Darryl Halbrooks
Red State
It's not perfect; it never is. But this time we've got a candidate who looks respectable, speaks with clarity and even possesses something mildly resembling charisma. And I don't expect this one to spring any surprises on us later. No sleazy affairs with buck-toothed former secretaries or blow jobs on the taxpayer's dime. This guy is lean and clean.
He's here on his third visit of the campaign because we're a battleground state. Everybody in the audience looks and smells like the political base except for the secret service guys and Larry "Bear" Worthington, a double-breasted Republican, who's only here to research the enemy. Worthington barely knows that I exist, even though I stand in the way of one of his development proposals.
"This president," my candidate is saying, "took us into a war without a good reason, has no plan to get us out, gave the biggest tax break to the top one percent in the country..."
I've heard the speech a hundred times. It's beginning to worry me that everyone else has too. But surely, the people of this country would not allow themselves to be duped again.
I'm not worried.
That's what I tell everybody I know who is worried.
The crowd is composed of young overweight women with a baby or two, men who look like they may have been out of work for a while, and the few student types who believe so much in the cause that they have become campaign workers. Despite their youth, they're no more attractive than the regulars; dressed in army fatigues, ten-year-old band jackets and hiking boots, they could be heading from here to a campground.
There is one woman though, whose red baseball cap, no team logo or product endorsement, I file into my memory. From under the cap, dark, expensive hair flows hypnotically over her shoulders. I want to lift and drop it. It looks heavy, like heavy water. A short red jacket cut from the softest, thinnest leather, comes to an abbreviated halt just above a perfect little ass. Her cream-colored pants drape from that lovely derriere, down to a pair of high heels. Maybe when the gathering breaks up, I'll ask her out for a coffee.
My ears, and at least the objective part of my brain, are still tuned in to the man. He's talking health-care now and stem-cell research. My new girlfriend seems to be losing just a bit of interest despite the way she keeps her eyes uplifted toward his towering presence on the podium. I see her stifle a yawn.
But when the speech is over I lose her in the press of the crowd. Instead, I run into Worthington, who to my surprise recognizes me.
"Good evening, Mr. Spencer. Guess you approved of what your man had to say, eh? He still wouldn't own up to his liberal ways though. You know his voting record, of course. He's one of the most liberal senators we've ever had. Why, Greenpeace voted him number one in the entire Congress."
"You know, Mr. Worthington, liberal is not a dirty word."
He slaps me on the back. "Call me Bear. You're young," he says. "In a few years you'll come around. You won't want big government meddling in your private affairs. I didn't have a nickel when I was a boy and now...with a little hard work and some wise investing, without the government's hand in my pocket as much as it was when your boys were in office, I've seen my invest..."
My mind always begins to wander when these guys start in on their hard work and bootstraps lecture. His hard work has resulted in the conversion of beautiful, productive farmland on the outskirts of town, into subdivisions whose houses are squeezed in so tightly, they must have required lubricant.
In the distance I spot the red cap. She's heading away from the rally grounds, toward her car, I guess.
"Excuse me," I say, shrugging Worthington's meaty Republican paw off my shoulder. His big fatherly hand guides me in the right direction, while his fat Republican mouth flaps a mile a minute, spouting the "government should leave me alone to rape and pillage all I want" right-wing gospel. "I think I saw the person I came with. She's looking for me. She has an early day tomorrow."
"Okay, Spencer. You have a real nice evening now."
"Thanks," I say, matching his lack of sincerity. "You too."
I pick my way through the dissipating crowd, out toward the parking lot, but the more I look for her red cap, the more I don't see it.
At home, I pour myself a beer and sit down to watch the Thursday night football game, hoping for something meaningful, but it's Utah vs. Southern Miss¾two nobodies from different conferences trying to make some kind of mark on the national stage. I go through my mail, the usual pile of catalogs and credit card offers. I warm up some leftovers and eat in front of the TV. PBS 1 is showing grizzly bears chasing salmon. PBS 2 has big cats chasing prey animals. I've seen a hundred versions of this stuff. I get an idea for a PBS special. Grizzly bears chasing big cats.
I need more discipline in my life. Might as well start by grading the papers I've been putting off for a week. After fighting through these sleep-inducing, inane tomes, unenthusiastically backed up by whatever research they can find on the Internet, I give up and hit the sack.
The other day I heard my name on one of the local right-leaning talk-radio programs I monitor, this one hosted by a former Watergate conspirator. Some of those guys did all right for themselves. The host mentioned me by name because some conservative student turned me in for limiting the topics they could write on to: How your government has failed to keep you safe from terror, Why your government's quest for oil has led us into an unjustified war, How has your government's foreign policies made us the most hated nation on the planet, Does God really exist and if so is it true that She is on our side? I do this, hoping to get some kind of rise out of them but it never works. They just pick a topic, and start slamming together unconnected arguments that they copied verbatim from papers archived from the previous semester.
