fictional characters

Political Operative III

STEVE BIERSDORF

You’re on your way down to the pool, where you’ll intermittently read and doze off, listening to the heave and sigh of the nearby waves. Your phone starts its three-note xylophone cha-cha of a ring and you see on the face of your phone that it’s Jen. Jen has a request for anything you have on Lowell Stamms and the Laken Institute, “cross-referenced please, they only want information on the two together.”

The Laken Institute is taking credit for new Right to Work legislation, lauding the bill’s passage on their home page. Fresh off that victory they’re pushing for a prevailing wage bill, ostensibly on behalf of taxpayers, preserving the wealth of their donors the real objective, a fraction more of which will find its way to the Laken Institute in support of these efforts. A fraction in this case being seven figures.   

Senator Lowell Stamms did a fifteen-month stretch for felony misconduct, for ghostwriting news releases and fundraising letters (lobbying activities) for the Laken Institute while Majority Leader of the state Senate. When proof leaked to the media Stamms was brought up on ethics charges. It was thought both he and the Laken institute were finished, but here now, years later, the Laken Institute is on a mission to marginalize organized labor. It’s bareknuckle time.

You have a trove on the Laken Institute, including their annual reports and profiles of each member of their Board of Directors and officers. Not that these profiles are damning in what they reveal about these mostly upstanding women and men, they’re more impactful in drawing conclusions from their affiliations, where they work, the things they’re responsible for professionally, what their companies have or haven’t done or supported or didn’t, detailed enough to reveal where they worship on Sundays, if they do.

“Offer them both profiles, the full profiles, Lowell Stamms and the Laken Institute. They can do their own cross-referencing.”

“Okay,” Jen says dutifully. She’s respectful of your vacation, but both of you know you should handle this. Jen is a data management specialist. RDBMS or NoSQL databases, Oracle certification, these are her wheelhouse. You’re the pitchman.    

On your way down the other elevator in Sandcastle Tower I, not the glass one but the other with padding hanging over the walls, as if the elevator is for transporting bulky furniture or the violently deranged, and the synthesized ring again. Jen tells you in a remorseful tone that the client doesn’t want both profiles and is insisting you cross-reference Lowell Stamms and the Laken Institute.

“Otherwise it’s too much extraneous information. That’s what they said.”

What they think is extraneous you see as a rich vein, but that’s your projection. They don’t understand the potential of what you’d be providing. Or if they do, they’re looking past it for something easy. Damning and easy. Damning takes work.  

“Text me the guy’s name and number, I’ll take care of it.”

You’re sitting on the beach looking out at the Gulf of Mexico with your AirPods in and you make the call. You introduce yourself, and invite him to lunch, Gary with an impossible to pronounce Polish last name. When you ask him spell that he says most people call him Gary W. You’ll be back on the eleventh.

***

You meet at Mo’s Irish Pub. Late morning, plenty of empty tables prior to the lunch rush. You’re on time, curious to see if Gary W. will be there. Being early implies diligence, whereas late implies indifference or disorganization.

Gary W. is sitting in a booth with a woman, sitting on the same side of a booth in an otherwise empty dining area, leaving the other bench for you, the woman on the inside. Gary W. is thick and takes up more than his share of their bench. He’s wearing a polo with slacks, labor management casual, around your age, while the woman looks younger, in her thirties and dressed formally, like she could go from here to a campaign event, interview with an editorial board, $10,000-a-plate fundraiser. They’re a mismatched pair. Their political interests might be aligned, but their agendas are a Venn diagram.

After introductions, a deferential pause, and you ask directly, “So what is it you’re after?”

They blink at you and exchange a look.  

“Information,” Gary W. says, and you almost respond with “no shit?”

“Is that something you normally ask of prospective clients?” asks Melissa Beauchamp, deputy campaign manager with Ellie Hendrix for US Senate.

“You know what they say. Don’t ask questions you don’t know the answers to.”

“Meaning?”

“Connecting Lowell Stamms and Laken is hackneyed. Old news, not old enough to be forgotten so too soon to recycle. Whatever you take to the media will be met with indifference. They like being surprised.”

“Our understanding is you traffic in information. No offense, but we’re not looking for a consultation,” says Gary.   

“Sure, I can give you what you’ve requested. The way I look at it, I have a vested interest in the outcome. If you pay for this information and it does you no good then I’m a purveyor of not inexpensive, useless information. If I give you what you’ve asked for, for what I charge, ultimately you’ll be dissatisfied.”

 Melissa asks, “What do you have in mind?”

“Ellie Hendrix is very likely going to be running against Joe Van Meter. My understanding is Van Meter is comfortably ahead in the polls.”

“Correct.”

“Van Meter is supported by the Laken Institute. Your idea is to tie him to nefarious money. Link him to some impropriety. Let’s start there. See if there’s a better way.”

“The Laken Institute has a stable of candidates,” explains Gary.   

“Unless they’re secretly financing a eugenics project, what they are and who they support is baked in. They’ve been around a long time. Weaken them by picking off their candidates.”

“We were kind of hoping to do both. Kill two birds with one stone. Cut off the head, kill the body,” from Gary. “Okay, I’m out of clichés.”

You smile, they smile.

“The press won’t care. When you bring them old news, they’ll tune you out. The next time you bring them something they’re less likely to listen, or if they do run it you won’t get the wattage.”

A server in a green Kiss Me I’m Irish t-shirt walking slowly by stops at the pause in conversation.

“Give us a few more minutes please,” Gary says.

