by Bob Smith
“Now everything’s good here,” George said to the table. “But some things are better than others.”
“Everything looks good to me,” Elena said, looking directly at George. I thought she might be rushing things with him, but who was I to judge? My understanding of heterosexuality was as limited as my grasp of calculus; I’d studied both in school but made no effort to master the subjects, as I was absolutely certain I’d never use them.
“What do you recommend?” Elena asked George. He immediately leaned over and pointed to several items on the menu. A busboy brought chips and salsa to our table and we gorged on them in the same manner that the United States devoured most of Mexico in 1848. When the waitress returned with our drinks, she took our orders. After she left, I looked at the empty baskets on our tables and asked a busboy for more chips.
“What do you do?” George asked Elena.
“I’m a stand-up comic.”
George’s eyes widened. “Really? Do you make money at that?”
“Some,” she said. “I’m starting to get work.”
Elena would get plenty of work over the next twenty years. She’d have her own half-hour special on Comedy Central, host several television shows, and be regarded as one of the best stand-ups in North America. I considered telling her about her success but remembered that she told me once that the struggle of becoming a stand-up is how comics develop. It seemed dangerous to interfere with that process.
“Next month, a friend of mine is doing a show in New York at Comedy U,” Elena announced. “I’m going to show my support.”
She’d mentioned in the car that a friend of hers was planning on coming out as gay on stage at a straight comedy club in SoHo. I caught Junior’s eye and tried to make him aware of my concern without alarming George. I didn’t want him to realize he was hanging out with a bunch of queers. (I didn’t consider that George might have found fucking a lesbian hot.) Junior picked up on my concern and shot back a dagger-eyed look that asked, Do I seem like an idiot?
“So you’re the artsy type?” George asked, his interest seeming to flag.
Elena ignored the dismissive attitude behind his question and asked, “What do you do?”
“I’m in oil and gas.”
“And how’d you get started in that?”
“It’s in my blood,” George replied.
Elena smiled at his choice of words and George picked up on that.
“Not literally,” George added.
“I hope not. If your blood type is Texas Light Intermediate, your cholesterol would be out of control.” She grinned. “Although you do seem sweet enough.”
George appeared to be favorably impressed again. “How do you know about benchmark crude?”
“I have a very smart ass,” she said.
I wasn’t surprised that she knew the technical jargon of the petroleum industry. Elena’s wide-ranging curiosity matched my own.
Junior chirped in. “Elena knows everything. She’s the smartest person I know.”
“I’m not the smartest person. Otherwise, I’d be having dinner at a fancier restaurant with fancier friends.”
“She’s the smartest ass,” Junior said.
She glanced down appreciatively at her own butt.
“It’s earned a BA?” George asked while making a humorous point of also checking it out.
“Actually, it has a master’s.”
“In what?”
“History.”
George perked up again. “How’s a master’s in history help in stand-up?”
“I know what’s what and who’s who, and those are things every stand-up needs to know.”
George dipped a chip in salsa before saying, “So your act isn’t pie-inthe-face comedy?”
“My act is smart. It’s more pi in the face.” A look of incomprehension crossed George’s face while he chewed. Picking up that she had to explain her joke, Elena added, “The mathematical symbol.” George nodded and smiled, showing that he got it while Elena rummaged for a notebook and pen in her purse. “Somebody’s probably already used this,” she said before she wrote down “π in the face.”
I was unable to say aloud what I thought: “π in the face” sounded like a perfect description of my experience of time travel. George watched Elena write with a strange look of amazement, as if he’d never seen a woman holding a pen before.
“I have to write things down or I forget them,” she explained. “Now that I think about it, “π in the face” seems like a joke an eighth-grader would make in algebra. That’s stand-up too. A lot of your ideas fizzle.”
“We call them ‘dry holes’ or a ‘duster’ in my line of work.” George became melancholy for a moment. “Lately that’s all I’ve been drillin’.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. It’s hard to always be prospecting, then discover you’ve hit fool’s gold instead of pay dirt.” She suddenly seemed pleased. “Actually comedians are searching for fool’s gold.”
George took a sip of his bourbon. “I never realized comics were so serious about their work.”
“Just because a job looks like fun doesn’t mean there’s not work involved. Do you think baseball players don’t work?”
I was impressed by how craftily she turned the subject to baseball.
“No,” George said. “They work hard developing their natural talent.”
“All successful artists and businessman do that,” she responded. “Doing stand-up is sort of like playing baseball. You don’t become good without playing the game. You step up to the plate and either knock it out of the park or strike out. Only in stand-up, you actually need to bat close to a thousand, because if you’re batting three hundred you stink.”
The waitress arrived, carrying a tray and a tray stand. As she started serving our meals, I ordered another round and Elena asked George about his business.
“I founded my own company, Spectrum 7. Business is real bad now. The price of oil is lower than a centipede’s balls.” The smirk crawled out of its hole. “Pardon my Texan.”
Elena’s cheeks dimpled, signaling to him that she wasn’t offended.
“I have a lot of respect for anyone who starts their own business. It takes guts.”
