Political Timber

by Chris Lynch

  I gave him the number. She’d probably love it anyway. Probably? Of course she’d love it. That’s what I was afraid of.

  “Hello? Hey, yes, is Sweaty there?”

  Well, naturally, it was her father who answered. On the air, to boot, since Matt always worked without a net.

  “All right, punk, which one are you. Robert? This you again, Robert?”

  “No sir, Mr. Sweaty. My name is Matt, and I’m on—”

  “Matt. Marinovich? You filthy little pervert, I told you if you ever called my daughter again—”

  Robert? Robert had been calling my Betty? And Marinovich? Yeeesh.

  “No, sir, listen, this is Mad Matt of radio station WRRR. And I’m here with Gordie Foley, future—”

  “Gordie? Hey, hey, Gordie, how the hell are ya?”

  Betty’s father and I had never spoken. Not once. She told me boys were not allowed to call her, and never, never were they allowed to come to the house. The guy was a total rumor to me. I didn’t know what I was to him.

  “Gordie,” he said again when I didn’t answer, out of fear. “This is you, right? Betty’s new boyfriend, Gordon Foley?”

  New. Betty and I had dated, more or less, for about two years now.

  “Hey, Mr. Hansen,” I said. “Can we speak to Betty, please?”

  “Hell, I couldn’t even believe it when she told me the other day, she was dating somebody famous like you.”

  The other day? Two *@#% years, and she just told him the other day? It was like I was a pod creature and I’d just popped into existence when... well, we all know when, don’t we?

  “Boy, when are we going to have you over to supper?”

  Maybe he was the pod.

  Matt was frantic on the other side of the glass, wheeling his arm like he was waving me in from third. Sol jabbed me in the neck with a pen.

  “Ah, Saturday. Can I talk to Betty now?”

  “Saturday, then. Sure you can talk to her.” He dropped the phone loudly, then picked it up again. “Be sure to bring the car, now.”

  “Sure,” I sighed.

  “Hey, hey, am I on?” Sweaty Betty cooed.

  “Sure sounds like it to me,” Mad Matt answered, rubbing his hands together hard enough to start a fire.

  “Hey, Betty,” I said meekly.

  “Hey, loverboy,” she said, just to make me squirm.

  “So tell me do, Sweaty—by the way, that’s a lovely name you’ve got there.”

  “Thank you, Mad. I got it way back in the fifth grade. One day I came to school without—”

  “You don’t have to tell him that,” I jumped in.

  “Hush, Gordie,” she said.

  “Ya,” Matt added. “Hush now, Gordie. Don’t worry, Betty, you’ll have your chance to tell us all about yourself later. Right now we want to ask you about the demigod here. Is he as amazing as he seems to the rest of us?”

  She paused. Let out a rapturous, loud, juicy sigh. “Yes, Matt, he is.”

  “Well, how is it then? With all he’s got going at the moment, has he got anything left for... you know, for you? Or are you another political widow?”

  “Let me just tell you, Matt, about this savage beast of a candidate—”

  “Honey...” I said through gritted teeth. “You don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to—”

  “I want to,” she chirped.

  “Say good-bye for a while, Gordie. Gordie’s going on break for a while, folks. He’ll be back later in the show,” Matt said, and made a slashing motion across his throat. Sol did something at the board, grinned, and I was temporarily off the air.

  “Bye, sweetie,” Sweaty twittered. I listened in silence as she told impressive, totally fabricated stories of my manliness.

  It was one thirty when I got home after my shift. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table in her flannels, with red-rimmed eyes. She didn’t even slow down when I came in. She had a mission to complete before she dealt with me, and that mission was to finish the entire box of little yellow marshmallow Easter chicks that had been in the back of the pantry for six months. There, done.

  “You told me it was an off-the-air internship,” she said in the practiced calm voice that was, in effect, the anticalm voice.

  “Mother.” I thought it best to go right into an aggressive, scolding mode. “You told me you never listen to that show.”

