The Porkchoppers

6

The idlers and loafers in the lobby were always rewarded with a minor spectacle whenever Donald Cubbin took an elevator up to his hotel suite. If the spectacle lacked pomp and ceremony, it at least involved enough ritual to make onlookers aware that Somebody Important was going to take an elevator ride.

If Cubbin were just arriving in a city, the arrangements began as far away as the airport, in this case O’Hare International at Chicago. After the Lear 24 had landed and taxied to its place of temporary rest, three cars, a large blue Oldsmobile 98 and a green Cadillac Fleetwood followed by a Plymouth taxi, drew up to the plane. All three cars had special airport passes displayed on their windshields.

The Oldsmobile and the Cadillac contained loyal Cubbin supporters including a sixty-three-year-old vice-president from the Chicago — Gary area, Lloyd Garfield, who, in Donald Cubbin’s borrowed opinion, wasn’t worth a bucket of warm spit. Nevertheless, Garfield knew where he could lay his hands on a sizable amount of money for the campaign and Cubbin would treat him with polite contempt. Garfield would have been surprised if he had been treated any other way.

Fred Mure was first out of the plane. He was listed on the union’s payroll as an organizer, but he was actually Cubbin’s shadow. If they were traveling, it was Mure who got Cubbin up in the morning and saw him into bed at night. He served Cubbin as valet, bootlegger, whipping boy, retainer, occasional confidant, and, some said, bodyguard because of the .38 Chief’s Special that he carried in his hip pocket. He was a handsome thirty-five-year-old man without even a high school diploma, who over the years had grown moderately wealthy by acting on the stock-market tips that came his way from those who had wanted something from Cubbin and who thought that Fred Mure could help. Sometimes he had.

Mure’s public devotion to Cubbin bordered on the slavish. It occasionally transformed itself into jealousy, which amused Cubbin who found Mure a little pathetic, but useful. Cubbin sometimes tried out explanations of complicated union economic proposals on Mure because “if that dumb son of a bitch can understand it, anybody can.”

After Mure helped Cubbin out of the plane, he stood back and watched while Garfield and two other Chicago supporters did the welcoming. When he was sure that Cubbin had no further need of him, he trotted over to the cab, got in, and handed the driver two bills, a ten and twenty.

“You can keep ’em both if you get me to the Sheraton in thirty minutes.”

The cab driver stuck the bills in his shirt pocket. “I can try, buddy.”

Mure got in the back seat, took a small notebook out of his pocket, and used a ball-point pen to write down, “Cab fare, $40, Chicago.” It was another one of his jobs, to keep Cubbin’s expense records, and he did it meticulously and with a commendable amount of imagination.

The two other men who got out of the Lear were Cubbin’s keepers. Ostensibly, one was the campaign manager and the other was the public relations expert. Their principal task, however, was to keep Cubbin sober — or fairly so — until the campaign was over. They already had been ten days on the job and both looked haggard, having just spent most of the one-hour flight from Hamilton, Ontario, thinking up reasons why Cubbin shouldn’t sample the two imperial quarts of Canadian whiskey that he had bought tax free at the airport. Fred Mure had been no help. He liked to see Cubbin take a drink. “It makes him feel better,” he had once said. “Makes him relax.”

“It makes him drunk, you dumb son of a bitch,” the campaign manager had told him.

Cubbin’s principal supporters had thought of getting rid of Fred Mure until the campaign was over, of sending him to Miami Beach or better yet, to Bermuda. All expenses paid. But when he had been approached, Mure had shaken his head stubbornly and said, “Don needs me.”

The only person who could get rid of Mure was Cubbin himself, but when the campaign manager had mentioned it, Cubbin had looked at him strangely and then said, “He stays,” in a tone that made further argument impossible.

