Man About Town

by Mark Merlis

  The screen went black. Then, in white letters: Citizens for Personal Responsibility. Whoever the hell they were. And an 800 number.

  Joel had a late meeting at the Dirksen Building, with the Finance Committee chief of staff and a guy named Mullan from Senator Flanagan’s office, who did health stuff for the minority. Joel was there on time, and Mullan, but the chief of staff was, they were told, in the conference room, just finishing up another meeting. They were left standing in the reception area, which deterred loitering by having no chairs, for ten or fifteen minutes.

  Joel despised Mullan. The smart people on Flanagan’s staff had decamped when the Republicans took the Senate and Flanagan lost the chairmanship. All that was left was Mullan, who was one of those managed-competition zealots. The kind who wanted to herd the elderly into private health plans. Once Joel had said, rather meekly, that it might be hard for old ladies with Alzheimer’s to study a list of health plans and pick one. Mullan had just stared, trying to figure out if Joel was a socialist or an imbecile.

  Today they didn’t speak, just avoided each other—in a space the size of a powder room—as each tried to eavesdrop on the meeting that was ending. The conference room door was closed, all they could make out was murmuring and occasionally a sharp laugh from the chief of staff. This was reassuring: if you heard her swearing, business was still being transacted; if you heard laughter, the meeting was in the gossip stage, just about to break up.

  Sure enough, the door opened and the chief of staff emerged, followed by no fewer than five pharmaceutical lobbyists. Joel knew all of them from their time on the Hill, and each said, “Hey, Joel,” while filing past him. Nothing more; none paused to chat. They looked cowed; the meeting might have ended with laughter, but they hadn’t got what they wanted.

  The Ice Maiden, people called her, with her austere Shaker outfits and her hair in a bun. This was archaically sexist, Joel knew, but even senators called her the Ice Maiden. Even senators were a little afraid of her.

  Cordelia, as senators called her to her face, looked over at Joel and Mullan, but didn’t say hello. She was just registering that they were there, and that this meant she had a Medicare meeting she had forgotten about. “Oh,” she said. She led them into the conference room and they waited while she riffled through her organizer, one of those complicated binders with a million to-do lists and project-tracking tables and little inserts with inspirational quotes on them:

  While she tried to figure out their task—she couldn’t just ask—Mullan said, “What was that about?”

  “What?” she said.

  “That meeting?”

  She didn’t answer, just looked at him with an expression that would have said to any sentient creature: If you were supposed to know what it was about, you would have been in the room, wouldn’t you?

  Mullan didn’t read expressions. “All those drug people. Was this that tax credit?”

  “No.” She closed her binder.

  “Because the senator was very interested in that…” Mullan looked over at Joel and finished, warily: “That thing we were talking about.”

  As if Joel cared about tax credits for pharmaceutical companies. Though Senator Flanagan, being from New Jersey, would care profoundly. All the signs you saw from the train while riding through New Jersey: it was like reading the labels in someone’s medicine cabinet.

  To assure Mullan that he hadn’t been cut out of anything, Cordelia had to divulge, “It was about the child health plan. They’re trying to kill it.”

  “The drug people?”

  “Haven’t they been talking to you?”

  “Um … no.”

  “They will.” Cordelia closed her binder triumphantly; she had figured out what they were there for. “Rural hospitals,” she announced.

  “Right,” Mullan said, wearily.

  “We need to go over all these technical amendments. Um … do you all have copies?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Me, either. I’ll be right back.”

  She left to dig up her amendments. Mullan rolled his eyes, and even Joel kind of had to feel for him. What did he care about rural hospitals? There weren’t any rural hospitals in New Jersey, because technically there weren’t any rural areas in New Jersey. Somehow every place in New Jersey was a suburb of someplace else in New Jersey.

  After they’d waited a couple of minutes, they could hear Cordelia’s voice. She was back in her office, talking on the phone. Joel and Mullan shook their heads. She had gone to get the amendments and she had taken a goddamn phone call. They might be on Medicare themselves before this meeting was concluded.

