The French Revolution

by Matt Stewart

  They filmed the new commercial on Fisherman’s Wharf, Joel in a banker’s suit and skinny black tie strolling past beggars and street performers, trinkets on blankets, spray-paint artists, ramshackle one-man bands. In the distance sea lions wrestled on wooden rafts. The sky smelled of diesel fuel and dirty salt.

  “San Francisco is a city of experiences,” Joel said to the camera as he walked along a dock. “I want to make the San Francisco experience better for our residents and businesses, to make important neighborhoods like Fisherman’s Wharf thrive. Building one of the most successful companies in the state has given me unique perspective on how to build a winning organization.” He stopped in front of a tourist shop, racks of cheap sweatshirts pulled onto the sidewalk. “As founder of Home Safe, a national nonprofit, I’ve helped thousands of foster kids grow up safe.” The camera panned down the wharf, fat tourists and bad restaurants, the only Hooters in town. “Join me, Joel Lumpkin, to help San Francisco grow up safe.”

  “You’ve got my vote,” Marat told him from off camera, still amazed that Joel didn’t know Fisherman’s Wharf was strictly for visitors, the black sheep of San Francisco, faker than a four-titted whore; not to mention the ad’s tagline, implying childishness and frivolity, insulting as a comparison to San Diego.

  “That was good,” Joel admitted. He kicked a fluttering bus schedule off the dock into the bay and raised his arms in victory.

  They played the shit out of the spot, five times during every local newscast for two months, during all the primetime sitcoms and NASCAR broadcasts, every ten minutes on the giant television screen on Market Street, right after the hourly station ID on the rap radio stations. They sponsored monster truck rallies and chili cook-offs, Joel outfitted in a silver-and-green vinyl jumpsuit and taking questions from a Harley sidecar; they sponsored a blimp to drift over the city with Joel’s name in cloud-gray across its envelope. FOX signed on for a reality television show, On the Trail with Joel Lumpkin, which, despite the 1 AM timeslot, pulled decent ratings because Joel swore a lot, got around in a helicopter, and took the camera crew along on his paid dates with supermodels.

  Gradually Joel Lumpkin, Independent candidate for mayor, crept up to 12 percent in the polls, in sole possession of third place.

  “I did some math on the plane,” Joel told Marat upon his return from a quick trip to Bahrain, where a subsidiary was constructing the tallest building in the world. “At twenty million dollars for approximately seventy thousand votes, that comes out to 285 dollars per vote. For the pleasure of getting my ass kicked.”

  “If you don’t like my work, fire me,” said Marat, his response prepared months ago. “I’m an ad guy, not a campaign manager. Your problem is the issues. You’re an outsider, and you haven’t told anybody where you stand. What do you expect?”

  “For 285 dollars a vote, I expect to win.”

  “People want to know why you’re putting so much effort in to this. Why do you want the job?”

  “Isn’t that obvious?”

  Marat knew he was in it for uncreative reasons, wealth and power on a colossal scale, his obsession with erecting huge buildings and lots of little ones too. Nouveau riche going for nouveau richer. “You need a real answer,” he said. “Even the biggest ad campaign in city history isn’t gonna win San Francisco by itself.”

  Silence over the phone line, Marat cocked up in his chair. “I want dirt,” Joel huffed, trying to sound pissed but underneath pretty pleased he’d smashed an advertising record or two. “Info, skeletons, shit; everything she’s fucked, I wanna know. Everything your parents fucked up on, that too. I’ll pay you twenty million dollars.”

  The number bounced around Marat’s head, the limitless untamed future of fortune. “Why should I believe you’ll pay me?” he asked.

  “I’ll put it in escrow. Arrange it with Ankra.”

  Marat spun his chair toward his office window, the tinted light marking the edge of the day. “You know about the thing in Iran,” he squeaked.

  “Let me think about it. Army jack-off threatens to kill his pathetic, sloppy, communist sister in the middle of a war zone, proceeds to get his ass beat. Rewarded with cushy job by Mayoral Candidate Me. Not helpful.”

  Marat nodded to no one in particular. His parents had been pathetic and sloppy, his whole life had been pathetic and sloppy—and here, at last, was a way to get clean.