“I have a lot of respect for someone who starts his own company and doesn’t just follow in his father’s footsteps,” Junior said as he scowled at me. “Especially if you’re not trying to follow your father and your brother.” Then he glared at Taylor, who erupted as if he’d been brooding all night.
“Oh, it’s my fault you didn’t look through your purchase. You just saw some old comics and impulsively jumped, without checking them for missing pages. Instead of being pissed off at me and Dad, be pissed off at yourself. It’s your job to know the business. I do. You fucked up.”
“Taylor, drop it,” I said. “We all make mistakes. That’s life. You’re down now but you’ll be up later.”
I don’t know where these bromides were coming from, but it occasionally depressed me to think the majority of thoughts in our heads are hand-me-downs. Taylor still looked steamed and Junior appeared to be humiliated by his public slam. He took a healthy swallow of his margarita.
“I’d rather be the guy who jumps and misses than the guy who sits and pisses,” George said before he winked at Junior.
“Look,” I said to Junior and Taylor. “We had a setback, but what’s most important is our family loyalty. No matter how tough we are on each other, our real enemies are other people.”
I sounded insane and felt disloyal to my friends, who were as important in my life as my family. It made me question whether feigning selfishness could actually make me believe this bullshit. George raised his glass. “Let’s toast to that. To family kicking ass,” he said as we followed suit, raising and clinking our glasses as we repeated: “To family kicking ass.”
Our waitress passed by, and I ordered another round. I’d already dumped two drinks in the potted palm and thought a third might kill it.
George said to me, “You’re leading your team. That’s what a good CEO does. That’s where the phrase ‘captains of industry’ comes from. A successful boss doesn’t have to know or do everything except cheer on his team. I was a cheerleader and know how to lead a team.” He finished off his drink. He didn’t sound drunk, but his reminiscing was starting to get wobbly. “And people think cheerleaders don’t take it hard when you lose. Because we’re not out on the field. We’re standing on the sidelines. But let me tell you, I took every loss as hard as our players. And I risked my neck for our team. You ever try a backflip on lumpy turf ? It ain’t easy and it takes guts. When your team’s losing and you’re down thirty points, the cheerleader has to keep smiling and not let anyone see that he’s down too. You have to boost your team when they fumble. You have to keep telling them they’re going to win even when you know it’s over. That’s what makes a great leader.”
As I listened to his pep talk I thought, He never stopped being a cheerleader. It made me more determined that we had to stop him from becoming president. He wasn’t stupid, but he was a profoundly damaged man. He really was a tragic figure, if tragedy is defined by the pathos of your limitations.
“Your dad was an oilman, right?” Elena said.
George’s face twisted once like a screw-top cap that turned partway but wouldn’t budge further. I recognized that stubborn expression from my years of boozing. It was the look of a mean drunk.
“People think I got everything handed to me because of him. That’s bullshit. It was my trust fund I tapped. My money I risked. He wasn’t out there raising my capital. I earned every penny. He wasn’t out there knocking on the door of every family friend. It was me and it was hard work. You spend six months sweet-talking money from millionaires and you won’t be so sweet. I called in every favor, owed everyone big time. Put my reputation on the line. And we’re down now but we won’t be forever.” He swallowed a mouthful of bourbon. “People think having friends with money makes life easy. I wish I had more friends without a dime. With rich friends, you have to compliment their pretty houses, compliment their not-so-pretty wives and say, ‘Hey, looking good’ to their fat kids. You have to talk money without sounding like you care about money. You have to blow hard with a gentle breeze.”
The waitress brought him a new drink, and he lifted the glass and halved the contents.
“Just because your dad buys you a baseball team doesn’t mean it’s gonna win the Series. That’s your job,” George declared, setting his glass down before digging into his chimichanga with his fork.
We had two more rounds at Dona Anita’s. When George got up to go to the men’s room, all of us dumped our glasses into an empty beer pitcher that I grabbed from a nearby table that hadn’t been bussed yet. After I paid the check, George offered to buy us a nightcap at a bar called Higgins.
I gingerly asked him if he was sure he was okay to drive.
George patted his pants’ pockets, searching for his car keys. “Don’t you know? In Texas it’s not considered drunk driving if you can step on the gas without falling over.”
Elena offered to drive him. She had stopped drinking after two margaritas and was probably the most sober of any of us. “I’m not worried about you driving,” she assured him. “I’d just enjoy the company.” She smiled at him flirtatiously. I was impressed by how good she was at pretending to be attracted to him. The one undeniable benefit of having spent some time in the closet is that it nurtures a talent that you can fall back on any time: lying convincingly. Sometimes I worried that queer kids in the twenty-first century coming out at twelve, or even younger, would never develop that valuable skill.
“Sounds great to me,” George said. “I love riding with pretty ladies.”
“You love riding pretty ladies?” Elena asked.
George laughed. “Oh, you’re bad.”
His leer was a promising sign that he wanted into her smarty-pants. We watched him toss his car keys to Elena, who caught them with a flick of her wrist. She waved to us as they pulled out of the parking lot.
Taylor drove our car and on the way to the bar, Junior asked, “Does he really become president?”
