First Citizen

by Thomas T. Thomas

  However intent I may have been on staying for the fighting, my leg ruled otherwise. Within days it began oozing pus, probably from germs in the garbage smeared on that cutter blade, and I kept doping it with alcohol and off-the-shelf disinfectants. Finally, the leg turned septic and puffed up like a blind white grub with an angry red mouth. The doctors were back in town, but the hospitals were full of burn and radiation cases. So I flew back to California to lie down and try to avoid an amputation. To this day, I still have a shiny purple scar across my shin.

  During those hundred days, the nation saw everyone from rogues to saviors to sycophants proposed to fill the highest office in the land. At one point, even Uncle Aaron was just three votes shy of a majority. But it always came up short. I followed the action from California by television and later got the complete story from Aaron. He was sure, from the fabric of the deals that were being made around him, that McCanlis was rolling logs against his own candidates. It was as if he wanted the confusion to go on and on.

  Finally, toward the end of March 2003, the Joint Congress passed a resolution declaring themselves unable to name a President and requesting Speaker McCanlis to serve out the remainder of Martin Geddes’s term. It was known as the Emergency Powers Act.

  I never understood the part called Title VI. Aaron had fought it like a devil and all the Democrats snarled when they talked about it. Yet to me it seemed like a technicality: Every two years, at the opening of a new Congress, the members were to assemble in caucus and name the Speaker of the House who would serve two years into the future.

  According to the Constitution, the House had the power to choose its Speaker and apparently the freedom to do the choosing how it liked. A powerful man or woman with a strong party behind him or her could serve again and again, for years. Look at Rayburn or O’Neill. Title VI would seem to break up this pattern, letting the new blood choose for the future.

  When I tried this opinion on my uncle, long after the fact, Uncle Aaron only said, “You young fool.” But he said it kindly. There were new lines in his face and tears showing in his eyes. He seemed to be exhausted by the struggle of those hundred days. A fast cancer took him just nine months later. As a supplement to the Emergency Powers Act, almost an afterthought, Congress approved and sent to the people the Thirtieth Amendment, which eventually became known as the Speaker’s Amendment. It provided for the Speaker of the House to assume the duties of the executive branch if both the President and the Vice President should resign or die.

  The rest you know. This new but already worn-out Congress neglected to call a special presidential election, as provided for in that amendment. The regular election in 2004 was spirited, with the young turks pushing through John Ramos and Stephen McKenzie at the Republican Convention in Kansas City. They won a landslide vote and were assassinated before the inauguration, while they were technically still private citizens.

  Both murders were well timed, well executed, and well covered. Three bullets each, all head shots, fired at medium range by a medium-size, medium-weight, medium-complexioned man, or possibly a mannish woman dressed as a man, who left the scene in a late-model, medium-size car of no remarkable color. One witness thought it was yellow, but he was later proven to be standing at another corner, looking the other way.

  George McCanlis called for a congressional commission to investigate the assassinations and thereby put off any special elections. Its members met for sixteen months and returned nothing but an array of rumors that the FBI had presented, with embarrassed smiles, early in the testimony.

  For the country as a whole, the deaths were some kind of psychological straw. One aging anchorman in a jacket-and-sweater combination opined sententiously, “The People can take no more.” As if these crises—the bombing, the assassinations, the political confusion—were acts of a stupid volition which, if somebody only wanted to, could be stopped or somehow made right. The pundits and the politicos generally felt that an immediate special election to fill the still-vacant presidency, another hotly contested national campaign within a few months of the last election, would somehow be “too disruptive” or “too costly” or just too much.

  On that note, “The People can take no more,” McCanlis was quickly confirmed as chief executive under the Thirtieth Amendment.

