The Unfolding, page 11
This time he’s keeping his cash on hand, thinking that soon he’ll need spending money.
He takes out a fresh index card.
We are among the last of an era, a generation where phrases like noblesse oblige, and haberdashery and supper, along with a warm glass of milk at night and a stiff shot of scotch during the day, were all a piece of something. We summered in one place and had Christmas in another. We had manners and a code of conduct, good men, men who thought beyond their own betterment.
He sounds like his father and his grandfather. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe they meant it then the way he means it now. The world is changing; he has no son who one day will do this same thing. Tony has no children. Bo McDonald lost a boy to drugs and has another child, a girl with problems of some sort, he can’t quite remember what. The guy from Phoenix, Eisner, the historian, has no known children. Kissick has five daughters who keep him under their thumb. He remembers running into Kissick and his family at an event and Kissick leaning over to say, “Everyone says they look like princesses; clearly I’m the frog. I can pay the bills, but I’m allowed to use the bathroom in my bedroom only when my wife isn’t in it; otherwise, I have to use the half bath at the back of the house. In order for them to feel good about themselves as girls, I have to accept that I’m disgusting. So be it.”
The Big Guy, relieved to have found language for something ephemeral that had been nagging at him, makes a card noting that none of the men have a son to carry on after them. There is no succession plan—there is nothing in place to say who will run the world after they are gone.
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Palm Springs, California
6:30 a.m.
Saturday morning, Tony calls to say he’s landed in Los Angeles and is en route.
Bo McDonald rings the doorbell exactly at eleven a.m. The Big Guy assumes he’s been sitting out front for a while because it’s difficult to arrive right on the dot. McDonald carries a small duffel, like a gym bag.
“Bo, good of you to come,” the Big Guy says.
“Nice of you to invite,” Bo says.
The Big Guy shows Bo around the house because that’s what people do; they show off the spread. He takes him down the halls, shows him the bedrooms. “I’ve put you by the pool,” he says, opening the sliding glass door, showing off the golf course in the distance and pointing out the fancy plants that they’ve put in over the years. “I used to have an amazing gardener who specialized in exotics. All well and good until it turns out he was also dealing in exotics of other kinds—human trafficking.” There’s more space at the ranch and he half wishes he’d hosted the event there but reminds himself that the house is fine; it’s big enough, filled with sunlight, sitting right on the golf course—and the men he invited said yes, so it can’t be too far beneath them.
Tony arrives next and goes into the pool immediately. “Just a quick dip. Much needed. DC has been cold and rainy.” Tony is long and lean and, unlike the Big Guy, still looks good in swim trunks.
Kissick, the tax man, comes through the door already irritated. “Have I mentioned how much I don’t like traveling? On the other hand, it’s nice to see you. I’m cheap; when it’s just me, I fly coach commercial. I add to the money I’m saving and I love it. I feel like Warren Buffett buying breakfast at McDonald’s. I sit there folded up like human origami and the service sucks. But that said, I did talk with someone interesting, and that doesn’t happen when you fly alone.”
“Maybe you should jump in the pool with Tony and wash off the ride?” Bo suggests.
“I only swim at night,” Kissick says. “I limit my time in the sun. I had a great-uncle who died of sunstroke. I never met the guy, but the idea of his dying alone in a New York hotel on a hot July night sticks with me. I took my wife and daughters to Rome last summer; it was unbearable, like a pizza oven. In all the photos I am dripping sweat.”
“The whole damn Tilt-A-Whirl is off course,” Bo says.
“I tell people that I live in Florida for tax reasons, but I won’t go out from ten a.m. to four p.m. for atmospheric reasons. ‘Atmospheric,’ that’s what my eldest calls it. I wear a bucket hat. I look like a man about to be arrested for selling pornography as I run furtively from place to place. Duck and cover; my brother got a melanoma behind his ear, didn’t really notice it until it was too late. Not me, nothing fucking invisible like a ray gun is going to get me; I’m going to die of something old-fashioned like colon cancer or a ruptured hernia.”
“I’ve heard that logorrhea can be fatal,” Bo suggests.
The historian, the scribe from the bar in Phoenix, arrives in a cheap rental car looking like a pizza delivery boy. He’s a good fifteen years younger than the rest of them. The Big Guy didn’t realize how much younger until he sees him in the daylight.
“I remember you,” Bo says, slightly surprised. “Last time I saw you was at our beloved club in San Francisco and you were wearing a dress.”
“I would assume that I was in a play,” the scribe says. “That was something I used to do—acting.”