“Are we going to eat?” Melissa wonders.

“A few more minutes,” Gary tells the server so he’ll go away.

“What’s the alternative,” Melissa asks.

“I’m not sure yet. Give me until the end of the week, Monday at the latest. I’ll give you what you asked for if I can’t come up with anything better. However you want it.”

“Cross-referenced?”

“Sure.”

They look at each other. 

“Make it worth our while,” Gary the union boss tells you. You shake hands.

No one stays for lunch. You hang back, watching them in the parking lot, walking to their cars, slowly pulling away from one another. She says something, he gesticulates, she says something else, he gesticulates again and she nods. You can guess what they’re saying by watching them. Subtitles aren’t necessary:

“So what do you think? Will he give us something we can use?”

“It’s what he does. I guess at some point you have to give that a chance.”

“And if not, we’ll just get what we wanted in the first place.”

“Exactly. I hear his information is good.”

***

You’re a human algorithm, your ability to decipher patterns. You can put your music playlist with over seven hundred songs on shuffle, and after listening to five songs you can figure out the shuffle pattern and correctly predict every song played after that. It’s a game you play sometimes when you’re out. Someone won’t believe you can really do that and bet you, and you always win. Once they bet you a hundred dollars, you couldn’t correctly predict the next song after listening to only three, on someone else’s phone. You had to count the number of songs in the queue, and after the third song you counted some more. It was an educated guess, but you were right. So your wife Jo leaving you for another woman, something you didn’t see coming, is one of life’s great paradoxes. Relationships have been patternless for you, you’ve always had your work and your gift, when all else fails.   

***

You caught on early that information is the new currency and developed your contextual niche. You tracked who gave money to who, at first through the Federal Election Commission (FEC), then through the many sites that track this, looking for patterns. Like, for example, politicians who might be friendlier toward insurance companies than toward the ranks of their insured. You were startled at how apolitically and abundantly insurance companies contributed, particularly after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v FEC decision. With health insurance at the forefront of policy debate, with policymakers peddling their influence, unholy alliances were inevitable. Rampant’s a strong word; pervasive?   

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners website provides tracking of complaints to every state’s insurance commissioner going back three years. Every six months you or Jen review the number of complaints made, by state, for every insurance carrier, crosschecking those with their complaint index. Where one is the baseline, if an insurance company hits four or higher on the index, even three or higher, it’s red flag time.

You have press credentials and so you file a request for public records under the Freedom of Information Act, requesting all individual complaints to a particular state insurance commissioner when you notice a high complaint index number, or a high number of complaints with a particular state insurance commissioner about a particular insurance company. When you get the individual complaints, Jen archives them.

You peruse the Joe Van Meter for US Senate website and discover he was state insurance commissioner, for a longer than normal tenure, going back several years. Right before he went into politics.

In sifting through the archives you discover twenty-seven complaints about XYZ Health Insurance billing its customers for treatment of hypertension, at three hundred dollars a crack, for routine blood-pressure screenings, where hypertension was neither diagnosed nor treated. Insurance Commissioner Joe Van Meter denied all twenty-seven complaints. It isn’t a surprise when you research Van Meter’s past campaign donations and find that XYZ has been a consistent and generous contributor. In some years his leading contributor.

You’re friends with reporters at two of the state’s largest daily newspapers and know several TV news producers well. They’ve quoted you as an anonymous source. Were you to provide this information directly to the media, that would imply bias, and you’re an apolitical mercenary. You sell it to the Hendrix campaign and they leak it to the media. You charge a lot. They can afford you. Since Citizens United v FEC they’re all well-funded campaigns. Your friends in the media will know where the information came from. 

Political Operative II

STEVE BIERSDORF

A pink While You Were Out slip is on your keyboard when you return from lunch, Jen’s oddly masculine handwriting, Ray Sears and Ray’s cell number, no elaboration. In your business people rarely leave voicemails. Ray is calling to let you know he contributed $7,500 to the Midwestern governor’s presidential campaign per your arrangement. The governor has just announced, so from this point on campaign contributions are a matter of public record.

Four years prior, the Midwestern governor established a state-run economic development corporation to provide loans and tax credits to small businesses, appointing himself chairman. Under the charter, in exchange for financial assistance, these businesses must provide payroll records as evidence of job creation for any tax credits or loans they receive. Any going concern could get bank financing, so the businesses coming hat-in-hand to the governor’s economic development corporation tended to be sketchy. The tax credits issued would be a pittance compared to the economic development corporation’s loan portfolio, the risk management side of the portfolio. 

Ray Sears Construction had been on the verge of bankruptcy. It was easy to get him to agree to everything. Ray Sears Construction received a back-channeled $200,000 infusion from the Lease On America Superpac backing one of the Midwestern governor’s rivals. Seed money that enabled Ray Sears Construction to procure a $2.5 million loan from the Midwestern governor’s economic development corporation. To get this money, Ray Sears signed an agreement to do the following, failure to do so resulting in revocation of the $200,000 infusion: a) neglect to pay the origination fee to the economic development corporation, which would be discovered in a Legislative Audit Bureau audit of the economic development corporation, b) neglect to provide payroll records so the economic development corporation could demonstrate that the money it lent created jobs, and c) contribute $7,500 (the max allowable) to the Midwestern governor’s campaign after the governor formally announced his intention to run for president. You were confident the economic development corporation would not press for the origination fee, or bother Ray Sears Construction for their payroll records. The previous year’s audit cited several instances where the economic development corporation neglected to charge an origination fee or obtain payroll records.

