The French Revolution

by Matt Stewart

  She owed them. Childhoods penned in under Fanny’s rule, recycled clothing, her own immobility and uselessness. Trading down kitchen stardom for the dumbest job in the world, missed sporting events and plays and back-to-school nights, helpless with homework, no mentorship or initiative, encouragement coming in derisive shots the kids couldn’t understand. Letting Marat’s dope-slanging fester in front of her, never laying down the law or highlighting applicable sentencing guidelines or offering replacement income in the form of a decent allowance. Lifelong financial mismanagement and her newfound gambling habit, burning money everywhere. How they pried Fanny free when she couldn’t, devising and executing a liability-proof suicide facilitation plan she hadn’t had the creativity or stomach for, the gray mark on their souls more than worth it: the sham contract burned in the fireplace, the ceaseless bitching abuse finally silenced, the elephant in the parlor returned to the jungle in the sky. The years lost to hyperobesity and lack of will, only clawing out through kid-imposed boot camp and calorie control. But she owed them the most for Jasper. And so long as breath was in her, she’d work their shitty jobs and smile her shitty smile, so they knew how much she regretted everything. To see her eat it when she didn’t have to, when the money was there. She’d volunteered to work at Marat’s hag-faced boss’s bagel venture because she was a world-class chef, a master of quality control and kitchen hygiene, she understood how to calm customers when tempers flared and had decades of management experience, and of course she could process data faster than anyone she’d ever met and might as well use the skills she had—but mostly she did it because of Jasper.

  Haunting her sleep for decades. Capturing stardust on the stereo.

  The impossible spiritual hero she never would have let him become.

  A moon big as a basketball hung over the Bay Bridge. In the Fairmont hotel ballroom, a Buick with tinted windows puttered onstage, Tiny Jake driving. The stage clogged with smoke, the car eased to a stop, two toots on the horn and out from the passenger side rolled Jasper Winslow, Werewolf, shriveled like an old cat and decked out in blue basketball warm-ups. He smiled and tap-danced a little for the moshing crowd, slick socialites sloshing cocktails and shoving for position, already convinced their ten-thousand-dollar donations were worth it.

  He hopped around the stage and went back to the car, pulled the seat back, and helped a woman climb out. She was dressed in an identical jumpsuit, thick round sunglasses, her hair pulled in a shiny ponytail, giant hoop earrings weighed down to her shoulders, a strained mouth-tucked smile. She walked stiffly, her swing a beat off, something phony about her style. Wasn’t until she started giggling up tears that the crowd realized it was Candidate Robespierre, and detonated.

  “Hello,” Jasper said into the microphone, breathy and punch-less over the din. “My daughter, Robespierre Van Twinkle. Next mayor of San Francisco.” Robespierre pushed her smile wide, looking young and uncharacteristically hesitant, her father’s arm a feather boa on her shoulders.

  “Lots of you know my daughter and I were apart for a long time,” he gasped. “So it’s good to be here with her. Made so much out of herself without me helpin’. I couldn’t be prouder.” Beside him Robespierre’s face retreated, she raised a hand over her eyes. The crowd burned with noise.

  “Think about all this woman done. Leading the movement against the foulest war America ever fought. Taking a stand against what’s wrong. Got the guts to go further than anybody says she should, take her Supervisor role to the federal government and raise the issue. Getting down in the trenches to make it better.” He slid back a step, propped a fist under his chin. “Beautiful, ain’t she?”

  He picked the mic off the stand and started to sing. She slipped down to the floor, her head hanging over her lap. It was hard to hear or see her father’s serenade over the crowd’s shouting, but those up front could make out the faded lyrics, “Hello Again” by Neil Diamond. He sat down next to her spinning out long notes, hopscotching the circle of fifths, harmonizing with himself, Tiny Jake mashing the drums up-tempo. The song ended, and she stood up and hugged him so hard he burped. She wiped her sunglasses on her jacket and blinked butterfly wings into the stage lights. The microphone moved into her hand.

  “My father. Jasper Winslow. Everyone . . . ”

  The applause defeated her. “A man . . . ” she took two long breaths “ . . . a man who exemplifies what this city is about. A city of compassion and opportunity. A great, majestic city that leads the country on the edge of the sea. My father.”

