Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
This Trudie business had been discusssed, but Stuart hadn't realized Little Nicky was really going to move forward with it. Trudie was Murray's former assistant, who had left suddenly eight months earlier and hadn't been heard from since. Sergei knew she was working at a mission in Bolivia, but was implying that she, and perhaps a Murray-Trudie lovechild, was being hidden, or had been disappeared.
Sergei and Nicky had come up with a number of completely indefensible connections between Murray Olongapo and every traffic accident, ATM burglary, sexually transmitted disease, dog mauling and summer camp drowning that had taken place in the six years Olongapo had been in office. At the beginning, it had been thrilling, Nicky's and Sergei's utter lack of fear or restraint, and Stuart had been morbidly fascinated with what they'd come up with next. They'd dragged out of the vault every unfortunate occurrence within a sixty mile radius -- bus crashes, floods, red ant sightings, and the freak (but preventable!) shark attack that claimed the left arm of Young Portia Epstein of Manhattan Beach. Each time Sergei and Nicky struck, Stuart would first gasp, then laugh, then show it to Samantha, and together they would try not to worry.
Nicky had begun with a flyer, stuck into the doorhandle of every house in the district, which intimated that Murray Olongapo was somehow responsible for or complicit with the failed efforts at the Bay of Pigs, given that Olongapo had visited Cuba with a delegation in 1998. Over a picture of American soldiers dead on a beach -- not actually from the Bay of Pigs; Nicky couldn't find one of those so they used a shot from Okinawa -- were the words: OLONGAPO: FRIEND OF AMERICAN GIS OR "AMIGO" DE CASTRO?
Olongapo hadn't even bothered to respond to the Castro leaflet, but the next day, the Craspedacusta campaign had received five donations, each for $5,900, from prominent Cuban exiles. Apparently there were about 200 now living in the district, having left Miami when the cast of "The Real World" showed up. Thereafter, every time Nicky put the words Olongapo and Castro in a leaflet or on a button, the checks poured in. It was like printing money.
"It's like printing money," said Little Nicky, while designing the next one, which was simpler and more direct: over a large picture of Elián Gonzalez were the words PORQUE, MURRAY OLONGAPO, PORQUE?
- - - - - - - - - - - -
At 9 a.m., when Stuart arrived, the fair was filling with food and color, white T-shirts luminous and the odor of sausage coming in measurable waves. Stuart walked directly to the booth that bore his name -- it was still so strange to him, to see his ungainly name in large clean forward-leaning letters -- and there found the two Jeannies, both of whom were dressed, as Sergei often asked them to do, very much like Hooters waitpersons. Their shorts rode high on the sides of their thighs, and their TV-tube-blue Craspedacusta T-shirts were worn snug. Jeannie One was from Orlando, Jeannie Two from the Ukraine. Jeannie One, whose last name was Currie, was the single African-American working for the Craspedacusta campaign, was unhappy about the outfit, but was willing to take one for the team, a lesson she'd learned from her dutiful grandmother, Betty, who had also worked in politics for a spell. Jeannie Two, on the other hand, had no experience of interest in the process, was just an old friend of Sergei's, though this could mean anything from a cousin to an ex-wife, and in two previous occasions had meant both.
"Hello Jeannie, hello Jeannie," Stuart said, directing a nod to each.
Jeannie One hugged Stuart around the waist and sighed. She did this at least once a day. She was thirty-six, unmarried, devoted to philately, spent a good deal of time attending reunion concerts, and liked Stuart a great deal.
Behind the Jeannies the rest of today's volunteers were occupied with the task at hand: putting helium into as many balloons as possible, and then attaching as many balloons to as many hands as possible, onto as many fences and food-booths and go-Karts as possible, each balloon tethered and swung aloft bringing them closer to achieving Total Visual Dominance.
In and around the booth, there were eleven six-foot canisters of helium, looking, with their aerodynamic shape and scuffs and scratches and dents, very much like a bouquet of unexploded Scud missiles. Manning the canister -- the squeak of the balloons being filled! It was painful and sudden, even when expected -- was Sergei's cousin Dmitri, who was sixteen but already more craven than his uncle, more desperate, with fewer qualms; he'd grown up in Moscow under Yeltsin and acknowledged no laws. He'd lost his father, a brother and two uncles to the Moscow River -- all had drowned in the summer, stinking with Stoli -- and he owed no one his pity or mercy. The ballooning process suited him, as it was brutish and short, and sounded nasty. Dmitri would finish the helium, pinch off the balloon and hand it to Haley, one of the three College Republicans from North Carolina, all attending UC-Riverside, who would then tie the balloon's umbilical and pass it to Nancy or Missy, two women in their mid-sixties who believed too fervently in everything Sergei said, found him impenetrable and sexy -- in fact thought he and not Stuart should be running -- and drank a gallon of milk a day to keep their bones strong. They would tie three feet of string to the balloon and hand it to one of the dozen other minions, who would either give one to a child young enough to want one, or otherwise run to an area of the fairgrounds not already bearing a Craspedacusta balloon and tie one on.
