Born to Run

by John M. Green

  Don ignored the stares and elbow nudges as he flicked one switch to turn the glass partition opaque and another to cut the lights. He twisted his first Bud long-neck open and took a swig. The first Marlboro flew to his mouth, as if it were guiding his hand there, and he let it droop waiting for a thought to emerge.

  It didn’t. So he inserted the DVD and hit Play. He ran it for a second before skimming ahead on fast-forward. After a while, he paused it and lit his cigarette. He took several long drags as an idea staggered its way out, but he rejected it. He pressed play briefly then fast-forwarded again. He repeated this cycle ten or fifteen times. What was he looking for? He still had no clue. For the first twenty minutes it was an exercise in desperate hope, no more than a frustrating time-filler and an excuse to get through three cigarettes and two beers. By the third beer, his concentration was intense and he was leaning so close into the screen he was almost in it, almost tongue-close to the monitor. What gripped his attention was the brow that Hank Clemens kept digging into his face, filling it with soothing gravitas. At Don’s insistence, this DVD had been loaded up with every TV interview Hank Clemens had given over the last rotten godforsaken week. The “brow” started with Meet the Press and, as the week’s clips progressed from there, Hank’s forehead developed more and more of these brows and the furrows notched in deeper and deeper. He was no Mr Country Club, not any more.

  Hank was Mr Responsibility. Mr Trust Me.

  Mr Fake.

  Don banged down his Bud with such force that the geyser of beer it shot up spilled over the table. He drew back on his smoke. Don’s revelation was about imagery, not Hank’s actual words; especially since Don had intentionally kept the sound on mute the first and second times around. It was in the way Hank said whatever crap he’d been schooled to say. It was like the guy had just learned up the whole series of “How to Appear Presidential in Ten Easy Lessons,” a course the GOP must have designed only after George W. Bush left office.

  Why hadn’t Don picked up on this before? It was so damned obvious.

  Don lit up another cigarette unaware he still had one in his mouth. In campaigning, he reminded himself, there was nothing wrong or immoral about phony sincerity. Politics was built on it. What was wrong was getting caught.

  No one had noticed it because they didn’t want to or, like Don, they weren’t looking hard enough. Don fumed at how the subway attack had played into Republican hands. The media, the public—everyone—had gone soft on Hank, respectful, toning down their previously harsh critiques… this wasn’t the time to be petty… we need to elevate the debate… let’s not sink into the gutter… or break a plate.

  Don loathed that plate. If the election weren’t being played on damn Queensberry Rules over the last two weeks, Hank Clemens would have been knocked onto the mat and counted out. It was time to rip off the gloves and go for the kill.

  Fuelled by beer, cigarettes and rage, Don hunkered down alone for two hours lifting two-or three-second grabs from the DVD and, with the editing machine, he stuck together a quick-and-dirty ad with Hank himself doing Don’s dirty work, all thirty beautiful seconds of it. Pure vote-catching magic.

  “So how will you deal with another terror attack, Mr Clemens?”

  The initial furrow of the brow, “I was at Homeland Security as you know…” The deeper crease, “…and you saw what we… er, they… did this time.” Crease unwinds into smarmy smile, “I think the people can trust me on this one, Tim…” Earnest puppy-dog brown eyes to camera, head tilting just a tad to flop his light brown fringe down to soften the image. Cut.

  And so it was also with Julia, and Phil, and Barbara, and Larry, and… Whether these six, no seven, repeat episodes were conscious ham-acting by Hank or not, Don couldn’t care. Jammed up one after the other—BAM! BAM! BAM!—they looked like it. The gestures, even the words, were pretty much identical, even down to the fireside golly-gosh ums and ers.

  Don leant back with his hands clasped behind his head and took a deep, long drag of his sixteenth Marlboro—but who was counting? It was sweet. Very sweet. He had sniffed out the rancid whiff of the disingenuous Republican prick and he was going to dig right in, yank him out and pump the fucker dry for all he was worth.