  “Right. But your cousin Matthew does. And he told his mother, who naturally called me. As did Carol’s mother. As did Hannah and Conor’s mother. As did Charles’s mother. As did—”

  I shrugged. “If you ground me, I can’t run my campaign.”

  “You’re eighteen,” she sighed. “We’re not going to ground you anymore.”

  “Cool,” I said. The first good words of the night.

  She pointed at me menacingly. “But I’m not going to vote for you.”

  Which, apparently, was what she needed to say to let off the steam. She pushed herself up from the table, noticed her fingers sticking, and licked the tips as she walked past me. I turned to follow her, then wrapped my arms around her and squeezed as we waddled out of the kitchen together.

  “Oh, you are so going to vote for me,” I said into her ear.

  “Hmmmph,” she responded, which meant yes. “But does she have to call herself that name for the whole world to hear?”

  OTHER

  WHEN I WENT BACK to work at campaign headquarters, I was towing the beginnings of an entourage. “Jackie! Jackie Foley, how are you?” Bucky gushed, scooting to the door to meet her.

  “I’m fine, Bucky,” Ma answered primly. She was surveying the office. She was not smiling. “Are you telling me Fins used this place all those years as his headquarters?”

  Bucky shrugged. “Fins always was a populist, Jackie. Man of the little—”

  “Pffft,” she snorted. “Well I never voted for that one, and I’m not voting for this one.” She was thumb-jerking in the direction of me, her only child.

  “Yes she is,” I countered.

  “Never?” Bucky was astounded. “You never voted for Fins?”

  She shook her head proudly. “I love my father-in-law. But he was a lousy, fat, irresponsible blowhard of a frivolous, spendthrift, self-satisfied politician. Not the finest qualifications for a mayor.”

  “But the very finest qualifications for a grandfather,” I answered.

  Bucky laughed. Ma did not.

  “So then why are you here?” Bucky asked, pulling out a chair for her.

  “I’m here to help my son. I may not support Gordie the public figure, but I do support Gordie the boy. Even if I’m not going to vote for him.”

  “She’s gonna vote for me.” I winked at Bucky.

  “This is beautiful,” Bucky said, wiping a nonexistent tear from his eye.

  “Cut the nonsense, Bucky,” Ma snapped, “and get me some envelopes to stuff.”

  Bucky saluted her army-style and scurried to get her some work.

  “So,” I said, clasping my hands in front of me. “Does this mean I get to boss you around? Send you out for coffee and toilet paper and all the other supplies my workers use so much of?”

  “You just try it,” she said, shimmying out of her jacket.

  Bucky plunked himself down in the seat across the card table from me. “Have you ever done drugs?” Bucky asked, very businesslike, licking the tip of his pen.

  I did not answer. Looked over my shoulder at my mother, who was working envelopes the way a monkey works peanuts. She had one way-arched eyebrow aimed at me.

  “Buuuuuuck?” I whispered. “What are you doing to me? That’s my mother.”

  “Listen,” he said, laying his pen down across his yet-unsoiled page. “If you got stuff to say that your mom can’t hear, we got some troubles, imagewise.”

  Beeeeep. The FinsFone.

  “Foolish thing,” mother opined.

  “Hey, Da.”

  “How come I ain’t been faxed yet? I was supposed to be reading the candi
date’s profile with my All Bran this morning.”

  “Guess the bread-and-water thing’s kind of a myth, huh?”

  “Put Bucky on.”

  “We’re working on it right now, Fins. Ya, coming along just fine. You were right, the kid’s immaculate, not a blemish on his history.”

  “Pshhhh,” Ma interjected from her gallery-of-one. “Even I know that’s not true.”

  “Ya, that’s Jackie,” Bucky said. “Gung-ho to work for the boy. She’s a dynamo, gonna make all the difference for us.”

  “Are you incapable of telling the truth?” Ma asked my manager.

