A Different Kind of Truth
Steven Michael Maddis
Copyright Steven Michael Maddis: 2012
Published by Smashwords
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You probably saw the show.
Chances are you were flipping the channels trying to find the Roadrunner or the N.F.L. pre-game shows and you stopped for a moment to watch him. You probably listened for ten seconds or a minute and dismissed him as another quacky evangelist trying to steal your dime. You might have given him five minutes or ten, before your sweetheart called you for brunch or your kid needed a ride to baseball practice, and in that five or ten minutes you might have heard something interesting. You might have listened until he brought somebody onto the stage, and that’s when you realized what you were watching. You probably turned the channel or went into the kitchen for your honey-sausages when you knew he was just ‘that guy’ everybody was talking about at work.
Maybe that was all he was, to everybody except his adoring public. Another topic at lunch time when nothing fresh was happening in pro sports or politics. He just went around in circles, playing the odds, knowing it was going to stop sometime. Isn’t that what we all do? Just in living? Make the most of it. Pull whatever you can from the sky till it sets itself on fire and you’re left standing in a pile of ashes with nothing to your name but a bunch of burnt-up memories. Just going around in circles. Maybe that’s all he was doing.
Maybe he was just another con. Maybe it’s all he ever was, but I don’t think so. Caden Crown was so much more. Always had been, and always for a reason. Always more.
In the year 2000, we tried to see just how much more he could be.
It was twenty minutes before showtime that day. The 1st of October. We left the City of Lights behind us as we did every Sunday. On both sides the desert bordered us, stretching away to its two feuding horizons. A few miles ahead was the Miracle Man’s palace of magic. As usual, Caden was lit on cocaine. Ironically, he said it made him calmer and stronger, each a benefit since it was almost time for him to save the world again.
He was smoking his “special” home-rolled cigarette as he usually did, holding it between his thumb and his yellowed index finger and taking each long drag with his eyes closed. The smoke that rose through the cracked-open tinted moonroof wasn’t that of a Camel or a Marlboro. Twice on Sunday, he’d giggle after exhaling. He smiled over at me- his agent, manager, and best friend- all packed into the form of one man. Caden, bastard that he is, offered me a puff from the joint.
Somehow, he had managed to sleep for a few hours the night before, then spent the early morning shaking off the evils of the evening. Headache and nausea, thanks to another bash high above the city. His home had played sanctuary to ten or seventy of Las Vegas’ elite until around four or five a.m., and several were still there when he left to pick me up. His guests had lost track of the hours, waking up whenever and wherever, on Caden’s furniture or his floor, wondering just what in the hell had happened. He told me he’d taken a quick look around his condo before he left for the studio. Said it looked like an Oklahoma summer tornado had hibernated till fall and skipped over a few states. There were fragments of his priceless sculptures spread across his carpet like mulch. The end tables on both ends of his white leather sectional were upside down in mounds of broken glass and burnt-up cigarettes. His dining area was virtually gone. His table, which I had just helped him drag in there in the middle of August, was separated into two equal pieces, as cleanly as though it had seen a bad blind date with a bandsaw. Two of the table’s hooked legs were hanging from the motionless blades of the ceiling fan above. The matching pine chairs were piled off in one corner, around a mangled hibiscus that before the party was as alive and well as I am today. People lie around corner to corner, in pools of liquor and vomit. On the skyhigh stone terrace, a prominent local businessman was sprawled face down, pantless, with one leg dangling to the knee through the wrought iron railing. There was a wicked poster-sized bloodstain set into the crème carpet, and Caden said he’d stared at that for a long time. Whoever had handed out the beating could have at least had the decency to carry his prey the six steps to the tiles in the kitchen.
One of the Firelight Casino’s premiere hookers was leaning over the only untouched fixture on the main floor of his condo. The six foot mirror-topped coffee table was spotless, but for the remaining lines of cocaine that had been separated from the eroded mountain in the middle. The blonde hadn’t gone to sleep. Her last clients- a pair of entrepreneurs from the bustling burg of Fargo, North Dakota, had kept her busy on the sofa until only moments before Caden emerged from his upstairs sanctuary. He nodded at her as she heaved a line of Peruvian powder through the straw and lifted her head dazedly from the table. She winked at Caden, who winked back. She offered him a before-work treat upstairs. He asked her if she’d showered, but she hadn’t. He declined, and snorted two lines. He surveyed his shattered domain while his chauffeur, Martina, brought the car around. He tried to soothe himself, remembering the times he’d seen it worse. And he would see it worse than this in the future- the law of averages lovingly nudged him with that comfy prediction.
That was all only hours before he finally agreed to go see the man in Vietnam. The man who would spin our lives around.
They’d picked me up at seven-fifteen and it was now seven-thirty. Caden would be in front of the cameras in one half hour, and already his eyes were glazed and he had his tell-tale shit-eatin’ grin on his face. As his closest friend, confidant and bodyguard extraordinaire, I just sat across from him in the limo, shaking my head with my loyal acceptance. Caden had started doing drugs heavily as soon as we stepped into the money. When we went on national television and he began to walk through millions, it only picked up. Yet through it all his glassy gaze was never called into question. He was capable of miracles. Miracles. Who would have the power to question him?
I wanted to hit him with the question about the man from Vietnam before the show. Afterwards, he’d blow the entire afternoon watching football and laying bets on the late N.F.L. games when he crashed on the early set. The bets would be placed under my name so as not to tarnish his. No problem.
Miles ahead, I knew his public had gathered and settled in.
