American Savior (38 page)

Zelda used the other phone line to massage the press, telling them how optimistic we were, and that Jesus was huddled in his room with Anna Songsparrow, working on his speech.

This last part was not technically true. Jesus was huddled in his room with Anna Songsparrow, yes, but the few times I went in there I found them playing board games. “Mom, which of the following was a popular Frankie Valli song in the 1960s?”

From time to time, haunted by the previous night’s conversation, I would take the single working elevator down to the main ballroom where a few of our lazier supporters were standing around drinking free booze, their signs and placards leaning in a corner. I’d check the entrances, talk with the policemen stationed there, then go out into the lobby and confer with Chief Bastatutta, who’d arrived at the hotel at breakfasttime and had not left. “I hope you voted first, Ace,” I said to him.

“Bet your ass, I voted. How many candidates like this are we ever gonna get?”

“So you’re convinced he’s God, huh?”

He gave me both barrels, his interrogator’s gaze. “I don’t need him to be God,” he said. “A guy who says what he says, who thinks like he thinks—that’s enough for me.”

Not enough for me, I found myself thinking, but I did not say it.

I need to confess something here: I have weird and unpleasant thoughts. When I am under stress, those thoughts come more often and with more power. Almost like I am out wandering in the desert and some devilish part of my own mind is tempting me to jump into the pickup truck with these thoughts and ride off into some upside down paradise where the beer is cold and I make all the rules. “Not enough for me” was a perfect example. Now what did that mean? And why did it pop into my head under the gaze of Chief B., a strong, uncomplicated guy who made up his mind about something and never wavered?

By six o’clock, an hour before polls closed in some of the eastern states, we started to hear, from a variety of sources, that Alowich was out of it. The race was between Maplewith and us. Not shocking news, but a confirmation of the trends we’d been seeing over the past week. It was going to be closer than expected, our sources told us.

“Even the popular vote will be close?” I asked Zel.

She nodded somberly.

“Not good.”

Although the network had not been kind to us during the campaign, Esmeralda kept switching back to Fox news. They somehow got the results a few minutes ahead of everybody else, and she said she liked their graphics better, though my personal feeling was that she must have had shares in the company. Brett V. Ruhm was their chief election correspondent, and he had two experts with him: Cham Grinwealthy, the former Speaker of the House, whose Contract on America had been nearly forgotten by then so he was considering a run for the White House himself in the next election cycle; and Billy Betbette, author, former cabinet member, and moral leader. They were excellent examples, I thought, of how much chutzpah a person needed in order to have a successful career
at the highest levels of American politics. Really, one of the essential qualities—and not many people talk about this—was a complete lack of shame. You had to be able to cheat on your wife with a younger woman, in the White House no less, and then appear on TV with a big smile on your face. You had to be caught with a dominatrix during the Democratic National Convention, then switch parties, become an analyst, and make biased predictions that never came true. You had to skip out on military service and then send other people into combat. Not only did you have to steal and cheat and lie—anyone could do that—but you had to steal and cheat and lie and have every person in the world hear about it and still be able to appear in public and speak as confidently as if you had the word of God bubbling out of your heart.

Grinwealthy, a moral paragon, had left his first wife on her deathbed, skipping out with his new woman. Betbette, moral paragon
numero dos,
had a gambling problem—which had not stopped him from writing stern books about old-fashioned morality, and not kept him from campaigning with Maplewith in Nevada. As payment for their sins, there they were, front and center on a big news network on Election Night, passing on to the electorate their wisdom … and their off-the-mark predictions.

“Pretty clear that, with the possible exception of New Hampshire, Colonel Alowich is going to take Democrat country, meaning New England,” Betbette said shortly before the network announced, at 8:12, that Maine, with its four electoral votes, would go for the Republican, Marjorie Maplewith. This made me tremendously nervous and upset, and not because I felt embarrassed for Betbette. Maine was a state we had hoped to win. Seeing it fall into Maplewith’s column so early in the night set off another run of bad thoughts, an interior monologue to the effect that Wales had blown it by taking northern New England for granted. Jesus had never even made an appearance there, and we’d sent Anna Songsparrow only at the last minute, and only on a limited tour. I kept this opinion to myself, of course.