  “Let him do his job, Ma,” I bossed. Felt good. I could warm up to this.

  Bucky folded up the phone and handed it back to me. I tucked it into the inside pocket of my dungaree jacket. He looked pensive.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Your grandfather, he has an... idealized view of you, I think.”

  “That’s my da,” I chirped.

  “But is he right?” Bucky demanded.

  “Ah, ya. Well, ya, pretty much. In spirit, I think, he knows me pretty well, which is important, I think.”

  Bucky began shaking his head gravely. “Two things, all right? First, if you’re gonna be any good at this whatsoever, we have to train you to lie better than that. Second, if it takes you that long to answer every one of my questions, it’s gonna take us all day, and we ain’t got all day. I gotta start calling newspapers about you, we got a handful of new college volunteers I gotta train on the phones this afternoon—”

  “New college recruits, huh? Any of them girls, Buck?”

  “I think a few, ya, but forget about that. Serious now. We have work to do. I want this bio shit ready for next week, which is gonna be your first fund-raiser. A hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-plate affair.”

  “A buck fifty a plate?. Jesus, Bucky, what’s on the plate, cocaine?”

  He put his pen down again.

  “Gordie.” He paused, sighed, ran his hands back over his head. Tried it again. “Gordie. Conditions... are such that this whole thing, the campaign, will run quite smoothly of its own power. Unless...” He raised an emphatic finger. “Unless you, the candidate, say or do something asinine.”

  I smiled at him. Hoping to relieve some of the gathering tension. The tension resisted my smile.

  “And it is becoming apparent, Gordon, that you are quite capable of just such a thing.”

  I waited what I thought was an appropriate amount of time before speaking.

  “I’m a senior,” I said. I shrugged.

  Bucky slid the form across the table to me. “You fill it out, Gordie. Bring it back to me when you return on Thursday. In the meantime I’ll run the campaign, and you keep from derailing it. Cool?”

  “Cool,” I said.

  “You’re free to go.”

  “Now? What about the girls?”

  “I’ll tell your mom to look them over and get back to you.”

  The next day was Wednesday. A school day, a sweet, simple school day like they all used to be, cruising the halls unknown and unperturbed. No demands, no expectations, no image making, no politics.

  Then again, maybe not.

  “Where have you been?” Mosi snapped. He was sitting on the windowsill at the back of homeroom. I was five minutes ahead of the bell, as usual. Mosi was way early, for him.

  “I’ve been in bed, then I’ve been at the kitchen table, then I’ve been in the car—”

  “We have work to do.”

  “No we don’t, Mos. We’re seniors.” I slapped him on the arm to reassure him.

  For a second he looked reassured. Then he shook it off. “No, Gordie, we have to work on your campaign. We’re way behind.”

  “Please, not you too. I feel like I’m working on that stupid thing twenty-four hours a day. I was kind of hoping school would be a break.”

  “No can do, man. If we want to win, we have to catch up right now.”

  I slid down into my chair. I was starting to feel constantly now as if it was time to brush my teeth and hit the sack, no matter what time of day it was.

  “Mosi, I have to tell you, I’m starting to doubt whether this is even worth scoring a great car and all the delicious chickens in town.”

  Mosi slapped me. Like General Patton in the movie.

  I sat there, stunned. Then the insanity of my words registered.

  “Thanks, man,” I said. “I’m ready to work.”

  I hopped up onto the windowsill next to him and pulled my mayoral questionnaire out of my back pocket. “Actually, I was planning to ask you for a little help with this anyway. This mayor shit is getting complicated.”

  Mosi stared at it, then pulled something out of his own back pocket.

  “No, no, no, I don’t mean that,” he said. “I mean this.”

  It was a copy of our imaginative school newspaper, The School Newspaper. Top story was the result of the paper’s student-body-president poll.

  “There was a poll? How did I not even know there was a poll?”

  “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 w
as 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.”