Tuff

18- THIRD PARTY OVER HERE

Winston, Spencer, and Bruce, the New Progressive Party’s representative, settled into a Theater District steakhouse. Winston pulled his nose out of a goblet of Belgian beer. The aroma was pleasant. Spencer suggested apricot with a hint of caramel. Winston disagreed, “Shit smell like alcohol to me. Maybe a little like Halloween candy.” Holding his glass up high, Bruce proposed a toast. “To Winston, forwarding the progress of American third-party politics like no one since Zachary Taylor.” Spencer seconded the toast with a hearty “Hear! Hear!” though he knew Bruce’s claim of Taylor’s being a third-party candidate was specious, Old Rough and Ready’s being a Whig at a time in American history when the Whigs and the Democrats were the two major parties in a two-party system. Tuffy raised his glass a centimeter off the table, grunted, and made a silent toast. To the three weeks until election day going by with the serious quickness.

During the past two weeks nearly every American third party had tried to wine and dine Winston over to their side. The gratuitous liberalism had added ten pounds to his frame. Sushi and alligator teriyaki compliments of the Green Party. Coq au vin, pâté fraîche, and lemon mousse with toasted coconut and blueberries courtesy of the Working Family Party. The Welfare Recipient Faction treated him and his “advisory staff” to grilled Bay of Fundy salmon with Israeli couscous. The New Party spared no expense and insisted that Winston order a second helping of yellowfin tuna au poivre with Szechuan peppercorns. The New Alliance Party sat him down to a heaping portion of shrimp and okra étouffé.

The feasts followed more or less the same agenda. His hosts, often a white charter member and two or three colored officers, opened up with a statement that Party X was a multiracial organization. But if during the ensuing conversation Winston mentioned race, the dithyrambic chorus was quick to tell him that race was a dead-end issue. That if history has taught us anything, it’s that using ethnic oppression as the basis for social and political upheaval is doomed to fail. No matter what you do, racism will be still be, if not prevalent, at least present. Social and economic class must be the rallying points of the future struggle for democratic dignity. The next line would be “More Calvados, Winston?” and he would silently sip his ten-dollar aperitif as daintily as possible, intuition telling him that if racism was an immutable oppression, so was poverty.

Bruce was well past the color, gender, class, sexual-orientation trivialities. When the waitress placed the appetizers on the table, Bruce, who matched Winston in portliness, was already on his second dinner salad and waist-deep into the tautology of third-party politics.

So much as he understood the language of political rhetoric, Winston agreed with the litany of New Progressive principles. If the New Progressive Party’s platform was idealistic, it was an idealism worth advocating: a constitutional amendment that guaranteed every American equal rights to shelter, health care, and education; community control over both public and private institutions, permitting cross-party endorsement in all elections; a minimum living wage. The cold facts had been presented, and from being a fly on the wall at countless of Inez’s cell meetings, Winston was well versed in leftist liturgy. He knew that after the wish list came the emotional plea. Bruce addressed him in a voice so sincere it lifted his head from his plate of apricot-basted quail. “Winston, the New Progressive Party believes in you. And from all that I’ve read about you, heard about you, and witnessed this evening, the New Progressive Party is ready to have you as its next candidate for whatever city office you wish to pursue in the next election, because the New Progressive Party believes that ordinary people have the ability to govern themselves.” While on the surface Bruce’s avowal was a show of support, it was dripping with a political rectitude Winston found condescending; but in the spirit of coalition politics, he kept his thoughts to himself. Why upset the man who’s buying bottles of the best beer he’d ever tasted at eight dollars a pop? “Ordinary”? thought Winston. Who you calling ordinary? “Ability to govern themselves”? What you really saying is that people like me can’t run people like you.

“Do you have any questions, Winston?” Bruce asked.

Winston sipped his beer. “Yeah, how do you pronounce this beer again?”

“Chimay,” said Spencer, cutting Bruce off.

“And you say this shit is brewed by priests?”

“Trappist monks, to be exact.”

“Monks don’t have sex, do they, Rabbi?”

“I suppose they don’t.”

“That’s why this beer is so damn good. They have to devote their energy to something that will take their minds off fucking. And this stuff is damn close to doing that. Prayer alone ain’t going to keep your hands off your dick, your mind off the pussy.” Winston lifted the bottle and read the label, “ ‘Chimay Grand Reserve.’ It even sounds like the shit. Strong too. But you can’t just drink it down. You have to bitch-sip it. Savor it. Smoke a cigar and talk politics like we been doing. Say shit like ‘per se’ and ‘deprivatization of the banking industry.’ ”

“I agree, Winston, it’s an excellent beer, but do you have any questions about the New Progressive Party?”

Winston signaled the waitress for another round before asking his question:

“Um, how many white people in the party?”

“I’d guesstimate that at this stage the NPP is eighty to eighty-five percent white.”

“Damn.”

“I know the numbers sound disproportionate, but remember the United States is almost seventy-five percent white and the NPP is working diligently toward meeting our goal of a forty-percent-white membership.”

“That would still be forty percent too many whities for my taste. Most times when a white boy just say a simple ‘Hello,’ I feel like I’m being talked down to.”

“I understand your reluctance. But give us a chance, Winston. I think you’d find the progressive white a bit more amenable to your political aspirations.” The waitress set down three more bottles of beer, and Bruce filled Winston’s glass, topping with just the right amount of a frothy head. “Winston, have you never worked with white people you felt you could trust?”

“There’s a white nigger live down the block from me, Charley O’, but I’ve known him and his people my entire life. If he’d have moved on the block when he was, say, nine years old, he’d still be on my cuidado list, like every other person I haven’t known since I was five.”

“So you have an almost inherent distrust of whites you haven’t known since you were born?”

Winston thought a moment, swirling the maple-colored beer in his glass. “Firemen. I trust firemen. I never seen or heard of a fireman not doing they job. You trapped in a burning building, them motherfuckers come and get you. Don’t matter how old, ugly, black, retarded, they turn on the hoses and do they thing. Long as they wearing them big rubber boots and those heavy-duty yellow jackets, I trust ’em.”

Winston went on a philosophical tangent in which he pondered why the Chimay had to be served in a goblet. For practical purposes the recruitment of Winston into the New Progressive Party was over. “I’m sayin’, would the beer taste any different from a paper cup?” The NPP would have to scour the grass roots and find another ordinary citizen to pin its hopes for dismantling the corporate oligarchy on. “Why can’t I drink it straight from the bottle?” This one was too drunk.