"How," Polly said, "do people rend their hair?"
"Everywhere a scene of carnage," Bobby Jay continued, "a scene of devastation. Red chaos!"
"Red chaos?" Polly said.
"Shut up, Polly," Nick said.
"Voice-over. And guess whose?" Bobby Jay asked coyly. "Charlton Heston?"
"No sir," Bobby said, all tickly and beaming. "Guess again."
"David Duke," Polly said.
"Jack Taggardy,"
Bobby Jay said triumpha
ntly
.
"Nice," Nick said.
"Didn't he have his hips replaced? I read that in
People."
"What do his
hips
have to do with anything?" Bobby Jay said.
"Is he in a walker, or what?"
"No he's not in a any damn walker!"
"Go on," Nick said.
Bobby reframed the scene. "So Taggardy's voice-over: 'Could this awful human tragedy have been avoided?' " "Question," Nick said. "Why 'human'?" "Why not 'human'? They're humans." "I would have thought, 'inhuman tragedy'?" "He's got a point," Polly said.
"Look, we can edit. Do you want to hear this?" "Yes," Nick said, "very much."
"Now we cut to my
little
lady. She's sitting in a chair, all prim and pretty. Darling girl. I had her hairdresser come over. She wanted to do her makeup but I wouldn't hear of it. I wanted her eyes red from crying. We dabbed a little onion under the eyelids, nothing wrong with that, just to get her in the mood, get those ducts opened up."
"Onion?"
"Didn't even need it. Soon as she saw those color police photos i was holding up for her off camera she started bawlin' like a baby. She's going on about how awful it was, and then she gets to the part about how she had to leave her pistol in the glove compartment.
Then
she looks right into the camera, right in your face, and dabs the corner of her eye—and that was
not
in the script—and says, 'Why won't our elected lawmakers just let us
protect ourselves?
Is that too much to ask?' Fade to black. Then Taggardy's voice comes back on and there's no mistaking that voice, like bourbon over sandpaper: 'The Second Amendment says the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Does
your
elected lawmaker support the Bill of Rights? Or are they selling you a Bill of Goods?' " Bobby Jay leaned back in his chair. "What do you think?"
"Transcendent," Nick said. "A deft manipulation of post-traumatic stress."
Bobby Jay grinned. "Sweeter than honeysuckle in moonlight."
"Congratulations," Polly said. "Really masterful."
"By this afternoon, every member of the Texas congressional delegation and the state legislature will have a copy. By tomorrow, every sinner in the Congress will have one. We may even air it nationally. Mr. Drum hasn't signed off on that yet, but I am most strongly recommending that we do."
Bobby Jay's boss was one of the few in Washington who insisted on the
mister.
It was part of his aura, and he did cast a large aura. When he had taken over the leadership of the troubled SAFETY years back, there had been only fifty million guns circulating in America. There were now over 200 million. He was a physically imposing man with a trademark bald head. Redekamp of the
Sun
had dug up the fact that at the age of sixteen he had shot to death a seventeen-year-old in a dispute over the ownership of a box turtle. The conviction was later overturned on the grounds that the box turtle, having subsequently died, probably of stress, had never been introduced as evidence. Ever since, the anti-SAFETY Washington press, comprising all of the press except for the conservative
Washington Moon,
included a reference to this unfortunate incident in every mention of him.
Coffee arrived. Nick asked Polly, "What's happening at Moderation?"
"We actually got some great news yesterday." This was a stunner. Nick could not recall such words ever having been spoken over one of their lunches. "The Michigan Supreme Court ruled that sobriety roadblocks were unconstitutional," she said.
"Party
down,"
Nick said.
"The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that they are constitutional, so for now they're constitutional everywhere except Michigan." Bobby Jay said, "Don't you
see?"
"See what?" Nick asked.
"The pattern. First they disarm us, then they start throwing up roadblocks. It's all happening on schedule." "Whose schedule?"
"Do you know how to beat a Breathalyzer?" Bobby Jay said. "Activated charcoal tablets."
"Maybe we could use that in our new Designated Driver campaign," Polly said. " 'If You Must Drive Drunk, Please, Suck Charcoal.' "
"You get them in pet stores. They purify the air that goes through the little pump. I don't know why they bother, all my kids' fish went belly-up within a day. You keep it under your tongue. Breaks down the ethanol molecules."
"Don't the police wonder how come you've got a charcoal briquet in your mouth?"
"There's no law against charcoal," Bobby Jay said.
"Yet," they chimed in unison. It was understood among them that at any given moment, somewhere,
someone in the "vast federal bu
reaucracy" was issuing regulations against them. They were the Cavaliers of Consumption aligned on the field of battle against the Roundheads of Neo-Puritanism.
Polly said, "My beer wholesalers convention next week. I'm worried."
"Why?" Nick asked.
"I'm scheduled to debate with Craighead in front of
two thousand of them." Gordon R
. Craighead was the chief "unelected bureaucrat" in charge of the Office of Substance Abuse Prevention at the Department of Health and Human Services, "Helpless, Hopeless, and Stupid" to those in the alcohol and tobacco industries. Craighead's office dispensed about $300 million a year to anti-smoking and anti— drunk-driving groups. Though it had been calculated that the tobacco industry spends $2.5 billion a year, or $4,000 per second, promoting smoking, Nick nonetheless railed against OSAP's "runaway budgets."
"Oh, you can handle Craighead."
"I'm not worried about that. It's my beer wholesalers. These are not subtle people. Most of them started out driving their own trucks. I'm worried that if Craighead starts talking about raising their excise taxes again, or if he gets into the recycling deposit, they'll start throwing things at him. They'll get abusive. That's not going to help anyone."
