Election Night in Pineville

ELECTION NIGHT IN PINEVILLE

By John Dawson

            It’s that time again when we celebrate American democracy by electing some bold visionary to lie to us for next three years. It’s a time of patriotic speeches, feverish flag-waving hoop-de-do, and finding the candidates with the best cookies and the worst microphones. People are sticking signs up in their yards and other people are sticking their noses up at ‘em. We’re unfurling and flying our flags, apple pie is flying off the shelves, and everybody’s keepin’ a sharp eye peeled for candidates lurking behind bushes. I gave the dog some Uncle Sam cereal this morning and whistled The Stars and Stripes Forever in the shower.   

            Our founding fathers knew that anybody shameless enough to get into politics would, once in charge of something, go completely rotten inside of three years. So they fixed it up statutorily that we wouldn’t have to put up with anybody for longer than that. If the incumbent can talk his way out of the scandals of his first term without getting run out of town, he can serve another three years, which is the predicament we’re facing today with Mayor Jeff Grifter in a gritty, scandal-ridden ripped-from-the-headlines race for re-election. 

            Election season consists of a frank discussion of the serious issues facing Pineville. We have forums to meet the candidates, and we studiously evaluate their platforms and qualifications. We weigh how artfully they weasel their way out of the slanderous things their opponent’s saying about ‘em – you don’t want a mayor, after all, who can’t finagle his way out of a slush-fund exposé or lie like a dog about a blonde. It wouldn’t be American. Finally, there’s the big debate on election night in the gym and we vote to elect the glibbest white man with the slimiest advertising and the best cookies.  

            Last night I’m sitting here minding my own business watching Criminal Minds, and just as the gloved hand with the scalpel begins to descend on the suburban housewife, the dang thing fades out for a commercial, leaving both of us on the edge on our seats. But instead of a deep-voiced cowboy selling me the new Dodge Ram, here comes Mayor Jeff on. He’s sittin’ in his City Hall office with a bust of Thomas Jefferson on one side and an American flag on the other, callin' his opponent Chet Lester a dirty dog. Now, Chet will film a commercial with a photo of Ronald Reagan on his desk and call Jeff a dirtier dog than he – Chet, not Ronald Reagan – is. Jeff will then say that Chet’s the dirtiest dog he’s ever seen. People growl about it, but negative campaigning works because, subconsciously, we want to believe whatever we hear on TV – Walter Cronkite’s fault, in the final analysis – and the more times we hear it we figure it must be true, like Progressive Insurance. I usually say the hell with both of ‘em and either don’t vote at all or vote for one just to spite the other.  

            In case you’re wondering, the gloved hand with the scalpel belonged to a deranged doctor who still has issues with his dead mother, so he slices the tongues out of brunette housewives in Springfield, Illinois, with parakeets who drive blue Fords. When Hotch and Rossi finally got their profile straightened out, they pinpointed the last surviving Ford-owning brunette housewife in Chicago through internet cuttlebone sales, stormed over to her house and caught the suspect red-handed, arriving about thirty seconds too late in a rare operational fail for the team.      

            Anyway, it’s a good time to commingle with the candidates and dangle our vote at ‘em if they promise to fix our personal pothole. Me, I’m generally apolitical because no matter what side you’re on,  somebody is going to think you’re stupid and I’ve got all I can handle.  But this year, in view of my recent encounters with an increasingly oppressive government – a citation telling to clean up my back yard plus a jaywalking ticket by undercover deputy Oates dressed up like Penelope Cruz – I’m voting the rascals out. Thomas Jefferson had it up to here with repeated injuries and usurpations and so have I.

            Having determined that there’s nothing in the Constitution that says you have to use the crosswalk, I hauled over to City Hall the other day to argue the aforementioned jaywalking ticket with Judge Moody, wondering if I compliment his late mother he might take it easy on me. On the way up the stairs, I see in honor of election season they’ve hung up portraits of some former mayors, the civic woodwork’s most debonair rapscallions. If you’ve been aching for a illustrated history of men’s facial hair trends over the years, I can recommend it as a tonic.

