by Chris Lynch
“Yes,” the woman said, “I will consider you. But will you consider me?”
Whoa. It hadn’t occurred to me that these would be two-way conversations.
“Sure,” I said. I shrugged.
“All right. What I need is some day care that doesn’t cost more than what I make on the job I need the day care for.”
It wasn’t like she was asking for a new convention center downtown. I figured this must be in that big old hundred-million-dollar budget easy. “I guarantee it,” I said, shaking her hand. Hey, nobody said I couldn’t.
She smiled. Warmly. Maybe incredulously, but warmly. She didn’t believe me. I scribbled the FinsFone number on one of my fliers and handed it to her.
“If I haven’t done anything about this within three months, you call me direct.”
The smile turned to a giggle and a shake of the head. I didn’t know what she was laughing about; I was dead serious.
But it sure felt good anyhow.
Can-do. I can, and I did. I made that lady smile, and it was a breeze.
I did it again as soon as I could.
“Of course, there’s got to be some way to get you that check sooner than six months later,” I huffed. “That’ll be fixed.”
“Just like the old man would do,” the old guy praised.
“Nobody’s going to tell you you can’t put a satellite dish in your own backyard, not as long as I’m on the beat.”
It looked, and felt, so different up close. I could do things. I could merely speak, and worlds improved. I wasn’t sure I wasn’t lying, but I actually felt like I could fix everything. What a rush.
I wanted to win now.
Except I didn’t want the job. I wanted to win the election, without being stuck being mayor.
It got pretty old pretty fast, though. Asking for votes, smiling all the time, talking to people... The highlight of the day came when Mosi and Betty and several of her friends came by to help work the polls for an hour.
“Maybe I can give the fliers out to people,” Mosi said, surprising me. It was a strange version of Mosi talking to me, distant, kind of sad.
I handed him the fliers. “Knock ’em dead, killer,” I said, and watched him assault the voters. I smiled—the real one, not the candidate one—as I watched him awkwardly work the crowd. I saw people do a double take as they realized Mosi, with his thick, dark features, big head, big hair, big arms and shoulders, and glassy eyes, was trying to give them something rather than take something away from them. It was obvious between my man Mosi, affirming many people’s fears about letting teenagers into the power industry, and Betty’s Boop Troops charming the male vote but chilling the female, that I was losing more support than I was gaining.
While I did not want to lose the primary, this setback was the most enjoyable part of the show so far.
“Can’t you stay with me awhile?” I asked Sweaty as the Foley contingent began folding up camp.
“Stuff to do, Mr. Mayor,” she answered. “Frankly, we love our man to pieces, but we’re going to have to be with you mostly in spirit, ’cause this shit is, like, dullest.”
I nodded, and wished I could go with her.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Don’t thank me now. Tonight. When they have some meaningful numbers, you come pick me up, and we’ll have a little celebrate.”
The candidate was infused with sudden renewed vigor.
“Ya?”
“Ya. I’ll be home, hot dog.”
Sweaty and her friends took off, to get back to life, to real life, to high school and boy-tease and pizza life that was their right and that I was piss-eyed jealous over. I stared at the last of them piling onto the bus, and kept staring as the bus pulled out, passed directly in front of the polling station, and somebody mooned me. I sighed. I got a pang of lonely. I used to like lonely.
For a few minutes I stopped campaigning. I leafed through other people’s literature. I found out that sheriff isn’t nearly the cool gig it sounds like, running desperadoes out of town; in reality it’s more like he baby-sits the jail. I also found that it requires no skill or background of any kind to qualify as a state senator. Maybe I was just after the wrong job.
Then I stopped reading, and I watched them work.
They all looked like asses.
The voters, who in a few hours would move some of these same people a step closer to positions of power, were treating the candidates as if they were panhandlers with dead fish in their pockets. And the candidates behaved as if they appreciated it.
I fell back against the yellow-brick wall of the Curley School. “What the hell are we doing?” I asked the candidate for state senate, Michael Morris.
“We’re kissing the public butt.”
“Okay,” I said. “So why?”
“Because during the day I usually work in my aunt’s dry cleaner. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want people telling me, ‘Hey, you didn’t get the sweat stain out from the underarm of my shirt,’ anymore. I want people asking me for favors. I want to be head of a committee that tells a developer, ‘No, you can’t build your restaurant there, because I said so,’ and I want to be the guy who tells the Indians, ‘Enough already with your damn casinos.’ I want to be that guy. I want to make a noise, y’know?”
I thought about it. I knew what he was talking about, but honestly, I couldn’t work it up like he could.
“And help people, you mean?”
“Ya... that’s part of it, of course, but... you know what I’m talking about.” He slapped me backhanded across the shoulder. “You’re in the business. You’re practically a power broker already.”
That was it, the thought that finally made me feel stupider than anything.
Power broker. This was what my da had given his adult life to. Not the what of what you could do with power, but the having of it for its own sake.