Ray wanted to celebrate when he was approved for the loan from the economic development corporation. You remember his almost desperate gratitude, insisting on paying for drinks. If he knew he was a pawn in high-stakes political subterfuge he didn’t care. 

When the Ray Sears card is played there will be documented evidence that a) Ray Sears Construction never paid a loan origination fee, b) Ray Sears Construction never provided payroll records, and c) Ray Sears contributed $7,500 to the governor’s presidential campaign. So the Midwestern governor’s job-creating economic development corporation looks like a slush fund, using taxpayer money to forward the governor’s political ambitions while failing to comply with its charter.

Political Operative I

STEVE BIERSDORF

What you remember best about Representative Bender, before he was Rep. Bender, were his expressions. Easy to know when Rep. Bender was in full disdain, haughty contempt or mocking disapproval, his go-to’s. Big eyes that hid nothing, small head, hawk’s beak of a nose, and a high-pitched, stinging laugh. Rep. Bender, informed, heartless, over-qualified, looking to eviscerate you in the public domain, to make you fear sharing your views if they conflicted with his. Your carefully researched positions made you a worthy opponent, and you had common decency on your side, which in retrospect may have been a disadvantage. You didn’t engage him as often as you disagreed with him because it was too despairing, chimeric scenes of first-strike violence crisscrossing your impetus. Rep. Bender would want to go for cocktails after work, as if taking every opportunity to refute any contention you made was routine in the course of any day. Nothing personal, just Rep. Bender doing Rep. Bender. For the first two or three drinks he’d be personable, even amiable. You knew to be gone by the third drink, before the magma buildup inside him became irrepressible.  

You’d forgotten about him when there he is one day, on the home page of the local daily newspaper, rumored to be the next assembly majority leader. From the pictures on his Facebook page he’s proportionally larger, as though inflated via compressor and intake valve. Same round predatory bird face with tired, gilded eyes, cataracts of excess. Pics with a cocktail in his mitt, from fundraisers at Nice Ash. You know Nice Ash, a popular and relatively new cigar bar, part of the downtown reclamation, probably something Rep. Bender helped engineer. Old brick buildings rediscovered, gutted, repiped and resewered, stone mullion windows, ceilings torn out and rafters painted over, refinished woodwork and inadequate ventilation.

You wander in on a Saturday evening, making your way to the far end of the bar with the other solo acts. Fight night on pay-per-view, one of the undercards about to begin, faces along the bar upturned to the flat screens bolted high on the walls. Two women in an octagonal chain-link cage, disrobing, walking to the center of the cage, close-ups of both women glaring death at each other (you try to spot fear or determination in their eyes as if this might portend anything). Referee imparting instructions, both women nodding, bumping gloves, back to their corners, the bell, and it’s on. The fight is over in less than a minute, one woman with a vicious roundhouse kick to the head of the other, knocking her unconscious. “Ho!” From several guys around you, shouted in unison more or less, another laughing like this, “who-who-who-who,” loud falsetto.  

You’re more of a cigarette guy, so you ask the bartender for a cigar recommendation. He comes back with a pressed Nicaraguan Viaje Robusto, ten dollars a stick, clipping it, presenting it to you with solemn reverence, lighting it, and you herf away on that slow-cooking monstrosity for what seems like half the night, inhaling sometimes.

Nice Ash fills up with resort-casual, above-average wage earners. Rep. Bender in the hizzy, you didn’t see him come in but you hear the laugh powering through the din. Loud and ridiculing as ever, emboldened. You didn’t expect him to have found an off-switch from then to now. Self-restraint was never one of his talents. You spy him through the cigar smoke and cluster of people, he’s nearer the entrance, centermost of a cluster of local A-listers, holding forth, throwing his head back and laughing, his laughter like a rider’s whip or sharp spurs to your flank.

Creeping up on last call and the crowd is thinning. You’re hoping he won’t see you. He’ll want to buy you a cocktail or a stogie, introduce you to his, what, associates? Sycophants? Hangers on? Groupies? If he has friendships they’re transactional, if or when he screws up they’ll lay claim to any spoils. Grab a shovel and throw some dirt on the box before the body’s stiff. And serial vetters they’ll be, wanting to know what you do to see if you’re worth the bother.

When your eyes are watering, they open the front door to let the backlog of smoke escape into the bitter night. Rep. Bender’s up from his bar chair, pulling a topcoat over his shoulders, putting his gloves on, throwing his head back and laughing, parting salutations, patting each other on the shoulder, and there he goes. The moment you’ve waited for. You’re up, slowly, studying your I-phone as you saunter out, brushing by someone. When you’re outside, you see his car isn’t far, you watch him get in and pull away and call 911, providing the make and model and plate number, eastbound on Sunset about a half mile west of 164. Driving erratically.

Avoiding as best I can the inherent danger of invisible, microscopic spittle

STEVE BIERSDORF

I’m on one of my walks through the Lighthouse Pointe subdivision, down to the Santa Rosa Sound and back. Past brick ranch houses, slab houses, some with screened-in pools in the back. A nondescript stroll until I get to the Sound, where the waterfront houses are to be quietly envied with aching restraint. 

Ordinarily not many people are about, landscaping crews leaf-blowing or cutting grass or edging, or sitting in their trucks smoking. It being trash pickup day, my biggest concern are the receptacles. A pair, their lids hanging open, twin receptacles as inseparable as their long-together proprietors, sometimes and often lying on their sides courtesy of a rambunctious wind, scavenging black bears, or petulant sanitation workers. I pass these lidless receptacles with at least six feet of distance between me and their openings, hoping to avoid an unseeable puff of rogue droplets, hovering in wait of their next host.

