Man of the Year

by Lou Cove

  “Oh yeah, no, I know. I’m not worried about if you like it.” Wait, that sounds totally wrong. “I mean, I want you to like it. Me. What I want.” This is going badly. Hindenburg bad. “And I want to be a man,” I say, my voice rising like a girl’s. “I do.” She frowns, shaking her head. I try one more option: “I want to be what you want me to be.”

  “You should want to be yourself, Spike.”

  “But that’s what I’m trying to be,” I reach tentatively for her.

  “I know.” She sighs, stepping back. “That’s the problem.”

  Say Uncle

  “What’s the word, Thunderbird?” Howie asks when Uli and I get home. He and Mama are at it again, scraping paint bark from a rotting sill.

  “Nothing,” I shrug.

  “Well, that was quite a visit today. I mean, that witch is the real deal, huh?”

  “Peter says she’s not,” Mama says, “but I’ve seen it for myself. She can definitely do some kind of magic.”

  “You can’t help but feel it,” Howie marvels. “Why would he doubt her?”

  “Well, he hasn’t ever met her, for one. But mainly he just thinks she’s a huckster. You know, she did manage to trick the governor into declaring her the official Witch of Salem.”

  Uli looks perplexed. “She did?”

  Mama nods, leaves, and returns with a newspaper clipping that bears a surprise headline:

  GOV. DUKAKIS UNWITTINGLY GIVES “WITCH” HER WISH

  She points to the way witch is set off by quotes and begins to read: “For six long years, Laurie Cabot has been struggling, doggedly, to get herself proclaimed ‘the official witch of Salem.’ This week, Ms. Cabot apparently worked her magic on Governor Dukakis, and he unwittingly did for Ms. Cabot what Salem mayors and councils have refused repeatedly. With the stroke of a pen, or more likely a signature stamp, Dukakis sanctioned Ms. Cabot’s claim to being Salem’s official ‘witch.’”

  “I don’t get it,” I say. “Why was it unwitting?”

  “Well, some politician asked the governor to give Laurie what’s known as a Paul Revere citation in recognition of her good work with sick children.”

  “But she does that…” For Penny’s sake, I don’t like the direction this is taking.

  “She does. And it’s wonderful. But the citation said ‘Laurie Cabot, Official Witch of Salem’ and technically, she isn’t. Or wasn’t. Oy. He must sign a hundred of them every week. But no one is really the official Witch of Salem. It’s a made-up title.”

  “But with the Duke’s John Hancock, it became official,” Howie gets it before I do.

  “Why does it matter? I mean, who cares? She’s definitely a witch.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Mama says. “I saw what she did for you. But the city council thinks she tricked Governor Dukakis so she could make money from the ‘appointment.’ And they think it’s their decision and no one else’s.”

  “‘Council Says Phooey to Witch,’” Howie takes the article and reads aloud. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen the word ‘phooey’ in a newspaper headline before. Very Salem.” He passes it to Uli, who picks up reading.

  “‘The city council wasted no time Thursday night repudiating Gov. Dukakis’s faux pas in naming Laurie Cabot as Salem’s official witch. Ward 5 Councillor Jean-Guy Martiseau recommended that the city council ‘go on record as not acknowledging any person or spirit as the witch of Salem.’”

  “Oh, I love this,” Howie grins, moving along to another chipped and rotting sill.

  “It gets better,” Uli continues. “‘I don’t think the governor should have anything to do with this. I just hope the witch doesn’t put a whammy on me.’ Ha! That’s pissah.” He hands the article back to Mama, who hands me another clipping.

  RECOGNITION DESERVED

  To the editor: I saw the article about my mother, Laurie Cabot. The way it was written was meant to make my mother look bad. But it also made Gov. Dukakis and Elaine Noble look bad.

  If the Governor did things unwittingly he would not be Governor of any state today. I respect Michael Dukakis for his recognition of my mother’s work and his right to declare her “Official Witch of Salem.”

  PENNY CABOT

  Age 12

  Salem

  I read it twice and my heart balloons, renewed with feeling for her.

  Why didn’t she tell me?

