Chapter 157: Fatherhood

Tuesday, September 14, 2004

I stared at Ari Fleischer, slack jawed and disbelieving. Suddenly he had a nervous look on his face. “Mister President?”

I took a deep breath and said, “You want to repeat that, Ari?”

“According to the story, Michael Petrelli is the son of Jeana Colosimo and you. There is reportedly a birth certificate, issued at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, New York, on March 29, 1974. Did you know this Jeana Colosimo?” He was reading from a notepad in his hands.

I smiled to myself and shook my head. “Good Lord! Jeana Colosimo? I haven’t heard that name in thirty years.”

“Mister President? Did you know this woman?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Maybe, Ari. I knew a Jeana Colosimo back in high school, in fact she was my girlfriend for a couple of years. That was in Towson, Maryland, though, not Queens. Is there any proof on this? Where’d this Petrelli name come from?”

“No idea, Mister President. Could it be another scam?” We had been hit by a hoax about a year ago, also, when some dim bulb claimed I was the father of her love child. It took about ten minutes to determine that she was a hooker in San Francisco and got knocked up when I was at the G-8 Summit in France.

I shrugged. “No idea. Probably. It’s obviously happened before. What do you think we should do about it?”

“First, tell me about the girl you dated. Were you serious about each other?” he asked.

I nodded. “This was all before I met Marilyn, of course. We met in college. This was high school. Anyway, yes, we were pretty serious. Let me think, we met near the start of my junior year, so I was...” I had to do the math in my head. “I probably had just turned sixteen. We dated until the summer after I graduated, not quite two years.”

“And you were sexually active?”

I smiled again. “Very!”

“How come she has never come up before?” he asked.

“Good question.” I thought for a second, and then snapped my fingers. “Of course! Jeana was a year behind me! When I was a junior, she was a sophomore, and when I was a senior, she was a junior! More than that, though, they built a new high school. Towson High was way overcrowded, so they built Loch Raven. At the start of my senior year, they split the school boundaries. Anybody who was a sophomore or junior in the new boundary went to Loch Raven. All the seniors stayed at Towson. She would have been a graduate of Loch Raven! That’s why none of the reporters who ever investigated me ever found her! She wasn’t a student at Towson High! They tracked down all my classmates, but she was a year behind me at another school. No wonder nobody ever stuck a microphone in her face!”

“I have somebody running out to get a copy of the Enquirer. Maybe they have a picture you can look at, see if it’s her. Why’d you break up?”

“Well, like I said, I was a year ahead of her. I was heading off to college, and she still had her senior year to finish. Besides, remember when you asked me once about how I busted my nose?”

It took him a second to remember that conversation, and then his eyes popped open. “NO! Don’t tell me!”

“Bingo! Her old man was running an armed guard around her the rest of the summer. I never heard from her again.”

“I don’t think I want to tell anybody that particular story!” he replied. “Alright, let’s surprise them with the truth. If anybody asks about the story, I’ll simply say that we don’t know anything about this Michael Petrelli. If there is anything to it, they are going to figure it out for us soon enough. If it’s a scam, it’s better if the press figures it out, and not us.”

“Okay.”

“What if it’s not a scam?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

Ari looked at me and said, “What if it’s true? What if this is the Jeana Colosimo you used to date, and this guy really is your son? What do we do then?”

It was my turn to shrug. “No idea, Ari. It sounds pretty far-fetched to me. A thirty-year-old guy pops up in the middle of a Presidential campaign claiming to be my love child? He’s probably just looking for a payoff.”

He nodded. “Probably. I’ll let you know.”

Ari left and I sat there a few minutes more, reminiscing about my misspent youth. Jeana Colosimo! I hadn’t thought about her in years! She had been the love of my life at one point, but even then, I always knew she was just a placeholder until I got to RPI and was able to maneuver my way to meet Marilyn. I couldn’t imagine Jeana getting pregnant, though. She had been on the Pill. I had never been that stupid!

Ari brought by a copy of the Enquirer after lunch. There I was on the cover, along with a picture of a very nondescript man in his late twenties or early thirties, and a picture of the mother. She looked vaguely familiar, but if it was Jeana, she had not aged well. The Jeana I had known was a centerfold knockout. The picture showed a middle-aged woman who had put on a lot of weight. I just shrugged at Ari and told him I couldn’t tell.

I told Marilyn about it that evening, over dinner. (“How was work, dear?” “Fine, honey. I was hit with another paternity suit!”) The last time this happened, Marilyn was royally pissed and wanted the hooker put in jail. She wasn’t happy, but she understood.

“This might be real?” she asked.

“I have no idea. I dated a girl named Jeana Colosimo, that is a fact. Is this woman that person? Is this man her son? I have no idea. This was all thirty years ago. I have no idea what happened to Jeana after I went to college.”

“She’s the girl you told me about, the one you dated the longest in high school, wasn’t she?”