I’ve gotten an early start this particular morning, off at a brisk pace when I come upon a broken liquor bottle and glopping of dried vomit infiltrating my six-foot perimeter. I feel a surge of anger as I step away, rushing by, turning my head, holding my breath as if that does any good (it may, I’m just not aware that it does). People believing themselves immune and immortal, hovering indefinitely in their physical primes, out and about, driving around and getting hammered. Wantonly spreading contagion. Further on I step over a green placker I’d have maneuvered around if I’d had advanced notice, irritated that people are driving around picking their teeth and leaving the rest of us with the fallout. When I get home I’ll take my clothes off, put them in the washing machine and help myself to a scalding hot shower. I’ll leave my shoes outside on the welcome mat, wipe down my sunglasses, phone, reading glasses, reading glasses case, keys, the inner and outer knobs on the front door and the deadbolt switch with disinfectant wipes.

I make it to the manhole cover in the cul-de-sac at the end of Winding Shore Drive, halfway, and I’m on my way back when I spot three bogies at twelve o’clock. Three women brightly dressed, gesticulating, engaged in lively conversation, headed right at me. I cringe as they laugh loudly and musically in unison, thinking of the ample bursts of invisible droplets their laughter has just emitted.

They’re on the left side of Winding Shore Drive, my left, their right. I cross to my right, their left. We’re outside, sure, and it’s breezier here by the water, but there’s three of them and their combined invisible wake of microscopic spittle. One woman notices me getting out of the way and thanks me, presumably for keeping my droplets out of their harm’s way, waving and smiling. She’s tall, with an unusually long, stringy arm and kite-like hand. I smile convivially, “no problem,” as if I’m being magnanimous. 

Hindsight and 2020

STEVE BIERSDORF

I’m twenty-five pounds overweight. I have a stomach. Not a belly or potbelly. Not basketball-ish, more like sloppy-distended. Neglected, toneless. Harder to obscure or diminish by sucking in if I’m shirtless. 

I plan to attack the problem at some point. Before turning sixty. A lot of things I plan on starting or being consistent with by the time I’m sixty. Sixty seems like a crossroads between I’m over it, and dying before my term policy runs out makes better economic sense, or fuck my heirs, I’m going to run this thing out as long as I can, eventually rotting away forgotten in a nursing home that accepts Medicaid.

What I’ve done so far, I’ve cut out the occasional key lime pie, quit the blueberry muffins, and I’ve saved several posts on Facebook for various abs or core exercises I’ll get around to. The effect of ten thousand steps a day has been negligible, other than a distressed spine and hip joint and intermittent back spasms. My pants and shorts are still difficult to fasten, even though I averaged four point eight miles per day last week, four point five the week before.

There’s a floor to ceiling mirror I pass on my way to my office. I watch myself. I move like the upper and lower portions of me are articulated. My upper body looks relaxed, my lower body looks jolting and distressed, like I’m walking with a prosthetic leg to my hip joint and I’m only now getting the hang of it.  

***

I mall-walk around the outside of the Viejo Mall. Late winter, in the fifties, not much wind, blue skies, so I’ll get a little sun on my face. A pinkish hue that will become ruddier in a day or two. Anything but pale. We white people, we hate being pale. 

As I’m walking I see my shadow, diagonally and slightly ahead of me. I wonder if I’ve seen this shadow in my dreams, when I was younger. I feel like I have. The shadow I see as I walk around the Viejo Mall is herky-jerky and misshapen. I have on a jacket that’s zipped, and protrudes more than does my protruding stomach, so the shadow looks neglectfully overweight. 

If I’d seen this shadow in dream when I was young, I’d have refused to believe this was me. And what if, in this predictive dream, I’d been able to infiltrate the body and mind of this man in his fifties? It would have seemed worse than it is, to a young man. The hip pain, the tweaked back, shortness of breath, enervation, I’m accustomed to it, I make it work. As a young man I would have been horrified to know this was my fate. Or destiny. 

Which leads me to wonder. Why not allow this to happen? If I’d been able to see this cartoonish shadow when I was young, or temporarily inhabit this fifty-something body, long enough to internalize its afflictions, maybe I’d have become obsessed with my health. Maybe I’d be better off these days. Just a thought. A suggestion for anyone listening.  

***

Her latest apothegm: “I’m going to stab myself in the neck with a fork.” Examples of its application: Trying to schedule an appointment with the workman’s comp doctor; attempting to get AT&T Uverse fixed remotely (‘have you tried unplugging the modem?’); toilet paper and mask scams on Facebook. The empty aisle at Walmart where anything to wipe your ass is normally stocked, Huggies or the local newspaper your best remaining options. Or a bottle of Fantastik 409, hold it under you and spray upwards, a kind of do-it-yourself bidet, if you can live with the burning sensation.   

Talladega it ain’t, but still

STEVE BIERSDORF

Because I’m less of a social animal these days, interaction with the itinerant masses is confined to my morning commute. I don’t count social media. The last guy I got into an argument with on Twitter, I’m pretty sure was Russian, or a Russian bot if there’s a difference. Unable to refute me intellectually, he (it?) called me a traitor for positing that China was winning the trade war.  

