Stephen O’Leary, my brilliant friend

One afternoon in June 1995, I found myself trapped in the Bodhi Tree, a stucco-fronted bookstore on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood where New Age wisdom-seekers sip herbal tea while discussing the latest ravings of Shirley MacLaine. I was freaking out because the professor I’d travelled 6,000 miles to meet had apparently stood me up. Stephen O’Leary, of the University of Southern California, had just published Arguing the Apocalypse, a prize-winning study of the rhetorical techniques of televangelists. I was researching my own book about the end of the world and was desperate to pick his brains. He was almost two hours late and the wind chimes were driving me nuts.

I was seriously considering flying back to London when this tubby little bearded guy scuttled in, babbling excuses and making a squeaky fuss about the best place to sit on the veranda. He wore shorts and Birkenstocks. Then he launched into his Aristotelian theory of millennial rhetoric, speaking so fast that he lost me in seconds. We’re not going to hit it off, I thought, not realising that my life had changed forever.

Ten years later I paid him another visit and O’Leary was still babbling – about Plato, The Simpsons, Karajan’s first Beethoven cycle and the intricacies of the Mayan calendar. That sounds like a mess, but Stephen made it hang together because he was the cleverest person I’d ever met. Also, we were high. We were staying in a scummy Mexican seaside resort famous for its dodgy pharmacies and we were on a mission. We had a shopping list of interesting prescription drugs. Stephen scored some Ritalin he needed in order to finish a paper about premillennial dispensationalism. Or so he claimed.

Back in his apartment in LA, I had some tedious indexing to do.