Part of me also found it hard to believe, which I admitted. “Yes,” I said sourly.
“Jesus Christ,” Taylor said and then sighed.
Confirming their doubts made me feel ashamed that somehow I and every other American alive in 2000 were responsible for letting him become president on our watch. Bush and Cheney were a reminder that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance; you’re required to scream “You stupid asshole!” every time you spot one.
“He seems like a nice guy,” Junior said, “but he comes off about as brainy as Mr. Ducker, my wood-shop teacher in junior high. I’d trust him with a band saw but not with running our country.”
“What’s weird is that he comes off as arrogant,” Taylor said. “Like he’s smarter than everyone else. That’s like an amoeba thinking it’s still the most intelligent species on the planet because it was the most intelligent species two billion years ago.”
“We’ve gotta stop him,” Junior said.
“Thank God he seems to be into Elena,” Taylor observed.
Junior’s statement made me angry. “There’s no ‘We’ involved. She’s the one who’s going to stop him.” I found our whole plan intolerably squalid. I hated that Elena was even driving with George Bush, let alone planning on sleeping with him. Was it our job to stop him by any means possible? I was starting to worry that changing history might change Elena, Junior, and Taylor more than it would alter the future of our country.
“If he’s as bad for us and the world as you say he is,” Taylor said, “isn’t it our duty to stop him?”
Taylor seemed to have really turned against Bush. I was beginning to hope it might stick.
“You know, if I could sleep with him and stop him, I would in an instant,” I said. “But I can’t let her do this. It doesn’t feel right. It’s not right. I don’t know how this will affect her, and I don’t know how this will affect you.”
“We’ll be fine,” Junior said dismissively.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “You just said that in a snotty know-it-all manner. I don’t recall being like that when I was your age. It already might be ruining you. This smugness might just grow exponentially until you become Dick Cheney. We’re traveling on untrodden ground here. I don’t want you to save the world and lose your souls.”
I knew I sounded demented, but I was feeling apprehensive about the whole thing in my gut. It wasn’t simple fear, but that instinctual alarm that by middle age I’d learned to heed.
“No one’s ever figured out a really nice way to fight evil,” Taylor said. “There are always casualties.”
“Yes,” I said. “But I don’t want the mother of my . . . child to be one of them.” I’d almost slipped again and said “daughter.”
There wasn’t any rational reason to argue against following our plan except for my almost superstitious distaste for George W. Bush. He was bad luck. I didn’t want anyone I cared about to get too close to him.
“At this point, George W. Bush is an innocent man,” I said. “Do we have the right to stop evil by any means? All of a sudden I’m just not sure.”
“If we really want to stop evil, maybe we should travel further back in time and bump off Adam and Eve,” Junior suggested.
What if my not letting Elena sleep with Bush meant that Isabella’s world tipped hopelessly into global warming? Our discussion made me vow to ask Elena if she wanted to reconsider her decision before it was too late.
We parked on the street and walked to Higgins, a fern bar with exposed brick walls and the fake Tiffany lamp chandeliers that were popular in the ’80s. George pulled out a credit card and handed it to the bartender. “Whatever my friends are having,” he said. I went to the men’s room, and when I came back George was seated at the bar and the kids had pulled their bar stools close to him. “Don’t ever sound too s
mart is my advice,” he said. “It puts people off. If you speak dumbass, nobody expects you to kick butt.”
With a flick of his eyes and a finger pointed at our empty glasses, George ordered another round. I’d carried my wine to the men’s room, where I’d dumped it in the sink. George had to be drunk after putting away five or six bourbons, but he didn’t sound drunk. He had become louder and more pugnacious, and from my experience a mean drunk who quits drinking and finds Jesus will spend the rest of his life turning nice into nasty. Tomorrow, with a hangover, he’d make everyone around him wish they had a drink.
“I’m realistic,” he said. “I say good things happen and shit happens, but unfortunately most of the time that means good things happen to shits. And we want to be one of those shits.” He looked at Elena. “Pardon my Texan.”
I’d never realized that cynicism could be folksy; George was an aw-shucks Machiavelli who winked at you after saying a ruler should be scary rather than lovey-dovey.
George continued, “I’ve learned more about business in Bible study than I did at Harvard.”
I’d forgotten that one of the most blinkered presidents in our history was a graduate of Yale and the Harvard Business School.
He took another sip of his drink. “If you think about it, Jesus took over a small local family business and went global. He reinvigorated the brand. He’s an example of a successful team leader who knew how to delegate authority. His disciples were out in the field, and yet he’s kept everything humming for two thousand years. And Jesus is on a first-name basis with everybody. People love that. He doesn’t spend his time reading long reports and he hates long meetings; he checks in once a day by prayer and can figure out who’s telling the truth by comparing stories. If you’re on the ball, that’s enough. Jesus judges everybody on his team by his or her character; he sizes them up like any good businessman. Then he either promotes them upstairs or fires them.” George smiled at his play on words. “And this is most important: he keeps everything he hears confidential. There are no leaks from Jesus’s office. That’s real power.”