Through the spectral glass dome of the made-for-tv cathedral, the crowd of believers would be rested lethargically in their slighty tinted impression of paradise, waiting for the show to begin. Most would have locked their eyes on the stage where their favored Miracle Man would ply his heavenly trade, but some would be staring off to the few naked clouds through the skylights.
I’d checked in on our newsgroup every once in a while, and got to know just how fanatical our fanatics were. I mean, there was nothing but sand and sky around the studio, but people had testified to friends and fellow hometown fans that when they focused- truly concentrated while staring through the dome- mountains could be seen. They saw rivers of pure crystal water running through, freshening the imaginary countryside for miles to come. Many had seen lost children, aloof in the skyward wasteland, heading home. One guy from New Mexico boasted he’d been on the set nineteen times. Said he always saw something different when he looked through the dome. His narcotics must have been stronger than Caden’s ever were. A, he couldn’t have been on the show that many times because the waiting list for tickets was backed up as soon as we went on the air. And B, fuck, he was from New Mexico. Clearly, not all his dogs were barking
Some people had imagined seeing people gathered on the roof, staring in peek-a-boo through the massive concaved skylight. These visions, though, were real. For several weeks when the show first started, overflowing fanatics mounted the building and caught the spirit from outside. I remember security helping all these fools off the roof. They got up easily, I guess never questioning how in the hell they were going to get down. Caden and the producers decided that it wasn’t fair to those that had paid to ‘bear witness’ that the rooftop onlookers should be permitted to see the gig for free. Not to mention that our bottom line, the ever-important adjudicator of all, was being dipped out. The gatherers on the roof were indicative of the need for more seating, so further renovations were immediately underway. The capacity of the studio was increased again by thirty percent, and each new padded seat paid for itself and its installation within three Sundays. It was all about profit. Sensational, nation-wide exposure and chided ignorance of our purpose. For Caden and me, it was about money, and about separating the nation’s believers from theirs.
When I got the insurance settlement in 1995, Caden and I kicked some capital into the operation in September. The cost of admission was staked first at a bargain basement price of thirty-five dollars. However, sellouts were frequent, so we edged the price to fifty and never heard a complaint. Popularity had been purchased through trade magazines and late-night infotainment, and we reached capacity weekly. When the network approached me with the unconditional offer of a one-time broadcast late in 1998, Caden gave me the nod without question as it had been his plan since we purchased the land. When the cameras first rolled and the pictures were smeared across the nation, the Miracle Man’s name became synonymous with healing. We signed the contract on the strength of that single pilot episode. The signing bonus itself was lucrative, in excess of six million dollars. Caden was disgustingly rich before the press release went out.
Under the capital of the network, the “cathedral” was renovated to accommodate camera bays and parapets, and of course higher capacity. Multimedia advertising campaigns blitzed the nation in June of 1999 and continued all summer. The commercials offered the opportunity of a lifetime. A mere hundred and thirty five dollars was a small price to pay to witness true miracles. That was the new cost to attend, and it must have been agreeable. The waiting list was two years long by our second week with the toll-free number.
If a viewer was more than that- if he or she wished a treatment- the cost was astronomical, in terms of dollars and cents. However, it was believed that Caden Crown could do it. Heal the ill. Cure the diseased. Put those in wheelchairs back on their feet. Seven viewers per week were given the opportunity and there was an immediate backlog. The price we charged was an upfront fee in addition to a prorated percentage of their future earnings, rounded to the penny in Caden’s favor, of course. Never once did I receive a complaint about the price. If they didn’t want the treatment, there was nobody ordering them to ask for it.
The first episode was broadcast right before the N.F.L season kicked off on Labor Day Sunday. We lit the nation on fire.
People found some extremely creative ways of trying to get on the show, and we were jammed up for six months right at the get-go. We hounded the producers, and they lobbied for an additional hour. We were on at 8 a.m. local time, 11 eastern. The network brass, regardless of the imminent profits, couldn’t rework the choke-hold contract of the evangelist who covered the 9am to 11am eastern time slot. At noon, the pregame shows were underway. Caden’s Hour remained sixty minutes, but we eventually found a way to squeeze nine “patients” into each show by eliminating commercial breaks. Caden himself kicked in the advertising dollars and no more commercials ran during his show. We lost on that deal, of course, but the press release sparked even more interest and backed up Caden’s proclaimed selflessness.
The producers, of course, were immediately flooded with the uproar of the nation’s agnostics and Satanist groups. Caden and I, as well as the network, found this peculiar. Why? Here’s why:
He never once mentioned God. Any God. He wasn’t even sure he believed that there was one, so he refused to market his show alongside “His.” It was the Hour’s premise itself which had the extremists upset. The groups and individuals only assumed that we were trying to pass it off like all the other guys- that God was supposed to be curing the Miracle Man’s followers. Not so. The only thing Caden had in common with the Sunday Morning Televangelists was the time slot. Other than that, he was a different breed. Gambling, drug addictions, hookers and all.
As the show’s popularity swelled into nationwide hysteria, the instances of vandalism and hate grew alongside. I had security onsite around the clock and calendar, and they still couldn’t keep up with the rocks getting thrown through the windows and the bags of burning dung that were hurled from passing desert traffic. At first, they’d give chase and capture these Bumfuck, U.S.A hometowners, but a dozen arrests later it was still going on. I bumped security up a little. Wrought iron fencing eleven feet high soon enclosed the property and dogs patrolled the perimeter. (Dogs the size of sumo wrestlers. I had to build a goddamned soundproof kennel to keep them quiet during the show.) Those that traveled to the site for the purpose of expressing their skepticism eventually discovered that it would be far easier to send hate mail than try to disparage the studio itself.
