Two-term Governor Cheeky Al Thorstenson was so popular that year that his Democratic challenger could have been, my father said, Ricardo Montalban in his prime and it wouldn’t have made a 5 percent difference. Even so, somebody had to run, somebody always has to run, and so Mike Pampkin put his sacrificial head into the race, and my father, equally for no good reason other than somebody must prepare the lamb for the slaughter, got himself hired as campaign manager. Nobody understood it all better than Pampkin himself. He wore his defeat right there on his body, like one of the unflattering V-neck sweaters that made his breasts mound outward like a couple of sad little hills. When he forced himself to smile for photographers, Pampkin always looked slightly constipated. And he was so endearingly, down-homey honest about his chances that people loved him. Of course, not enough to vote for him. Still, for such an ungraceful man, he had long, elegant hands, Jackie O. hands, my father said, only Pampkin’s weren’t gloved. Mike Pampkin’s hands were unsheathed, out in the open for the world to see. He was the loneliest-seeming man ever to run for statewide office in Illinois.
It was 1980. I was a mostly ignored fourteen-year-old and I had already developed great disdain for politics. It bored me to hatred. But if I could have voted, I must say I would have voted for Cheeky Al also. His commercials were very good and I liked his belt buckles. Everybody liked Cheeky Al’s belt buckles.
Probably what is most remembered, if anything, about Mike Pampkin during that campaign was an incident that happened in Waukegan during the Fourth of July parade. Pampkin got run over by a fez-wearing Shriner on a motorized flying carpet. The Shriner swore it was an accident, but this didn’t stop the Waukegan News Sun from running the headline: PAMPKIN SWEPT UNDER RUG.
My memory of that time is of less public humiliation.
One night, it must have been a few weeks before Election Day, there was a knock on our back door. It was after two in the morning. The knock was mousy but insistent. I first heard it in my restless dreams, as if someone were tapping on my skull with a pencil. Eventually, my father answered the door. I got out of bed and went downstairs. I found them facing each other at the kitchen table. If either Pampkin or my father noticed me, they didn’t let on. I crouched on the floor and leaned against the cold stove. My father was going on, as only my father could go on. To him, at this late stage, the election had become, if not an actual race, not a total farce, either. The flying-carpet incident had caused a small sympathy bump in the polls, and the bump had held.
Yet it was more than this. Politics drugged my father. He loved nothing more than to hear his own voice holding forth, and he’d work himself up into a hallucinatory frenzy of absolute certainty when it came to anything electoral. One of my earliest memories is of my parents having it out during the ’72 presidential primaries. My father had ordained from on high that Scoop Jackson was the party’s savior, the only one who could rescue the Democrats from satanic George Wallace. My mother, treasonably, was for Edmund Muskie, that pantywaist. There were countless other things, but doesn’t everything, one way or another, come down to politics? In my family, politics isn’t blood sport, it’s blood itself. Finally, in 1979, my mother, brother, and I moved out for good, to an apartment across town. But every other weekend and Wednesday nights I spent with my father in the house that used to be our house, in the room that used to be my room, in the bed that used to be my bed.
My father in the kitchen in October of 1980, rattling off to Pampkin what my father called “issue conflagrations,” by which he meant those issues that divided city voters from downstaters. To my father, anybody who didn’t live in Chicago or the suburbs was a downstater, even if they lived upstate, across state, or on an island in the Kankakee River. He told Pampkin that his position on the Zion nuclear power plant was too wishy-washy, that the anti-nuke loons were getting ready to fry him in vegetable oil.
“Listen, Mike, it doesn’t matter that Cheeky Al’s all for plutonium in our cheeseburgers. The only meat those cannibals eat is their own kind.”
Pampkin wasn’t listening. He was staring out the kitchen window, at his own face in the glass. He didn’t seem tired or weary or anything like that. If anything, he was too awake. In fact, his eyes were so huge they looked torn open. Of course, he knew everything my father was saying. Pampkin wasn’t a neophyte. He’d grown up in the bosom of the machine, in the 24th Ward. Izzy Horowitz and Jake Arvey were his mentors. He’d worked his way up, made a life in politics, nothing flashy, steady. Mayor Daley himself was a personal friend. And when the Mayor asks you to take a fall to Cheeky Al, you take a fall to Cheeky Al. That Daley was dead and buried now didn’t make a difference. A promise to Mayor Daley is a promise to Mayor Daley, and there is only one Mayor Daley. Pampkin didn’t need my father’s issue conflagrations. He was a man who filled a suit. Didn’t a man have to fill something? At the time he ran, I think Pampkin was state comptroller, whatever that means.
