Q: “So the President is stating that Michael Petrelli is not his son?”
A: “The President is stating he has never met or heard of Michael Petrelli. I think it is pretty suspicious, though, that this Petrelli character pops up in the middle of a hotly contested and close election campaign.”
Q: “What if he is related to President Buckman?”
A: “I am not going to play the what-if game. What if aliens land on the South Lawn? Ask me when the aliens land.”
I smiled to myself. I liked the line about the aliens. That made it to the evening news. Meanwhile I had much more important things to worry about, like debating John Kerry, and, oh yeah, running the country.
The story didn’t go away, however. By the end of the week it was being reported in both the New York Times and the New York Post that the Jeana Colosimo in Queens really was the same Jeana Colosimo I had known at Towson High. The Colosimos had moved from New York City to Baltimore in 1971, which was when I met her, and they still had family in Queens. (Mr. and Mrs. Colosimo had died several years ago.) Then, in 1973, the Colosimo family sent Jeana back to New York City to live with several very strict aunts and attend a parochial girl’s school in Queens. That didn’t work out so well, since by the middle of the fall semester she was very obviously ‘in the family way’. The nuns kicked her out as a bad influence and Jeana ended up getting a GED right around the time she gave birth to a son. She named him Michael after her father, to try and get back into his good graces but that failed, and she ended up living with her aunts for a few months. Desperate to get away from them (they were from the old country and barely spoke English, and spent most of the time lecturing her in Italian) she hooked up with the first guy she met, Mario Petrelli. The marriage didn’t last even a full year, but by then she had been able to get out of the house and start getting a few college credits at the nearby community college. By that time she was calling the baby Michael Petrelli, but it wasn’t clear if Mario had adopted the child. Jeana had spent the next thirty years in Queens, working as a secretary in various office jobs, and had died in a car accident in June.
Meanwhile, Michael Petrelli was being investigated as well. Michael had grown up in Queens, and his most noticeable accomplishment was a total lack of accomplishment. He had graduated from high school with middling grades at best, and never gone to college. He had gotten some training in being an auto mechanic over the years, and had spent the last ten years working as a mechanic, occasionally employed, and occasionally under the table. He had alternated between having his own apartment and living with Jeana in her apartment. He had first learned about me when he was going through his mother’s things after her funeral, and discovered her diaries. His birth certificate didn’t have his father’s name on it.
The New York papers were able to track down a few cousins of Jeana, who reported that Jeana had been ‘knocked up by some guy down in Baltimore’ but they never knew the name. They also reported that Jeana had always had a diary and wrote everything in it. I began to get a sinking feeling in my stomach about all of this. One of the cousins reported that she herself had gotten pregnant as a teenager, and that Jeana knew it, and thought it was romantic, at least until she had to start taking care of a baby on her own. Is that what made Jeana go off birth control, a desire to emulate her cousin?
Mario Petrelli was tracked down. He turned out to be an insurance salesman in Hempstead. He had married Jeana, but it hadn’t worked out and ended almost as soon as it began. No, he had never adopted Michael, and no, he had no idea he was using his name. He hadn’t talked to Jeana in well over twenty years and didn’t even know she had died.
The biggest question in my mind was why Jeana had never told me. Okay, she was in Queens, and I had left Baltimore for a number of years, but it wouldn’t have been difficult to track me down, either at Rensselaer or in the Army. My lawyers informed me she had a claim against me for child support at least until Michael was 18, and maybe beyond, depending on circumstances. Maybe she thought I didn’t have any money, but by the mid-80s I was becoming well enough known as a businessman that she must have learned about me. Still, I had never heard from her. Shame? Pride? Now I would never know.
By Sunday morning, there was more than enough smoke floating around to start hearing the word fire. Will Brucis, who was appearing on Meet the Press, was asked point blank about the mounting evidence that I had an illegitimate child. “What evidence? All we’ve heard so far is that President Buckman had a relationship with a woman when he was a teenager who may or may not have been this man’s mother. He hasn’t contacted the President and he hasn’t asked for any DNA or paternity test. All we know for sure is that he sold a story to a tabloid that can’t even be called a newspaper.” The Washington Post gave the whole thing the nickname ‘Babygate’. How cute!
Will’s comments actually managed to move the ball, but not necessarily in a helpful direction. Michael Petrelli called a lawyer, one of those sharks who give ambulance chasers a bad name. I was informed that Angelo DeSantos had a series of billboards with his likeness on them near local police stations and jails, and also near any dangerous intersection he could find. Michael might be an idiot, but Angelo knew a gold mine when he fell into one. Michael had already sold his story to the Enquirer, cheap, for living expenses. Angelo was going to raise the bar considerably higher, and come after me. According to the about to be released Forbes 400, I was the 10th wealthiest American, with an estimated fortune of just under $14.1 billion. By the end of that week Angelo DeSantos had filed a law suit for half of my assets, just over $7 billion, along with thirty years of appropriate child support and fines and other payments, for another $1 billion. What’s the Italian word for chutzpah?
It got better after that. Petrelli had promised the Enquirer that he would let them print Jeana’s diaries. DeSantos read one of them and shitcanned that whole deal. He was going to have them published as a memoir, ‘Secrets of a President’s Lover’, or some such crap. Jeana must have been very impressed, which isn’t all that hard to do with a teenage girl. Her diaries were extremely explicit, much more than could be printed in a newspaper, although redacted snippets were tossed out as teasers. There was just enough let out to make me think this might be legit.
Brewster McRiley and Ed Gillespie were beside themselves over this. Our carefully crafted message that we were the bunch that knew what we were doing was coming down around our ears. Everybody in the senior campaign ranks was wondering if this was the most incredibly perfect October Surprise ever invented, but nobody was going to kill a middle aged woman in Queens in June to screw up my reelection. No, Michael Petrelli, the greedy bastard, had managed to do that all on his own. John Kerry kept his mouth shut and looked Presidential, with that somber and mournful look he possessed. Instead he let his designated asshole, John Edwards, make all the jokes he could get away with, at least until I called Kerry and reminded him of the favor I had done him with the Swift Boaters. He shut down Edwards after that.
On Tuesday the 28th, we had our debate in Houston, the same city where George Bush had announced to the country that I was his V.P. pick. It was a solidly Republican city, and I got a warm welcome. Still, Babygate hung over everything. There were no questions about it during the debate, and John Kerry never said a word about it. John Edwards, the philandering ass, had a team of joke writers that Mel Brooks would have been proud of, and made a few more jokes at my expense whenever he could get away with it. The best that we could say in response was that it wasn’t the behavior to be expected of a Vice President, unless Edwards was running for Vice President of a drunken fraternity. John McCain promised to chew him up as needed.