Chapter 104: Momentum

The campaign continued to gain momentum after the diner incident. During the next month I picked up another fourteen endorsements from various local police chiefs and fire department captains. We were on a roll! Okay, the Sun had endorsed Stewart, but everyone had known that was going to happen. He was a Democrat, and the Sun was a city paper, which heavily favored the Democrats, and they had endorsed him for every election he had run to date. It wasn’t an issue for us; we didn’t expect it to matter to anyone out in the Ninth.

Andy Stewart was running scared. He was spending money like he owned a printing press, and he had bankers donating cash to replace it. We matched him ad for ad, and what surprised me was how many donations I was pulling in. It wasn’t all coming out of my own pocket. I was constantly calling people, thanking them, and writing notes to them. He was slinging mud left and right, and any semblance to the truth was accidental. He brought up the ‘billionaire buying a seat’ theme, the ‘murderer’ theme, the fact I was disowned, that I was a ‘rogue vigilante’, I was ‘unstable and mentally deranged’ (that one he got from some shrink he bought who never even met me.) He even claimed that I didn’t need a cane and that I was faking the limp for sympathy! We just released the medical report from Walter Reed declaring the damage to be permanent and qualifying for a medical discharge from the Army.

One of the silliest points in the entire campaign came when Andy Stewart dug up my valedictory address from Towson High and used highly edited excerpts to show my many flaws. “We are the largest, the richest, the most privileged, and the most pampered generation of Americans yet born” and “Ours seems to be a legacy of entitlement” and “We will be known as a bunch of whiny bastards.” He even sliced words out of multiple sentences. All these were plastered in ads and television ads to show how out of touch I was with my own generation and with my fellow citizens.

We responded by taking out a full-page ad and reprinting the speech in full. It was too long to make a television ad out of, but we did highlight some of the better phrases and had an actor with a nice deep baritone repeat them. Brewster was all over me about not telling him about the speech. He loved it and would have used it earlier in the campaign. I simply told him I had forgotten it; it happened seventeen years before, for Christ’s sake! Brew just chewed my ass and asked what else I had forgotten. (How do you tell somebody something you’ve forgotten? There’s a major logical inconsistency in that!)

At that point even the Baltimore Sun began to be exasperated by their favorite son. They began reporting a tally of the lies coming from Stewart headquarters. The Sunday Sun two days before the election even ran a cheeky cartoon on their editorial page. It showed a couple examining two identical graphs, one showing a rising line called ‘Buckman’s Poll Figures’ and the other showing a matching line called ‘Stewart’s False Claims’. One character was saying to the other, ‘It looks dead even to me.’ That one we cut out and put into a scrapbook.

And then, suddenly it was over. I campaigned right through Sunday and Monday and called it quits at dinner time. Marilyn’s parents drove down Monday. My wife had told them that no matter what happened in the election, we were going on a vacation, and we needed them to babysit for a week. Tuesday, we got a sitter for the kids and then we drove her parents over to campaign headquarters and showed them around. The place was deserted, though. We had done what could be done. There would be no more ads, no more interviews, no more mailers or flyers, no more posters. We had a few people in making phone calls to see if supporters had made it to the polls yet, and a few volunteers were out driving old folks to the polls. Otherwise, we were done. If we hadn’t won by now, there was little we could do on Election Day to change things.

At lunchtime, we drove Big Bob and Harriet over to the Westminster Diner. They had seen the video, like about half of America had. To be honest, when we walked into the place, I damn near died laughing. Nick Papandreas had festooned the place with “Buckman for Congress!” posters, which simply astonished Big Bob. A hard-core Democrat from before he was born, it was a wrenching change in his worldview to realize that by this time tomorrow his baby girl might be married to a Republican Congressman!

Nick came out of the kitchen as we came in the door, and he rushed over to us. My hand was shaken so vigorously I thought it was going to come off, and he gave Marilyn a hug. “Come in, come in! I get you a good table!”

“Nick, thank you! I want to introduce you to some people. These are Marilyn’s parents, Bob and Harriet Lefleur. Bob, Harriet, this is Nick Papandreas. He owns the Westminster Diner.”

“Welcome! It’s nice to meet you! Come, follow me!” He led the way over towards a large round table on the side, and then snapped his fingers at a young man who scurried over. “Get water and have Anastasia come out.”

“Sure thing, Uncle Nick.”

To Big Bob and Harriet, I said, “Nick’s got more relatives working for him than you two do.”

We sat down, and Nick stood there at the side. “Anastasia will be your waitress today.”

“Where’s Amy?” I asked.

“She has school today, but she’ll be in this evening.”

“How’s she feeling? She alright now? No scarring?”

“No, she’s fine. A little scar, but it is fading away. I tell her tonight you asked,” he replied.

I smiled. “You do that, but more important, you tell her to make sure she votes for me. I need all the help I can get!”

“I do that, too! I tell everyone, ‘Vote for Buckman!’ I tell all my family, too! I a Democrat, but I tell them to vote for you.”

I laughed at that. “If I can get your entire family to vote for me, I’ll win for sure! Thank you, Nick, I appreciate it.”

“After that night, I have to vote for you. That was a bad night. Me down, Amy down, that poor girl getting beat up in my own restaurant ... that was a bad night! Congressman Stewart, he should be ashamed of himself!”

