Peter Orner: Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

CHICAGO, 1969

Two-term Governor Cheeky Al Thorstenson was so popular that year that his Democratic challenger could have been, my father said, Ricardo Montalban in his prime and it wouldn’t have made a 5 percent difference. Even so, somebody had to run, somebody always has to run, and so Mike Pampkin put his sacrificial head into the race, and my father, equally for no good reason other than somebody must prepare the lamb for the slaughter, got himself hired as campaign manager. Nobody understood it all better than Pampkin himself. He wore his defeat right there on his body, like one of the unflattering V-neck sweaters that made his breasts mound outward like a couple of sad little hills. When he forced himself to smile for photographers, Pampkin always looked slightly constipated. And he was so endearingly, down-homey honest about his chances that people loved him. Of course, not enough to vote for him. Still, for such an ungraceful man, he had long, elegant hands, Jackie O. hands, my father said, only Pampkin’s weren’t gloved. Mike Pampkin’s hands were unsheathed, out in the open for the world to see. He was the loneliest-seeming man ever to run for statewide office in Illinois.

It was 1980. I was a mostly ignored fourteen-year-old and I had already developed great disdain for politics. It bored me to hatred. But if I could have voted, I must say I would have voted for Cheeky Al also. His commercials were very good and I liked his belt buckles. Everybody liked Cheeky Al’s belt buckles.

Probably what is most remembered, if anything, about Mike Pampkin during that campaign was an incident that happened in Waukegan during the Fourth of July parade. Pampkin got run over by a fez-wearing Shriner on a motorized flying carpet. The Shriner swore it was an accident, but this didn’t stop the Waukegan News Sun from running the headline: PAMPKIN SWEPT UNDER RUG.

My memory of that time is of less public humiliation.

One night, it must have been a few weeks before Election Day, there was a knock on our back door. It was after two in the morning. The knock was mousy but insistent. I first heard it in my restless dreams, as if someone were tapping on my skull with a pencil. Eventually, my father answered the door. I got out of bed and went downstairs. I found them facing each other at the kitchen table. If either Pampkin or my father noticed me, they didn’t let on. I crouched on the floor and leaned against the cold stove. My father was going on, as only my father could go on. To him, at this late stage, the election had become, if not an actual race, not a total farce, either. The flying-carpet incident had caused a small sympathy bump in the polls, and the bump had held.

Yet it was more than this. Politics drugged my father. He loved nothing more than to hear his own voice holding forth, and he’d work himself up into a hallucinatory frenzy of absolute certainty when it came to anything electoral. One of my earliest memories is of my parents having it out during the ’72 presidential primaries. My father had ordained from on high that Scoop Jackson was the party’s savior, the only one who could rescue the Democrats from satanic George Wallace. My mother, treasonably, was for Edmund Muskie, that pantywaist. There were countless other things, but doesn’t everything, one way or another, come down to politics? In my family, politics isn’t blood sport, it’s blood itself. Finally, in 1979, my mother, brother, and I moved out for good, to an apartment across town. But every other weekend and Wednesday nights I spent with my father in the house that used to be our house, in the room that used to be my room, in the bed that used to be my bed.

My father in the kitchen in October of 1980, rattling off to Pampkin what my father called “issue conflagrations,” by which he meant those issues that divided city voters from downstaters. To my father, anybody who didn’t live in Chicago or the suburbs was a downstater, even if they lived upstate, across state, or on an island in the Kankakee River. He told Pampkin that his position on the Zion nuclear power plant was too wishy-washy, that the anti-nuke loons were getting ready to fry him in vegetable oil.

“Listen, Mike, it doesn’t matter that Cheeky Al’s all for plutonium in our cheeseburgers. The only meat those cannibals eat is their own kind.”

Pampkin wasn’t listening. He was staring out the kitchen window, at his own face in the glass. He didn’t seem tired or weary or anything like that. If anything, he was too awake. In fact, his eyes were so huge they looked torn open. Of course, he knew everything my father was saying. Pampkin wasn’t a neophyte. He’d grown up in the bosom of the machine, in the 24th Ward. Izzy Horowitz and Jake Arvey were his mentors. He’d worked his way up, made a life in politics, nothing flashy, steady. Mayor Daley himself was a personal friend. And when the Mayor asks you to take a fall to Cheeky Al, you take a fall to Cheeky Al. That Daley was dead and buried now didn’t make a difference. A promise to Mayor Daley is a promise to Mayor Daley, and there is only one Mayor Daley. Pampkin didn’t need my father’s issue conflagrations. He was a man who filled a suit. Didn’t a man have to fill something? At the time he ran, I think Pampkin was state comptroller, whatever that means.

So the candidate sat mute as my father began to soar, his pen conducting a symphony in the air.

“So we go strong against nuclear power in the city on local TV here. But when you’re down in Rantoul on Thursday, make like you didn’t hear the question. Stick your finger in your ear. Kiss a baby, anything—”

“Raymond.”

Pampkin seemed almost stunned by his own voice. He was calm, but I noticed his cheeks loosen as if he’d been holding my father’s name in his mouth. Then he said, “My wife’s leaving me. It’s not official. She says she won’t make it official until after the election. She’s in love, she says.”

My father dropped his pen. It rolled off the table and onto the floor, where it came to rest against my bare toes. I didn’t pick it up. On the table between the two men were precinct maps, charts, phone lists, mailing labels, buttons, and those olive Pampkin bumper stickers so much more common around our house than on cars.

“Can I get you a cup of coffee, Mike?”

I watched my father. He was gazing at Pampkin with an expression I’d never seen before. Drained of his talk, he looked suddenly kinder. Here is a man across this table, a fellow sojourner. What I am trying to say is that it was a strange time—1980. A terrible time in many ways, and yet my father became at that moment infused with a little grace. Maybe the possibility of being trounced not only by Cheeky Al but also by the big feet of Ronald Reagan himself had opened my father’s eyes to the existence of other people. Here was a man in pain.

They sat and drank coffee, and didn’t talk about Mrs. Pampkin. At least not with their mouths. With their eyes they talked about her, with their fingers gripping their mugs they talked about her.

Mrs. Pampkin?

My inclination before that night would have been to say that she was as forgettable as her husband. More so. Though I had seen her many times, I couldn’t conjure up her face. She wore earth tones. I remembered that once she hugged me and that she smelled like bland soap. She wasn’t pudgy; she wasn’t lanky. She wasn’t stiff, nor was she jiggly. Early on in the campaign, my father had suggested to Pampkin that maybe his wife could wear a flower in her hair at garden events, or at the very least lipstick for television. Nothing came of these suggestions, and as far as I knew, the issue of Pampkin’s wife hadn’t come up again until that night in the kitchen, when, for me, she went from drab to blazing. She’d done something unexpected. If Mrs. Pampkin was capable of it, what did this mean for the rest of us? I remembered — then — that I had watched her after Mike got hit by the carpet. She hadn’t become hysterical. She’d merely walked over to him lying there on the pavement (the Shriner apologizing over and over), and the expression in her eyes was of such motionless calm that Mike and everybody else around knew it was going to be all right, that this was only another humiliation in the long line that life hands us, nothing more, nothing less. She’d knelt to him.