American Savior (31 page)

Still, we survived the ambush, physically and otherwise. When I tried to talk with Jesus about it on the plane—where we were tending to our wounds and drinking hard liquor—he waved me away. “Forward, forward,” was all he said. And then, “Get my mother on the phone, she’ll be worried when she hears about it.”

B
RUISED AND SCRATCHED
, wearing newly purchased clothes in some cases, we kept to our upper Midwest schedule, which was to culminate in a photo-op of Jesus greeting his mother at the source of the Mississippi River in northern Minnesota. The mad scene at the Church of Christ in God never repeated itself, nothing even close. But—and this was so strange to me—after that awful day the polls did start to waver. At first, Alowich and Maplewith wisely avoided direct comment on the debacle, choosing instead to highlight the point that Jesus was refusing to debate them. They did utilize the unfortunate church appearance in their ads, after a few days, but what they really hammered away at was the debate issue. Combined with Jesus’s fast rush for the limo door, the refusal made him look, to some eyes at least, less brave than he had looked in the rodeo ring. Justin Dreaf took advantage of this opening to roll out a new advertisement, played repeatedly in the key battleground states (unlike Jesus, he
did
care about the electoral college) in which scenes of Jesus hurrying toward the limo were combined with a voice-over saying, “Is this the person we want to lead us in a time of war?”

And Colonel Alowich struck a similar note, putting together a spot that showed Jesus outside the church, and Alowich in his military uniform with his TV-star wife at his side. “Some run,” the voice in the ad stated, “and some stand and fight. Alowich, for president.”

This stuff had its intended effect, I’m sorry to report. At least to the
extent that the poll numbers slipped back to where Maplewith and Jesus and Alowich were all in the high twenties or low thirties, with a few undecideds. Strangely enough, Jesus, who had been upset at having only an eight-point lead, now seemed content to be locked in a statistical tie. For those next few days he did nothing but shower us with compliments and encouragement as we braved the cold and windy upper Midwest on his behalf. I was beginning to think he was playing some kind of game with us—and with the American voters: everything he did seemed designed to break us out of our usual expectations, our assumptions. It could be very, very frustrating.

TV stations and newspapers loved the fact that things were tightening up as we went into the final month (though, as Wales reminded us, races almost always tightened up in the last weeks of a campaign), and they loved the fact that virtually the whole Jesus team was going to be appearing on one show or another on TV and radio. Zelda was working way too hard. On one morning, after we’d had a private hour together and a room-service breakfast, there were seventy-three messages on her cell phone when she turned it back on. Eighteen of them were from the Linneament people, asking if she was sure they couldn’t get the candidate himself on Hurry’s show, even as a call-in, rather than just the parents of one of his chief advisors. “Mr. and Mrs. Thomas are chief advisors themselves,” Zelda fibbed. And then she added the clinching line: “And they’re huge fans of Hurry.”

THIRTY-SIX

It may sound at times as if I disdain the many-headed beast we call the American media. I apologize. As a former television personality, I know all too well how easy it is to make newspaper, TV, and radio reporters into punching bags, to portray them only as the kind of people who will come up to you after your best friend has been killed by a mugger, stick a microphone in your face, and ask how you feel. It’s easy to criticize the big media companies, too, because they have been known to spend twenty percent of their broadcast time on a teen movie starlet’s drug problem when there are hungry kids in East Kentucky or roving bands of rapists in Somalia.

Probably nowhere is this penchant for heartlessness, this tendency to highlight the fluff and ignore the substance, more obvious than during a presidential campaign. But, in fairness to the reporters on the beat and the owners of news outlets, it has to be said that the campaigns go on so long now that the people who cover them are like refugees on a sixteen-month walk, searching the roadsides and forests for any scrap of nourishment, any small dirty puddle they might drink from. And I also have to admit that, during our famous campaign, there were some substantive investigations and analyses, not only of the candidates, but of the problems America had to wrestle with in those days. The
Jim Wearer News Hour,
for example, was decently good at giving these issues in-depth coverage. Wearer could have dressed better, in my estimation, and they could have done with more video, more life, but at least they were good
enough to spare their viewers an endless recounting of the tribulations of celebrity marriages, the criminal adventures of NFL stars, the sorrow of the parents of kidnapped girls, and the daily shifting of the polls.

