Robert Coover - Public Burning

I was also feeling suddenly very airy and exposed, almost like a bad wind had got up between my legs, like a French kiss in the wrong place — I glanced up and discovered that everybody in goddamn Times Square was still watching me, not a reverent sonuvabitch in the lot, they’d been watching me all the time, all except Pat, I spotted her now, she was the only one with her head down — even my daughters were gaping at me with stupid smirks on their faces. It looked as though everybody were laughing, but I couldn’t hear anything over the whumping thunder of my heart beating in my ears (my God, I can’t even let my hair down in public, much less my pants! this was worse even than the time I got diarrhea in that jeep in Bougainville!). What crazy things we do, I thought, as I lurched, grunting, wheezing, half-blind from panic and glare, squatting and bobbing about the stage in one last desperate effort to pull my pants up — it was always best, I knew, to do the unexpected if you could get away with it, but this time, damn it, I’d overreached myself. I’d forgotten all the things my Mom had taught me: Don’t make a fool of yourself, Richard, don’t stick your neck out, don’t give yourself away, don’t expose yourself! What was it led me up there, led me up here? I remembered the ticket seller’s caution: “Sure you want on that train, bud?” The cops at the Hunter Street barricades, the dissuasive phalanx of newsguys, the Warden’s curious lecture on history and the convulsive struggle: all warnings I had failed to heed — and yet I was sure I’d been right. “To be great,” Ethel had said (I think it was Ethel — was it Ethel?), “is to be misunderstood.” She was back there, I knew, standing in the wings somewhere, her head shaved for the electrodes, her own heart beating so wildly in her little breast that you could see it through that sad ragged dress she wore, and I had a sudden impulse to dash back there, grab her up, and make a run for it. But I restrained myself, or my pants did, reminding myself (I was much encouraged by the return of this thought) that I had to think of the effect of my decision on the next generation, and on the future of peace and freedom in America, and in the world. Ethel would want it that way. Courage, confidence, and perspective. Which meant that I had to carry through to the finish, whatever the personal agony it would involve — I had to fight back! No crawfishing, no whining, whimpering, or groveling — if you’re always on the defensive, take it from me, you always lose in the end — no, they were asking for it and they were going to get it! I’m a pessimist, but if I figure I’ve got a chance, I’ll fight for it, and I always figure I’ve got a chance — I think that has been a hallmark of my political career. In that respect I’m an Optimo. Optimist , I mean! (Jesus.) But how was I going to do it? Well, I’m a poker player, one of the best, and a good poker player knows it’s important to get good cards, but also that most big pots are won by a bluff. Yes, I had to let fly with everything in the arsenal, throw up a real smoke screen and let out, as Uncle Sam would say, the dark (“Cuttlefish it, boy! If you can’t convince ’em, confuse ’em!”) — whereupon, having intended something entirely different by such determinations, I stumbled over that old lady’s body (Judas, it was Betty Crocker!), touched my toes to keep from falling over on my head, and cracked a stupendous fart. “AMEN, BROTHER!” some dingbat bellowed, and then I did hear them — Jesus Christ, they were all howling their asses off!

What was to be done? I stared gloomily at the bespattered electric chair, the famous Sing Sing hot seat, and — my own butt on fire from shame and floor burns — listened to the mob in Times Square behind my back. The door to the Dance Hall was now closed and above it was a sign that said SILENCE. I wondered if it was a message to me. I knew that the only defense I had was offense, that I had to somehow talk my way around this humiliation without admitting to any mistakes, but if I couldn’t get my pants up past my ankles, how was I to begin? There was a white hospital cart behind the chair and it looked very comfortable, very restful. I realized I was close to breaking — a man can only take so much! — and that it was now or never. But if now, what? I didn’t know whether to point with pride, view with alarm, or just let my ass go on speaking for me. The stage itself offered no clues, only soberingly lethal realities. I was afraid to look at Uncle Sam. I tried to wargame my situation, to reduce it to some set of constants I could work with, but all I could think of was the time my old man caught me swimming in the Anaheim irrigation ditch. On that occasion, he’d picked me up and thrown me back into the ditch — that’s right: fire with fire, ditches with ditches!

