Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (112 page)

JACKIE MONROEVILLE HITCHHIKED
into Tallahassee with a tattered backpack and a dream of being the First Lady of Florida.

Twenty-four years old, she came equipped with a high school diploma, waitress experience and thermonuclear ambition. She had the coy, freckled face and disarming eyes of Sissy Spacek, and her secret weapon was the best shampoo money could buy.

Jackie scoped out the terrain of power, window-shopping downtown restaurants at lunch for the men with the best suits. A half block from the Capitol, her gut told her she had the right place, and she asked for an employment application. Within a week, she was the best waitress at the Quorum Grille. Fast, accurate, dishing pie with a balanced amount of flirtation. On average, her ass was grabbed three times a day, her breasts double-entendred seven. It only made her more confident. The stupider they were, the easier it would be to make it in this town. At night in her garage apartment, she went through the business cards the men had tucked in her waitress apron, segregating the ones who just wanted to get in her pants from the ones who wanted to peddle her sex appeal for commercial advantage.

After two months, she bought a snappy red business suit, selected the five most promising business cards, and examined herself in her full-length mirror. Already five-
eleven, she decided against the heels and kicked them off. She practiced tough facial expressions. “You are a tiger!” She did a spinning kung-fu kick with a “Heeee-
yaaaaah!
” She addressed herself in the mirror one last time. “Go out there and
kill!
”

Three hours later, Jackie was looking at herself in the mirror again, having just landed a nontyping secretarial position at the lobbying firm of Periwinkle Belvedere. She pointed at her reflection with authority. “You are the fucking master of time, space and dimension!” Then into jogging shorts and out the door.

Jackie was a mutt, a scrappy little piece of white trash from a cruddy redneck toadstool town in the Florida panhandle. Half trailers, half broken-down cabins, the whole neighborhood stank of complacent failure and diseases that had been wiped out elsewhere. Jackie’s girlfriends could plan on getting jailed, pregnant, shot or raped by a relative before twenty-one, and Jackie had no special talent or intelligence that would exclude her. Just a pile of grit. She cursed and she spat. She hustled through her shift at the cotton mill and went jogging three miles every evening, then came home and read
People
and dreamed. She had no real education. She only knew she wanted up. And that the spitting would have to go.

The polished manners of her lunchtime customers, their business suits, the professional talk—all freakishly exotic to Jackie. What she did was study people. She didn’t know how to describe success, but she knew what it looked like when it walked in the diner. Jackie watched to see what they did differently. She went to the Tallahassee airport and flipped through the magazines the executive women put down. That’s how she picked out her business suit. She followed one of the women into the airport’s hair salon,
buttonholing the stylist after the woman left—“Give me what you gave her”—paying a week of waitressing tips. On her breaks, she sat in a booth at the Quorum Grille, pretending to read, instead listening to conversations and writing down words. At night she practiced for hours—the poise, the grooming, the vocabulary—trying to lose her textile twang. She found it couldn’t have been more slow and difficult if she had been raised by wolves. But Jackie’s self-training was relentless: a draconian, do-it-yourself
My Fair Lady
intervention.

Jackie showed up her first day at the lobbying firm and was told by Periwinkle himself to go home. All her job required was attendance at Perry’s dinners and parties. She had just learned she was decoration.

It opened up all kinds of hours during the day to hang around the Capitol and read tossed-aside newspapers. She collected the citizen’s guides to good government from the “free” racks. She studied the mug shots and kept a notebook of names and titles.

In the middle of the 2000 legislative session, Jackie arrived for her first party at the Belvedere compound in the slinky, strapless black dress provided by the firm. She stood with six other attractive women in dazzling evening wear. At first Jackie thought she was outclassed. The women were obvious blue bloods. Had to be debutantes from the old Tallahassee families. No visible tattoos or needle tracks. She kept her mouth shut and smiled politely. But after listening to them giggle for a half hour, Jackie thought, What is their fucking problem!

She inched away from the women, toward the punch bowl, not watching where she was going, and bumped into someone at the end of the buffet table.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, concentrating on syntax. “I beg your pardon.”