On the opposite side of the political spectrum, Harry “Hurry” Linneament had his moments, too. Like an angry bulldog who goes around chewing on every piece of furniture in the house, even Hurry (in a more extreme case, on rare occasions, even Shawn “Not So” Mannily) would occasionally get his teeth into an issue that wasn’t purely a thinly veiled partisan infomercial. Linneament would shake it and growl over it and run around the house with it, and you’d come home to find, I don’t know, pieces of your television remote scattered on the carpet. But at least some of the time he took on the big issues, though he and his carefully screened callers (“I’m
such
a huge fan, Hurry!”) could seem, to my critical ear, totally lacking in compassion for those less fortunate. Whereas you’d turn on America Free Radio and Wendy Shriller would be cackling about Colonel Alowich’s penny loafers, or helping to spread a rumor that Margie Maplewith had run up a big bill at the Victoria’s Secret store in the Mall of Idaho. Essential things like that.

But here I am again, waxing sarcastic. What it comes from, probably, is my own frustrated ambition. I’m willing to admit that I am envious. Throughout my adult life, all I’d wanted was to be nightly anchor on a big station. Boston. Atlanta. New York. To bring Big News into the homes of millions of people.

So consider this an apology for taking easy jabs at the creature we depend on to tell us how the rest of humanity is behaving. Consider it a prelude to my report on the third from the last week of the campaign, the week in which Jesus’s people took to the airwaves
—
and got slaughtered.

Here’s the play-by-play:

1) Batting first: Dukey McIntyre on the
Lenny Queen Show.

Whatever you think of Queen, he’s been doing what he does for a long time, and he’s a pro. Like Linneament, he wasn’t pleased at being thrown a crumb instead of the frosted cake, but he took what he could get. The Jesus-for-president story was the kind of thing that comes along once in
the lifetime of a talk show host, so they ended up making a big fuss, in advance, announcing that Queen had landed
an exclusive interview
with Jesus’s deputy chief of security and the CEO of Scorched Earth Protective Services, Ronald McIntyre.

Despite this hype, it took Queen himself about half a second to size Dukey up. Loose cannon that he was, Dukey went on the show wearing a camouflage T-shirt under a black leather jacket—the ultimate in tough-guy apparel, as far as he was concerned. For the first twenty minutes, Queen fed him a series of softballs right over the middle of the plate, “So, Mr. McIntyre, tell us, what are the special challenges involved in protecting a candidate like Mr. Christ?”

And Dukey bunted every one of them right into the dugout. “Well, Mr. Queen, the special challenges is that you have your scum everywhere, your loose screws, you know? My boys and I, well, let’s just say we’re not hesitated about using what has to be used?” As he concluded his sentences on the interrogative upturn, the serious grown-up face he’d affected during the first part of his answer would suddenly desert him. Dukey would look up at his famous host from under his rust-colored eyebrows like a second-grader waiting to hear what his dad thought of the two boards he’d nailed together down cellar.

A few minutes from the end of the interview, Queen hitched up his suspenders and made the mistake—at least I thought it was a mistake—of resurrecting the homosexuality issue. He did it in a roundabout, gentle way, alluding to the attacks Justin Dreaf had financed, ads featuring an open closet door behind our man, perhaps the glint of an earring. Dukey had street smarts, if nothing else, and he saw right through this question. “Listen,” he said, and he could not keep himself from jabbing a finger at Queen across the table where they sat. You could see Lenny’s big rectangular head jerk back two inches, the glasses slide even further down his nose. “Listen, this is the most BS thing ever, I’m tellin ya, okay? The next person, I’m tellin ya, who starts calling our man a fa —, who starts calling him a homo, deals with me. Get it?”

Queen got it. His producer and technicians got it, too. The camera left Dukey’s face and never returned. For the last two minutes of the show a
visibly shaken Lenny Queen rambled on about “the unusual situation we have here, a first in American politics, of protecting a candidate, already the target of an assassin’s bullet, who claims to be Jesus Christ. Folks, we’ve seen nothing like it.”

