2.2 Graceland

Author’s note: Apologies for the 24-hour delay, some last minute editing disasters coupled with professional ongoing polycrisis. We now resume our in-progress novel, uh, still in-progress below. Thanks for reading.

“Those fucking yahoos,” Dave’s incredulity bleeding into laughter bleeding into coughing as he spoke, “grifters. Obvious grifters. Clear grifters, c’mon Stan.”

“Hey man,” Stan defending himself, the threat of a whine that always lingered at the edge of his nasal register getting stronger, creeping in, “your categories, I’m just asking.”

“Just asking,” their boss snorted back, “listen, if you can’t spot the grifter when you’re sitting at the table, then it means you’re the fucking mark. And if you’re the fucking mark I got not fucking use for you. Break it down for me, how much you drop to ‘em?”

“Two stacks,” Stan huffed, his beard rustling defensively, “so far. Deal was two hundred now and two hundred more, mid-summer. We’ll touch base then see what’s what.”

“So, uh,” Tyler could hear the way his voice sounded like he was asking the high school seniors for a cigarette in the bathroom, but went on, “so, we’re bribing cops now.”

“Bribing cops,” Stan said, twisting around in his seat, theatrically raising his wayfarers, ”like a motherfucker,” dropping the sunglasses back down for some dramatic emphasis.

“Shut the fuck up, Stan,” the edge in their boss’ voice sharp, cutting, Stan sinking in the front passenger seat. Dave’s eyes sliced over from him, found Tyler’s in the rearview, pinned him there before going on. “It’s a little walking around money, nothing serious.”

“Guessing you could walk pretty far with four hundred thousand,” Tyler observed, aiming for a dispassionate neutrality, not entirely sticking the landing.

“You’d know,” Stan snort-laughed, his beard shakily framing his face from the back.

“Fuck up, Stan,” Dave repeated, going again through the whole routine again, dirty look from the corner of his eyes, seeking and finding his new employee’s in the rearview, “look, kid this is the gig, told you that–we find out what people want from us, to get what we need from them. A little street money goes a long way.”

“Towards what,” Tyler asked, hoping he wouldn’t regret it.

“Towards bodies, numbers, troops,” Stan interjected, anxious to get in on the fun of condescending to the new guy as frequently and fearlessly as their boss did.

“Stan.” Dave’s voice implying the shut-the-fuck-up instruction, “listen kid, these guys, these cops, they’re just your average run-of-the-mill grifters. That’s all, and every campaign needs their grifters. So you give ‘em what they want, a little street money, a few hundred thousand, cops come cheap, and we get the loyal foot soldiers we need.”

“For what,” Tyler pushed, becoming more sure he’d regret it as he did, “exactly?”

“For whatever we need,” Dave’s flat response a dismissal of the entire subject, but as the seconds crawled uncomfortably by with the miles under the corolla’s wheels, he picked up a different thread, breaking the uncomfortable silence, “Grifters,” he began anew, “every fucking winning campaign needs its grifters. Grifters, saviors, and strivers.”

“Break it down, boss,” Stan encouraged, looking for good graces to slide back into.

“So listen, on any campaign any one you’re gonna meet is either a striver, a savior, or a grifter,” Dave went on, his throat warming up, limbering into his canned speech. “Your strivers are the type of little shits, right, they go to school based on how many black robes graduated from there, or what the odds are they get into goldman or something straight outta undergrad are. Probably like you, kid,” Dave eyed the young man in his rearview, his eyes off the road long enough to make Tyler uncomfortable. “Strivers are good for getting coffee, knocking on doors, whatever, grunt work, shit work. They’re the interns of political campaigns. Six figures of student debt and fifty million letters of recommendation from the fortune 500’s list of c-suites to wipe my ass with. I don’t have much use for someone who chose their frat based on a risk assessment of career fallout and reputation damage from party pics being leaked three decades later.”

Stan was rapt, Tyler gleaming something about the dynamics at play here, the old man’s ready-to-go speeches and the expectation of a willing, even hungry, audience. He ran his face through a series of seeming-interested gestures–raising eyebrows, nodding occasionally–while he wandered off into his own thoughts of corrupt cops and cash bribes.

