I beamed as if I had just offered my favorite nephew a choice job. I took my arm off Dent’s shoulder and moved in front of him, gesturing with both hands. “I want to hear a little communication here, Bruce. The problem with the world today, nobody communicates enough. I want to include it in my own personal New Bill of Rights. Humans must communicate more.”
Bruce Dent stared at me. “How much does a deputy campaign manager make?”
“Assistant deputy campaign manager, Bruce. Now we’re talking.”
—
I met Sandy Morrison late in the afternoon at her suite at the Royal Orleans on Bourbon Street. It was a sprawling space, with louvered windows and French doors leading out to a balcony overlooking a courtyard. The curtains were drawn and the air conditioning was on so high that I shivered as I stepped inside the room, sweat forming in the small of my back. Somewhere Brazilian jazz was playing. It felt like a nightclub.
Sandy was wearing a tailored red suit that seemed to match her fingernails perfectly. It didn’t look accidental. In a high wingback chair, she crossed her legs and steepled her hands.
“Of course I can do it,” she said.
“But will we get caught?” I knew the answer, but I just wanted to hear some reassurance.
Sandy shrugged. “If we use my people, my regular phone banks, maybe. You never know who might talk. Christ, J.D., I have twenty-two hundred people who make phone calls for me in a dozen cities. You think I can nursemaid every one of them? All I can do is strangle them when they fuck up.”
She smiled. It seemed to be a notion that had particular appeal to her.
She stood and walked over to the curtains in front of the French doors leading onto the balcony. Pulling them back, she revealed a stunning Asian woman in a string bikini lying on a chaise longue. She looked to have been doused in oil.
Sandy let the curtain drop. “Nineteen,” she mouthed, almost shivering in delight. She crossed over and picked up a pack of menthol cigarettes off the wet bar and lit one with a gold cigarette lighter. She snapped it closed with a hard click, inhaling half the cigarette in one long gulp.
I’d used Sandy Morrison phone banks for years before we finally met, when I was running a Texas governor’s race and found myself in her home base of Dallas. To my astonishment, she insisted on picking me up in a limo and took me on an all-night tour of Dallas’s strip clubs, the “best tittie bar circuit in the world,” she’d proudly announced. All the doormen had known her and many of the dancers. I’d never seen anybody have as much fun.
At the final club of the evening, a massive place known as VIP, with what seemed like hundreds of dancers, Sandy had summoned a dozen of the most attractive to a private room known as the Champagne Club and, with obvious delight, told me to take my pick, any or all would be happy to accompany me back to the Mansion on Turtle Creek hotel, where I was staying. More overwhelmed than aroused, I passed.
“You sure, honey?” she’d asked, gently waving a handful of hundred-dollar bills toward the women. Sandy fanned the bills between her fingers, like a Vegas dealer. I wondered where she had learned the trick. “You take that car back, sweetie, ’cause little Sandy is going to have herself some fun. God, I do love being rich.”
When I left, she was surrounded by the dancers, handing out hundred-dollar bills like candy to children. She was smiling and looked supremely pleased to be alive.
“We elect your Hilda, she going to take away my cigarettes?” That was one of the accusations Armstrong George had made, that a President Hilda Smith would push to make tobacco illegal.
“God, I hope so,” I said.
“Fuck you,” Sandy said, lighting up another. She held the smoke for a moment, then blew it in my direction.
“Fuck you, too.” I smiled at her.
“Here’s how it ought to work,” she announced. “What we do is get somebody else to make the calls. I hire another outfit, a small firm, and tell them that I was approached by Armstrong George’s campaign to make the calls but couldn’t do it because I was already working for Hilda Smith. But I thought she was going to lose and wanted to help Armstrong George, so I was setting it up.”
I thought about it for a minute. It was a typically devious and effective Sandy plan. “I like it,” I said.
“Okay. Great. How are you going to pay for it?”
“Let’s talk about that,” I said.