  Through the smoke cloud of three more cigarettes, the punchline for Don’s makeshift ad materialised, “So… WE’RE gonna trust HIM to do WHAT?” It would be spoken over an old sepia snapshot of a young Hank bowing deep on a schoolboy stage, arms spread, soaking in his parents’ uncritical applause. With a good ol’ fratboy like Clemens, Don’s media hounds would be able to scavenge a shot like that from somewhere, for sure.

  And they did.

  The ad got to air Saturday night and Don had it running all Sunday and all Monday. No voter registered in any of the swing states could have missed it unless they were on vacation and lodging their postal votes from New Zealand.

  “HANK, this Foster ad is despicable,” said Gregory, crushing his empty Diet Coke can for emphasis. It was still an hour before Don’s new ad would first hit the airwaves—a “friend” at CBS, still trying to suck up after the Close-up debacle, had slipped Gregory a soft copy by email and he’d forwarded it to Hank.

  “Why?” Hank asked, doe-eyed with naïveté. “It’s what I believe… It’s why we’re winning.”

  “You are kidding, right?”

  He wasn’t.

  To retaliate, Gregory upped the frequency of his negative Foster ads, turning the volume on the dish drops way up. He also revived an early one: a clip showing Isabel and Hank in serious discussion with the newly added caption, “What Isabel Diaz likes about Hank Clemens is that he listens…” If Don’s ad got any grip, this one—Gregory was certain—would loosen it. If you couldn’t trust Hank, don’t worry; Isabel was behind him.

  By Monday morning, Gregory felt sick. The Times’ editorial stank and even the generally pro-Republican Wall Street Journal questioned his strategy. “Buy one Hank… get one free Isabel?” it asked, rejecting the notion.

  The polls were no better either.

  Foster was back. By a nose.

  42

  HANK’S ELECTION NIGHT concession speech was initially seen as respectable, mostly because it was short:

  Just a moment ago, I spoke with Robert Foster and congratulated him on becoming the next president of the United States… What remains of partisan rancour must be put aside, and may God bless his stewardship of this country… I am grateful to all those who supported me and supported the cause for which we have fought… I know that many of my supporters are disappointed. I am too. But our disappointment must be overcome by our love of country…

  It was the usual billowy fluff that a loser would plump up to express his grace in defeat and to charm his followers into accepting that their months of unpaid toil weren’t wasted. Yet, Hank’s words failed both objectives and, worse, twisted themselves into the ultimate sword of humiliation, skewering any scraps of dignity his campaign workers and supporters had clung to. As headlined the following day, even in defeat Hank was a phony.

  Bobby Foster had been ensconced in his hotel suite putting the final touches on his victory speech and his Big Entrance but, in case he needed to respond to something, he kept one eye and one ear on Hank’s teary TV act. Hank wasn’t long into it when Bobby’s other eye was drawn to Don Thomas who he caught over in the corner mumbling. Mumbling was something Don, a stickler for the spoken word, never did. On closer inspection, Bobby thought he saw Don’s lips flapping perfectly in sync with Hank’s.

  “How are you doing that?” Bobby asked.

  Don knew Hank’s words especially well since he’d written most of them. Word-for-word, Clemens was reciting Al Gore’s concession speech from the 2000 election. Don would never forget those words… or the five seesaw weeks of legal wrangling that had hollowed him out and drooped his stoop by a whole other inch.

  As Bobby and his swollen entourage swished out of the suite, Don stayed behind to phone Gregory on his cell; Don could see his pee
r’s bald head on TV with Clemens—over to the side, of course—and he watched as he took the call. “What the hell was that?” snapped Don.

  Gregory knew Don’s voice instantly and, wisely, stepped off camera to speak. He too had recognised Gore’s words. “So, Don,” he said, wiping his brow, “WE trusted HIM to do WHAT? Your ad. That was the, ah, inconvenient truth, wasn’t it?”

  Don accepted this as the highest of praise from one professional to another; Gregory’s own concession speech.

