Them Hustlers

by Jeffrey Manber

  He thought he heard a “love you” as the phone clicked off, but it was not like the tightly wired lobbyist Tanya Lyn Owens to be intimate in the halls of Congress or whenever surrounded by her political clients.

  Her clients were a contingent of southern politicians who had climbed out of the marshy earth of small towns along the banks of the Mississippi as local politicians or newspaper publishers, the fortunate few that clawed high enough to reap the rewards of national politics.

  No matter their whirlwind six months together his fiancée still thought of these men, not him, as paramount in her life. It was to Congressman Tommy Tucker (D-LA) and Congressman Rodney Wilkes (D-LA) in particular that Tanya emotionally clung, marveling almost every day how this one or that one had leaped from the Bayou and arrived in Washington as United States senators and congressmen.

  Phil had to admit that the life stories of Tanya’s clients were a large part of the attraction he felt for this woman, what with her boy-like figure not up to the curves he usually sought in a lover. Especially one he had agreed to marry. Her sexual attraction was in some ways the naughtiness of the Washington night life she had shown to him. Through Tanya Lyn he had met not just the politicians but also the mistresses and trophy wives of the Washington power players, experiencing their feuds and rivalries as all jostled to gain more influence, more money, more prestige or hit the political holy jackpot and grab all three.

  One dinner reception had included at the head table, just opposite him and Senator Bob Dole, a radiant Princess Dianne. Phil with his salesman confidence was sure that the Princess was eying him and if not for the blocking presence of the scowling Bob Dole, he just might have scored that night. He wasn’t being vain, as a girlfriend had once complained; it was just the experience of a veteran hunter. He knew the stories he told about his business in Japan and his jokes in broken Japanese were the highlights of the otherwise dull evening.

  Look, strip away the lofty title and the British Di looked to Phil no different than any young, pretty, lonely married woman sitting at a boring dinner in a foreign land. Prime opportunity for a fantastic one-nighter.

  Because of Tanya, bountiful opportunities to dip into the well-hidden Washington excesses abounded. A rolling fetish party was a recurring event for her "boys," as she called her politicians, complete with girls dressed in skin-tight red leather costumes and diamond-encrusted masks, some with whips and one with a large paddle board to spank errant congressmen. And the secretaries in their Capitol offices were always eager young arrivals from the best families. “Pretty young thing, now ain’t she?” An influential southern congressman had teased Phil after introducing his latest assistant, while poking his elbow into Phil’s side.

  Yeah, the scent of temptation was ever-present. At a small dinner three months before sat a classy looking arts buyer from California, rumored to be a recent lover of the president. Of the United States. It was the talk of the group for days. This was the zest for life that sprang from Tanya’s Bayou clients, their lovers, friends and even enemies that more than likely was not present in a delegation of say, Midwestern congressmen. Nor in the world of unsold product lines and second hand merchandise that occupied Phil’s life.

  He thought to himself more than once that maybe he was enamored with this woman’s life, and not to the woman herself.

  * * *

  Relieved at having created a block of free time with minimal interrogation, Phil prepared for the drive up to Atlantic City. Damn, but he had forgotten about the celebration, a surprise bash for Tommy Tucker, Tanya’s most important congressional connection. Well, if possible, he would return from Philly in time. If he got lucky, met a girl, he could always explain it off by saying the meeting ran too late.

  As he threw on the bright green sports jacket that Tanya had brought back from a trip to London, with her boast that it cost only $800 bucks stinging in his ears every time he touched the jacket, he tried to remember if every relationship began from the first day with small lies that grow into larger lies that become the unsustainable foundation between two people.

  While adjusting the jacket in the full length mirror that Tanya had carefully made sure could not be seen from the bed, he was about to conclude that no, there had been a time when he entered into new relationships with a mental tabula rasa, drawn by a physical attraction, a certain scent or smile or firmness of the breasts. Later came the inevitable desire for a bit of freedom. And so a small fib would begin, and the unaccounted event created by the lie would be the incubator to grow in a different direction, and not be swallowed up as an undivided duo.

