American Savior

by Roland Merullo

  “Not your kind of security,” Wales said. “Security security.”

  “Oh security security. I thought you were talking about the other security.”

  “Moron.” He spat into the surf, and then turned his head torward me again so I could hear him better. “We took a walk. Palm Springs. Early, you know, before that weird bus ride. I was telling him that, after all those years of struggling—well, I’m a little bit like that guy you described, shooting the chipmunks.”

  “Big belly,” I said. “Your looks gone.”

  “No, I mean, after years of being single, not finding a woman I wanted to spend more than two nights with, not loving my job, feeling like I was doing nothing more than walking the treadmill and making the paycheck, after all that, you know, I find Ezzie, and it works out the way it has. So great. Then Jesus comes and picks me to be his campaign manager. Guy could have had anybody on earth for the job, right? Now I wake up in the morning and I look at Ezzie asleep next to me and I think about her and me and the job I have, the privilege of it, the thrill, and I worry this will all be taken away from me. Finally I have it, you know? My own little paradise—even your presence doesn’t spoil it for me. And I spend part of every day thinking: what if I lose this? It’s weird.”

  Not on the golf course, not on the job, not in Patsanazakis’s over late-night beers, or in an unguarded moment at a birthday party when he’d had four martinis had Wales ever talked to me the way he talked that day on the beach. It was what Zelda had said: as if Jesus had magically shown us how to take off the armor-plated vest. I was shocked into silence. We were coming close to the screaming fans by then, the surfing safari.

  “He said something I’ve been thinking about,” Wales went on. “Can’t wrap my mind around it.”

  “Let me figure it out for you.”

  “He said you have to say yes to everything. He said Job had trouble when he said no, and then once he said yes, everything worked out; that was the whole point of the story. That kind of trust.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “All those sores and everything. Losing the condo, the car. Not for me.”

  “Be serious a minute, Russ.” Wales turned and looked at me.

  I felt, at that moment, childish and afraid. I did not like the feeling. I tried to swallow my fear, but it stuck in my throat and made my voice come out funny. “So, what then? We’re supposed to let someone shoot Jesus and kill him and say yes to it? We’re supposed to let, I don’t know, let Zelda or Ezzie die, or leave us, and say yes to it? That’s what you’re saying?”

  Wales kept looking at me. I could hear the waves breaking and splashing. “All those years you did the news,” he said. “All those stories about kids who died in car crashes on prom night. All those guys who got shot in Fultonville and Hunter Town. Earthquakes. Floods. Cancer. Parents whose kids got kidnapped and were never heard from again. Didn’t we learn anything from that?”

  “I interviewed a lot of those people in person,” I said. “I can tell you, ‘Yes’ or ‘Yes, thank you, God,’ was not exactly the first thing that jumped to their lips.”

  “Naturally,” Wales said, but he was looking at me like I was missing something.

  “When I found out Esther was, you know, doing the mattress tango with the Tai Chi guy, the first words out of my mouth weren’t, ‘Hey, thank you, God.’”

  “Good example,” Wales said. “Think about it for a minute.” We were having more eye contact in those few seconds than we’d had in eight years.

  I blundered on. “When Stab was born the way he was, my mother and dad didn’t jump for joy about it.”

  “Good example number two.”

  Wales kept looking at me. I started to have an understanding of what he might be getting at. “Okay, fine,” I said. “But there are things that don’t work out for the best in the end. I can give you ten examples from the news reports you just mentioned. The mother and dad who—”

  He held up his hand. “I know that,” he said. “Norm Simmelton and I had a conversation about it. You don’t go up to them and say, “Hey, it’s all right, you’re kid’s going to die in a few weeks but everything happens for a reason.” You don’t say that. You can’t. You shouldn’t.”

  “But,” I began.

  Wales waited for me to go on, and when I didn’t, he said, “But.” And then. “Maybe.” And then. “You don’t ever really know.”