“Yeah, I suppose. You never met her because she was a year behind me and ended up over at Loch Raven.”

She thought for a second, and then quietly asked. “Did you love her?”

I stood up from the table and came around to her side. I picked her up and gave her a big hug. “That was long before I met you. Okay, yes, I loved her. I also told you once, that you weren’t the first woman I loved, but you were the last. Nothing has changed since then, nothing.”

Marilyn hugged me back fiercely at that. I let her sit down again and went back to my plate. She giggled for a moment and then asked, “Did this Jeana get the Carl Buckman Experience?”

I snorted my wine out through my nose, which caused a burning sensation. Marilyn was laughing at my discomfort, and I just pointed at her. “You are pushing your luck!” That just made her laugh even harder.

Unsurprisingly, Ari was asked the next morning at the press briefing about the story in the Enquirer. I was watching it on the closed-circuit television.

Q: “What about the story in The National Enquirer about President Buckman having an illegitimate son?”

A: “Well, I can tell you that when I mentioned the words National and Enquirer, the first thing the President said to me was that Elvis was still dead and that there were no aliens in Roswell. I think that pretty much sums up the President’s thoughts on the subject.”

Q: “So the President is stating that Michael Petrelli is not his son?”

A: “The President is stating he has never met or heard of Michael Petrelli. I think it is pretty suspicious, though, that this Petrelli character pops up in the middle of a hotly contested and close election campaign.”

Q: “What if he is related to President Buckman?”

A: “I am not going to play the what-if game. What if aliens land on the South Lawn? Ask me when the aliens land.”

I smiled to myself. I liked the line about the aliens. That made it to the evening news. Meanwhile I had much more important things to worry about, like debating John Kerry, and, oh yeah, running the country.

The story didn’t go away, however. By the end of the week, it was being reported in both the New York Times and the New York Post that the Jeana Colosimo in Queens really was the same Jeana Colosimo I had known at Towson High. The Colosimos had moved from New York City to Baltimore in 1971, which was when I met her, and they still had family in Queens. (Mr. and Mrs. Colosimo had died several years ago.) Then, in 1973, the Colosimo family sent Jeana back to New York City to live with several very strict aunts and attend a parochial girl’s school in Queens. That didn’t work out so well, since by the middle of the fall semester she was very obviously ‘in the family way’. The nuns kicked her out as a bad influence and Jeana ended up getting a GED right around the time she gave birth to a son. She named him Michael after her father, to try and get back into his good graces but that failed, and she ended up living with her aunts for a few months. Desperate to get away from them (they were from the old country and barely spoke English and spent most of the time lecturing her in Italian) she hooked up with the first guy she met, Mario Petrelli. The marriage didn’t last even a full year, but by then she had been able to get out of the house and start getting a few college credits at the nearby community college. By that time, she was calling the baby Michael Petrelli, but it wasn’t clear if Mario had adopted the child. Jeana spent the next thirty years in Queens, working as a secretary in various office jobs, and died in a car accident in June.

Meanwhile, Michael Petrelli was being investigated as well. Michael had grown up in Queens, and his most noticeable accomplishment was a total lack of accomplishment. He had graduated from high school with middling grades at best, and never gone to college. He had gotten some training in being an auto mechanic over the years and had spent the last ten years working as a mechanic, occasionally employed, and occasionally under the table. He had alternated between having his own apartment and living with Jeana in her apartment. He had first learned about me when he was going through his mother’s things after her funeral and discovered her diaries. His birth certificate didn’t have his father’s name on it.

The New York papers were able to track down a few cousins of Jeana, who reported that Jeana had been ‘knocked up by some guy down in Baltimore’ but they never knew the name. They also reported that Jeana had always had a diary and wrote everything in it. I began to get a sinking feeling in my stomach about all of this. One of the cousins reported that she herself had gotten pregnant as a teenager, and that Jeana knew it, and thought it was romantic, at least until she had to start taking care of a baby on her own. Is that what made Jeana go off birth control, a desire to emulate her cousin?

Mario Petrelli was tracked down. He turned out to be an insurance salesman in Hempstead. He had married Jeana, but it hadn’t worked out and ended almost as soon as it began. No, he had never adopted Michael, and no, he had no idea he was using his name. He hadn’t talked to Jeana in well over twenty years and didn’t even know she had died.

The biggest question in my mind was why Jeana had never told me. Okay, she was in Queens, and I had left Baltimore for several years, but it wouldn’t have been difficult to track me down, either at Rensselaer or in the Army. My lawyers informed me she could have had a claim against me for child support at least until Michael was eighteen, and maybe beyond, depending on circumstances. Maybe she thought I didn’t have any money, but by the mid-Eighties I was becoming well enough known as a businessman that she must have learned about me. Still, I had never heard from her. Shame? Pride? Now I would never know.