The other person didn’t answer. Jackie recognized him from the newspapers. It was the speaker of the house, Gomer Tatum, and he wasn’t answering because he was turning purple. He reeled down the buffet, one hand at his throat and the other pulling trays of hors d’oeuvres off the table. Jackie caught him from behind at the lobster bisque. She got her arms around him and a fist up under his rib cage. She constricted her arms and thrust. Once, twice—
c’mon, you cow!
—three times, forcefully expelling a partially digested pig-in-a-blanket into an oil portrait of Horatio Belvedere III.

Jackie received a light round of applause.

“Whew!” said Tatum. “Another close one!”

Jackie did some quick brain-retrieval from the better government guides. Speaker of the house. Let’s see. Third in line to be president. No, that’s federal. But it’s gotta be something close like that on the state level.

She checked his left hand. No ring. “You have a girlfriend?”

Tatum looked behind him to see whom she was talking to.

“I’m talking to you!”

They started dating regularly, going to all the finest restaurants where lobbyists kept running tabs.

“You ever think of running for governor?”

“Me?”

Jackie realized the first thing that would have to go was the extra pounds. He was unelectable in his present buffoon weight class.

Jackie decided to fuck him into shape.

It was a steep but noble sacrifice, which Jackie could only accomplish with the lights off and the room one hundred percent dark. Then she climbed on top and gave him the most vigorous, aerobic screwing ever experienced in an industrialized nation. She got into a precise rhythm designed to boost his cardiovascular system and burn cholesterol. The whole time she motivated herself by mentally projecting the governor’s mansion inside her frontal lobe and repeating under her breath, “I’m gonna be First Lady. I’m gonna be First Lady. I’m gonna be First Lady….”

After ten minutes she began hearing a wet smacking sound that she couldn’t place at first. She slowed her rhythm, listening carefully until she experienced the first tremors of dread.

“Are you—?…Are you
eating a sandwich?
”

She heard a loud, esophageal gulp. “Wanna bite?”

“Oh! Jesus!” She leaped off him and jumped in the shower and scrubbed obsessively with an abrasive sponge and hydrogen peroxide.

IN
the fall of 2001, Gomer Tatum, much like Marlon Conrad, had no idea he’d be in next year’s governor’s race.

But unlike Conrad, Tatum hadn’t for a second been mistaken for gubernatorial timber. Since becoming speaker of the house, his biggest accomplishment was keeping ice cubes stocked in his office wet bar, which had to be camouflaged by a twenty-volume set of
Reader’s Digest
condensed editions ever since the permissive lunchtime drinking of the go-go 1980s had resulted in numerous afternoons of unintelligible legislation and sprained ankles.

Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives was the perfect job for ice-cube detail, just as long as his staff
kept back-dooring special-interest bills through the rules and calendar committees, onto the floor and into the governor’s hands. Great pay and benefits, no qualifications required except a highly elastic sense of situational ethics. It was kind of like being maître d’ at the most exclusive restaurant in the state, or, in Tatum’s case, the guy with the cologne and paper towels at the urinal.

The speakership was an extremely powerful and important position, so it was awarded based on whose turn it was.

Actually it hadn’t been Tatum’s turn this time, but the person ahead of him in the line was, well…black. The Democratic leadership giggled. Yeah, we know we’ve always gone in order, but get real!

Since then, Tatum had retained the speakership for two reasons. One, he could be bought. Two, he went cheap. Tatum became tremendously popular with the swarm of lobbyists who worked the Capitol like bees, tending and preening Tatum, the bloated queen at the center of the hive. The only ambition Tatum possessed was to stay clear of political entanglements that might jeopardize his state pension or leisure time on the job.

When the governor’s race began shaping up, Tatum had placed the safe bet and thrown his support behind the Democratic front-runner, state Attorney General Casey Underworth.

A week later, Underworth was found confused on the side of the Apalachee Parkway after a single-vehicle accident, pouring champagne in the radiator. Wearing half a tuxedo. The wrong half. An underage female in the passenger seat. Withdrew from the race for “health reasons.”

The mantle then fell on house majority whip J.J. Weathervane, who a month later said he had no idea why
a local building contractor broke into his house while he was on vacation and installed a new roof. Gone to federal camp for the summer.