The network forwarded all mail they received in our name, and adding that to the piles of direct correspondence we got? Shit. I bet we got more mail in late 1999 and early 2000 than Britney Spears, Oprah Winfrey and the New York Yankees put together. Our staff of eight worked full-time intercepting Caden’s mail, and sifted through negative letters over positive at a normal rate of three to two. The show was apparently changing lives for the good, but so many people- disbelievers and miserable sloths with too much time to waste- involved themselves on the other side of the spectrum. Everybody doing something good has to accept the bad reviews. I read in an interview once that a guy once approached a friend of Yoko Ono’s, in ’81, trying to sell his book. His book? It was a life’s effort. He wanted to spend the rest of his days discrediting John Lennon and Yoko. John Lennon. Is that crazy or what? Yoko said that she figured this guy had some sort of inbred belief that there shouldn’t be such a thing as legends. That people shouldn’t be allowed to shape the world, but just live in it as equals. Shit, John Lennon wasn’t trying to change the world. He was just trying to make a buck and draw in those that were interested. Everybody else could flake off like so much dead skin.
And so it was with the weekly Hour of Better Change.
The disbelievers did have a case. Sure, some people were healed after their experience on the plush cinnamon carpet of the magicman’s studio. Many tumors shrunk. Many vertebrae mended themselves. Hundreds of people swore the magic man had saved them. Cured them. Healed them. Changed them, as the name of the show predicted.
But the Miracle Man had an endless repertoire. Caden’s treatments were complimented by those of the world of medicine. His promises were backed up by ongoing scientific research. His assurances to the victims of cancer- often over half of his ‘patients’- were assisted by chemotherapy and radiation. But the doctors and hospitals only helped the Miracle Man, though. It was him. He had saved them.
Car accident victims who made it to his stage at the beginning of their years of physical therapy would after those years send Caden a letter of praise before thanking the doctors who’d walked slowly alongside them. The Miracle Man had saved them. The Hour of Better Change was the best hour of all. It only cost a roundtrip flight to Vegas and two or three nights in a hotel. And seven thousand dollars up front, followed by five percent of each paycheck or disability payment until all was well or all was over. Most paid the magic man before their utility bills. He was far more important.
So we were really doing no wrong. There were vicious accusations around the world that Caden’s “shoulder rubbing” was useless. That it was impossible for anybody to cure or heal anything with a brief massage. Whenever he read the reports and the letters-to-the-editor in all of the big city newspapers and tabloids, he laughed, and I’m not making that up for the benefit of the reader. He read them and laughed. Laughed high above Las Vegas in his two-level penthouse apartment, lustfully laughing at the poor saps who’d put their vehement thoughts to paper in their dingy clapboard inner-city houses. He laughed at them, because they were them, and he was him. Caden Crown. Miracle Man. Faith Healer working without the Hand of God.
That day in the limo, I was flipping through a stack of newspapers and magazines while Caden enjoyed the last quarter-inch of his joint. Ever fruitless in my search for marketability, I was as loyal to Caden as I was to myself. He’d been my best friend since the end of our youth, those forty-odd years before. The early years had been misery for both of us. Broken homes and foster homes, abuse and misuse and neglect. We remained in contact, relying on each other as the one true constant in each other’s life. Although Caden’s life settled down in adulthood once we set down in Vegas, I saw more misery than Caden could have survived. My marriage had somehow lasted nine years and the divorce in 1993 had been brutal and everlasting. While I won sole custody of our only child, the victory was short lived.
My eight year old boy was killed tragically in an amusement park accident the first weekend of my care. I watched him die. To top it off, my effervescent ex-wife wrote me a tidy little letter before blowing her brains all over the back wall of her home-office. She blamed me for the death of our son. I cursed her in death even worse than I had in life. Even though I knew it wasn’t my fault, the very thought of her believing that messed me up. Just the possibility of her believing it for a second- especially the second before she pulled the trigger- triggered something in me and I dug myself into a hole so deep, so flooded with rotten guilt I should have drowned in it.
I eventually settled out of court for a shade under a million dollars, even though I could have topped out for fifteen times that in a trial. I wanted it over. I took the cash, and if there’s anything that comforts me at night, it’s the memory of seeing that guy at the trial.
He never testified. Never opened his mouth. But I knew who he was- he was a foreman at the plant which manufactured the faulty pin that snapped- and when he approached me and started to offer his apology at the end of the hearing, before I’d even decided to settle, he broke down and bawled at my feet. He wasn’t bullshitting. He was blaming himself, as I blamed myself. Everybody responsible ran the other way- the park’s Safety Department, the management- but me and this poor guy who did nothing wrong, we took all the blame. All I did was try to take my kid for a day out and get him settled after eight years of chaos. All this other man did was his job- make sure his crew punched in on time and punched out for lunch, protecting the bottom line. It was Quality Control that had let the pin go through. It was the assemblers at the park who let that haunted pin get through the works and into action on that ride. The Safety Inspectors who checked out the midway every morning to make sure some kid wasn’t going to fly off a ride and rocket across the midway were ultimately responsible. The inspectors that morning must have checked out the Whirling Dervish, or whatever the fuck it was called, before they had their first coffee and okayed something that was pretty fucking far from okay. But enough about that. Maybe later. All that’s important is that this one guy, whose name I never did get, felt like he had something to do with my son’s death just because he was around when the element of my son’s death was cast. Poor guy. His apology meant more than the millions of dollars I could have gotten. I took the nine-fifty and tried to run away from my own guilt.