            The first mayor of Pineville – this would be around 1867 or so give or take a year as the boys didn’t keep records until the wives fixed up the cuss box in ‘69 – was Private James Monroe Hogg (1845-1952) of the Blue Army and one of our forefathers who founded the place in April 1865 on the day before the war ended. Records from Jimmy’s administration are scarce, but he and the other founding boys, having met by chance in the forest and finding a mutual interest in pacifism and plum wine, liked the place and decided to build some pine houses and stay a while. In May 1865 they invested  municipal funds to import, on speculation, three  fine Christian sisters from Kentucky, Pansy, Rose and Violet Estes, because, well, they were red-blooded boys and it can get lonely in the forest. The girls were humdingers, the boys snapped them up, and they began begetting left and right and before you know it the little town of Pineville sprang up. It’s all in Chapter One of my first book which you can probably get in thrift stores now.

            Smiling John Shannon was mayor during the boom years when the railroad came to town and put us on the better maps. His administration had the foresight to obtain a large  campaign contribution from the Shamrock Brick Company, and City Hall was built in 1872. It’s got six-foot thick brick walls, two brick-reinforced basements, a brick sub-basement, and a pensive cubist brick lion who sits out on the front steps in, if you ask me, stony silence. That’s him – Patrick, not the lion – up there on the wall next to Jimmy, with sideburns that begin where Elvis only dared to dream.

            Luigi Scarlatti – the fedora with the smirk the next row down – got elected mayor in 1922 by giving a half-pint of Old Grandad  and a little bag of reefer to everybody in town and signing up supporters who had been dead so long they were too brittle to roll over in their graves about it. Luigi got whacked during the Olive Oil Wars of 1925. That was a colorful era, and you can see the bullet holes inside the old Scarlatti Olive Oil Imports building down at First and Pine. Due to our downtown gentrification program it’s an artsy coffee shop now.      

            The Depression that engulfed America in the 1930’s escaped Pineville because no matter how broke people are, they’re never too depressed to spend a smackaroo or two on a jug of the finest hard cider this side of Appleton, Wisconsin.  Our plum cider  industry – the Hoggs, Applebottoms and Esteses primarily – provided trickle-down dollars to the town and a steady paycheck during Prohibition to Henry Crow, the Pine County revenuer who never busted a still in 13 years years despite one being in his mother’s basement and cider on the old gal’s breath half the time. In appreciation, we elected Henry in 1934.

            William Harlan Harrison up there was the first mayor to actually get caught doing something wrong. At the trial, his lawyer Hiram Socrates Peabody argued that  the City Charter doesn’t actually say you can’t bribe a public official with a blonde – show me the verbis legis, he demanded – and that the cowardly charge of his friend, the District Attorney,  is a despicable assault on the Constitutional pursuit of happiness of all righteous, God-fearing, Pineville jurors. He reminded the jury that the unjustly accused would have fought for their freedom on foreign soil if he’d been drafted, and that he takes his mother to  church every Sunday. Well, when Hiram got going like that, nobody could touch him with a ten-foot polemic. The peers acquitted Harlan and he got off with an admonishment from the judge to stay away from the blonde.

            One of our more memorable mayors was Neil Eagleburger in the 1960’s. Neil was a pretty good Presbyterian Pineville boy when he got elected, but after he got back from a Mayor’s conference in San Francisco he seemed to be a lot more relaxed all the time. He let his hair grow down on his shoulders, grew a beard, and started wearing flowery shirts and beads and going barefoot and playing Jimi Hendrix on the call-waiting machines at City Hall, which scared the bejabbers out of the elderly people calling in to check the holiday trash pick-up schedule. He introduced a resolution to rename Second Street to Love Avenue and tried to get all the “chicks” to stop wearing their bras. Despite what many Democrats felt were liberating aspects to that proposal, in a town full of Baptists, Presbyterians, Mormons and Catholics – more collective sanctimony than you can shake a stick at – that cracked the town camel’s back. One day  Neil was playing Abbey Road and smoking some primo hashish with a braless blonde intern in his office, and the sheriff came and arrested him and confiscated the evidence. They had a special emergency recall election and sent Neil on the long and winding rail out of town.      

            We elected Jeff two years ago on his platform of being a handsome, genial young man who’d never been arrested and goes to church regular. But frankly, power and politics has changed the man, and now he’s kind of a cross between Richard Nixon and Pat Boone.  If you meet him on the street and ask him about the repair bill for the town snowplow, he’ll smile, say he’s glad you asked about that, and give you fifteen minutes on the history of snowplows and their importance to our democracy. He’ll probably tell you about the time Abraham Lincoln tried to put a snowplow yoke on his old horse Patience and that there’s a lesson for us in that. Then he’ll walk off, leaving you impressed with his patriotic snowplow perspicacity but without an answer to your dang question.  

