His Honor the Mayor

I pray that this being a work of fiction and with everything in this story being made up and not being based on any events, places or persons existing in real life that no parallels or similarities exist. But I have been wrong before.

I wrote this story to be entertaining. It is not partisan political commentary. I don’t play favorites, all politicians are scum. I tried hard to use completely made up names and details, the statistics mentioned cannot be correlated. The characters are not parodies of any actual persons. The protagonist is an unethical disreputable cad.

He uses power and influence to get what he wants, screwing everybody over in the process. That includes his daughter. I did not intend for him to be liked. He believes that if you are not a licensed attorney the only semi-valid constraint on your behavior is what people believe the law says and what the State’s Attorney will prosecute...

You have been warned, turn back before it’s too late. Please.

“I am Rahauten Werhmweud and I am asking for your vote on Tuesday.” I said smiling into the camera and its crew filming my fourteenth and hopefully final commercial of this election cycle. My final appeal to the voters before election day next week. “Just tell me how much it will cost me and my beautiful campaign manager will write you a check. I will even put money in the account to cover it if I win. If I lose fuck you.” Those were the unspoken but appropriate next lines, can’t say it all in thirty seconds.

‘President Werhmweud,’ ah that has a really nice ring to it. Although I have several more steps to complete, the Governor’s Mansion for instance, before moving on up to that white washed sandstone icon built in the former swamp now inhabited by more vertical alligators wearing thousand-dollar suits. That town of great civic monuments like K Street, and the Federal Mint. Imagine being able to bribe people with the money that you print yourself. Never forget that slaves built that big white house.

And face it bribery is the civilized way to get anything done in this world. Two categories of objects exist to move people, carrots and sticks. The Soviets found that it was hard to sustain a political or economic system predicated on threatening the people manufacturing the sticks to get them to manufacture sticks so you can threaten other people with those sticks. At some point a carrot was required.

A few old Soviet pensioners born during the Tsar’s reign lived long enough to have their pensions disappear with Gorbachev’s office in the Kremlin. Ancient Rome lasted for 13 centuries, 23 if you count Byzantium its successor. A tribute to the power of the carrot. Whores love carrots, and everyone is a whore, and also simultaneously a john. Some are better at it and some are worse at it some like the job while some hate it, but we are all nonetheless fundamentally whores and johns.

There are a few people like me who are honest, they know that they have a price. Then they go out into the world and they obtain it. They are the movers and the shakers, the ones to be reckoned with. Most people though are like the sheep who elected me four times to the City Council, conflicted peons set in opposition to themselves.

They are whores too, but they tell themselves that they are not. They have a price but tell themselves that they are not for sale. Because of this inefficiency they can be bought for a low price. Hamburger, chips and a soda on wax paper, rather than a medium-rare peppercorn encrusted Filet Mignon, roasted vegetable salad and Pinot Noir in crystal, and on bone china with a linen table cloth and napkin.

I make no qualms about what I want, you may hate me, but I am the most honest person you are likely to ever know. I blackmailed my way into graduating fourth in my class from high school. Fourth because given my history to have been one of the three speakers at graduation would have been suspicious.

I cheated my way through college, connived my way through law school, bought my bar exam, becoming a top earner at Dewey Cheatem and Howe the top law firm in town. My success was predicated on seeing who had the most Gold Doubloons and figuring out how to get them to willingly, happily give them to me to rescue them from their current predicament.

Some of the people I went to law school with were inspired by President Taft, John Jay or Thurgood Marshall. I was inspired by the protagonists in the novels of John Grisham, a literary how-to guide. He taught me well, I know enough not to let my girlfriend hold my ill-gotten gains for me. Waiting like a Putz for someone who will never show. No, it has to be someone who had a much stronger attachment to me than that.

I really like my wife of twenty-two years. She is one really hot piece of ass and we have lots of grown-up fun when she isn’t too busy acting like she cares about some cause, shopping or fucking someone else. But she cannot be ‘the one’ I boost into the stratosphere to continue my legacy. We have a good working relationship, she likes my position and influence, credit cards and freedom to pursue other discreet relationships.

I like her social status and respectability, her willingness to screw me roughly half the number of times that she actually agreed to and when she invites her ‘friends’ to play. I don’t push it after all I also like not waking up dead with her grandfather’s Fairbairn-Sykes stuck between my C3 and C4 vertebrae like her ex did.

There is really only one constraint on what a person can do in this world. What those around him will let him get away with. The key is what others believe that the law says. I would say think but get real most people don’t think they believe. The State’s Attorney is the ultimate judge, if he won’t prosecute then you win. If he does those Gold Doubloons you’ve stashed pay for other people’s dreams of glory. The actual letter of the law is important only to the licensed professionals paid to write or interpret it.