At school the next day, there's a letter in my box from the dean. I'm to take these topics off my university web page, and stop wearing any kind of T-shirts or caps with political slogans. I must remove any posters backing one candidate or another by 5:00 p.m. today, or the custodial staff will remove them for me. Dutifully, I take razor blade and paint thinner to my office door before leaving campus for the day.
Jason Hass, a Hitler Youth-type from my 10:00 a.m. World Governments class, leans with crossed arms against a wall about twenty feet away, watching me remove my posters¾smirking. The little shit must have squealed on me.
I run into a poet friend of mine in the parking lot. Jose Cardenas is a "prostitute" he says, who makes his living teaching Spanish in the Department of Foreign Languages.
"No one een hees right mind," Jose says, "would pay good money for poetry."
We go out for a beer and commiserate over the state of the world, the country and the university. I tell him about the directive from the dean.
"You're not alone. He e-sent a notice out to everyone¾because of you, I might add."
"What about academic freedom? What the hell is going on here? What is this, Berlin, 1938?"
"Maybe, but you'd better watch eet, eef you want to keep your prostitute's license."
Jose's chair is a right wing nut-case, who is threatening to cut Jose's position. He wants to hire an Arabic specialist to take Jose's place.
"Een our las' faculty meeting," Jose tells me, "the guy says¾as though I'm not sitting right next to heem¾‘The last thing we need is to encourage even more Latinos into the country. We need to move into an area that ees ‘happenin.' Tha's how he said eet, ‘happenin.' He says we have to ‘strike while the iron ees hot.' Do you know thees esspression?"
I confess that I am familiar with the saying. He goes on to tell me that his chair had suggested to
him that he, Jose, learn Arabic; it would make him a more saleable commodity.
Monday evening's city council meeting is a public forum concerning a development in my own neighborhood, a semi run-down, semi-gentrified area close to campus. I admit we have our problems, big student parties on Saturday nights and too many cars parked on the narrow tree-lined street, but I like it. I have a few very good community-minded neighbors, and even the students, who naturally don't give a rat's ass about anything but getting drunk and getting laid, are generally polite. I've had a word or two with them over noise and beer cans, but they eventually come around.
At the forum, Bear Worthington is scheduled to present his idea for a new block of apartments. I am prepared with my arguments against, but as I take my seat I am stunned to see, sitting beside Worthington, the perfect creature from the Democratic rally. She has on the same leather jacket but no cap this time. Her dark, heavy hair is perfectly braided. She is clearly with him, as there are empty seats around them. I watch for any signs of affectionate touching. There are none but they do whisper to one another. A note pad rests in her lap. What can this mean?
After the meeting comes to order, the list of problems that can be expedited goes first; someone wants to put an outbuilding too close to a property line, someone else wants to run a business out of his home in an area zoned residential¾at last we come to the meat of the agenda. Bear Worthington steps to the front of the room, where he has arranged a full-color display of the two existing houses he intends to demolish, an enormous plot layout and professionally drawn architects' renderings of the complex of apartment buildings he plans to put up. The project is much, much bigger than I or any of my objecting neighbors had dreamed.
I stand up, feeling inadequately prepared, having no pictures or charts of my own. I would like to refer to his photos, but that might draw attention to my own lack of a battle-plan.
"Mr. Worthington," I begin, "has laid out for you ladies and gentlemen of the council, a plan which not only destroys two houses that have a history in our community and which represent a certain amount of architectural equity, but in addition to that, he now shows us a scheme for a project on a much larger scale than any of us had imagined."
"Objection!" Worthington shouts.
"Mr. Worthington," the chair of the board says. "This is not a court of law. Please do not interrupt. Allow Mr. Spencer to state his case. You had your turn."
"But these two houses," Bear says, "that he calls ‘architectural equity', whatever that is, are nothing but dilapidated piles of junk. My apartment buildings have been designed to fit into the neighborhood. They will be much more attractive than those two eyesores."
"Oh, right," I pipe in. "Every house in this neighborhood is a wood-framed Victorian. This monstrosity you want to put up is red brick with pseudo-Romanesque, fake arched windows and doorways, and this plan..." I rip at the papers that show the entire development. "Mr. Worthington has found some way to extend his project, destroying trees that have been growing for eighty years and wrecking backyards of every house left standing in the neighborhood."
"The two houses that face Arlington Avenue," Worthington chimes in, "have easements behind them that stretch the entire length of Oak Street. That's why I purchased the properties. I've invested over a hundred thousand already. If I am not allowed to build on those easements I'll lose money."