  In the back of the ballroom, Marat chewed gum a step or two in front of Joel Lumpkin, blocking him from the curious glances of donors who’d seen him around and wondered if he was a war victim here to raise awareness, deformed from uranium exposure, face melted from Iranian cluster bombs. A head arresting for its chemical odor, multiple layers of makeup topped with several unnecessary loads of hairspray plastering down his trademark buzz cut. The outlandish white suit Joel insisted on wearing attracted extra attention, white shoes white slacks white gloves white blazer white vest white top hat, accented with aviator sunglasses and a camel-bone cane. A porn-star circus ringmaster; even for San Francisco, a sight.

  “All this self-love shit,” Joel mumbled. “We’re the best, pretty and expensive, rah rah. Like a goddamn pep rally.”

  “It is a rally,” Marat reminded him, though in principle he agreed; the fawning oratory felt like overkill even for his finagling sis.

  “We’re a family here,” Robespierre continued. “We take care of one another. That means boosting the minimum wage. Building homes people can afford. World-class health care for everybody, I don’t care who.”

  From the crowd somewhere: Stop the War! They swelled around the call, sang it out like a hymn, in rounds.

  Robespierre held her hand to the light. “That’s my issue. You know that. There’s no other public servant against the war more than me. It’s getting our kids killed. It’s encouraging terrorism. It’s feeding extremism. It’s built on a foundation of lies and oil-company shareholders. You know me and where I stand.”

  “In front of a tank!” a shout came, and they remembered her trip to Iran, her interviews with soldiers and Iranian peasants. Her good fortune sitting in the backseat when an IED exploded along the road to the Tehran airport, her escorts not as lucky, their brains piling in her lap.

  Like banshees the crowd yipped and bucked.

  As Marat brooded below the din, he noticed a pair of young women a few rows in front of him, Asian girls in black satin dresses and gold jewelry, touching each other’s arms. Discreetly he tracked them through the rest of his sister’s speech and his dad’s next few songs, their slight hips swaying, their lean curved backs, knuckled spines. Hair long and glossy, the color of outer space. His prick tingled, he felt motion. God, it had been a long time.

  When Werewolf launched into “We Built this City,” Marat asked the woman closest to him to dance.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, wrapping her fingers around her purse defensively. “I’m married.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” he said. “Maybe your friend then.”

  “That’s my wife.”

  Marat gave silent thanks for the most erotic constitutional amendment ever. “Oh—thanks for coming,” he backpedaled. “That’s my dad and sister up there.”

  “Yeah, right,” the first one said. “What’s your name, King Louis? Richelieu?”

  “Actually, it’s Marat. No kidding.” A slug of pride struck about how San Franciscans knew the history of their names, often going on to offer opinions about Republicanism and gluttonous monarchs, stringing connections between the Revolution and the Hegelian dialectic and the roots of French identity.

  “Marat!” exclaimed the second one. “How’d you wind up with those wild names?”

  “My parents wanted to make it easy for me to start conversations with women,” he said, selecting one of the dozens of responses he’d come up with over the years. “What’s your name?”<
br />
  “I’m Marie Antoinette,” said the first one. “And this is Cake.”

  “I have bad news,” Marat said. “Things may end badly.”

  “Don’t they always?” asked Cake.

  “Let’s dance,” Marie Antoinette said, “just us.” She took Cake’s hand and led her to a patch of open space amid couples and canoodling hippies. They danced forgetfully, three feet apart, eyes flashing around the room in a slow undirected swirl, no mojo to speak of. After a few minutes of aimless bouncing, they were confronted by the pillar of marble known as Joel Lumpkin.

  “I’ll pay a hundred thousand dollars to watch you two get it on,” he said through level lips.

  “Excuse me,” said Marie Antoinette. “Who are you?”

  “I own the place,” he whispered.

  “Then you know where the free booze is,” Cake suggested.

  “What, the Fairmont? I thought the holding company was publicly traded,” wondered Marie Antoinette, whose mother managed a boutique hotel in St. Helena and kept her relatively up to date on the Bay Area hospitality scene.