“Saviors, though, saviors at least can be useful,” Dave kept going on, Tyler recognizing it as some life skill he had never quite developed. “Saviors can take a fucking bullet for the campaign, good company men, but limited utility. A halfway decent savior is a great replacement-level utility player. They’re true believers, the savior-type, they really think they’re not just going to save the world, but that only they can save the world,” Dave’s tone eye-rolling through the statement with inflection alone, “Put ‘em in front of the press corps with a half-assed lie and they’ll sell the living shit out of it. You gotta admire anyone willing to burn up a little bit of personal credibility to win a newscycle. I mean, that’s your major difference between your saviors and strivers–both go to the same, I dunno, four schools, they all know all the same fucking people, clerk for the same whatevers. But a striver doesn’t want to get any dirt on them, they’re always lining up the next opportunity, the next big thing, thinking about whatever their own fucking brass ring is. Fuck ‘em. Give me a savior, a true believer, even if it’s just in themselves, any-fucking-day,” Dave put a period behind each word with a little slam of his palm on the steering wheel. “Someone who’s been dreaming of gutting social security since college? Doing keg stands quoting Ayn Rand? They’re the ones you can march out in front of some tank, tiananmen-style, armed with whatever bullshit you can cook up. Kinda limits their long term viability, but good in a very specific kind of crutch.¹ ”

On the radio the bouncy appropriated afro-world beats of Graceland started up, some sad boomer station from the far reaches of Long Island finding them on the open highway. He imagined the Hamptons heavy-up with exactly the kind of aging, self-absorbed audience that would feel their hearts warmed by Paul Simons’ midlife crisis masterpiece. His own response was more complex, but no less immediate, whenever Simon started singing about the Mississippi delta. Even if he still hadn’t ever learned what, exactly, a national guitar was.

When the album was just past its own drinking age, Tyler was ten years old, it was 2004. His father had never been quite what therapists would have labeled present or loving but he had been a fixture. His presence and, far more importantly, his expectations, were always apparent even at a consistent, distant, remove. Tyler read about Olympus and knew what it meant to try and please the gods, when they were so distant, so incomprehensible in their desires.

When his father did appear, when he did deign to be present and interact with his children it made him seem so much like rain falling on Los Angeles–sparse, inconsistent, confusing, and rare. At that age there was no vocabulary for what he could sense was happening, even now, therapists and confidants only offered the barest help in verbalizing the feelings about and from that time. He imagined then, and even now, that whatever it was was much like what housepets experience before disaster strikes, before things are swept away, changed.

“But grifters,” Dave was savoring his speech now, fully warmed up for the work of it. Tyler, tuning in and out, anxious to not have to pay attention and equally anxious to not be seen to not be paying attention. “Grifters are the gold fucking standard of campaigns. Grifters are the get-shit-done-go-to-guys. Every campaign needs its grifters, needs it get-shit done guys. They’re the ones you can rely on in the breach.”

The change was difficult to pinpoint, so much of it seemed to be by degrees, recognized most notably after the fact. His father was, moment-by-moment, becoming more present, available, engaged and interested in the lives of his children. This change coinciding with and offsetting in equal amounts the disengagement of his mother, Mona’s step-mother, and his father’s then-second and soon-to-be-former wife. One day they both sat the children down, announcing their divorce, lying with so little effort to hide it that even ten-year-old-Tyler recognized that things would, in fact, be changing dramatically, could not stay the same.

So his father took them to disneyland, trading favors for the privilege of spending money to close the park off for three extravagant days. Once, Tyler had told the story to a college girlfriend, her disbelief strong enough to send him to the internet in an effort to cost out what those particular memories had been worth to his father’s then significantly smaller fortune. There was no answer, the park’s website, wiki, and multiple message board sources all insisting that what he had experienced with his father and sister was unavailable at any price.

“Folks hear grifter, right,” Dave, unbelievably, still going on, Paul Simon having wrapped it up and the radio moving on to an extremely aggressive sales pitch for vitamin supplements for seniors. “They hear grifter and think it’s someone you can’t trust, someone you gotta keep an eye on,” the disgust in the boss’ voice was palpable, “these people, they want the world and they want it clean and wrapped and nice for them. Whatta you think, kid,” those watery eyes searching, finding Tyler’s slowly focusing on and in the rearview, “you trust a grifter to get the job done?”

“You tell me,” Tyler offered meekly, playing to his audience’s rock-bottom expectations.