“Okay,” Sandy agreed, sitting back down. She always liked to talk about money.
“I can come up with the money from Host Committee funds. It’s such a mess, nobody will notice.”
The balcony doors opened and the young woman walked into the room, trailing a towel. She smiled at Sandy, ignoring me completely. “This damn city smells,” she said.
“Yes,” Sandy answered. Her eyes seemed to narrow a bit as she watched the athletic woman walk across the room to the bedroom door.
“God, I do love being rich,” Sandy said, after a pause.
“About money,” I said.
Sandy focused on me, smiling slightly. “Yes, J.D.? What’s wrong? You look squirrelly.”
“Well…,” I started, then stopped.
Sandy laughed. “After all these years we’ve been doing business and I’ve tried to throw some sugar your way, are you now trying to tell me you want to get a little profit-sharing plan going?”
“Not really.” We stared at each other for a moment, then I shrugged. “Well, maybe.”
“Jesus Christ, J.D., just spit it out. You’re the only campaign manager I work with who doesn’t demand a piece of the action. You’ve given me a shitload of business. You deserve a piece.”
There it was. Now all I had to do was say yes. She’d been trying to give me money for years. There was no reason not to take it. It didn’t have to be called a kickback, it could be a finder’s fee. Or a profit-sharing arrangement. She was right. I’d never gone in for it, but this sort of stuff happened all the time in politics.
“Maybe,” I finally said. “But not to me. If we did anything, I might want you to make a contribution to a little organization run by Tobias Green.”
Sandy started laughing, then coughing as her cigarette smoke went in the wrong direction. “Tobias Green?” She coughed some more, and as her face strained and turned red, I thought she looked ten years older. Little lines stood out on the edges of her face that I figured were left over from face-lifts. “That poverty pimp?”
“He’s a great American and civil rights hero.”
“He tried to screw me at the 2000 convention.”
“I’m sure he wasn’t the only one.”
“He comes up to me at some bullshit cocktail party and says in that deep voice of his, ‘My dear, have you ever made love to a black man?’ ”
“What did you say?”
“I told him I’d arranged for a gang bang by a small group of Dallas Cowboys just two weeks earlier for my birthday, thank you very much.”
“Good. Very good.”
“Then I showed him a little Polaroid souvenir I just happened to have in my purse. We still had those things then, Polaroids. Then I told him to go to hell.” Sandy smiled. “I had different tastes then.”
“I see.” I tried to push the image of Sandy and the football players out of my head. She was joking, wasn’t she?
“You’re blushing,” she teased, and it annoyed me because I realized she was right.
“I’m a family-values guy, Sandy. You know that.”
“Right. Just ask that little press aide of yours you’re screwing.”
God, this woman knew everything. That was why she was so good at her job. It was the key to her sales techniques. “Look, Tobias is helping my brother with a little independent expenditure campaign and I might be trying to arrange for some donations.”
“I love your brother,” she said immediately.
“You do?” I had a horrible image of Tyler and Sandy hanging out together at his club.
“What’s wrong? Is this supposed to be som
e kind of secret? Everybody loves Paul Callahan.”
“Right.” That brother. What a relief she was talking about my convicted felon brother, not the other one. That was the fast slide to nowhere I was riding.
“What’s going on? You embarrassed because he went to the slammer? This is Louisiana, honey, nobody gives a damn. He never bet against LSU. Now that would have been a problem.”
“We sorta been out of touch for a while,” I said, as if that explained it. “He’s running for public service commissioner, and Tobias Green has been so moved to help his candidacy with a little independent expenditure committee since my brother is such a man of the people and champion of lower rates.”
Sandy laughed. She knew all the lines. “Okay. How much cut do you want?”
I didn’t say anything.
“What are you, the last Boy Scout? Jesus, J.D., it’s just business.”