Most of my commute is nineteen miles east on 98. If you look at it from a satellite shot, 98 looks like a cool throughway near water. In patches between trees and subdivisions, it is. You can see across the Sound, to hilly dunes with green vegetation, white sand like scoops of vanilla ice cream, the vegetation like candied syrup ladled atop. Or depending on the zoom, a long, thin, grainy line of blow.

Once I pass the causeway to the beach I know to be in the right lane, during heavy traffic season, which is the school year less holidays and summer vacay. Kids here get way more time off than I ever got. Christmas vacation is a month. They get the entire week off for Thanksgiving.

In the faster moving right lane I feel better about being mired in traffic. The left lane is intended to be faster, and yet it moves slower, reliably. If pressed to explain this phenomenon, I’d say we’re creatures of habit, slaves to our routines. Clinging to the way things were when we formed our habits, always struggling to adapt to change. The left lane is for faster moving traffic. When there isn’t congestion, it normally is. What this tells me is that many of the drivers battling rush hour traffic are my peers. Millennial or Gen Z drivers have no such preconceptions about the left lane. 

I’ll settle on a vehicle in the left lane and watch it in my side-view mirror, to validate that the left lane is the slower, reveling in this knowledge. Today I choose a Honda Element ahead of me. A tannish color, but not tan or khaki. Verve-less, primer beige. I pass it, I’m ahead of it now, watching it recede in the driver’s side mirror, disappearing behind a growing line of vehicles.

I’m east of the Tom Thumb light, where traffic thins out. From here the left lane can be, and often is, the faster of the two. We’re east of the Hurlburt Field overpass, old, overgrown trees with Spanish moss hanging over the road. On the north side of 98 are houses almost anyone can afford. On the right, behind the old trees or interwoven with them are houses on the Sound, big houses with an old Southern feel that almost no one can afford.

In the right lane, I consider changing lanes then don’t, figuring a truck ahead of me in the left lane will clot the lane. I move ahead of the truck. The truck moves ahead of me. I move ahead of the truck. The truck moves ahead of me. It’s a big truck, with a four-poster bed, a Pod truck. They’ve dropped off a Pod, and free of this burden are anxious to rejoin the traffic flow. Pass other vehicles. A shackle removed, a burden unshouldered, free and easy down the road they go. It speeds up close to the vehicle in front of it, tailgating, so if I wanted to change lanes there would be no room for me. Not in front of the Pod truck. 

We’re coming up on the Doolittle light. To get to work, I can turn left at this light or proceed through the light and take the next left on San Cristobal. The Pod truck gets in the left turn lane, to turn onto Doolittle, I get in the left lane it just vacated, where the Pod truck would have been. Through the light, take the next left on San Cristobal, no impediment. I glance back, the Pod truck stuck in line, waiting for the green arrow granting permission to turn left. I win.  

***

In traffic. Trucks pulling enclosed trailers for Quality Plumbing, Clean Dog LLC (portable dog grooming). Plumbers keep their wares under wraps, unlike landscapers or home improvement contractors. A tacit understanding exists, that all things plumbing are best kept unseen and not contemplated. Like what happens to all the excrement. When Tropical Storm Nathan passed through the local wastewater treatment facility dumped one hundred thousand gallons of ‘partially treated’ sewage into the Sound, where there are now relatively high levels of enterococci, bacteria that inhabits the intestinal tracts of humans and animals. Which sparks an idea for a sci-fi novel: The waste management division of NASA blasts so much shit into space that a more technologically- and morally-advanced species is deeply offended, collecting our septic rockets, prying them open, and raining all the shit back down on us. Shit Storm is the working title.

***

Commuting, early on, still west of the Navarre Beach causeway. A white truck passes me on the right. A white Dodge Ram, and on the sides right behind the cab and on the tailgate it says Power Wagon. In front of me is a silver pickup, Super Duty across the tailgate. 

I find the hyperbole to be patronizing. Wagon I associate with station wagon, a fake-wood paneled family transport from back in the day, littered with wrappers and discarded toys, children screaming at each other, parents slumped dejectedly in the front seats. Or a little red wagon for pulling your toddlers and their toys around. Power and wagon are dissociative. And Super Duty, your seventy-thousand-dollar employee capable of pulling something twice its weight.  

There’s no way I’m letting Power Wagon get where it’s going sooner than I get where I’m going. I move to the right lane, and sure enough, as dependable as the sun rising in the east, the right lane moves faster. As I’m closer to the Tom Thumb light, about two-thirds of the way, I get left. Power Wagon is lost behind me. I sleep on my advantage, remaining in the left lane as the right lane moves faster again, and there it is. Power Wagon is a tenth of a mile ahead, two-tenths. I stay left, and sure enough, the right lane bogs down. But then Power Wagon gets in the left lane, four or five vehicles ahead of me. We climb the Hurlburt Field overpass, and I get in the right lane, the ‘slower moving’ lane. Soon the left lane will bog down, as we get closer to the Doolittle turnoff. It always does. Sure enough, I pass Power Wagon. It’s a tenth of a mile back, two-tenths.

I turn left, off of 98, and it’s over.

King of the road, yo.

Usherette

STEVE BIERSDORF

Pulling up to a double wide, parked in a clearing inside a mangrove thicket. An old maroon pickup truck on tires nearly flat, you might make it to the nearest service station to put air in those tires, might, depending on how close the service station is. Walking to the door, knocking. Knocking again. Greeted with the sound of vehement hacking from behind the door, “just a minute,” managed between hacks. Entering the trailer, a deteriorated woman accessorizing with a portable oxygen tank and clear tube to her nostrils. 