The campaign manager was Oscar Imber, who had taken his master’s degree in economics at the University of Texas, writing his thesis on “The Use and Misuse of the Pension Fund of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of America.” The thesis had won him an immediate job offer from the teamsters’ union, which had been tempting, but he had turned it down for a similar offer from Cubbin’s union that promised a little less money, but far more authority. After eight years, Imber was administrator for the union’s pension fund which, at last count, was up around $611,000,000. Because of the Federal Landrum-Griffin Act, which outlined the rules that unions must follow when conducting their elections, Imber had cautiously taken leave of his official job to become the Cubbin slate’s campaign manager. He had done so not because of any fondness for Cubbin, but because his own job was one of the ripest plums in the union. If Cubbin lost to Hanks, Oscar Imber would barely have time to empty his desk. He at first had tried to stay neutral, but it had proved impossible when in separate, equally heated discussions with both candidates, they had let him know that they regarded those who were not for them as against them.

Imber had flipped a coin to make his choice. It had come up heads and Cubbin. Once having made his decision, he informed Cubbin that he was taking over the managing of the campaign because “You haven’t got anybody else around with enough sense to do it. If they’ve got any sense, they’ve gone over to Sammy.” Cubbin was so relieved that somebody was taking charge of the campaign’s details that he hadn’t argued.

As he watched Cubbin climb into the Cadillac Imber spoke to the man next to him. “What time’s he due on that TV thing?”

“Midnight.”

“It’s going to be a long day.”

“They all are.”

The man that Imber spoke to would have been tall if he had straightened up out of his slouch. He carried his thin body like a wire question mark that somebody had once started to straighten out but had given up on halfway through. His head jutted forward from his lean neck as if on some perpetual, private quest. His hair was black, long and touched with gray at its shaggy ends. He had bright blue eyes that seemed a little cold, a slightly hooked nose, and a thick, black moustache curving around the ends of a thin mouth that managed to look hungry.

The thin man was Charles Guyan and for the past ten years he had earned a comfortable if uncertain living by trying to get men whom he usually felt nothing but contempt for elected to public office. He had been successful three-fourths of the time and there was a steady demand for his services, which, along with inflation, now enabled him to charge $50,000 a campaign plus expenses. The $50,000 was all profit because Guyan had no overhead, not even a permanent address. When he wasn’t working a campaign, he and his wife lived on their thirty-two-foot Chris-Craft and cruised the inland waterway from Florida to Virginia. Guyan felt that he had four years left before his steadily mounting disdain for his profession rendered him ineffective. In four years he would be forty and he wasn’t at all sure what he would do then and he worried about it a lot.

Seated now in the back seat of the Oldsmobile 98, Charles Guyan and Oscar Imber listened patiently while the car’s owner, a minor union official from Gary, gave them his version of the political climate.

“It’s warming up,” he said. “We’re stirring up lots of interest.”

“That’s good,” Imber said. “How does it look?”

“Oh, Don’s gonna make it okay if he keeps his eye on the ball.”

“John?” Imber said.

The minor union official whose name was John Horton turned his head around and away from the road he was supposed to be watching. “Yeah?”

“You want to know something?”

“Sure,” Horton said, his attention back on the road and his driving again, “what?”

“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

It didn’t bother Horton. “You just wait and see, Oscar. Old Don’s gonna make it all right, if he keeps his eye on the ball.”

“John’s supposed to deliver his local,” Imber said to Guyan. “I doubt if he could deliver a bottle of milk.”

“Don’t you worry about my local,” Horton said over his shoulder. “You don’t have to worry none about that. You’d better worry about those nigger locals, that’s what you’d better worry about.”

“Your local’s eighty-percent black, John,” Imber said.

“Uh-huh, about that, but they’re all good niggers; you don’t have to worry none about them.”

“Just the other ones, huh?”

“Well, you don’t have to worry none about mine, I’ll guaran-goddamn-tee you that.”

Imber slumped back in the seat. Guyan stared moodily out of the window. They rode in silence for several minutes until Imber said, “Well, you’ve had ten days of it. What do you think?”

“It’s a throwback to the thirties.”

“How?”

“I can’t use commercials on TV or even radio because we’re only trying to influence about nine hundred thousand votes in what... forty-some states?”

“About that.”

“So the cost is prohibitive. I’ve got the world’s most natural TV candidate, but I can’t use him. If this were a regular election I’d say spend every dime you’ve got on TV but it’s not, so I can’t use it, and that leaves only one thing.”

“What?”

