Free Political Timber by Chris Lynch Page A

saying that to me.”
    “Forget it. Just go out there and accept the people’s love. Tell a joke, do some rah-rah, talk about your dear da. Then get down before you put your foot in it.”
    “Thanks, coach,” I said.
    I worked up a full greasy sweat at dinner, mumbling to myself like a psychopath as I practiced sounding natural. Fifty different people came by to introduce themselves as lifelong FOFs (Friends Of Fins), and I established my credibility as a politician by slipping every one of them the slimiest handshake of his life. My father laughed at almost everything because he, unlike his son, had not lost the ability to not take any of it seriously. I had to stop looking at my mother after a while because the pain became too great. She saw the anguish in my face, which brought her to the brink of tears, which, when I saw that, brought me to the brink of tears, and so on. Mosi ate his chicken cordon bleu in three bites, ate his baked potato and its skin, and some of its foil wrapper. He ate the wrinkled peas, the garnish, and the lemon slice in his water.
    “You gonna finish that?” he asked me.
    My food was untouched. “Mosi, first why don’t you ask me if I’m going to start it?”
    “You gonna start—”
    I shoved my plate toward him.
    “... Gordon... Foley !” That was all I heard. There must have been an intro of some kind because I had a vague recollection of Bucky’s voice over the P.A., but nothing registered until I heard my name, and the terrifying applause that followed it.
    I toddled up the two steps to the podium and settled in under the four-foot-by-six-foot photo of my grandfather, smiling broadly and waving, cigar in fingers, from the driver’s seat of my car. So why wasn’t he up here doing the dirty work, I thought. Anyway, I was happy to see half the room still concentrating on eating, receiving desserts, trading tastes, flagging waitresses for more coffee. So I just said hi and launched, hoping my seven minutes would evaporate before they noticed me.
    “So when Bucky told me... a hundred and fifty dollars a plate, just to come and listen to me ...” I paused. My comic timing, at least, was functioning. “I asked him, ‘What’s on the plate, Buck, cocaine?’”
    I had thought, previously, that silence was one of those absolute things, that there were not degrees of silence. But this, this thing , this fearsome black nothing of silence, was a new experience in my eighteen years. Not even a fork grazing a plate.
    That was, of course, until Mosi caught up to us.
    “ Bar-har-ar-har-ar-har ...” and so on. His laugh, zipping through the still room, bouncing off this wall and that one, back again, crisscrossed the room several times, slicing me every which way like a Star Wars laser.
    Despite what common sense tells him, a guy just has to look to his mother at a time like that. I was actually relieved to find her finally crying, in a controlled, dignified way. Now it was behind us, and I could slog through. My father held her hand, with the other hand cupped over Mosi’s mouth, and nodded for me to continue.
    I looked over to Bucky, who was doing a mime version of driving a car. Pause. Comprehension.
    “Well, what I really just want to tell you is, when you see me behind the wheel of that car. ...”
    Bucky mimed a shark now, weaving through the imaginary water, his hand sticking up like a divider in the middle of his head. Oh ya, mention Da, mention Da.
    “ Fins , Fins’s car. When you see me in Fins’s car, you should know that it’s not just a coincidence. It’s not just appearance. It’s a tradition. This symbolizes continuity, a carrying on of the tradition of fine service the Foley family has provided the people of Amber for decades. The spirit of populism, our commitment to all the little men and women of our city—will not diminish in the transition from one Foley to the next.”
    There was a nice swelling of polite, sincere, relieved applause from the crowd. Bucky did