  In the next presidential election year, 2008, the major parties rallied and chose their candidates. The pundits observed that they seemed to be second-stringers. Not one sitting member of Congress had consented to run. None of them was visibly involved with the conventions. None endorsed the candidates. And a month before the election, the three presidential candidates and two of their vice presidential hopefuls—I don’t remember their names, nobody does now—were assassinated. They were fragged by a wire-guided rocket, shot by a “jealous husband,” crushed by a falling stage flat, snuffed by cyanide, burned in a head-on collision. All of these were creative ways to die. And, if some or all were actually murders, they involved enough modi operandi to give the FBI an excellent excuse not to link them to each other or to the assassinations of 2004.

  Once again McCanlis assumed, or rather retained, the duties of chief executive.

  By the time the presidential election of 2012 came around, power was firmly centered with Congress and not with the vacated Office of the President. So, although the columnists and anchors posed rhetorical questions about the possibilities of an election, it never attained the necessary political velocity to get off the ground.

  Five times McCanlis was chosen in caucus as Speaker for a “trailing” (as it came to be called) two-year term. His future was secured.

  Chapter 11

  Granville James Corbin: High Times And Misdemeanors

  I met my second wife, Tracy, at a ball. No, I take that back. It was at the Norwegian Embassy, which was in a converted mansion along Fifth Avenue in the low Eighties. And the ballroom was where they held their receptions. This one was for the King’s birthday, or maybe the Crown Prince’s. Neither was there for the occasion.

  Why was the embassy in New York and not the capital? After the bombing of Washington, you see, the Federal government may have been content to relocate in Baltimore; the diplomatic community, however, would have none of that. I think they were nervous about living so close to that wide, black-glass crater. And it didn’t help that the local Baltimore vids were reporting the milly-milly each morning—that is, so many thousandths of a millirem riding on the wind from the southwest. Too much like the reports following Chernobyl. So when the new ambassadors and their staffs arrived, replacements for those who had died in the bombing, they migrated to New York, where their U.N. consulates were settled in and would remain for a few years more.

  Tracy Starrett was at the birthday reception, being squired by a flaxen-haired giant who was either some kind of unlanded baron or a renowned socialist. Perhaps both at once. Call him Peer Gynt. He introduced himself and tried to get me into a confab about municipal sewer sludge and the problems they had with the wastewater treatment plant at Trollhaven. Or wherever.

  In the meantime, this woman, beautiful by any standard, and tanned, and blonde, and wearing a strapless sheath of blue-gray silk that was being held up by static electricity, was still on his arm but looking around the room like a pilot fish about to jump ship. And she still had not been introduced to me by Gynt.

  At first, I thought she was Scandinavian, his wife, and just restless. After the third time she made some extravagant flip-flap gesture with her left hand, I caught her third-finger code and tumbled that she was unattached and signaling frantically to be rescued from the ice giant. I deftly inserted some wisdom into his talk about sewers and permafrost, sought her agreement, then excused myself for not being introduced. Even Peer Gynt got the message.

  “Ah, may I present Granville Corbin, who is one of your countrymen, Tracy.”

  “Charmed,” she said with relief.

  “Mr. Corbin is an expert on—”

  “I know that he’s an expert, Karl.” H
er eyes never left my face. “He’s an expert on money, experienced with women, and I hope he knows something about food and can offer me better than that mess of pickled fish and head cheese you call smorgasbord.”

  “What’s your pleasure, Tracy?” I asked smoothly.

  “Prosciutto. Pasta. Piccata. None of this piscati profanatti, hey?” Her accent was pizza-Italian, hinting at origins in the Midwest.

  “Do you have a wrap?”

  “Right here.” Like a stage magician she pulled four square yards of silk out of her clutch purse. It was iridescent blue-gray on the outside to match her dress but silver-sheened on the inside. When I raised an eyebrow and mentioned the temperature outdoors was ten above, she gave a small laugh.

  “Space blanket,” she said. “Keeps two bodies warm for, oh, hours.”

  We walked away from Gynt without ever looking back. Tracy and I did not make love the first night. Instead I left her in the hotel lobby with just a pressing of hands. But we had made arrangements. She was flying back to Denver and her family in the morning; I was going to be in Pueblo toward the end of the week to inspect a site. We would meet at the Brown Palace at six Friday, by the bar, white carnation in my lapel, purple gardenia in her hair. Use code. Wink. Nod. Goodnight.