  Leaving the house he stepped out into the driveway where two cars waited. His ten year old Jeep Cherokee, once the pride of a decade younger man, was inadequate for Tanya’s world and so rarely used. Phil instead opted for her black two door Lexus sports car. Slipping inside, he adjusted the mirror, flipped on the radio to the one station still playing hits from the 1970s and turned onto Queen Street. But where to go?

  The choices were to drive directly to Philadelphia or stop at a fortune teller. Tanya’s red-bricked townhouse was in Old Town, Alexandria, just over the Potomac River from Washington, DC. There was little surprise that Tanya had chosen to live here. Old Town was the destination of choice for a certain type of Reagan Republican or the conservative Democrats that were her clients.

  The new Republican majority in Congress led by Newt Gingrich had helped the town prosper; and multimillion dollar townhouses were springing up alongside the tiny two century old row houses built by sea captains and cargo traders and prosperous slave traders. Robert E. Lee had been raised here, his childhood home as much a part of the spirit of Old Town as the nonstop construction boom.

  The more liberal Democrats had their own preferred communities. For them, Dupont Circle in the District was a magnet. Or the Hill area for congressional staffers. Those Democrats older or more successful settled either in the Northwest part of Washington, areas like Georgetown and Kalorama or further on in Bethesda, Maryland, on the other side of the monster beltway that surrounded Washington.

  Phil preferred a summer afternoon in Dupont mostly because it was filled with girls who saw no need for wearing a bra. By Phil’s own calculations, 4 out of 10 girls walked across the park at Dupont Circle without bras, compared to only 1 out of 10 on Old Town’s main drag of King Street. That was a sizable difference, wasn’t it? A good reason to hang out with Democrats.

  Though he felt out of place in Virginia, he had to admit that Tanya’s house was cute. The two story row house with the fake gas lights on each side of the carefully aged door fit right into the look of the town. A contractor up from Louisiana had spent a week in July hand sanding the wood to make the new door look old. “Funny enuff about these girs,” the worker laconically mused, “spendin' good money to make wood look too old and ther faces lookin' too young.”

  Phil had said nothing critical in reply, unsure always if someone from her entourage was testing, probing to see what he thought about Tanya or the congressmen or the mistresses. Cooks, chauffeurs, contractors were all imported from Louisiana and all were the eyes and ears of the inner group.

  * * *

  His wandering thoughts snapped back to the issue of the day.

  Time for a reading? There was a tarot reader on King Street near the Metro. The main drag of Old Town ran from the Potomac River for about half a mile to the Metro stop.

  Once filled with small mom and pop shops, King Street had turned seedy and few stores had survived the cultural carnage from the white flight during the forced school integration of the 1970s. The civil rights effort turned a once vibrant southern community into one of desolation. It was as if a neutron bomb had imploded, leaving the buildings intact but without the families and customers.

  One that emerged from the self-imposed rubble was the House of Tarot Cards, up a few steps in a line of what were once two-family homes. The fortune teller had done a reading for Phil five years before. It was a gypsy place. Normall
y he avoided the gypsy fortune tellers, fearful the business was a front for fencing stolen goods or running scams. But he had given her a try and damn, if the woman hadn’t been right on a major turning point in his life.

  Phil never forgot a good reading. Each in his life took place at a critical moment.

  On that day five years ago he had not planned to have a reading. That was always the best, letting chance play a hand. On a humid summer afternoon he had been walking to the Metro after meeting a waitress; her name was Marion, when a sudden thunderstorm propelled him into the second floor room. A random act that he philosophized was not really random, in the deep dark ways which life unfolded.

