by Joe Klein
More symmetry: Daisy came after me that night in the hotel the same way I'd come after her on kilt-night. There was an edge of desperation to it, an edge of--please, please disregard what just happened, I can make you very happy. But she was trying too hard; we were all arms and elbows; at one point, she bit my earlobe and I said "Ouch!"
"So," I asked afterward, "what are the structural flaws in the Canadian single-payer system?"
"Oh God," she said. "I know you know I'm not her. I know that. But you see pieces of her in me--like, maybe, the fact that I'm saying this right now She would be doing this. She would have bit your ear too hard. Shit, shit, shit, Henry." She pounded the pillow, sat bolt upright, zipped her mouth shut and threw away the key. "Mmmpf, mmmpf, mmmmpf," she said.
I reached down, over the side of the bed, and came back with the key. I turned it in her left dimple and unzipped her mouth. "I'm sorry," she said. "Really, really sorry."
"Don't worry about it." I said, but she could tell: I had been freaked by her mother.
"Henry, I'll make you a deal: If we turn out to be, like, together--I mean, for a while--" she said. "If it'll make you feel any more comfortable, I will kill my mother. Literally. I'll do it with my own hands."
"If you really want to hurt her," I said, "maybe you should hire a couple of proletarians to do the job."
"They could tie her to a chair first, and make her watch hours upon hours of negative spots," Daisy said. "And then force her to actually cook fucking dinner for them. And then they could strangle her while reciting Langston Hughes."
She was up on one elbow, playing with my hair. I was staring at the ceiling. "Henry, why are we here?" she asked. "Why aren't we at your apartment?"
"I don't know," I said. "I have the feeling it's not my apartment anymore. I'm not the guy who used to live there. Or maybe it's what Luther said: body man's got to stay close to the body. Or maybe, it's just that Mrs. Flores doesn't do room service."
"Henry, do not buy that servant shit," she said. "It's race stuff. It's Luther fucking with you."
"I don't know," I said. "Jack grabbed the cell phone out of my hand today during the Rucker business-and Rucker, he acted like I was lower than dirt. Luther's got me noticing that stuff now."
"That makes them assholes," she said. "It doesn't make you a servant. Henry, you can't let this stuff get to you."
But she knew it was getting to me. All of it.
There still was a presidential campaign going on, though it had surprisingly little to do with Jack Stanton. Our Rucker Ruckus/Stanton Standoff (as the Sunday News inevitably put it) was news in New York, but made barely a ripple in the rest of the country.
The rest of the country was madly in love with Freddy Picker. It was a sudden, hectic infatuation. He would appear on the covers of Time ("Picker Fever"), Newsweek ("Make Room for Freddy") and People ("Pickermania!") that week. He would be interviewed, by Lesley Stahl, on 60 Minutes that Sunday night; it had already been taped, Picker and Lesley walking the grounds of his environmentally correct Florida plantation. He was wearing a denim work shirt, overalls, high riding boots and a camouflage cap. "You're a hunter, Governor Picker?" she had asked.
"Not for sport." He smiled. "For food. I can rustle you up some Picker-shot quail for dinner, if you want to stick around."
He was, as Daisy had sensed, very good. He moved, ever so easily, away from Lawrence Harris's more extreme positions-no more talk of a Virgin Uses fee or a fifty-cent tax on anything. "Everybody knows we got to do something," he said on his first Larry King show. "But it'd be sort of foolish for me to stand up here now, in the middle of a campaign, and say just exactly what it is we're gonna do, Larry. To close the deficit we need to raise some money." He casually turned away from King and addressed the camera. "Senator Harris figured there were ways we could do it that would also protect the environment. I think that's a pretty damn good idea. But we've got to wait until this country elects a president and he sits down with the folks in Congress and works out the precise details."
"You're saying Harris was wrong to be specific?"
Picker laughed. "Awww, c'mon now, Larry. That's not worthy of ya'. You're tryin' to play gotcha. The folks know what I'm sayin'. Next topic."