When I got the cash, I heaved myself out of the debt-well and offered immediate assistance to Caden, who was mired in his sixth career since we dropped out of high-school in the middle of an Algebra exam in 1960. Together, we’d stacked our books neatly on our desks and left. Pittsburgh was left behind for good. We drove to Indianapolis and spent years working odd jobs.
At that time, Caden was still living life under the banner of his given name, Costante Imbroglio. Funny story about his name:
Only his mother was of Italian descent, and even then barely so. His father had been a gambling derelict dockworker who’d seduced a young lady- Caden’s mom- in the produce section of a grocery store. She was swept off her feet, bounced off her headboard for a few weeks and left in the dockworker’s dust one sunny Wednesday morning. His name was forgotten. Hers was spoiled, as she found out after a trip to the family M.D..
Pregnant and husbandless, she was a disgrace. If she’d had any family, they would have disowned her.
She had the child. He was born with a full head of sandy blonde hair and fair Anglo skin, and was a miniature version of the bastard dockworker who’d given so many promises by the candlelight in Miss Imbroglio’s crumbling tenement apartment.
She left the baby nameless as she spent a few weeks falling in love with him. Yet it wasn’t all roses and lullabies. Before the dockworker planted his seed, she’d barely had the means to support herself, and now with the baby? She considered giving up in several ways, but promised herself to raise the little boy to live a strong, fruitful and proud life, unlike that of his father. She wanted to give him an inherently Italian name, but wanted it to mean something. Since he was the first steady fixture in her life, she named him Costante, which she knew from her early schooling was Italian for ‘constant.’
She brought him to the tender age of six months, then did give up. She left him on the stairs of a Brooklyn shelter with a brief note of explanation. He was raised by that name, and lived under it until we got to Indianapolis in ’60. We found out then why the gangs of greasers were always laughing at him in class and at the football games after school.
We made a lot of cash cutting lawns during the Indianapolis summers and shoveling show in the winter. We actually built up a client base. We were riding high and scrounged up a few bucks to get some business cards printed. We each had our name in one corner, with the phone number to the payphone outside of our leaky, infested apartment in the middle. I forget what we called ourselves, but we were eighteen and stupid. We were probably called the Indianapolis Grass Cutters or the Indy-pendent Lawn Mowers. We weren’t very creative in our landscaping stage. Oh look at us now!
Anyways, we ran around the neighborhood- around where the Colts play now- and we handed out our little cards. One Saturday morning, one of those mornings where the humidity hits an hour before the sunrise, we got a call from this little old Italian lady, and Caden- Costante- took the job since I was yakking my insides out from our long night of Guinness at a local pub. He got to the address, and ran back to a payphone to call me to confirm what he’d scribbled on the notepad. Nope. He had the right address, but the lawn was trimmed as short as the hair of the American G.I.’s who were just starting training, long before they ever heard of a place called Vietnam.
This “little old Italian lady” wasn’t so old, maybe forty, and she met him on the porch and invited him in for a drink. Poor guy thought he’d pimped himself out to a horny hare-lipped housewife, but he says he got into her house and was sure he’d been there before. Wasn’t sure why, but it just felt comfortable. Safe.
They drank a pitcher of lemonade, and the lady finally came clean. She asked him if he was really Italian, with his sandy blonde hair and his fair skin, and he said that he only assumed he was. Again, he was waiting for her foot to lift his pantcuff under the table like in an old episode of Three’s Company. A baby was crying in a bassinette in the hallway. A young Frank Sinatra was crooning in the other room. So annoying and frantic, the baby. So romantic, Old Blue Eyes. She asked him if he knew what his name meant in Italian and he conceded he had no clue.
She quietly set her glass down with a somber, sorry look in her eyes. She informed my good friend that he had spent the first eighteen years of his life with the name “Constant Cheater.”
They became friends, and corresponded all through our travels. She’s now dead. The crying baby from the hallway is now a woman in her forties. Until shortly after the turn of the century, she was driving a limousine and buying takeout at Taco Bell for a rich man named Caden Crown.
With a sparkling fresh, new name, the former Mr. Imbroglio wasn’t going to be satisfied cutting lawns. He was soon hungry for more. I earned my keep in those menial odd jobs while Caden began to bounce from career to career. Never planning on becoming rich, he had certainly hoped for it. In Gary, Indiana, he begged for a sales position on some corner used-car lot, and the owner hired him on the spot. A true natural, Caden soon set blistering sales records in two auto dealerships and became a hometown household name. I did oil and lube jobs for the entire five years we were in Gary.
In ’66, it was off to Minneapolis where Caden used his ruthless yet amicable sales skills to break into real estate. He sold backsplits and bungalows to young kids like us, who were more interested in starting families than smoking reefer and crying for peace. We made a decent living for his two years in the business before abandoning it for a lower-key undertaking. When things heated up in Vietnam, Caden and I went far north. We were guests of a tiny town in Saskatchewan until 1978, when the troops had been home for long enough to be sure they weren’t going back.
We returned to the States, and made it to the southwest via half a year in Oregon. It was dismally cold that winter, and we’d seen more than enough ice and snow in Saskatchewan to last our lifetimes.
We did little more than throw darts at a map by the roadside and head from town to town in a beat-up Chevelle. We finally settled in Nevada in 1980 and loved the life. The town was growing under the Mob influence, and there was money to be made around every corner. I met the woman of my dreams- who would eventually splatter her brains all over my favorite James Lumbers original- playing the nickel slots in ’83, and I worked for her dad in his television store. We married in July of the following year and were happily so until approximately October. For reasons that defy even my most exerted explanations, all was wrong. But she was pregnant, gave birth September of ’85 and we held on for those nine years. In ’93, the divorce hit, and even more final than the judge’s decision was the death of my son at the amusement park. I settled for the nine-fifty before baseball started in ’94 and unofficially bequeathed half to my longtime friend before the strike that ended the season. From there, The Hour of Better Change was no longer Caden’s dream. It was real.
