Primary Colors (28 page)

"It's one thing for the scorps to write it and another for Charlie Martin to present the world with the biggest, fattest sound bite imaginable," I said. "Y'know, Richard? Y'knowhauamean?"

"What is this?" Richard asked. We were near downtown now, moving through clusters of volunteers. Some were standing with signs on street corners; others were working sidewalk tables. "You think only ugly girls interested in politics nowadays?" Richard said. "This is like the inverse Miss America contest. You gotta figure the Republicans do better than this, right? They get cheerleaders and prom queens. We get tree huggers and NOW ninnies. We get whole armies of women who look like Lucille." Richard did have fairly mainstream taste, and a fairly constant frustration level.

"Richard, shut the fuck up and look at this," I said. It was, in fact, a remarkable scene. Downtown Manchester was a political street fair. There were clowns and mimes. The Rotary Club was giving away hot dogs. The millionaire vanity candidate was handing out purple balloons with his name on them; there was a Lyndon Larouche sound truck circling, playing Beethoven's Ninth; there were Operation Rescue fanatics waving dead-fetus posters. Harris volunteers were handing out green-and-white pom-poms. A Nilson Dixieland band played in the park facing the Holiday Inn.

"Brigadoon," I said. "By midweek, it'll all be over. Just some techies packing up. By next weekend, half these storefronts'll be empty again."

"I mean," Richard said, oblivious. "Henri--you assessing this talent? Pathetic. 'Lo, Tom."

Tom Brokaw was coming the other way--with Richard Cohen, The Washington Post columnist, and several other scorps. "Hey, Jemmons, you got numbers?" Brokaw asked.

"Steady as she goes," Richard said. "You?"

"Hear the Globe track has you up nudging twenty again. . . ." "And Harris?"

"Thirty-five or so . . ."

"That boy's only gettin' one outta three in his home state with half a ton a trash on our head. Wait till we get him down home."

"You gonna make it down home?" Cohen asked.

"Well, who the fuck else gonna make it?" Richard snapped. "Ozio?"

"In the South, in the South?" Richard shrieked. "You talk about Orlando down home, they think you talkin"bout Disney World. You got any other hot ideas?"

Cohen shrugged and smiled, palms up. We moved on. "Jeez," Richard said. "Heavy fucking lifting. It's like goin' through life carryin' Libby Holden on your back. And they think we don't earn our money."

"The Globe number--Leon's showing more than that," I said. Leon was, in fact, showing us moving again after the debate.

"A bump, a bumplet, a sta-tis-tical hiccup: we're still fucked, Henri." "What do we need?" I asked as we passed Martin headquarters, which was overflowing with student volunteers. Several dozen college kids were milling on the sidewalk around a very attractive blonde who had a street map and a megaphone. She was giving out assignments. Richard gawked at the blonde. She smiled back at him. "Listen, honey, you wanta learn about the intricacies a' politics?" he asked. She shook her head slowly, sexily, and blew Richard a kiss.

"What do we need?" I asked again.

"I'm smitten," he said. "Fuckin' hippie has the best-lookin' talent--wouldn't ya know it? I'd take that girl door-to-door in a hot-flash, we'd push every doorbell in town."

"Richard, for Chrissake." We were stopped at a red light; a Harris station wagon sped past, slushing us pretty bad.

"Fuck you, asshole!" Richard shouted, then, to me he said, "We need one outta four, long as Natural Forces stays under forty and no one comes up behind us. We can limp our sorry asses outta here with twenty-five--and we're nowhere near that."

"Leon has us twenty-one on a three-day track," I said, assaying an argument I didn't quite believe, "which means last night and this morning had to be near twenty-five."

"And sample size?" Richard said. "You call four people. One of them giggles like a heathen and says, 'Well, that redneck sonofabitch sure tucked it to of Professor Perfect las' night. Mebbe I'm for him.' You think that means something? Call my broker. He'll sell you all sorts of shit."

Our headquarters, halfway down the next block, wasn't nearly as bad as I'd feared. It was alive, every bit as alive as Martin's had been. And a better sort of crowd: student vols in plaid flannel and jeans mixed with older folks in union and tavern windbreakers. "Cross between a Nirvana concert and Tuesday-night bowling league," Richard said. "Not bad. Not fucking bad at all, for a cripple."