Bo shrugs. “You might call it that.”
“It was most likely my last role, the Emperor Norton. Just another of the crazy things one will do to please their father. Despite my best efforts, I was an endless source of disappointment.”
“Your dad was a gifted man but not easy to please. Someday ask him about the times we spent together in France in the 1950s,” Bo says. “He’s got some good stories. Things that couldn’t be said then—but now it’s fine.”
“Like what?” The guy wants to know.
Bo shrugs. “They’re not mine to tell.”
“My father is no longer with us,” the scribe says.
“Sorry to hear that,” Bo says, but doesn’t offer anything more.
Meanwhile, Kissick is just standing there looking at the guy, waiting. “I never knew your father, but I am sorry for your loss,” Kissick says.
“Eisner,” the scribe says, offering his hand to Kissick. “Mark Eisner.”
Eisner looks at the Big Guy, makes eye contact, and repeats, “Mark Eisner.”
“I could have sworn the name used to be different,” Bo says.
“My father was Einhorn. But I changed it after high school.”
“Hiding the Jew?” Bo asks.
“Not exactly, far from observant. It was more the horn jokes, horny and so on. So now it’s Eisner, Mark Eisner.”
“Pleased to meet you, son of a horn,” Bo says. “Your father was a sp—”
“Speechwriter,” Eisner says, finishing it for him. “He wrote for Eisenhower.”
“Do the names Malcolm Moos or William Ewald ring a bell?” Tony asks.
“Moos was president of the University of Minnesota—which is where my dad’s family is from,” Eisner says. “It’s the land of a thousand lakes, L’Etoile du Nord. He grew up fishing on the St. Croix River.”
“I didn’t know Jews fished,” Bo says.
“Where do you think lox comes from? And the Jews of the Midwest were quite assimilated; they fished, they played poker, and they even drank.”
“I’m sure you know that Malcolm Moos wrote Eisenhower’s farewell speech that foretold the rise of the military industrial complex,” Tony says.
Imitating Eisenhower, Eisner intones, “ ‘Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.’ ”
“Which brings us to this morning.” The Big Guy jumps in, trying to get a handle on a situation that gives herding cats a new meaning—try herding cats who each have a certain male need to dominate.
The Big Guy stands before the group scrubbed pink and new, refreshed by having been brought back to life by Charlotte twice in one week.
He pulls out his cards. “I’m glad you’re here. I’m looking forward to hitting some balls with you, grilling some meat on the fire, having a drink or two, and talking with you about this fix we’re in.” They smile and nod. “What happened in Phoenix has been happening right under our noses. We have known for a while that within the party things were going south, and we elected, pun intended, to do nothing. We can no longer not know what we already know.”
“Quit beating around the bush,” Bo says. “Just spit it out.”
The Big Guy stops and takes a breath. “What happened in Phoenix . . .” Overcome with emotion, his lip quivers and he skips ahead. “As I watched the returns coming in, I felt as though I were watching the Hindenburg going up in flames. Only it was us; it was the American dream on the pyre. I looked around the room and everyone was blank, dumbstruck. ‘Maybe it’s not as bad as we think,’ I heard someone say. ‘He’s a good-looking man,’ another said, speaking of Barack Obama. What I saw in that Phoenix hotel room was the grim face of defeat, having backed the wrong horse in the absence of a better horse. And worse yet, knowing it wasn’t a horse race anymore, it wasn’t even a rat race, it was a farce, buffoonery.”
“A pasquinade,” Tony says softly.
“Oh, the big words,” Bo says.
“It was clear to me that a mockery had been made of the system that had for two hundred years anchored the land of the free, home of the brave.” The Big Guy’s voice crescendos as he reaches the word brave. “In the past there were times when I thought it didn’t really matter which side a man was on as long as he loved America. Being in that hotel room on Tuesday, listening to men speaking in platitudes, was a night unlike any other. It was the long goodbye, the end of not just an era but the end of the America as dreamed by our fathers.” The Big Guy’s eyes mist, like he might actually cry. He looks up, biting his lip, blinking the mist away. His eyes return to the room. ‘Are you bitter?’ Someone asked me that on Tuesday night.” He pauses. “ ‘Are you bitter?’ ” He says it slowly. “I said to him: ‘Bitter is an aftertaste. At the moment I’m pissed off.’ ” He makes a fist, thick and meaty. “Someone needs to grab this country by the balls and wake it the hell up.” He thumps himself in the chest with his fist. “I take it personally as a failure. My failure. We are here today because I didn’t take responsibility.” He thumps himself again. “My fault.” He’s apologizing and it’s making the other men in the room uncomfortable. “You might be saying to yourself, it’s not his fault; if he thinks it is, he’s got delusions of grandeur. Exactly! If it is not all on me, then what? Then it is on US. It’s not John McCain’s loss, it’s our loss. We are the ones who had every tool to see this coming, to take steps; and instead of paying attention, we stopped looking outward, we closed our eyes.”