He’d first had the idea a couple years before, while mired in his only Vegas career, which was back to his roots- selling cars. He peddled the Oldsmobiles and the Buicks of the nation’s degenerate gamblers who’d lost them to the loansharks in the city’s dark, skanky bathrooms. The slices of life that Caden saw on the three lots which employed him were as vast as all imagination. Rich and poor, every country of origin, they flocked to Las Vegas for the riches to end all riches. Gambling was leaned on as a supplementary income for some. They’d coast into town in their new sedans, already planning the expenditure of their fresh fortunes. After a few days or a week in town, the car was gone, their house was mortgaged. Their home phones were now answered by the machine as their families had left, after getting that latenight phonecall informing them that the life savings were tapped out. Caden felt sorry for these people, but in their misery he took solace in one succinct observation. A large slice of Americans just did not care about their money. To travel to a strange place was natural- if one’s intention was to see the sites or cultural immersion. But these people that descended on Vegas in their hungry droves, they were here because they loved money too much to value it. Even those making a decent living came to Vegas to balloon pennies to dollars, because decent wasn’t enough. More. More was needed.
He realized, without even really thinking about it, that if people were so willing to hand over their earnings for the chancy opportunity of getting more, who was to say they wouldn’t spend that cash on their health? To save their lives? It was one of the maxims of everybody whose loved ones got sick- “Oh, I’d give it all up to get my husband’s health back!” What a bullshit proposal. It’s easy to say, because you know damn well it’s not possible. You can walk around the office while your spouse is rotting away to a stomach tumor, and hear some intern making six bucks an hour complaining about not being able to make the rent, and you casually strut by and tell him “Money isn’t everything, kid. I’d give it all up to get my wife’s health back.” Bullshit. These people can’t say that having the bills paid doesn’t make things easier.
But what if you could hand over a hefty chunk just to try?
Sure, it was being done. But the ones doing it were not only preying on the public’s hope- they were exploiting the public’s beliefs. Their faith. The so-called faith healers promised the viewers they had God on their side, shooting heavenly magic-beams through their fingertips and making bad things run away scared. It was a pretty good scam, Caden gave them that, but who was going to look after those who didn’t buy the God angle? What about those people out there who didn’t believe in the superior being, but were still willing to accept the possibility of a miracle? Caden knew there was desperate people across the country, plodding the final steps to their death beds. He asked himself, what would they pay to try and save themselves? They’d spend a fortune on experimental medications and studies, but would they buy into a Godless Miracle Man? The thought itself was seductive, and its exploration became Caden Crown’s sole purpose at the end of the 20th century.
Before my unfortunate circumstances provided Caden with the funds to go large, he explored his early options by studying psychology at a local library. He fluffed off most of what he read and relied more on instinct. He wanted to try it out for himself. He attended some local sermons, not to reconsider his take on God, but instead to try and emulate the oratorical skills of the ministers and rabbis. He also watched some of the Sunday morning telepreachers, and while he appreciated their efforts, he discovered the best route would be being himself. By acting as he would be in a one-on-one with a potential car buyer, he could manipulate people to the verge of believing. By being himself.
Himself along with me.
His first efforts –before my so-called winfall- got underway in ’93 and were weak. His attendance in the basement he leased topped out at forty or fifty only because he charged eight bucks for the show and served a buffet. Gamblers who found his flyers around the hotels would check out his show, just to cash in on the sandwiches and cookies and the coffee, which was always fresh. They’d never again see the people the Miracle Man was supposed to be “healing.” They were probably all actors that Caden Crown had dragged over from L.A. to play roles in his deception. But there was maybe one out of twenty who bought in, and it was that five percent that spread his name slowly across the nation like a good-willed virus.
The religious groups considered revolting, but ultimately realized that if they approached him they’d only fuel his fires. If he was ignored, he’d go away.
One of Caden’s true believers made his name. Of the millions of visitors the city saw, a journalist from Philadelphia was perhaps the first to specifically come to Caden Crown. He’d paid the treatment fee, which was seventy five dollars. (It was enough to cover the rent, but that was all. Any more than that, and he’d have to offer some sort of guarantee.) He brought his wife, who was wistfully fading away to cancer. The journalist was desperate. His soul mate had been through all the traditional treatments and was still suffering. He promised Caden behind a closed door that if his treatment worked, he’d be a household name by Christmas.
She survived. In the three months following her trip to Vegas, the tumor shrank away to the size of a pea and then to nothing but a cluster of cells the doctors needed a microscope to see. The journalist penned a glorious testimonial that was picked up by the newswires. This was Caden’s first brush with fame, yet it only lasted three or four days. Of course, he was discredited at diners and around water coolers across the country. “What a scam! What a joke! What kind of moron would believe that load of shit?!”
The journalist thankfully didn’t follow up the story. His wife passed away the next fall when the cancer was finally angry enough to claim her.
Caden plodded through his new excursion, but I could see him falling into a depression. He still made his share of our living selling cars, but was far beyond enjoying it. Or anything. It was like he had some problems going on that he didn’t want to share with me. Something bad. Evil, maybe. Evil, but his and his alone.