We still didn't know all that much about him. The first profiles were flattering, of course. He had been a businessman before becoming governor, had moved his family's Pensacola-based oil equipment supply company into oil lease speculation, and traded brilliantly-catching the wave just before the first Arab oil embargo, then leaving the business to his younger brother, Arnie, in order to dabble in politics. He appeared to have a great sense of timing. He launched himself into the 1974 gubernatorial campaign as a Democrat against the exhausted, befuddled incumbent. He campaigned in a leisure suit, with a broom-the broom, the leisure suit, the sideburns, the hawklike nose and eyes, the big smile made him immediately popular with political cartoonists, and soon the public. His marriage, in midcampaign, to Antonia Reyes Cardinale, the daughter of a wealthy Cuban furniture dealer (and a Nicaraguan heiress), helped with the normally Republican Latino vote. He won election easily. A big future was predicted. It was one of those victories that the Washington political columnists, always in the hunt for new talent, picked up on immediately. A charismatic big-state governor is always worth checking out. Libby's research turned up a ripple of speculative columns about Picker soon after he took office. He did not discourage the speculation. He said, "Being president might be a fun thing to do-they need some sweeping out up in Washington, too." But he never really acted on it. He never really acted on much of anything as governor-there were no great Picker initiatives, no great Picker scandals, no great Picker tax increases or tax cuts. Things seemed to run pretty smoothly. He was well liked. Two sons were born. There was another ripple, smaller, speculating that he might make a good vice presidential candidate in 1976--but Jimmy Carter's surge pretty much put an end to that; a Georgia-Florida ticket would never fly. He endorsed Carter. "Hell, we practically grew up in the same neighborhood," he said. And then: Nothing. Until the strange press conference in March of 1978, an event that had clearly been planned as the announcement of his reelection campaign. There were photos of Picker, black hair parted in the middle and curling down over his collar, looking anguished; his wife, an exquisite woman, dark hair pulled back in a bun, standing just behind him to the right, holding one of their sons in her arms--and tears in her eyes. After the famous line "I was gonna announce for reelection, but I changed my mind," he had added: "I guess I'm just not cut out for this work. You want a more patient man than me. I hope you'll indulge me a little by not asking too many more questions about it."
There was a headline over an analysis piece in The Miami Herald several days later that pretty much summed up the local press reaction to Picker's retirement: HE jusr GOT BORED. There was no speculation about personal problems or marital difficulties. And by the time the divorce was announced, six months after he left office, Freddy Picker was no longer news.
"It's just a giant fucking LOOK fucking HERE sign, a solid-gold invitation to scrutinize, dontchathink?" Richard said that Sunday morning, sitting in the coffee shop of our nondescript Lexington Avenue hotel, near Grand Central. "But everyone's too damn lovesick to do much looking now. They'll get around to it, a few weeks. 'Course we may be deader than Eleanor Roosevelt by then. Shit, Henry, how much would you trust any of these guys who said he just got bored? How many of 'em get bored with power, with all these nubile teeny-bop muffins and munchkins paddin' around sayin', 'Ooh, Governor, can I get you this? Or maybe that? Can I clip your toenails?' "
"Maybe he's different," I said. "Maybe he's the real thing."
"The real thing? What on earth is that, Henri? There's no such thing. Not in this business. Not in this century"
"FDR?"
"Okay, but only because he was a cripple and had to live with pain every day," he said. "FDR minus polio is George Bush."
"Oh, come on."
"Callo
w, cheery rich boy, summers up in Maine, sends a lot of thank-you notes. Henri, never underestimate the educational power of sheer fucking pain."
"Maybe, then, Picker's been educated," I said.
"Mebbe," he said, taking a sip of Diet Coke, which-along with a barely pecked-at stack of pancakes-was his breakfast. "But it's a curious thing, dontchathink? It's got ol' Libby curious. Bumped into Lucille 'smorning and she told me Libby was kind of obsessing on Picker-turned out she worked for him in '74. Well, not really worked. She volunteered. She wore a button, said: 'I'm a Picker Person.' Member all these folks-Jack and Susan, Lucille, the Libsterall of them were working for McGovern down there in '72. Libby stayed on, hung out in Margaritaville. Gotta figure, if there's anything there, she'll wrastle it to the ground."
"If there's anything there," I said.
"When has there not been anything there lately?" Richard said. "There's always something there. He's a pol. Lookit the moves he's makin'. You don't come down off Harris's high horse smooth as he has and not be a pol."