Later, after Grinwealthy said he now thought Alowich wouldn’t win a single New England state, we learned that the colonel seemed to have held onto Rhode Island and was making a strong showing, along with Jesus, in Massachusetts.

Watching these erudite analysts would have been amusing—they erred so spectacularly and with such straight faces—except that a cloud of doom was descending over our exhausted team. None of us said anything, but I would place a bet that we were all thinking the same thing: we’d already lost Maine and Rhode Island, two states we hoped to win; what did that say about the rest of the blessed night?

It got worse: Maplewith was soon projected to take New Hampshire by a comfortable margin. Connecticut was up for grabs.

All that work, all that sacrifice; the exultation of watching people standing three deep in front of the Simi Valley Feng Shui Academy, or along Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, hoping to catch a glimpse of Jesus; the terrible feeling of the hissing, jeering crowd in the church in Montana; all those ups and downs, all those gorgeous golf days spent sitting over coffee and doughnuts with police captains; the big balloon of hope … and now we could feel it slipping out of our hands and floating into space. We kept our eyes fixed on the TV screen, but it was with a sense of dread.

The next announcement did little to brighten the mood: A few minutes after Brett Ruhm speculated that Alowich might be back in the race after all, and would probably make a stronger than expected showing in the South, thanks to his military background, Maplewith took Virginia and North Carolina. And then, ten minutes later, South Carolina, too.

“God help us,” my mother moaned. “God help us.”

Grinwealthy said, “What we’re starting to see here is what my colleague Anne Canter predicted a couple weeks ago: in the solitude of the voting booth, Americans are vigorously rejecting the whole Divinity Party show.”

And so, naturally, not ten minutes later, Maryland and New Jersey went into our column. Wales got out a fresh cigar and clamped his lips around it.

Delaware went to Alowich. Florida was too close to call.

The phone rang; no one answered it. We were paralyzed. None of us wanted to lift the receiver and hear someone on the other end say, “We’re getting early results from the Midwest. It’s over. We’re finished.”

“We have to answer the phones, people,” Wales complained, but he
made no more move to do so than anyone else. After the fifth ring, the phone went silent.

When Betbette spoke the following line, Fox’s coverage got to be too much even for Esmeralda: “Once we see New York go for Alowich, which I’m starting to think it will, the Jesus campaign, so-called, will have to fold up its tent and slink back into the wilderness where it came from.” Ezzie switched to NBC, just as they were putting New York in the Jesus column. A huge cheer went up … until they said Ohio was leaning to Maplewith.

“We’re still in it,” I remember Wales saying at about that point. “Don’t lose faith, people.”

And, though it didn’t feel like we were still in it, he was right. The long and the short of it was, by the time we got to zero hour in the Midwest, the tallies looked like this:

Alowich—Rhode Island, Delaware, West Virginia = 12 electoral votes.

Maplewith—Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, Kentucky, Mississippi, Alabama = 109 electoral votes.

Jesus—New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, Vermont, Pennsylvania = 92 electoral votes.

At that point in the evening, thanks to big margins in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, we had 42 percent of the popular vote, Maplewith 37 percent and Alowich 21 percent, but we all knew how little that meant. The only thing the popular vote demonstrated was who the American people most wanted to be president.

“It’s going to come down to Florida,” Wales said ominously. But even that seemed optimistic to me. I felt like the hope of victory was leaking out of me through both shoes. I was beginning to find myself wishing we would at least keep it close, that the final results wouldn’t represent a wholesale rejection of everything Jesus stood for.

“Popopoffolous is predicting the same thing,” Nadine said, from her place in front of her laptop. “Florida, Florida, Florida. George Bill thinks Alowich could be the new Nader. He could take enough support from us in Palm Beach County to throw the election to Maplewith.”

“Who is the secretary of state there now?” her husband inquired.

“Not one of our people.”

“How do you think the Supreme Court would vote if it goes to a recount and there’s a challenge?”

“Let me answer this way,” Nadine said. “Two of the justices go elk hunting in Saskatchewan with Aldridge Maplewith.”

