Interface

21

Mary Catherine was expecting a car, not a limousine, so she didn't know that the shiny black behemoth was hers until the driver got out, walked around, and opened the door for her. By that time, the sight of the limousine was already drawing a crowd; not many of these showed up in this particular neighborhood of Chicago.

Her lunch date had told her that he would send a car around to pick her up at the hospital. Instead, he had dispatched a limousine. Which didn't make a lot of difference to Mary Catherine. Both of them were just vehicles to her, just ways of getting around town. She had been around enough not to be bowled over by the gesture. It was just another exercise in being William Cozzano's daughter and trying to keep things in perspective.

The limousine had a TV and a little bar inside of it. The driver offered to give her a hand mixing a drink. She laughed and shook her head no. She was going to have to come back from this lunch and keep working.

She knew that there was a certain kind of person - a certain kind of man, to be specific - for whom the back of this limousine was like a natural habitat, who felt as comfortable sitting on those leather seats and drinking Chivas in the middle of the day as Mary Catherine felt behind the wheel of her beat-up old car. During the time that Dad had been Governor, she had run into a lot of those people, gotten to know their peculiar rhythms and their particular view of life. They had always seemed completely alien to her, like cosmonauts or Eskimos.

Then Dad had proclaimed her the quarterback. As if her regular job wasn't enough responsibility. Now, she had to dash out of the neurology war, filled with gunshot-paralyzed drug dealers and demented AIDS patients, and dash down the stairs and jump into the back of a limousine where the decisions were all different: what kind of drink to mix, what channel to view on the TV.

She had club soda and watched CNN, which was what the TV set was already showing when she climbed in. The timing was fortuitous: it was high noon, the beginning of a fresh news broadcast. The Illinois primary was tomorrow. The elections were still very much up in the air, not much else was happening in the world, and so the campaign was being covered pretty heavily.

The out-of-power party had their front-runner (Norman Fowler, Jr.), their runner-up (Nimrod T. ["Tip"] McLane), and their plucky underdog (the Reverend Doctor Billy Joe Sweigel). And just to make things interesting, they also had a popular favourite: Governor William A. Cozzano, who wasn't even running. But wildcat Cozzano petition drives were popping up all over the place and so the media had to treat him as a serious candidate.

All three of the legitimate candidates got roughly the same sort of coverage: shots of the great man flying or driving into a prefabricated campaign event, a rally at a high school or whatever. They shook hands, they smiled, and they all did something just a little bit wacky, hoping that it would gain them just a little more recognition among TV viewers.

Mary Catherine was tired and stressed and she quickly zoned out, found herself watching all of this stuff without really processing it. She had slumped way down in the soft leather seat of the limo, displaying posture that would have driven her late mother to hysterics, and was gazing through heavy lids at the colorful images on the screen, letting them pass directly into her brain without hindrance. Which was exactly the way you were supposed to watch TV.

As if on cue, there was her father.

CNN was showing her a wall of glass windows. The camera was aimed upward at the outside of a building. Ceiling light could be seen in a few rooms, and many of the windows were festooned with mylar balloons, flowers, and children's artwork. Mary Catherine saw an IV bottle hanging from a rack and realized that she was looking at a hospital. The camera zoomed in on a particular window with lots of expensive flower arrangements. A man in a wheelchair was dimly visible peeking out between the bouquets.

Then it all snapped into place. This was Burke Hospital in Champaign, and they were zooming in on her father's private room. The TV crew must have gone to the roof of the parking ramp directly across the street, five stories high, and aimed the camera up and across to his window.

Dad was nothing more than a silhouette. The windows were all metallic and reflective; you could only see into them when it was dark outside. But sometimes when the sky was profoundly overcast in the middle of the day, it was possible to look in those windows and see dim shapes underneath the silvery reflections. And that was what some enterprising cameraman had captured on videotape: Dad, sitting in a wheelchair, looking out his window.

The image was gray and indistinct and so you couldn't tell that Dad was, in fact, strapped into the wheelchair to keep him from slumping over. He had been turned squarely toward the window and so you couldn't see the support that rose up behind his head to keep it from flopping around. He was lit from behind so you couldn't see the drool coming out of his mouth and the moronic expression on his paralyzed face.

