New Hampshire Is for Lovers

This got a confused laugh. No one knew what it meant, but it always worked.

"How many of you have lost your jobs to Mexicans and Indians, to [here she paused to underline the absurdity of these nations and people] Bosnian Serbs and Rwandans? How many of your paychecks are buying crack for women with eleven children living in luxury in Cabrini Green? How many of your tax dollars are going to pay overtime for police to keep the peace when gay men in chaps march through your streets tonguing each other? How many of you can't get ahead because 40 percent of your earnings are going to pay for the government to kill fetuses and allow New York artists to use them in their 'installations'?"

She went on for a while in this way, which needn't be further described or recounted because it would not be believed. She finished amid an explosion of clapping and whooping. Even staffers representing Hamilton and Inferior Jr. were cheering. In response, O'Mealy licked her red lips again, pouted, and seemed to be -- was she? -- fingering a riding crop.

Viewers at home couldn't see the riding crop, because O'Mealy kept it at her side, beneath the beveled roof of her lectern, but the studio audience could clearly see that her right hand held a riding crop of black leather, and her left hand was busy fondling it. The audience felt odd about this riding crop. They felt tittery and gooey and their teeth seemed sharper. Each one of the 128 men in the audience was at that moment picturing Carol O'Mealy doing unspeakable things to his flesh, as would a butcher to a ham hock. Each one of the 77 women present was wondering if the riding crop she would purchase the following day should be leather or plastic, and which color and length.

Outside, J. Junior Inferior Sr. could no longer feel his feet or fingers. The only part of his body that still seemed a part of him was his back, which was attached to the soft, broad stomach of Montana, who was asleep. Montana was a snorer, and he snored in a strange, quick rhythm, making noise while both inhaling and exhaling, in a way that reminded Senior of a song he'd heard once in a commercial for Volkswagen, the lyrics of which were, if he remembered correctly, "Da da da."

Inside, his son, who as a child could not catch a ball, could not color inside the lines, could not add or multiply, or draw a rooster using his hand -- his son who ate from the cat's litter pile and once broke open the TV "to let the people out" -- was about to address the nation in hopes of retaining his presidency.

But Junior was stuck. Hamilton had taken away the possibility of his instigating a proper tribute to his father, while O'Mealy had played the audience the way some kind of wooden instrument would be played while resting in the crook of one's neck.

Thus there was only one place for Junior to go. Straight to hell.

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