The MacGuffin (3 page)

Though there were computers in Druff’s building now of course, modems, fax machines. Some people in data processing had desktop- published a pamphlet on sidewalk repair and replacement for his department, another on gutters and pavements, others on street signs, on markers and street graphics, on leaf collection and snow removal, on how to obtain permits for street fairs and block parties, on detours and barricades. And put out brochures on lighting and traffic signals, on street cleaning and lawn maintenance. (Not “lawn.” What was it called, that little strip of grass easement between the pavement and the curb the home owner was responsible for? The City Commissioner of Streets had forgotten.) Both the pamphlet on gutters and pavements and the one on markers and street graphics had won first prize in a national competition, and the lawn maintenance—
verge
it was called—brochure was a classic, better than Beverly Hills’, better than West Palm Beach’s,
those
garden spots. Druff, who hadn’t even known there
was
such a competition, had been sent by the mayor to the awards banquet in St. Louis. (He was a good old City Commissioner of Streets, and when he was called up to the dais to collect the citation in his category—public service publications in cities of between one and two million people—he made a speech without benefit of Inderal—“I’m totally unprepared for this,” he’d told them, “because whoever thought for a minute we’d win?”—and became, with that “we,” an instant favorite with the crowd. He was a good old City Commissioner of Streets. And, afterward, took a drink with a few of the boys, some whom he knew from the days when he was political, but most of them new to him, a kind of under-professional—not docs or the lawyerly or of an insider-anything, killer-M.B.A. imagination, accepting burnout ten or so years down the road like some teenager the cancer she takes in with her suntan—municipally managerial, infrastructure type—hospital administrators, parks commissioners, fellows from water, from tunnels and bridges, low-income housing. Talking with one in particular, not a bad sort if you accepted up front that he was a bore, who’d asked him questions about his town and then confessed he’d never been there himself. “What, not even to change planes?” “No,” the guy said, “never.” And really wanted to know the sort of shop his city was, what the museums were like, if the zoo was any good, how come it didn’t have a baseball team. “It’s a great place to raise children,” Druff told him truthfully, then added, “not great children.” “Is it?” “Probably because our housing stock is so good.” Offering “housing stock,” because, Druff being Druff, he had to, since honor had it that tie went to the bore and Druff, thinking of the children he’d not too greatly raised, owed him.)

Then, back in town, an altered man, or at least an altered City Commissioner of Streets, thrown back on his old affection for the electorate, for shirtsleeve America and the July Fourth condition, his meat inspector—cum—fireman notions and mail-must-go-through priorities. His own shirtsleeves rolled and actively inventing campaigns, promoting civic pride, this patriot of the local, this hustling jingo of the here. (“What’s
this
all about?” Loft, the director of the airport, had asked. “A little slogan I thought up,” Druff said. “What? A slogan? ‘Change planes in our town and we’ll show you a time’?” “Sure,” Druff told him, “if they had even a two- or three-hour layover, we could pick them up in buses and show them around. No city in America has thought of this yet.” “There’s such a thing as turf, Druff. You’re the street man here. You of all people ought to know that.” So took his case over Loft’s head. “Look,” he’d argued to a chilly City Council, “what’s the worst that could happen? That the bus has an accident and everyone in it is killed or maimed. Don’t worry, it won’t happen, we’ll use only the most seasoned drivers. It
won’t
happen, but even, God forbid, if it does, most of these people are covered by the credit cards they use to purchase their airplane tickets, by their travel agencies, by the bus company itself. I asked counsel to look into this and he assures me we’re in the clear.” Going at his job in those mercantile rooms of yore as if City Hall were still a department store. He was a good old City Commissioner of Streets and only wanted to be a better one. Why not? Streets were roads, roads were what the Romans built, and he, Druff, was road man here, Imperial Commissioner of the Way to the Empire! So give me a little credit please, he’d thought. I understand about empire, why wouldn’t I know about turf?)

And, honored by his honors (all the more splendid for his not having known about the national competition or such categories in the first place, or even all that much about the project itself, and all the more moving for his having merely signed off on it—signed off
on?
—their having come to him not so much a sign that he’d cashed in on other people’s efforts as much as a tribute to the smooth functioning of his department), by his Academy Awards in Gutters and Pavements, in Markers and Street Graphics, and his Lifetime Achievement Award in Mowing the Lawn, continued for a time to press his campaigns.

His shame campaign.

