by Scott Simon
Ern whistled admiringly, as if at a sleek car.
“I protect the acting interim mayor of Chicago,” Sgt. McNulty explained.
Sunny raised his glass and the sergeant, Rula, Rita, and Ern followed with their own, clinking.
“To the mayor of Chicago,” Sunny declared. “The one and only.” Sunny's voice broke and his eyes simmered. He was so worn out that he couldn't seem to blink back the tears, and feared that he was getting weepy. Several voices up and down the bar pealed back, “The mayor …”
Rula and Rita scraped their chairs around Sgt. McNulty, clearly intrigued with his rounded rower's shoulders, his short, sandy hair, his blunt sentences, and impeccably straight sideburns.
“Would you have shot that alderman?” asked Rula.
“Let's just say he's lucky to be home tonight, flossing his teeth with one arm.”
“Would you have killed him?” Rita asked more softly.
“I would have dropped him,” the sergeant said flatly. “We don't go in for dramatic language.”
“Dropped him?” she asked.
“At that distance, it would have been like putting holes in a sofa. Drop—like a watermelon from a window.”
Rula mashed the palm of her right hand down on her knee.
“Splat!” she said. “How many people have you dropped?” Sunny noticed that his daughter had absorbed her mother's custom of swirling the ends of her long hair over the rim of her glass.
“None,” said the sergeant evenly.
“How do you know you could?” asked Rita.
“You just do.”
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“No.”
“Don't want to be tied down?”
“I don't have girlfriends,” said McNulty and Rita slapped her forehead into the palm of a hand as Rula blurted, “Oh bloody hell,” a gobbet of baba ghanoush clinging to the line of her lip.
“It's true what they say,” she declared. “All the good ones are already taken, or gay.”
“Who the hell says that?” Sunny asked with alarm, and his daughters laughed as if their father had just blurted out the most ridiculous and endearing thing. They stood up to take a couple of stools at the far end of the bar to watch the TV screen. There were long lines of people standing soberly in heavy boots outside of the Cultural Center, flurries frosting their arms and shoulders. Sunny could hear sobs from the screen, cars crunching past slowly in the snow, and the muted voices of announcers. Rula reached her right arm across Rita's shoulders. Rita leaned her head against her sister. Sgt. McNulty leaned in closer to Sunny, speaking just to him.
“That must be nice to see, Mr. Roopini.”
“They could just as easily dig their fingernails into each other,” he told him. “But, yes. Especially now.”
“What happened last year,” the sergeant said cautiously. “I'm sorry.”
“Thank you,” was all Sunny could ever seem to say.
“It was on my mind today. I didn't want …”
“Yes,” Sunny said simply.
“May I ask—what happened?”
“Oh. Well, the two guys took a plea.”
“I meant your wife,” the sergeant stressed. “The guys—I couldn't care.”
“Oh,” said Sunny. He folded his hands over a knee and wondered how to state it once again. “Well. She was in the currency exchange to buy phone cards. She got them every few weeks so the folks who work in our restaurant could call back home to El Salvador, Greece, Hyderabad, whatever. She was putting the cards in her bag when those guys came in.”
McNulty shook his head with every other word.
“I wish I'd been there that day, too,” he said.
Sunny could not seem to turn his eyes off. Rula and Rita could overhear their father getting choked and teary and moved back toward the sofa and their seats.
“Sheldon misses you, Pappaji,” said Rula, reaching around his shoulder. “He saw the TV and was worried.”
“Me and Sheldon both.”
“Do you protect Sheldon, too, Sgt. McNulty?” asked Rita.
“Our cat,” Sunny explained.
“I guessed,” said the sergeant. He turned up his glass and took a solid swallow. “You bet,” he announced. “Nobody gets the drop on Sheldon.”
“He hasn't been declawed,” Rita said teasingly drawing her tongue across her lips. Sunny hadn't liked seeing the expression since she was six.
“Me neither,” said the sergeant. “We're a good pair.”
“Sheldon loves our father,” said Rula, moving onto Sunny's left knee. “Two of a kind, we say.”