But that wasn't quite true. Picker wasn't acting like the sort of politician we were used to. He hadn't brought on any consultants; in fact, he'd let Paul Shaplen go. He had announced, on Larry King, that he wouldn't do any thirty-second spots. Or polling. Or focus groups. "I'm not going to hire a bunch of folks to tell me what you're thinking and how to get at you," he'd said.
"Maybe you're right, Henri," Richard scoffed. "Maybe he ain't a pol. Maybe he's fucking Jesus Christ. Ain't hard to be the Jesus of the week in this business-for a week. Two weeks, though, kinda stretches the envelope."
"The blood thing is saintly," I said.
"The blood thing is politics, a fucking stroke of genius," Richard said. "Do you realize that every last one of my clients, every last one of the mangy suckers, called this week to ask if they should go down and donate a fucking pint of blood? It's like it was after that Supreme Court nominee, what was his name-Ginsburg? Yeah. After he said he'd smoked a couple joints, every last one of my clients called within twenty-four hours to find out what they should say about marijuana. And they were right to ask. Scorps asked every fucking alderman in the country that week if they'd gotten high. So now it's blood." That Sunday there were stories in the papers about blood donations increasing nationally by 10 percent. But we didn't realize just how huge the thing had become until Picker held his first and only Connecticut rally, in the Yale bowl, that night. More than twenty thousand people turned out-and some enterprising soul, unaffiliated with the Picker campaign (according to the next day's stories) set up booths outside all the entrances to the stadium, selling a variety of blood artifacts-drop-of-blood lapel pins, bumper stickers, posters with a picture of a smiling Freddy Picker, lying down on a cot, sleeve rolled up, giving blood. A logo had suddenly materialized: PICKER, with the "I" in the shape of a drop of blood.
Picker spoke from a bare stage that night. None of the usual political trappings, just an American flag. He had most of the leadership of the Connecticut Democratic Parry up there with him. He was introduced by Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. And he just stood there, frozen-frightened, it seemed-as the crowd went berserk. Richard, Daisy, Lucille and I watched it on C-SPAN. Stanton was off in Brooklyn, meeting with the Lubavitcher Rebbe.
"Who the fuck did this schedule?" Richard moaned. "We 'bout to get our butts kicked all over Connecticut and Jack's off in a different state sucking up to some medieval Jew?"
"You have to meet the Lubavitcher Rebbe when you do New York," Lucille said.
"You have to meet hint the Sunday night before the Connecticut primary?"
"It's when he said to come," Lucille sniffed.
"So we run on his schedule? We run on that fuckball Richie R. Ucker's schedule?" Richard was screaming, red in the face. "Who the fuck is running for president here? This is the stupidest goddamn thing." "Jemmons, I've just about had it with you," Lucille said.
"Shut UP, everybody-please," Daisy said. The candidate was about to speak.
"Okay, okay-I'm sorry," Picker said, recoiling a bit from the echo, adjusting the microphone. He was wearing a dark suit, white shirt and b9
a striped tie. He looked like a politician, but his body language was strange, different: diffident. "This is kind of overwhelming."
"WE LOVE YOU, FREDDY," a girl shouted.
"You hardly know me," he said. "I don't know . . . I don't want you to, ah, lose perspective. I, ah . . . I'm kind of nervous up here." The crowd exploded. People were waving handmade placards with large painted drops of blood. Picker pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his brow. He really did seem nervous.
"It's weird, Henri," Richard said. "He seemed much more comfortable in front of a crowd when I saw him in Florida. But I guess it's different when you're the man."
"Now there's a candidate for your mother," I whispered to Daisy. "Humble. Apolitical. Paul Newman likes him. And no thirty-second spots.
But Daisy was transfixed. Picker seemed to be struggling. He didn't know what to say next.
"I . . . I didn't expect this," he said. "And, ah, all you folks giving blood in the tents out back, I want to thank you." The crowd erupted again. It was deafening. "Look," Picker said uneasily, "could you do me a favor and not cheer so loud?" There was laughter. "No," he said. "I really mean it. I really want everyone to calm down. And I guess I mean everyone. I guess I mean the press, and the TV folks, and my colleagues, and the folks who make a living advising my colleagues-I think we all need to calm down."