  “That’s good spin,” Howie says. “Sounds like she has a press secretary doing some ghostwriting for her. Turning it back on the paper and the council and making them the ones calling the guv’s integrity into question.”

  “She’s protecting her mom,” I interrupt. “And I’m sure she wrote it herself. Why don’t you stop making fun of her? You’re being a big … dick.”

  “Whoa!” Howie bellows, not believing my anger.

  “Lou…” Mama says as I bolt from the room.

  I’ve thrown a gauntlet, and I don’t know how to retrieve it but I know I’m not going to apologize.

  “Hey, gringo,” Howie taps softly on my open door. “Can I talk to you for a sec?”

  I nod and he joins me on my bunk. “I was in no way trying to shit on your girlfriend. You know that, right? Friends don’t do that, and we’re best friends. So I’m sorry. OK? I’m sorry. I should know better. I was being a big, fat dick.”

  “Even though you don’t even have a big dick,” I crack.

  “I have the smallest fucking dick in show business, buddy. That’s why they made me get it up for the pictures. If I stayed soft you’d hardly see it.” I laugh with him. “Hey!” He slips a magazine out from under the pillow. “You still have my Hustler. And now it’s all sticky! Ewwwwwww!” He throws it at me and I scream and we roll on the bed together in a pile, his strong arms pinning and squeezing me just hard enough.

  And then just hard enough becomes too much. I try to flip onto my side, to get an elbow underneath me for leverage, but Howie’s mass seems to increase in direct proportion to my resistance. I fight with my legs and hips but I’m pinned. My forearms are free to flail but with Howie’s hands locked on my biceps there was no way to reach him. I harden with a poison mix of anger and fear. The smell of Brussels sprouts fills my nose from somewhere ugly inside.

  “Get off!” I scream. Atjeh barks warily from the bunk below.

  “Say uncle,” he laughs, adopting the goo-goo voice that adults use with babies.

  “No! Just get off!” I buck and try to roll over.

  “Uncle!” he repeats, singsong.

  “You’re not my dad!” I shout, surprising myself.

  “No, uncle!” Atjeh yaps again, scrabbles around the room, trying to get a look at what’s happening.

  “Ugggghhhhh!” I flex one last, futile time against him, then scream “GETTHEFUCKOFFMEYOUFUCKINGASSHOLE!”

  Howie springs up, realization dissolving his dumb handsome smile. “Hey. Hey hey.” He reaches for me but I’m off the bunk and on the floor, face down in the beanbag chair by the dormant fireplace, Atjeh alternately licking my face and snapping up at Howie, who hangs his legs over the edge of the bunk, shaking his head.

  “Hey. I was playing. I’m sorry. It was just a game. I guess I’m … I’m just doing a shitty job of being the adult.” I don’t reply. “What’s going on? This vibe is off. I can see that.”

  I roll over on the beanbag, my face so hot I could melt him just by staring. His expression betrays a hurt I haven’t seen before and I can tell he isn’t prepared for conflict. I reel in a tide of love/hate I’ve known with only one other person on this planet: Papa.

  What hits me, suddenly, is the impermanence of the situation. For all the excitement, the campaign will only delay the inevitable: Howie and Carly will move on, and the Coves will go back to regular family life. Which is what, exactly? We’ve hardly given ourselves enough time in a single city to bother finding out. I should never get attached, to any place or anyone. It always ends. Badly.

  I don’t want to do the campaign anymore, I admit to myself the m
oment before I say it aloud to Howie. And as I do I start to cry.

  “Fine. Done. Campaign over. We’re out of the politics business.” I look at Howie, his expression unreadable through the film of tears. “Does that help? Is that better?”

  “But you … You have to win. I want you to be Man of the Year. I want you to win. I just can’t be…”

  He sits next to me and I can smell him. I smell Carly, wood smoke, pot smoke, cigarette smoke, everything that makes up Howie all wrapped up in a fragrance as familiar and comforting as that of my own bed.

  “Hey, it’s almost April. The June issue comes out in May. So if they haven’t stopped counting votes, they’re going to any day now.”

  “But every vote counts.”

