Political Timber (12 page)

The bell rang, and my study period ended. O’Dowd, who didn’t actually have a study period, followed me out, toward the next class he wasn’t supposed to be in with me. Once in the hallway, with hundreds of students crisscrossing, he stepped on the heel of my shoe, giving me a flat tire. When I bent over to fix it, he stepped up behind me, kneed me hard in the tailbone, and sent me crashing down on my face.

Traffic in the hallway, in the immediate area around where I’d sprawled, stopped. I recognized all the faces that stared down at me, but I didn’t really
know
anybody. Because for so long I was happy enough to have it that way. Most of the faces showed some kind of pity, but they weren’t exactly giving it up to me. O’Dowd, of course, was leering down at me, then around at the spectators for approval, then down at me again.

It came over me then that I needed to say something. That I needed to address my peers. From right there flat on the floor.

“I never wanted this, you know. I never really wanted any of this stuff that’s going on here. It just all kind of was dumped on me, and then things got out of my control, and then words started coming out... that really had nothing to do with me. With who I really am.”

I didn’t know what I was trying to accomplish there, but—maybe because I spoke to them from the seat of my pants—I seemed to make contact with my classmates. Probably for the first time.

Burt Sybertz, a behemoth of a football lineman and a shot-putter, a useful athlete but with zero star quality, put his hand out to me. “You don’t have to be a dick all the time, Bob,” he said to O’Dowd.

As I took Burt’s hand and he pulled me up nearly off my feet, I repeated, “Well, like I said, I never really wanted this in the first place.” When I was standing, I was face-to-face with O’Dowd.

“But I want it now,” I said.

I
SHOWED UP AT
my local polling station shortly after it opened at seven
A.M
. It was in the basement of the Curley School, which I had attended from kindergarten through sixth grade. Not all that long ago, as one of my old teachers pointed out on her way in to vote. I reminded her to remember me when she pulled that lever. She patted me on the head.

I wore a blue jacket with gold buttons, a powder-blue shirt with a white collar, and a painted Jerry Garcia tie from Bloomingdale’s. I never thought I could feel good in a jacket and tie, but I felt real good. My dad had bought me the outfit as a primary-day present, giving it to me at breakfast that morning.

“So,” I said. “I’ve won you over. You’re in my corner.”

“Son, I am always in your corner. I have been so pleased to see you taking on new challenges, reaching for something, working. I’m really proud of you, Gordie...”

My father is a very precise speaker. When he talks, you can hear the commas, you can hear the question marks and the semicolons. And you can hear the ellipses.

“But...” I helped him along.

“But, I never voted for my father, and I’m not voting for you. I love you both, but I don’t love your version of public service.”

“Jeez, Dad. Y’know? This is a hairy day for me. You
could
fake it. You could just lie. It’s a secret ballot, not like I could check on you.”

“Gordie... I considered that. Then I reconsidered. I figure, when the smoke clears, I will have done more for you, as your father, by showing you what I value and standing behind it.” He shook his head at himself, working it out as he spoke it. “Does that make any sense to you?”

“Well, my head’s kind of busy today. But, ya, it makes a little. And I have a feeling—when the smoke clears—it’ll make more.”

He smiled. As far as he was concerned, I got it. And for the moment, that was good enough for both of us. I smiled back.

“Anyway,” Dad said, knotting my new tie around his own neck because he knew I had no idea how the thing worked. “I wanted to make sure you looked fine on your day.” He slipped the tie up over his head and lowered it over mine, even though I only had on a T-shirt yet. “I hope you win without me, Gordie.”

“Actually, Dad, I was sort of hoping I could lose
with
you.”

So I went out into the fray with the feeling I could not lose. Just a feeling, a funny, unrealistic thing a guy’s dad can give him without hardly trying.

Fins had called me, and Bucky had called me, but that was all pep talk and bluster. This was a workday for me, and no press release from my staff could pretend to be me. I hit the booth, voted for myself—the first time I had voted for anyone—and stepped back out into the light with a strange feeling, a powerful feeling.

Not that I had voted for me. But that I had
voted.
I really
was
a player now.