“Now you’re getting it, son,” Dave evidently warmed by the flattering of his ego, “grifters, saviors, strivers, doesn’t fucking matter who. You go to war with the army you have, if that’s six dipshit harvard grads and some fucking two-decker man, that’s what you got,” the pointed disdain wasn’t lost on Tyler, who hadn’t gone to Harvard, despite his father’s best intentions. “The trick of it isn’t getting the best and the fucking brightest, this isn’t a heist movie, we’re not oceans-elevening this shit up, recruiting Brad and George to come save the fucking day. No, you work with what you got and the trick of it is making sure you understand the limitations of every piece on the board.”

Tyler hmmed his appreciation of Dave’s expert wisdom, pushing his head back against the headrest level with his neck, imagining Anaheim sunshine on his cheeks. His hair had been a sandy blond, then, summer-light. Remembering himself, some distant, different-haired, smaller version, always gave him just a little bit of a start. In his head he was gap-toothed, having gleefully pushed out some canine or molar just before the trip to the park. But some part of him, bigger than the pleasant gap-toothed memory, suspects he’s just drawing on a television show he saw once or some billboard for a happy family all together and off to buy something expensive and important. He couldn’t separate his desires for fictional, gauzy, television-induced happiness from his actual memory, from the assorted and supposed facts.

Truthfully, though, he remembers being happy, however many teeth he had, then. His father on one side of him, his sister, already off at college, the event timed to spring break or summer months, he couldn’t remember which. Mona, eye-rolling, foot-stamping, sneaking away to smoke cigarettes but always returning to hold his hand as they bounded from ride to ride. There was endless possibility in that sprawling, empty theme park, no other visitors, employees just standing around, waiting for their arrival to entertain them. Every ride accessible, available, waiting at the end of the speedy navigation of crowd control barriers bereft of any crowds to control. The expansiveness of it all, open and empty, just for them.

“That’s the trick of it,” Dave’s voice warm now, his self-pleasure audible, “everybody,” he said, sounding out each syllable in rhythm to the sound of the turn signal indicator he had thrown on halfway through cutting off a minivan, “everybody has a part to play. Knowing your role, or really, having someone know your role and understand what you’re good for and what you ain’t, that’s the trick of it, that’s how you win.”

Tyler considered his boss’ advice, and wondered what the man saw in him, where he planned to deploy him. He wanted to sink back into disneyland, into the warm, comforting, memories of his sister’s too-cool-teenage-facade cracking on space mountain, a curve slamming them to one side, her fear and joy all wrapped up in one another, her scream earnest and unguarded. 

Years later, Mona had managed to take that from him, without malice but equally absent forethought, she had told him one day, smoking cigarettes behind the poolhouse together, about the box on their father’s desk, carved ivory, brass hinges, full of cocaine she said. Her implication clear–the man, their father, unable to even enjoy time with his kids without a little bit of pick-me-up, a bit of a livener. Tyler grumbling in his head, petulantly wishing for his own little box, his own bit of pick-me-up to get through whatever Dave had planned for him.

“So how do I fit in,” he finally asked, emerging from his reminiscing, pushing the thoughts away with a poorly-practiced mindfulness too many therapists had tried to instill in him. “What’s my role here, then?”

“You’re like the team cool guy, kid,” Dave groped around a little until he found all the words, ordered them properly, “you’re the one who opens the doors for us, convinces us to stay out a little bit later, party a bit harder,” he winked into the rearview.

“I thought I was the cool guy,” Stan attempted to joke, but it fell flat, no sale, and the whine in his voice had come back, the beard flinching away from recognizing its limits.

“You’re the fucking lawyer, Stan,” their boss clarified, passing around impromptu job titles along with a little humiliation, “have you ever known a cool guy lawyer, c’mon.”

“What does that mean, though, the cool guy?” Tyler pressed.

“You know, like in the movies,” Dave falling back on a comfortable frame of reference, “all the losers are in line outside the club or restaurant or whatever, the fucking copa, and Ray Lolita walks up, shakes a hand, palms a bill, and him and Lorraine Bracco walk in through the kitchen, you know, all the staff saying hi and shaking hands. That’s your job. But, y’know,” he hedged, “metaphorically speaking, I mean.”

“Metaphorically I get us into the copacabana like a crooked union boss?”

“Nobody likes a literalist,” Stan huffed, Tyler didn’t necessarily disagree, but thought the observation was ill-timed given the degrees of metaphor being debated.