“Fucking blind is what I’d call it,” Bo says.
“Let’s take a moment to ponder that and then we will begin again.” The Big Guy takes a breath and blows it out as if to clear the air. “Let’s start with this; we are lucky men, members of the good fortune club and the school of hard work and elbow grease, which is wonderful because we will need both in equal measures for what comes next.” He delivers his remarks in such a way that it’s clear he stayed up late ordering and reordering his sentences.
“We’re old-fashioned Americans, not assholes; we care about our country,” Bo says.
“This conversation is entirely reasonable, that we don’t want it all to turn to shit in some kind of socialist experiment—which, by the way, won’t work,” Kissick adds.
“And you, sir, you are a phoenix rising from the ashes,” Eisner, the scribe, says under his breath. The Big Guy looks at him. He heard it, but there’s no need to say anything.
“We can ask ourselves, what’s the call we’ve not answered? We are conservatives. We believe in free markets, individual liberty, the freedom to do what the hell you want. We come together with wisdom and experience and the awareness that democracy was not created in a heartbeat. Democracy is fragile, more fragile than any of us are comfortable admitting.”
“Dangerous times,” Kissick says. “It wouldn’t be surprising if what we think of as democracy is not the same as what they think of.”
Bo interrupts. “It bothers me that these ‘new right’ rodeo boys, as I call them, are getting in; they’re taking up seats that used to be ours.”
The Big Guy continues. “These last few months have been a roller coaster; it’s getting out from under us. Bottom line is, we’ve lost control of the Republican Party and it’s not just our ability to steer the course of the country; the party itself is about to blow into a thousand little pieces.”
“The party is already blown,” Bo says.
“I blame the young,” Kissick says, looking at Eisner.
“The young don’t know diddly,” Bo says.
Tony stands up, which immediately draws all eyes. He stretches his arms high over his head, abruptly bends his torso right and then left. His vertebrae audibly pop. “Very good introduction, putting things on the table. I want to go back to what you said about being a passionate conservative. Yet you feel we need to get involved. I’m hearing that we f’ed up, took our eyes off the ball, and woke up on Wednesday to find ourselves in a different place.”
“Correct.”
“Let’s keep it in context,” Tony says.
“This moment is happening at a specific time and place with history behind it and eternity ahead,” Eisner says.
“That’s a good line, history behind us and eternity ahead,” Tony says.
“Yeah, my father put something like that in a speech for Eisenhower or maybe it was for one of the Kennedys.”
“Must be nice to insert words into the mouths of powerful men,” Tony says.
“If I understand correctly, you’re about to be out of a job,” Bo says to Tony.
“The situation is fluid. My position often stays with the office rather than traveling with the man.”
“Interesting,” Bo says. “So you’d be willing to work for him?”
“I’m interested in supporting the office,” Tony says.
“Can we get back to the subject?” the Big Guy says. “We have lost our beacon, our North Star. Let’s remind ourselves of who we are and use history as not just our guide but as our inspiration to put things back on track.”
Bo jumps in again. “Among these rodeoers are extremists and we need to be careful not to align ourselves too closely with them.”
“Perhaps there is something these ‘extremists’ can offer?” Tony suggests.
“What’s that?”
“Cover,” Tony says.
“Are you suggesting we use the extremists to do some of the work for us?” Bo asks.
“It’s worth thinking about,” the Big Guy says.
“I’m not necessarily suggesting that they work for us but that perhaps their activities don’t work against us. Flamethrowers create noise and distraction, which can make our point of view appear more moderate. Depending on how things evolve, they’re potentially an asset.”
“I’m not looking to be moderate,” Bo says. “But I don’t want to look like a fool. To me, that’s what those boys are, fools.”
“What we’re gonna get from Obama is more government intervention,” Kissick says. “That’s something that even fools don’t want. In fact, it’s the last thing they want—liberal hobbyhorses on gun control and social intervention.”
“Transparency,” Eisner says. “That’s one of their favorite words.”
“The Constitution is about to be ripped to shreds,” Bo says. “Keep that in your crosshairs.”
