Against All Odds

by Scott Brown

  Our happy family, so different than what Gail or I had known.

  Courtesy of the author.

  A beach holiday after I had completed a triathlon. Ayla isn’t quite tall enough to get the rabbit ears over dad.

  Courtesy of the author.

  Gail encouraged me to run for office, and her personal support has been crucial to my success.

  Courtesy of the author.

  My first day in Boston at the State House, being sworn in as a Massachusetts state representative.

  Courtesy of Mark Kasianowicz

  I love competition. This was taken at the National Duathlon Championship in Ohio back in 1995.

  Courtesy of the author

  Finishing the first leg of a triathlon, the swim, in 2010.

  Courtesy of Capstone Photography

  Crossing the finish line in 2010. When I run, bike, or swim, my mind clears.

  Courtesy of Capstone Photography

  Arianna on Sugar Free, her beloved horse.

  Courtesy of Shannon Power (www.shannonpower.zenfolio.com)

  Ayla, who was an American Idol semifinalist, in concert.

  Courtesy of Shannon Power (www.shannonpower.zenfolio.com)

  Me, surrounded by the three most beautiful women in the world.

  Courtesy of Shannon Power (www.shannonpower.zenfolio.com)

  I ran much of my U.S. Senate campaign from the back of my truck.

  Courtesy of AP/Steve Senne

  With Rudy Giuliani during an event in Boston.

  Courtesy of AP/Winslow Townson

  A fantastic rally in Worcester, Massachusetts, right before the election.

  Courtesy of Shannon Power (www.shannonpower.zenfolio.com)

  My first election night with Gail beside me.

  Courtesy of Shannon Power (www.shannonpower.zenfolio.com)

  Having my family all there was a very special moment.

  Courtesy of Mark Stockwell

  We all did it!

  Courtesy of Shannon Power (www.shannonpower.zenfolio.com)

  This photo captures my philosophy of public service: every voter, every person matters.

  Courtesy of UPI/Matthew Healey

  For over a year, cameras and microphones have followed me everywhere.

  Courtesy of UPI/Matthew Healey

  Thanks to the people of Massachusetts, the truck has come to Washington.

  Courtesy of Brendan Hoffman (www.brendanhoffman.com)

  Chapter Thirteen

  Gail and Mr. Mom

  I met my wife over a napkin. I was home from Fort Benning after finishing my Infantry Officer Basic course, prepping for the bar exam, doing some modeling and a little house painting for extra cash, when my buddy Seth Greenberg called. I had been introduced to Seth when he sponsored a Richard Gere look-alike contest at a local Boston club while I was at Tufts. Seth was very handsome, with dark good looks; women flocked to him; men respected him; and he was making a small fortune in the Boston-area party business. He began in college by throwing parties in local venues and asking for a piece of the door—the entry fee—and the bar. He got people to turn out and the more guests who came, the more he got paid. The Richard Gere look-alike contest was another one of his ideas, except he had planned on entering it himself and had also planned on winning. Unfortunately for Seth, I saw it advertised and entered it too. And I won. But from that night, Seth and I became fast friends. We went out together constantly, and I helped him throw some of his parties, for my own cut of the door and the bar. By the spring of 1985, he was a part owner of a club called the Paradise, which was being used one evening to film a Miller Beer commercial. “There are going to be some hot-looking women here,” he told me. “Come on down.” So I did.

  I walked in with my field-maneuvers tan and the remains of my army buzz cut and started chatting with some of the people hanging around. And then I saw her. Gail had long brown hair, pouty lips, and a face that was not just beautiful—it was mesmerizing. In a room of gorgeous people with perfect faces, teeth, and hair, for me, she was the most perfect of them all. I watched her all throughout the shoot, even when she took a break and went over to sit down and eat. She looked flawless there too, until the moment when she spilled something on herself. She didn’t notice, but I did, and I saw my chance. I rushed over with a napkin and handed it to her.

  That was all the opening I needed. We made some small talk and I tried to get her phone number, but she wouldn’t give it to me. Instead, I persuaded her to take mine.

  In Boston, Gail was a pretty well-known model, who was working to put herself through the broadcast journalism program at Emerson College. She also had a boyfriend who was in the news business. People told me they were somewhat serious. We were thrown together a few times in the weeks after that, professionally, working at a couple of modeling jobs. In our first shoot, we had to walk together down the beach, arm in arm, looking out at the sand from opposite directions, our eyes never meeting. But in the photo, you can see and feel the chemistry.

  Our paths crossed briefly again when we met outside the Massachusetts labor board, trying to collect on the bond of our modeling agents, both of whom had stiffed us. Mine took a whopping $50,000 of my paychecks and used the cash for plastic surgery and to support his drug habit. When I discovered how much he had stolen from me, I confronted him, grabbed my portfolio and composite cards, and walked across the street into the offices of Maggie Trichon, one of New England’s premier agents. I told her, “My last agent screwed me, I’m with you now.” And I was, whether she wanted me or not. After that, Maggie had me working almost every day, even as a hand model—I was hockey great Bobby Orr’s hands when he filmed a BayBank ATM commercial. I stayed crouched down behind him and then raised my hands when it was time for Bobby to touch the electronic keypad. Basketball players’ hands take far less of a beating than hockey players’. As time went on, Maggie trusted me enough to ask me to act as her lawyer as well.