“Hi dearie. Come in.” Hack, hack, hack. Full-body wracking. Tears in her rheumy eyes. Kasha thinks about asking “how are you,” but she can’t be doing well, Mrs. Ackerman.

Inside is dark, red drapes over the windows like oversized doilies defraying sunlight. Cigarette smoke has infiltrated everything. When she leaves, wherever she goes the rest of this day, her patients will think she’s been smoking. Chain smoking. Mrs. Ackerman sits in a tartan plaid recliner. Kasha assumes it reclines because there’s a wood lever on the lower left side of it. She sits on the matching sofa that smells like eight thousand smoked cigarettes.  

“How’ve you been?” Mrs. Ackerman asks Kasha with her incinerated voice. On the phone, people mistake her for a man.

“I’m good. What can I do for you today, Mrs. Ackerman? How about a shower?” Mrs. Ackerman smells worse than normal, her hair grease-flattened, split-endy. She’s the only person willing to help Mrs. Ackerman with that shower. Alicia the nurse won’t, her kids, son and daughter, no chance.

“Well, I don’t know.”

Mrs. Ackerman glances longingly at a pack of Virginia Slims on the battered-antique round end table next to her. The ashtray’s been emptied in anticipation of Kasha’s arrival. A glass of something clear, stagnate, probably room-temperature water with a dash of dust particles.

There’s really nothing Kasha can do for her other than to try to make her more comfortable.

“It’d make you feel better. Let’s get you all nice and clean.”

“Can I have a cigarette first?”

Kasha mock frowns at her.

“Will you at least smoke outside?”

She stands, holding out her arms.

“Come on, I’ll help you. It’s a beautiful day. Come outside and enjoy it some.”

***

The Kellers are new. Kasha’s given the address, and instructions from Clemenza, her supervisor and de facto dispatcher for in-home hospice care CNAs and nurses, to “see the Kellers.” She pulls into a middle class neighborhood of ranch homes on slabs, fenced-in patios and enriched-soil backyards, some with screened-in pools. She parks at the curb, goes to the door and rings the bell.

The Kellers answer the door together. Neither looks deathly ill, or anything other than lamé in their golden years. 

“Hi, I’m Kasha.” She takes a step forward but they don’t part and let her through, or invite her in.

“Nice to meet you,” says Mrs. Keller. Mrs. Keller locks on to her eyes and studies her. 

“Let me ask, you…Kasha did you say?”

“Yes, Kasha.”

“Have you been saved?”

“I hope so.”

Mrs. and Mr. Keller exchange a look.

“This is for you.” Mrs. Keller hands her a brochure. “I don’t think we’ll be needing you today. I thank you for stopping by, though, and God bless you. Find Jesus before it’s too late. He’s waiting, but frankly he’s losing patience.”

***

Into the brightly tiled Florida room, Mrs. Calpysa smiling at her as she enters. Mrs. Calpysa sees herself as a younger woman when she sees Kasha, or similarities. Kasha is older than she may realize.

“Kasha! Come here.” She’s lying on the indoor-outdoor sofa, propped up with pillows. She holds out her arm. Kasha hastens. She bends when she gets to her, Mrs. Calpysa taking her some of her hair between thumb and forefinger.

“My. Such beautiful curly blonde hair,” she says, as if seeing it for the first time.   

***

Dani’s out back by the screened-in pool. Kasha lets herself in. Dani’s Lhasa apso, Tammy, hopping up on her hind legs, yapping excitedly, clawing Kasha’s shins. Dani’s in her wheelchair, in the shade of eaves. A glass pitcher with a pale green concoction, almost empty, on a round, mottled-glass table beside her.

“I thought you’d never get here.” She says this like a single, long word. She holds up the glass pitcher.

“Replenish, my Lady.”

Kasha takes the pitcher, heads off to the kitchen.

“And when you’re done with that, please run to Mariachi’s, I’m completely famished. Shrimp quesadilla with black beans and Spanish rice, please. Here.”

Kasha, halfway to the kitchen, pitcher in hand, stops. Dani is holding up her Amex, waving it in the air over her head.

Over the clinking of the ice as she stirs in lime juice, she hears, “Oh, and Tammy needs a bath. She stinks. I’d have thrown her in the pool if I knew she could swim.”

***

Mrs. Young isn’t responsive when she gets there. She knocks on the door, no answer, rings the bell, nothing, so she tries it, it’s open. She lets herself in as she’s done before. The TV is blaring from the bedroom. The View. The women are worked up and shouting over one another.

Mrs. Young is lying in her king-sized bed, propped by several pillows, eyes open, with an open-mouthed amused look.

“Good morning,” Kasha says brightly. Mrs. Young doesn’t respond. Kasha looks for the remote, to turn the sound down. She’s forever turning the sound down. She hates loud TV, commercials especially.

“Mrs. Young?”

Nothing.

“Mrs. Young,” she says loudly, although loud is relative with the ladies on The View in background. “Shit.”

No pulse. She pinches Mrs. Young’s nostrils shut, no reaction.

Mrs. Young’s late husband founded a resort town to the east where they filmed The Truman Show. They’re wealthy. People will be keenly interested to know Mrs. Young has passed. Significant assets will transfer. 

***

His house smells of him, old man, unwashed clothes, accentually of urine. She opens the windows and turns on the ceiling fan. He lives in Florida and he has the windows shut and no A/C. She’s there long enough to get the clothes washed and into the dryer or hung. He has a skin allergy he attributes to electromagnetic hypersensitivity. She washes his clothes with an organic detergent that fails to leave his clothes smelling clean and fresh. 

