Boyfriend from Hell (2 page)

Furious, she made several calls and couldn’t reach Michael; she left messages. She considered going to the restaurant and confronting him and decided against it for her personal dignity. She was going to give him the following day to call back, and
then
she would walk in on him at the restaurant.

He called the following morning at ten thirty.

“Hey, you were trying to reach me.”

“Hey, I saw
Time Out,
Michael.”

“The paparazzi. They escalate things.”

“No, they take pictures.”

“Main thing is, they gave me a green light on the show.”

“Congratulations. And how long have you known this? Have you already celebrated with Rosetta what’s-her-name?”

“Ronnie, I’ve been under a lot of pressure.”

“Yes?”

“At odds and ends.”

“And is this Rosetta an odd or an end? Are you sleeping with her, Michael?”

“That’s not the issue.”

“How can that not be the issue?”

“The issue is I need to be open to new things these days.”

“New things?”

“Like the show. And new people. And new business opportunities. And I care for you too much to just string you along while I go through all this.”

“You mean your moment?”

“For however long it lasts. I think an exclusive relationship feels a little too exclusive right now.”

“So what are you saying, you want to sleep with me
and
sleep with her, or just sleep with her? And how exclusive can it be if we haven’t been together in weeks?”

“Ronnie, this is hard to say. I think it would be better all around if we were just friends.”

“You don’t end a relationship, eighteen months, Michael, with a phone call. There are things to talk about, feelings to be honored. I’m coming over.”

“No.”

“Is she
there?”
He didn’t respond. “She is, isn’t she? And she’s using soap
I
bought.”

“That’s not so funny.”

“I mean it not so funny. A cabaret singer. I get it now. You keep the same hours.”

“You’re a tremendous person, Ronnie.”

“I thought you were, too, but you just got less tremendous. All the best with the restaurant and the new show and the new girlfriend, or girlfriends, and the new business opportunities. Did I leave anything out?”

“Ronnie, this isn’t going the way I wanted it to.”

“It could get worse. I could take out one of those personals in
The Nation
and tell all your fellow readers that you and your cuisine only
seem
proletarian. Good-bye, Michael.”

He sent flowers and called, not looking to get together again with her, rather to offer a rewrite on the break-up, which he felt he handled badly. He even clumsily offered for her to eat in his restaurant anytime, to bring a guest if she wanted.

“I think he may have blundered into giving me a lifetime comp,” she said to Nancy over breakfast on the run.

“You should do it. Just keep showing up.”

“The hell with him. It’s a weird culture, to parlay meat loaf into celebrity.”

Ronnie and Nancy discussed online dating as a means of meeting someone new and she went so far as making an exploratory move, registering with a Web site. It seemed daunting to her, going through the e-mail gamesmanship, marketing herself electronically. The clincher was an article in
The New York Times Magazine,
which suggested relationships that came by way of the Internet often had a way of rapidly ending, as if someone hit a delete button. She experienced the departure of Michael as akin to a “delete text.” She wasn’t eager to repeat the experience. Nancy offered the squash champion via her boyfriend as a way of Ronnie getting past Michael. Ronnie was untroubled that it didn’t work out with the guy. She found work was turning out to be the best antidote. She worked hard on the article for
Vanity Fair,
it was accepted and scheduled for the March 2005 issue.

Ronnie Delaney was virtually the writer equivalent of the new generation of young actresses she interviewed for the
Vanity Fair
piece. In college she wrote for
The Brown Daily Herald,
largely features about campus life. She intended, upon graduation, to get a job with a newspaper, and then circumstances fortunate and unfortunate conspired to direct her toward becoming a freelancer in New York.

In her senior year she queried
The New York Times Magazine
about doing a piece on political correctness within the Ivy League and was given the assignment. Researching and writing carried her through the time of her graduation into the summer and she stayed in her apartment near school.