  “I’ll find something,” he snapped, and hung up before Joel could change his mind.

  She would be content just relaxing, she told him. Maybe she could garden, or learn Japanese. He kissed her and said he’d do anything for her, honest, so why waste her life on bullshit when her heart was firm on desserts? She was still good at it, her gorging instincts all burned off, the city tiring of Element’s dominance and ready for a change of scenery. As for Zoogman, Jasper’d heard on the T.V. that he’d been thrown in the slammer for drunk driving and tax evasion, his mug shot described as a more metallic Frankenstein. If pastries were still her thing, Jasper’d fund it, do it right.

  Esmerelda opened Luna in the Mission in the summer of 2019. Jasper arranged the financing, put his legal team on the contracts. He sang for opening night, the Buick towed in from Vegas, Tiny Jake slapping skins, unveiling a new album’s worth of material as carts covered in grapefruit soufflés and marigold muffins trundled from table to table. The buzz was sensational, the crowds voracious and forgiving. The comeback of a culinary myth: from anonymous fall to magnificent resurrection, complete with Grammy-winning soundtrack.

  Luna had misted glass walls, floors stained Israeli blue, the name scripted in pink neon and flickering softly onto 15th Street. Diners entered through a dome modeled on Casablanca’s Grand Mosque, took drinks at a long maple bar salvaged from a Memphis truck stop, and rode a moving sidewalk past a graffiti remake of Guernica to their mod table constructed of industrial plastic. An open fire hissed in the center of the dining room; an old Victrola honked out jazz in the corner. Jasper’s gold records hung from the ceiling, strung up with wire and twinkling.

  Entrenched in the kitchen, Esmerelda crafted plates, bullied staff, enforced quality control, and badgered suppliers over the phone, breaking periodically to parade out to the dining room and defend her desserts from uninformed critiques. During the day she devised recipes, experimenting with beakers and Bunsen burners, sampling fruits flown in from Asia and Africa, building a comprehensive collection of the world’s greatest chocolates. She planted an organic wheat field in drained marsh-land by the airport and turned the crop to flour in a mill she installed in the restaurant attic, then added yeast and desalinated ocean water, pumped in purified oxygen during the kneading process, and baked world-class bread over smoldering Scottish peat in a dedicated hillside kiln. Every day after the lunch rush she walked down to the Mission Pool and swam laps, the chlorinated stress burn she called it, coming back rambunctious and at her most creative, hitting her peak as the big spenders rolled in. During crunch time she was indefatigable, a finger in every mixing bowl, jotting down new ideas at a hundred miles a minute, taking no breaks and still outshining her younger, friskier, and narcotics-powered staff. She attributed her stamina to the exercise regimen, her sensible diet, and a delirious trepidation that had taken root in her head: she knew how good she had it and would never again piss it away.

  She invented vanilla soup, jalapeño chutney pie, baked bananas infused with pineapple reduction sauce, Fluffernutter cake layered with raspberry jam. She torched ice cream and froze fondue into popsicles, coated oranges with anise and sprinkled with gummy bears, flambéed star fruit in grappa and served hot slices on graham crackers. Out in her wheat field she caught insects, mostly flies and ladybugs, which she roasted over a mesquite flame and encased in butterscotch fudge for a dish called Cretaceous Amber. Her desserts were Petri dishes of flavors, she explained, reminding anyone who asked about inspiration that when you work in a copy shop for twenty-five years, the ideas pile up. For the old-timers who remembered her glory days at Inc
ognito she brought back the oatmeal cookies, still fabulous and trapezoidal and topped with luscious homemade ice cream, the only tradition she allowed was worth keeping.

  It took her a few weeks to understand that she was cooking for Jasper. He put the show on hiatus and stayed with her, parking himself and his gang at a long table in the back corner, sampling the first batch of every dish and telling showtime stories and signing autographs for guests. A hot handspun swagger bolstered his speech, and he came off as more put-together than the peaky voice on the radio implied. Esmerelda tracked him on the security cameras as he swigged soda through a straw and hobbled to the people-mover for a smoke on the sidewalk, his face hidden behind sunglasses the size of DVDs. She watched him nod and smile at creaks and clanks from the kitchen, the possible sounds of his fan base rustling. Sniffing the air for her smell.