  Mullan got the Wall Street Journal out of his briefcase. Joel hadn’t brought anything to read. Well, last week’s The Nation, but it wouldn’t do for Mullan to see impartial, nonpartisan Joel reading a commie rag like The Nation.

  Joel looked at the pictures of the chairman on the wall. It was interesting: his wig was of a different color in different pictures, but not in any clear chronological sequence. That is, it wasn’t black during the Nixon years, salt-and-pepper during Reagan, gray during Bush. Instead, he seemed to grow older and younger at random. Possibly the black-hair periods coincided with his several rumored affairs. Joel found himself, queasily, visualizing the chairman in flagrante, when Mullan said, “Why would the drug companies care about the child health plan?”

  Joel shrugged. He hadn’t been following the child health plan, it wasn’t his area. He just knew from the papers that the chairman, who apparently would think nothing of throwing an eighty-year-old Russian immigrant from a moving train, wanted to expand children’s health insurance. You could say “child” to a politician with a heart as big as, say, Strom Thurmond’s, and he’d just melt. In a budget plan that hacked away at every social program enacted since the Cleveland administration, the Republicans had set aside two billion to cover uninsured kids. Joel wondered when they’d get around to providing health insurance for transvestite prostitutes with a little heroin problem. Probably they’d give insurance to puppies first.

  Joel had never liked children much. Well, he liked them okay until they were two or three and could begin to articulate their world views; after that he would have been happy if somebody froze them and thawed them out when they were hot eighteen-year-olds. He understood in the abstract that they mattered, that it was important to school them and make sure they got their shots and their Ritalin so they could grow up to be productive adults and keep the GDP humming along so maybe there would be a chance Joel could get his Social Security. He just didn’t want to be anywhere near them. The most welcoming and cheering sign an establishment could have on its door was No Strollers.

  It was fortunate, then, that he had never risen to those few occasions that might inadvertently have culminated in progeny. Nonetheless, he found himself more and more living in a paedocentric universe. Everywhere, he saw family restaurants, family entertainment, family communities. In Congress the word had become almost obligatory. Bills didn’t have names like the Tax Cut for Major Contributors Act or the Pointless Subsidies for Superfluous Farmers Act anymore. Instead, they would have snappy titles like the Fair Shake for Working Families Act or the Family Farmers Emergency Protection Act. Joel would draft report language for some committee, and the staffer would cross out “people” every time it appeared and replace it with “families.”

  He knew he shouldn’t take this personally. The word was merely a decorative flourish; only a few demagogues really wielded it like a knife, to divide the world into two classes, families-with-kids and deviants. Mostly the family-family-family was just nostalgia, or whistling in the dark, in an era when the average marriage went stale faster than the wedding cake—certainly faster than his and Sam’s had. Still, whatever people meant by it, Joel got the message almost every waking hour: the whole point of human existence was to have children, make a family, pass your name on.

  Maybe it was. Raymond J. (Joe) Harris, Jr., had sired Raymond III, not to mention Jennife
r and Scott. Even Ron, before he escaped to Zippers, had dutifully produced the resentful and uncommunicative Ron Junior, who in turn would sooner or later overpopulate the back seat of his SUV. Raising his family, doing the right thing, as that grandmother on the Citizens for Personal Responsibility ad had so sweetly put it. Something to show for his time on the planet, something to leave behind him besides a great many sweaters or the definitive collection of Deanna Durbin memorabilia. Some reason to have been here.

  “Jeez, it’s seven-thirty,” Mullan said.

  “Uh-huh. Can I borrow part of your paper?”

  “No, look, I gotta go. Senator Flanagan doesn’t care about all this rural shit, why don’t you just tell her everything’s okay with the minority?”

  “You know, every dollar they give to a rural hospital comes from an urban hospital.”

  “What?” Mullan said.

