Political Timber (7 page)

“One might say you’re out of touch, prez. Read on.”

I read, out loud. “‘Maureen McCormick, forty percent.’” I turned to Mosi. “Do I know her? Wait, she’s a junior, right? Black hair, like, six feet tall?”

“Close. She was in
The Brady Bunch.
”

“‘Ollie North, twenty-two percent.’ Him, I know. ‘Robert O’Dowd, eighteen percent.’” I gave this one more considered thought. “He was that freaky guy in The Crying Game.”

“No. O’Dowd’s real. Football tricaptain.”

“I see. ‘Tracy Bannon, sixteen percent.’ Ohhhh. I know Tracy. She’s real.”

“Quite.”

“Okay, and down here on the bottom, we have... ‘Other, four percent.’ ‘Other?’”

“I checked. There were a couple of freshmen that voted for themselves, a write-in for the bacon-burger lady in the cafeteria who only speaks Portuguese, and you.”

“Well,” I said calmly, practicing my new think-before-speaking policy. “That’s not very good. But the question is, do I give a rat’s ass?”

“I don’t know, Gord, do you?”

“Let me check. ... No, I don’t think so. Mos, remember, I just backed into this thing because I didn’t want to get beat up by Sweaty for talking to those girls. Who, other than a complete putzball, would want to spend the greatest year of his life kissing asses to be elected head dildo of this peckerhead factory?”

“Wow.” Mosi hopped down from the sill as the bell rang to go to first period. “Now that you put it that way... you’re getting to be some kind of a persuasive orator since you’ve been running for mayor.”

I hopped down and started walking with him. “I know it. The whole experience is, like, changing me. It’s a lot of things... the Gran Tourismo Hawk, the radio gig, my own personal campaign office with college girls working for me and stuff.”

“College girls?”

“Ya, you wanna volunteer?”

“Can you make ’em do whatever you say, ’cause you’re the candidate?”

“Don’t know. I haven’t tried it out yet. But I figure it must be like being a really good guitarist in a really hot band, you know. It’s got to make you look prime no matter what kind of a melon you are. I’m feeling all nuts and buzzy with power these days.”

“Wow some more. I’m volunteering, then.”

“Done. First thing is, meet me at lunch to try and work out this questionnaire thing. It’s gonna be a bitch, from what I can tell.”

“I’ll be there.”

“And keep next Thursday night open. Get this—there’s a hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-plate fund-raiser for me at some club.”

“A hundred and... what’s on the plate, cocaine?”

“See, now that’s what I said.”

The phone rang as Mosi headed to his class. I let it ring a few more times so that I could feel the way all the hall-crossers were looking at me. Other than the drug dealers’, mine was the only body in school that rang.

“Hey, Da,” I said, clanging against a yellow locker.

“I want to see you. This afternoon,” he grrred.

And all the nuts-and-buzzy power seeped out of me just like that, leaving me shrunk down to what I used to be.

“Hello, Da,” I said easily, poking my head into the room.

He said nothing at first. He was sitting in his usual chair, casually leafing through a paper. The guard—he waved to me—was standing by the rear door.

“Cross-country team’s doing very well. Football team still stinks, unfortunately.” He turned a page, working the paper from back to front. “Oh good, they’ve needed to renovate those lavatories for a long time now, haven’t they.” He was quickly to the front page. It was only an eight-pager. “What do you know... old Ollie North. Never gives up, does he? I have to remember to give him a call.”

Fins slapped the newspaper down in his lap and glowered at me.

“Oh. Well hello there...
Other.
I didn’t even realize you were here. Funny, how some people can be there, and then again seem like they’re not.”

“It’s not my fault, Da. And I never said I was the most popular guy in the school.”

“Most popular? Gordie, you’re off the chart. You’re a flippin’ asterisk.”

“Can I ask you how you got that, my dinky little school paper, here in... I mean, you subscribe, or what?”

“You may not ask. Gordie, we can’t have this. You’re a Foley.”

“If you don’t mind my saying so, Da... who gives a shit? It’s crappy old student body president, which I don’t even want anyhow.”

“Ya, well it’s too late for that. You know what the real papers will do with this? You wanna be mayor, but you come in goddamn twelfth in your own high school. ...”

“No, wait a minute. I don’t wanna be mayor.
You
want me to be mayor. And you promised I don’t really have to win, remember?”