She knows what Pastor Adams should look like, or did, from his pictures. Him in the Marines, crew cut, big ears and proboscis, toothy grin, calm blue eyes. A black and white of his wedding, in a white jacket tuxedo, feeding his new bride wedding cake. She imagines When I Fall In Love as background music (the Nat King Cole, Natalie Cole sound-mixed duet). It’s the distance from then to now, how optimistic they were about the life ahead of them, coming to this at last.     

First order of business is toiletry. He’ll have soiled his adult diapers. Get those off, get him in the shower if she can, restore a little dignity, make him tolerable to be around. She can see gratitude in his eyes, in his expression, when he’s attended to and settled in, resting on the old sofa near the front window. She can tell he resents the lack of autonomy, and sometimes he resents her because she does these things for him, as if he could do them for himself if it wasn’t for her. His pride is less of a glimmer by now, still flickering. 

With each visit she becomes like a bartender for his thirsty conscience, a repository for his regret. His voice is a hard whisper. Sometimes he’ll exhale as he talks and his words burst forth in what must have been his normal voice.

“When they’re little you just don’t know what they’ll become.” When she next comes, “he never read my books. Not one of them.” His hand rifles through his hair, an old habit, a faint echo of youthful vanity. 

“We haven’t spoken in five years, other than when he calls me on my birthday. Once he called and it wasn’t my birthday. Why are you calling? I asked him. Is it my birthday?” 

“What did you talk about?”

The Pastor turns his head to the side, toward the window, not answering. Something gnawing at him and he’s near the end. Kasha ushering him to eternity’s doorstep. She might be someone to relay these last few messages, as if from the beyond, to whoever they’re intended for. 

The next time he has more to say.

“I wanted them to find their own way. To be their own people. Learning from example. My father never explained things to me, I figured it out for myself. I found my calling. I would say none of them did. They found vocations.” A pause. “They work a lot. One thing I’ll say about them, all three of them, they’re hard workers.” 

When next she arrives, an ambulance is there. Parked in the driveway, lights off, back doors open. Everyone is inside the house. The EMTs have Pastor Adams on a bariatric gurney, ready to wheel him away. Wearing an oxygen mask, he sees Kasha and pulls the mask away from his face so she can hear him. She leans in to hear, turns her head and throws her hair to a side, holding it away from her ear, her other hand lightly on his forearm. Looking imploringly at her, wide-eyed, “tell them to read my books. Do that for me, please. Please.”

An Incapacity for Savoir-Faire

STEVE BIERSDORF

There was much more they were hoping to accomplish. In the back of their thoughts – tumbleweeds blowing by, squinting into the sun and windblown sand, A Gun For Ringo playing in the background – they knew they were wasting their time. No one likes Pho that much. They discover he’s lefthanded, likes his steak medium well (would have thought he liked his food raw or undercooked), dislikes kimchi (a surprise), and eats with Western utensils instead of chopsticks when given the option. Desperate for progress, diagnosing as false positive his use of forks, knives and spoons. 

By his command, Old Uncle strapped to a wall, by wrists and thighs, dismembered with one of those Chinese antiaircraft guns (88 mm, German made) with foot trigger, from World War II, so loud you wear headphones or your hearing is permanently damaged. Sawed off at the shoulders, at the tops of his femurs, the torso and head dropping to the floor with a sticky thud, arms and legs pinned to the wall. 

It would shock you to know he thinks he’s better than you, smarter than you. You assume he assumes you’re superior to him because you’re Caucasian and he’s Asian. He thinks it’s odd that you like him. He sees this as exploitable. If he can’t win, he’ll quit. Never was there the remotest possibility of win-win. 

If Satan were to walk into a crowded café somewhere under guise, strapped with C4, and detonate himself, this would be the anti-Christian equivalent of his dying to propagate sin (as opposed to absolving it), each bit of his flesh an incubus for evil and hate. You and he are two chunks of scattered incubus meat.    

Tagger

STEVE BIERSDORF

On my drives to and from work, I go on hiatus from the morning palaver I normally half-listen to, or have on for noise. I drive with only the hum of the tires or cars going the other way, passing me with a gasp, or the occasional off-key brass section of an approaching train. Sometimes if I have to wait on a train I count the cars. Sometimes the trains are over two hundred cars long, and during drive time. I could write my congressman, suggesting there be restrictions on how long trains can be during drive times. Fifty cars or fewer seems like a reasonable expectation. My congressman is notoriously pro-commerce and with a well-funded hammerlock on his congressional district, so any response is unlikely. Accountability doesn’t apply. 

During a momentary lapse from my hiatus I make a fortuitous discovery. I’m pretty sure it was Marge and Murray and not any of the other him and her morning drive-time concoctions, Bruce and Darla, Lefty and Carole, Johnson and Box. Marge says that would be a cool job, watching TV for a living. Murray says you can go to our page and check it out. On Marge and Murray’s page is a help-wanted advertisement for TV-watching positions in the UK or Ireland, for a well-known subscription service for movies and TV shows. If I’m willing to relocate I’m invited to apply. I think about moving to the UK or Ireland and watching TV for a living. Getting paid to watch TV might be worth the dearth of sunshine or living among people with jacked-up grills and pretentious vocabularies.