  “The way they do hospital payments is zero-sum. They give to Montana, they have to take from New Jersey.”

  “Oh.” Mullan’s eyes widened, possibly with a dawning understanding of how the American system of government worked. “Well, I have to leave anyway. I have to pick up my kids at my mother-in-law’s. Tell her we’ll just have to reschedule.”

  “You better tell her that,” Joel said. “I’ve got no place I have to be.”

  Almost eight. Everybody would be gone from the Hill Club. Joel decided to stay over on the Senate side and get a bite at one of the joints on Massachusetts Avenue. He wound up at Corcoran’s, the kind of bar that served buffalo wings and margaritas in ice-cream flavors and had junk hanging from the foam rafters—oars, photos of baseball teams with handlebar mustaches, war bond posters. Some queen must have assembled this stuff and sold it to bars by the wall-foot. Possibly the same source supplied the equally predictable bartender, a beefy straight boy in the uniform of pinstripe shirt, khakis, apron. The place wasn’t crowded, but he found a million things to do before serving Joel: made a couple of blender drinks, rang up a check, changed the channel on the TV from the baseball game on ESPN to the baseball game on ESPN2, served somebody an order of nachos. All this probably took only a minute or two, but Joel felt himself flushing with anger, as if the guy were deliberately ignoring him. He made himself calm down; it wasn’t as if he were going into the DTs. When at last the bartender appeared before him Joel asked very politely for a white wine. The bartender said, “Chardonnay?”

  “Do you have anything else?”

  “No.”

  Then why do you ask, Joel thought. He knew he was going to get his chardonnay from a two-gallon jug, but what did he expect, ordering wine in a prefabricated burger joint?

  Actually, there was something he found soothing about places like Corcoran’s, even though—or because—they operated with such utter indifference to his needs. He was about twenty years older than the target customer, he didn’t drink beer, he didn’t care which baseball game was on, as long as it wasn’t so loud that he couldn’t read the copy of The Nation he pulled out of his briefcase. No one would cruise him here—or rather, fail to; no one would even talk to him. He was just a faceless middle-aged man who would be having a few drinks and a burger.

  After his second wine, he ordered what they called an elephant burger and went back to The Nation. Maybe he could be a responsible citizen without finishing yet another article on the International Monetary Fund. Or the next, an inspiring piece about how to mobilize labor and bridge the gap between workers and social activists. He lit a cigarette, sipped his wine, and watched as the bartender mobilized himself enough to bring Joel silverware, ketchup, salt and pepper.

  Joel felt kind of sorry for him. Maybe he did okay on tips, but he didn’t have health care, retirement, any of that. If he’d had any brains, he would have joined a union, but he probably didn’t see himself as a worker, more as a kind of performer. When he got a little older, he wouldn’t be the hunky ex-jock the demographics of this place dictated, he would be a middle-aged bartender. They’d kick him down to the day shift, where he’d mostly bus sandwiches instead of pulling drafts. Or they’d just find some reason to fire him, some larceny they were ready enough to overlook when he was still pulling in the customers.

  Joel didn’t feel sorry for him at all, this was all a way of feeling superior to him. Joel’s 401(k) versus the bartender’s muscles. Joel was a member of the New Class, the little privileged crust that spent its days analyzing and communicating and making heaps of money while the mass of men brought the silverware and ketchup. Of course Joel deplored this arrangement—hell, he read The Nation, didn’t he?—he knew he shouldn’t be paid outrageous sums to sit around in meetings that never even started, while this sucker brought him ketchup. He didn’t even want to imagine how the people who actually made the ketchup must have lived.

  Still, if there was going to be a New Class, he was glad to be in it. Just barely in it, maybe, but he didn’t have to worry for a nanosecond about paying another, for Christ’s sake, dollar fifty to add bacon to the elephant burger. More: he was glad that he was in the New Class and the bartender wasn’t. That the bartender’s goddamn Simms of Santa Fe body was at Joel’s service. As if that made up for anything, as if Joel wouldn’t have given his 401(k) to be that bartender for one instant.