  “Come with me,” he said. “I’ll explain.”

  They followed him cautiously to the bar, where he produced his business card and a round of champagne, then detailed the elaborate stock leverage plan he’d developed to wrest control of the hotel, listed the directors on his payroll. They listened intently.

  He offered them another hundred grand for video, with sound.

  And before Werewolf could drool down to “Amazing Grace,” Joel Lumpkin walked back to his private elevator with the wives on his arms, chatting about decorating themes for the grand entrance and the ideal rum for mai tais. A Twinkie, Joel later described it, pasty white cream surrounded by yellow fluff.

  Back on the floor, Marat pulled out a joint and puffed it until the smoke beat back the fire ants scrambling under his skin, until people started pointing and coughing and he offered a toke to a chubby purple-haired lady who obviously blazed. She dismissed him with a double-chinned grimace.

  “Why not?” he asked. Suddenly he wanted to fuck her, to see if he could fuck her or fuck anything, find out how to fuck again.

  “Smoking inside’s illegal,” she said.

  “And disgusting,” somebody added.

  “It’s weed. We’re at a concert.” The pot sheared off the edges, put the knives away. “You wanna dance?”

  He put the blunt to his mouth again and took in the heat. When the smoke floated away, he was alone on the floor, a ten-foot bubble around him. He danced by himself, slow shambles and arm wiggles and the rhythmic ingestion of spine-melting marijuana steam. Werewolf’s voice was all jumpy though, singing new notes and swapping out words to songs Marat thought he knew, which fouled up his rhythm and betrayed the balance he was closing in on.

  “Play some goddamn reggae!” he bellowed after his father wound down a Garth Brooks cover, filling a dead moment with a demand that was both unreasonably on point and heard by every last person in the auditorium. His father nodded a couple of times, stomped his heel, licked his thumb and traced it over his shiny head, walked ponderously left to right across the stage.

  Running down deh alleyway

  Thieves and children coincide

  Daylight catching up to me

  Until I finally learn to fly

  By the time he hit the chorus the crowd owned the song. Arms hung over shoulders, illuminated cellphone screens flickering Rasta peace.

  Come and soar past deh moon

  Round round deh sun

  And into Jah heart

  Into Jah heart

  Into Jah heart

  In the voices of millions. Marat sang clouds of smoke, wandering to the edge of his buffer zone and aiming to latch onto a comrade, the purple-haired chubby chick, any live human being. His good arm could not find purchase, each targeted cosinger slinking out of reach when he sidled in. What else to do but smoke and smoke until all he could hear or see were stars, the gold fragments glittering in his eyes, the spangled guards entering his private zone and lusciously asking him to come along. Played that game in high school, he laughed, got his arm smashed up for the pleasure. They smiled back with strong teeth and let him clutch onto their shoulders, towing him through heavy oak doors and columned foyers with tiered light fixtures, the fire in his blood devolving to chilled gas and the barest air as security ejected him into the cold.

  Marat Van Twinkle’s first act of the day was to take an atomic dump. He had developed this routine in the army, when mornings on base were the only time all day he’d been near running water with sports magazines on hand. His bathroom stop was brief, just long enough to speed-read a single article before using a modicum of toilet paper for wiping, lighting a match, and moving to the shower.

  In Iran there hadn’t been space for masturbation between the group showers, crowded latrines, days riding in Humvees taking potshots from Iranian civilians. This had resulted in a frothy temper, frazzled nerves. An urge to fire his weapon more frequently. So in the spacious shower in his Pacific Heights mansion, a dab of shampoo on his palm and two minutes later the violence was out for a few hours. His staff was aware of his friendlier disposition early in the day but had yet to figure out the reason.

  Usually he played golf or tennis from 7:30 to 9:00. This depended on the size of his hangover. His biggest deals were conducted in this period, sucking down beers and spliffs, betting hundreds of dollars per point, his high-stakes partners appreciating his irascible edge. He was ineffective at golf and didn’t like it, his bad arm only in the way, the minimal physical exertion and posthole celebratory pot smoking not enough to ward off the sense of imminent terror creeping back in. Tennis was more active, his one-handed backhand deadly accurate, all the sprinting and squeaking pleasurable to his drug-heightened senses. Somewhat spent, he was at his most agreeable during his morning tennis match, most flexible on his terms. Some of his business partners found a way to like him then.