“Remember Gordon Foley when you cast your ballot.”

“Hi, I’m Gordon Foley. Think of me when you’re voting.”

“Gordon Foley for mayor. Thank you.”

“Fordon Goley. I’m your man.”

“Hi. Uh... bye.”

“Hi, ma’am, Gordon Foley here. Can I kiss your baby?”

“Well, yes, he is my grandfather.”

“It’s parked right over there across the street. Sure you can look at it, right after you go in there and vote for me.”

I handed out my flier to everybody with hands. If they raised those hands to refuse, I pretended not to understand, and slipped it between their fingers. Six feet farther down the sidewalk lay a small carpet of my literature, with the black-and-white picture of me grinning and waving as I stood up in the Studebaker Gran Tourismo Hawk.

“Will you please consider me when you’re making your choice for mayor?”

It had become almost mindless. The words had begun to float from my lips without being launched by me. Until somebody heard, and responded.

“Yes,” the woman said, “I will consider you. But will
you
consider me?”

Whoa. It hadn’t occurred to me that these would be two-way conversations.

“Sure,” I said. I shrugged.

“All right. What I need is some day care that doesn’t cost more than what I make on the job I need the day care for.”

It wasn’t like she was asking for a new convention center downtown. I figured this must be in that big old hundred-million-dollar budget easy. “I guarantee it,” I said, shaking her hand. Hey, nobody said I couldn’t.

She smiled. Warmly. Maybe incredulously, but warmly. She didn’t believe me. I scribbled the FinsFone number on one of my fliers and handed it to her.

“If I haven’t done anything about this within three months, you call me direct.”

The smile turned to a giggle and a shake of the head. I didn’t know what she was laughing about; I was dead serious.

But it sure felt good anyhow.

Can-do. I can, and I did. I made that lady smile, and it was a breeze.

I did it again as soon as I could.

“Of course, there’s got to be some way to get you that check sooner than six months later,” I huffed. “That’ll be fixed.”

“Just like the old man would do,” the old guy praised.

“Nobody’s going to tell you you can’t put a satellite dish in your own backyard, not as long as I’m on the beat.”

It looked, and felt, so different up close. I could do things. I could merely speak, and worlds improved. I wasn’t sure I wasn’t lying, but I actually felt like I could fix everything. What a rush.

I wanted to win now.

Except I didn’t want the
job.
I wanted to win the election, without being stuck being mayor.

It got pretty old pretty fast, though. Asking for votes, smiling all the time, talking to people... The highlight of the day came when Mosi and Betty and several of her friends came by to help work the polls for an hour.

“Maybe I can give the fliers out to people,” Mosi said, surprising me. It was a strange version of Mosi talking to me, distant, kind of sad.

I handed him the fliers. “Knock ’em dead, killer,” I said, and watched him assault the voters. I smiled—the real one, not the candidate one—as I watched him awkwardly work the crowd. I saw people do a double take as they realized Mosi, with his thick, dark features, big head, big hair, big arms and shoulders, and glassy eyes, was trying to give them something rather than take something away from them. It was obvious between my man Mosi, affirming many people’s fears about letting teenagers into the power industry, and Betty’s Boop Troops charming the male vote but chilling the female, that I was losing more support than I was gaining.

While I did not want to lose the primary, this setback was the most enjoyable part of the show so far.

“Can’t you stay with me awhile?” I asked Sweaty as the Foley contingent began folding up camp.

“Stuff to do, Mr. Mayor,” she answered. “Frankly, we love our man to pieces, but we’re going to have to be with you mostly in spirit, ’cause this shit is, like, dullest.”

I nodded, and wished I could go with her.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Don’t thank me now. Tonight. When they have some meaningful numbers, you come pick me up, and we’ll have a little celebrate.”

The candidate was infused with sudden renewed vigor.

“Ya?”

“Ya. I’ll be home, hot dog.”

Sweaty and her friends took off, to get back to life, to real life, to high school and boy-tease and pizza life that was their right and that I was piss-eyed jealous over. I stared at the last of them piling onto the bus, and kept staring as the bus pulled out, passed directly in front of the polling station, and somebody mooned me. I sighed. I got a pang of lonely. I used to like lonely.

