American Savior (34 page)

The problem was that, after the first half hour of the debate, and the first few effective explosions, they kept doing the same thing. The moderator, Lance Panderson, a charisma-loaded network anchor who had pioneered the gray-haired-and-proud look, kept pressing them for specific answers to specific questions, and they kept using the questions as a jumping off point for their next anti-Jesus tirade. At the forty-five minute
mark, Zelda said, in an excited voice, “They’re both blowing it!” And by the one-hour mark, we had started to cheer loudly every time they mentioned Jesus’s name—which was about every thirty seconds. With a few minutes remaining, Alowich seemed to understand, suddenly, what was happening, and he inserted vaguely complimentary language into his closing statement, saying that Jesus had run a strong campaign (“for a first-timer”) and was obviously a good man (“though perhaps not quite as good as he claims to be”), but Maplewith kept battering and battering. She was trying, Esmeralda suggested, to counter the antiwoman voters by showing how tough she was, that she could give it out with the best of the big boys. But Stab summed up what a lot of viewers came away with when he said, “She’s
mean!
”

Not at any point in the campaign was I happier than when that debate ended. We all felt we’d been given a new lease on life, and we celebrated with a couple of nice bottles of wine back at the hotel. Jesus returned from what he said was a three-mile jog in the dark (“so I’ll have half a hope of being able to stay with Annie C.”), and we greeted him with a chorus of happy analysis, all talking at once, giving different versions with the same conclusion: the other two had screwed up big-time.

The seesaw polls bore this out. To the shock of TV’s smartest pundits, Anne Canter included, not only were voters not turning away from Jesus in the last leg of the campaign, they were clearly turning back toward him. We had worried—all three camps had worried—that, in a three-way race, no one would emerge with a majority of electoral votes. And as the new numbers came out, that seemed to be our main problem. On the day that Jesus and Annie C. met at Cape May and had a photo-op there in their tracksuits and wool hats in the forty-degree late October chill, the
Christian Science Monitor
poll had it this way:

THIRTY-EIGHT

The “Run for the White House,” as Wales christened it, was both a brilliant idea and a security chief’s worst nightmare. Even with the help of local and state police, even with another dozen Harley Davidson aficionados that Dukey had summoned from the western New England chapter of the Panthers (and who had volunteered to work for Jesus without pay), even with the enthusiasm that greeted us at every stop and seemed to multiply with each mile, the fact was that our candidate—who’d already had one narrow escape from death—made a perfect target for any lunatic who decided God wanted him or her to sneak onto the top floor of an abandoned building in Tom’s River or Rahway and try out his new .30-06. Every afternoon I scouted out the next day’s running route in the company of a couple of uniformed cops. Every night I sat down with the Simmeltons and tried to assess which of the several threats we’d received in the past twenty-four hours posed real danger. I was up before the sun every morning—not easy for me—making sure we had thorough protection at the point where the day’s run would commence, that the bus had been checked and rechecked for explosives, and that the next hotel was as secure as we could make it.

Zelda kept the same hours, trying to handle all the press requests. She printed up and distributed position papers, arranged for credentials, secured rally permits, deflected requests for TV interviews. Everybody was working sixteen-hour days: Mom helping Zelda with local promo,
supervising the caterers, and watching the two youngsters part-time; Dad mapping out the best travel routes, arranging for separate housing for the bikers (who had adopted him, strangely enough, as their wise elder, and who preferred seedy motels where they could drink and swear and break things without calling so much attention to themselves), and printing up a daily schedule; Stab handing out the glossy leaflets on which had been printed a half-dozen key points of Jesus’s platform, several big endorsements, and a couple of inspirational quotes; the Simmeltons helping with Web site problems; Dukey acting as Annie Ciappellino’s personal bodyguard (which made Ada—who helped Zel with press errands—jealous); Enrica Dominique providing both runners with daily therapeutic massages; Wales keeping tabs on the national picture, the polls, and reports from hundreds of local Jesus for America chapters. He also monitored the other candidates’ advertisements and the schedule of Anna Songsparrow, who’d gone to the three northern New England states with Esmeralda for a final swing through an area we had probably not paid enough attention to.

