“Healing the shame within,” Gregor offered helpfully.
“That’s the kind of thing,” Bob said. “It’s all over the place now. I can never seem to make it stick in my head. It stuck in everybody else’s head though. Whoosh. And it wasn’t just Hazzard. It was dozens of people. Have you ever heard of the inner child?”
“Of course.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“Not exactly.”
Bob Cheswicki sighed. “I don’t know what it is either. I went into Waldenbooks the other day to buy myself the new Ed McBain, I went into the wrong section and there they were. Books about the inner child. Dozens of them. And those seminars. Did I tell you Paul Hazzard used to give seminars?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “I’ve heard he used to give workshops, but I never was sure what they were workshops in.”
“Owning your anger,” Bob Cheswicki intoned solemnly. “Learning to nurture yourself. I’ve read the titles. And don’t ask me what they mean, because I don’t know. What I do know is what he used to charge. Three hundred dollars for a single all-day session—that’s three hundred dollars a head. Seven hundred fifty dollars for what was called a limited weekend, meaning Friday evening, all day Saturday, and Sunday breakfast. One thousand two hundred dollars for a full weekend, all three days, morning to night. One thousand five hundred dollars for the four-day, Thursday through Sunday, marathon special. Except he didn’t call it a special.”
Gregor was shocked. “Did anyone come? Who would pay prices like that?”
“Lots of people,” Bob replied. “A typical limited weekend at, say, the Sheraton, would draw about six hundred people—and at the height of his popularity he’d have limited weekends scheduled three times a month and booked up six months in advance. The marathons were much better attended. He’d hold those about once a month and he’d get about a thousand people at each of them, and they were booked up well in advance too.”
“It must have been a brutal schedule. He must have been exhausted.”
Bob Cheswicki shot him a cynical little smile. “He wasn’t exhausted at all. He didn’t do much more at any of these things but give a speech at Sunday breakfast or maybe open the conference on Thursday or Friday night. He lured what he called workshop leaders to do the actual sessions. He paid them minimum wage.”
“And they put up with that?”
“The assumption was that they were learning so much doing what they were doing, they should have paid him. And yes, they put up with it. Hell, they even believed it. I talked to some of them.”
The waiter returned, carrying salads and a pepper grinder the size of the baton the grand marshal carried in the Tournament of Roses parade. Gregor and Bob both waved pepper away and grabbed their salad forks.
“So,” Gregor said. “You keep talking about Paul Hazzard’s career in the past tense. Is it over?”
“Pretty much,” Bob admitted. “It would have to be, wouldn’t it?”
“Because he went on trial for killing his wife? Because people think he did kill his wife in spite of the fact that he was acquitted.”
“It doesn’t matter if people think he killed her or not,” Bob said. “In fact, it’s probably worse if they think he didn’t—from the point of view of the workshops, I mean. Look. What Paul Hazzard was selling—what all these guys are selling, really—is the theory that we make our own reality. That much I understand. We can be victimized, you know, and warped by our parents, but once we get into recovery and take control of our lives, well, then it’s a different story. If bad things happen to us, it’s because we secretly want them to happen to us—”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Gregor said sharply.
“I’m not being ridiculous,” Bob insisted. “I know this is all contradictory as hell, but nobody seems to care. They just go on and on like this. And think of it from the point of view of a young woman who is thinking of spending seven hundred fifty dollars for one of Hazzard’s workshops. If you were that young woman, would you really want to learn the secrets of life from a man whose wife was randomly murdered by a tramp? What kind of reality would you think Hazzard was making for himself?”
“But Bob, for God’s sake.”
“I know, I know. But trust me, Gregor, that’s the way people in this movement think about things. After the murder it was as if Paul Hazzard were jinxed. The people who thought he was guilty didn’t want to know him because nobody does want to know a murderer if they can help it, except maybe those strange women who want to marry one once he’s on death row; don’t let me get into that. The people who thought he hadn’t done it didn’t want to know him either though, because—well, I just explained that. Nobody signed up for his workshops. Nobody sent in for his inspirational audiotapes. The sales of his books went way down and one of them even went out of print. I’d guess his income went from about a million five a year to less than fifty thousand.”