  At work in the kitchen she finally fell in love with Jasper Winslow.

  “Come with me,” she said a month after opening, on a night he was tapping his fingers and toes in half-time from boredom, his spirit smothered by constant fan handshakes and empty greetings, more pastries than he could digest properly, not a drop of vodka. She led him upstairs to the washroom by the wheat mill and took off all her clothes. He sat on the toilet and pulled on his earlobes.

  “I believe this belongs to you,” she said, guiding a hand over her breasts.

  “Well, huh, that’s not bad,” he admitted.

  “This too,” she said, placing his other hand inside her thighs.

  “That ain’t terrible neither.”

  “And this.” She put her hand on his cheek and pressed her mouth on his rubberized lips, tasting burned firewood and aspartame. She kissed his chin and his nose, and reached for his sunglasses.

  His head retreated, his hand had her wrist. “Don’t do that,” he said.

  “It’s me,” she said, soft as cotton.

  “Don’t matter. That ain’t for the lily-livered.”

  “I want to see you,” she insisted. And by applying some elbow grease and using a toothbrush for leverage, she eventually pried the sunglasses out from behind his ears and off his head. His face was blanked with strips of scars where his eyes had been, discolored patches rolled together like overlapping coats of paint. She breathed in and kissed them like they were cool cream eggshells.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He shivered. “Me too.”

  “Well, no point sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves.” She reached for his dick. “Might as well make the best of it.”

  Inside a week they were tossed into family, turning up aged wedding bands and dusty pictures, sharing coffee mugs and shampoo. She moved in with him at the hotel and sold her flat in SOMA for an outrageous celebrity-enhanced profit. He held court at the restaurant; she attended all his shows. They made love constantly, gently, affectionately. Bonded solid through history and habit.

  SECOND CHANCES WORK, announced Robespierre’s campaign literature as she called for providing the homeless with psychiatric help instead of bussing them to Modesto and Stockton, increasing police walking patrols in the Excelsior rather than razing crime hotbeds for strip malls. Her parents went to campaign events as often as she could rope them into it, Esmerelda tucked under Jasper’s arm like a baseball in a glove. Sometimes they told their story of separation and reunion; mostly they stood offstage and clapped. Everyone who heard them speak felt inclined to vote for Robespierre just a little bit more.

  Marat recognized his father’s charm, his mother’s verve, their poetry cooking within him. Hanging with them wasn’t awful, they were polite and respectful now, even tried to pay for meals. He felt their reunion stemmed from easiness and desperation, which sickened him, but the part of him that crafted cheesy ads for Middle America knew they made a terrific story, a delicious pile of comeback and true love horseshit, ripe for a TV miniseries.

  But the facts still seared: Jasper was a coward, Esmerelda a fuckup, his sister a manipulative thief who’d nearly let him die. This he could never ignore.

  Twenty million simoleons hung in the air without a place to land. He took a Cohiba out of his office humidor, repacked it with bud, and puffed until the smoke detector went off.

  The guys from his unit were in the right places. It took an hour of phone calls to get things moving: the guys in private security, the psychiatrists, the financial advisors, the cops, the lawyers, the computer guys, the high-clearance government staffers. All had seen Joel Lumpkin’s footage from the Iranian plains, their permanent disgrace. Poking Iranian detainees’ penises with sporks. Dog piss poured into soup. The Koran rolled and smoked in front of prisoners; hysterical, vengeful cries; boots dead on their ribcages. Spiked knuckles and lighter fluid. Blindfolds and pistol whips, involuntary evacuation. And the ugly kid with the hidden camera whirring away in his helmet the whole time. They hadn’t known about the spy system until they came back stateside, when Joel showed up on their doorsteps and demanded the deeds to their homes.

  Between friendly fire and munitions accidents, no chance that shit’d fly on the battlefield. But in tranquil Homeland America, Joel Lumpkin had more guys than they did, plus those incredible videos that they played on a portable TV right on the porch. So much blood, they hadn’t remembered how much, pouring shame down their shirts, blackening names and faces, totaling hard time and probably worse. Even if they managed to find a legal loophole, these were obvious atrocities—what else could they do but sign? And when Marat went back to the well years later looking for dirt on Joel Lumpkin’s behalf, they gave him what he wanted, ready to be done with it, no fight.