The oversized, non-removable Day-Glo stickers he’d have had the city slap on the windows of trucks and vans, of commercial vehicles double-parked in the street, tying up traffic, the sample copy for which he’d written himself. (“This vehicle is double-parked in violation of city traffic ordinances and has been appropriately ticketed. Citizens who feel they have been personally inconvenienced, either by being unable to move out of their parking spaces, or by being denied access to parking spaces which might otherwise have been available to them, or by being unduly held up in traffic, are, in light of the selfish disregard shown them by the other driver’s lack of consideration for his neighbors, encouraged to take down the name of the company, its phone number or address when available and vehicle license plate number, and report all such incidents to the appropriate authorities.”) If he’d been a mathematician or scientist such a solution to so longstanding a municipal problem might have been termed elegant—he didn’t mean his copy, his copy was merely a detail, an example, an instance, a first draft; he put no great stock in his copy; his copy could always be improved—so he was disappointed, though not surprised, when the city fathers to whom he’d shown mock-ups, complete, right down to Druff’s improvable text on the Day-Glo sticker and its permanent bond shaded in on the verso, had thrown up objections that were, well, political. (“Yes,” said the mayor—Dick’s “guy” and “old hack” of the morning’s reminiscences—“that would do the job all right, but those vans and trucks that block up the traffic are doing deliveries, dropping stuff off, picking stuff up. This is commercial traffic you’re talking about, acceptable lifeblood traffic. We have to deal with it. You’re mixing babies and bathwater, what do you call it, apples and oranges. Good government is knowing who should get the tax abatements.” A shot, Druff thought, a shot and a hit. “Yes,” he said, “I see what you mean, Mr. Mayor. I’m old and stupid, too caught up by ancient history and old times. Maybe what appealed about my idea was that it was so purely an adaptation of the eleventh of my Fourteen Points, ‘no senseless scraping,’ brought up to date.” The mayor brushed away Druff’s dismissal of himself. “Now now,” he said, “it’s a
good
idea. It is. Maybe its time hasn’t come but it’s a
good
idea,” adding, too cruelly for any absolutely first-rate pol, thought Druff, “and whenever my City Commissioner of Streets feels he has another one up his sleeve, I want my City Commissioner of Streets to feel free to stop the presses and let me know.” Saying “my City Commissioner of Streets” as in ancient history and old times he’d said “my opponent,” for, yes, this was he, his old opponent from the Lincoln-Douglas. And might have assured Hizzoner right then and there that Druff would no longer trouble him with any more bright ideas from that sleeve of his. Which he didn’t because you never ever made a campaign promise you didn’t absolutely have to.) But abandoning the last of his promotional schemes right then and right there, returned to the easy status quo of Awards Banquet ante.

For the rest of the morning Druff accepted phone calls and answered letters, working routinely within the soft parameters of the job description. Twice he had fifteen-minute meetings, one with the department’s chief engineer, who’d been assigned to draw up plans for an enclosed walkway above Kersh Boulevard where three or four months earlier a young woman, a foreign exchange student from Lebanon, on her way back from campus to her dormitory after an evening lecture, had crossed not at the corner but at one of those push-button traffic signals in the middle of the block, and been killed by a hit-and-run driver. The engineer had shown him blueprints (“What’s this,” the City Commissioner of Streets said, “sheet music?” Then asked the engineer to rough the bridge in for him in terms—no cross sections, no esoterics—Druff could understand. “This won’t fall down, will it?” he’d asked. “No? You don’t think so? Well, what can we rely on if not our informed guesses? Go ahead, put a crew together.”) and now reported back to him that it was his, the chief engineer’s, understanding that the city was unwilling to proceed with construction until the university agreed to pay the costs on whatever was built on university property. The second meeting—Druff had forgotten that it had been scheduled for today—was with a lawyer, some bagman type from the university. He’d come with its sealed, lunatic bid. “Obviously the school regrets this tragedy, but isn’t this all a little like locking the barn door after the dish has run away with the spoon?” the fellow said. “The city should never have put up a pedestrian-activated traffic signal in that spot in the first place. It fair screamed ‘attractive nuisance’ to any beered-up kid who chanced by.” However, in the interest of putting all this behind them, he’d told Druff, the university was willing to help out, but preferred that the university’s builders be engaged on, well, the university’s buildings, that this was essentially a city project and that city contractors ought to be used on it, and it needn’t bother that the walkway be built in conformity with campus style, that a strictly neutral municipal architecture would serve, it was a matter of indifference to the university if the city failed to match its distinctive and rather expensive limestone. Druff, who smelled kickback the minute the guy opened his mouth, thanked him for coming and told him he’d convey the university’s position and get back to him with a decision.