“There is no need to finish that thought,” said Sunny with an urgency that surprised him; but Rula went on.
“The two of them scratching themselves, watching TV and falling asleep on the sofa.” Then she noticed Sunny's light brown suede brogues at the end of his pin-striped legs, and leveled a finger at them as if she were pointing to lichens glowing at the back of a cave. She leaned over to kick her father's right foot.
“Oh Pappaji,” said Rita. “Poor Pappaji. You look like such an alder-man!”
Aldermen were considered the comic relief of politics. Chicagoans liked their mayors to be pugnacious and effective. They rarely cared if a mayor rewarded his or her allies, as long as those enriched could build the buildings, run the trains, sweep the snow, haul the trash, catch the muggers, and stand back to let people make money. They could even tolerate officials who ached to be statesmen; they had put up with the likes of Lincoln and Stevenson, if a long time ago.
Most people recognized only a few aldermen by name, but tended to associate almost all of them with a series of traits. Aldermen mangled language. Unless disciplined, they behaved like four-year-olds trying to catch candy spilling out of a piñata. They would tell a blind newsstand clerk that a five-dollar bill was a twenty. They might be occasionally entertaining, in the way that Roman emperors kept young children at their banquet tables for amusement. But you wouldn't want your sister, your daughter, or nowadays, your son, to marry an alderman.
Sunny knew that he benefited by contrast. He was well spoken and immaculate (he was especially careful to attend to his hands; slapping dough onto the rough clay side of tandoori ovens made him scarred and hairless on the back of his hands). He knew that his faint English accent conveyed a note of sophistication to Americans, and he worked to keep it, after more than thirty years in the city. Once, a reporter caught Sunny carrying a copy of The Economist under his arm. He reacted with exaggerated surprise, as if he'd just seen an orangutan wearing velvet slippers. It was enough to earn Sunny a reputation in the council for being some kind of Disraeli or Vaclav Havel.
In fact, Sunny was probably less well educated than most aldermen. He had left Truman City College in his second year after the death of his father, Sidhan. His brother, Vendan, was already a premed major, so the future of his family's restaurant fell on Sunny. He buried his father with remorse, but ended his academic career with relief.
Yet two decades in the chamber convinced Sunny that there were as many certifiably smart aldermen as those who were embarrassingly stupid. Linas Slavinskas was not only an astute lawyer. He surprised Sunny with cosmopolitan observations about opera, literature, and art. (Linas explained away such fluency by telling Sunny, “You don't impress the girls who work the makeup counter at Saks by talking about our sewer rebate program.”)
Vera Barrow and Kiera Malek were poised and informed on weekend interview shows. The mayor usually dispatched them to represent the city at international conferences that wanted a look at a real Chicago alderman. Vera would return and report, “They kept waiting for me to drool.”
Once the mayor had posted Arty Agras to an urban land use conference in Athens. “I'm so glad to be in the land of my forefathers, who have given so much to civilization,” Artie told his hosts. “The Acropolis, the Coliseum, and the right of affectional preference among men.”
But even Arty, who was certainly more what the delegates had in mind, ha
d spare moments of such lucidity in reading the small, numbing print in a city budget that Sunny had wondered if his malaprops were part of some prolonged act. “You see, Sunny,” he would say as he drew back one of the blue vinyl covers and let the pages fall, “a printed budget is a little like a fan dance. The small part that shows makes you think you're seeing more than you are.”
Cyril Murphy of the 40th was the Irish Republican Army's legal counsel in Chicago and could draw the minute lines of a redistricted ward as if he were deveining shrimp. Rod Abboud was an ass, but no fool. He had been to the University of Chicago's law school with Linas Slavinskas (but unlike Linas, couldn't seem to make an observation about parking restrictions along Western Avenue without quoting “the distinguished scholar, my fellow Maroon …”). Evelyn Washington was a second-grade teacher at the Cyrus Colter School. Reasoning with seven-year-olds, she said, prepared her to mediate with aldermen.