  Someone sat down on the stool to Joel’s right. Joel glanced over. It was Senator Harris. Joel stammered, “Hi.” Harris nodded curtly and looked away, fixed his gaze on the bartender to keep Joel from saying more. Of course he had no idea who Joel was; probably he was approached by his share of loonies.

  Harris raised a finger, as if that would bring the bartender over. The bartender was busy churning up margaritas. How democratic, that he should ignore a senator as blithely as he did Joel. Except of course he didn’t know it was a senator. Even so deeply inside the Beltway as this, people went about their business oblivious to the great personages who deigned to walk among them. And if the bartender had recognized Joe Harris, he wouldn’t have been impressed, not half so much as if some relief pitcher had walked in.

  Only Joel was impressed. He didn’t stare, he kept his eyes straight ahead and nibbled at his elephant burger, trying not to look like a pig. But he felt a faint glow to his right. As if Joe Harris, a mental midget from a nothing state, gave off light. Why should he have felt Harris’s presence so intensely? Some atavistic reverence for senators that had somehow persisted after years of observing at close hand their deep mediocrity? Or just that faint sexual stirring he had felt at their first encounter, his nearsighted libido somehow mistaking the man for Alex Rivers? Perhaps the two sentiments were not in fact distinguishable.

  He ought to have hated the man. Here the guy had introduced a bill whose basic premise was that faggots should die in the streets. Probably he was not unacquainted with whatever shadowy forces financed the Citizens for Personal Responsibility. Harris apparently hated Joel; why couldn’t Joel hate back? Maybe because, after so many years on the Hill, he didn’t connect people with the noxious things they said and did. There were people, and there were issues, and there was no connection at all.

  In the minutes before a hearing started, senators would trudge into the room, chat with one another or just take their places at the table. This one was measuring Sweet’n’Lo into his coffee and stirring it with childish concentration; this one was reading his schedule for the afternoon, slowly shaking his head with weariness and dismay; this one was whispering with his kneeling LA, trying to figure out what the hearing was about. Once the hearing began, the one who had been stirring his coffee might say the most poisonous things: he might propose mandatory life sentences for flag burners, or wonder what was so wrong with toxic waste anyway. Still it seemed to Joel as if the words just came out of the man, as if he were possessed like the little girl in The Exorcist. And in a way he was: merely the mouthpiece for the accumulated anger or thoughtless greed of the people who had sent him here. Once Joel had seen a senator stirring his coffee, it was impossible to view him as the embodiment of evil, or e
ven as an independent actor. He was just a schmo trying to get through the long days in a place where nothing good could ever possibly happen.

  The bartender came over, finally. Harris barked: “Absolut martini, up, and I’ll see a menu.” The bartender looked at him with mild disdain, strolled away, and began to wash a few glasses in order to illustrate that barking was not an effective motivational tool. Joel peeked at Harris. His face was clenched; it relaxed slowly as, perhaps, he reminded himself that the cosmos was not on his payroll.

  Joel wouldn’t have guessed the Absolut martini. Not that he had any idea what people drank in Montana, but it complicated Harris somehow.

  “Hey, pal,” Harris said, turning toward Joel. “What is that?”

  Joel Was almost too thrilled to speak. “It’s the elephant burger. They also have a donkey burger.”

  “Sure. What’s the difference?”

  “The elephant burger has blue cheese and the donkey burger has Monterey jack.”

  “Uh-huh. And it comes with the fries?”

  “Yes, sir.” The “sir” just automatic, but it betrayed that Joel knew who Harris was.

  Harris acknowledged this: “Well, I guess I’ll cross party lines and have me a donkey burger.”

  Joel smiled vapidly at the little joke. Harris’s martini arrived. “Donkey burger, medium rare,” he said to the bartender. He turned back to Joel and raised his glass. “Thanks, pal.”