A couple of standing silhouettes were visible behind him: a nurse and a slender young man. James. James pushed the wheelchair closer to the window so that Dad could see out. Then he left Dad alone there and disappeared from the frame. The camera panned 180 degrees.

The parking ramp covered about half a square block. Parking was not hard to find in the area, so few cars ever made it all the way up to the rooftop level. Right now, half a dozen vehicles were scattered around. Most of the remainder of the roof was covered with people. Hundreds of them. They were carrying signs and banners. They were all looking straight up in the air. Straight up toward Dad. And now that he had appeared in the window, they were all rising to their feet, reaching into the air, shoving their signs and banners up into space as if Dad could reach down and pluck them out of their hands. But it was a strangely silent demonstration.

Of course it was - they were in front of a hospital. They had to be quiet.

The camera zoomed in on a long, crudely fashioned banner, like the ones that fans hold up at football games: WE LOVE YOU WILLY! Others could be seen in the background: FIRST AND TEN FOR Cozzano! GET WELL SOON - THEN GET ELECTED!

There were a couple of shots of other hospital patients, in their flannel jammies and their walkers, looking out windows and pointing. Then back to the shot of Dad's silhouette, just visible from the chest up, in front of his window.

He waved out the window.

Which wasn't possible. Most of his body was paralyzed after the second stroke. But he was doing it. He was waving vigorously to the crowd.

Something looked funny: his hand and arm weren't big enough.

It was James. He must be down on his knees next to Dad, concealed behind the windowsill, holding up his hand and waving for him.

Cut back to the crowd, waving their banners hysterically, going nuts.

Cut back to the window. James was till waving, pretending to be Dad. Then his hand stopped waving and became a fist. Two fingers extended from the fist in a V sign.

Mary Catherine shot upright and spilled her club soda on the limousine's wool carpet. "You bastard," she said.

Back to the crowd. Finally they lost it, forgot they were in front of a hospital, started screaming and cheering. Hospital security cops jumped forward, waving their arms, telling them to keep it down. And then they cut back to network headquarters, where all of this was being watched by their afternoon anchorman. Pete Ledger. Former pro football player, turned sportscaster, turned newscaster.

A well-respected, middle-aged black guy with a sharp, fast tongue who'd probably end up having his own talk show one of these days.

His eyes were red. He reached up with one hand just for an instant and wiped his runny nose with the back of one finger, sniffled audibly, took a big deep breath, forced himself to smile into the camera, and announced, in a cracking voice, that they were going to break for a commercial.

"My God," Mary Catherine said out loud to no one. "We're in deep shit."

She flinched as the door of the limousine came open, letting in bright unfiltered light. The car had stopped.

She'd lost track, but something about the light told her they were near downtown, hemmed in by skyscrapers. They were in a crowded little side street, just south and west of the Board of Trade, stopped in front of a brownstone with a first-floor restaurant. An awning extended from the front door, across the sidewalk, to a loading zone along the curb. An uniformed doorman had opened the door for her.

He reached in with one hand and helped her out, which was a nice, if superfluous, gesture. He was an older guy, a kindly white-haired doorman type, and as he was helping her out on to the sidewalk, he gave her hand an extra squeeze, nodded at her, looking at her in a way that was almost worshipful.

There was another man, a guy in a plain old dark suit, standing under the awning waiting for her. Dad had once told her that you could gauge the quality of a restaurant according to how many people you spoke to before you actually got around to ordering food. She wasn't even into the door of this place yet and she had already encountered two people.

"Howdy, Miz Cozzano," the man said, "I'm Cy Ogle."

"Oh, hello," she said, shaking his hand. "Did you just get here?"

"Nah, I nailed down a table for us," he said. "But I figured that since I dug you out of work like this on such an ugly day, least I could do was come out and say hi."

"Well, that's very nice," she said noncommitally.

So far, he didn't seem like the cynical, media-manipulating son of a bitch that he was supposed to be. But it was way, way too early to be jumping to conclusions.

Another guy in a suit, who clearly did work here, nearly killed himself bursting out the front door of the place, and met her halfway up the sidewalk, holding out one hand, bending his knees as he approached so that by the time he reached Mary Catherine he was practically duck-walking. Mary Catherine could see in his whole face and affect that he was Italian.

He was crying, for god's sake. He pumped her hand and grabbed her upper arm with his left, as if only all the willpower in his body prevented him from violently embracing her. He said nothing but merely shook his head. He was so overcome with emotion that he couldn't speak.