“Look, kid, you open doors,” Dave said, wearied by the whole detour from his beautifully planned speech about grifters, saviors, and strivers. “You get the attention of people whose attention we need right now. Like I said this morning, I’d appreciate if you do it with a little more fucking pizazz, but that’s all you really need to do–be your dad’s son.”

“Great,” Tyler said, shrugging his enthusiasm back at his boss, “my dad, what does he have to do with all those cops we just bribed?”

“Walking around–” Stan started, stopped when Dave looked over, their boss allowing himself a small smile at the effect he was able to wordlessly produce on the man.

“Kid, you want to come in on this, because there’s a world, a not distant, not at all hard to fathom world, where you is sit in the backseat of this fucking car and shut the fuck up. There’s a world you can live in where all you have to do is look as fucking pretty as you’re able to and play with your fucking phone or whatever while the grown ups talk.”

“Or?”

“Or I can tell you what your name buys us,” their eyes locked in the rearview, “your call.”

That last day in disneyland, there had been a phone call, their father angry and yelling into what now seemed like a novelty prop but was then the cutting edge of cellular technology. Mona had taken him, a rested hand, gently pushing him along, then, as he lingered, taking his tiny hand in hers and gently, but insistently dragging him with her. She got him a cotton candy, fluffy and full, bigger than his head. Their father, a silhouette in the short distance apart, yelling into his phone. They left soon after, Tyler now realizing there was also a world, somewhere in the vastness of possibility, where they stayed. Where they were a happy family.

“Sure, boss,” Tyler shrugging into it, playing cool, “tell me, then.”

“That January, your dad’s name meant six buses. That’s three hundred out of just over two thousand, on the ground, ready to rock. Because of your dad. It means this meeting we’re headed to, now. People willing to talk to us, because of your dad. It means the difference between this being just a carnival of fucking hopped up facebook freaks and an honest-to-god political movement. It means lawyers, real lawyers, not like this fucking moron,” Dave rolling his eyes at Stan, too wounded to even whine in reply, “it means legitimacy, buy-in. It means that the masters of the fucking universe have come down from the fucking mountain top to bestow their blessings on us mere mortals.”

Tyler thought of Beijing, of New York, of Anaheim–a radio station there, not a theme park–of a half dozen jobs over less than a decade, assignments from his father to go into the world and carry his banner, plant the flag on some cell phone factory or local radio station, some sports blog. All those first days, wondering what he was supposed to be doing, trying to be nice to people who rightly regarded him as an agent of chaos, an ill-omen, the calm before the storm.

“Your father,” Dave went on, “was feeling froggy, you know that. They put him on the front page, below the fold, but still. Billionaire tied up with the plot to overthrow an election. I don’t even know what he spent, but we were both on those calls in 2020. That summer, the riots, that fall, the vote, that winter, the count. You know,” the old man’s voice went wistful, his watery eyes out of the frame of the rearview, staring back into the past. “I met your father, fuck, hundred years ago, whatever. Back when he was small time, about as important as a big wheel down at the chamber of commerce for a decent sized city. He made a name for himself, like Brando, cutting deals, collecting favors, banking goodwill, trading it in to put this or that little creature of his in the right place to approve a zoning variance or offer an exemption for some tax. Your old man’s smart, kid. He knows the game, and he knows that when we walk into a room with you everybody knows what the score is, knows who’s backing the next big winner. That’s all this is, that’s all it’s about. He needs something from us–now, just loyalty, just a seat at the table where the conversation is happening. So he gives us you, he gives us his little walking, talking–which we could probably all do with a little less of, if we’re being real friendly and honest here–imprimatur. You know what an imprimatur is, kid?”

Oddly enough, Tyler did. But he felt much smarter for recognizing the moment to stay quiet.

“You’re your father’s imprimatur. You’re why we’re headed to Teterboro right now, why we have time booked with two silicon valley fleece-wearing motherfuckers, and why that time comes with a free ride on a gulfstream, transcontinental. You with me, now?”

Tyler sunk into the backseat, playing up petulance he suspected Dave read into the movement, he accepted the part and leaned into it, just another spoiled rich kid, angry his dad didn’t hug him enough, stunted to somewhere around high school. Absently some itch at the back of his head wondered if he was playing a part at all, or if his new boss had read him dead accurately.