The stress level was enormous. I think the only thing that kept us going, really, was the legions of smiling, screaming, applauding, praying, fainting, ordinary New Jerseyans who lined the route. They held up homemade signs saying things like:
WE BELIEVE
! and
PRESIDENT CHRIST FOREVER
! They covered whole sections of roadway with flower petals or palm fronds. They tossed rosaries at Jesus to bless or sang hymns as he passed. They held out photos for Annie C. to autograph. Between worrying about Jesus’s physical well-being and dreaming about what life would be like if we actually made it to the White House, there were whole days when I ate almost nothing between my six a.m. coffee and dinner.

With a week to go and the polls holding steady, Annie and Jesus could be found running side-by-side up Broadway in Manhattan (what a permit nightmare that was!). We had a large rally in Harlem, where local storefront preachers came out in force, and the Harlem Globetrotters put on a brief show to warm up the crowd; another enormous rally in a Spanish-speaking section of the Bronx; another, the following afternoon, in Westport, Connecticut, where the entire staff spent the night at a
mansion owned by Walter W. Estabrooke, the real-estate developer and casino owner, who claimed he’d been a lifelong atheist before seeing Jesus on
Meet the Media
and being converted.

Converted to what? was the question no one ever seemed to ask. In my rare quiet moments I puzzled over the fact that, with the exception of the one fateful sermon in Montana, Jesus had stayed clear of churches, mosques, temples, chapels, crucifixes, men in dark robes, and the language associated with such things. He told Wales he thought organized religion had done many wonderful things in individual cases, but that it was too often divisive, creating an us-against-them mentality that was the polar opposite of what he was trying to accomplish. (This did not stop the ACLU from filing suit against the campaign, claiming it blurred the constitutional distinction between church and state. For a day or two it worried us, but the suit ended up before a judge named Winston Washington, a friend of the Simmeltons, in the Sixth District of New York, who threw it out as frivolous.)

After his day of running and stumping, Jesus would come back to the hotel, or wherever it was we were staying that night, go over strategy with Wales, hang out with Stab for a few minutes, call his mother, and then basically lock himself in his room. He rarely ate dinner. Unless it was something extremely urgent, he told us not to bother him, he’d see us at breakfast, he needed some downtime. We had learned, by then, to accept this; with the possible exception of my brother, no one took it personally.

We had it timed so that we’d arrive in West Zenith on the Sunday before Election Day. Somehow, remarkably, we kept to that schedule, even as the crowds thickened through central and northern Connecticut, and the press corps expanded before our eyes. The polls continued to be favorable, though in the final week the undecideds appeared to be swinging ominously into the Maplewith camp, and Colonel Alowich was leaking votes in that direction as well. Wales told me in private what all the news broadcasts were mentioning: that while Jesus held a lead narrowly outside the margin of error, that lead did not translate well into the electoral college. There were, it seemed, swaths of the country where, for
whatever reason—a barrage of negative ads, contrary influential religious figures, historically powerful Democratic or Republican machines, a lack of attention on our part—Jesus’s appeal had been muted. Michigan, Illinois (which we had been counting on), and Ohio were too close to call; Arkansas and neighboring Oklahoma were leaning Alowich’s way, along with his home state of Washington and traditionally Democratic states like Maryland, Delaware, Hawaii, and Rhode Island. Florida was unpredictable. Texas, with its heap of electoral votes, would be a fight between Maplewith and Jesus. We appeared to be safe only in California, perhaps New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

During one of the rare conversations Zelda and I managed to have that week, she said, “I don’t think I could handle another election in which a candidate wins the popular vote but doesn’t get elected. I don’t think the country could handle that.” And the political shows spent a lot of time on the same subject, speculating, predicting, waxing confident in their opinions despite what most people said was the strangest and most volatile configuration of states in recent electoral history.