Brad Lieberman sat at a desk in the front, working a phone, handing out piles of literature and xeroxed neighborhood maps to a line of coordinators. He waved to us, gave a thumbs-up. We squeezed past the pegboard partitions behind Brad to the larger back room, which had three long rows of tables with telephones and thirty people working them. Off to the side was another table with two large coffee urns and dozens of boxes of doughnuts, cascading, half open, half eaten. Interesting people were working the phones. Bill Johnson was back there, as well as several of the Gang of Five. And Momma, puffing Slims and radiating cheap perfume from the middle of a row, her raven beehive sucking up like a textile-factory bobbin-all of them working down lists of people who'd been called at least once in the past month. I went over to Johnson when he put down the receiver. "How's it goin'?"

"Twos and threes," he shrugged. "We ain't lightin' it up." "No fours?"

"Shitload of fours. But you gotta expect that. Count every hangup a four. Where's the candidate?"

"At the mall," I said. "He's just gonna stand there and work the mall all day, if you can believe it."

"No touring?"

"He said every minute in the van is a minute wasted. He figures he'll get a steady flow all day this way-"

"He's a fucking horse," Johnson said. "Always was."

Richard came over. "Henri, you ain't lived till you heard Momma work a phone. 'This is Mary-Pat Stanton, the candidate's momma. Now you gonna vote for mak boy or not?' Hot shit!"

"Richard," I said, getting sort of excited now, "let's get Ken Spiegelman off the phone and see if he can give us something for the candidate to say on the telethon tonight about health care." Spiegel-man was a Gang of Five member from the University of Chicago. He was young, slick, accessible-too young for treasury secretary but building his portfolio.

"Why, that's just brilliant, Henri," Richard said, diving into the middle of Momma's row and retrieving her. "We say the exact right twenty-five words 'bout health care tonight, and we'll just . . . walk away with this thing. Right? I got a better idea."

He wrapped an arm around Momma, cupped his hands: "HEY EVER'body, listen UP! Best-loolcin' woman in the room got somethin' to say. Go 'head now, Momma. Gwon stand up on this here chair." Momma didn't need much prodding. She was wearing a flagrant orange-and-white State U. tracksuit. "Y'all havin'fin?" she croaked, and she smiled, her big, broad lipstick-and-mascara face bursting into utter glee. "Wal, listen. Ah know you workin' hard foh mah Jackie, an' he's the best a momma could have, and y'alls the best friends our family could have, an' ah ain't got no highfalutin' talk like Mr. Senator Lawrence Harris." There were hoots and whistles. "But in mah book, y'alls are just EX-CEPTIONAL. With a gang lahk this, we could do serious damage in a roadhouse-y'get me, Jemmons? We could jus' rip up a joint."

"Momma, I was thirty years older, I'd be lickin' your ear!" Richard said, playing to the crowd-which roared.

"And ah'd be squealin' like a pig," Momma said, doubling over, hands on her knees. I had to admit: I'd never fully appreciated Momma until that moment. I'd considered her something of an embarrassment, a joke. But she had everyone in that room up now, and feeling good. Every face was beaming. She was her son's mother.

"Now listen up y'all. Ah'm a-gonna set down now, 'fore ah fall down. But ah love ya, and ah'll never forget ya. Win or lose, come rain or come shine, ain't this just GRAND!" She started down, to whoops and applause, then went up again: "Now, jus' a second, jus' a second. Ah'm a-listenin' to what ah just said--and ah would like to amend it a little--okay, Jemmons?"

"Have at it, Momma," he said.

"The lose part," she said. "Ah didn't mean to say that--win or lose. Mah boy ain't gonna lose. You folks ain't gonna lose. Ah don't see a loser in this here room. And ah've seen more than a few losers in mah sorry ol' life." The place was rocking, hoots and whistles. "But mah Jackie ain't no loser, and y'alls his friends and you ain't losers neither. So listen up: We are going to win this thing. We are gonna steal this thing right out from under Mr. Senator Lawrence Harris's nose. Then we gonna go on down home and whip his sorry butt. And that's all ah'm a-gonna say."

