Waking the Dead by Scott Spencer

Author:Scott Spencer
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2010-07-21T04:00:00+00:00

11

THIS WAS JUST the time when it was beginning to get tough running as a Democrat. There were a couple of hundred unshaven Americans held hostage in Iran, the Russians were running their war games in Afghanistan, and the president was appearing on TV direct from the White House wearing a woolen cardigan because oil prices were too high to turn up the heat in the Oval Office.

Bertelli was trying to make this work in his own favor, talking about getting America back on track and acting as if I were the incumbent, just because my party happened to be in power. Chicago, thank God, was feeling the disillusion with the Dems less than most places—we still ate our kielbasa, rooted for the Sox, and voted the straight ticket. There were, according to Isaac, about two hundred thousand registered Democrats in Chicago who were either dead or had not yet had the privilege of being born. You could count on their ectoplasmic loyalty. In my district, however, with its large numbers of University types, the vote was less predictable: you never knew what those goddamned chrome domes were going to do. They read the columnists and subscribed to the fine-print magazines and had those old leather-bound books from which they could draw horrifying historical parallels.

The non-chrome-domian parts of my district were poor and black. And though the old Democratic organization still operated out in Woodlawn and under the El tracks on 63rd Street and up and down Stony Island and out toward Cottage Grove, it was getting harder and harder to bring out the vote. Not many jobs, lots of freaky crime, hopelessness glowing like radiation out through the window grates— it was awfully difficult to get someone in the ghetto to pin on a campaign button.

Just then, my district was falling under the influence of a slight, hunchbacked, demagogic Baptist named Ebenezer B. Andrews. The Reverend Andrews’s church was always jammed and from the pulpit he railed against abortion, describing it not only as a sin against God but as the state’s attempt to further oppress the blacks, by keeping their numbers in check.

The Republicans and Bertelli were hip enough to know about Andrews and clever enough to strike a bargain with him—and with no previously existing alliances in the community, they were free to do so. And Bertelli, that old goaty libertine, in whose pretentious little bistro a thousand and one abortions had been decided upon (or “opted for” as they said in coffeehouseland), anoints himself as a defender of Chicago’s fetuses and with that sneaky little hop and a skip he catapults himself into an alliance with the most vocal and well-organized subgroup in the ghetto. It was absolutely astonishing! I had already lost the gays; now I was in danger of losing the blacks.

I needed to paste together a base of support quickly, but without an incumbent to run against I found myself casting about for an issue and coming up empty each time. I had

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