  Her family turned out to be rich. Chris Starrett, her father, was an investment banker connected with drilling for natural gas and petroleum. He may have known my father, although I never got a chance to ask.

  Starrett handled hundreds of millions and, apparently, kept a few of them for himself. The family had a ranch, with horses, west of Golden, fifteen acres of lawn and fifteen hundred of scrub with a wedding cake house of white stucco and glass in the middle of it all. In a much grander way, it reminded me of the home in Pacific Grove.

  Tracy had rooms there, when she wanted, and also kept an apartment up in Boulder. She had a part-time job keeping a computer warm doing the accounts in a doctor’s office while completing her university degree. Busy girl. But she found time to work me in.

  We made love on the fourth date, which in those times was a standard of propriety that the Pope would applaud. After that, she was about the only woman who registered on my retinas. Tracy was frank, witty, knowing, expensive, stunningly beautiful, and sensuous as a cat. With me. Before me, she claimed a state of near-virginity: She had known just one boy on her prom night—“and didn’t everybody?”—and had experienced one long-term love affair with an older man— “which was almost like a marriage, it got so twisted”—during the start of her acting career. I was the first man she could relate to “at anything like my own level, thank God!”

  We got married at the end of the summer on the Starrett ranch. As a social event in the Oil Patch, it was almost like a marriage of aristocracy. However, after the shocks in the energy market, this was a dowager aristocracy living on coupons and the tired cachet of the Nineties, while a new and more vulgar life surged around it.

  The reception at Golden got a little fragmented. At one point the pills were running three-to- two against the champagne, and toward sunset, a wing of the Arvada version of Satan’s Slaves roared in on their spidery Harleys. Leather, lungs, and lusts. But a couple of the houseboys hustled them out quickly, without even wrinkling their own white uniforms, and after that I focused on the bulges in those boys’ biceps. All in all, the party stayed remarkably decorous.

  That night, Tracy and I left for Bear Lake and two weeks at a cabin she had wangled from a friend for our honeymoon. When we got back, I put her in a penthouse along San Francisco’s new Embarcadero. I worked harder than ever to make her happy and keep her in the style she demanded.

  Hard work doesn’t mean drudgery. I learned that early enough. The garbage mining business was exciting. We were solving tough problems, beating out the competitors and the imitators, discovering new byproducts and new sources of supply. Birdsong and I founded an organics research center that was supposed to discover new ways to crack hazardous wastes, which are mostly human-made, very complex molecules. We were even thinking of branching out into radioactive wastes and reprocessing spent fuel from all those Federal reactors.

  Yes, the business was exciting right up until it was making really big money; then it became predictable. And any business, once you’re on top of it and the problems are knocked, becomes a bore. If you’re selling high fashion, after a while the daring cuts, the textures and materials, and pouting models, all begin to blur and it’s as much bean counting and nickel busting as running the bargain basement at Macy’s. Garbage got to be like that: all a blur.

  You might think backing the lottery in Montana—and later in New Mexico—would be exciting, but only if you are a gambler and don’t understand the business. For me, they were a cold-blooded investment with a guaranteed payoff. About as much fun as buying double-A-plus bonds.

  For a while, I dabbled in the developing futures markets for municipal solid wastes and sewer sludges. Of course, Birdsong and I had created that market, but what the hell, owners could be players, too. Except that I knew it so well. There’s no fun when the pace is seasonal, the wrong moves are obvious to anybody, and the suckers are just handing you their money. Another guaranteed payoff.

  Then I discovered S.W.E.E.P. Electric futures is the fastest-moving commodity market in the world. It was so exciting and unpredictable that I loved it even when I lost money. I just had to buy myself a seat on it—but why do they call it a “seat” when you never have a minute to sit down?

