Saturday, May 17, 2008
Introducing Episode 1 of Salon's new political serial.
Jan 26, 2004 | "Bastards!" said Sergei.
"Can they do that?" asked Little Nicky.
They could do anything. In a race like this, for State Rep, 34th District of California, there was no oversight. There was no feeling of outrage, no general sense of the limits of taste. And thank God for that. Sergei and Little Nicky, manager and head of special projects for the Stuart Craspedacusta campaign, wouldn't want any oversight or general sense of the limits of taste. This was a filthy contest already, and most of the filth was theirs and today would be no different, for today -- the Fourth of July -- was a day too crucial for cleansing. Today, at the Independence Day Walkabout and Arts Fair, the Craspedacusta campaign had to achieve no less than Total Visual Dominance. If, through the creation and placement of Craspedacusta balloons, posters, buttons, flyers, kites, banners and giant Styrofoam hands, they could achieve Total Visual Domination, they could appear to have won this battle. And if they appeared to have won this battle, they could be seen as having momentum, and if they could be seen as having momentum, they would have juice, and if they had juice, then the staff of Murray Olongapo, their Democratic opponent, might become discouraged, panicky and desperate, and they might try to spend more of Olongapo's money now, too soon, in an attempt to catch up, and if so, that would leave Craspedacusta with more for the home stretch. Or, better yet, Murray's people would try something unwise -- as when they let Olongapo, a theater enthusiast, guest-star, in drag, in an outdoor and all-male production of The Merchant of Venice -- and then Sergei would swoop in for the kill, swift and efficient; he'd know what to do.
But with this, he had no idea where to start. This was preposterous. This was a perversion of democracy, or whatever, this goddamned blimp. "A goddamned blimp!" Sergei said, as it took shape. It wasn't even 8 o'clock and already Sergei and Nicky and the Craspedacusta campaign had trouble. They arrived at the high school expecting to find it empty but instead were assaulted visually by a hive of Olongapo's minions, inflating this blimp the size of a ranch house. Little Nicky was staring at the blimp, his mouth open and limp.
"What kind of gas you think that is?" he asked, head tilted, like an inquisitive pet. "Is that air, or would it have to be something lighter?"
Poor Little Nicky. He was so clever and such an imbecile. Chubby, unshaven, wild-haired, from New Hampshire, with eyes and an ever-sweating forehead that gave him the perpetual look of someone disarming a bomb. His neck, covered in carbuncles, was hidden under a bandanna worn at all times. He seldom blinked but when he did it was a full-facial blink, like he was clicking into place all the parts of his head. Though he was very serious, very methodical, he was given to maniacal fits of laughter. The little bastard laughed maniacally at any joke or witty observation given him, especially by Sergei, who was so unsettled by Nicky's laughter that he'd stopped telling jokes or making witty observations in Nicky's presence. When he wasn't laughing or talking or sweating profusely in visible rivulets, Nicky was the best special projects man in politics willing to work for $600 a week and expenses and live at headquarters in case the phone rang in the middle of the night, with an informant on the other end of the line, bursting with revelations that would once and for all bring down Murray Olongapo, that clueless, humdrum and complacently competent moron.
"I hate that guy," Nicky said. "What kind of name is that, anyway, Olongapo? Sounds African. Or Maori. Or Spanish."
The name was Filipino, as was Murray, a few generations removed from immigrants -- but Sergei didn't bother explaining this to Nicky, who seemed particularly dim that morning. Instead, Sergei watched as the blimp, now engorged, rose from the football field with an air of unmistakable menace.
Nicky whistled. "It's like a planet," he said. "Or a big car."
Sergei and Nicky had no blimp. They hadn't thought, for a second, about a blimp. Where did one get a blimp, even a mini-blimp? "Fucking internet," Sergei muttered. Man, he hated the internet, almost as much as he hated the World Wide Web. He and Nicky stood for a minute more, their shoes soaking through with dew, both of them wondering why blimps hadn't always been on their minds, why they had had this blind spot where blimps were concerned, why they had brought only balloons and banners to this fair, why they had thought, in this instance, wholly within the box.
