Political Timber

by Chris Lynch

  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.

  DINING WITH THE CANDIDATE

  DINNER 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.

  “Hi, everyone,” I said, so quietly that Matt had to signal me to speak up. “This week’s report is, yes, it appears that I am starting slowly in the school race—”

  “Slowly?” Matt jumped in. He had a control where he could not only talk over me, he could shut my mike off completely while he did it. “Slowly? Gordie, the Titanic started slowly. For you they would have just built the ship right there on the bottom of the ocean.”

  “I’m building some momentum,” I countered with no conviction. “And secondly, I don’t care for the name ‘Little Fins.’”

  “You don’t. All right, I admit, it wasn’t my best work, but some days... Wait a minute.” Matt’s face lit up. His voice rose and he got up out of his chair. “Where do we always turn when we are in need?”

  Shit, I thought. It’s gonna be a long night. Sol was laughing already, which he was now doing with more regularity than he had in the history of the show.

  “To our loyal and insightful listeners, of course. So pick up your phones, kiddies, and join in the great American political process. Let your voice be heard as we play the all-important Name the Candidate game! Help the boy out, gang. It’s no wonder he’s getting drubbed. Can’t be a decent candidate without a gripping handle.”

  “I like Gordie,” I tried.

  There was a loud buzzing sound effect that blasted my eardrums. “Nope, sorry, Gord. Doesn’t rhyme.”

  Sweaty was the first to call. “How ’bout Gord the Sword,” she moaned. She sounded like a 900 number.

  “Would you please get off the line,” I snapped. “This is hard enough.”

  “I bet,” she added before clicking.

  The Hawk, for all its greatness, is definitely no more than a four-passenger vehicle. This worked out well for the fund-raiser because I wound up squiring not only my volunteer/nonsupporter mother and her date, my nonvolunteer/nonsupporter father, but also my visionary assistant, Mosi. Sweaty refused to come after I told her to shut up over the public airwaves. She insisted on an apology over those same airwaves, and since I wouldn’t have the chance until tomorrow night, no Sweaty tonight.

  Anyway, I had Mosi. My parents hopped into the backseat together, and let Mosi ride up front like he was my date. He was wearing a maroonish suit that clung to his big short arms and thick neck like he was growing right out of it before our eyes. And though we were on our way to dinner, he came packing a gigantic bag of Smartfood.

  As I warmed up the Tourismo in the driveway—regardless of the weather, you let her idle for exactly four minutes or you are abusing her—Mos sat in the passenger seat, bearing down on the popcorn like a horse with a feedbag.

  “What’s up with you?” I asked, whispering a little bit lower than my folks were whispering and giggling in back. I turned on the radio, but nothing would come out of it until the tubes heated up.

  “Nuth,” he garbled.

  “Look at me, Mosi.”

  He looked up. Popcorn cheese ringed his mouth and sprinkled his eyebrows like fairy dust. The eyes themselves were dewy and unfocused. I sniffed him.

  “Jesus Christ,” I snapped.

  “What is it?” my father asked.

  The radio, warmed, blasted in out of nowhere. The four minutes was not quite up, but I threw the car in reverse, apologizing to it as I did.

  “Nothing, Dad. Mosi just has popcorn cheese on his suit, and he looks like a dick!” I snarled.

  “Gordon!” Ma gasped. Dad and Mosi seemed not to mind.

  “Want some Smartfood?” Mosi asked, swinging around and aiming the bag at my parents.

  I swiped the bag out of his hand, threw it out the window. “No eating in the Studebaker. I told you this a million times.”

  “A little nervous about tonight, son?” Ma asked.

  I grunted.

  “What’s that sound? What’s that sound I hear back there?” I was just asking for dramatic effect. I knew very well what the sound was, just as I knew the Hawk’s every sound. It was the creaking of the tiny spring that holds down the lid on the mini-ashtray in the rear door handle. “There’s no smoking in the Studebaker, Dad. You know that.”

  I watched his laugh lines in the mirror. He was enjoying himself. “Used to be able to smoke in the Studebaker,” he said, grandly draping his arm over my mother’s shoulders.

