. Indicated that having a double-standard for the female faculty would not look good. And reminded him that I would be gone at the end of the semester anyhow. We reached an understanding, then."