Next up: Secretary of State Betty Luckett, whose last official act was earmarking state funds to imprint her name in a variety of vibrant colors on a whole catalog of bottle openers, key chains, golf tees, mousepads, stress balls and fake vomit. Indicted for aggravated dumbness.

And on it went…way down the line of succession…House Transportation subcommittee on fuel efficiency chairman in absentia Nick “Boom Boom” Ribbentrop, heart attack in private booth at the Gentlemen’s 25-cent Executive Cinema…

Conspicuously passed over in the attrition was Tatum, who sweated bullets every time the party looked around for a new candidate, and who sighed in relief each time someone else was tapped.

But after Ribbentrop keeled over, the Democratic executive board finally relented, against its better judgment. Okay, okay, we’ll try Tatum. Where is he?

Tatum thought he had it made in the shade. He’d just restocked his wet bar and was now wobbling blissfully through the state cafeteria in the Capitol basement.

Tatum was quite a sight in the cafeteria. A breed apart, he would eat anything, limp salad, pudding crust, like something out of a prison movie, or Belushi in
Animal House
, starting to chow down before he reached the cash register.

“Tatum!” yelled the state Democratic Party’s executive chairman, Coco Robespierre, walking up behind the speaker as he pushed a heaping styrene tray along the metal rails.

Tatum was caught in the act, a large dumpling halfway
in his mouth. He tried to cram the rest inside, but his cheeks were already at maximum tire pressure. He desperately poked at the clump of food with puffy little fingers. He tried to close his mouth, but it wouldn’t shut all the way, and his lips tightened like a gasket around the doughy protuberance.

“Mmmmmm?!” asked Tatum, turning to the chairman and pointing at his own chest.

“Never mind,” Robespierre said and walked away.

THE
Democratic Party instead went with former Insurance Commissioner Wolfgang LaGuardia.

His candidacy was announced during a prestigious cookout/fund-raiser at the home of a Leon County circuit judge. The elite of the Democratic power structure were out on the judge’s screened-in pool patio. The press was invited because they were needed; Wolfgang’s name recognition was expected to debut in single digits.

Tatum was there with his date, Jackie Monroeville, who by now was totally brazen. She had introduced herself to everyone, knew the language, the secret paths of power. She grabbed a drink and sidled up to the party chairman.

“Coco, I don’t see how you could pick LaGuardia when Tatum was available. If this was the federal government, he’d be third in line!”

“What are ya doin’ with that shlub?” said Robespierre. “Want to join me for a cup of coffee after this thing?”

“Only if you back Gomer for the nomination.”

“Suit yourself,” said Coco, smiling and waving at a donor across the patio.

An hour later, LaGuardia decided he would show the host how a future governor operates a gas grill. But some
thing went wrong in his ratcheting of the fuel line—possibly the four Johnnie Walkers he had before making the adjustments—and when the lid exploded off the grill, it made one hole going up through the screen roof over the patio and another when it came back down and landed in the pool. The music was turned off, and there was a full ten minutes of stifling awkwardness until the judge, partial to gin himself, considered the two holes in his screen roof and said, “Fuck it! Let’s have some fun!”

The music came back on, and voices rose again in merriment. The judge’s wife wheeled out an old charcoal grill from the garage, and they kept LaGuardia away from it. Soon the fire was glowing at the perfect pitch, and the grill was covered with steaks, shish kebobs and baked potatoes in aluminum foil.

“Soup’s on!” yelled the judge’s wife. LaGuardia ended up first in line, a few more scotches under his belt, and he was having trouble gauging the earth’s gravitational field. When he reached for something to steady his balance, his hand found the handle on the grill. But the grill had wheels, and it rolled into the pool.

Coco Robespierre saw it happening in slow motion and wanted to scream, but nothing would come out. The grill hit the water like a political atomic bomb. The coals went in with a loud sizzle and sent up a mushroom cloud of steam. Ash filled the air Vesuvius-style and spread out in a thin film across the pool’s surface. The metallic potatoes sank, but the filet mignon floated like turds.