  What is it about this car that makes guys do that?

  “In fact,” he reminisced, “everybody did. My dad would be tooling along in the front seat on a Sunday afternoon, one arm around my mom, beeping and waving at everybody we passed. He really was king back then, I’ll give him that. Anyhow, he’d have a big old stogie stuck in his kisser, Mom would be smoking a tiparillo—she was a maverick herself—and me and my sister would be all scrunched down in back sharing a butt out of the ashtray.”

  Dad paused to laugh at his story. “With the top down, and all the parade-waving they did, my folks never even knew what we were doing back there. Everybody in town saw us smoke except our own damn parents, heh-heh.” There was an extra little twist to that last laugh that was kind of chilling.

  “Awesome story, Mr. Foley,” Mosi doofed.

  “Ya, really cool, Dad. But you still can’t smoke now. Times have changed. New regime. Get with the program.”

  He booed me. I was a high-school kid, last in the poll, on his way to make a speech to adults with money. My date, who was not pretty enough to get away with it, smelled like a Rastafarian priest. And my very father was booing me.

  “It’s called preaching to the converted,” Bucky said, in an effort to calm me down. “It’s the easiest thing in the world. You don’t have to win anybody over. This is your grandfather’s core of support, his inner circle. They love him, they love you. And all two hundred of ’em have paid a buck fifty apiece to prove it.”

  “Two hun... at a hundred fif...”

  Bucky stood patiently, waiting for me to defeat the equation. He couldn’t wait any longer.

  “Gord, has anyone mentioned to you that the mayor has to manage a one-hundred-million-dollar budget?”

  “Jesus, I wish people would stop saying that to me.”

  “Forget it. Just go out there and accept the people’s love. Tell a joke, do some rah-rah, talk about your dear da. Then get down before you put your foot in it.”

  “Thanks, coach,” I said.

  I worked up a full greasy sweat at dinner, mumbling to myself like a psychopath as I practiced sounding natural. Fifty different people came by to introduce themselves as lifelong FOFs (Friends Of Fins), and I established my credibility as a politician by slipping every one of them the slimiest handshake of his life. My fa
ther laughed at almost everything because he, unlike his son, had not lost the ability to not take any of it seriously. I had to stop looking at my mother after a while because the pain became too great. She saw the anguish in my face, which brought her to the brink of tears, which, when I saw that, brought me to the brink of tears, and so on. Mosi ate his chicken cordon bleu in three bites, ate his baked potato and its skin, and some of its foil wrapper. He ate the wrinkled peas, the garnish, and the lemon slice in his water.

  “You gonna finish that?” he asked me.

  My food was untouched. “Mosi, first why don’t you ask me if I’m going to start it?”

  “You gonna start—”

  I shoved my plate toward him.

  “... Gordon... Foley!” That was all I heard. There must have been an intro of some kind because I had a vague recollection of Bucky’s voice over the P.A., but nothing registered until I heard my name, and the terrifying applause that followed it.

  I toddled up the two steps to the podium and settled in under the four-foot-by-six-foot photo of my grandfather, smiling broadly and waving, cigar in fingers, from the driver’s seat of my car. So why wasn’t he up here doing the dirty work, I thought. Anyway, I was happy to see half the room still concentrating on eating, receiving desserts, trading tastes, flagging waitresses for more coffee. So I just said hi and launched, hoping my seven minutes would evaporate before they noticed me.

  “So when Bucky told me... a hundred and fifty dollars a plate, just to come and listen to me...” I paused. My comic timing, at least, was functioning. “I asked him, ‘What’s on the plate, Buck, cocaine?’”

  I had thought, previously, that silence was one of those absolute things, that there were not degrees of silence. But this, this thing, this fearsome black nothing of silence, was a new experience in my eighteen years. Not even a fork grazing a plate.

  That was, of course, until Mosi caught up to us.

  “Bar-har-ar-har-ar-har...” and so on. His laugh, zipping through the still room, bouncing off this wall and that one, back again, crisscrossed the room several times, slicing me every which way like a Star Wars laser.