When the money fell into my lap in 1995, Caden spent a few weeks in meetings and somehow bought the land from the county and hired one of the top architects from San Francisco. The cathedral-like studio went up for- somehow- less than five-hundred thousand. (I still don’t know how that happened.) The structure itself brought people the forty miles from town, and with them came the buzz. Business, if it could be called that, picked up. Within a couple of years, the network approached. And the rest was Crown’s bid at making history.
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He looked across the limo at me and my magazines. He finished the joint and swallowed the roach. He reached into his jacket for one of his favorite Colts cigars. If it ever wasn’t a spliff between his lips, it was rarely a cigarette… usually a Colt. He liked to let them hang there.. dangling from his mouth like a kid would do with Popeye cigarettes, back in the days before they became socially responsible candy sticks.
He grabbed a glass and poured himself a few fingers of Scotch from the wetbar, from a bottle most likely worth what you cleared on your paycheque last week. He started to take a sip and saw my eyebrow rise.
“What’s up?” He asked.
“Looks like we may be able to go after Alzheimers.” I said. He loved when he found new hooks. “They’ve discovered a new serum that seems to retard the effects of the early stages. Alcerochem is going to fund a study. If we scout around and get the names of the guinea pigs, we can bring them out here before they get the treatment.”
“Alzheimer’s, huh?” Caden stared out the window, grinning at the sand dunes. “Bring them out, but I won’t be held responsible for helping them find their way home.”
I shook my head at the cruel stab at humor, and returned to my magazine. Caden sipped his scotch while watching the desert fall in behind the limo. “What do we have today?”
“Four cancer, an A.L.S, an M.S, a bad back and a pair of migraines.” I said without consulting any records.
“Christ! Four more c-spots? I told those guys we’ve got to lay off that shit. We’ve got to broaden our reputation. Our fan base, if you will.” He winked as he said it.
“There’s a heavy backlog, Caden. Over half of the appointments are cancer patients now, ever since that lawyer from Chicago.”
Caden smiled at me. “The fucking guy was in chemo for six weeks before he got here and we still get the credit for his remission. I love this business.”
“We’re going to have to do a couple of primetime specials or something to clear up the list. There’s a lot more ailing the nation besides cancer.” I said stoically. I folded up my trade magazine and set it neatly beside me, hoping to catch him on the waves of his euphoria. I made it sound casual and insignificant. “By the way, we heard from that Chinese guy again.”
“I thought he was Vietnamese.”
“He is. Whatever. Anyways, we heard from him again on Friday.”
“How many letters is this guy going to write before he…”
“No.” I said. “He called.”
“He called? On the phone? Jesus. He is a freak.”
“He really wants you to come over there.”
“No way. No house calls. I’m not going twelve thousand miles to sign an autograph. Fuck that. If I didn’t go to Vietnam to fight for my country, I’m sure as hell not going on business.”
“He’s still adamant he’s got…”
“Yeah, yeah, the power to heal. Not interested. In the last year, they’ve indicted two guys over there who had the ‘power to heal’. One guy had a mummified body in his house and claimed the cops killed him when they did the autopsy. I don’t trust anybody over the ditch. I’ve got all the power I need. It’s called the media.”
“Those cases were in Japan, not Vietnam. I’m telling you, Caden. You really should check this out. It’s worth the trip just to see the land.”
“Oh, come on. I thought I saw Vietnam in Forrest Gump, and it was South Carolina! If ‘Nam looks like South Carolina than I’ve got no desire to…” Caden looked out the window of the passenger side. “Oh, Christ, there they are.” On cue, the intercom beeped and Martina spoke.
“Should I pass them, Mr. C.?”
“Nah. You might as well stop.” Caden said. “I won’t be long.”
Our long white limo eased over to the side of the road, and Martina nosed it right up against the trunk of the silver Grand Marquis. Caden looked at me, annoyed but far from surprised. They’d been intercepting us on the way to the studio every week it seemed.
Where they first got the tip that Caden was in with some bad people, I still don’t know. They just met us every Sunday and laid the heat on him with their updated accusations. He always gave them the time to talk. Nice guy. They never went after him for the cocaine or the pot. They had no suspicion that Caden was dealing, so they backed off on him for his habits, leaving that to the local police. But this tip, wherever they got it, it gave them such a hard-on for Caden, they couldn’t resist poking him with it every Sunday before the show.
Martina parked, and we didn’t get out. Fucking F.B.I. guys… always wanted to talk in the limo. Guess it was the only time they’d ever get their sorry asses in one. I tried to usher the last poofs of smoke from the limo, but Caden waved me off. As Caden sipped his Sunday scotch, Walker knocked on the window and Caden flipped open the door.
“Agent Walker, come on in!” He said with his patented aching sarcasm. Walker got in and slammed the door beside him as he settled in. Caden moved over beside me, with his back to the driver’s seat, and together we eyed Walker as we had for six consecutive Sundays. Walker spoke, in a tone not unlike Tommy Lee Jones’ as the marshal in the Fugitive.
“Caden, I know you’re waiting for all this to go away, but it’s not going to.”
“I’m not waiting for this to go away. I just want you to go away. I’m going to start sleeping over at the studio Saturdays to make sure I’m there on time.” A horn wailed as a huge brown van flew past the limo. Late arrivals I guess, just honking on a wing and a prayer, hoping it was the Miracle Man in the parked limo. It sure was. And he was up to his miraculous eyeballs in trouble.
“We did a little checking on what you said last week. About Enrique.”
“How’s he doing? I haven’t seen him in weeks!” Caden lied. Enrique Morales was probably still asleep face-down on Caden’s terrace.