Sunny didn't want to devote too much of his life listening to Arty Agras retell old goodfellas stories, or swallowing a grimace that could be confused with a smile at one of Collie Kerrigan's jokes. But he didn't regard the time he spent with his colleagues as personally disagreeable, and certainly not beneath him. Politicians tended to be friendly, aldermen especially so. They collected funny stories. They wanted to be liked. Hell, they wanted to be loved and asserted themselves desperately and gracelessly like ducks trying to make love to a football.
The Roopini name had been the object of joking (“Dark as you are, you must be from Calabria,”) since the family arrived in Chicago in the first great wave of East Indian emergency room doctors and grad students. One day Sunny found an Italian cookbook left in a booth. He thumbed through it and began to think. Within a few weeks, he offered spaghetti with lamb meatballs on the menu, mostly to feature something for Chicago children who still wrinkled their noses at the idea of lentil dal and sag paneer. Within a few more weeks, a neighborhood newspaper made admiring, humorous mention of Sunny Roopini's Italian specialties—and Sunny was obliged to concoct several more. Sidhan had opened the restaurant to Indian community meetings on flat Sunday afternoons, when football and baseball games usually made business slow. Sunny reached out to bring in Dante Alighieri clubs, Kiwanians, synagogue groups, realtors, undertakers, and a swinger's club (for, as Sunny reasoned, people who favored orgies would certainly enjoy their three-course buffet). Within months, there were wedding rehearsal dinners, bat mitzvah luncheons, and happy hours with samosas and cha-patis. For greeting the disparate groups of people, Sunny began to perfect witty little speeches about being an Indian in America, but not an American Indian. Looking back, it was his beginning in politics.
But after twenty years in the council, Sunny Roopini felt increasingly spent and dull. All the irrecoverable hours he had spent at meetings, rallies, and citizen forums, absorbing breathless banalities and policy babble like a sponge at the bottom of a pail. All the cynical courtesies he had awarded uncaring adversaries, all the tinny excuses he had offered disappointed friends.
There were times that even as Sunny opened his mouth to make some pledge—to balance a budget, slash taxes, or keep Chicago clean!—he mentally prepared to explain, a few months hence, why it was not possible. The state legislature blocked it; the federal government wouldn't fund it; powerful antediluvian forces crushed the will of the people like a paper cup in the street. The next campaign came, and politicians would still send new promises into the sky, like balloons, to drift away.
The predictable rotation of promises and excuses made people cynical. But Sunny sometimes told friends, “A campaign promise is like shouting out ‘I love you’ during orgasm. You mean it. You mean it absolutely in that moment. But any adult should know that you might not be able to mean it next week.”
Increasingly and uselessly, Sunny imagined ways that he might have made more money, seen more of his daughters, met Salma Hayek, or at least have been the best at some craft or business. The issues with which he was identified—gay rights, school reforms, and immigrant issues—had mostly prevailed. Sunny didn't fool himself that he had made the difference. But there were times when he wondered why, if the goals had been gained, he was still on the field?
But a politician wasn't a priest. A professional had to find new things to believe in.
Sunny found that he still enjoyed the chance to accomplish something actual and concrete—to make a call and get a dead tree cut down, a traffic light put up, or a parking ticket dismissed for a senior citizen who had confused Tuesday and Thursday. He was glad that the right note or phone call—the right small joke in the ear of an overburdened city bureaucrat—might get an autistic child into a good program. He took pleasure in writing a recommendation for the Alferez girl to get into Annapolis, or for the father of the Schweppe boy to get early parole. He was happy to hear people say, “All that snow, but I could get to work because the thirty-six was running. Alderman Roopini makes sure the plows are out before the first flake.”
Sunny hadn't had a serious opponent for years. But he was still surprised by the number of people so eager to compete for a prize that was so widely mocked.
Some still saw the chance for financial reward in a council seat. “Never take a dime,” Linas had famously advised. “Just hand them your business card.” But forty years of reforms had heartlessly curtailed the ways in which an alderman could avail himself of opportunities.