If I live long enough this is how I’ll spend the rest of my life, thought fifty-eight-year-old Druff on the downhill side of destiny, folding his stale, foul, used-up juices into a clean handkerchief and placing three or four fresh leaves from his pouch of chewing tobacco into his mouth. It was not a disagreeable prospect. A sedentary, lackluster office life held no terrors for him. The worst that could happen was that he’d be bored. If it was too late for anything to happen to him, why that was all right, too. Enough had happened to him already. He suffered from two or three major illnesses—heart disease (three years earlier, he’d had bypass surgery, after having a heart attack years back); spontaneous pneumothoraxes (four times a lung had collapsed on him; it was, they liked telling him, a young man’s disease; runners burst blebs while they were still in their teens); and peripheral circulatory blockage in his legs (wounds, below his knees, took forever to heal; a stubbed toe could turn into gangrene just like that). Also he couldn’t always, or even very often, get it up. What was more troubling was that he didn’t very often even want to.

Which might, thought Druff, explain, I betcha, the power fantasies, all that If-I-Were-King subjunctivication of his life.

Only it wasn’t Bobbo the Roman Numeral I in those fantasies, but Bobbo, Prez of the Free World As We Know It. An American first, pictures don’t lie. That was no crown on his head, it was a straw boater; no throne under his ass, a folding chair. RD to the constituents, those who’d put him into office and those who’d voted against him. RD in the black banners of the national press. RD’S STUBBED TOE TO COME OFF! RD DRAWS DEEP BREATH SMELLING FLOWER, COLLAPSES LUNG! RD REPORTS HARD-ON, MAY RUN FOR SECOND TERM!

And it wasn’t always, or even all that often, in terms of headlines that RD appeared to himself. No no. He knew, was on talking terms with, his priorities. Heady, daring stuff. Missions to bring the hostages out. And had worked out position papers not only on the emergencies but on the back burners too, credits to Canada for dropping acid rain on their forests and wildlife, how to accommodate revolutions in place, what to do about an ailing dollar, how to deal with the burdens of secrecy in a dangerous world—Why, go public! All
sorts
of innovative shit.

For one thing, he would allow no one to run for office—this was complicated and controversial and would almost certainly require a constitutional amendment—who was not fluent in Japanese or some other language du jour.

Am I ridiculous? Well, I don’t mean to be.

Dick, Druff thought suddenly, his spy and sometime chauffeur, had probably soft-soaped the security guy in the outer office, sent him to lunch, and was probably his guardbody now.

And
laws?
The laws in his country would be the best on the books. Free speech, free press, the right to worship where one pleased, everything state-of-the-art in those departments. Holland couldn’t hold a candle. But that was only the beginning. Because, face it, how often, how often
really,
did the average man have this stuff jeopardized? And how many times in the course of a normal, decently led life did your garden variety citizen have to worry about a Miranda decision and the safeguards against self-incrimination and all the rest of the illegal- search-and seizure-provisos and stipulations? Because didn’t it finally come down to what he told his constituents, the good folks who’d put him in the White House in the first place, that government mostly
was
traffic and threats to tow? It has
nothing
to do with you, my fellow Americans. (Except for the fact that I’m its ruler and have to give its dinner parties, it has scarcely bugger squat jack all to do with
me!)
And that’s why I’ve convened this Constitutional Convention, my ladies and gentlemen, to see if after two hundred and some years since its founding we can’t put together some laws that might actually
mean
something to the man in the street. We will, and right in front of the gaze of an interested world, now turn our attention to those areas of governance which have been too long neglected. For this purpose I will, and in the not-too-distant, be naming a blue-ribbon committee to consider subjects such as Used Car Law, Points and Closing Law, Improper Credit Card Charges Law, Bank Statement Error and Utilities Bills Law, and the Rules of Guarantee, Warranty, and 7/70,000. In addition, a special Presidential Oversight Commission will be addressing everything ever written into a lease pertaining to the payment of the last month’s rent in advance—Rent Deposit Law. Because, well, to tell you the truth, my people, you don’t all that many of you look like Virginia gent farmers and country-fed, all-purpose, Jeffersonian aristoi to me, or even, when it comes right down, artisans and mechanics either. Good night and God bless.