“That’s what your father’s name is worth. Those Oyster Bay grifters? Maybe the read fucking bloomberg, who knows, but even if they don’t, they get the news. They can tell which way the wind is blowing and, brother, right now the wind is at our back, filling our sails,” Dave chewed for a moment on his own split metaphor, went on. “They know who has the juice, and they want to be there when we win, on the right side. So if that takes a few thousand,” Stan coughed into his armpit, “or a few hundred thousand, fine. If that’s what gets them where we need them, fine. There’s always another billionaire like your dad ready to throw in another few hundred million for the cause. At this point we’ve got more billionaires behind us than the fucking forbes list.”

“Sure,” Tyler said, neutrally, his agreement undefined, “what does that buy us though?”

“Feet on the street, troops,” Dave said, again shifting his gaze over to Stan who withered under it, “he needs to know when to shut the fuck up, but he’s not wrong.”

“Troops,” Tyler responded, probing the word like his imagined gap-toothed smile, “troops for what?” He asked, hoping his voice didn’t sound so much like a child.

“Christ, kid.” Dave’s weariness crescendoing, finally exhausting his seemingly infinite energy for explanation. “You watch the news, or maybe you don’t, but 2020 wasn’t that long ago. This, all of this,” he began, growing more animated, hitting the steering wheel for emphasis as they drove on, around them suburbs thickening up to cityscape, “is a fucking war. A war. You with me, now, you fully onboard, following? You read books, right, you got some fancy degrees I bet,” he didn’t but Dave didn’t appear to be looking for corrections, “Clausewitz said that war is politics by other means. But he’s wrong. He’s precisely, back-asswardly wrong. It’s all war. War all the time. Turtles all the way fucking down, kid. And politics? War isn’t politics by other means, politics is war by other means. So that’s what the cops are for, the cops and the sovereign sheriffs, and the three percenters, and the skinheads, and the fucking chowderheads building bunkers, and the fucking billionaires, too That’s what they’re all for, that’s what we do here, we go and make sure the people with money, power, guns, and most importantly all three, that they know what side they’re on. We go out and we press the flesh and we make goddamn sure they all know just who their daddy is. That’s what we do.”

Tyler said nothing, Dave’s eyes were huge in the rearview, deep and watery, a blue so cloudy  pale he looked for cataracts in them, but saw none. Eventually the older man looked away, flicked the turn signal indicator halfway through the motion of cutting across two lanes from the breakdown shoulder. It clicked three times then died off. Behind them a twin corolla in rideshare-app black rode the horn for a few miles. The boss reached for the radio, flicked it back on after having cut it off at some point deep in his speech, smothering the competition.

The sad summer boomer station was fuzzed to oblivion as they drove on, deeper into the city, a crackle pop that sounded like some dj naming one of any number of bands named after some midwestern city or state. So Dave attacked the dial, stabbing buttons on the steering wheel that made the little digital readout jump and swim. Eventually another burst of static gave way to a deep and authoritative voice, offering advice on navigating traffic throughout the five boroughs and out into the tristate, 1010 WINS on the tens, getting them through.

The older man seemed temporarily spent, having managed to expel all of his canned speeches and hard-earned knowledge, momentarily empty of anything else to say. The sun was shining, the traffic rolled along at roughly the pace of a brisk walk. He seemed intent on pointing all his remaining energy to jockeying for position, cutting in and out of lanes, horns blaring as he forcefully nosed the rent-a-car into and out of traffic, shaving seconds from the GPS estimate.

“So,” Tyler said, the single word either encompassing or brushing aside all the previous statements, “your, uh, taxonomy, where does the Big Guy fit in, then?”

“Kid, I’ve been doing this almost as long as you’ve been alive,” Dave said, weariness and sharp edge competing now in his voice, but that energy coming back, the relish to expound and explicate an idea audible there. “In all those years, all that time, the Big Guy is the first and only person I’ve met who is all three, all at once. All the time.”

“And,” Tyler advanced, carefully, leaning forward just slightly between the two front bucket seats, “which one of those are you?”

“Now,” Dave smiled his awful smile, somehow bouncing it back off the windshield to land on his intended target, “you are beginning to ask the right questions, son.”

1   Literally, this is Paul Ryan, former Speaker of the House and VP nominee for the Republican ticket in 2012, “Paul Ryan says he’s been ‘dreaming’ of Medicaid cuts since he was ‘drinking out of kegs’”, Vox, published 17 March 2017