Some who ran hoped the council might confer enough fame to help them run for higher office. But Sunny thought it was an undependable stepping stone. A voter might forgive a congressman for voting for or against war in Iraq, the medicinal use of marijuana, or expanding gun controls; but never an alderman who had opposed installing a traffic light on the corner of Ashland and Wrightwood.
Yet running for the city council was still an affordable exercise of citizenship and ego. The excessive number of wards meant that the city's political map was broken down into fifty accessible enclaves; Sunny could walk the length of the 48th in fifteen minutes. An alder-manic candidate could forgo the spectacular costs of buying television ads to charm, scare, or intoxicate millions.
One night, the mayor had asked Sunny to watch a reel of his political commercials. Horns soared; strings swelled. The camera swept quickly over glossy skyscrapers glowing in the morn. A female African-American crossing guard in an orange belt warmly waved on a waddling flock of six-year-olds in a multiplicity of hues. Office workers strode purposefully over bridges, their faces intent on the future. Wellproportioned construction workers struck poses of casual prowess against a pile of red girders and construction cranes. A man with a handlebar moustache (he could be Greek, Italian, Mexican, Lebanese—he could be Icelandic—but in fact was an Australian actor of Scottish ancestry) playfully pummeled dough in his beautifully bricked restaurant kitchen. Ola! Opa! Mangia! A white woman in a pinstripe suit toting a portfolio against a slender hip talked on her mobile phone as she stalked a busy street. A diversely complexioned crowd in short-sleeved shirts rose from ivy-walled bleachers. A chorus sang:
Chicago breaks new ground! Chicago reaches for the sky! It's the city that astounds! On that you can rely!
The camera finally settled on the mayor in Daley Plaza, his broad shoulders admiringly encircled by nine photogenic youngsters in various heights and hues.
“I remember when you could get by with just four kids,” the mayor told Sunny. “Black, brown, white, and yellow. Now, they got to add a beige one. Could be Indian, Assyrian, or Brazilian. Soon you'll have to add a kid in pink socks, so you think he's gay. Good ad?” he asked as the screen blinked back into the dark.
“Jewish guy from LA?” Sunny asked. The mayor shook his head.
“Jew in Sydney,” he explained. “We wanted something fresh. Know how much that cost? To make, to run?”
“A million.” Sunny blurted the first round number that occurred to him.
“Try seven,” said the mayor.
“And gone before you can get up for the bathroom,” said
Sunny.
“That's the idea,” the mayor explained. “I asked the consultants if we could make one that runs sixty seconds. Say a little something about issues.”
“And they said?”
“‘Do you want to run for reelection, Mr. Mayor, or make movies?’”
“Seven million dollars,” Sunny said slowly.
“That's why you hire consultants, isn't it? To keep you from doing the right thing. Plus I'm buying radio, polls, newspapers, phone trees, popup screens, pooper scoopers with my name on the handle, and enough window signs to cover the moon. And I'm running eighty points ahead of a bunch of dented bean cans.”
The mayor meant the assortment of Prohibitionists, Trotskyites, and people named George Washington who managed enough signatures to appear on the ballot.
“Seven million dollars,” Sunny repeated. “How many phone calls does it take to raise that kind of money, two thousand dollars at a time?”
Silently, both men tried to do the math. They burst out laughing.
“Too fucking many,” said the mayor.
The natural orbit of aldermen around the city's mayor had been in ebb since the disco era. Hiring laws had become so depressingly sincere that the mayor had once exclaimed, “What's this city coming to when you can get a job for a total stranger more easily than for an alderman's brother-in-law?”
Mayors and senators met with the French ambassador, the head of the World Food Program, or Bill and Melinda Gates. But aldermen were considered household appliances. People expected them to work at the touch of a fingertip. No one believed that an alderman had anything more urgent in life (no excuse short of kidney dialysis would do) than to sit through a community meeting about making Buena a one-way street between Broadway and Marine. And if Sunny spent two hours absorbing the anxieties and gripes of the Andersonville Neighbors Association, how could he tell the Edgewater Council that he was too busy on Tuesday?
If heavy rains in the middle of the night made a gutter overflow along Ridge Road, the phone in Sunny's pocket would warble like a trapped bird.