"We were just watching CNN over the bar," Ogle explained. "It was incredible."

Some kind of a huge commotion was going on inside the place. It got louder as Mary Catherine moved toward the door, led by the crying Italian and followed by Ogle, and as she crossed the threshold, it exploded.

The back of the restaurant was all quiet little tables, but the front of the place was a sizable bar, currently packed with bodies. They were all men in suits. This was an expensive place where people in the commodities business, and the lawyers and bankers who fed off them, gathered to fortify themselves with martinis and five-dollar mineral water.

And right now they were all on their feet, howling, applauding, stamping their feet, whistling, as if the Bears had just run back an interception for a touchdown. They were going nuts.

And they were all looking at Mary Catherine.

She came to a dead stop, shocked and intimidated by the noise. Ogle nearly rear-ended her. He put one hand lightly on top of her shoulder and bent toward her. "Pretend they don't exist," Ogle said, not shouting but projecting a deep actor's voice that cut through the noise. "You're the Queen of England and they're drunks in the gutter."

Mary Catherine stopped looking at them. She stopped making eye contact with any of them. She focused on the back of the rnaître d', who was plunging through the crowd of pinstripes, making an avenue for her, and she followed him straight through the thick of it and into the restaurant proper. The people at the bar were chanting now: Cozzano! Cozzano! Cozzano!

Half of the people dining in the restaurant area stood up as she came through. Nearly all of them applauded. The maître d' led them straight to a table at the very back of the place, behind a partition. At last, they had privacy. Just Mary Catherine and Ogle.

"I'm really, really sorry about that," Ogle said, after they had been seated, menued, watered, and breadsticked by a swirl of efficient, white-aproned young Italian men. "I should have arranged to bring you in the rear entrance."

"It's okay," she said.

"Well, I'm embarrassed," Ogle said. "This is my business, you see. It was unprofessional on my part. But they had CNN going above the bar, and I didn't reckon on that footage being shown just before you got here."

"Powerful stuff," she said.

"It was unbelievable," Ogle said. He stared off into space. His face went slack and his eyes went out of focus. He sat motionless for a few seconds, moving his lips ever so slightly, gradually beginning to shake his head from side to side, playing the whole thing back on the videotape recorder of his mind.

Finally he blinked, came awake, and looked at her. "The kicker was Pete Ledger getting choked up. I never thought I'd see that in a million years."

"Me neither," she said. "He's usually too smart for that kind of thing."

"Well," Ogle said, "this is some powerful stuff that's going on right now."

That led them into small talk about the primary campaign, the misguided petition drives that were trying to put her father's name on the ballots in several states, and eventually into a discussion of Dad's stroke and its aftermath. Mary Catherine kept the whole thing quite vague, and Ogle seemed content with that; whenever the conversation wandered close to Dad's medical condition, or his political prospects, his face reddened slightly and he grew visibly uncomfortable, as if these topics were way beyond the bounds of southern gentility and he didn't know how to handle it.

She had only rarely gotten a chance to watch Dad doing business. But she knew that this was how Dad operated: lots of small talk. It was an Italian thing. It meshed pretty well with Ogle's low-key southern approach.

In fact, Ogle seemed to have no desire to talk business at all, as if the near riot at the bar had embarrassed him so deeply that he couldn't bring himself to return to that subject. So, after an opportune pause in the conversation, Mary Catherine decided to open fire. "You manage political campaigns for a living. My dad's not running for anything and neither am I. Why are you buying me lunch?"

Ogle folded his hands in his lap, broke eye contact, and glanced around at the food on the table for a few moments, as if this were the first time he'd ever thought about it. "There's a bunch of people in my business. Most of the important ones are busy running primary campaigns, for various candidates, right now. But not me. So far I have not committed my resources to any one candidate."

"Is that a deliberate strategy?"

"Sort of," Ogle said, shrugging. "Sometimes it pays not to commit too early. You may end up backing some loser. In the process, you antagonize the guy who ends up being the nominee, and then you can't get any work during the general election, which is where the big money gets spent."

"So you're holding back until you find out who's likely to get nominated. Then you try to get them as a client."

Ogle frowned and stared at the ceiling as if something was not quite right. "Well, there's more to it. I have been doing this for a number of years now. And frankly, I'm getting tired of it."