  The gypsy laid out a horoscope spread in a circular pattern; meaning one tarot card for each astrological sign. Each card represented a question regarding Phil's life: whether he would be happy, his health, his relationship with money and his family. It was a long reading, with the cards showing change coming in many different forms in his life. Finally, after turning over the last card, the gypsy predicted he would stay with the family business even as those all around him would leave. That would be his father and two brothers. The reading could not have been more dramatic, her heavy Eastern European accent punctured by the thunder and the pouring rain, and his coming to understand and eventually accept that he would soon be alone, left to run the struggling business without Pop and Aaron or David. That she was right about. The very next summer Dad would pass away at the age of 67 from throat cancer and the brothers scattered to a better life, Aaron to New York and David to California. He stayed with the business even though it was spiraling downwards. There was something comforting about selling merchandise that was now used and stripped of the branding and of value for nothing more than the fabric itself. Suited Phil to a tee.

  Phil steered the Lexus west, towards the Metro. It had been several months since his last reading. A good decision, he encouraged himself. Time to recalibrate. He could not be more worried about the relationship with Tanya. His failing business rendering him eunuchly dependent on Tanya and her world. It was a world he still didn’t understand. How exactly she made her money. Even on the phone, just now, his lover, his fiancée, didn’t promise to give him money, instead holding out the chance to “get” money. From where? From whom?

  Three weeks ago Tanya started pushing marriage. Even booming Congressman Tucker had egged them on, asking when “y’all gonna tie that knot?” This was a question shouted during one of the numerous private parties Tanya was always attending, where Hurricanes, the powerful sweet drink from down on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, flowed like beer. With a post-hurricane rush that made him uneasy a date has been set, just over four months from now, in early December, when Congress would be in recess. Three hundred invitations were being printed and he and Tanya planned within the week to mail out the wedding announcements.

  No one could confuse the impeding union with a coming together of like-minded partners. Tanya Lyn was steeped in the materialism now in full bloom that came from mixing political power and cold hard cash. This was a woman who took pleasure in pushing through a single sentence in a six hundred page piece of legislation that could be worth hundreds of thousands to a client. She had showed him one of these sentences, though it wasn’t quite the sort of sentence that Phil was in the habit of reading. It was six lines of single spaced type with four commas and he couldn’t understand a damn thing. “Don’t harm yourself,” purred this lioness of the Washington jungle, “ya not supposed to understand it.”

  The very day after her stealth success in having the language added to the annual appropriations bill, Tanya rewarded herself “since no man would be thoughtful enough to do it for me” on a buying spree, returning that evening buoyed by the weight of a half dozen shopping bags.

  Phil, on the other hand, was on a fast from consumerism, propelled by the brutal reality of a business that bought last year’s merchandise and out of style fashions and sold them for pennies per pound. His experience made him leery of the relentless branding that made one pair of jeans sell for $50 and another from the same Vietnamese factory, but backed by a multimillion dollar ad campaign, sell for $200. When the unsold jeans arrived in his warehouse, both product lines would be sold wholesale for fifty cents a pound to clients in rural towns and far more to the small boutique stores in places like San Francisco or Tokyo or Boston or Austin.

  The brutality of the business had made him far more cautious in all sorts of things, including his handling of his own relationships. That meant that Phil no longer liked telling big lies. Better to have some degree of honesty blended into the mix, like additives into the fuel. So yesterday he had gone ahead and arranged for a late lunch with a merchandise broker from Philadelphia. The broker’s family had for three generations, just like his, been in the used clothing business. Phil heard the guy was desperate to sell a few thousand pounds of blouses, the remains of a sponsorship deal with a famous actress that had turned sour when she had been caught sniffing cocaine.

  In the business of second hand merchandise, everyone knew that the blouses were just as good as before the photos splashed onto the tabloids. But fickle women turned away, leaving to brokers like Phil a chance to buy low and sell slightly higher overseas. If he had the money.

  Money was his problem right now. One dishonest French partner, coupled, it must be admitted, with too much time spent at the casinos and a strong dollar had leveled pretty low his business. The business would come back, Phil knew that. But it would take time. Something Tanya and her hyper personality just didn’t understand.