  And then somebody in the crowd was calling us to come over and watch Richard Sprockett, who had decided to get on a surfboard himself, first time, just to see what it felt like.

  THIRTY

  What Jesus was trying to do, I realized after that conversation with Wales on the beach, was to push us deep into the part of ourselves we habitually ran away from. “There is,” he said, during an ad-lib speech somewhere in the brown stucco sprawl outside San Diego, “a golden alpine field within each of you, a place where you are bathed in approval, not because of anything particular you have done, but simply because of your own sacred nature. If you had a president who could show you the route to that place, what a difference it would make in your lives, and in the culture of the world!”

  I imagined intellectuals and anti-intellectuals mocking him in living rooms across the country. “Golden alpine field,” they’d be saying. “My own sacred nature. What kind of bullcrap is that?”

  But by then I had started listening more and more closely to what Jesus said. On the one hand, our work with him was very much exterior work: the speeches, the logistics, the nitty-gritty of trying to convince large numbers of people to vote for him. On the other hand, in California especially, all of us felt that he had his own global warming thing going: he was trying to change the interior climate we’d been used to our whole lives, the way we thought, the kinds of assumptions we made—assumptions about ourselves, the people close to us, the country. “Enlarge your definition of possible,” was something he liked to say when a member of the staff told him we couldn’t do something he wanted us to do. It was almost as if he were simultaneously running for national office and conducting a private seminar in spiritual healing.

  We spent a large amount of time in California, unreasonably large, both Wales and I thought. But Jesus insisted on it. “The arena of enlightenment” was his nickname for the state, though, as with many of his other remarks, we couldn’t be sure how seriously we should take it.

  From San Diego we worked our way northward at a tedious pace, doing sometimes as many as eight rallies a day. Instead of going by a fixed itinerary, Jesus told Wales to accept any reasonable invitation that was offered, and once that word got out, we had requests from every small-town mayor and school committee from Escondido to Santa Cruz. He went out to Twentynine Palms to talk to the U.S. Marines there (telling them that their arduous basic training had been the equivalent of a spiritual apprenticeship, a way of gaining control over their fears). Up to Fresno to address fieldworkers in Spanish (telling them that their sweat fed the nation). Back down through San Bernardino, LA, Oxnard, Ventura, Santa Barbara, Bakersfield, San Luis Obispo, and every little truck stop and hamlet in between.

  The effect of these events was a kind of saturation of the local news media—which loved the fact that they had real stories to report, rather than having to use trickle down from the big news wires and national networks. From the first day of the campaign, Jesus had always shown a preference for doing things differently, partly to get publicity, and partly because that’s just who he was. But in California that tendency was turned up a couple of notches. He seemed to want to talk personally with every citizen of the state.

  In San Francisco he arranged a meeting with a bunch of big-money bankers and investors called the Feltonov Group, after Pavel Ivanovich Feltonov, the Russian-émigré, hedge fund billionaire. Strictly a behind-closed-doors event, this meeting was held in the San Francisco Hilton. I’d had a sit-down with the chief of police there, and with a state police captain, passed on word that there had been a specific threat to Jesus’s life (tho
ugh I said I had no more details than that), and they responded by giving us more protection than the Queen of England would have had. There were plainclothes sharpshooters on the roof of the hotel, motorcycle cops on all sides of us as we drove in from the airport, bomb-sniffing dogs in the fancy lobby.

  Jesus emerged from the meeting saying he’d had “substantive discussions on the future of green investing in all sectors of the American economy.” And that same afternoon Feltonov himself went on record as saying Jesus was the candidate who would best serve the economic interests of the American people. It was a huge endorsement as far as America’s business elite was concerned, and we saw an immediate upward bump in donations.