Back at my groveling station. The work was hard, harder than anything I’d done in the campaign so far, and I got sweaty marching up and down the street, shaking hands and smiling and being nicer than I felt like being after a while. Around eleven o’clock Fins had called to check on things, and I rushed him, telling him things were great but that I had to get back to my post. He was giggly. My grandfather was not a giggly man, not even in victory. His first acceptance speech, all those years ago, was famous for having to be bleeped over while Fins wailed away at his beaten foe.
He called again at eleven thirty and twelve thirty and two, but I stopped answering.
By then I wanted to go home. I wasn’t consumed by the outcome of this right now. I didn’t especially care if they made me mayor or pope or god right there by popular demand; I just didn’t want to be there. Many, many—mostly old—well-intentioned people came by to tell me how much they loved my da, to relate wonderful tales of how he had mangled the law to do something chivalrous for this struggling family or that. One grand-looking little dame—there was no other way to look at her—in a pink sombrero-size hat tried her damnedest to tell me a very personal story of herself and my grandfather one evening in the Tourismo—my Tourismo—which made the little hairs on my arms prickle and which I was not going to listen to.
“That car,” she said, pointing shamelessly at the Studebaker across the street. “That fresh, brassy little—”
“It’s not the same car,” I interrupted. “This one’s a fake. One of those copies they make from a kit. The real one he drove off the bridge in Narragansett.”
The old woman deflated. I thought it was because of the car, and I felt bad.
“I thought Narragansett was our spot,” she moaned. She left me without another word, but with a very Maureen-for-mayor look on her face.
It didn’t matter anymore what people said to me, if they were going to vote for me, if they loved Fins and were ‘sure the cub was gonna be just like the old lion,’ wink wink. I had, halfway through the day, learned possibly the biggest life-lesson I was going to learn from the whole political experiment
:
There is nothing harder than pretending to care about what you’re doing, when you’re really not convinced you do.
Do all of us politicians run out of gas this quickly?
It was starting to show, as fewer and fewer people came up to me.
“I’ll hang around with you if you want.”
It was Mosi. I hadn’t even realized he hadn’t gotten on the bus with the rest of them earlier.
“Hey,” I said, excited. “You’re here.”
“Hey,” he answered. “I am. Got any more fliers? I gave all mine out already.”
I put my hand on his shoulder. “I’m so glad you stayed, Mos.”
“Ya? Well, good. Do you feed your volunteers? I’m starvin’, like.”
I laughed and laughed, more than he thought made sense.
“Pretty easy to amuse these days, Gordie. Ain’t getting many laughs lately, huh?”
I stopped laughing, shook my head no.
“I’m sorry for that,” Mosi said. Then he shrugged, because what else could he do? “Got any fliers?” he repeated. “Got any food?”
I looked at his round face, and it brightened my spirits. But it didn’t give me any more energy for going back to the job I didn’t want to do.
“No, and no,” I said. “Let’s go eat.”
Mosi beamed. “You’re the man.”
“Remember, Mr. Mayor, don’t inhale now.”
I laughed, choked, laughed. Choked.
“He’s in the inhaling, the devil is. Can’t let him get in you, that devil. Long as you don’t inhale, the devil stays out of your deepest, most secret, most important parts. You can still be a virgin the other way.”
I picked up the guitar and played. Jesus, I was good. My god, I was good. I was loud and I was fast and I was really, really good. Brilliant would not be too strong a word.
Mosi has a microwave in his private padded garage with the many guitars and the TV and the stereo. Mosi’s parents buy him whatever toys he wants and give him his privacy in his padded-garage world, just as long as he promises not to get a driver’s license because they don’t want him behind the wheel of a car. That’s the deal.
Mosi’s parents love him.
So do I.
So Mosi had the microwave and the Foley campaign sprung for every single frozen burrito they had at the Li’l Peach.
Mosi was plucking a wine-sweet tune out of his orange sunburst Fender Telecaster when me and my lead belly fell asleep on the hard carpeted floor of the soft padded garage.
I was still a little fuzzy as I sat with my parents watching the day’s events play out on the TV. (I think it was the burritos hanging with me longer than anything else.)
I couldn’t believe it was me up there.
“I’ll tell you what, Gordie,” my father joked. “If you don’t finish at least fourth in this field, I’m changing my name.”
He was right. With this being a special runoff election for my grandfather’s suddenly vacated job, there wasn’t the usual time to thin out the field of crackpots, so the race was open to anybody who could get the three hundred signatures and find the office to file. Fringers. Libertarians who wanted to gain control of the government so they could then disband it. One-note wackos like the antidog guy, the antirecycling guy, the pro-assault-rifle lady. It seemed like every concerned citizen, every community activist who ever saved a tree and got his picture in the paper, and every part-time real-estate broker with too much free time was in the contest, threatening to wake this town up and put it right after decades of “old-school political hackdom and machine dictatorship.”
Nobody mentioned any names, but we in the Foley household all shifted in our seats every time we heard the reference.
I could not believe it was me. Like a cloud of smoke and thirty feet of space separated me from my image on the screen. It didn’t look like me, didn’t move like me. The people who greeted that me did not treat him the way real people ever treated me.
Unfortunately, the haze lifted fairly early for me. The haze of the afternoon, and the haze of feeling like the election was there, in my TV, and I was here, in my family home.