He waved me off. “Image, Gordie. Image, is what we’re talking about. You know and I know and everybody in this town with half a brain—which our research shows is like forty percent of ’em—knows that it ain’t you runnin’ for mayor, it’s me. See, I had my successor picked, and everybody could see that she was gonna be me. Then she started not working out. So my boy, my grandson, my Gordie, he shows up with his perfect Foley face, he’s in the race, and my loyal constituency, they get the signal. You wanna vote for Fins—which most of ’em want to do—you vote for Gordie.”

I started panicking. “I gotta
win
? I
knew
it, you tricked me, Da. Jesus Christ.” I started flapping my arms and pacing like a zoo gorilla. “I had other plans, Da. This was my big year. I’m already way more popular than I can handle—”

“At four percent?”

“And now what you’re telling me is I couldn’t lose if I wanted to. Which I do. How can I go on the Bermuda trip with the rest of the class if I gotta be stupid goddamn mayor, huh? How can I moon at half-time of the Thanksgiving Day game like everybody else?”

Fins was now waving his own hands, telling me to whoa.

“You don’t gotta win. Remember, we just need to scare your opponent back on course. She’ll be fine. And, no offense, but I need her. She’s good. You... might have some difficulty with the day-to-day that I couldn’t do for ya.”

“Damn right I would.”

I stood there hyperventilating, but with nothing left to argue. Fins knew what he was doing. He always knew... except with those undercover FBI guys; but, live and learn.

“So,” he said smoothly, back in charge. “We gotta fix this school thing. It’s an embarrassment. And as beloved as I am, there are some people who wouldn’t mind having some mean fun at the old man’s expense.”

I sighed. At least I didn’t have a seizure this time.

“That’s right, kid. I’m afraid the school, you’re gonna have to win.”

“Da, I’m sorry to let you down, but I don’t know if that’s possible.”

He folded up his little newspaper and tucked it under his arm. Then he stood and shuffled away toward the door.

“It’s possible,” he said. “Go now, run along and play. Be young. Enjoy yourself.”

For once, we had the same idea.

I watched his hunched shoulders as he faded through the door. And I noticed that my legendary grandfather was looking like a little old man.

D
INNER WITH THE BUCK-
fifty-plate club turned out to be more complicated than which-spoon-is-for-the-fruit-cup. Bucky warned me that I was going to have to do a little speech thing. And even though he threatened to pull me right off the podium by my tie—a tie?—if I spoke for more than eight minutes, that was about seven minutes beyond what I figured my material required. So I had to prepare that. And there was still the questionnaire thing.

“You have to help me, Mos.”

“I don’t know, Gordie,” he answered grimly. “Four percent. I mean, you
shared
four percent. Even I didn’t realize you were that unpopular.”

We were sitting in Mosi’s garage among component rubble. He had dismantled four of his guitars for no apparent reason, scrambled up the strings, pickups, tuning keys, knobs, switches, etc., and was attempting to reassemble them in bold new ways.

“I’m a visionary, you know,” he said as he stared, vacant and glassy-eyed, at the pile of stuff. “I could do something radical here.”

“What exactly were you after here, Mos?”

He started giggling. “I’m a visionary. How the hell should I know?”

He picked up an intact guitar from the arrangement of guitars left standing, and he started to strum. Standing right on the pile of loose components.

“So what does all this mean, Mosi, that because you found out I’m behind in the poll you’re not going to help me?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No? So what did you say?”

Mosi opened his mouth, stopped strumming, pointed at me with his pick, then giggled some more. “I don’t know, Gord. What did I say?”

I snapped at him. “You are the most useless—”

“Can we go to Burger King?”

“What?”

“I’m starving.”

“Jesus, Mosi. Are you listening to me? This isn’t funny anymore. I, like, have all this pressure on me all of a sudden, and I have to produce. It’s as if nobody gives a shit that this is my senior year at all.”

He stared at me with St. Bernard eyes. Hopeless.

“You buying?” I sighed.

He shook his head.

“Jesus Christ, Mosi. What good—”

“Don’t you have an expense account?”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” I said. Fins had given me one of his gold cards, which I never used, but would let slip out of my wallet when delicious chickens were around to see it. He also had been feeding me cash through Bucky. “But my expense account is only to be spent on volunteers and campaign-related incidentals.”