"Have you seen Sergei?" Stuart asked.
Jeannie Two's nose did a painful sort of twitch at the sound of the name.
"What?" he asked.
"Nothing. I won't let him do this to me again."
There was a moment when Jeannie Two waited for Stuart to ask her to elaborate, and Stuart noticed a new scuffmark on his new white K-Swiss shoes.
"How do I look?" she asked, leaving her feelings about Sergei behind and brightening. She was often asking people's opinions about herself; she needed candid input daily. She'd been on three television dating shows and had been deliciously humiliated each time. She had sued and been sued on shows where retired judges rendered binding verdicts. She'd lost both times. She entered contests she couldn't win, and regularly posted her pictures online, begging for frank comments, suggestions and ratings. She loved to be judged and loved America for being so willing to accommodate her. Also: she was cadaverous and her skin had the color and texture of a pumpkin.
Stuart demurred.
Neither Jeannie knew exactly where Sergei was.
"Well, I guess I oughta be going out," Stuart said, hoping someone would stop him. "You guys need help with anything?"
They didn't.
"You go out," Jeannie Two said.
"You come along?" he asked One.
"You have enough moist towelettes?" she asked. Call it a passing thing, but he had surrendered to moist towelettes. He carried a dozen with him always, ever-ready to rub them all over his fingers and palms before handshakes and after. Stuart checked his pockets, feeling the bulge from the two handfuls he'd grabbed at home. They were the perfect size, the perfect weight. They were the best-engineered product he had ever known and he felt thankful, truly thankful, that we lived in a country where moist towelettes were available not only to the landed few, but to everyone. He nodded to Jeannie One and she grabbed a basket of buttons and stickers, pens, fanny cushions and license plate holders and they made their way into the multitude. Each time Stuart caught someone's eye, he would extend his hand and smile. "Hey there!" he said to children and men in their forties and fifties. "Hello hello!" he said to seniors and to those whose English was unpolished. "Hey," he said to people around his age or under. Each time he took someone's hand in his, he tried to invest something in the action. He made it a ritual: he would look down at the hand he was shaking, see its elephantine wrinkles, its marks and calluses. He knew that some hands were shortfingered, the digits like udders, and those hands were always dry; some fingers were so slender and the slender ones were cold; the perspiring hands always appeared barren from the outside. Nothing was as it seemed, but he liked to shake hands with young boys, to look them in the eye and act very serious when doing so. With women of a certain age, he flattered and found a way to touch, meaningfully, their inner wrist. It did not fail.
Even without the inner-wrist fondling, though, he really enjoyed it, all of it. He wasn't thrilled about putting himself into people's faces, interrupting their conversations or trains of thought -- and he tried not to do either -- but when he found himself in brief conversations with a voter or family or high school student interviewing him for her newspaper, he felt at home, was unsurprised but very happy with how warm people could be, and the number of people now in his life, who he could wave to at the beach or the taqueria. He had increased his acquaintances exponentially, and this made him feel infinitely more enmeshed in and necessary to his world. How many people did he know now? Thousands -- thousands he could recognize and half of those he could probably name. His high school had been one with 1,100 students, and he figured between the upperclassmen and those below, he'd known by name about 700. Add to that the maybe 400 he came to know in college, and his relatives -- 36 there -- those at his church, and you have around 2,400. He was not someone who chatted up clerks and cabbies, and was too forgetful to go regularly to the same barber, so while he considered 2,400 people a great amount, more than you'd find at a professional tennis quarterfinal or even the largest Indian wedding, he was sure he'd already doubled that in the past six months. The nursing homes alone -- he'd done both of them, Sunny del Sol, Vista Mira View -- he was sure, held 200 people each whose names he'd probably recall if he saw their faces again.
He took pleasure in all this, but every time he heard himself say "How you doin'?" he felt a slight electric shock, as if his unforgiving teenage self were punishing him. The question, though, flowed from his tongue with such ease that he wondered what might be next: "Working hard or hardly working?" Or "You can say that again!" Or "Don't even start me on that!" It was mildly unsettling, but there was something thrilling about the process, about having an excuse, a logical and socially responsible reason, to be greeting and sometimes getting to know a small amount about, strangers, lesser known neighbors, and octogenarians. He'd met an artilleryman from the Korean War -- on the Korean side! -- yesterday, and that was something.
As Stuart greeted an older couple, easily eighty-eight each, both grinning and feisty, he caught Dmitri across the park, freeing a group of thirty Olongapo balloons. An audible moan emitted from Stuart's throat, unplanned. Oh god, he thought, the counteroffensive has begun. He couldn't believe the things being done ostensibly in his name. He tried not to watch as Dmitri cut the balloons' strings and ran, ducking behind a row of portable toilets. Stuart, still holding the warm hand of his octogenarian friend, watched as the cluster of American-blue balloons rose and shrank away into the sky's less strident blue, where within a few hours they would sail twelve miles, land in the Pacific and eventually choke a group of migrating turtles.
Episode 2: The balloon battle heats up, and Bill Bennett enters the picture.
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