"Are you doing Q and A?" Polly said yes, there would be a question and answer after the debate.
"Make them write down the questions. We did a panel once with Mothers Against Smoking at a vending-machine owners' convention. We took spoken questions. A nightmare. The vendors were wrestling the microphone away from each other, shouting at the mothers, 'You're stealing bread outa my kid's mouth and you call yourself a mother!' I was a little surprised. I always thought the mafia was traditionally more respectful of mothers. Now I can't get Mothers Against Smoking even to return my calls. After that I made it a policy, only written questions. Have you got a slogan for the meeting?"
" 'We're Part of the Solution,' " she said. "What do you think?"
Nick considered. "I like it."
"We had a hard time with it," Polly said. "They wanted something more aggressive. They're very feisty, the wholesalers."
"I've got a slogan for you," Bobby Jay said. "I saw it on a T-shirt. 'A Day Without a Buzz Is a Day That Never Wuz.' "
"Our first choice," Polly continued, ignoring him, "was 'In the Spirit of Cooperation,' but they said it sounded too much like 'spirits.' I spend half my time keeping my beer people from killing my spirits people, and my wine people from trying to kill the other two. The whole idea behind the Moderation Council was strength through unity at a time of volumetric decline, but it's like trying to unify Yugoslavia." She sipped her iced cappuccino. "It's tribal."
Polly lit a cigarette. Nick appreciated a woman who smoked sexily. She leaned back and tucked her left arm under her breasts to support her right elbow, the arm going straight up, cigarette pointing at the ceiling. She took long, deep drags, tilted her head back, and let the smoke out in long, slow, elegant exhalations, with a little lung-clearing shot at the end. A beautiful smoker. Nick's own mother, in her day, had been a beautiful smoker. He remembered her by the pool, summers in the fifties, all long legs and short pants, pointy sunglasses and broad straw hats and lipstick that left bright, sticky smudges on the butts that he filched and coughingly relit behind the garage.
Nick was rousted from the reverie by the shrill cricketing of Bobby Jay's cellular phone. Bobby Jay flipped it open with practiced cool, like it was a switchblade. "Bliss. Yeah?" Bobby said.
"Great."
He said to Nick and Polly, "The postal worker. They got him. Uh-huh . . . uh-huh . . . Missouri . . . uh-huh . . . uh-huh . . .
what?"
His brow beetl
ed. "Well how the hell does CNN know? It was
on
him? FBI . . . what did, you didn't say anything to them, did you? Look, did you check with Membership?" Nick watched Bobby's face sag and thought,
This face is in
free
fall.
"Sustaining? Was he paid up? Well,
yes,
check, right away, before you do anything. No,
don't
call CNN or the FBI back. I don't care. I'll be there in three minutes."
Bobby Jay folded up his phone. Nick and Polly stared, awaiting explication.
"I got to go," Bobby Jay said, tossing a twenty onto the table. It landed like a fall leaf in a little puddle of melting ice.
"Do we have to find out what happened from CNN?"
Bobby Jay looked like he was about to break a sweat. "Take deep breaths," Nick suggested.
"The son of a bitch was a member," Bobby Jay said. "Not just a member, but a sustaining life member."
"How did CNN find out?"
"He had his membership card with him. CNN got a shot of it lying with the rest of his wallet. In a pool of blood."
"Hm," Nick said, no longer jealous about Bobby Jay's incredible
good luck. At least with tobacco the casualties were tucked away in hospital wards.
"I'm on SAFETY!" Polly said, doing a take on the famous SAFETY ads showing macho, if slightly fading, actors standing on skeet ranges, holding expensive, engraved shotguns.
"Polly,"
Nick rebuked her. She was so cynical, Polly. Sometimes Nick wanted to spank her. She made a
big-deal
gesture. Bobby Jay was oblivious, staring at the center of the table. Polly waved a hand back and forth in front of his face and said to Nick, "I think he's going into shock."
"Oh my Lord," Bobby Jay said quietly,
"the video."
"You probably want to recall it," Nick said, but Bobby Jay was already out the door, on his way, it appeared, to a
long afternoon of certain buttl
ock.
3
W
hile you were out
a producer for the
Oprah Winfrey
show had called to ask if Nick would go on the show in Chicago on Monday afternoon. The SG's call for an outright ad ban was getting a lot of play, and Oprah wanted a show on smoking right away. Nick called back immediately to say that, yes, he'd be available. This was face time, major face time. Millions and millions of women—tobacco's most important customers—watched Oprah. He was tempted to pick up the phone and tell BR, but decided to play it cool and conduct a little experiment. He called Jeannette and, in the course of asking her about some routine stuff, slipped it in. "Oh, I almost forgot, I have to do the Oprah show on Monday, so can you get me everything we have on the ineffectiveness of advertising?"
He set the timer on his watch. Four minutes later BR was on the line wanting to know what the deal with the Oprah show was. Nick laid it on a bit about how he'd been "cultivating" one of the producers for a long time and it had finally paid off.
"I was thinking maybe we should send Jeannette," BR said.
Nick ground his jaw muscles. "It's going to be a pretty splashy show. Top people. They made it pretty clear that they want the
chief
spokesman for the tobacco industry." Not your office squeeze.
BR said with an edge, "All right," and hung up.
His mother called to remind him that he and Joey had not been by for Sunday supper in over a month. Nick reminded her that the last time he had, his father had called him a "prostitute" at the table.
"I think it says how much he respects you that he feels he can speak
to you so frankly," she said. "Oh, by the way, Betsy Edgeworth called this morning to say she saw you on C-SPAN talking about some Turkish sultan. She said, 'Nick's so
attractive.
It's such a shame he didn't
stay
in journalism. He might
have had his own show by now.'
"