  Weeks later, on a warm Friday night, I was home in my mom’s last house in Wakefield, sitting in my tiny room under the eaves, my bed a mattress on the floor. I was reading. I was renting out my one-bedroom condo to make some extra cash, and I had moved back to my mom’s home with a closet-size bedroom while I worked to get the next phase of my life started. Suddenly the phone rang. It was Gail, telling me, “My girlfriend stood me up. You want to go out?” She was living in Watertown, twenty minutes away. I said, “Sure.” It was nearing summer, and I raced up and changed into what I thought was my coolest outfit, a pair of long salmon-colored shorts in butter-soft leather that I had gotten as payment for walking the runway in New York. They were tagged as $1,500 shorts. I paired them with white sandals and a light, pastel striped shirt. I thought I looked great, something like Miami Vice meets Ralph Lauren, perfect for an evening in the middle of the 1980s. When I showed up behind the wheel of my gold Dodge Daytona wearing salmon walking shorts, Gail, knowing that I was a model, thought it was likely to be an early evening for her. She was not exactly blown away. But I was.

  She came to the door in a thigh-high beige dress with a cutaway back. There was only one place to take a woman like that, the Top of the Hub, Boston’s equivalent to the now vanished Windows on the World atop the World Trade Center in New York City. It is a wraparound restaurant perched on Boston’s towering glass Prudential building, with views over the entire city and the Charles River, and it was the fanciest place I knew. We ordered drinks and appetizers and sat and talked. Like my parents, Gail’s parents were divorced. She had four sisters, the oldest of whom had suffered a devastating stroke brought on in part by birth-control pills when she was just eighteen. The stroke had left her tot
ally paralyzed on her right side. As the third-youngest girl, Gail had been on her own since she was seventeen; after the separation and divorce, both of her parents had moved out of their house, leaving their children behind to basically finish raising themselves. Gail had to complete high school, put herself through college, and make her way almost entirely on her own. I understood her life, not just superficially, but as closely as if it had been mine. And from the start, I admired her for it.

  I also learned that it wasn’t her girlfriend who had stood her up, but her boyfriend. And I’ve never been more grateful in my life. By the end of the evening, I was perilously close to love.

  We dated for a few months, even though we both knew that we had something very special from the beginning. After Gail, I rarely had time to go out with Seth in the evenings. She was the only person with whom I wanted to spend my free time. Not only was she gorgeous—she still is—she was and is funny and smart. She has a husky, deep laugh that is to me one of the most joyful sounds in the world. Her mind is constantly working in different directions. She is fascinated by the people she meets, and she is uniquely giving and warm. As a twenty-five-year-old guy, I was captivated by her face and her body, but a quarter of a century later, what I find most beautiful is her heart. She is the person I look for first whenever I enter a room. I did it then, and I do it now. Gail is the half that makes me whole.

  On a warm summer afternoon, we were in Providence, Rhode Island, where I had a modeling job. We were crossing a busy main street right in front of a new building that was going up, and Gail got down on her knee in the middle of the pavement and asked me to marry her. I started to laugh, not quite sure if she was serious. Then I looked in her eyes and realized that she was. I kept telling her to get up and get out of the street, but she said, “No, I’m not getting up until you say that you’ll marry me.” All around us, cars were honking, people were shouting, but Gail would not budge. The construction workers on the scaffolding had paused to watch, light glinting off their hard hats, and they were whistling and hollering, “Do it. Do it. Do it.” “Say yes. Say yes!” And I did. I said, “Yes. Yes. Yes. Now get up!” We stood in the middle of the street, arms wrapped around each other, kissing, as cars whizzed by, until one of the construction guys yelled, “Get a room!” Then we walked off to the modeling job.

  I designed Gail’s engagement ring myself; one of the stones in it was a gift from my grandmother and my mom. And when I put it on, I asked her to marry me as well.

  The night that I gave her the ring, Gail was preparing to leave for her first full-time journalism job, a dream job for anyone starting out in television reporting: to be the lead anchor at WNCT-TV. In Greenville, North Carolina. I was just trying to get a law practice started in Boston, taking on secondary cases that came into a Boston law firm. I was working with an attorney named John Brazilian, who shared office space with the legendary F. Lee Bailey and other attorneys. I couldn’t move to North Carolina, but I wouldn’t ask her to give up her career either. If those dark apartments on Albion Street, Broadway, and Salem, or those years of rolling my things up in a blanket and moving from house to house, had taught me anything, it was that all women, if they want, should have the security and identity of their own job and their own career. I would never ask my wife to give up her dreams for me. And two of the things I loved about Gail were her drive and her determination. North Carolina it was.

  I became an expert on the flight schedules and the transfers to twin-engine turboprops, skimming through the air on weekends between Boston and Greenville. I would gaze out at the stacked formations of clouds plying their own way up the East Coast and wonder if we would be a commuter marriage and worry about what would give way first.