“Yeah.” Walker said. “He seems to have forgotten the details of the night in question. Says you weren’t there alone. Says you were there with Loomis.”
“Jerry Loomis? Fuck, come on, Walker. I don’t get involved with those guys any more.” Jerry Loomis was a prime local purveyor of narcotics and managing agent of many upper-scale but behind-the-line prostitutes. Caden would have had a better time convincing Walker he was from Neptune.
“I’m just telling you what he said.”
Caden sipped his drink, not so much angry at Morales, but at himself. He had no idea Walker would get to Morales so fast. By the time he’d called Enrique from the cellphone the Sunday before to warn him, Walker had probably already been there, and Enrique was too afraid to say. None of it mattered anyway. Walker’s nose was sniffing out his prey. If he were a hound hunting a prison escapee, he’d just sloshed into the creek and kept the scent. He was on to Caden hard, but Caden didn’t let him know we knew that. “Walker, you’ve got to believe me. If I’m ever desperate enough that I’ve got to get into dealing drugs, I’ll pack it in and go back to Gary. I’m clean. I’m telling you.”
“I didn’t suggest you’re in business with Loomis. I just said you were with him on the night in question. Is that right or wrong?”
“I don’t have to answer that.”
“No, Caden, you don’t, and I don’t have to keep allowing you these opportunities for casual conversation. One of these Sundays, you might be pulled over by a whole bunch of real cops. You’ll be chit-chatting at the precinct, and I’ll be the least of your worries. Perhaps I’ll give them an anonymous call, a reason to stop you and check your pockets. What are you going to do? Wave your hand out the window and ask all your followers to block the cop cars?” He grinned when he said that. “Give me respect, and I’ll let the show go on as long as I can.”
Caden looked at me and I nodded at him.
“Yeah, I was with Jerry.” He said. Walker scribbled something in his notepad and looked back up at Caden.
“What was the content of the conversation?”
“That I won’t answer.” Caden snapped.
“Oh, but you will.”
“Oh, but I will? Right, right...” Caden said, rubbing his chin like a sarcastic Fu-Manchu. Then he started to wave his finger at Walker. “I got it. Baseball. We talked about baseball. We always do. Take this afternoon, for example- Cleveland needs to beat the Jays in order to stay alive, you see? But the Jays have David Wells going and he hates the fans in Cleveland…do you know he just got his 20th win for the first time in his career?”
“Cut the shit, Caden. Enrique already told me.”
“Enrique was probably drunk, that night and when you talked to him. Even if he was sober enough to have paid attention to Loomis and me, there’s little chance he’d be coherent enough to tell you about it.”
I saw Caden painting himself into a corner, and looked at my watch. “Mr. Walker, we’ve got thousands of people assembled…”
Walker held up his hand. “One second. Just one quick question, Caden. Are you in bed with Milupara?”
“No.” Caden said seriously. Walker didn’t buy it.
“Thank you. Have a good show.” And he left.
Martina pulled away, even honking “shave and a haircut” at Walker’s partner. She could be a bitch when she had to be, but she was a nice lady. Caden didn’t have to tell her to hit the road. She wound that Caddy up to eighty-five or ninety, and we still showed up early. Security was just pulling four people off the roof. They’d parked their brown van around back and used it for a boost.
We were sneaking in our entrance at the back of the building, and as the door closed behind us, Caden turned to me and smiled, which made me feel better. He hadn’t said a word since we left Walker on the roadside. As we stepped into his kingdom, he smiled. And said he needed a vacation.
He said he might even consider Bangkok.
That was something we’d talked about for years. But when he said it, I knew he was getting at something else. He was getting at me. This whole Vietnam thing was the only thing, besides my dead son’s voice, that could keep me up at night.
The man had been after us for months. He claimed to have the “power to heal” and he wanted to give it to Caden. He knew, like most of the population, that Caden was far from full of the “power.” (He was full of something else, and making a disgustingly massive fortune off of it.)
The man had begged and pleaded for us to come out and meet him, at least to entertain his ideas. Caden, with me onside, thought the guy was cracked. It was never going to happen, at least that was how we’d looked at the situation for most of the time. But around Labor Day, he’d started talking about it. Flip-flopping. Prime example was his outburst before we met with Walker, just minutes before. Never going to happen. Ever. Yet, it was becoming more and more evident that it wouldn’t take much to get him on the plane. He was getting frustrated. And he was getting bored.
We were only minutes away from getting the push to Vietnam.
It started out as a relatively normal show that day- if anybody duping an entire nation out of their cash was capable of anything normal. Caden got a quick do-job from the girl in makeup, who’d intrinsically stared at her watch and gave him a little impatient huff when he sat in the chair. I guess Caden had had enough of her. On the way to the stage, he had me fire her. (I hired her back of course, as Caden would have wanted. She could work wonders with ten minutes and a brush. She could take the knots out of Medusa’s hair.)
I took my seat in the office and watched the bank of monitors. As the din of the crowd shrank away to nothing, I saw him on the screen just as he prepared to take the stage. He reached into the pocket of his cinnamon-shaded blazer, which matched the carpet perfectly. He enjoyed a quick toot and peeked around the corner to see a stage-hand counting down. He was no more principled in those terms than Steven Tyler, who used to prepare lines of coke on the amplifiers in the early Aerosmith shows for consumption throughout the performance. The only difference between Caden and Aerosmith was that his fans were the kind that tried to hide the real them in the real world. The kind that denied they even watched the show. They made the trek to Vegas to watch him work, indubitably believing he was a model citizen capable of no wrongdoings. They worshipped him as Aerosmith’s fanatics worshipped them, but Caden’s fans were a legion of undercover extremists who wouldn’t admit their allegiance at work or wear a licensed t-shirt.