Harriet was just sitting there open mouthed, listening to all this. Some more customers came in, and Nick went off to help them. A twenty-something waitress came out of the kitchen and smiled at us. She looked as Greek as Nick did, but her accent was pure Maryland. “Uncle Nick bending your ear, Congressman?”

“I only get to be Congressman if enough of your family votes for me,” I told her.

“Uncle Nick will get you in. Just keep coming around for lunch when you’re here,” she replied.

“That’s a campaign promise I can keep, for sure.”

Anastasia gave us our menus and gave us a few minutes to look at them. I went with one of my favorites, a Reuben and a chocolate shake. After she took our order, Big Bob said, “So this is where you had that fight?”

I nodded. “Yeah, right over there.” I pointed towards the entrance and cash register. “The one girl was in that booth, and Nick and Amy, the waitress who got clobbered, were over there. You guys saw that on the news?”

“We saw it. We weren’t sure we liked seeing you on the news that way.” He glanced over at his wife, and Harriet just shrugged her massive shoulders.

“It wasn’t my idea. I couldn’t let him just keep beating people up, though, could I?”

Marilyn came to my defense. “Let’s face it. I married a hero!” She leaned over and kissed my cheek, and I blushed.

“You know, if Nick really does get his family to vote for me, I’m a shoo-in, but I’ll have to keep eating a lot of meals here.”

After lunch, we drove over to Hereford, and I showed the Lefleurs around the office. We had expanded even more since the last time they were around, and now we had the entire office building in the office park. (There were still three other buildings around us.) We had moved some of the legal and accounting functions upstairs and left the traders and partners downstairs. After that, we drove to the high school and voted. It was strange to see my name on the voting machine, but I pulled the little lever and smiled. Then we went home and rescued the sitter.

Over dinner Charlie asked, “Are we going to have to move if you win?” The girls were still a little young to understand about the election, and only pointed out when Daddy was on the television, but Charlie was a bright little shit! He had learned about some of this stuff in school already.

“I wasn’t planning to. Why?”

“Well, won’t you have to go to Washington? Isn’t that, like, really far away?”

I nodded in understanding. “Ah, well, it’s not that far away. It’s a couple of hours by car. Maybe I’ll have to get a girlfriend down there and stay at her place when I’m in Washington.” I winked at Marilyn’s parents as I said this.

Charlie started laughing. Marilyn fell into the trap, though, and started hooting and hollering! “There’s not going to be any girlfriends! You’ll be coming home!” She kept going like this for another minute, and even the Lefleurs were laughing at her. She then did the usual finger wag and said, “You think you’re so smart! See if I ever vote for you again.”

“You told me you were voting Democrat, that way we’d cancel each other out.”

“Smartass!”

“Better than being a dumbass,” I responded.

“With you, they’re the same thing!”

Holly and Molly were laughing at their mother now, too. I just sat there and smiled.

The polls were going to close at eight, and we wanted to be at the campaign reception before then. We had rented the Westminster Best Western, which was about the biggest banquet hall in the area. Anything bigger was down inside the Beltway. We had a podium set up at one end of the room with a few flags behind it, and space for cameras and reporters in front of it. I figured we would get a few of each, considering the colossal nonsense we had gone through with this campaign! Oh, and the free drinks for the reporters wouldn’t hurt, either. Everybody else simply got tickets for two free drinks, after which they had to buy their own.

We got there around half past seven, and found the place surprisingly filled. It was more than just the campaign volunteers, too. My partners at the Buckman Group were there, along with the Destriers and Jack Nerstein. Brewster McRiley was running around, nervous as all get-out, and driving people nuts.

I finally grabbed him and pulled him out of the room. “Brew, you’re going crazy. Now settle down before we tie you into a chair.” I led the way to the suite we had booked as our little headquarters. The powers that be followed along.

“But there’s so much to do,” he protested.

“No, Brewster, there isn’t. It’s all over by now, except for the counting. There’s nothing left to do except give a speech and have a party.” I pushed him towards an armchair and pushed him down into it. “Now, stay there. Do you have a girlfriend? Do I need to have her sit on you to keep you in place?”

He smiled at me. “No, no girlfriend.”

“A boyfriend then?”

His eyes popped open. “Jesus, NO!” I just smiled at him until he realized I was goofing on him. “Marilyn’s right, you really are a son of a bitch!”

“There you go. Now calm down and relax. Have fun and say thank you to all the volunteers. Either we win and I give a victory speech and we have a party, or I lose and I give a concession speech, and we all get drunk and cry. It’s what us mathematicians call a binary outcome, a zero-sum game. I will let you stand up if you promise to go find a beer and have a drink.”

Brew rolled his eyes but promised, and I laughed as I sent him out. John and Jack Nerstein came in with some Solo cups and a bucket of ice, and a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of Sprite. We poured ourselves a round of drinks. “Mud in your eyes, gentlemen!” Jack said.

“Down the hatch!” I agreed.

“Skoal!” said John. He drank some, and then asked, “You ready for this?”

“It’s too late to back out now.” I had another swallow. “I don’t know which scares me more, losing and having to face people afterwards, or winning and actually having to be a Congressman! What in the fuck do I know about being a Congressman?”