The writing style she developed was breezy, colloquial, and, with guidance from a good writing course in college, grounded in research. Her editor at
The Times Magazine
suggested that none of the major metropolitan newspapers in America would be likely to hire her as a feature writer, a level at which she was already functioning. She had gone past conventional entry-level jobs.
The Times Magazine
was publishing her piece and they wanted to use her again. She never even got her résumés into the mail. The piece ran and she was given another assignment. Then her father died. He suffered a heart attack while walking through the sylvan grounds of the Bronx Botanical Gardens. That he died there, in a place of calm, on a mild summer day, doing nothing more than strolling, she considered a statement by her father, as if he had willed himself to die. With the small inheritance from her father’s insurance policy she could help support herself and try to make a go of it as a freelance writer, the level to which she had already evolved, rather than step back into an apprentice job.

She moved in with Nancy, a literature major who had come to New York from Wilton, Connecticut. Ronnie worked on a variety of pieces, dated around, usually men introduced by friends of friends from school, or people she met at parties. She had zero tolerance for bars and clubs and wrote a piece for
The Village Voice
on “The Latest Terrible Opening Lines at Bars and Clubs.” She and Nancy bought shares in a group house in Fire Island, which resulted in Nancy meeting her boyfriend and Ronnie meeting no one. She followed this with a piece in
The Village Voice
on “The Latest Terrible Opening Lines at the Beach.” Over the next two years she wrote articles for various publications and attracted attention among editors as a lively new writer.

While researching the
Vanity Fair
piece she asked each of the actresses to tell her, if they cared to, about “the wiggiest guy they ever dated.” One of the actresses described a weekend relationship with an otherwise “semi-ordinary guy,” a musician who revealed “an unbelievably strange side.” He turned out to be a member of a satanic cult which held Black Masses on 129th Street.

Ronnie looked into the cult, the Dark Angel Church, unashamedly featured on the Internet and highlighting its leader, Randall Cummings, at Darkangelchurch.org. She called her editor at
New York
magazine and pitched an article on the basis that the city was amazingly fragmented with special interest and demographic groups, but this was
beyond
beyond.

She was assigned the article and placed a call to Randall Cummings. He was smooth spoken and articulate, invited her to a mass, and was perfectly willing to be interviewed. He loved the idea of an article in
New York
magazine, as befitted the head of a satanic cult so modern that it had its own Web site.

The Dark Angel Church was located in Harlem in a narrow one-story brick building on 129th Street near the overhang of the West Side Highway, the exterior painted black with a small black plaque near the front door identifying the church. Harlem was known for its many churches, so it made sense to her that an anti-church group would not draw heavily from the minorities who lived in the area. Of the sixty or so people who entered the building while Ronnie observed, most were Caucasian. The worshippers wore unfashionable clothing, several men in work shoes, giving her the impression of a predominantly working-class crowd.

She waited for the stragglers to enter and approached the door. She was confronted by a bone-thin man of five feet six in a black suit, black tie, black shirt, and black shoes. The blackness of his appearance was broken by the man’s complexion, nearly ghostly white. Ronnie detected makeup.

“What do you want?”

“I’m Veronica Delaney. I’m here at the invitation of Mr. Cummings.”

“Last row. No tape recording. No pictures.”

“I’m going to take notes. That’s what I’m here for.”

“Do it quietly.” And he stepped aside allowing her to pass.

The interior of the church was painted black, the space illuminated by candelabras with glowing black candles mounted along the side walls. The worshippers were sitting in pews. Randall Cummings, their leader, stepped to an altar, an imposing six feet two, wearing a hooded black robe, and she amused herself by wondering if he might be wearing black underwear with little Calvin Klein logos. He peered at the congregants before speaking. His face was elegant from what she could see of it, with a long, thin nose. The voice, as on the phone, was soft, resonant, Middle Atlantic announcer style. No, better than that, she decided, good enough for a voice-over on a PBS nature special on seabirds. She was having difficulty taking this seriously, it was so Halloween to her.