He fluffed his collar and wiped his nose when the spotlight shot down on the carpet where he was going to step out. When that spotlight came on, the track-lighting in the auditorium went weak, slowly dimming until the crowd was in blackness. A few started to whisper, unable to contain their excitement. The only thing audible over the whispers was the “shushing” of the rest of the crowd.
A light lit up on the main camera and the music started. A whole bunch of “quiet” signs over the stage instructed the crowd to be just that. The show was on the air.
The music, a quasi-classical spoof of some ancient symphony, wheezed out of the Bose speakers and the audience saw a another spotlight, this one on Caden’s podium just off the center of the broadway-sized stage. The music accelerated, no doubt battling the slow-gin-fizz of the tunes on all the other channels, the ones the church-goers were watching. No devout followers of any religion in our crowd. Pure, unadulterated suckers praising only Caden Crown. I checked the monitor with Caden still on it, and saw him smiling. He loved the rush.
The music slowed down and softened, and a recorded game-show voice introduced him. The voice was that of a prominent local announcer who’d done a lot of work for the car-lots Caden used to inhabit. The spotlight showering the podium dimmed a little, and the one on the carpet where Caden was to emerge rose up along the edge of the wall from which he’d mysteriously appear.
When the introduction was made, the Miracle Man stepped out to his public.
They went wild.
As the crowd roared, both spotlights cut out, and the stage was again as dark as the seating area. A few moments later, the light splashed on the podium again, and there was Caden, glowing. Laced out on cocaine. Stoned on weed. Maybe still a little drunk from the night before. And raring to go.
He gave the obligatory thank-yous and the humble aw-shucks waves, simultaneously reveling in the ovation and trying to convince the crowd that he was embarrassed that they were making such a big deal about little-old-him. What a top-grade bullshitter.
The ovation, which had been clocked by some thick-glassed New York media expert as the longest in television, lasted for minutes until finally the applause signs blacked out and the quiet ones lit up again. Another play of the puppetmasters. The producers could have left the applause light on for the whole show, and the crowd would essentially have paid $135 apiece just to clap at Caden. Know what?
I doubt they’d have complained.
When the crowd noise finally faded out, Caden went to work on his sermon. It was terse and redundant and perhaps only a mish-mash of the previous ten. He rarely had much else new to say, and the script we fed into the teleprompter was usually generic. We’d throw in a couple of timely references to the week’s news, but beyond that it was, well.. just scripted babbling. The organized mess.
I’d had to discourage him from the urge to improvise, thanks wholly to his unnatural state of mind and body during the shows. One week he’d said fuck right on the air, slipping it past the time-delay guy. In his third week of live performance, he’d uttered versions of pussy two times. Once as a noun, as in “Anybody that bows down to those creeping forces of imminent death is nothing but a pussy!” and once as a creatively descriptive adverb, as in “If your friend or neighbor begins to weaken, begins to roll over to the power of death, he’s just pussily giving in. You look him in the eye, and you ask him what Caden Crown would think of someone so pathetic!” What a guy. I found that he was okay in his one-on-ones with the patients, the jibber-jabber before he placed his hands on their shoulders. Sometimes he closed his eyes as he looked dazedly through the skylight and told them they’d be okay. Other times he’d just tell them. But in his opening “sermon”, his talk-show monologue, he was too prone to falling back on his trashy trucker talk, and we had to start scripting for the teleprompter. It worked out fine.
The sermon that day was nothing special. We had him ease into a diatribe about the differences between our culture and that of the nations that seemed to be always at war. He predicted that all forms of evil would at some time fall. That justice came to all who dictated the fates of their common man. That whole line. (A few days later, Slobodan Milosevic was ousted from power in Belgrade. Close to five million people across the U.S. believed that Caden had made it happen. That he’d ordered it just by his passing mention of the very topic. We even got some mail thanking him for it... in broken English of course.)
The crowd was enthralled as usual. They listened to his diatribe until he went to his ten minute question and answer period. He used to do this on the commercial breaks, but there was no commercial breaks anymore. He answered a few questions about life and death and all points in between, with Amber- our voluptuous telegenic co-host- bouncing through the crowd with her microphone. What a gig she had. A ninety minute workweek and she was making almost a hundred g’s. Caden and I had both been “taking her to task” since her first audition, but Caden had kind of laid off on her. Not me. She was something. Something else.
Caden just kept pointing at the people in the audience, choosing from the raised hands like he’d just asked the crowd “Who was the thirteenth president of the United States?” Essentially, all he was doing was erecting his propaganda machine. People waved their hands like Horseshack, and once Amber got the mic in front of them, they’d just go off. Thanking him for saving their spouse or giving hope to their sickened son. Some would just thank him for making their life better, just by existing. He had them. Owned them.
Around twenty after eight we started going to the treatments. We only had about four minutes per patient, but they certainly didn’t mind. They were paying Caden for his power, not his time. If he could ply his trade over the phone, they’d probably just call in their problems and pay the same fee.
Caden took the ‘x’ at center stage as the wheelchair was brought in from the green-room. The patient was perhaps thirty-five, or a shade to either side of it. His story was told quickly at Caden’s urging. He had been heading to work on a Sunday morning when a slow-moving firetruck T-boned his Lexus in his hometown. He wasn’t killed, and even though he’d been the one to run the red, he made enough from the settlement with the city to supplement the hospital’s efforts with Caden Crown’s therapy, which wasn’t covered by any insurance. No shit. It was a smokescreen, a magic act.