A Changed Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

running through my mind while I was having that…experience at the rave.”
    The part about the hymn is pure rich smoke Nolan’s blowing up their asses. But sure enough, he can feel Bonnie’s eyes on him. It’s been Nolan’s experience that women love imagining you as a kid with your hair slicked back, all sweaty and hot in your scratchy church suit. They want to go to bed with that kid. That’s how weird women are.
    The first time Nolan met Margaret, in a bar in Hudson, a gospel tune came on the jukebox. Nolan knew the words, he sang along. Trials, troubles, and tribulations… Nothing corny, like singing in Margaret’s ear, but softly, to himself, like a man remembering something sweet from childhood. The song ended. He’d looked at Margaret, and he knew it had worked. Our man was in.
    Maslow asks, “And did you still feel that way the next morning?”
    “What way?” says Nolan. “Excuse me, I…”
    “Loving the world,” says Maslow.
    Does the old guy believe him at all? It’s impossible to tell.
    “Even more,” Nolan says. “I woke up under a tree. Somehow Raymond found me. He drove me home to his place. When I got there, I was still flashing on hate, how I used to hate everything, how hate poisoned the world, how every bad thing that’s happened could be traced directly to hate.”
    Most of that came from Maslow’s book. But the basic idea is true: Nolan couldn’t stand one more minute of ARM, or Raymond and his friends. Just turning in to Raymond’s driveway nearly made him puke. Maybe it was the lawn gnomes in Raymond’s yard, or maybe the fact that they looked so much like Raymond and Lucy and their kids. In the end, it was a pit-of-the-stomach thing. An allergy to the guys in ARM, to the sound of their voices. None of them gave a shit about the planet. They made fun of save-the-whales types. You’d think the Ex-high residue would have left Nolan loving Raymond and his friends along with every other human creature. Loving the white race. But somehow it didn’t work that way. It was time to get out of Dodge.
    “So what did you do then?” Bonnie says.
    “One morning, I woke up before everyone else, and I went to Raymond’s desk. I went online. I typed in ‘Neo-Nazi.’ And then ‘Help.’”
    “Is that how you got to us?” says Bonnie.
    “No,” Nolan says. “First I got some newspaper site, with this article: ‘Neo-Nazi Helps Foundation.’ About this white separatist brother who saw the light and reformed—” Does this qualify as a lie? It’s too small to matter. Nolan did look up the story on the Internet, but by then he’d already seen a program about it on The Chandler Show.
    On TV, the former skinhead got the total fashion makeover. He was all duded up in a fancy suit, and they’d waited till his hair grew back enough to look like some hip, faggy buzz cut.
    Harrison Chandler was nearly sobbing when the guy explained how he’d turned from the dark toward the light, from the path of hate to the path of love. Nolan would rather not think about that. Because then he’ll have to think about how much Raymond and his buddies liked to watch Chandler and yell at the TV, because Chandler is an extremely visible overpaid Negro employed by the Jewish media. That episode really ticked them off. They were throwing beer cans at the set until Lucy shut the party down.
    Maslow wants to know what they did in ARM? They watched TV and yelled.
    “Oh, that guy who went to work for the Wiesenthal Foundation,” says Bonnie. “Remember, Meyer?”
    The old man doesn’t want to remember. There’s something about this he doesn’t like. Better wrap up this part and move on.
    “Anyway,” says Nolan, “I read about this skin who had a huge…change of heart because he heard his four-year-old daughter calling someone a nigger.” Bonnie and Meyer flinch. “Excuse me. Which, frankly, would not have been enough to make me turn—but then, I don’t have kids.” He smiles at Bonnie. She has kids.