Of course it was. Just business. I thought about all the things I had done over the years that most people would find repugnant: the nasty attack ads, the opposition research teams I’d put onto opponents to find everything possibly incriminating, lives I’d probably ruined. Not once had I ever blinked. But this was one thing I had never done: I’d never stolen, never skimmed, never diverted a dime. I’d always played the money straight down the middle.
“A hundred and twenty-five thousand.”
She waved her hand dismissively. “You want me to call the home number of every delegate in town?” Sandy finally asked, moving on. “So it gets back to them here at the convention chop-chop, right?”
“And other key members of their influence circles.”
“You want the delegates to hear from people they know, get an echo chamber going.”
“That’s it.”
“I’ll do a zip sort of the delegates and match it with my key opinion leaders list. You’ll get the media types, mayors, Rotary Club chairmen.”
“Perfect.”
“You got a questionnaire?”
I handed her a piece of paper with six questions typed on it. For an instant I worried about fingerprints, but then realized that was silly—if Sandy wanted to screw me, she had plenty of ammunition without fingerprints.
“Short,” she said. “I like that.”
“I want maximum hits. Few hang-ups.”
Sandy Morrison read from the list of questions. “ ‘If you knew that Vice President Hilda Smith had once had an abortion, would it make you more or less likely to support her for president?’ ” Sandy whistled. “Nice. You know my position on abortion,” she said.
“No, Sandy, I can’t say that I do.”
“I believe in the college rule.”
“Yes?”
“Until they go away to college, a parent ought to have a right to reconsider.” She continued to read. “This true?”
“Does it matter?”
“Not as long as my check clears.” She smiled.
“It will.”
—
There was always a long line in front of Galatoire’s, which was just one of the reasons I hated it. The place represented just about everything I’d come to resent about New Orleans: it was old, self-congratulatory to a fault, stuck in its way for no purpose, and celebrated its dullness. This idea that you get great food in New Orleans has always been sort of a fraud concocted by gluttonous locals as an excuse to glorify the fact that they were just like everybody else: they liked to eat and did it too much. But if you hung a nice picture frame of supposed gustatory greatness around the out-of-control hunger, it made it somehow chic and high-minded, not just another bunch of folks who loved to stuff their faces. It was sort of brilliant, like the lazy turning sleeping into a much valued art. Instead of Food & Wine you could have Napping. But there weren’t a half-dozen restaurants in New Orleans that could bump up against the top fifty in LA or New York or even Miami, another overheated hellhole but at least one that had a lot more vitality than New Orleans. Sure, there was better food than, say, in Jackson or Baton Rouge, but “New Orleans as a food heaven” was a lot like the city itself: better if you didn’t look too close.
Jessie Fenestra, the oh-so-famous local columnist, was standing by the door to the side, chatting with the maître d’. Seeing her in person, I recognized her right away, very tall and thin, standing with a cigarette in hand, her head held at a quirky angle, as if she were always on the verge of asking a question. She wore oversized sunglasses, like Jackie O at Hyannis Port.
It was a sight I remembered well from the parking lot of our high school in Metairie. She was always surrounded by a cluster of girls, prettier than she was in a typical way, but she had a flair that clearly made her the leader. To a skinny sophomore like me, obsessed with bikes and guitars, she seemed as distant and unapproachable as a queen in a horse-drawn carriage. There were rumors about her, too, that she was “hot,” a term that seemed oddly inappropriate and thus all the more appealing for this cool creature who was always so composed.
“J.D.,” she said now, dropping her cigarette and grinding it under her heel, “you look like a million goddamn bucks. I knew you’d come.” As if I had a choice after she’d called me and told me how good it was to hear my voice, and how proud she was of me, did you read my column on you, and, by the way, somebody tells me the FBI has been talking to you and maybe there are some problems? Could we talk? The deep, rough voice didn’t match the elegant figure. She leaned down and kissed me on the cheek, roughing my hair slightly. It felt like I was meeting an affectionate aunt, not a reporter who had threatened to tell the world that some wacko at the FBI had me pegged for a cynical bomber.