           

            Snowplows, you see, have become a campaign issue this year, because last week during our most recent blizzard, Jeff  snuck out on our official city snowplow to go plow his mother’s street late at night so she could get to church the next morning.  But the old motor overheated and threw a rod and got stuck, and now Pineville motorists are slip-sliding into each other on slushy streets and careening down unplowed parkways and wreaking traffic havoc. Meanwhile, on the mayor’s mother’s street you could have a beach volleyball tournament if you wanted to.  The citizenry are in an uproar and if we'd be storming a Bastille if we had one.  

            The Mayor’s spokeswoman – his secretary Shirley – issued a statement saying that the Mayor is an official elected city employee, and he was engaged on official city business with official city equipment on an official city street and officially there isn’t anything wrong with that. She reminded the voters that they turned down a quarter-cent tax for maintenance on official city vehicles seven years ago under a previous Republican administration, and in any event, snow is an Act of God according to the insurance company so the matter is officially closed. In response, Jeff’s detractors are demanding that that next time it snows he has to go plow their mother’s streets.

              

            Our helpful Ace Hardware Man, Chet Lester, is Jeff’s opponent and I’m leaning on supporting him, basically because there’s nobody else. But he says if he’s elected he’ll try to take a look at my water heater and see if he can’t figure out a way to get me some more hot water in the morning. (Not that it matters to you, but my shower goes cold after about five minutes and I can hardly get all the way through That’s Life anymore.) Chet suggested that a donation of the Alexander Hamilton ilk might go a long way to making my voice heard in City Hall if he gets in and he never forgets a friend. So he’s my man.

            Chet’s daddy Sylvester ran the old Western Auto Associate store at Fifth and Pine with his second wife Hester before he had a stroke and died in Hoses and Belts.  Chet took over, but then Walmart plopped down out on the highway and put him plumb out of business. So he called Ace up and told ‘em he’d be helpful to people if they’d give him a new sign and the same wholesale prices Walmart gets. Since Ace is mad at Walmart anyway – it’s too long a story to go into here but it involves hundreds of thousands of Chinese hoes – they agreed and ever since Chet’s been obliging, eager to please, kind, accommodating, supportive, and cooperative with the customers. Any time you got a problem, he’ll hit the nail on the head for you. 

            Last week he was at a public hearing in the City Council room where they were legislating whether to repair the old snowplow or buy a new one. Jeff was introducing an emergency measure that would allow the city to waive the normal ninety-day review period for major purchases so they could act boldly and decisively. Chet walked up to the podium and tapped on the microphone.

            "Scuse me, ya’ll, but I got a sale on snowplows and if the council will take a look at my bid here, you can see I beat Walmart cold.  Ya’ll can have the streets cleared by tomorrow morning if you act boldly and decisively and give me the check.”

            “Well, on behalf of the council, thank you Chet for your fine civic gesture, but the Streets Department has already accepted a bid from the John Deere dealership out there on 57 that’s going to suffice just fine. But thank you Chet, we appreciate it. Next!”

            “Mr. Mayor, don’t your brother-in-law Skippy work out there sellin’ tractors and plows on commission?”

            “You don’t have the floor no more, Chet, and…”

            “Ain’t the Streets Department your uncle?”

            “This is highly irregular!” Jeff shouts out like Hamilton Burger when Perry Mason’s trying to pull a fast one on him.

            “I got a copy of the statute deal right here, and it says that bids are supposed to be open for public inspection, so let’s compare it to mine. Plus, relatives, see page fifteen, Nepotism, are forbidden from stickin’ their their sticky fingers in the city till. Or," he goes, sensing a good place for a dramatic pause, “is the mayor planning to replace the snowplow he broke out of his own pocket? If that’s the case, I withdraw my bid and he can pay his brother-in-law’s ten-percent commission and the Deere franchise fifteen percent markup all day long if he wants to."  

            “That’s off the record, Chet, on account of you ain’t recognized. And the city don’t need another salesman comin’ around pushin’ his product because we got a procedure for that.” Jeff banged his gavel down like Felix Frankfurter dismissing an ill-prepared litigant.

            Well, Chet blew a gasket, words led to words, and he said something about Jeff’s sister Amy that he might not should have said. It took three alderman to separate ‘em and they finally went home, licking their wounds and sporting black clouds hovering over their heads like the kid in Peanuts.
  