"You're getting tired of your business?"

"Certain aspects of it, yeah."

"Which aspects?"

"Dealing with campaigns."

"I don't understand," Mary Catherine said. "I thought you were the campaign."

"I would like to be the campaign. Instead, I'm the media consultant to the campaign."

"Oh."

"The campaign proper consists of the party's national committee and all of its hierarchy; the individual candidate's campaign manager and all of his hierarchy; and all of the pressure groups to which they are beholden, and their hierarchies."

"Sounds like a mess."

"It's a hell of a mess. If I can just make an analogy to your business, Ms. Cozzano, running a campaign is like doing a heart-lung transplant on the body politic. It is a massively difficult and complicated process that requires great precision. It cannot be done by a committee, much less by a committee of committees, most of whom hate and fear each other. The political nonsense that I have to go through in order to produce a single thirty-second advertising spot makes the succession of the average Byzantine emperor seem simple and elegant by comparison."

"I find that kind of surprising," Mary Catherine said. "People have known about the value of media since the Kennedy-Nixon debate."

"Long before that," Ogle said. "Teddy Roosevelt staged the charge up San Juan Hill so it would look good for the newsreel cameras."

"Really?"

"Absolutely. And FDR manipulated the media like crazy. He was even better at it than Reagan. So media's been important for a long time."

"Well, you'd think that the major political parties would have figured out how to deal with it more efficiently by now."

Ogle shrugged. "Dukakis riding in the tank."

Mary Catherine grinned, remembering the ludicrous image from 1988.

"The Democratic candidates in the '92 debate, sitting in those little desks like game show contestants while Brokaw strode around on his feet, like a hero."

"Yeah, that was pretty silly looking."

"The fact is," Ogle said, "the major parties haven't learned how to handle media yet. And they never will."

"Why not?"

"Because of their constitution. The parties were formed in the days when media didn't matter, and formed wrong. Now they are like big old dinosaurs after the comet struck, thrashing around weakly on the ground. Big and powerful but pathetic and doomed at the same time."

"You think the parties are doomed?"

"Sure they are," Ogle said. "Look at Ross Perot. If Bush's psy-ops people hadn't figured out how to push his buttons and make him act loony, he'd be president now. Your father has everything going for him that Perot did - but none of the negatives."

"You really think so?"

"After the reception you got when you came through that door," Cy Ogle said, nodding toward the entrance, "I'm surprised you would even ask me such a question. Heck, you dad's already on the ballot in Washington state."

She was appalled. "Are you joking?"

"Not at all. That's just about the easiest state to do it in. Only takes a few thousand people."

Mary Catherine didn't answer, just sat there silently, staring across the restaurant. She had been watching this political business for a while, but she still couldn't believe that a few thousand total strangers in Seattle had taken it upon themselves to put her father on the ballot.

"This is kind of interesting, as an abstract discussion," Mary Catherine said. "I mean, I'm enjoying it and I guess I'm learning something. But how it relates to my dad isn't clear to me."

"You're going to be hearing from a certain major political party," Ogle said. "Medical situation permitting, they're going to try to draft your father at the convention."

"And if that happens, you want me to use whatever influence I've got to get them to hire you?"

Ogle shook his head. "They won't hire me. They don't work that way. They always form their own in-house agency so that the political hacks, with all their little ambitions and intrigues, can exert more control over the ad people, whom they see as unprincipled vermin."

"So beyond having interesting conversations, what use are you to me? And what use am I to you?"

Once again, Ogle broke eye contact, put his silverware down, stared off into the distance, thinking.

"Let me just state one ground rule first," he said. "This conver­sation is not a business thing."

"It's not?"

"Nope. But it's not a social thing either, because we are total strangers."

"So what is it, Mr. Ogle?"

"Two people talking to each other."

"And what exactly are we talking about?"

"Surfing."

"Surfing?"

"Media is like a wave," Ogle said. "It's powerful and uncon­trollable. If you're good, you can surf on it for a little bit, get a boost from it. Gary Hart surfed on that wave for a few weeks in 1984, after he won New Hampshire from Mondale. But by the time the Illinois primary came around, he had fallen off the surfboard. The wave broke over him and swamped him. He tried again in 1988 but that time he just plain drowned. Perot rode the wave for a month or two in '92, then he lost his nerve."