  They packed her story into the American Dream template: local girl rises up from a dysfunctional family, overcomes poverty and bad parenting, excels at Stanford, gets her feet wet interning for Pelosi and Obama, wins election young, energizes the city, puts principles first. They leaked the Examiner clip of when she wandered into the mayor’s office during her parents’ wedding ceremony and it was everywhere—the featured story on gossip websites, batted around with coworkers over Friday beers, a punch line for area comics. It helped a lot that she was devastating through the lens, her pouty lips and spread-out eyes appearing mysterious and desirable through a judicious application of cosmetics, her hair vivacious and springy, her body contorted into attractiveness by her ultrastylish, form-sensitive wardrobe. She drove a 50 percent bump in traffic when pictured on news websites and spoke fluent sound bite:

  “Joel and I are both young and energetic and running for mayor. The difference is I’m running on ideas, and he’s running on greed.”

  “I’ve seen Joel’s new commercial. Never have accident lawyer ads looked so professional.”

  “You may have noticed Joel’s obsession with construction. He calls it visionary. I call it an edifice complex.”

  “Out of touch with San Francisco? I’d say by his social programs he’s out of touch with the twenty-first century.”

  “That’s not to say Joel Lumpkin’s a bad guy. Bad guys pick on poor people. Joel won’t even let poor people stay in the city.”

  But during commercial breaks Joel Lumpkin’s face plowed down the screen on his overdressed walk along Fisherman’s Wharf, swinging by a kitschy tourist shop blabbing something about business and a foundation, sea lions woofing in the background. Viewers complained about the frequency of the ads, the ridiculous market saturation, the indeterminate point, the obvious unfamiliarity with the city’s values, but they grew to know them intimately. Joel Lumpkin was a guy they spent time with whether they liked it or not, and the stability of his routine implied some dedication, a guy willing to put in the time and money. Possibly this man was reliable. Feasibly someone to vote for.

  And there was something about running as an Independent that stirred the latent nonconformist in all San Franciscans.

  Phone calls from vets flooded Marat with tales, hearsay, conjecture, myth, the occasional factual nuggets mixed in. Names of every man his sister had kissed, credit card number
s and passwords, an itemized list of all the garments she’d had dry-cleaned in the past four years. Medical records since birth. Her favorite brand of soap. An inventory of her garbage. He confirmed that she was a compulsive liar, an adroit manipulator, a backstabber and an under-the-bus thrower, but by public official standards there was nothing particularly repulsive—her rap sheet was no worse than a frat boy’s blog.

  In the second week of September he met Joel for starchy bagels. “Inedible,” Joel decided. “How much to hire your mom back?”

  “I didn’t find anything,” Marat reported.

  “Marat, come on.” Joel telescoped his neck and puffed up his cheeks, an incredulous screwball-comedy smile. “You mean to tell me no blow jobs in the office john, no fast-tracking her friends’ business permits, no girls-gone-wild trip to Cancún on the government dime?” He took another bite of his bagel sandwich and chewed in a flurry of angry contractions. “Everybody does it.”

  “She lies about things. Weird things.”

  “Go on.”

  “Her favorite food. The number of times she’s visited Asia. How much her clothes cost. The time her next meeting starts. Her location. All this small stuff.” Executed with a samurai’s touch, he’d heard over and over again, these tidbits of misdirection cultivated fear and affection and huge respect, painting a portrait of power.

  “What about money?”

  “She keeps it clean there. Doesn’t misuse city funds or embezzle. And nothing’s on the record, either. It’s all hearsay, small talk.” Each button pushed just long enough to get what she wanted and leave. “That’s all I’ve got.”

  Marat heard himself say it and knew it was false. He hadn’t even started. It was hard to cut Robespierre out all at once.

  Joel choked down a half glass of OJ. The pressure point was nearby, he knew; all Marat had to do was follow his nose to where the shit stank worst. “Get dirt on your parents,” he directed. “Between the two of them, somebody’s covered in it.”