            The next morning City Inspector Wilmer Oates – Jeff’s second cousin, although his father has never actually come forward – sauntered up and slapped a $35 ticket on Chet for displaying his hoes on the sidewalk. Producing his statute book, Wilmer told Chet that his hoes were  impeding pedestrian progress and obstructing the  public sidewalks and you can’t do that. What if somebody comes along, he goes,  and steps on a hoe the wrong way and it jumps up and smacks him on the forehead? 

            Chet and his daddy before him have been standing their hoes on the sidewalk in front of the building for seventy years now, without even one incident ever involving somebody so stupid he doesn’t even know how to walk down the street. Wilmer don’t care though, he says he’s just enforcing City Codes like he’s paid to do, and shuffles on on down the street looking for other Republican scofflaws.

            Chet admires Oliver Wendell Holmes, and he's pretty sure that tyranny goes too far when the King starts pickin’ your  pocket because you exposed a smoke-filled-back-room deal with his brother in law for the new snowplow, even if you did say something about his sister you wouldn’t repeat in church and if your hoes might, technically, interfere with  blind passersby who have larger than normal feet.  

            So, that Friday night over fried flounder, Chet told Esther he’d decided to run for Mayor, and asked her how she’d like to be First Lady of Pineville.  She went and took a bubble bath and came out draped in a slinky fur-lined peignoir and Tabu, and told Chet she liked the idea just fine. (Gratuitous, I know, but I give my readers, and my hardware men, what they want.)  So Chet’s  running on a platform of Throw the Rascal Out and promising change at City Hall, always a safe platform because we usually want to dump a new mayor after six months anyway. 

            So here we are three months later, the second Saturday of November, when the candidates have their debate in the high school gym and then we vote and get it over with.

            And what a grand night for a good old-fashioned American political debate! The red, white and blue banner-bedecked gym was packed to the rickety rafters with  patriotic Pinevilleans waving flags and signs and trying not to spill their beer as they climbed up.  And, of course, there’s the excitement of electing the next Mayor in an election that the media – The Pine County Herald – characterized as the dirtiest campaign since 1904 when Rutherford Chick called Artemus Snider a cross-eyed skunk, and Artemus shot him in the leg. Nobody called Artemus cross-eyed  much after that. He’s the one in the second row with the strabismus and a mean look on his pinched little face.  Due to issues with his mother earlier in life, Artemus was married three times to redheaded librarians but I don’t have time to get into it now.

            Another thing that makes Pineville like every other American city is that our high-school gym smells like dirty socks soaked in cheap industrial Lysol. Four generations of Puma youth have excreted hundreds of thousands of gallons of teenage sweat in there, and that’s on top of all the hormones and pheromones and what not they’re shooting out half the time so there’s a moldy, sour lingering admixture which tonight, thankfully, has been partially adulterated – maybe somewhat mitigated – by the aroma of fresh-grilled patriotic hot dogs (which made me wish Felix Frankfurter was here to enjoy one),  grilled American cheese sandwiches, baked beans and apple pie.

            Everybody grabs a paper plateful of all the American grub they can balance on their plate with one hand, then they trot over to the tub for an ice-cold-red-white-and-blue Pabst Blue Ribbon. Which is what me and Aunt Mary, the old yellow-dog democrat,  did. She’s been to every Election Night since Harry Truman winked at her at the depot in 1948. This year she finagled me into going to keep her company. She said that  I might learn something and  since tonight’s Criminal Minds is a rerun – The Catfish River Killer – I decided to go.     

           

            Since Stone Phillips didn't answer our letter, this year’s media celebrity debate moderator is Maria Elena Montoya-Hernández from Channel 3 in Mapleville. Maria’s one of the prettiest girls in Pine County – think South-of-the-border Reese Witherspoon – and she used to be  the weekend weathergirl, which is pretty much the dregs of the TV business because they make you go stand out in the monsoon and tell the viewers it’s raining. During our last tornado, the station manager noticed her standing out there advising the viewers it was wet and windy outside, and he called her into his office that evening and she emerged as a live-late-breaking-action-news-investigative reporter. Ever since, she’s been broadcasting so much glitz and Latina oomph over the tri-county airwaves that it won’t be long until some big network snaps her up. That’s what happened to Soledad O’Brien. She was just a weekend weathergirl on NBC and I said to myself at the time, hmmm, that good-lookin’ gal’s gonna go places once the executives get her out of those wet clothes. 

            There was an earsplitting howl of feedback signifying that one of the young engineers from the Audio-Visual club forgot to turn the volume knob down before he turned the microphone on.

            “Good evening ladies and gentleman, boys and girls and welcome to the Pineville Mayor’s debate! Buenas noches señoras y señores, niños y niñasde, todas las edades y bienvenidos a la Pineville el debate electoral.”

