by Editors

Lance awoke with a start.  His atomic watch having once again aligned itself with the universe.  It was useful to have a watch that spoke out the time with unerring accuracy, but it was a bother to have it sound an alarm at 3:00 a.m. just so it could adjust itself to the spinning of the planets.

 

The Dem convention was underway in Queen City.  Bam Orama had yet to attend, now attempting to stoke up the fires of the Dem faithful out in the Heartland.  But many Heartlanders weren’t buying it. Something was sadly awry with the message that Jefferson Swinton and many other old Dems were peddling.  Jefferson had recently told his wife Hildy that he wasn’t sure that he was making a connection with the younger progressives who had flocked to Bam Orama in 2008.  Saying that the election was “all about jobs” seemed to cheapen the message.  Lance knew that it wasn’t “all about jobs”; and it wasn’t about whether or not Osama bin Loaded was assassinated.  Those were topics that the Repugnican Party were using to muddy the waters and to get younger Dems so disgusted with politics as it was being practiced that they would opt to stay home on Election Day, thus handing an unlikely victory to Dullard Rumnose and Pauley O’Roarke

 

Lance had a strong intuition that Dummit Axelhead and Durwood Poofe were inadvertently sabotaging the campaign of the man for whom they were working.  Lance had to be sure that it was this duo who were feeding the President, the former President, and the Vice President lines that did not flow trippingly on the tongue.  Therefore he was about to enter the inner sanctum of the Orama Campaign Headquarters in Queen City in the only way he could, which was as his alter ego, The Shade.  As the reader who has been following Lance Carter’s adventures already know, Lance has the ability to slow his heartbeat to fewer than two beats per minute, which, as has been outlined in earlier episodes, allows him to remain unseen as he reads the thoughts of those whom he has decided to monitor.

 

Dummit and Durwood sat in a funk in the best of room in the best of hotels in Queen City. “I thought that if we just concentrated on the Bush years, we’d be ahead in the polls,” groused Axelhead.

 

“Yeah,” said Poofe, disconsolately.  “I thought that all we had to do was concentrate on hope and change and we’d be a lock in November.”

 

The Shade had breezed by Security by quickly flashing the guard at the hotel door the plastic key to his own motel room. Before the puzzled fellow could hazard another look, Lance had quickly zipped past him into the resplendent foyer.  Although he had been sorely tempted to order a “Noilley” at the bar, he said to himself, “First things first.”  Later he and Lara would be able to share cocktails (she with her Pimms Cup, as always) but Lance had felt that somehow Bam Orama’s candidacy was stuck, and that he had to extricate it.

 

Now he stood silently in a corner of the hotel’s Empire Suite as Poofe and Axelhead  sipped their Chardonnay and tried to figure out what went wrong. “I think we’re out of synch,” said Poofe.

 

“Yeah, darn right,” replied Axelhead.  “So what are we gonna do?”

 

“Do you think we should try to get Jefferson Swinton to campaign for us?”

 

“Duh,” said Dummit, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

 

The Shade suddenly felt like laughing.  Got to stifle it, he thought, even though those two lame brains would have made a good comedy team.  If you thought Abbott and Costello was funny, Axelhead and Poofe would have beaten them on any laugh-o-meter.

 

Of course, Jefferson Swinton had already made up his mind to campaign for Bam Orama.  The two men had been at odds ever since Bam cruised by Hildy Swinton in 2008.  Hildy’s faithful were not happy campers.  Dem women who had worked tirelessly so that Hildy would become President were seriously ticked that Bam had come in with his message of “Hope and Change” and pulled the rug out from Hildy.

 

But now Jefferson had seen the light at the end of the tunnel. It would be counterproductive to sit out 2012 the way he’d done in 2010, allowing a crew of foaming-at-the-mouth crazies to capture the House of Representatives and push the Repugnican Party further and further to the right, so much so that GOP has now come to signify “Greedy Old Putzes.”

 

It’s an old adage in tennis officialdom that you don’t want to get in the way of a woman player on the way to the rest room.  So, too, you don’t want to get in the way of Dem women who have been fighting to break the glass ceiling but have time and again been rebuffed.

 

Dummit Axelhead raised his eyes from his empty glass of Chardonnay and emitted a thought.

“Hey, Durwood.” he belched, “What about we send everybody who gave $10 to Bam in 2012 a letter saying that we can’t do without your money this time, only now we make it $13 because of inflation?”

 

“I don’t know,” said Poofe. “Maybe we should say that it’s going to create lots of jobs if we continue letting the big banks rip off homeowners by raising rates on their mortgages.”

 

“I don’t know if that’ll fly, ‘cuz I heard that most homeowners have had their mortgages foreclosed.”

 

“Yeah, that’s too bad,” answered Poofe.  Then as an afterthought, Poofe looked right at the space The Shade was occupying unseen and said, “Gee, I wonder what all those poor people are doing  tonight.”

 

“I guess they’re not having a glass of Chardonnay in the best hotel in Queen City,” said Axelhead.  And then the two raised their glasses in a toast, the way you’re supposed to do, by raising the glass from the heart and extending it towards one another without the gauche practice of clinking glasses.

 

“Say,” said Axelhead. “Why don’t we have the campaign make its pitch for bucks by saying that we couldn’t have done what we’ve done without you, and then address the guy by his first name.”

 

“Not bad,” replied Poofe.  “We could say, ‘Thanks, Richard, we appreciate all that you do for women like you.  No, wait, that doesn’t sound right.  Well, you know, we could fix it up.”

 

That’s it, thought The Shade, as he slipped out the door to the hallway and back out onto the street.  These guys were dolts, imbeciles.  They couldn’t sell a jug of water for a dime to a guy whose pants were on fire.  It was a good thing that Jefferson Swinton had decided that he didn’t want to sit out this race.  Even though he was an artful dodger, and a fan of fellatio, there was this je ne sais quois about him that made men want to shake his hand and women want to shake something else.  Oh, well, said Lance to himself as he once more became visible to others, some guys are chick magnets and others are drawn to just one true North.

 

Lance flipped open his IPhone and pressed the stored entry.  After only two rings, he heard the voice that he had been missed hearing ever since he had arrived in Queen City.  “Where are you, Lance?” said Lara in a slightly exasperated tone.

 

“I’m just about to take a plane out of Queen City,” said Lance from the taxi that was speeding its way towards the airport. “Save me a seat at the Carlyle bar, because I’ll be there before 10 pm.”

 

“You’d better be,” said Lara, remembering how Lance had left her at the bar earlier. “I want to hear all about the Convention.”

 

“Yeah,” said Lance, “I didn’t see that much of it, and I’ll miss Bam’s acceptance speech,  but I did catch some lady riding a pink bike with sparkles on it, spreading the word about equality and women’s rights.”

 

“It’s about time,” said Lara. “I can’t wait to get your reaction on the campaign.”

 

 

Chronicles of the Shade – Part III – Episode 5

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