So we arrived at the West Zenith Hilton (part of which we’d booked for Jesus, our staff, and key supporters from around the country, and which would host the traditional Election Night rally/party/acceptance or concession speech) physically exhausted, hopeful, worried, enthralled at our success, and floating on a small raft out in the middle of what felt like a huge, dark, roiling sea of uncertainty.

At which point, Jesus disappeared.

THIRTY-NINE

We pulled up to the Hilton at eleven o’clock on Sunday night, but even at that hour, a mob of well-wishers filled the circular driveway out front. Jesus wanted to say a few encouraging words to them before going inside. This brief speech was the usual just-before-the-vote mixture of gratitude, optimism, and encouragement (“On Tuesday, let us start the long process of turning this nation in the direction it must go!”), except that it ended on a strange note. I was standing a few feet away from him. He was wearing only a light sweater and jeans against the November chill, no gloves, no hat, no scarf, and he was delivering the lines with his usual vitality and responding to the wild cheers with his usual sunbeam smile. At the end, though, instead of summing up with a bland comment like, “Let’s all get some rest now. We have one more day of hard work in front of us,” he said, “And now I shall disappear,” and ducked through the glass front doors with lines of West Zenith police officers to either side and his crew of faithful associates following close behind.

And now I shall disappear.

I noticed the remark, of course. I felt a twinge of anxiety, but Jesus said he would like to have a last, quick meeting with us in his suite, so I did not dwell on the “disappear” part.

The meeting was short. He gave a couple of suggestions for the last day, and told us that on Election Eve, as a gesture of thanks for our work, he would be taking us out to the Taj Mahal, an Indian restaurant in Wells River.

“What’s this, the Last Supper?” my father joked, another of his funny remarks that did not quite clear the humor bar for everyone in the room. The next day, Monday, after Jesus did, in fact, disappear, my mother would accuse my father of having offended him and demand he apologize, even though there was no one to apologize to at that moment. My father told her she had no sense of humor, and they got into it again the way they’d been getting into it for forty-three years.

Hearing them take verbal jabs at each other upset Stab, though, as was often the case, he could not articulate the cause of his feelings and so just spluttered, waved his arms, and shouted “No! No! No more!” Stab’s anger upset Zelda. Seeing her upset made me angry, so I yelled at Dukey, who went to the window and sulked. Ada shot me a dirty look. Their miracle son, Dukey Junior, walked over and kicked me in the shin. Amelia Simmelton lectured him about how nothing worthwhile was ever achieved by violence. Dukey told Amelia not to talk to his kid in that tone of voice. Norman Simmelton told Dukey not to talk to
his
kid in
that
tone of voice. It was a nice moment all around, and our candidate had gone missing, besides.

But I’ve gotten ahead of myself. Let me back up. It was nine o’clock on Monday morning, the day after our triumphant return to West Zenith, less than twenty-four hours before the polls opened. We were down in the hotel breakfast room having toaster waffles and ready-mixed hot chocolate, and Jesus not only didn’t join us, but we realized he had not spoken to anyone that morning, despite the fact that a last big press conference was scheduled for the hotel’s main meeting room at ten a.m. After a while, Zelda told me she had an intuition that something was wrong. The first thing we did was call upstairs to Jesus’s room. No answer. The second thing we did was send Dukey up. Dukey knocked. No response. He badgered a housekeeper into opening the door. No one inside. No note. The bed had not been slept in. Dukey came downstairs to the breakfast room with his report—he and Enrica were sure there had been foul play—and started blustering at me that I hadn’t been careful enough, an assessment of my work which I did not appreciate, coming, as it did, from my subordinate. Zelda was wrapping her hair around her fingers as if she wanted to pull it out.

So we argued and fretted for a while over the remains of our breakfast. We made phone calls to the rooms of various regional chair people—in some cases rousing them from sleep after a late night of partying. No Jesus. We contacted our downtown headquarters. No sign of him. With some reluctance, and after a small argument, Wales made me call the police and tell them we had a missing person on our hands.