            I’ll tell you what, as good as Maria looks on TV when she’s sticking her microphone in a shady acupuncturist’s face in the parking lot, she looks even better in person where her charismatic smile and  hermosa morena de pelo al igual que una chica Breck and gleaming Latina everything hits you in the face like Miss South America or somebody.  

            “Woo-hoo!”

            “My name is Maria Elena Montoya-Villareal-Hernández…”

            “Yay-us!”

            “And I am muy feliz to be here with you tonight and be sure to watch Action News at ten for the latest in live, late-breaking election returns and the most accurate weather forecast in the tri-county area. I will be your debate moderator tonight, which means that I will ask some of your questions – has everyone turned in their questions - ¿ha todos se volvieron a sus preguntas en?”

            I love them Spanish upside-down question mark deals, don’t you?

            “At this time, I will now introduce the candidates, and please hold your applause until I’m done because mi novio me quiere de vuelta a casa a las diez y estoy consiguiendo solamente cincuenta dólarespara este. Presenting your next Mayors of Pineville, Jeffrey M. Grifter, Chester Lester and . . . Miss Dorothea Birdseed!”

           

            There was a collective female screech like Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford just walked in without their shirts on carrying enough chocolate cake for everybody. 

            I’d been wondering why there were three podiums – or podia, Webster says you can take your pick – set up on stage and sure enough,  following Jeff and Chet out trots little old Dottie Birdseed, President of the Republican Ladies  Club and President Emeritess of the Pine County Daughters of the Confederacy – a politically ambitious woman, clearly. Aunt Mary prodded me in my Pabst arm, but fortunately my motor skills when holding a beer are legendary and without spilling a drop I go “What, dang it?”

            She tells me to look around I might learn something, and I crane around and espy about thirteen hundred and fifty two Pineville women poking in their purses, pulling out pink Dottie is a Hottie buttons, pinning them on their pinafores – a plurality of which, I now perceive, are pink - and making more I-am-woman-hear-me-roar noise than you ever heard in your life. It was like Joan of Arc rode in on a flaming chariot.    

            It began to dawn on us – nobody’s fools, we men - that what was afoot was audacious feminine electoral skullduggery on a massive, incomprehensible scale as yet unseen in the history of mankind including Lucretia Borgia. Pineville loves its womenfolk, don’t get me wrong, but a united public assembly of ‘em jumping up and down and screaming like banshees makes us nervous. All they needed was torches.

            I and the other gentlemen – me and the boys – were exchanging blank looks at one another.  Imagine getting settled in as Lincoln and Douglas get ready to start in on slavery, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton suddenly pulls up a chair and starts in on her red velvet cake recipe. It just ain’t done.  It’s highly irregular, because we’ve never had a woman run for Mayor before, and society has to be conditioned to something like that.  Plus, she’s a dark horse we never even heard a snort out of.

            I should mention that there is a precedent for a woman Mayor. When Bill Baggerly had his heart attack in 1942 – he’s the red face in the third row – his wife Betty, seizing the opportunity for  power over men she had craved since her Pop gave her sister Priscilla a tricycle for Christmas in 1906, strapped him in his bed and gave him morphine all day so after a while he didn’t even want to get up and go back to being Mayor. She took over the reins of city government and signed all his in absentia papers for him, went to council meetings, and kept him in bed for the remaining two years of his term while she made all the mayoral decisions and appointments. The day after Bill’s term ended, she yanked the morphine drip out of his arm and told him to get up and go get a job.    

            Jeff and Chet have their frank, friendly politician faces on, and they’re waving at their friends  like William Penn at a Quaker revival.   Dottie – all five-foot-two-eyes-of-steel-blue of her – is squinting at the crowd over her spectacles-on-a-rope. For some odd reason, she reminded me of Sister Elizabeth peering over her spectacles at me in fourth grade as she was getting ready to inspect my fingernails.  I had a vague foreboding then, as I had now.

            “Ladies and gentlemen, please stand for your national anthem. Here to sing it for you is the Pineville Baptist Church Ladies Choir, led by Pastor Willard Grimes.” 

            Brother Billy led his flock of harmonic ewes out in their magnificent form-fitting, sparkling blue and white concert gowns – Pumas colors, you know – tooted his pitch pipe to G, and the girls warbled The Star Spangled Banner Song with so much reverent four-part exultant bursting patriotism – my heart swelled when Glenda Lou Applebottom took a deep breath before rippin’ into the rocket’s red glare part – that by the time it was over everybody felt like going to bomb some foreigners. When you sell dollar beer and poke Pineville’s patriotism you get that.