  43

  JUBILANT, FOSTER GRACED the lectern with eight flashes of gleaming teeth behind him: his wife and two children and his running mate, Mitch Taylor and his family. The Democrat crowd was in ecstasy: banners waving, chants of “Fos-ter… Fos-ter,” torrents of confetti, balloons, pumping music, red roses tossed into the air…

  From up on the stage, it looked great. It felt great. It was great.

  Bobby embraced his wife, Marilyn.

  Another cheer.

  He managed one “Good evening, my fellow Americans” without interruption. For several heady minutes the cheering wouldn’t let up. The flock of the faithful were in heaven, apart from the fifty people scattered among them who weren’t. To slip past security all they’d had to do was smile, look neat—Democrat neat, not Republican neat—wear “Vote 1 Foster” buttons and carry their folded placards and their bouquets of red roses and plastic buckets full of petals through the airport-style metal detector at the entrance.

  The group reached the centre of the vast venue and spread out. The network TV cameras panning the euphoria zoomed in on the red buds they were tossing into the air and the handfuls of rose petals they scattered over the floor. Simultaneously, the scene was beamed up onto the big screens hugging the walls.

  At first Bobby lapped it up as yet another rapturous moment and he held the pause, goading the excitement even higher. The ex-trial lawyer knew how to play an audience. If you could do juries, he reminded himself, adoring crowds were a piece of cake.

  But when the first unfolded placard shot into the air from the heart of the crowd, and then another, and another, Bobby’s night of glory began its plunge: “Bouquets for Isabel… Wreaths for Bobby.”

  “Usurper.”

  And “Wail to the Thief.”

  Eight different slogans, short and shrill. All with “ImposterFoster.com” slashed in red across the top corner. Ten stunned national TV seconds was how long the placards stayed up before the scuffles wrestled them to the floor amongst the torn roses. For the networks, ten seconds was ample.

  Upstairs in the suite, Don was slumped forward more than usual. He was open-mouthed, gaping along with the thirty or forty million others also witnessing this abomination. He lifted his beer to his lips but as the infiltrators began their synchronised chants he set it down again without a sip.

  “Im-pos-ter Fos-ter.”

  “Bel…Bel…Isa-bel.”

  The president-elect scanned the crowd. Where were the damn marshals? Who was behind this? Fuck. And fuck her. He read on, barely in control of himself, and his voice was shaky.

  The uproar and scuffles continued.

  Three pages into his speech, he paused and pasted a plastic smile on his face.

  Don saw it coming. He felt it. His stooped frame shuddered from the base of his curved spine up.

  No. Don’t.

  Don’s hand moved to his heart and he felt the calm cool of the pack of Marlboros in his shirt pocket. Almost without thinking, his fingers lifted the red and white box out.

  The TV camera pulled in on Bobby for a close-up. Don saw the familiar lawyer’s venom flare from his boss’s eyes as he hesitated over the next page.

  Don’t.

  Don didn’t move. He caged in his breath and though he had no religious bone in his bent body, he prayed that Bobby wouldn’t do it…

  Bobby ripped the next page right out of his speech, crushed it in his hand and hurled it to the floor, staring at it as if it were vermin.

  Don’s fist slammed into the table, crushing his pack of smokes. “Fuck!”

  Foster looked up and raised a hand in silence but this was no longer an audience the ex-lawyer knew how to play. It was out of control and his one chance of calming the mob was gone.

  Don shrieked again, this time knocking his Bud over the coffee table, beer slopping all over his copy of the words Bobby’s heel had trampled.

  “Fuck!” he yelled again, not caring who’d hear. He struggled to find a Marlboro that was still vaguely smokable and hung it off his lip.

  Don was seething. Despite the odds, he had personally dragged this ungrateful bastard over the line and instead of just grabbing the flag that Don had handed him and waving it aloft in their carefully thought-out victory move, Bobby fucking Foster had over-reacted and pissed into the wind and was going to get it back all over his face.

  Don lit the cigarette and sucked as though this was his only way to get air. The smoke seared into his eyes, sending his tear ducts crazy. At least, he told himself, it was the smoke that caused it.