Chapter
VI

Wlost New Hampshire, but not badly. It rained Election Day, and that was good for us. Stanton voters proved to be as devoted to the candidate as he had been to them-in fact, according to the exit polls, an implausible number said the deciding factor was that they'd actually met the governor. And so we did somewhat better than Richard's one in four; our 29 percent was more than Nilson and Martin combined. Harris won, of course; but he could manage no more than 38 percent in his home state, which gave us hope. Election Day itself was strange, empty. We slept in. We packed our bags. We went to the movies. We saw Wayne's World. Daisy and I held hands; Richard jiggled; Lucille-an unexpected delight-had a rowdy and infectious laugh. Halfway through the movie, I went out into the lobby and called Brad Lieberman. The first wave of exit polling was coming in. "We're alive," he said.

I went back in, whispered the results to Daisy on my left and Richard on my right. Daisy squeezed my hand and stuck her nose in my ear. "No Caribbean this week," she whispered.

"Disappointed?"

"Yes-and no."

We shared an umbrella walking back across the asphalt expanse to the Hampton Inn. We walked with our arms around each other, ver
y c
lose and comfortable. Richard and Lucille went ahead, separately, their black umbrellas bobbing in the wind. Mountains of snow were stacked around the light poles; everything was gray and white. "I'm beginning to feel nostalgic," I said. "We've lived our lives around this parking lot. I can't count the number of times I looked out over at the multiplex and wished I was at the movies."

"And I can't remember them ever having a Werner Herzog," Daisy teased.

"And all the nights I had to slog across over there and retrieve the candidate from Danny's Dunkin' Donuts. You wonder what Danny's going to do with himself now."

"I wonder what the candidate's going to do with himself now," she said, "without Danny's Dunkin' Donuts."

We stopped just outside the lobby door, under the marquee, but still under the umbrella and turned to each other, and kissed. It was a serious kiss, our first public display of affection.

"Henry?" she said, meaning: Did that mean what I think it meant? "Yes," I said. It did.

She looked at me, her eyes widened; she put her hand on my cheek. "What are we going to have him say tonight?" she asked.

"That it was a moral victory."

"Henry?"

I looked at her.

"Do you think the telethon helped us any?"

"No," I said. "He did it by sheer force of will. He did it on Saturday, standing at the mall all day. He did it on Sunday and Monday. I mean, have you ever seen anybody do one-on-one like that? But the telethon wasn't a bad idea," I added quickly, remembering that it had been hers. "Henry?" she said. "Is this . . ."

"I think so."

.. or are we just relieved that we won?"

"We didn't win."

"We didn't die," she said. "So we won."

"We better go inside."

She kissed me again, quickly, open-mouthed, on the lips.

Jack and Susan were both up in the suite working the phones, thanking local supporters. "I will never forget this," Jack said, over and over. "I will always remember what you did for us here."

Susan hugged me. It was a big day for hugs.

Jack was off the phone now He came over and shook my hand. He was wearing a white shirt, suit pants, no shoes. "Henry, I'll admit it: last night, I thought we were dead."

"Well, Leon's last track didn't help much," I said.

"He couldn't measure intensity," he said. "Our folks just felt more strongly about this election."

"That's because of you, sir."

The governor ambled over to the table. There was a fruit platter and some sandwiches. "Don't!" Susan said. "You fell off the wall, you didn't crack-but you're still looking like Humpty-Dumpty."

She said this lightly, but with an edge. He narrowed his eyes, and took some grapes. "Henry, how early can we get on and off, and go home?" he asked.

"Polls close at eight," I said. "You've got to stay and do the nets. You want to do Nightline?"

"No!" Susan said. "And no press conference. Those jerks had us buried, all of them. Let 'em stew in it."

"Well, we aren't gonna be able to make 'em disappear," Stanton said. "They weren't able to make you disappear either," she said. "And so they'll have to come to terms with that. We're going to tighten this up now, Henry. We've got a new set of priorities. We'll do local TVs first, networks second, local pencils third, national pencils last." "And pundits never?" Stanton laughed. "C'mon, they're there. We can pick and choose. Henry, get Richard and Daisy and all-get 'ens here 'bout six. We'll thrash this out. Also, have Laurene schedule the nets. We'll do 'ern all tonight. We'll do the morning shows from Mammoth Falls tomorrow, from the Mansion-okay?" He looked over at Susan; she nodded. "And okay, Mrs. Stanton-no press conference. Henry, y'all come on the plane with us. Tell Richard and Arlen and Leon, and whoever else we got here to stick around and work spin. Then get their selves down to Mammoth Falls by tomorrow night. Y'know, I'm gonna miss this place."