Keep Waterloo Weird
(Page 2 of 4)
“Can you hear me? Is this okay?” On the dais, a lone gangly figure bent over the microphone, his cheeks pink, his long tie a pendulum, his hands in his pants pockets. He looked out at the row of cameras across the room, and a couple cameramen raised their thumbs in reply.
Oh, to be a cameraman. The cameramen, really more like camera guys, like guys you’d invite over to watch a ball game or help build a carport, were endowed with a kind of silent, geekish authority because of their equipment. Big black video cameras on six-foot tripods anchored the camera guys to a particular spot, where they belonged, where they stood with feet planted wide. Everyone else was in motion. Everyone else squeezed and nudged and if necessary resorted to outright pushing, and when they found a spot, they still weren’t still; they craned their necks and bounced up on their toes. They clapped, at intervals, for no reason at all. The worst were the campaign staffers: sleep-deprived, half-deranged people with stickers on their lapels and cell phones clamped to their ears, ducking this way and that, colliding and then parting again. But even the reporters in the press area were—with the exception of the inertial Sonny Muñiz, political columnist for the Standard-American—circling their territory like big dogs in a very small park.
Nick himself avoided designated press areas, media sign-in tables, question-and-answer periods. He’d never been keen on joining that particular club, and as a writer for a barely respectable publication, he wasn’t quite the club’s cup of tea either. He kept his notebook in his back pocket and removed it only when necessary. He didn’t dress like a reporter, not like the middle-aged newspaperman in his baggy flak vest full of pens or the television correspondent in her stiff suit. Nick wore glasses with black plastic rims and black boots and black jeans, thick, dark items to offset his lack of bulk.
Over a loudspeaker, music started to play. Electronic horns, electronic drumming: the theme from Rocky. Not a tune that lent itself to clapping, but people were clapping anyway, searching for the beat, eager for the show to start.
There it was: a bubble in the collective chest. Nick could feel it. The staffers, the lobbyists, the old-timers, even a few onlookers from hotel management had all gathered, not unwillingly, here in the Lamar Room with its stain-resistant wallpaper and obese chandelier. They seemed happy to be here, on tiptoes although there was nothing to see yet. No one was safe from it, not even Nick, hard as he tried to keep his pulse from elevating in situations involving politicians and the Rocky theme. And what was it? Difficult to say. Something mysterious conjured like life in a test tube by this roomful of human chemicals all sweating and waiting and clapping, excited because the television cameras were here, excited because elected officials were here, jazzed by a second-rate candidate for statewide office, yes, but jazzed anyway! Never mind that the evening news and elected officials were normally subjects of ridicule. It was a bad movie that made you cry in spite of yourself. Nick was a sucker for those sentimental movie moments, and his heart was thumping now. To the theme from Rocky.
Nuh-nuh nuhhhh, nuh-nuh nuhhhh.
The candidate was making his way toward the podium, accompanied by a man Nick recognized as a state senator and a woman he thought he recognized but couldn’t identify. He’d seen her picture somewhere. In a cranberry-colored suit and shimmery blouse, her plucked eyebrows arching high over her eyes, her teeth flashing, she looked like an official photograph.
Nick scanned the crowd again and accidentally made eye contact with Mark Hardaway’s press secretary—a short, stolid woman who spoke in short, stern sentences, a former daily reporter and a fixture of the political scene. Looking at Nick, she pointed to the designated press area: Go. People associated with campaigns, Nick had noticed, liked to give orders. He peeped over at the reporters’ area, a disagreeably small, thronged corral, and stayed where he was, pretending not to have noticed the instruction. Out of the corner of his eye he could tell the press secretary was still signaling him to move.
All right. Fine.
But blocking his path was a broad woman in a wrinkled jacket. “Excuse me,” he said. The woman didn’t react. He touched her jacket and tried again. “Excuse me?”
The woman turned and looked at Nick as if he were slathered in shit, then stepped several millimeters to the left. He wormed his way past her and through the audience and into the reporters’ area. For the sake of something to do, he took his phone from his pocket and checked its digital window for the time. On it was a picture of a question mark doing some sort of end zone dance. Missed call. Maybe from Liza.
Earlier that morning, Liza had phoned, which was not her habit. He’d been sitting there in his work area, in his socks, staring at his screen saver of busy fish, and had arrived at a decision to stretch. Lifting his arms overhead, he’d caught sight of Trixie Moss marching grimly in his direction, inclined forward and frowning, which could only mean that his last (admittedly rather lame) column had incurred her copy editor’s displeasure or that there had been some new development in her divorce proceedings. Swiftly, he brought his arms down and snatched up the phone to pretend he was on a call, but instead of a dial tone he heard Liza’s “Hello?”
“Liza?”
“I didn’t hear the phone ring.”
“It didn’t.”
“But you answered it?”
“It was an accident.”
“An accident.”
“A good accident,” he added in vain. Her voice sounded flat, and he wondered whether something had happened and then whether somebody close to her had fallen ill, or perhaps died. Without quite intending to, he thought of Miles, a friend of hers from childhood (though very much full grown now, brawny and carnivorous) whom she’d started dating after she and Nick had split up. He thought of Miles keeling over, of Miles giving the bucket a good manly kick. He was still working through this idea when Liza asked whether he could meet her for a drink that evening. He’d said yes. Seeing her was something he wanted to do just about every evening, and he’d allowed himself, if only fleetingly, to hope that something might come of it. Yet he guessed by her tone of voice that she hadn’t asked him for a drink so that they could make out afterward in front of her parked car the way he was imagining, nor was she going to disclose that Miles had unexpectedly perished, and so although he wanted to see her in general, the prospect of this particular rendezvous, its purpose unclear but serious, made him queasy.
Now he flipped open his cell phone and saw that this recent call had come from his uncle. He snapped the phone shut.
The tubby, perspiring Senator Comal, who because of his untelegenic appearance and two divorces would never be tapped to run for statewide office, began his introduction. I want to tell y’all about a great man and a great leader, Comal began. Raised in a small town. Has small-town values. Educated at our state university. Enlisted in the United States Navy. Farmland Insurance. City council. State Assembly. A wife and two children. Parents still living in the same small town. At last Comal yelled out Hardaway’s name, and the candidate stepped forward to the microphone, squinting a little and mugging at the row of cameras with their gaping black eyes. The clapping quickened; girlish “whoo!” noises floated up from the crowd; flashes whined and strobed.
As Nick understood it, Mark (“Shares Your Values!”) Hardaway had been plucked from the obscurity of a city council in the western part of the state—having impressed the local kingmakers with his cast-iron jawline and treadmill physique, not to mention a congenial malleability when it came to his positions—and thrust into one race for state Assembly and five years later into another for his current position, commissioner of the Department of Human Needs. Now he was running for governor. Everyone knew this already, but he hadn’t yet officially announced his candidacy. To announce you had to have cameras and bunting and a speech.