  A few hours later, Jesus earned another big endorsement, this one from the U.S. Association of Public School Teachers. He’d attended a book group at the home of a supporter in Marin County. In advance of this, the press had joked that no teachers could afford to live in Marin County, but this proved to be inaccurate: there was at least one. Andrea Welsh’s husband had made millions selling plastic fireplace inserts that looked like a real fire, but in spite of her wealth she’d kept her job as a sixth-grade teacher at Mill Valley Elementary, while raising three children and hosting a monthly book group with eleven well-connected women friends. That month they were reading Christ Stopped at Eboli, and someone in the group had half seriously suggested they inquire as to the possibility of Christ stopping at Marin. Zelda jumped on the idea. Jesus sipped tea, nibbled sandwiches, and spent an hour talking about the book (the first and last chapters of which he read on the ride up from San Jose), and though the title turned out to be misleading (it was an account of southern Italian poverty in the time of Mussolini; Christ made no appearance), they had a lively discussion nevertheless. Jesus suggested that, in place of No Child Left Behind, which teachers universally loathed, they develop a national program in which kids in elementary and middle school were required to spend part of every week reading to the blind, to people in nursing homes, to invalids, and so on, and then to write an essay about their experience at the end of the term. Andrea Welsh had invited the head of the USAPST, who loved this idea. So we got another big endorsement.

  Maybe the highlight of the Big State Tour, as Wales named it, was a meeting with its governor, Markus Stradivarius, a moderate Republican whose support Marjorie Maplewith had been courting for a year and a half. Stradivarius, a poet and descendant of the famous violin-making family, had emigrated to the U.S. from the Balkans and come to national prominence when he was chosen out of a comely pack of six young studs on Bachelorette’s Number One, a TV show that had been popular in the late nineties. No one understood how he had done it, but Stradivarius had parlayed his date with a Victoria’s Secret model, Zindy Zathro, into a career in politics. He’d had a couple of minor setbacks—a brief groping scandal, the whiff of rumor that the bachelorette show had been rigged—but had proved to be a survivor. He liked Jesus’s abortion conference idea, he said, and was intrigued (he pronounced it “intricked”) by the environmental economy comments, and though he stopped short of offering an endorsement, he did allow photographers to take a picture of him shaking Jesus’s hand, and he did promise to write a poem for the inauguration, should Jesus get that far.

  By the time we finished our three-and-a-half-week tour of California and flew to Medford, Oregon (more white limos waiting there), national polls showed Jesus with a double-digit lead in the largest electoral state, and it was clear which campaign had momentum and which did not. I don’t know if it was the “more woman” jab, or the empty challenge from her husband’s pulpit, but Republican hopeful Marjorie Maplewith’s campaign stops had taken on an unfortunately desperate mood. The crowds were small. Her frequent trips to California looked like a tardy attempt to counter Jesus’s flanking move there. It was common knowledge that her closest advisors were making a frenzied search for the right slogan.

  Colonel Alowich had figured out how to laugh in a more pleasing fashion—unh, unh, unh, instead of his teeth-revealing ha! … ha! … ha! — and that, combined with an energetic tour of the Northeast and a new proposal for improving public schools, had brought him back into a near dead heat for second. Unfortunately for him, he had hired disgraced advisors from the Dukakis and Kerry campaigns, and their advice was not always sound under pressure. In a blatant attempt to court the Ultimate Fighting vote, for instance, they sent Alowich moose hunting in Maine, even though he had not been known to have hunted since one weekend trip with his dad, in third grade. His campaign ran a spot showing him with a shotgun over his shoulder, a deep voice in the background intoning: “The man to keep America safe and strong!”

  Maplewith’s media people were not much more sophisticated.