“All right now!” I cried, turning on the mob at last. I was finding my way again. “You may wonder what I am doing up here with my, uh, trousers down! Well, let me just say this! We in America, we in the Free World, all of us here tonight — and let me be quite blunt about this — we have ALL been caught with our trousers down!” An inspired rhetorical ploy which had worked miracles in hundreds of debates, not to mention my famous crisis speech last fall, and which should have worked here, but it didn’t — on the contrary, they got rowdier than ever. They were all out there, I recognized them, jammed around the stage, pressing forward, lit up by the flashing lights of Broadway: Congressmen and judges, governors and celebrities, Republicans and Democrats, all sorts of weird characters dressed up in funny costumes and large papier-mâché heads, little kids, old ladies, all whooping it up and laughing to beat hell. “But this is no laughing matter!” I shouted over the racket (I saw Harold Stassen snorting and pointing, Cabot Lodge looking pleased as punch, Bill Knowland and Lyndon Johnson rolling all over each other in the aisles — even Bob Taft was splitting his crippled sides with laughter), “this is a struggle for the souls of men!” Now what the hell was so funny about that? What was the matter with these people? Were they crazy? I thought they must be nuts! “This is one of those critical moments in history that can change the world, and we need your help, and so I came here like this tonight — and incidentally this is unprecedented in the history of American politics — I came here like this to dramatize what the danger is, a mortal danger that we all face!”

“YOU TELL ’EM, STICKY DICK!” they shouted back at me, “YOU GOT THE BALLS!”

“I tell you, we are on the brink!” I screamed — I had to scream: the uproar in the Square was deafening, and on top of it radios were blaring away, bands playing, generators humming, and police helicopters were rattling overhead, taking pictures and dropping booze parcels. “Look at Korea!” I cried. “Look at China! Eastern Europe! Our own State Department! Even the Supreme Court! We’re exposed on all sides by this insidious evil! this sinister conspiracy! this deadly infection! Let me assure you, the Phantom isn’t changing! He isn’t sleeping! He is, as always, plotting, screaming, working, fighting! Scheming, I should say!” I tried to recall that lecture Uncle Sam had given me about the walleyed harbinger who thirsted for Christian blood, but I was too overwrought and afraid I’d fuck it up — I was having trouble enough working my own bromides. “We owe a solemn duty, not only to our own people but to free peoples everywhere on both sides of the Iron Curtain, to roll back the Red Tide which to date has swept everything before it! We cannot allow another Munich!” That wasn’t bad, a touch of the old Dick Nixon — I seemed to be getting off the dime at last! They were still laughing, all right, but they seemed more attentive. “It’s…it’s not easy for me to take this position,” I went on, choking up a little to show them that I was vulnerable, too, that I was as human as the next guy, or perhaps because I couldn’t help it, “— it happens that I am a Quaker!” Which for some reason set them all off again, snorting and wheezing, falling off their chairs — Foster Dulles looked like somebody had got ahold of his old Presbyterian face, which just wasn’t made for laughing with, and was wringing it out like an old dishrag: Christ! what if I killed him! “But as Abraham Lincoln once said: ‘Uh, other means may succeed: this could not fail!’” I felt good about that, coming up with that quote all by myself — Lincoln was always helpful in a tight spot, better even than Jesus or Dale Carnegie, and I’d thought he would rescue me from this one, but I might as well have been quoting Gracie Allen. Even Douglas MacArthur was chuffing away, his sun goggles tipped down over his nose, and Oveta Hobby was reared back in her chair and laughing so hard she was showing her khaki drawers. “He…he also said that the world will, uh, little remember nor long, uh, remember what we talk about here,” I pressed on desperately, “but just let me say that I think the world will never forget what, uh, the achievements of this administration here tonight!”