The next week a man shows up for a speech of yours with an assault rifle, open carry.
And again the week after, another man.
They get them on TV, they start saying things like The Tree of Liberty. Like The Blood of Patriots and Tyrants.
One of the talking heads puts it to them, what about our history of political violence? How can you say that in a country like this? Don’t you know we live in a country with a terrible history of political violence?
And they don’t answer.
They don’t have to.
They know — we all know — what kind of country we live in.
Here in the city, or in Philadelphia, Bridgeport, Trenton — drivable places — whenever you had one near enough, I had to show up with my little bundles of checks. I’d joystick into the lobby in my Rodem Universal, personal checks from folks all over the country in ha6Q KA-AY #8 0 1W1X1O7W
Totals of fifty or a hundred thousand dollars from these good people I’d never met; that I was about to hand this bundle over to you, or rathe3CDKQT4G# MOF R /TF BH
this seemed miraculous to me. And each time I’d think, today is going to be the day.
One of yours would be standing at my side. After ten or twenty minutes had passed in silence, a certain mutual solicitude between us — your people had become us C B NTA/ PM7L,I M
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had become used to my ways — I would hand over my little bundle, and joystick off.
No, this was not to be the day after all.
I wonder: Did they think I was some kind of rube?
One of the boys from publicity would be waiting at the vehicle. He’d work the lift and lock me in place and we’d be off.
This morning is the first one I’ve come out since the election. I let myself pretend it was about Gips and Roos — that I was upset — I felt I should be upset. I showed up, and realized immediately it had been a terrible mistake — after all, there were no checks this time. I hadn’t reckoned on how it would be to park there in the lobby without checks. Let me tell you about a passage in the most recent book in the Vietnam series. There’s a description of an expat British drug addict who opens a promising acquaintance’s medicine cabinet to see a worn, discolored toothbrush and nothing more: he feels a raging fatigue that scraped him to the bone.
That raging fatigue was one I rewrote during the editorial process, but now I wonder if that was a mistake — what were they, these feelings in my body, if not a raging fatigue? I actually moaned in pain. Moaned and moaned again, and I had to put a stop to it — I couldn’t be seen moaning in pain, not the man who runs a Big Six New York City publisher. Imagine the trade publications, the industry blogs. If I was to be seen in one of my very rare public appearances, carrying on like that, with moans of pain. I wanted to shut up! To simply be silent! But I couldn’t be silent — yet I couldn’t be seen moaning, so I did the only thing I could, I opened my mouth and started to speak — and what I spoke of started with Reagan. Because it was after they shot him outside the Washington Hilton that I was last moaning in pain like this.
Why can’t he be a little more like Reagan? I asked.
Take the public option.
See, what Reagan would have done is he would have waltzed right in with the public option on his arm and bowed to the right, bowed to the left, and done a little do-si-do with the public option, if you get the picture — and pretty soon everyone down in D.C. would have been in on the fun, they’d have all been dancing the night away with the public option, and I mean really cutting a rug.
I said, Don’t look away. If you want to re#WQ5E0
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then refute my words, but don’t pretend that this man you see before you, in this magnificent chair, with this face that looks like — looks like what? what does it look like to you? what does this face even look like to you? — don’t pretend he’s not addressing you with these words!
Let’s get the public option passed before Social Security goes bankrupt, or it will never happen.
These words are a simple truth, and you can’t refute a simple truth.
If you want a simple truth it’s that I bundled up a million bucks for the guy.
Me!
Whose daddy went to work every day in a rusted-out Ford and a mended, threadbare suit — the same suit every day, until the suit gave out at last, and he had to start all over. Sputtering and backfiring down a dirt road to sell funeral insurance, junk insurance, to poor, ignorant people, just to try to keep food on the table for himself and his boy.
One million!
Is it funny that I blurted all that out to them — to strangers — out in the corridor?
Sure it is — but first there was the raging fatigue. Then the Swede’s monkey wrench, and I didn’t feel the fatigue, not anymore, but I felt something — was it what was behind it? The monkey wrench flew in and the whole past got knocked wide open, and what was — let’s say, what was behind and beneath it came out. I mean: All these ideas came flooding, and these memories, and these images — a pink dress, a briefcase, an open car — but I couldn’t figure out the connections between them. With a flood, see, you have currents and eddies, but you don’t have connections, per se. And so there I was, first Rodem Universal, then nursing home reject, corridor, then backstage VIP, trying to make the connections.
What I ended up with was a plan. It was the plan.
Forty-six years ago some bad things happened in Dallas, and I decided to get out. I came to New York City with a briefcase, and in that briefcase was some cash — not any million dollars, but I used it to buy an ailing publishing company, rewrite its mission, and turn it around.
I made it a publisher of crime — of international crime, and I pushed from my mind everything that came before.
I had a plan for me—just like now I’ve got a plan for us—and through the plan, I became one of the most powerful figures in the industry — one who could raise for you, in seven months, over a million dollars.
I pushed from my mind what came before — I stuck to the plan. Now I have a new plan, but I also have what came before — and it’s flooding, since the monkey wrench LT#WTYOAF2 S2PKV B2L
so fast I’ll never be able to push it away. Like how Daddy and I sat on the roof and listened to the radio every night, and he explained the news we heard — that’s one thing that’s flooding.
We passed the rifle between us, taking shots at the empties we’d set up, lit candles stuck in their necks, down on the stumps.
Daddy taught me to shoot, and as good as he was, soon I was better — I could shoot the eye out of a jackrabbit from fifty yards, Daddy would say in wonder.
He was so proud of me for that — maybe only for that.
Daddy knew he’d be judged on his actions — we all would. On how we put the food on the table, but also on the choices we made at the most critical moments in our country’s history. What he did in his day-to-day was something he’d be judged for, but how he acted as a citizen was a way to atone. Korea, the Egyptian revolution, the Mau Mau uprising — Daddy worked through the stories we heard on the radio — stories of people from all these far-flung countries — and he explained to me how one should act, or should have acted, in those countries. On the roof together, the two of us listening to the radio, he explained these things for hours, until I nodded off. I’d try to fight it. I loved it up there, just listening. I don’t know that I’ve been happier than just listening to my father talk up on the roof, rifle going back and forth between us. Still I nodded off. And he said, That’s fine, then, and I crawled down and in through my bedroom window. He’d stay up for a while with his Four Roses, then go down the ladder and scout the perimeter. Those nights! In asides, or little shushes, or a play of fingers over my neck and back, he worked me through breathing and sighting and trigger control, and explained the workings of the countries we heard about — it seemed he knew every country in the world. The cool night air smelled of tar and gunpowder and a breeze off the swamp. On cold nights, there was also the smoking sweetness of the kerosene space heater he’d built a platform for on the roof’s peak, and he rested a hand on the small of my back.