Like We Care (26 page)

Several times, Todd tried to “Well, okay then. . .” Annie into phone surrender, but it appeared to Todd that she had nowhere else to be. Whatever was going on in Berline seemed to really matter to her.

And now, here she was again, trying to keep the campaign alive, and maybe she had a point. If Todd’s plan from the outset was to test his theory on as broad a canvas as possible, why pull back just as it was taking hold? Why not give the string a little more play to see where this thing went?

R
²
Rev, she reported, was not unaware of the echo effect that her show was having. Viewership for the re-airings, while not significant, was holding steady, which was particularly odd, given the non-lurid content. The Promotion Department continued to get calls from kids trying to find out more about Joel and perhaps score a photo. With a half-hour to fill during a slow news week, Manny Clarke was persuaded by Annie to drop a 42-second bite into
The Week In Review
, using the field footage that Annie had ordered the night of the premiere in Berline and reporting that the Happy Snack protest, now being fed by its own hype, was entering its seventh week, and that similar protests were popping up all over the country.

But Annie couldn’t be sure how long the R
²
Rev megaphone would be at their disposal. Unless violence broke out at one of the parking lot gatherings, or unless some kind of Spring Break wet T-shirt gimmick could be worked into the mix, there wasn’t much chance of the net giving this story any more play. And even less likely was the chance that Annie would be on hand to fan any more flames. Whether she was pushed or she jumped, she knew her time with the company would soon end.

She wanted to re-conceptualize the campaign to a grassroots framework, and there sat the internet, just primed to provide the machinery. It would be easy enough for Annie to get a hold of her show and Chiron-in a web address before the next airing. Could Todd, on his end, put something together? Nothing flashy at first, just some downloadable images of Joel and the protest, maybe daily words of wisdom that Todd could spin and pass off as Joel’s. Animation would be killer, if you could pull it off.

“How about a Whack-A-Mole thing with Daljit Singh’s head?” Todd smirked.

Annie groaned appreciatively. “You’re sick.”

“Society is to blame,” he drawled.
Good God
, he thought, I’m
riffing
with this girl, and she’s responding. Wasn’t it a few weeks ago that I was going retard just looking at her?

“Well, I think I could put something together,” he said coolly. “Maybe I could link it to my candidate’s page.”

“What?”

“Joel and I are trying to get our Social Studies teacher to run for City Council, get young voters behind him. Just for a goof.”

“
Jesus, Todd. . .
” Annie gasped.

He wilted. No surprise that his savoir-faire had the resolve of a pelican sucked up a jet engine. “Well, we wouldn’t have to,” he stammered. “It was just—never mind.”

“No,” she pleaded. “This is. . . This is your bump-up! This is how you take it to the next level. If you can—”

Her mind was racing.

“Is he going to run?”

“We think we can guilt him into it.”

“And he could win?”

“Dunno. He’s black, so we know we can get that vote. And Joel’s out right now working on support from, like, eighteen to twenty-three-year-olds.”

Annie was scribbling furiously. Right near the top of her pad, she scrawled: Call Viceroy!!!!

“No, absolutely link to your guy’s site. Post a daily journal of what you’re doing, but make sure
you
write it—you know what works. And then. . .” This was getting silly, but silly might be all she had once cast from her cubicle. “If
this
caught on, and other kids tried
this
, you could link campaigns together. You could share strategies, drive each other on. It could turn into a pissing match, everybody competing to see who can actually get a candidate into office.”

Even Todd thought this was too much.

“This really is maybe just a goof.”

“Bullshit, Todd. Bullshit,” Annie said sternly. “You don’t do anything without an endgame in mind. Don’t go soft on me now!”

“Okay,” he said contritely.

She plowed through the schedule log for the next couple weeks. “Okay, the show airs again a week from Saturday, noon on the coasts, eleven a.m. there in the Midwest. I can get the web address on the show by then. Can you get a site up by then?”

“I think so.”

“Get back to me as soon as you can. And, remember, it doesn’t have to be flash to start. We can get more repeat hits if we roll out the bells and whistles over time. Just run some photos of Joel and of the parking lot crowd, and. . .”

She trailed off as the idea struck. She tapped her pencil on her desk. She watched herself, tapping her pencil.

“Todd?” she asked evenly. “Did you really trademark ‘We’re Not Buying This Shit?’”

“Yeah. It was easy.”

“Get us a site. Call me back.”

“Streaming live video,” Ira shrugged casually. “Right there from the Happy Snack.”

Todd was skeptical. “You could do that?”

“Sure. It’s not just porn sites doing this stuff anymore.”

He cocked an eyebrow at Todd. Todd blushed.

“Isn’t it expensive?”

“Nah. Matter of fact, I’ve been trying to get Centurion Used Cars to try it out on their site. They could show off their inventory and how cars are flying off the lot because of their low-low prices. But the guy who owns the place thinks that if you set up a live feed, all you’re going to get is a bunch of punks showing up to give the finger and pick their noses for the camera.” He shook his head sadly. “You really have to take these old farts by the hand. In fact, I’ll bet I can get them to kick in the gear for a few weeks as a trial run. Might have to run a free banner ad, though. Teenagers buy used cars, teenagers are going to be your exclusive demographic—everybody wins.”