One of my earliest cases was thought to be a real loser, I was the young associate offered up as a sacrifice to defend an important client’s doomed daughter. Our firm’s client, think of Lauren Bacall’s character in “The Big Sleep’ or Rachel Ward’s in ‘Against All Odds,’ she was as beautiful as either and presumed by her family and her law firm to be as guilty as both.

I took her father’s money, or rather the firm did as a retainer and I offered her a choice, to be regularly fucking her new husband an aspiring associate lawyer, driving a new Beemer, living in a fine home with a maid or to be regularly fucked with both hands by her drugged-out biker chick cellmate Crazy Mary while the dyke guards watched and took side bets after an eight hour day of doing the prison laundry.

Being smart as well as beautiful she made her decision in about three minutes after a brief contract negotiation mostly crafting a stipulation that I got the goods, and let me tell you that they were really, really good after her acquittal. Four months later the trial Judge following his summary judgement apologized to her, her family, her lawyers and the jury for wasting everybody’s time and then admonished the State’s Attorney for his poor choice in bringing such a weak case before him.

Don’t ask me what it cost to get that acquittal let’s just say that if I had lost, the people from whom I borrowed all the money ... Said money that I distributed like a freaking ATM ... Those folks would have buried me out in the boondocks somewhere in pieces. Most likely after breaking every bone in my body, twice. Instead I got one child and a lifetime of eye candy and a semi-reliable promise of non-exclusive benefits. She got Neiman-Marcus, Dior, Saks, Beemer, Burdines, a penthouse downtown, and a maid.

It has worked out pretty well, my wife fucks me enough that I don’t contemplate turning off her cash flow, and she’s gotten a bit spicier over time inviting her current others to playtime in our glass house in the sky. It’s fun watching two attractive girls going down on each other and bringing each other off several times before lining their pretty butts up side by side so I can diddle them both.

Thrust, thrust, thrust, switch ... Thrust, Thrust, Thrust, Thrust and switch ... Fucking in 3 4 time. It’s fun going to town on her ass while her current beau is throating her. Or better for her vise-versa. None of her young studs care for her like I do. It’s much safer to have me in her throat, I pause from time to time to let her breathe.

Having General Sternwood and Mrs. Wyler as in-laws helped jump start my political career and having their classy daughter on my arm at public events seems to make people trust me, or at least benignly envy me. My beautiful Baby Girl came along fourteen months after her mother’s acquittal.

She was ten and the perfect campaign prop when I was first elected to the City Council. “Wehrmweud cares about women, children, families, schools, health-care, crime, inflation you name it because it affects his family,” that’s what we paid the political operatives to say.

Baby Girl has benefitted from my influence as well, it got her into one of the best private schools in town where she was valedictorian at seventeen, coincidentally three years after the city vacated a street and sold several tax properties to that school for one dollar apiece. Their new building, track and playground are beautiful. She graduated summa-cum-laude at twenty from City College with a BA in Political Science.

Really why should a Poly-Sci major take classes in foreign history or language, art or natural science. Her graduation reception was held at their new downtown campus located in the in the ‘Old Post Office’ complex, part of a redevelopment zone enacted two years earlier.

Here we are today at the Biltmore Hotel, in a five-room suite, waiting, talking to precinct captains and fixers, computer geeks and spin doctors. Watching each new report on three television sets, staffers listening to a half dozen portable radios.

The deal I struck was unusual and most people did not agree with my handing over the reins of my mayoral campaign to a twenty-one-year-old campaign manager just a year from her degree, who had never in her life held a paying job. But I had taught her well, she liked to tag along with me and watch what I did at City Hall, which was equal parts get re-elected and make deals to help my many friends.

I know her mother sent her away so she could shop or sleep, get drunk or sleep off being drunk and or fuck one of her numerous others. But her mother didn’t explicitly tell her to come here, that was Baby Girl’s choice, it showed interest and initiative. So, at age twelve or so she was a part-time unpaid campaign intern.

She learned well and she was a lot more competent than most of those clueless college kids with all of their impertinent and distracting questions, “shouldn’t we use our office to help people,” “is that legal,” “is that ethical,” “how does this coffeemaker work,” or “why can’t I just mail this envelope, what’s in it.” Baby Girl knew how to deliver a small brown paper bag without calling attention to herself or looking inside of it.

The few people who were not appalled at my hiring Baby Girl as my campaign manager would have deserted me had they heard the contractual terms that had not been made public.