Maureen Tisdale-Morrissey laid a beating on everybody. A brutal beating. The other candidates combined did not add up to her percentage.
The number two candidate was the chief of police, a man nearing retirement who already had a good job and a good pension to look forward to.
Number three was a personal-injury lawyer who was famous as the first guy in the country to advertise for clients in a big way on TV. He was so rich from marketing his ad-strategy video to other lawyers that he pledged to take no salary if elected.
Number four, a fraction behind number three, but way, way, way ahead of the rest of the pack, was a local high-school student and radio personality who drove a nice car and dated the most excellent girl since the beginning of girls.
“I knew you could do it,” my mother said as the newscaster declared the top four slots locked up two hours before the polls closed. She leaned over and kissed me on the head. “I think it was my vote that put you over.”
“Sorry, babe,” Dad said as he stood to shake my hand. “I canceled you out.”
“I hate it when you do that,” she said as the phone rang.
“It’s got to be for you,” Dad said, laughing a sadistic little laugh. “You might as well just camp out with the phone now. Your life is over.”
“Ma,” I whined, “do I have to get that?”
Ma picked it up, said some warm greetings, some thank-yous, some nice-to-hear-from-yous, and one big congratulations. Then she came back into the room.
“Gordon? You have a breakfast date tomorrow?”
“Ohhh.” I remembered.
Dad looked puzzled.
“Maureen,” Ma said to him. “Tisdale-Morrissey.”
Dad looked back at me. “The lady who just kicked your fanny all over the city? You want me to go with you, son?”
“Ha-ha, Dad. I can take her if she tries any rough stuff.”
“Gord, I’m your father, and I’m not so sure.”
The phone rang again. I whined to my mother. Then the FinsFone rang in my pocket.
“Shit. Dad?” I flipped him the phone and headed for the door. “Think you could handle that for me? Please?”
“Ah... what the hell,” Dad said. “The old guy’s had a tough year. I guess I could absorb a little gloat from him.” He picked up. “Who? Who? I’m sorry, sir, but does Gordon know you? Are you a close personal friend?”
Dad was having himself a good time as I left.
She was sitting on her steps when I pulled up.
“Egads, a politician,” Sweaty said. “I don’t usually get into cars with known criminals.”
I threw open her door. “Who you kidding, you do it all the time.”
She hopped in, kissed and congratulated me. “I’m so proud,” she said. “Champagne, Gordie. You know, it’s the only thing for this.”
I drove to the world’s easiest liquor store. The place that sold me my first six-pack of Haffenreffer when I was fifteen using Mosi’s fake ID that had his picture on it and that said I was twenty-seven years old. The place that had sold to me with six different IDs since that time.
“I can’t sell to you, man,” the clerk said.
“What are you talking about?” I rummaged through my wallet for Fins’s gold card, which I was sure would cinch it.
“Don’t bother, man,” he said. “Not only are you underage. Not only are you a celebrity right about now. But you are a celebrity mostly because you’re underage. That would be pretty stupid, me selling to you with you all over the TV and everybody calling you ‘The Kid.’”
He gestured over his shoulder at the little black-and-white TV, where the election was still the topic of the day. “No more screwing around for you, boy. You’re a public figure.”
With that, I turned and scuffed across the filthy floor to the exit.
“But I will give you
a two-liter Sprite, free, if you give me your autograph.”
I got back to the car, and I think my face told Betty the story. She was sympathetic, which was something, because when Sweaty Betty has a yen for champagne and doesn’t get it...
“Scoot over,” I said. “I’m exhausted. You want to drive for a while?”
“Do I want...? Are you kidding?”
I shook my head, settled quietly into the passenger seat.
BREAKFAST OF CHUMPS
WHEN I WALKED INTO the dining room of the Meridien, I felt special. Big-mucky-looking businesspeople all in the same suits were leaning hard into each other, making important points, at every table. A few of them even looked up at me as I was led to Maureen’s spot at the far corner of the room. They grabbed quick looks, tossed me small nods of recognition, even made comments to each other as they gestured in my direction. It wasn’t attention like, “Wow, there goes a big deal.” It was more like, “Say now, there’s something you don’t see every day.”
The polished-silver gleam of the place settings jumped up at me, as if they themselves were lighted rather than reflecting the chandeliers. There was a thickness to the room, carpeting that made you feel suspended off the floor, swirls of green-and-rust drapes hanging over the windows and falling all the way to the baseboards. I tried not to stare as I passed all the people who truly belonged here, but I couldn’t help but be fascinated by the table manners that allowed them all to be intensely focused on each other, running the whole world, probably, while making the eating of a meal as neat and precise as Swiss watch repair.
It felt to me like the room was full of money and brains and style and the people who knew how it all worked.
I was wearing the same jacket and tie I had worn all the day before.
“Gordon, love, I could not be more proud of you.”
She was more impressive in real life than she was on the radio or at the old softball games.
“Thank you, Mrs. Morrissey,” I said, the first of the day’s many sweats breaking out along my collar.
“Pshhh, you call me Maureen.”
“But not Mo.” I reminded her of Mad Matt.