He limped to the end of the interview without mentioning Dukey’s name again, and made a phone call to Zelda the second it was over. He let her know that he wasn’t happy, he’d felt threatened, and that he’d give the campaign none, zero, zilch in the way of coverage the rest of the way in.

One out, nobody on.

2) B
ATTING SECOND
: My parents on the
Harry Linneament Radio Show,
coast to coast.

Linneament, who didn’t often have guests in his studio with him, led off by saying this to my father: “Mr. Thomas, my understanding is that you are a member of the Hebrew faith, and that—”

“I’m a Jew,” my father interrupted him.

“Fine, a Jew, if you will. Tell me, how is it that a Jew comes to be working on the campaign of a man named Jesus Christ?”

“I’ve been straightforward about it from the start,” my dad said. “Ask anybody. To me, this guy is the best guy for the job, that’s all. In this country we’re not supposed to pay so much attention to what color somebody is, what religion he is. To me, this guy is a rabbi, a teacher, and he’s smart as a whip. Gutsy, too. Exactly what we need in the White House for a change.”

“So the religious differences don’t bother you? The fact that your people consider Jesus to have been merely—”

“He’s a great rabbi,” my father said. “I stick by that.”

“And, Mrs. Thomas, tell us, how is it, exactly, that you came to serve as a key advisor on this campaign? You have a degree in political science, I understand?”

“I’m a mother,” my mother said. “I don’t have degrees in anything. My son got involved. Like any good mother, when he asked for my help, I went forward with my arms wide open. I’m a Catholic, by the way, and I raised my children in that faith.”

“But it’s preposterous, isn’t it? I mean, with all due respect to you two—you seem like friendly, intelligent, good people … and they’re big fans of mine, besides, folks, so I guess the intelligent part is obvious, heh, heh.… But, number one, how could you really believe that this man is
the
Jesus Christ? Number two, that he’s come back to earth. Number three that he’s come back to earth to run for president of the United States, of all things!”

“It’s a matter of faith,” my mother said. “You’re the one who’s always talking about God and the Bible. Well, put your money where your mouth is.”

“I’d like to say I don’t believe he is God,” my father had to put in. “For the record.”

“But, and forgive me, ma’am, I direct this question to you: In a time of grave crisis, you are asking us to trust our lives to someone who seems to have almost no past, who certainly has no political experience that we can find a record of. The country is unraveling from within, and being threatened with destruction from without … and you are asking us to elect a young, unmarried, unknown?”

“It’s a matter of faith,” my mother repeated, using the tactic she had used with my father for forty-two years. It had always worked with him, and she saw no reason why it wouldn’t work with Hurry Linneament. She would simply say the same thing over and over until she wore him down. “Plus,” she added, “unmarried isn’t such a bad thing. A lot of marriages don’t work out these days. Plus, it’s a matter of faith.”

“But faith in
what?
” Hurry blustered. His rich voice was going squeaky. Plus, he’d been married five times.

“Faith in God,” my mother said.

“Or in a good man,” my dad put in. “A teacher.”

Things went along this way for much of the hour, a stalemate, it seemed to me. I was lying in bed listening on the hotel radio, eyes closed, right hand wrapped tightly around my lucky hole-in-one golf ball. Linneament would shoot an arrow; it would bounce off my mother’s shield. Another arrow, a bounce off dad’s hard surface. I wasn’t displeased. But then the
show was opened up to callers, and one after the next we got things like this: “I’m a good Catholic, Mrs. Thomas,” Jane from Maryland said. “A
real
Catholic. I think you should take note of the fact that the cardinals have not acknowledged this so-called Jesus. You never mention that. If the cardinals and bishops don’t say he’s God, how can he be God?”

And Robert from upstate New York: “Hi, Hurry, I’ve been a fan of yours since you started, way back when. I thank God every day that we have a voice of truth in this troubled land, but I have to say that I’m surprised you’d have these liberal screwballs on your show.”

And Eddie from Wyoming: “We don’t suffer fools gladly out here, Hurry, as you know. In the next election, I’m thinking of claiming to be Buddha or something, and I’m running for Senate. Can I give you a Web site where your listeners can send donations?”