The blimp was now aloft completely, tethered by ropes attached to twelve of Murray's Minions, as they cheerfully and jokingly called themselves. They were such losers. Sergei hated them, and hated Murray, with his bright blue socks and fish ties and his insistence that all references to him be "Murray," never Mr. Olongapo, or Congressman or Representative or even Sir. "They haven't knighted me yet!" he'd say if you called him Sir, and then wrap one of his skinny rubbery arms around you. "He's so charming!" people said. "So down to Earth!" Cluck cluck cluck. Booga looga boo. He was a doofus and a dunce. Any grown man -- and Murray was 66 -- who wore the same ridiculous bright blue socks every day and showed up at any formal event in a different fish tie -- the tie! it looks like a fish! ho ho! -- was an abomination and a disgrace. Because Murray asked to be called Murray, implying youth and accessibility, Sergei always called him Olongapo, hinting at a certain harsh and exotic impenetrability, though Murray, and his parents, were born in San Diego. In response, Murray's Minions were lately using "Stuart Little," though Stuart, at 5'8", was not exactly short, and seemed taller. Sergei had been personally offended by that moniker, by the quick and savage way they'd come at poor Stuart, who, oddly enough, he'd privately been calling Stuart Little for months himself. Every attack, Sergei knew, prompted a return volley, one that was invariably nastier, more shocking than the one that started things, and on and on this would go, in small flurries, always ending with one side going too far -- as when Sergei publicly referred to Olongapo's wife as "Imelda" -- leaving each side momentarily too stunned to fight.
Sergei turned to Nicky. "Make some calls. See if there's another blimp."
"For today?" Nicky asked, and flinched.
"Yes for today, you weasel. Today."
Nicky made a flurry of calls, to no avail. Nicky was making the calls right next to Sergei, on his cellphone, and this made Sergei tense. There was a time, before portable phones, when Nicky would have taken the orders and gone off to an office or booth, leaving Sergei alone to survey the landscape and await the information in a brooding executive fashion, ostensibly working on his own tasks while Nicky did his. But having Nicky right next to him, making the calls Sergei could easily be making himself, was very awkward.
"They said they don't really make blimps anymore," Nicky said. "They don't know where this one came from. They said maybe it's a balloon, not a blimp."
The blimp was, in fact, more in the shape of a zeppelin, long and narrow, cigar-shaped but ribbed by its armature. It was, Sergei and Nicky had to admit, gorgeous. Its base was golden, subtly so, pearly perhaps, and over it were painted stripes of red and white and stars of blue. Sergei gazed at it and felt weak, defeated already -- there was no way to achieve Total Visual Dominance with a behemoth such as this floating over the fairgrounds, unchallenged. The blimp seemed so smug. It could float, aloof and static, above the thousands at this fair, symbolizing everything out of touch and bloated and unresponsive about the incumbent, and people would love it. And once something like that was aloft, how could one bring it down? It was so much more difficult. How to convince the populace that this ridiculous mass of nonaction was not something to gaze at, admire, but was their worst enemy, the very face of tax-and-spend imprudence?
Sergei had an idea. "Can't we get some kind of giant inflatable grizzly or something?" He pictured the grizzly atop the fairgrounds' snackbar roof, swatting down the blimp with its great claws. Nicky called about grizzlies.
"I found a crow, but it would --"
"A crow?"
"Yes. An eighteen-foot crow. Available a week from tomorrow."
Sergei sighed. Maybe Nicky was not as good as he'd previously thought. When Nicky was focused, he was a genius. But his sense of the time-space continuum, of urgency, was sometimes lacking. Would he have to fire Nicky? He didn't want to fire Nicky, as good as it would feel -- and boy, that could feel good -- to accumulate enough hatred of Nicky in the upcoming days to make it possible. He was and always had been and always would be surrounded by people less perfect than himself, and about this his mother had been correct. When he thought of his mother, her pacific eyes, her 26" biceps, Sergei sighed and his chest swelled. She'd been a Soviet pole-vaulter long before women's pole-vaulting existed in international competition, and was a woman always candid and wise and capable, with the shoulders of a highland gorilla.
A gust of wind came, cool and quick, and Sergei's feelings of frustration were followed, almost immediately, by a strength drawn from knowing that there was work to do, and he was just the man to find the people to do it. And if they didn't do it properly, he could fire them and start over, which was something he enjoyed because he believed so fervently in every last one of his people.
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