“My fellow worshippers, it was a good week for the forces of evil. But then it always is. And yet, does that translate into your everyday lives? In hard cash? In business opportunities? In a level playing field for people such as yourselves who are not the entitled heads of corporations, the CEOs who get rich on the backs of those who do the work, the Wall Street boys in their private jets and their weekend houses and their fancy boats and their fancy cars, and their lawyers in
their
weekend houses and fancy cars with their mistresses and lovers, in a system where the rich get richer and the hardworking work harder?”

In college she had taken a course on modern political movements and as she listened she thought it could have been an updated Socialist Party speech by Eugene V. Debs from 1920.

“But it doesn’t have to be thus,” as he began to depart from Debs. “You can channel a force greater than all the forces on earth—and do unto others before they do unto you. You can level that playing field. You can be allied with the power of darkness, which exists, as you know. As you all know.”

The ghostly doorman wheeled out a cart with a television set attached to a DVD player, flipping it on with a remote. A fast-cutting series of images flashed on the screen, brutal images: war scenes, concentration camp scenes, American GIs dead in the streets of Iraq, dead or malnourished African children, crime scenes, an unremitting montage of civilization’s inhumanities, the worst of Mankind, torture scenes, lynchings, floggings; and on the bottom of the screen, flashing repetitively, a crude attempt at subliminal messaging, the words: “Satan lives … Satan lives … Satan lives.” She made a note for herself on the use of the footage for proselytizing—“unconscionable.”

“Is there any question in your minds,” Cummings said, as the five-minute film came to an end, “that evil—pure, constant evil—exists on this earth? It didn’t just get here. It didn’t just show up one night. It is the handiwork of the Prince of Darkness, whose power we are here to harness. And you will.”

Cummings then encouraged participation, for people to stand and bear witness to the injustices done to them that week, a litany of slights at checkout counters, work settings, parking spaces, doctors’ offices. The injustices, she noted, could easily have been from a Larry David routine on
Curb Your Enthusiasm.
But these people were in earnest. In each case Cummings offered words of encouragement of a perverse nature, that the aggrieved parties should lie, cheat, steal—summon the powers of evil to even the scores against them—and then he added that they should be sexually adventurous, too, illicit, if need be, to get their due in the world. Ronnie thought that was a tidy bonus, an invitation to sex folded into a satanic message.

She sensed that he walked an interesting legal tightrope, never overtly encouraging violence, keeping the fires banked on his particular modified view of evil, perhaps with an eye toward avoiding jail if any of his people were arrested for their actions.

Most of the testimonies from cult members were trivial, although some people expressed genuine pain over the illnesses and the deaths of loved ones. For these he offered a consistent form of guidance—take action. One congregant lost her husband in a farm accident in upstate New York.

“Your husband, what was his name?”

“Tom.”

“Your Tom’s unnecessary death proves the very existence of Satan. This week do something evil. Steal something. Take something that does not belong to you or something you have not paid for. There is nothing you can do about your husband’s death. What you can do is learn from it and empower yourself—through Satan. Be powerful through evil. Channel the evil that took him. What will you channel?”

“Evil.”

“And whose power is with you?”

“Satan.”

“Amen,” he said. “Whose power is with her?” he asked the congregation.

“Satan,” was the answer in unison.

“Who?”

“Satan,” they said, louder.

“Who will you win with?”

“Satan.”

“Win with Satan.”

He shook his head in the affirmative and she had an image of them pouring out of the church as if they had all been in a football locker room and were collectively going to rob a liquor store.

At the conclusion of the dozen testimonials, which lasted an hour, Cummings brought the service to an end by instructing them to join hands as he led them in chanting, “Satan is power, Satan is power, Satan is power.”

She left the building quickly to get ahead of the cult members leaving. Her intention was to stand outside the doorway and pick up any random conversation. Everyone departing was concerned with a scene unfolding across the street. A police barricade was set up with a squad car parked nearby and two police officers on duty. Behind the barricade three men and two women were shouting, “Go to hell, go to hell!” They looked more rabid and unstable in their anger than the people leaving the satanic mass. A van bearing a
NEW YORK NEWS
logo was parked curbside, a camera crew shooting the proceedings.