"Oh my god, no!" I say, bringing my hands to my face in a horrified gesture. Our verbal battle continues along these lines for another fifteen minutes until the board decides to table the discussion until the next meeting. During the entire debate I am making as much eye contact as possible with the young woman sitting next to that red-faced lout, Bear Worthington. I think I detect signs of interest in her lovely eyes, and I'm working on some pretense to talk to her when Bear strides purposefully in my direction.
He actually grabs me by the lapels.
I look down at his dangerous fistfuls of cloth. The scene is straight out of a 1940's gangster film.
"Listen you little pip-weasel, if you and your flag-burning pals cause me to lose my shirt on this deal, out of your tree-hugging socialist concern for the heritage of this shit-hole neighborhood of yours, I will personally break your scrawny pencil neck. Got it?"
He releases his grip on my corduroy jacket, dusts it off in his mock-friendly, big-pawed way, and walks off.
"I'm so sorry about that," his lovely young protégé tells me. "He is really a pussycat. He's just upset. You know, he stands to lose a lot of money on this."
"So I hear. And you are?"
"I'm sorry...Lindsay," she says, "Lindsay Wheat-Thin."
She gives me the hyphenated spelling of her absurd moniker.
"I'm Mr. Worthington's secretary¾his sort of girl Friday. I keep the books, arrange meetings, that sort of thing."
"Wheat-Thin? What sort of name is that?"
"Oh, well, I teach aerobics classes at night and I needed a kind of stage name, you know, for business. I tried it for a while under my real name. Don't tell anybody," she whispers. "Donna Hadley. When I changed it my business picked up 87 percent."
"What's wrong with Donna Hadley?"
"Shhh! Somebody might hear you. Lindsay, please."
"OK, OK, Lindsay it is."
After a little more small talk, Miss Wheat-Thin and I find ourselves in a little café, discussing Worthington, the hideous apartment complex her boss has envisioned for my neighborhood, and politics in general. As she enlightens me on her near fascist political views, words I would rather not hear from her beautiful lips, I try not to think about the misdirected mind that controls her perfect body. These situations are about the sexual urge. They shouldn't be all cluttered up with strongly held beliefs. As she tells me about what a sweetheart Bear Worthington is really, how he would do anything for you, and about what an awesome (her word) fellow her President is, I'm imagining, as well I should be, slipping her panties over her upraised hips.
I smile and fight the urge to say, "Your fucking boss threatened to kill me about twenty minutes ago."
We swap bad relationship stories before saying goodnight. She agrees to go to dinner with me on Saturday. Through the rest of the week, I find it difficult to focus on my classes. During one of my lectures, I realize that as I am talking about Castro's rise to power to an audience of 200 uninspired gen-ed students in the big lecture hall, I am having sexual fantasies about Lindsay Wheat-Thin. Being an aerobics instructor and all, I can only imagine what flexible delights might be in store. It's fascinating that one can have these thoughts as one says, "Cuba remains the only viable model of Soviet style communism." If I were to utter aloud the thoughts running though the parallel universe of my subconscious, how many of the 200 would even notice?
When Saturday rolls around, I spend as much of it as I can, performing housekeeping duties, while trying to keep my mind off the possibilities of the coming evening. I recently sanded and Bondoed my old 1994 Chrysler Lebaron convertible. It looks, if not better than new, at least better than when I acquired it. I even put a new top on it. My original intention was to rehab it for sale, but the damned car keeps running too well to justify getting a new one. I spend most of the afternoon waxing and vacuuming it. Maybe Lindsay doesn't know anything about cars. It might pass for new.
I've made reservations at the Wellington for 7:30. I've been starving since five (when I usually eat), but five is unfashionable, even here in mid-continent. She invites me in to have a seat while she finishes dressing or whatever it is they do that takes a half hour or so after you already think they look hot. I stay seated, resisting the urge to snoop. The pictures I can make out from the couch seem to be a father, mother, sister, and brother, as well as several cats and a dog. A big orange cat walks through the room, gives me a look and says, "eeow."
"That's Herschel Walker," Lindsay announces from around a corner. "You can call him Herschel. He likes strange men."
"So did that sound mean that he did or did not find me strange?"
She pokes her head out.
"Did. He knows strange when he sees it."
I open the car door for her. When she gets in, the door embeds itself into the turf.
"Step out for a sec and let me pull forward a bit."
"This is so embarrassing," she says. "I bet none of your other dates bog your car down."
"No, don't worry about it. The last girl I went out with was much fatter than you. I thought we'd never get that car out of the mud."
Lindsay laughs half-heartedly.
"Say, this is a Chrysler Lebaron, isn't it? I used to have one of these when I was..."
She cuts herself short, realizing that she is about to make an issue of our age difference, and possibly a gap in social status.
At the restaurant, which specializes in big juicy steaks, Lindsay orders a vegetable dish and a salad. Of course. What was I thinking? Aerobics instructor. I order some pasta dish instead of the T-bone I had in mind. Over dinner we discuss favorite books and movies. I tell her that I try to read the kind of things I would like to write. I don't admit that I actually am working on a novel, off and on, mostly off.