  Marat was kingfish at Lumpkin’s associated offices, running the ad agency, the bagel shop, most of the real estate projects. They’d landed in Iran together courtesy of the SFPD and a mutually despised anonymous tipster, felony drug and assault charges dropped for the pleasure, and a couple of targeted bribes pushed them into the same unit for the duration of their prescribed five-year tours. Lumpkin hit sleaze bottom with his spying and extortion scheme, but he’d paid Marat extremely well for his help scouting and deflecting suspicion, managing the surveillance film library, building up his blackmail. And as with pot, Marat’s life-style grew to require it. When they returned to San Francisco—Marat with his blown arm, Lumpkin with his boxes of video—Joel came through as promised: a mind-boggling salary, a choice job, an immaculate résumé that made Marat one of the most hirable executives in his age bracket. He’d thought he’d get out when there was a good opportunity, but when offers to run flashy startups and established powers came in, he turned them down. His work wasn’t boring, he rationalized, he did a lot of critical thinking, mostly he was the boss, no complaints whatsoever on money, and when he didn’t talk to Joel for a while he got to feeling OK.

  It was only at night, enjoying the opulent view from his wrap-around deck and absorbing Buju Banton playlists through a green fog, when the true state of the world sponged him. A family he couldn’t trust, his only friends the ex-security guards from high school, a career that failed to improve the universe in any way, the gnawing certainty that everything he ever did was tainted. Fallout pulsated with the music’s juicy bass lines: the death of his untreated grandmother, ruined soldiers, end runs around pot laws and supporting Colombian drug cartels and propelling the biggest asshole he’d ever met into unimaginable wealth. The humiliating attacks on his staff, just because he could. This was the world he’d made.

  Upon arriving at work he showered again. The desert dust was always on him. The ad agency senior staff meeting was at 10:30, account directors and star creatives selling him their crap to sell crap, the irony seem
ingly lost on everyone but him. He listened as long as he could take it, asking clipped questions, ragging on his staff’s cheap clothes, curtailing discussion with a gravelly throat clearing, answering his cellphone with exaggerated volume.

  The morning after Robespierre’s mayoral kick-off bash in February 2019, Marat endured a nine-hole ass-whupping at the hands of his real estate broker, his head shattered with alcohol. Getting outbid for Marie Antoinette and Cake rumbled in his stomach, along with four bong hits, two jelly donuts, and a quart of black coffee poached from the kitchen.

  By the time the senior staff meeting rolled around, he was percolating.

  “Levi’s brand strength has always been tied to American roots and a sense of authenticity,” Garrett began. He was lean and wore a Hawaiian shirt with teal sharks eating palm trees, Dickies painter pants, a straw hat with a beer logo, argyle socks with red sneakers, unflinchingly overcreative.

  “Historically,” Garrett continued, “Levi’s has emphasized frontier, rural settings and urban America in their advertising. The cowboy. The hipster. Rough ’n’ ready heterosexual icons. The American Dream.”

  A heavy gong shook in his skull; twists of stomach bile spouted up to his mouth. “Enough with the God-bless-America bull,” he raged, “there’s too much jingoist crap out there already.”

  “You’re right.” Garrett’s green stoplight eyes bored in on him across the conference table. Marat hesitated. This reaction was precisely why he’d hired Garrett in the first place.

  “Consumers are tired of the old stereotypes. We want to take this in a new direction. Suburbia.” A row of identical aluminum-sided homes flashed onto a projection screen, mirrored yards and lawn equipment, the same forgettable cars in the driveways.

  “Suburbs get a bad rap,” said Maureen, the new creative director, tall and muscular with a wide round nose like a doorknob. “Boring, sterile, lots of driving. But people move to the suburbs for a sense of community. Family. To own a yard and deck and garage, paid for with the money they earned. It’s the new authentic America.”