  The actual trading floor—called just “the Pool”—is located in Las Vegas, of all places. Maybe because it’s close to Hoover Dam, the first big regional energy project. Maybe because it’s about the most central place in the southwestern U.S. that’s not Los Angeles. Maybe just because of the action and the type of people it draws.

  The timing for electric futures was on a dozen different interlocking cycles. Longest cycle of them all was the rate at which the old privately or publicly owned utilities and the new Third Party Producers could build power plants. That cycle was in fives and tens of years. But news of a proposed big project could rattle contracts and coalitions just months out.

  In a slightly shorter range, years and months, were the boom and bust of economics. Mostly boom in the Twenty-oughts. You bet against what the Imperial Valley’s growers, the peach canners, and the electric-arc steel people would demand from the grid.

  The seasonal cycles were fairly predictable. When would the fall rains come? What would the winter peak for heating in the mountains be? How about the summer peak for cooling in the deserts and California’s Central Valley? Those were events you could bank on—just about. Climate.

  Weather, however, was the biggest thing in the daily cycle: You had to study the forecasts and look out for heat waves. In the Southwest, that meant air conditioners humming on every rooftop, drawing megawatts of power like a kid sucking soda through a straw.

  And the joker, the wild card, was downtime. Who, among all the suppliers of capacity, would suddenly get a hot turbine bearing, discover a leaky steam generator, lose a cooling tower, or drop a control rod and have to trip off line? Then the scramble for surplus power was on and we brokers earned our commissions.

  Well, we earned it secondhand. Our Pool men did all the actual buying and selling. As brokers, we merely supplied the cash cushion and the tolerance for risk. What’s a Pool man? To work down on the floor of the Southwest Electric Energy Pool required someone who could speak a totally new language, a verbal shorthand made up of “gigs” and “megs,” of delivery times counted in “moes,” “dass” or “hows” from that morning’s opening, of electricity as either “cap” for dispatchable capacity or just “ergs” for available energy only.

  That last may need explaining. You see, a wind turbine will give you electricity, but you can’t switch it on and off; it only runs when the wind blows. The windmill is just ergs and so less valuable to the user system than a fossil or nuclear power plant which is switchable—you can run it anytime yo
u want—and so “dispatchable” by the system operators.

  And there are a dozen other, similar details to running the grid. Most of them are communicated with hand signs and body language down in the Pool. The pace is that fast. Deals are made and kept on the word and memory of the Pool men, backed by their brokers. The grid’s computer system lags about twenty seconds behind deal and delivery for the real-time and daily transactions, and about ten minutes behind for the month-by-month futures trading. So the action is all in the head.

  If I had tried to work the floor myself, the other Pool men would have cleaned me out in fifteen seconds. They would have clustered about me shouting offers and orders at my head, making a deal on every flinch and twitch, just like an auctioneer running up the bids on a half-asleep buyer who’s nodding in the back row. Breaking in a new Pool man costs a brokerage about N$300,000 until he—very rarely a she—learns the lingo and the body language. A seasoned Pool man has a useful life of about five years. Then he either gets out and starts his own brokerage with subcommissions he’s earned, or collapses in a heap from the scoriations on his cardiovascular system. The pace is that fast.

  My most exciting day in the Pool, even secondhand, was August 19, 2008. It was the third day of a heat wave that was held over our heads by a massive high-pressure system in the California Central Valley. No relief in sight for a week, at least. The heat in Vegas was so thick that the sweat popped out in just the five steps between your air-conditioned limo and the lobby of your air-conditioned casino. Oh, the hum of that lovely power!

  I’d flown down from San Francisco to watch the action from the vantage point of the Pool’s gallery and its on-line monitors. Even before I focused on the screens’ numbers, I could sense the tension in the air. Electric! A glance at the joggling columns of figures told me that the market was, um, under-supported. Through his ear-plug, I told my Pool man, Joe Dark, to buy everything he could for a week out, with delivery in hour lots. Other sharks were moving in ahead of me. Joe actually took the time to turn and find my face along the gallery windows. He scowled and made a choke sign in my direction.