Boyfriend from Hell Read Free

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