She's a big mystery fan. She loves the woman who is trying to work her way through the alphabet one title at a time. She just finished O.
"I could never do that," I say. "I'd get bored at C."
"Do you mean writing or reading?"
"Either."
After our meal, I am at my polite best, opening the car door for her and generally behaving like Bear Worthington at the Developers' Ball. Backing the car out of our space, I ignore for three full seconds the noise, and even the feel, of the telephone pole I have turned into, as it scrapes down the entire door and rear panel of my newly painted LeBaron.
I guess she's impressed with how I keep my cool, or maybe she just feels sorry for me as I get out to examine the seven-foot dent, because when we finally get to her apartment, she invites me in, and I don't drive my wrecked car home until the next morning. She's as bendy as I had hoped.
At the next council meeting I am prepared. This time I have charts and figures and traffic impact studies, all super-sized at Kinkos, complete with folding easels and a laser pointer. It's my intent to prove that the extended development in the easements behind the two houses will create a strain on utilities, trash pick-up, traffic patterns, and so on. Worthington, with his cute girl Friday by his side, has prepared for this attack with counter-studies of his own. In the end though, the matter is tabled once again.
"While you all fart around with this, I'm losing money by the hour," Worthington shouts. He gives me a look which, combined with his big red face and tightened fists, says a mouthful.
Lindsay and I become a regular thing over the next few weeks. I stay over at her place two more times and she spends the night at my place once, although she disapproves of my housekeeping. I hang around watching TV or reading during her aerobics classes. When I ask her if I can take part in one she says, "No boys allowed."
There are a few awkward moments when I stop by her office to pick her up, but Bear tries to steer clear of us as much as possible. She has told him about us and apparently he's equally eager to avoid me, so he makes himself scarce. She says he doesn't want to have to hurt me until this whole thing is over; then he's going to make me wish I had been born without thumbs.
On Sunday afternoon, Lindsay and I drive down to Lake Toxico. We both agree that although it is unfortunately named, it is a beautiful spot, surrounded as it is by wooded hills and rocky outcroppings. A few new houses sit tastefully above the lake in the hillsides, some with sets of covered steps leading down to the water.
Lindsay sits hugging her knees in the sunshine, occasionally tossing a piece of bread to some ducks who are beginning to gather in great numbers, reminding me of a scene from Hitchcock's The Birds. I skip a flat rock now and then.
"Wouldn't it be great to build a house up here?" she says. "I get tired of living in the city."
"What would you do all day? You can only feed so many ducks."
"There are a lot of these ducks¾and more on the way," she points out.
New ducks, I notice now, have appeared from behind a rocky precipice rising from the water. I guess the news about lunch has spread.
"I suppose," I say, "that I could write in a quiet place like this. I started on a novel about five years ago. Every now and then I get it out and tweak it but it's not working and these days it just makes me sad."
"What's it about?"
"It's about an idealistic young campaign staffer. Her man gets elected and takes her and the rest of his staff along for the ride. But once she gets to the White House she's disillusioned by Washington and its old-boy network. She learns to doubt her own long held liberal notions when they are tested daily. But the President and the whole staff including her..."
"What's her name?"
"Annette."
"No good. Not tough enough. How ‘bout Jada?"
I really hate the sound of that but I say, "Jada, yeah, that would be great! Anyway...they all try to work within a system they actually find flawed while compromising and sticking to their guns as much as possible."
"Sounds a little like The West Wing," she says.
"Yeah, I know. I actually started my book before The West Wing came on, but they sort of beat me to it. That's part of the reason I lost my enthusiasm, the other part is your man in the real White House. It's hard to go on writing about what it should be when I know what it is. I can't even watch The West Wing anymore. Too unbelievable, when we actually live in a right wing police state."
"Oh come off it. Why don't you give it a rest once in a while? Our president is a wonderful, caring man. He believes in God and the protection of the unborn. And he's just trying to protect us from more terrorist attacks. Look how safe we've been since 9/11. If he hadn't been president when we were attacked, Saddam Hussein would still be in power. Would you want that? Would you want those people to continue to live in tyranny?"
She goes on like this for about five more minutes, documenting the president's advocacy for me, the taxpayer, until I realize I've not only lost my enthusiasm for my book, but I'm rapidly losing my enthusiasm for even feeling her up. There is really little point in once again stating the obvious: no WMDs, the reason our awesome, swaggering president gave for going in. Nor do I point out to her the twenty other evil dictators currently running their own little shows; are we going to take them all out? To try to argue these seemingly indisputable points with these people is useless. And Lindsay is one of these people. She's the only person I actually know, have some respect for¾maybe even love¾