            “The candidates will now make their opening remarks and then I will ask the first question. Mayor Grifter.”

            "Boo!”

            The snowplow radicals, you know.

            “Fellow Pinevilleans, my churchgoing family, my beloved wife and children, can I just begin by saying God Bless America. Thank you, thank you all. Abraham Lincoln, my friends,  talked about a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Isn’t this a great country where a boy can be born in a barn like me and work his way up the ladder of life?  I got here, friends, by realizing the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,  and I can tell you that Ronald Reagan might have been my friend if he hadn’t died while I was still in high school. Some of you may remember my winning touchdown with three seconds left in the playoff against Elm City the year we went to state. Thank you, thank you all.  And…”

            “Buzzzzzz!”

            “…and the government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Thank you very much and God bless America and our troops overseas!"

            “Boo!"

            “What about the snowplow?”

            “Thank you Señor Mayor. Now we will meet the mayor’s first opponent, Mister Chester Lester.”  

            “This on? Well hey there, ya'll, y’all know me I run the hardware store downtown

and I’m running my campaign based on hard-nosed change. If ya'll want somebody tough as nails to retool the city bureaucracy, I’ll put my nose to the grindstone, call a spade a spade and put the hammer down on chiselin’ politicians,” he jerks his head  Jeffwardly, "who throw a monkey wrench into the town machinery. I’ll shovel the spit out of City Hall. I’ll take a hatchet to the present administration, ratchet this city into gear, and I won’t pull no punches while I’m doin’ it. And that ain’t all…

            “Buzzzzzz!”   

            “Woo-hoo!”

            “Go Chet!”

            “Miss Birdseed, por favor.”

            The crowd hushed – oh, you could hear some slurping but it wasn’t loud – as Dottie cleared her ancient throat.  This was a historic first moment in Pineville political history  and somebody will probably write about it someday.  

            “Thank you, Maria. Good evening, good citizens of Pineville. I am looking forward to debating the issues which face us here tonight and asking for your votes.” 

            “The first question is addressed to Mayor Grifter. Mayor, when will you tell us the truth about the snow plow - escándalo de el asunto de arado de la nieve - and the – how do you say, snow job - you’re pulling on the voters?’” 

            “Har-Har!” We appreciate a cheap pun in Pineville after a pair of Pabsts.

            Jeff smiled like Pat Boone getting ready to tell you that this sweetl little Corvair was owned by his grandmother.  

            “I’m glad you asked that question, Maria, because like Thomas Jefferson said, and I agree with him, that the man who fears no truths has nothing to fear from lies. So  I’m pleased to have this opportunity before all my churchgoing friends to provide a clear explanation. You know what, Maria? We live in a free country and not  in godless, Communist China over there,  which some people send a check to every month  for their cheap imported hardware, putting American boys and girls out of work. Let’s hear it for the United States, everybody, and for our brave men and women overseas. Thank you, thank you all. I might add that  nobody has seen my opponent in church in five years. John F. Kennedy reminds us…

            “Buzzzzzz!”

            “Boo! Boo!”

            “Su réplica, el Sr. Lester?      

            “Har-har! Well Jeff, I’m sure we all appreciate you teachin’ us about all China, but why don’t you just come out and tell us how much of a  kickback you’re getting on the snowplow deal  from your brother-in-law? You know, your brother-in-law, Skip, out there at his daddy’s Deere dealership on 57? I bet Skippy’s wife don’t know where he goes on his lunch break. It ain’t to church, brother!”

            I heard a shriek from a distant corner of the gym.

            (I can answer the question, because I chanced to be at that awful Pink Pussycat place the other day doing research for an article I’m putting together for JAMA called Close Observations of Muscular-Skeletal Synergy. Over in the VIP area I espied three tractor salesmen harvesting three glamorous entertainers who’re crawling on ‘em like caterpillars on corn stalks and reaping the rewards, dollar-bill-wise, of the two-hour lunch breaks the boys take when business loses traction.)   

            “Excuse me,” Dottie goes, and when the retired President of the Ladies Garden Club fixes to talk, people become all elephant-ears.   