My cell phone number is like a porterhouse dropped into a river teeming with piranha. It’s on marketing lists cold-callers ply, the standard lists, not the high net worth lists. Occasionally I take these calls, usually not. Sometimes there’s an automated message telling me I’ve reached my credit limit but that if I call now they can extend it for me, or sometimes the automated message tells me it’s imperative that I call an 888 number immediately. I don’t have any credit cards (if I don’t have the money for it I don’t buy it, which as an American is counterintuitive of me). I’m not sure what’s different this time, but I take the call. 

A woman wants to know if I’m still interested in the TV-watching position I applied for. I’m not sure why we don’t conduct the phone interview right then, but we prearrange a time and date. A recruiter calls me at the scheduled time and gets my basics, then questions me extensively about what I watch on TV. I watch a lot of TV. Even if I’m doing something else I leave the TV on. I go to sleep with the TV on, my remote has a timer and the TV shuts off while I’m asleep. She’s careful not to react to my answers, but I sense she likes the smell of what I’m cooking. Sometimes she interrupts my answers with the next question when my answers are long-winded. I’m told my responses will be carefully considered and if they’re interested in moving forward they’ll contact me. On my drive home, I wonder if they have road construction in the UK or Ireland. I’d be willing to trade our road construction for their dentists, but not if I’m moving there.

A few weeks later and I recognize the same area code when the next call comes. The caller introduces himself as Jim Goodlatte. I ask if an affinity for lattes is genetic predisposition, and he chuckles as if he’s heard this a thousand times. Only good ones, he says, his stock rejoinder. He has only one question, why I want to be a Tagger, which is what a professional TV watcher is called. Who wouldn’t?  I ask. He’s coming to town, and wants to meet face to face. He schedules me for an interview at a local hotel. He’ll be interviewing people for two days, interviews on the hour. He instructs me to go online and take a personality test in the interim. 

The personality test consists of side-by-side responses to a single question, in rectangular boxes, with rounded corners, in big font and simple sentences, nothing so mind-bending as a double negative. At the outset I’m warned that it takes approximately forty-five minutes to complete the test and that I should set this time aside. I’m to go with the response that most closely matches how I am, or how I self-actualize. I’m encouraged to answer instinctively and not overthink my responses. The questions have nothing to do with watching TV. An example: When confronted with a difficult situation do I 1) trust myself to come up with the appropriate solution or 2) do I prefer to first gather input from others? Offended by these inane questions, I decide to be contradictory. I choose the same or similar response to sets of oppositely intended questions. I tear through the test in little more than ten minutes. 

And then I’m back at work, trying not to think about this opportunity, but that I might get out has me in a good mood. Watching TV in the UK or Ireland is an exciting proposition that I’m totally up for, I decide. A customer is telling me about the vehicles he’s modified. He’s a parts manager at an Audi dealership. He’s a nice guy, but he’s the tenth or eleventh customer of the day. I’m thinking about how I can get him to sign two more forms and break out my disinfectant wipes while he’s telling me about how he tripled the torque output of his Ram truck. I smile suddenly and he smiles back like I’m smiling at something he said, like discussing torque ratios really tickles my balls.

    

Singha

STEVE BIERSDORF

He usually parked at the edge of a weedy vacant lot for sale that would soon belong to someone, adjacent to a new home under construction. It was early, and he desired to get the day started right with a brisk walk. Atop a ladder was a man in a white t-shirt, injecting nails with a nail gun as if he was stapling the house together. As he was walking by the man looked down at him and said something, what, quite, he didn’t catch, only the word “local” and a number, and it was a question judging from the tone.

He noticed they were dressed similarly, he also in a white t-shirt and jeans, though his white t-shirt was an advertisement for Singha beer, a souvenir from his one visit to Bangkok, there for a week and a half, where he had unprotected sex with a deaf Thai hooker who started menstruating mid-copulation. And so he came back with the Singha t-shirt and six-months’ wait to see if he was HIV positive, an interminable wait for the results in those early, terrifying days of HIV. Since he wasn’t conversant in sign language, the deaf hooker had communicated with him by pointing and gesturing and making nonsensical noises. When she wanted to get paid, she pointed to his wallet and grunted. She observed as he counted off the bills, and when he didn’t give her enough Baht, she grunted with more emphasis. He’d felt entitled to a discount.

“Sure,” was all he could come up with, and the man on the ladder pointed toward the front of the skeletal house and he heard the man say, “start cutting those boards. And make sure you wear the safety goggles.” Appreciative that the man on the ladder was concerned for his well-being, he came into the front yard and there was a single board lying across two sawhorses, other boards piled nearby, one by sixes if he had to guess, the safety goggles hanging from a protruding shoulder of one of the sawhorses. After affixing the goggles he found the hand-held circular saw and began cutting, one board after the other, slicing easily through them and a pile of sawdust growing steadily like an ambitious anthill beneath where he cut.

A while later and the man had descended from the ladder, and he was trying unsuccessfully to shout over the zinging metallic whine of the circular saw. From the man’s expression, he appeared upset. He took his finger off the saw trigger to hear what the man might have to say.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“I’d think that would be fairly obvious. By the way, I’m getting paid for this, right? It’s not that I mind lending a hand, but I did have other plans.”

“I mean, what the fuck are you doing to this wood? This is all the wood we have. We’re on a schedule.”

“I’m cutting the boards in a herringbone pattern. For never having used one of these things,” looking slightly maniacal or overzealous with the safety goggles still on, he hefted the circular saw aloft and shook it for emphasis, the man staring at the Singha advertisement on his t-shirt, coming to a realization. “For never having been trained and thrown to the wolves, this is precise work if I say so myself.”