  TWENTY-FOUR hours before Election Day, with Don Thomas’ last-minute ad campaign turning the fetid tide, he again grabbed a longneck of beer and a package and, hunched over, ushered Foster back inside the candidate’s hotel suite, closing the door behind them.

  “What?” snapped Bobby.

  “I’ve been digging around,” said Don and he handed his boss the package.

  The ex-lawyer noted the red ribbon. He pulled on the bow and, with his law background, was able to skim through the hefty folios of expert opinions very quickly. Bobby regarded himself as good a constitutional lawyer as anybody so, at first, the analysis Don handed him had stunned him. Three separate experts (from Yale, Harvard and Chicago) had opined, in writing, that the House of Representatives could virtually appoint anyone they liked as Speaker. The person didn’t even have to be an elected representative nor even, more amazingly, a citizen.

  “This says,” Bobby noted with subdued deliberation, “that the House can elect anyone Speaker. Even a British monarch or an Afghani warlord. Or, for Christ’s sake, Britney fucking Spears.”

  “Hell, no,” said Don, a smirk spilling over his pudgy face, “it’s got to be someone real.”

  Foster shot him an icy stare. “All the same, every single Speaker since Congress first sat in…,” he looked down at the sheets for confirmation, “in 1789 has been a Member of the House.” And as both men knew, a Member had to be a citizen of at least seven years’ standing.

  Don explained that though his proposal—okay, Spencer’s, but he wasn’t about to jog memories—had not one single precedent in American history, it was still 100 percent legal. “Sure, we’ve got over two centuries of precedent against us. But all that is merely what’s happened; convention. It’s not the law.”

  Slowly Foster nodded, and his eyes zigzagged down the pages, carefully analysing the words of the Constitution and the commentary Don had put before him.

  Don’s nostrils flared as he inhaled the cool clean air. He needed a cigarette. The longer Foster took, the more he could feel the excitement brimming. He was going to say yes. This was going to be one of Don’s finest moments; not only would his candidate triumph tomorrow night with the unofficial declaration of the polls, but he’d be forever marked as one of the few leaders truly able to unite a divided country.

  He’d already crafted a spellbinding three paragraphs for Bobby to weave into his victory speech and he passed them to the candidate.

  The writing was stirring—up there with his best—though, if truth be told, it was clichéd: that Bobby intended to be a president for all Americans especially in these troubled times; that sores needed healing; that Isabel had much to give the nation; that it was a tragedy she’d been barred from the opportunity of serving, but that Bobby had personally blazed a new track for her; and that, if she were willing, he would prevail on the House to propose her as its Speaker immediately.

  BUT Don’s plan went badly wrong… election night
went badly wrong… Despite their preparations, no one in the Foster camp had predicted the turmoil that erupted on the celebration floor.

  In the midst of his victory speech, before hundreds of supporters and millions watching TV, when Foster got to the page surging with Don’s vibrant prose about Isabel and the Speaker’s role, instead of galvanising the historic moment and pulling the rug from under the protesters, the combative trial lawyer still in Bobby had ripped out the sheet, screwed it up and hurled it onto the floor, crushing it under his foot.

  No way was Bobby going to elevate that fucking witch now, he decided, not with those ImposterFoster fucks not more than fifty feet away wreaking havoc on his hard-won victory. This was orchestrated, he fumed as his eyes panned across the floor for clues.

  Foster didn’t know it, but Isis’s plan had just reached its spectacular destabilising climax.

  Yet those who had engineered the disruption had no idea their actions were self-defeating; that because of Foster’s hot-headed reaction they had foiled Isabel’s elevation as Speaker, something at that stage they didn’t know was even a possibility.

  More so than Foster’s, their own victory that night was pyrrhic.

  44

  SEVEN LONG TRANSITION weeks later, Don hadn’t stopped. “We can’t keep doing nothing. It’s Christmas. This could turn into an avalanche…”

  “Fuck them,” Bobby spluttered. “I’m President-Elect fair and square… no missing votes, no hanging chads, no Supreme Court… a good, solid, honest-to-goodness majority...”