“Print.”

“So?”

“So it bothers me.”

“Why? Hanks has the same problem.”

Guyan sighed. “I’ve never run a print campaign before. Not all print. I’ve got a candidate who looks like he oughta be voted for and I’ve got an opposition candidate who looks like somebody just dug him up out of the cellar, and I can’t use either of them in commercials. Jesus!”

“Well, what about printed stuff?” Imber said.

“I don’t have much faith in it.”

“Why?”

Guyan sighed again. “Who the hell reads anymore?”

Three blocks from the Sheraton-Blackstone Hotel Fred Mure told the cab driver to stop at a liquor store. He went in and paid six dollars for four half-pints of Ancient Age bourbon. He put two of the half-pints in his coat pockets and two in his trouser pockets. Back in the cab he told the driver, “Let’s go.”

“That stop’s gonna make us a minute late,” the driver said.

“Don’t let it worry you,” Mure said, taking out his notebook and writing down “HFO — $12.” HFO stood for “hospitality for others.”

At the Sheraton Mure jumped out of the cab and pushed through the revolving door. Waiting in the lobby was a group of five men. One of them stepped forward, but Mure waved him back. “Wait right there, Phil. He’ll be here in five or six minutes.”

“We just wanta see him for a minute.”

“You can see him upstairs.”

“Appreciate it, Fred.”

But Mure was already heading for the bell captain’s desk. The captain rose quickly when he looked up and saw Mure.

“How are you, Jimmy?” Mure said.

“Fine, Fred, and you?”

“Keeping me on the run.”

“What’ll you need?”

Mure looked at his watch and then pointed at the bank of elevators. “Give me number one and number two in five minutes.”

“Right. How many bags?”

“Need a couple of boys.”

“You’ve got ’em. Staying long?”

“A few days. I’ll take care of you later.”

“Sure, Fred.”

Mure moved away from the bell captain and stationed himself in the lobby where he could keep an eye on both the elevators and the revolving door. He also let his gaze wander about the lobby, mentally classifying its occupants. No nuts, he thought. Just people.

The captain had summoned four of his bellhops who nodded as he gave them instructions. “Cubbin’s due in about three minutes. You two get on the door. You two bring number one and two down and hold them. Just like always.”

The four bellhops nodded and moved toward the elevators and the revolving door. Five minutes later the green Cadillac bearing Donald Cubbin pulled up at the hotel entrance. The uniformed doorman jumped for it. Cubbin was first out followed by the vice-president and the other two members of the Chicago reception committee. From the blue Oldsmobile came Oscar Imber, Charles Guyan, and John Horton, the minor union official. Before Cubbin had made it to the revolving door the bellhops had already gathered the bags from the two cars.

Cubbin was first inside the lobby, his long, double-breasted raincoat open and flapping, a cigar clenched between the white teeth of his smile, his eyes restlessly moving from side to side searching for anyone who deserved a wave or a nod or a hi-ya, pal. When he saw the group of five men he winked and jerked his head toward the elevators, not breaking his long stride.

“Number one, Don,” Mure murmured as Cubbin flashed past him. The idlers and loafers in the lobby had turned to watch the entrance that had now swelled into a small procession.

“Who is it?” an idler asked a loafer.

“Lorne Greene,” the loafer said, not wanting to seem stupid.

“Who’s that?”

“Pa Cartwright. On TV. You know, on ‘Bonanza.’”

“Oh, yeah. I thought it looked like him.”

Cubbin entered the elevator swiftly, Mure just behind him. Well schooled, the bellhop who was piloting the automatic car turned the key, closing the door.

“Stop on six, Carl,” Mure said.

“Right, Mr. Mure,” the bellhop said.

The elevator stopped at six, but the doors didn’t open. The bellhop kept his face carefully to the front of the car as Mure handed Cubbin one of the now opened half-pints of Ancient Age. Cubbin tipped the bottle up and swallowed greedily. Then he handed it back to Mure who told the bellhop, “Okay, let’s go,” and slipped the bottle back into his coat pocket.

Donald Cubbin closed his eyes and sighed appreciatively as he felt the whiskey go to work.