  Her officially sanctioned (“Hi, I’m Margie Maplewith and I approve this ad”) effort was somewhat more decent than an unofficial ad, later attributed to her people, that showed a Jesus look-alike in drag, and played well in parts of Utah. The more widely circulated spot showed, in fast sequence, shaggy-headed antiwar protestors carrying signs that said ENDLESS!, racy scenes from a Girls Gone Wild segment on late-night cable TV, men in turbans shouting, “Down with America!” (in English, strangely enough), all of which, she seemed to be implying, were Jesus’s fault. He was shown in a still photo with his mouth open and his usually neat hair wind-blown and unruly. And then, much more slowly, and accompanied by John Philip Sousa music, the candidate herself came striding onto the stage of a small-town rally at which everyone was white and hundreds of flags were waving. The camera panned to a young girl in the front of the crowd, blonde and ecstatic, and then the announcer was heard asking: “Would you trust your children to be cared for by someone you don’t know? Someone who comes suddenly on the scene claiming to be good and pure? Someone who won’t commit to belonging to one party, one religion, or even to one gender? Someone who hasn’t spent his life in the United States of America but has wandered around doing things that cannot be verified? Or would you put their future in the hands of someone who has built a business, stayed true to her faith, served in the halls of Congress, a woman who has raised two fine children of her own in a stable, lasting marriage, and fought for the well being of families for thirty years? Now, and on Election Day, the choice is clear: Maplewith for president!”

  But everything they did had the scent of staleness to it. The American voters (and just as important, for our purposes, the American news media) had seen candidates giving speeches, shaking hands, leveling charges, talking technicalities, slinging slogans. What they had never seen before was a candidate who spent a whole precious morning hiking with three environmental engineers in the Cascades, or wielding a hammer—not for ten minutes, but for six hours—at the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in northern Oregon, where new houses were being built to replace those damaged in a mudslide. Jesus took a yoga class in Portland, went into nursing homes and gave speeches sitting in a wheelchair so he could “know what it felt like.” He had an apparently unlimited store of original ideas and, on that West Coast swing, he put them out on the table for us to accept or reject. And we accepted most of them, and watched the money and the endorsements pour in.

  Working on a political campaign can be tremendously seductive. When it’s going well, it is a thrill like almost no other, and through the last part of that summer it went very well for us. I remember one night, after a particularly large rally, when Zelda and I lay in bed unable to sleep. “It’s like people are doing a transference,” she said. “They’re projecting onto him an idealized version of their father, or themselves. And I feel like some of that is rubbing off on us, don’t you, Russ?”

  My mother had a slightly different take on the whole thing. At one point, after Jesus had gone kayaking on the Columbia River near a place called Chenoweth, she and I went for a stroll along the bank there, and she said, “Being around him makes me feel like I feel right after confession. It’s like all your sins have been forgiven.”

  “I don’t picture you having a lo
t of sins to forgive, Ma,” I told her.

  “Marrying out of the church?” she said, in a pained voice. “Being late for mass all the time, in the early days, because of your father’s … romantic advances.”

  She started to go on with the list, but I saw a small opening and stopped her. “I think Jesus is trying to say that the church, you know, well, it’s a big church. Big door. Anybody can walk in, and the rules aren’t as important as, I don’t know, loving your husband, for example.”

  She did not argue the point, which astonished me. I took it as a good sign.

  THIRTY-ONE

  We reached Seattle in late September, and we had three straightforward rallies there in two days—no surfing, no book discussions, no bull-riding or hiking or wheelchair rides—and huge police protection at all of them. The good will in California and Oregon had, I suppose, taken the edge off my paranoia. We were feeling the love, as Enrica Dominique put it, when, having taken a leave of absence from WZIZ, she joined us at the Seattle airport and saw how happy we looked. Enough time had passed since my brother’s teary talk about Jesus being shot that I no longer worried about it night and day. Still, I want to go on record as saying I did not slack up on the protection of the candidate. I had tried and tried to get him to wear a bulletproof vest and to have more indoor rallies, but he steadfastly refused. He did not mind the police around him, he said, but under no circumstances would he say yes to having his own Secret Service detail until the election was over. Given those restrictions, I did everything I could.

  Randy Zillins called again on our second morning in Seattle. I had not heard from him since our lilies of the field conversation. “Just want to let you know I went down to the Jesus headquarters in town and the place was mobbed,” he said. “I still can’t believe how many people are buying this act.”

  “What if it isn’t an act, R.Z.? Then what?”