  “True. True. But let me let you in on a little secret. This whole campaign thing? It’s not going to make a difference one way or the other. You know that, right?” I stare at him, unsure of what he’s saying. “Salem? Marblehead? If we were in LA, maybe. New York. But here? It’s just for fun. Just a way for us to pass the time.”

  “But you said you wanted to win.” It can’t be for me.

  “I do, little Jefe. I’m trying! Oy, am I trying! But at the end of the day they’re going to pick who they’re going to pick. The thing is rigged. You know it is. They probably don’t even count the votes. It’s like your dad said, they just want someone who will make them look good, who they can send out on a press junket. Maybe I’m that guy. Maybe I’m not. But there’s nothing you or I can do about it.”

  I know it’s true. But I believe it’s not. If it came down to the wire. If Mr. April was closing in … We could have made all the difference. I stare blankly at Atjeh’s snout, settled protectively over my lap. “What about being your campaign manager?”

  “You were,” Howie says imploringly. “You are. But if it’s causing you grief? That was never the point. It was a fun game while it lasted.”

  That last part scores the nerves, settles in the marrow.

  A game. We’re not Starsky and Hutch. We’re Alice and Bobby Brady.

  “I just want to be alone for a while,” I say.

  The Nuclear Sleepover

  The April 1979 cover of Time is a full-bleed photo of two big, purple towers and red alarm lights blinking in the twilight. I had never seen one of these structures before last week. But there isn’t a person alive who doesn’t know what they are now: cooling towers for a nuclear power plant. They are in a place called Three Mile Island and they are not cool. The headline is two words long:

  NUCLEAR NIGHTMARE

  The adults stop talking about it when I come into the room but it’s impossible to miss the new vocabulary: fallout, core breach, radiation poisoning. I read the newspaper every day, trying and failing to convince myself that apocalyptic disasters only happen in the movies. A few weeks ago it was The China Syndrome. Now it’s Three Mile Island. And if The China Syndrome is real, then what else can be?

  President Carter and Rosalynn fly to the site to prove it’s safe, but there aren’t many people there to greet Air Force One because they’ve all fled their homes. Headlines in The New York Times proclaim “Milk Safe” and “Area Now Safe for Pregnant Women” but do little to calm the panic.

  Howie has taken the “accident” in Pennsylvania more seriously than anyone else, retiring to bed for the past two days. My disappointment in him softens as his own frailty and fear come into stark relief. “We’re getting whacked. Again,” he says from under the covers when I try, unsuccessfully, to draw him out.

  There’s lots of pot smoking in the house but none of the giggles. The fissures in our nuclear family—the one that includes Howie and Carly—are illuminated and 31 Chestnut is now lonelier and more solemn than it’s ever been. But it can’t just be because a stuck valve in a power plant in Pennsylvania spewed coolant and torched the heart out of reactor number two. Howie is offline. Answers from Mama and Papa as to how to survive in a world with a nuclear meltdown are few, and I suspect the adults in my life don’t have any. I retreat to my Secure Position but there’s little here beyond the shrieking bite of the March wind. I’m losing all my hiding places.

  Well, almost all.

  Penny calls. Her husky voice is oddly high. She’s scared. “Sleep over tonight?”

  It’s Friday so I don’t even ask. I just go and call Mama later: announcing, not requesting.

  Penny, clad in loose waffle long underwear and black T-shirt, pulls me into her room as soon as I arrive, brings out a thick, furry blanket, and invites me under, side by side, knees bumping. Occasional shivers rumble up my spine.

  “Spike,” she whispers. I look into her eyes, wet and desperate, and nod. “I don’t think, if something happened. Like the radiation meltdown thing. I don’t think my mom…”

  “She’ll always protect you. She knows how.”

  “Not this.”

  And it’s true. It’s Three Mile Island, not pet dander. And she’s the most beautiful girl I have ever seen.

  “I always wished that, one day, my powers would come out. Superpowers. When they were needed most. Just … flame on!” I say.

  “That’s a comic book, not real life,” Penny says.

  “I know. But things happen. Look at you. Look at your mom.”

  “It’s different.”

  “Why?” I shift closer to her. She sits up.

  “Let’s change the subject.”