Zelda alternated between answering the phone (we would never learn where the one unanswered call came from) and walking over to stand with me. She’d put a hand on my arm, and I’d stop pacing for a time. “We’re still in it,” she’d say. Or, “A lot of states still haven’t reported.” Or, “I just spoke with him; he’s not worried.” And I’d nod and pretend to agree, but, as I read it at least, the television code was saying: Maplewith, Maplewith, Maplewith.

At ten past nine, as the full weight of despair was pressing down on me and I wanted nothing so much as to walk out of the hotel and pound the streets of West Zenith until it was over, Jesus emerged from the back room. He had showered and changed into cowboy boots, new jeans, and a long-sleeved orange T-shirt with
JETHRO TULL
printed on the front. He had a spring in his step.

“Where’s Anna?” my mother asked, just to have something to say to him.

“Praying,” Jesus told her. “She has a lot of work ahead of her. We were choosing jobs for all of you in the new administration. You’re going to like what we’ve decided.”

This bit of absurd optimism was met with a resounding silence. Even Stab couldn’t raise his spirit enough to ask what Jesus supposedly had in store for him. Our candidate was standing there with his hands on his hips and a smile in his eyes, as happy as if we were watching the second quarter of the NBA Playoffs, and he’d been held up in traffic and had just breezed in, grabbed a plate of buffalo wings and a Corona, and was about to sit down and watch his team extend their lead.

Esmeralda gave him an update, saving the worst for last: Florida was still too close to call; and Illinois, which all our victory combinations had taken for granted, was also looking like a toss-up.

Jesus shrugged, put his arm around Stab, who’d gotten up to grab more doughnuts, and motioned me over with his free hand. “The brothers
grim,” he said, when he was encircling both of us. “Arnie, how did you and Mudgie produce these two jokers?”

“Just lucky, I guess,” Dad told him grimly.

“Security stuff all set?” Jesus asked me, releasing us and reaching for a stick of celery. I almost had the feeling he was making fun of me for worrying so much, making fun of all of us for caring so much. Another ugly whisper of doubt floated around me then. Maybe Anne Canter had been right: it was a game to him, a quick stopover on planet earth to reassure himself that nothing had changed, that we’d never learn our spiritual lessons. The voters had sensed that. In the end, after flirting with the idea of electing a sacred creature as president, they’d seen the absurdity of it, realized they didn’t deserve it, decided there must be two Jesuses and this one didn’t matter, and voted their pocketbook.

Trying not to let that line of thinking show in my voice, I told him that the hotel was as tight as we could make it, given the fact that the public had access to the lobby, the meeting rooms, and the lower floors. “We’ve sealed off the top two floors, this one and the eleventh,” I remember telling him. And I remember, even now, the odd twist of a smile on his face when I said it. “There is a floor above us, no rooms, just machinery—elevator engines, one of which is not working, air-conditioning and heating units, ductwork. Dukey’s boys and the local police have been instructed to let only workmen with passes get up there, using the stairs. The hotel people have reprogrammed the elevator so it goes only as far as the tenth floor, but they can change that for us when the time comes, if we call down. Until then, if any of us wants to use the elevator, we’ll have to walk down two flights and take it from the tenth. Chief Bastatutta is in the lobby, keeping an eye on people there. The state police and the Secret Service are ready in case you become the president-elect.”

“In case?” he said, lifting his eyebrows at me. He chomped on the celery, chewed and chewed, never breaking eye contact. “You’re the best security guy in the business,” he told me. “Don’t ever doubt that, no matter what happens.”

But I doubted it, of course, and I did not care for the implications of the “no matter what happens” remark. It had occurred to me at some point
during the previous hour that the bubble of confidence in which I’d lived before joining the campaign had been slowly deflating, not just since the results started coming in, but for the past several months. When Jesus had first called me, I’d been sure of my job, my popularity, my place in the world, my future in television. Now I wasn’t sure of anything, least of all that I was the best security guy in the business. As the minutes ticked down, I sneaked glances at Jesus, trying to see past his happy expression, looking for another hint about what might happen, and when. But he was playing poker with us that night, holding his cards close and betting the farm. He knew the future, of course he did, and it is astounding to me, in retrospect, that he seemed so happy and so at ease in those hours.