Todd had met his match—somebody with a great big robot brain. “Sure. Whatever.”

Ira grabbed a legal pad. “What else?”

The Happy Snack protests had not escaped Ira’s attention. He appreciated their subversiveness, their elevation of a fellow nondescript kid like Todd. He had just lamented the fact that the protests were being wasted on a dying medium like cable television. So here was his chance to contribute.

“I don’t know,” Todd said. “Surprise me.”

Ira accepted this with a wink and chuckled darkly to himself as he jotted down some ideas.

“Be good, Ira. Be good.”

A
nd then Joel was in New York.

The stunt had been Viceroy’s idea, which needless to say meant that Annie had planted the seed and then waited for the bullshit to fertilize it to full flower.

She had reconnected with him after Todd had told her about the political angle they were splicing into the original campaign. This teacher, Frank Kolak, had indeed announced his candidacy, and with very little effort on his part had already jumped ahead of the incumbent Councilman. Simultaneously driven by a desire to make mischief and to help a former teacher who had earned the regard of his students from his time in the classroom, young adults in Berline—freed from much of the rote pissiness that defined them as high schoolers—took on an almost “Hey, gang! Let’s put on a show in the barn!” spirit as they canvassed for their man.

One Dickinson grad, wasted as a graphic artist for a local ad agency, eagerly took on the design of the campaign literature. Inside the brochure were testimonials to Frank Kolak’s successful teaching career (including a district Merit of Excellence award in ’98 and a series of state victories as coach of the debate team), along with Frank’s own views on local issues which, while Todd had to drag them out of him, were well thought-out and, in spots, almost visionary. The guy really had been following the Council meetings and probably knew more about the town than some of the people already on the Council.

But the key to the pamphlet was the cover. At Todd’s direction, the front featured a large photo of Mr. Kolak, the picture under-exposed just a half-stop to highlight his black skin, the white of his nervous smile shining through. As the young campaigners knocked on doors in working-class neighborhoods, they could see the resistance that Frank generated from older residents, who clearly preferred their elected officials to reflect their own image. The campaigners would smile earnestly as they tried to force one of Frank’s pamphlets on the inconvenienced man or woman of the house, then endure the door being slammed. Their message was coming through: This town is being passed along to us, you small-minded yokels. Here’s
our
man for the future. Deal with it.

Sending a reluctant Frank out to knock on doors along with four or five of his supporters just accentuated the divide and helped fuel the campaign. Truth be told, very little outright hostility was directed at Frank. This was not the South of the early ’60s, after all. And yet it was impossible to miss the reflexive dismissal of Frank’s candidacy, the slap often delivered most stingingly by a smiling hausfrau who prided herself on her racial enlightenment, but whose cloying condescension was all that Frank could count on come election day.

These young people, who with hindsight had come to realize that Mr. Kolak was just about the only teacher who had given them something of himself while they were at Dickinson, squirmed uncomfortably as they watched this good man endure the awkward race dance playing out on front steps all over town. So many of the adults on the other side of those doors reminded them of their parents, who they were actively trying to distance themselves from as they forged an adult image of themselves. If their parents voted at all, they wouldn’t vote for Frank—and that was good enough for them. He
had
to win.

So, back in Berline, the kids had gone from undermining corporate America to pirating the electoral process, and John Viceroy fell in love all over again. His fading, acid-rattled reveries for youthful, ’60s era revolt could now be fused with a wound still fresh and smarting: Election 2000, and the outrage that went down in Florida.

Viceroy, by design and mandate, was a Clinton Democrat, a genuine true believer who could, if forced, square “Lincoln freed the slaves” with “At least Bill didn’t make Monica swallow.” Clinton was his boy, a soul survivor who took
precisely
the right message from the Age of Aquarius (“Quick, they’re stoned. Steal stuff!”). And while everyone knew the party would be over come 2001, Viceroy had worked hard for his team in the vain hope that a contact buzz from the Clinton Administration could be wafted in along with Al “He’s From the
19
60s?” Gore.

But the fucking conservative Supreme Court handed the election to Bush, and overnight D.C.’s stick-up-the-ass moralizing was making life hard for John Viceroy and the media complex he helped run. It wasn’t just R
²
Rev—MediaTrust owned two of the country’s biggest publishing houses, Hollywood’s most profitable movie studio, two-thirds of the nation’s radio stations and, perhaps soon, one of the three major television networks. Suddenly, all its product was being assaulted by sanctimonious gasbags playing to their power bases. Some of these fucks
were still there
from the Vietnam days, but most galling to John Viceroy were the men his own age who had crustified into such joyless, unhip pussies. Bush himself was barely older than Viceroy, for Christ’s sake, and according to legend, once partied hard. What the hell happened to him?

It was like the good fight was back on: heads versus straights, satyrs versus the pure—only now, both sides had lots and lots of money. Lots and lots and lots.

After the 2000 election dispute, no one was going to get caught short again. Previously uncommitted liberals and, most notably, “disenfranchised” blacks—still bitter over real and perceived slights in 2000—were due to come out in record numbers, the under-represented palpably eager to cast votes in such overwhelming quantities that not even “fuzzy math” could swing the final count in the conservatives’ favor. In the aftermath of 2000, voting had nearly become
sexy,
left-leaners having learned the hard way that each and every damned vote really does count.