T. Boyle - Greasy Lake and Other Stories

By the time the convention rolled around, the New Moon was waxing full. I remember the way the phones rang off the hook: would we take a back seat to Fritz, throw our support to John, accept the VP nomination on a split-issue platform? Seven weeks earlier no one had even deigned to notice us — half the time we didn’t even get press coverage. But New Moon fever was sweeping the country — we’d picked up a bundle of delegates, won in Texas, Ohio, and California, and suddenly we were a force to reckon with.

“George,” Colin was saying (I’m sure it was Colin, because I’d canned Carter and Rutherford to avoid the confusion), “I still say we’ve got to broaden our base. The one issue has taken us leagues, I admit it, but—”

I cut him off. I was George L. Thorkelsson, former representative, former senator, and current governor of the Mesopotamia of the Midwest, the glorious, farinaceous, black-loamed hogbutt of the nation, and I wasn’t about to listen to any defeatist twaddle from some Ivy League pup. “Hey diddle, diddle,” I said, “the cat and the fiddle.” I was feeling pretty good.

It was then that Gina — Madame Scutari, that is — spoke up. Lorna and I had discovered her in the kitchen of Mama Gina’s, a Nashville pasta house, during the Tennessee primary. She’d made an abbacchio alla cacciatora that knocked my socks off, and when we’d gone back to congratulate her she’d given me a look of such starstruck devotion I felt like the new Messiah. It seemed that the Madame (who wasn’t Italian at all, but Hungarian) was a part-time astrologist and clairvoyant, and had had a minor seizure at the very moment of my epiphany in the DC 10—her left arm had gone numb and she’d pitched forward into a platter of antipasto with the word “lunar” on her lips. She told us all this in a rush of malapropisms and tortured syntax, while cauldrons of marinara sauce bubbled around her and her faintly mustachioed upper lip rose and fell like a shuttlecock. Then she’d leaned forward to whisper in my ear like a priestess of the oracle. Leo, she’d said, hitting my sign on the nose, Scorpio in the ascendant . Then she drew up her rouged face and gave me a broad Magyar wink and I could feel her lips moving against my ear: A New Moon Soon , she rasped. From that moment on she’d become one of my closest advisers.

Now she cleared her throat with a massive dignity, her heavy arms folded over her bust, and said, in that delicate halting accent that made you feel she could read the future like a Neapolitan menu, “Not to worry, Georgie: I see you rising like the lion coming into the tenth house.”

“But George”—Colin was nearly whining—”gimmicks are okay, but they can only take you so far. Think of the political realities. ”

Lorna and the Madame exchanged a look. I watched as a smile animated my wife’s features. It was a serene smile, visionary, the smile of a woman who already saw herself decked out in a gown like a shower of gold and presiding over tea in the Blue Room.

I turned to Colin and tersely reminded him of the political realities his late colleagues were currently facing. “We need no naysayers here,” I added. “You’re either on the bus or you’re off it.” He looked at me as if he were about to say something he would regret, but the Madame cut him off, her voice elevated yet soft, the syllables falling together with a kiss that cut through the confusion and the jangling of telephones like a benediction: “Promise them the moon,” she said.

The convention itself was child’s play. We’d captured the imagination of the country, restored the average working man’s faith in progress, given America a cause to stand up and shout about. We split the thing down the middle and I took my delegates outside the party to form the first significant rump party since the days of Henry Wallace. We were the New Moon Party and they came to us in droves. Had anyone ever stopped to consider how many amateur astrologists there were out there? How many millions who guided their every move — from love affairs to travel plans to stock purchases and the most auspicious time for doing their nails — according to the conjunction of the planets and the phases of the moon? Or how many religious fanatics and sci-fi freaks there were, Trekkies, lunatics, werewolves, extraterrestrialists, saucer nuts, and the like? Not to mention women, who’ve had to carry that white-goddess baggage around with them since the dawn of time. Well, here was an issue that could unite them all. Nixon had put men on the moon; I was going to bring the moon to men. And women.

Oh, there were the usual cries of outrage and anathema, the usual blockheads, whiners, and pleaders, but we paid them no heed. NASA was behind us, one hundred percent. So were U.S. Steel, the AFL–CIO, the Teamsters, Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Big Oil, and just about anyone else in the country who worked for a living. A New Moon. Just think of the jobs it would create!

The incumbent — a man twelve years my senior who looked as if he’d been stuffed with sand — didn’t stand a chance. Oh, they painted him up and pointed him toward the TV monitors and told him when to laugh or cry or make his voice tremble with righteousness, and they had him recite the usual litany about the rights of the rich and the crying need for new condos on Maui, and they prodded him to call the New Moon a hoax, a technological impossibility, a white elephant, and a liberal-humanist threat to the integrity of the interplanetary heavens, but all to no avail. It almost hurt me to see his bowed head, smeared blusher, and plasticized hair as he conceded defeat to a national TV audience after I’d swept every precinct in the country with the exception of a handful in Santa Barbara, where he’d beaten me by seventeen votes, but what the hell. This was no garden party, this was politics.

Sadly, however, unity and harmony are not the way of the world, and no leader, no matter how visionary — not Napoleon, not Caesar, not Mohammed, Louis XVI, Jim Jones, or Jesus of Nazareth — can hope to stave off the tide of discord, malcontent, envy, hatred, and sheer seething anarchy that inevitably rises up to crush him with the force of a tidal wave. And so it was, seven years later, my second term drawing to a close and with neither hope nor precedent for a third, that I found the waves crashing at very doorstep. I, who had been the most heralded chief executive in the country’s history, I, who had cut across social strata, party differences, ethnic divisions, and international mistrust with my vision of a better world and a better future, was well on my way to becoming the most vilified world leader since Attila the Hun.

Looking back on it, I can see that perhaps my biggest mistake was in appointing Madame Scutari to my Cabinet. The problem wasn’t so much her lack of experience — I understand that now — but her lack of taste. She took something truly grand — a human monument before which all the pyramids, Taj Mahals, and World Trade Centers paled by comparison — and made it tacky. For that I will never forgive her.

At any rate, when I took office back in January of ’85, I created a new Cabinet post that would reflect the chief priority of my administration — I refer to the now infamous post of secretary for Lunar Affairs — and named Gina to occupy it. Though she’d had little formal training, she knew her stars and planets cold, and she was a woman of keen insight and studied judgment. I trusted her implicitly. Besides which, I was beleaguered by renegade scientists, gypsies, sci-fi hacks (one of whom was later to write most of my full-moon addresses to the nation), amateur inventors, and corporation execs, all clamoring for a piece of the action — and I desperately needed someone to sort them out. Gina handled them like diners without reservations.