Ogle turned in his chair and focused in on Mary Catherine now. "You and your family, you've been having a day at the beach. You've been out wading in the shallow waters where everything is warm and safe. But the currents are tricky and suddenly you find that you have been swept far out into the deep black water by a mysterious undertow. And now, great waves are cresting over your heads. You can get up and ride those waves wherever they take you, or you can pretend it's not happening. You can keep treading water, in which case the tsunami will break on top of you and slam you down on to the bottom."

Mary Catherine just kept her mouth shut and stared into her water glass. She was feeling several powerful emotions at once and she knew that if she opened her mouth she'd probably regret it.

There was fear. Fear because she knew that Ogle was exactly right. Resentment because this total stranger was presuming to give her advice. And there was a frightening sense of exhilaration, wild thrilling danger, almost sexual in its power.

Fear, resentment, and exhilaration. She knew that her brother, James, was experiencing the same feelings. And she knew that he was ignoring the fear, swallowing the resentment, and giving in to the exhilaration. Holding up his hand in the V sign, egging on the crowd. It was unforgivable. A hundred million people were going to see that.

She looked at Ogle. Ogle was looking back at her, a little bit sideways, not wanting to confront her directly.

"There's a third outcome you didn't mention," she said.

"What's that?" Ogle said, startled.

"You start riding the wave because you enjoy the thrill of it. But you don't know what you're doing. And you end up getting slammed into the rocks."

Ogle nodded. "Yes, the world is full of bad surfers."

"My brother, James, is a bad surfer. He's a really bad surfer," Mary Catherine said, "but he thinks he's good. And he seems to have located a really big wave."

Ogle nodded.

"Now, I have no idea, still, what it is that you want, or what you are proposing, or what you think you're going to get out of it," Mary Catherine said. "But I can tell you this. James is a problem. My father and our lawyer Mel and I would all agree on that. And without committing myself or my family to anything financial, let me say that if you can provide some advice in dealing with this problem, it would not be forgotten."

"You did what!?" Mel said.

She knew he was going to say it. "I asked him for advice," Mary

Catherine said. She was in the back of the limousine, riding back to the hospital.

"You shouldn't have done that," Mel said. "You shouldn't even have met with the guy without my being there."

"I was very good. I'm not the sap you think I am, Mel. I didn't make any kind of financial commitment. It was just a couple of people having lunch together, talking. And I asked him for advice."

"About what?"

"About James."

Mel sounded disappointed, wounded. "Mary Catherine. Why would you ask a total stranger for advice in dealing with your own flesh and blood?"

"Because half of my family is dead, or nearly dead, you're away on business, and James is being a complete asshole."

"What do you mean? What's James doing?"

She explained it all to him: the wave, the V sign, the cheers of the crowd, the hysterical reaction of the businessmen inside the bar.

But Mel didn't get it. He listened, he understood, but he hadn't seen it. He hadn't seen the emotion on people's faces. He didn't understand the power of what was going on here. To him it was all TV, it was all Smurfs, and he couldn't bring himself to take it seriously. He didn't get it.

She was glad she had talked to Cy Ogle, who definitely did get it.

"What did this guy say?" Mel said.

"His name is Cy Ogle," Mary Catherine said, "and he said that he would think about it."

"What kind of a name is Ogle?"

"That's beside the point. But he said that it was originally Oglethorpe, which is a big name in Georgia. But somewhere along the line someone had a bastard child, who ended up with the name Ogle, and he's descended from that person."

"So he comes from a long line of bastards."

"Mel!"

"Don't Mel me. He charmed you with some kind of southern shit, didn't he? I can smell it from New York. Told you a bunch of wacky tales about his picturesque family down in the land of cotton, seemed like the nicest guy in the world."

"Mel. Be honest. You don't know anything about handling the media. Do you?"

"I happen to know a lot about it."

"Then how did that happen today? That thing with James? If you're so good at handling the media, then why is it that everyone in the country has the impression, today, that Dad is running for president?"

Mel didn't say anything. She knew she had him.

"Because of what happened today, we have to have a media person," Mary Catherine said. "It doesn't have to be Cy Ogle. But depending on what he does with James, it might very well be."

Mel sounded glum. "I hate the media."

"I know you do, Mel," she said. "That's why we're in deep shit now. We need someone who loves the media. And I can tell you that whatever imperfections Cy Ogle might have, he definitely loves his work."