And the crowd calmed down. "This is really a terrific country, but we get a little crazy sometimes," he continued. "I guess the craziness is part of what makes us great, it's part of our freedom. But we have to watch out. We have to be careful about it. There's no guarantee we'll be able to continue this-this highwire act, this democracy. If we don't calm down, it all may just spin out of control. I mean, the world keeps getting more complicated and we keep having to explain it to you in simpler terms, so we can get our little oversimplified explanations on the evening news. Eventually, instead of even trying to explain it, we just give up and sling mud at each other-and it's a show, it keeps you watching, like you watch a car wreck or maybe wrestling." He stopped; he liked what he'd just said. "That's right. The kind of posturing and hair-pulling you see us do in thirty-second advertisements and on podiums like this one is exactly like professional wrestling: it's fake, it's staged, it doesn't mean anything. Most of as don't hate our opponents; hell, we don't even know 'em. We don't have the fierce kind of ideological differences we used to have, back when the war in Vietnam was on. We just put on the show because we don't know what else to do. We don't know any other way to get you all riled up, to get you out to vote. But there are some serious things we have to talk about now. There are some decisions we have to make, as a people, together. And it's gonna be hard to make them if we don't slow this thing down a little, calm it down, have a conversation amongst ourselves."
He paused. "I guess . . . I guess--you know it's funny, I never even thought of it at the time," he said. "But I guess that's why I decided to start this thing by giving blood." There were cheers from the crowd; he tamped them down. "You can't do much else but be calm when you give blood. You just lie there and you can think, or listen to music, or to a book on tape--you don't feel like spouting off all that much. And all the while, you're giving something. Not a lot. Just a pint. But if each of us turned around and thought in those terms, thought about giving a little--instead of worrying about what we want to get, or what the government is taking from us . . . If we thought about it in those terms, we'd all just naturally sort of--calm down. Don't you think? And I guess that's what I want to do with this campaign: sort of calm things down a little, and see if we can start having a conversation about the sort of place we want America to be in the next century. I want Governor Stanton to know I welcome him into the conversation--and the president too, matter of fact, if he has the time. But that's what I . . ." He stopped, distracted for a moment. He
looked down at the podium, looked up again: "Yeah, that's all I want to do. And, ah, okay. That's about all I have to say now." There was applause then, sustained and rolling applause, but no wild cheering, no craziness. He had tamed them. He had tamed us. We just stood around the television set, watching.
Finally, Richard said the obvious: "We are in seriously deep shit now."
Deeper than we could begin to imagine. If Freddy Picker seemed to be campaigning from Mount Olympus, all cool and breezy and high-minded, we were neck-deep in the Augean Stables. Nothing went right that week. Tuesday was especially juicy: We were clobbered in the Connecticut primary and the New York Post headline was STAN-TON'S BLACK LOVE CHILD. I had spent the past month dreading that headline, but now that it was here, it seemed almost superfluous. It seemed the nail after the final nail in our coffin; we were already feeling dead and buried by Freddy Picker. It wasn't much of a story, in any case. There wasn't much in the way of facts beyond the stuff Melville-Jones had put on his trashy TV show, and the governor denied paternity vehemently-but his denials didn't count for anything anymore. And the fact that Fat Willie had vanished was not useful. We spent that morning debating whether to admit that a blood test was in the works, that the governor had volunteered to have his blood taken-and decided, finally, that it was best to keep quiet. Any admission of involvement would imply complicity-and the blood contrast with Picker would be devastating. And the fact that we were even debating such a thing implied our utter hopelessness: in the New York press, his paternity was a fact.
Stanton was stunned. He was barely communicating. He sleepwalked through Howard's stupid schedule. The most rudimentary acts of politics-walking into an event, through the inevitable mob of cameras and screechers-became a near-unendurable agony, each movement demanding total discipline and tremendous exertion. The traditional New York politics of reflex and obligation had become twisted, distended, a forum for lunacy; our obligatory, scripted concessions weren't greeted with the usual mopey, self-righteous acquiescence, but with a fury-the blacks, the Jews, the Irish: no one was happy. All New York seemed off the edge, in the throes of some primordial catharsis. On Tuesday, after the McCollister story broke, the first feminists dressed as pigs began to appear. They waved OINK, OINK placards. They made pig noises. On Tuesday night, after Stanton graciously conceded Connecticut to Harris-Picker, he went to a downtown disco for a Women's Political Caucus benefit and could not speak because a group of gay radicals stood in the middle of the dance floor chanting, "BUGGER, BUGGER, BUGGER, BUGGER, BUGGER."