  So meeting the merchandise broker was his reason to Tanya for going to Philly.

  Some action in Atlantic City to read the dice the real motivation.

  As the Lexus crawled along King Street his mind drifted back to the question of the first lies in all the relationships of his life. Forced to a stop by a mother pulling from her double parked car first one child and then a second, and then a double stroller, he knew in his heart that lies had always been part of every relationship with a woman, even with his mother. Sure, at first there were no secrets. None. Is that the love of a child to his mother?

  Then the small fibs took root, like not telling Mom about the time spent with Alicia, who would read to him the poetry of Jim Morrison or the freckled faced Mary, Mary as he called her, who played Pink Floyd with the scent of incense floating in the air. And when he started feeling the need not to tell the truth, the fatal separation between mother and child was underway. It ended when he brought home Kristina, telling his mother that yes indeed this Irish Catholic girl was Jewish.

  That lie ended two relationships.

  The House of Tarot Cards loomed up on the right. A parking space right in front! That sealed the question. It had been a good idea to come for a reading. No doubt. A parking space right in front, what more need be said? This was destined to be an important day.

  ~ ~ ~

  Chapter 3

  Tanya yearned for a smoke. A year ago Tommy had demanded she stop, not liking the smell of tobacco on the breath of a woman. This from a man who routinely smoked Cuban cigars while eating a dozen or so oysters smothered with heaps of Tabasco sauce. Eggs first thing in the morning were often drowned in Tabasco; sometimes the BBQ flavored potato chips tossed down with an afternoon beer weren’t hot enough so on would go the green pepper sauce concocted by an old black woman from his parish. Tanya had more than once complained he reeked of the Louisiana earth. Tommy had liked the comparison, but she hadn’t meant it as a compliment.

  A cigarette would be good about now. Virginia Slims. Extra-long. She was feeling pressure. A deal had been agreed to late last night and an hour ago right in the hearing room she had been handed a brown bag with $15,000 cash. Now that money had to be put into their system. Carefully put into play, what with nosy reporters and snooping government regulators.

  Tanya let slip a small laugh. She had begun to think like Tommy. But the hypocrisy of it all. Ethics from an admini
stration whose leader was using the Oval Office for his own sexual pleasures. And him lying about it, wagging his finger out at the television audience with the righteous of dear Congressman Rodney Wilkes when he was caught with the teenage daughter of his largest campaign donor. That had been some mess for her to clean up. But she had taken care of it all. Like always.

  Putting cash into the system used to be a no-brainer. Now so many laws had been laid out that friends had been trapped from Baton Rouge to Jackson, Mississippi, and even Mr. Lander of the New Orleans construction family had been caught up in this new age of righteous morality. Right now it was Democrats being entrapped, but that was only because their party had enjoyed decades of unbridled congressional power. Give the Republicans a few more years and their rendezvous with the ethics Grim Reaper would soon take place. Just watch and see. And yet the Gingrich Republicans had the audacity to make morality their political weapon to retake the White House. Rue the day, they will. Tanya was sure of that with all her heart.

  Lately she had started using Phil’s bank accounts. What a puzzling man. He had more bank accounts than money. But that served an awfully useful purpose. She could deposit the funds into one account, pay them out into another, skim a little off the top for herself, invoice yet again and skim some for the slush funds necessary for the current campaign or Tommy’s walk around money for that Bobbie Doll dyed-blonde mistress who spent her days reading gossip magazines and watching television. It was not impossible to stash the cash, just required a whole bunch of accounts. That’s all Phil was good for. And sex.

  Phil. It was the phone call with Phil that was making her edgy for a smoke. She needed him. Tonight was the surprise birthday party for Tommy. It wouldn’t do for her to be there alone. The congressmen would be paired with their wives, and it was the perfect showcase to introduce her future husband. Why did men always throw a wrench into her plans? Phil had promised to drive out to Annapolis soon to look at buying a place, what if he cried about being too tired?