            “First off, Jeffrey Grifter, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Filling City Hall with your deadbeat in-laws and trying to sneak an illicit snowplow purchase past the voters and then lying through your pearly whites – which you haven’t finished paying for yet, in fact you haven’t made a payment to your dentist in over a year and a half have you now - every time you open your smart mouth. I’ve known you since you were walking around in a stinky diaper, young man, and your precious mama should have walloped the tar out of you that time you ate the whole batch of Rice Krispies treats for the church bake sale and blamed in on your dog. That might have taught you a lesson, Jeffrey Grifter.”

            “Woo-hoo!”

            “Diaper!”

            “El alcalde de los pañales!”

            “This is highly irregular!”

           "But no, your dear mother let you run wild, and now you’re getting caught with your hand in the Rice Krispies again, aren’t you? Have you no respect for your mother’s memory, Jeffrey Grifter?”

             Jeff was trying to search his memory banks for a exculpatory quote – maybe something from Eleanor Roosevelt – but the airing of  the long-suppressed stinky diaper incident plus new questions about his involvement in the Rice Krispies Treats matter had  tied his already forked tongue to the extent that he could only stand there and gape. It was, he felt, wrong on so many levels and he didn’t know where to begin.  

            “Har-har-har, you tell him, granny!” That’s Chet again, well-known for schadenfreude.

            “As for Mr. Lester, I have here the security tape from the Motel Six in Elm City last Saturday night, which, curiously, shows a green automobile bearing license plate HRDWR4U pulling into the lot and a man resembling Mr. Lester entering the office and signing the register while the other occupant in the car, a well-known blonde divorcée whose name I will not mention, applies her lipstick in the rear view mirror. Whereas the video obtained from the bar shows the blonde and our subject engaged in what can only be described as . . . "

            The blood drained from Chet’s face like Dracula winked at him from across the room and the gymful of women – genetically hypersensitive to matters involving extramarital monkeyshines with blonde divorcees – hooted like an owl convention when the mice walked in.

            “Who? Who!?” That was Esther backstage.

            There’s only one person on the entire planet – at least the Pineville portion of it – who has the intelligence network to know not only if you’re brushing off your dentist bill, but can also snag a copy of the surveillance tapes from the local Motel Six – one of the most coveted sources in gossip history – and that would be Aunt Mary. She’s been gossiping, although she calls it social networking now, in Pine County for sixty years and if she don’t know a secret about you by now you’re dead, Jack. If you’re a politician, having Aunt Mary on your side is like having Pinkerton for a son-in-law and you’ve got dirt on him.

            “But disturbing as it is, Mr. Lester, it pales in comparison to how you and your opponent have neglected the serious issues facing our town. I’ve waded through your campaign materials, your speeches and your television advertisements, and I find not one articulate position about the sidewalks, taxes, schools, fire and police pensions, and most importantly to Pineville, neither of you’ve said one word about your plans for the persistent pothole problem plaguing Pineville, now have you?”

            The pothole problem goes back to Pete Peterson’s administration.  Peterson  and Sons Paving made the winning bid on the new streets, and since then, due to it being hot in the summer and cold in the winter, their cheap Taiwanese asphalt – they don’t know snap about asphalt in Taiwan – keeps concaving and convexing back and forth which causes erosion, which causes the potholes to keep popping open, year after year. Pete sold the city sixteen tons of the stuff to use for repair, so we’re still using it to stuff the potholes, and naturally new potholes keep popping up perennially through the previous potholes, perturbing the populace and perplexing the powers that be. Whoever’s in charge of the  Streets Department in winter takes a lot of heat over the potholes, but it’s not his fault. Every politician since Portland invented cement has promised to fix them, but nobody has ever had a concrete plan how to do it.

            “I am here, good people of Pineville, at the behest of the women of our fair city, the leaders of whom came to me several months ago, distraught at the state of our city and appalled by the two choices they were being given. They pleaded with me, for the sake of our city’s future, to enter this race.”

           

            I sensed a groundswell taking place, maybe due to the shaky rafters, and you know you’ve got a lively debate going on when you see a supporter of one candidate takes off her Birdseed  boater to bash a booster of an opposition candidate on the head and tell him to pay attention.

            “Some of you may be asking why a woman mayor? I ask, what have you got against women? What is it about women that  makes you angry? Does  your copy of the Constitution say we, the men? What’s your problem?”  

            Women, bless ‘em, do that, you know. They fire a series of rapid, loaded questions at you, and while you’re still tryin’ to figure an answer to the first one, here comes the second one, and then the next, and so on. It makes us tired and we give in, and they know it.