  I turn onto my back, rest my head on her thigh, and stare up at Leif Garrett, visible in the moonlight.

  “What if I had the power to … I don’t know … something like Johnny Storm.”

  “I don’t think being a flying flame is going to help you if a nuclear power plant blows up.”

  “OK. Sue Storm, then. She can create force fields, like protective bubbles.”

  “Great. Then you can be like the boy in the plastic bubble. You have a John Travolta thing, kind of. A Jewish John Travolta—”

  “No, not that kind of bubble—”

  “Like a shorter, not hairy John Travolta.”

  “A force field bubble. They’re impenetrable. And they make it so she can fly, so it’s better than Johnny.”

  “I really need you to stop,” she says, lifting her knees to her chest and pushing me off.

  “OK.” I drop it and we sit in silence for a long time.

  “I’m sorry,” she says finally. “Let’s just go to sleep.”

  We curl together under the warm blanket. I’m actually spooning a girl, I think. Penny’s hair smells like the woods, making my penis swell, and I have to pull back a bit so she doesn’t feel it.

  “Come back,” she says.

  I try to get as close as I can, folding at the waist so just that one part of me doesn’t touch. But it’s sticking out so I have to pull my hand back to tuck it under the waistband of my underwear. I pretend I’m just scratching.

  Penny flips over to face me again. “Where are you going?” she whispers.

  “Nowhere,” I promise.

  She puts her face right up to mine and kisses me. The touch of her lips overrides the emergency cooling system of my internal reactor and my face floods with radioactive isotopes. She pulls back, smiles softly. Fusion.

  “I thought you said—”

  “Shhhh.”

  “—they don’t last.” I remind her, unable to stop. I need to hear her say they do. It will.

  “Don’t.”

  I lean in to kiss her again but she shakes her head, smiling. It’s over. “Once is enough. Now go to sleep.”

  I know that nothing will ever be enough, but this is so much more than I could have hoped for. I tuck my raging plutonium fuel rod away again, press my chest against her back, wrap my arms around her stomach and feel the bottom of her breasts graze my forearm every time she exhales.

  Nothing but a thin layer of waffled cotton between us. Then the door opens and Laurie comes in, robes catching the twilight.

  “Is someone in here with you?”

  “It’s
Lou,” Penny says without sitting up. I hold my breath.

  “Oh, good,” Laurie says. “I’m glad you’re not alone. Louis, it’s nice that you came over tonight. This is such a terrible time and friends need friends.”

  “Uh huh,” I say from under the blanket.

  “So just take care of each other,” she says finally, closing the door. “And sleep on the floor, Louis. OK?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “You two are so good to one another,” she says from the crack she’s left open in the door. “Maybe you’ll get married one day. Wouldn’t that be something?”

  Penny’s face is hidden in the pillows so I can’t see her reaction. Mine could light up the room.

  *

  Laurie leaves the next morning to join the Red Sox in Florida for spring training and help them break the Curse of the Bambino. I stay over a second night and we kiss once more. Just once. I don’t dare touch Penny in any way that could screw the pooch and she doesn’t invite it.

  I get home Sunday night, blood racing. Amanda grabs me the moment I walk through the door—she wants to show me the loft Mama built in her bedroom. “And she let me pick out new wallpaper! It’s bright green with yellow flowers and we painted the loft bright yellow to match!”

  I indulge her briefly on the way to my room. It’s a sight, for sure. Mama’s skills are undeniable.

  Behind closed doors I flop onto my bed, close my eyes, and think of waffled long underwear and black cats.

  Penny’s Been Thinking, Gretchen’s Been Drinking

  Spring pops in Salem. Our campaign scuttled, the Man of the Year voting period ends with little fanfare and the nuclear fallout does have a half-life. Penny says I can’t come over while her mom’s away. President Carter gets attacked by a swamp rabbit while fishing in Georgia and Howie slowly returns to his old self. We make up like brothers, a couple of hugs and soft punches. The money for the job Papa keeps promising for Howie never comes. And with the work of lobbying voters in the most important election in modern American history behind us, we devote our evenings and weekends to house renovations and trips to the movies. All we can do is wait.