  Because Gail was in North Carolina, I planned our whole wedding in Boston. I found the place, the Tufts chapel, with a party afterward at the university’s Inter-Cultural Center. I picked out the caterer and designed the menu. I booked our wedding night at an inn in Gloucester, Massachusetts, before we flew to our honeymoon getaway in Aruba, where we would stay at the Divi-Divi. All Gail needed to do was to come home, put on her dress, and walk in.

  And she almost freaked out. On the morning of our wedding, she was crying and ready to throw up, wondering if she was really able to go through with it. She was a news anchor in the middle of North Carolina who was getting married in Medford, Massachusetts, to a guy who was working as a lawyer in Boston. But she put on her dress. It was July 12, 1986, and we were married inside the Goddard Chapel’s one-hundred-year-old stone walls to the steady beat of pouring rain against the stained glass. I remember thinking that it was good luck for a wedding if it rained. Our guests were model friends, photographers, actors, and some of my friends from New York. I also had my military friends, and my high school and college friends. My fifth-grade buddy, Jimmy Healy, was my best man, and I had many other friends in our wedding party. I sent a very special invitation to Brad and Judy Simpson, who came too.

  A pastor who was a friend of Gail’s married us and we recited our own vows, which we had written. I told her, “Gail, my love, you are my best friend and my love. I pledge to you, in front of God, our friends, and our families: my love and support today, tomorrow, and forever.” I envisioned our future life, “growing together, caring for each other, and sharing ourselves, our thoughts and our dreams. To you, I pledge fidelity, sincerity, and honesty.” I promised too that I would communicate and “show compassion toward you when compassion is needed.” I told Gail, “I love you for your beauty, your intelligence, and just your overall being. I am yours always.”

  To me, Gail promised, “When you are strong, I will love you; when you are weak, I will love you—forever I will love you despite the hardships we face in this life we’ve chosen to share together forever. I pledge fidelity, sincerity, and honesty to you, and the openness to be there whenever you need me. I’m yours always.” Those words have only come to mean more to me in the intervening years.

  Afterward, with Gail glowing in her white dress, and me in my tux, we walked down the campus street under a sea of bobbing umbrellas to our reception. Most people worry about the marriage ceremony, the lifelong commitment, or the vows. For us, the reception was fraught with far more peril.

  Divorced parents add a challenge to any adult child’s wedding, but we had not one set to contend with, but two, with three remarriages, and then my mom. Our receiving line consisted of Gail, me, her mother and her new husband, my mother, my grandparents, Gail’s father and his new wife, and my father and his new wife. The stress level of just shaking hands and accepting congratulations was astronomical. We were both terrified that something would be said and the whole event would dissolve into chaos, a sea of hurt feelings and years of recriminations. We had eleven people in the receiving line, seven of whom we had no way to control. (I didn’t worry about my grandparents.)

  For the meal, we rejected the idea of a head table, and we let the various family divisions stake out their own encampments, while Gail and I kept circling the room, checking on everyone. It was a series of “Hey, how you doing? Good? OK, see you later.” Finally, after a few questions—“Why is your father over there and your mom on the other side over there?”—and some looks and shrugs, we realized that things were getting tense, and we gave up. Gail and I had a glass of champagne and decided to start enjoying ourselves. We left our parents to fend for themselves, and eventually even they ended up having fun. Our guests had a great time, including a few who decided to hang from a second-floor balcony. It was the first wedding reception that the cultural center had ever hosted and I believe it was the last.

  We also paid for the entire wedding ourselves, and we were very grateful for our family and guests who gave us cash as gifts. I think we came away with about $300 after all the bills were paid. That night, driving up to Gloucester, we stopped to buy a pizza because we were starving. In all our circulating around the tables, we had forgotten to eat anything oursel
ves.

  As our wedding day approached, Gail had made the decision to leave her job in North Carolina and take the big gamble of looking for television jobs in the highly competitive markets around Boston. In 1986, for a woman, it was particularly risky to leave your contract over a month early to follow the man you loved. The belief was that commitment to your career was paramount; the heart could and should wait. Gail chose the opposite course, and I loved her all the more for it. We had bought a one-bedroom basement condo in Brighton for about $60,000 with some of my modeling money, and in those first months of our newlywed lives, she grimly worried whether we could afford it. Finally, in late 1986, a job opened up at WLNE in Providence, Rhode Island. We got out a map of Massachusetts and I put my finger in between Providence and Boston, splitting the distance between the two cities. The town I landed on was Wrentham, and that was how we picked where to live. A town of less than ten thousand people, it sat right on the Massachusetts border with Rhode Island and dated back to 1660. It was burned during King Philip’s War, the bloody yearlong conflict that raged through the New England colonies, pitting local Indian tribes—led by a Wampanoag Indian named Metacom, who was known as King Philip—against the English colonists and converted Indian Christians. Hundreds of colonists and some three thousand Indians died during the conflict. Wrentham’s other major claim to fame was as a town where Helen Keller had lived as an adult. On the north side was Foxboro, Massachusetts, where the New England Patriots football team plays. I sold the basement condo and my other condo, the fixer-upper that I had been renting, and we started looking for a house.