           

            “Now fellow citizens of Pineville, Jeffrey Grifter and Chester Lester represent nothing more than the failures of the past –  the same incompetence, double-dealing, and weakness for blondes that we’ve all seen before. If they act like this before they’re elected, how in the Aitch-e-double l do you expect them to act when they’re in office? Duh!”

            I had to admit she had a point and so did the crowd. Plus, hearing a little old lady saying “Duh” was very entertaining in itself.

            “How on earth could a woman possibly mess it up any worse than men have? Now, my platform contains a plank on the sidewalks, my ten-point plan to lower city expenses while upgrading schools and police pensions, plans for my kitchen cabinets,  a nice new datebook with a list of things-to-do and…”

            “Woo-hoo! You go Dotty!”

            She was workin’ the crowd like a Kennedy at a wake.

             Although it took a moment for the truth of what she was saying to sink in, Pinevilleans are a wise and reasonable electorate. Neither Jeff nor Chet’s said anything about sidewalks, streets, schools, taxes or potholes. All they’ve been doing is slandering each other’s names all over the place til’ they’re blue in the face.  The sudden intrusion of legitimate issues into a Pineville political campaign was momentarily throwin’ us off our feed, to be brutally frank with you. 

            “Now, I’m going to ask fifteen  minutes to outline my vision for Pineville, and I’ll thank you, Maria, to hold your questions until I’ve finished. Mayor Grifter and Mr. Lester, you might just as well sit down and listen. You might learn something.”

           

            Well, Jeff and Chet wanted no further part of Dottie, realizing that every time they opened their mouth she opened her mouth bigger and spit up another scandal on ‘em. Jeff had a fingerpaint larceny lurking in his past that he wasn’t anxious to have smeared before the voters, and Chet had had it up to here with scandals vis a vis his Chinese hoes and well-known blonde divorcées, whose name I will not mention here.

            Well, this story is too long anyway so I won’t go and tell you Dot’s bold visions for the future, but they were lulus. She outlined one bold vision smack on top of another one, and there was a gradual awakening in the hearts and minds of Pineville men that maybe, just maybe, we ought to take a chance and give the old gal a shot and do what the girls want, as crazy as that sounds. It ain’t like we’re got Lincoln and Jefferson running this year, and we men do have the responsibility to make important decisions in the course of human events when it comes necessary to dissolve the political bands which have connect us. Yep, all things considered, by the third Pabst I think it was pretty clear that we’d decided that change was afoot and her name was Woman. Proverbs was right: If you can’t beat ‘em, give up and try to salvage what you can. You never know. Maybe we'll get a beautification program on Pine Street or something.  

            I won’t embarrass Jeff and Chet by revealing the vote totals, nor will I humiliate the seven men who voted for them, but Dorothea Louise Birdseed was elected Pineville’s first Madam Mayor. The Herald printed her acceptance speech this morning, and here’s a piece of it:

            “My friends, Amelia Bloomer said that the human mind must be active, and the thoughts of a woman's heart must find vent in some way; and if the flower of the mind, instead of being highly cultivated so it may produce a rich harvest of fruits and flowers, is suffered to run to waste, it is not surprising that it yields nothing but weeds, briars, and thorns.”

            I don’t know what it actually means, but I need all the gravitas I can get, and I’m only reprinting it now while I try to figure out how to  wrap this thing up.

            Chet got down to brass tacks and went back to  the nuts and bolts of running the store. He  blamed his alleged indiscretion with the blonde on Budweiser commercials. Esther has forgiven him, but she’s clamped down on him now, he's got a short rope and the poor man has to punch a time clock in his own house now.  

            The blonde divorcee chose not to be interviewed for this story.

            Through her attorney Hiram Socrates Peabody IV, Jeff’s sister Amy declined to comment.

            Jeff saw in Politicians Monthly that  Kansas City, Kansas had an opening for a handsome young alderman, so he loaded up the truck and moved the family up there, poor things. He veered off a bridge outside Harrisonville on the way, drove into a pond full of pigs,  and was stuck for two days in the mud with ‘em.

            And that, aspiring authors, is how you sneak a moral into your dang story.

            Yep, it’s a beautiful  new day in Pineville. We’re looking forward to watching the progress of Mayor Birdseed as she puts her plans and projects into place for schools, taxes, police pensions and potholes and decides what color to paint her office.  But Dottie has her weaknesses just like everybody else. Satan is everywhere, especially City Hall, and I give her one, maybe two years. It may be this, or it may be that.  Maybe even a blonde divorcee. That’d be good.