By Sunday morning, there was more than enough smoke floating around to start hearing the word fire. Will Brucis, who was appearing on Meet the Press, was asked point blank about the mounting evidence that I had an illegitimate child. “What evidence? All we’ve heard so far is that President Buckman had a relationship with a woman when he was a teenager who may or may not have been this man’s mother. He hasn’t contacted the President and he hasn’t asked for any DNA or paternity test. All we know for sure is that he sold a story to a tabloid that can’t even be called a newspaper.” The Washington Post gave the whole thing the nickname ‘Babygate’. How cute!

Will’s comments managed to move the ball, but not necessarily in a helpful direction. Michael Petrelli called a lawyer, one of those sharks who give ambulance chasers a bad name. I was informed that Angelo DeSantos had a series of billboards with his likeness on them near local police stations and jails, and near any dangerous intersections he could find. Michael might be an idiot, but Angelo knew a gold mine when he fell into one. Michael had already sold his story to the Enquirer, cheap, for living expenses. Angelo was going to raise the bar considerably higher and come after me. According to the about to be released Forbes 400, I was the 10^th wealthiest American, with an estimated fortune of just under $14.1 billion. By the end of that week Angelo DeSantos had filed a lawsuit for half of my assets, just over $7 billion, along with thirty years of appropriate child support and fines and other payments, for another $1 billion. What’s the Italian word for chutzpah?

It got better after that. Petrelli had promised the Enquirer that he would let them print Jeana’s diaries. DeSantos read one of them and shitcanned that whole deal. He was going to have them published as a memoir, ‘Secrets of a President’s Lover’, or some such crap. Jeana must have been very impressed, which isn’t all that hard to do with a teenage girl. Her diaries were extremely explicit, much more than could be printed in a newspaper, although redacted snippets were tossed out as teasers. There was just enough let out to make me think this might be legit.

Brewster McRiley and Ed Gillespie were beside themselves over this. Our carefully crafted message that we were the bunch that knew what we were doing was coming down around our ears. Everybody in the senior campaign ranks was wondering if this was the most incredibly perfect October Surprise ever invented, but nobody was going to kill a middle-aged woman in Queens in June to screw up my reelection. No, Michael Petrelli, the greedy bastard, had managed to do that all on his own. John Kerry kept his mouth shut and looked Presidential, with that somber and mournful look he possessed. Instead, he let his designated asshole, John Edwards, make all the jokes he could get away with, at least until I called Kerry and reminded him of the favor I had done him with the Swift Boaters. He shut down Edwards after that.

On Tuesday the 28^th, we had our debate in Houston, the same city where George Bush had announced to the country that I was his V.P. pick. It was a solidly Republican city, and I got a warm welcome. Still, Babygate hung over everything. There were no questions about it during the debate, and John Kerry never said a word about it. John Edwards, the philandering ass, had a team of joke writers that Mel Brooks would have been proud of, and made a few more jokes at my expense whenever he could get away with it. The best that we could say in response was that it wasn’t the behavior to be expected of a Vice President, unless Edwards was running for Vice President of a drunken fraternity. John McCain promised to chew him up as needed.

My debate performance was uninspired, at least to my way of thinking. We spent half the time on domestic issues and half on foreign policy. Neither one of us truly beat the other. Regardless, since this was the first debate I had ever been in, and expectations for me were extremely low, the fact that I walked out on stage without my pants falling around my knees benefited me. The pundits ruled the debate a draw and congratulated me on my performance in the face of personal adversity. Good grief!

The idiocy mounted through October. Angelo DeSantos was going full bore New York crazy on me. He filed an injunction against the Secret Service to prevent their harassment of his client, which was insane, since the Secret Service had never even talked to his client. He filed a paternity suit against me, claims against Marilyn and the kids so that I couldn’t hide my assets with them, liens on my home in Hereford and my jet, filed suit against Suzie and her family for some damn reason, and half a dozen different lawsuits against me for harassment and civil rights violations. I was going to be spending my fortune fighting the court cases.

I took a day off and met with my attorneys and the White House Counsel, John Weisenholtz. The Counsel’s office wouldn’t fight my battles for me, but they would protect the office of the Presidency. Their joint verdict, on everything, was that this was all smoke and mirrors. None of this would ever go to trial and would all get thrown out in any pretrial stage. I could tie this up in court until we all died of old age. The claim for half of my assets was based on the nonsensical legal theory that Jeana Colosimo and Michael Petrelli formed a ‘second family’, and therefore deserved half of my assets, just like Marilyn, Charlie, Holly, and Molly who would split up the other half. There was no possible way that I owed thirty years of child support that had never been sought by his mother.

On the other hand, this was America. Anybody can sue anybody else for anything whatsoever. I could stand on my good name and spend the rest of my life fighting this asshole, or I could buy him off. I might have the law on my side, but Petrelli had a certain vestige of public sentiment, and he had some extremely racy diaries that I didn’t need to see the light of day,