For a few minutes I stopped campaigning. I leafed through other people’s literature. I found out that sheriff isn’t nearly the cool gig it sounds like, running desperadoes out of town; in reality it’s more like he baby-sits the jail. I also found that it requires no skill or background of any kind to qualify as a state senator. Maybe I was just after the wrong job.

Then I stopped reading, and I watched them work.

They all looked like asses.

The voters, who in a few hours would move some of these same people a step closer to positions of power, were treating the candidates as if they were panhandlers with dead fish in their pockets. And the candidates behaved as if they appreciated it.

I fell back against the yellow-brick wall of the Curley School. “What the hell are we doing?” I asked the candidate for state senate, Michael Morris.

“We’re kissing the public butt.”

“Okay,” I said. “So why?”

“Because during the day I usually work in my aunt’s dry cleaner. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want people telling me, ‘Hey, you didn’t get the sweat stain out from the underarm of my shirt,’ anymore. I want people asking me for favors. I want to be head of a committee that tells a developer, ‘No, you can’t build your restaurant there, because I said so,’ and I want to be the guy who tells the Indians, ‘Enough already with your damn casinos.’ I want to be that guy. I want to make a noise, y’know?”

I thought about it. I knew what he was talking about, but honestly, I couldn’t work it up like he could.

“And help people, you mean?”

“Ya... that’s part of it, of course, but... you know what I’m talking about.” He slapped me backhanded across the shoulder. “You’re in the business. You’re practically a power broker already.”

That was it, the thought that finally made me feel stupider than anything.

Power broker. This was what my da had given his adult life to. Not the
what
of what you could do with power, but the having of it for its own sake.

Back at my groveling station. The work was hard, harder than anything I’d done in the campaign so far, and I got sweaty marching up and down the street, shaking hands and smiling and being nicer than I felt like being after a while. Around eleven o’clock Fins had called to check on things, and I rushed him, telling him things were great but that I had to get back to my post. He was giggly. My grandfather was not a giggly man, not even in victory. His first acceptance speech, all those years ago, was famous for having to be bleeped over while Fins wailed away at his beaten foe.

He called again at eleven thirty and twelve thirty and two, but I stopped answering.

By then I wanted to go home. I wasn’t consumed by the outcome of this right now. I didn’t especially care if they made me mayor or pope or god right there by popular demand; I just didn’t want to be there. Many, many—mostly old—well-intentioned people came by to tell me how much they loved my da, to relate wonderful tales of how he had mangled the law to do something chivalrous for this struggling family or that. One grand-looking little dame—there was no other way to look at her—in a pink sombrero-size hat tried her damnedest to tell me a very personal story of herself and my grandfather one evening in the Tourismo—
my
Tourismo—which made the little hairs on my arms prickle and which I was not going to listen to.

“
That
car,” she said, pointing shamelessly at the Studebaker across the street. “That fresh, brassy little—”

“It’s not the same car,” I interrupted. “This one’s a fake. One of those copies they make from a kit. The real one he drove off the bridge in Narragansett.”

The old woman deflated. I thought it was because of the car, and I felt bad.

“I thought Narragansett was our spot,” she moaned. She left me without another word, but with a very Maureen-for-mayor look on her face.

It didn’t matter anymore what people said to me, if they were going to vote for me, if they loved Fins and were ‘sure the cub was gonna be just like the old lion,’ wink wink. I had, halfway through the day, learned possibly the biggest life-lesson I was going to learn from the whole political experiment:

There is nothing harder than pretending to care about what you’re doing, when you’re really not convinced you do.

Do all of us politicians run out of gas this quickly?

It was starting to show, as fewer and fewer people came up to me.

“I’ll hang around with you if you want.”

It was Mosi. I hadn’t even realized he hadn’t gotten on the bus with the rest of them earlier.

“Hey,” I said, excited. “You’re here.”

“Hey,” he answered. “I am. Got any more fliers? I gave all mine out already.”