“Ah,” he probed, “am I in there somewhere?”

I pulled out my questionnaire. “Can you show me how to do some of that big-ass lying you do?”

He smiled, put the guitar back on its stand, and led me out by the arm. “I have never told more than an innocent white lie, and even then it was only to help out a desperate friend.”

“Ya,” I said, “that’s it. Just like that.”

At Burger King, Mosi ordered three cheeseburgers, onion rings, curly fries, and a chicken-tenders kids’ meal. In the kids’ meal he received a little Disney Pocahontas figurine.

“First off, have I ever done drugs?”

Both of his cheeks were puffed with food. He held up one finger for me to wait while he masticated. I hate waiting when a guy does that.

He swallowed, held the figurine up high. “I think Pocahontas is maybe the finest Disney babe yet.”

“Stop it, Mos, we got work here.”

“Mmmm,” he said, staring and thinking some more. “No
maybe.
She is the finest. Look at those eyes.”

“You’re just trying to provoke me. Cut it out.”

“No, man. I’m in love.”

I slammed down my pen. This had to stop right here.

“You have no taste, Mosi, you know that? Pocahontas is maybe
half
—and I’m being generous—maybe half the woman Jasmine is.”

“Forget about it. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Forget the eyes, okay. Let’s talk about the buckskin, and the Wonderbra she’s gotta have on under it.”

“Oh, time out. You can’t count attire. That’s not part of the scoring. If it was, how about Ariel? All right, seashells. The girl wears nothing but a pair of seashells. If that isn’t fineness—”

“I forgot about the shells. And don’t forget, Gordie, she loses her voice partway through the movie. A girl who wears seashells
and
can’t talk... I change my vote. It’s Ariel.”

He had me pondering. As usual, I was pondering all the wrong things.

“Drugs, Mosi! The question was, have I ever tried drugs?”

“Oh,” he said, like he’d just walked in. “Is that all? Well, the answer is yes.”

“No, no, no, the answer is not yes.”

“It’s not?”

“No, it’s not. I am a candidate for public office, don’t you see? I’ve got to approach this carefully. See, if they drug-test me, I’m clean, that’s not an issue. But if they go digging around asking questions...”

“Gotcha. So the answer is no.”

Poor Mosi. He sounded so proud, too.

“Wrong. They’ll think I’m lying because I’m a teenager and they figure we’re
all
stoned. So I have to come up with just the answer, which makes me look a little bit hip, but not hip enough to be threatening, and honest. Honest is good. Is there such an answer?”

As I spoke, I had gotten so involved in the dilemma that I was rubbing my hands together and staring at them, ignoring Mosi entirely. When I looked up again, he was in the process of fitting one whole cheeseburger in his mouth at once and staring at Pocahontas again. His eyes were a glaze.

I wrote him off, folded my arms across the table, and tucked my face into the crevice there.

“You didn’t inhale,” he said calmly after swallowing.

I raised my head. “What did you say?”

“You tried smoking dope on two occasions. But you did not inhale.”

I beamed at him, and in his reflective face the pride was back. “Mosi. Mosi, you stud. That’s so damn stupid, it’s genius. It’s the perfect wishy-washy, please-everybody-and-don’t-actually-say-a-damn-thing answer imaginable,” I said, and started scribbling. “I don’t know how you do it, Mos.”

“Neither do I. I just get, like, visions sometimes.”

“Cool. Let me know when you get another one.”

“Okay. How ’bout this: With the pills, you only licked ’em.”

“No, Mos. I think we have enough here.”

“And with the needle—”

“Mosi! Thank you. That’ll do, thanks. I think we got it covered. Here, here’s two bucks, go get a cherry pie.”

He got the pie, came back, and sat down as I finished writing.

“Do you think they’ll be interested in your thing for fabric softener?”

“I don’t think it’ll come up, Mos. Okay, next,” I said. “Do I attend church regularly?”

“Jesus, they’re tough,” he said.

“Tell me about it,” I concurred. “It gets worse, even. Wait’ll you see.”

“He’s here. He’s back. He’s hot as a pistol. Dead last in the student-body-president race, but numero uno in our hearts—boys and girls, give it up for Gordie ‘Little Fins’ Foley.”

Mad Matt flipped some switches, cued Sol to do likewise, blew a party horn, and basically did all that jackass stuff he was great at.