She pulled me by the arm into the high-ceiling cool of Galatoire’s, past the two dozen or so waiting in line, since Galatoire’s made it part of their charm not to accept any reservations. “They love me here,” she said by way of explanation. We settled in a corner table for four. “What’s the point of being a big deal in New Orleans if you can’t get a good table? I have reached the height of New Orleans ambition. I can eat at Galatoire’s without waiting in line.” She laughed mockingly.
“Jessie,” I asked, “could you take your sunglasses off? I feel like we’re in an old Sopranos episode.”
She smiled but didn’t move to take off the glasses. “It’s part of my local color. It’s important when you are a minor celebrity in a small town like New Orleans to cultivate eccentricity. Believe me, the glasses are the most harmless way I’ve come up with yet.”
“I see,” I said, then asked what I knew she wanted me to. “What were the other ways?”
She shrugged and pulled out a cigarette. It was a moment from a French film, Jean Seberg in Breathless. “The usual.” She thought for a moment. “Wore a see-through gown to the Bacchus ball, dated the Saints’ starting defensive tackle for a while. Black. Three hundred and forty pounds. That was after I divorced Wayne and swore I’d never wake up with another football player. I lied. Was seen all over town with a certain Hollywood actress when she was in town shooting a film. Everyone whispered that we were lovers. They were right.” She took a long pull from her cigarette. “You know, the usual.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“It was. But then you run out of new stuff. You know this place, J.D., it’s a total cul-de-sac for those of us who never got out. We’re doomed to spend our lives trying to shock the same people every day. It gets old.”
Food started arriving, though we had never ordered. Two martinis appeared. My God, I thought, martinis. This is a town where people still drink martinis at five o’clock in the afternoon.
“They know me,” she said, by way of explanation. Then, tiredly, “Everyone knows me. I’m famous.” She sighed. “Just so famous.”
She took a long drink from the martini and seemed to visibly perk up. “Like you, J.D. You saw my column? My yearly wet kiss. You don’t know how lucky you are. I rarely write anything nice about the living. The dead, I like the dead. This is a town that celebrates the dead, and I am the number one celebran
t.”
She raised her martini glass in a salute and downed it with a flourish. I had a feeling I wasn’t the first one to see this little act—the martinis, the death spiel—but it still had a certain sparkle.
“Jessie,” I said, looking around the restaurant, wondering how many people there knew who I was, either delegates or New Orleans friends or, worse yet, reporters. What in God’s name would they think of me sitting across from this woman drinking martinis the day before the convention began? I couldn’t even remember the last time I had actually sat down to a meal in a restaurant.
“You know what a tornado and a southern divorce have in common?” she asked suddenly. “Somebody’s gonna lose a trailer.” Another martini had appeared on the table and she took a long sip from it. “That one was the hit of the newsroom this morning. Such wits surround me.”
“Jessie,” I began again. “I have this distinct memory of you on the telephone telling me that you were going to write a column about me and some FBI rumors. I got a few things on my mind, but I do distinctly remember that conversation. Or tell me I made it up. That’s fine. I don’t really care. But let’s not pretend it never happened.”
When I finished, I realized people were staring at me and Jessie had a shocked and bemused look.
“Wow. You’ve changed,” she said. “Do you shout a lot now or was that just a show?”
A few people were taking pictures of us with their phones. I slumped back in my chair. I was so used to shouting at everybody that it seemed normal. I was beginning to act like some barely domesticated animal that easily fell back into its feral ways. Jessie took a long drag of her cigarette and stared through her oversized sunglasses. “I like that. Passion. How’s your brother?”
“My brother?” Which brother? I had been crazy to agree to see her. Of course she would know about Tyler. She lived in New Orleans. She was a reporter. She loved New Orleans characters. Probably used to go out with Tyler, part of his little network of wackos. Oh, this was just great.
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