So the candidate sat mute as my father began to soar, his pen conducting a symphony in the air.
“So we go strong against nuclear power in the city on local TV here. But when you’re down in Rantoul on Thursday, make like you didn’t hear the question. Stick your finger in your ear. Kiss a baby, anything—”
“Raymond.”
Pampkin seemed almost stunned by his own voice. He was calm, but I noticed his cheeks loosen as if he’d been holding my father’s name in his mouth. Then he said, “My wife’s leaving me. It’s not official. She says she won’t make it official until after the election. She’s in love, she says.”
My father dropped his pen. It rolled off the table and onto the floor, where it came to rest against my bare toes. I didn’t pick it up. On the table between the two men were precinct maps, charts, phone lists, mailing labels, buttons, and those olive Pampkin bumper stickers so much more common around our house than on cars.
“Can I get you a cup of coffee, Mike?”
I watched my father. He was gazing at Pampkin with an expression I’d never seen before. Drained of his talk, he looked suddenly kinder. Here is a man across this table, a fellow sojourner. What I am trying to say is that it was a strange time—1980. A terrible time in many ways, and yet my father became at that moment infused with a little grace. Maybe the possibility of being trounced not only by Cheeky Al but also by the big feet of Ronald Reagan himself had opened my father’s eyes to the existence of other people. Here was a man in pain.
They sat and drank coffee, and didn’t talk about Mrs. Pampkin. At least not with their mouths. With their eyes they talked about her, with their fingers gripping their mugs they talked about her.
Mrs. Pampkin?
My inclination before that night would have been to say that she was as forgettable as her husband. More so. Though I had seen her many times, I couldn’t conjure up her face. She wore earth tones. I remembered that once she hugged me and that she smelled like bland soap. She wasn’t pudgy; she wasn’t lanky. She wasn’t stiff, nor was she jiggly. Early on in the campaign, my father had suggested to Pampkin that maybe his wife could wear a flower in her hair at garden events, or at the very least lipstick for television. Nothing came of these suggestions, and as far as I knew, the issue of Pampkin’s wife hadn’t come up again until that night in the kitchen, when, for me, she went from drab to blazing. She’d done something unexpected. If Mrs. Pampkin was capable of it, what did this mean for the rest of us? I remembered—then—that I had watched her after Mike got hit by the carpet. She hadn’t become hysterical. She’d merely walked over to him lying there on the pavement (the Shriner apologizing over and over), and the expression in her eyes was of such motionless calm that Mike and everybody else around knew it was going to be all right, that this was only another humiliation in the long line that life hands us, nothing more, nothing less. She’d knelt to him.
Pampkin’s hand crept across the table toward my father’s. Gently he clutched my father’s wrist.
“Do you know what she said? She said, ‘You have no idea how this feels.’ I said, ‘Maureen, I thought I did.’ ”
“More coffee, Mike?”
“Please.”
But he didn’t let go of my father’s wrist, and my father didn’t try to pull it away. Pampkin kept talking.
“You get to a point you think you can’t be surprised. I knew a lady once, a blind lady. Lived on Archer. Every day she went to the same store up the block. Every day for thirty-five years. She knows this stretch of block as if she laid the cement for the sidewalk herself. It’s her universe. One day they’re doing some sewage work and some nudnik forgets to replace the manhole cover and vamoose. She drops. Crazy that she lived. Broke both legs. It cost the city four hundred thousand on the tort claim to settle it. I’m talking about this kind of out-of-nowhere.”
My father sat there and watched him.
“Or let’s say you’re on Delta. Sipping a Bloody Mary. Seat-belt sign’s off. There’s a jolt. Unanticipated turbulence, they call it. It happened to a cousin of Vito Marzullo. All he was trying to do was go to Philadelphia. Broke his neck on the overhead bin.”
When I woke up on the kitchen floor, the room looked different, darker, smaller in the feeble light of the sun just peeping over the bottom edge of the kitchen window. Pampkin was still sitting there, gripping his mug of cold coffee and talking across the table to my father’s shaggy head, which was facedown and drooling on the bumper stickers. My father was young then. He’s always looked young; even to this day, his gray sideburns seem more like an affectation than a sign of age. But early that morning he really was young, and Pampkin was still telling my father’s head what it was like to be surprised. And he didn’t look any more rumpled than usual. Now, when I remember all this, I think of Fidel Castro giving those eighteen-hour speeches to the party faithful. There on the table, my father’s loyal head.
I was fourteen and I woke up on the floor with a hard-on over Mrs. Pampkin. One long night on the linoleum had proved that lust, if not love, had a smell, and that smell was of bland soap. I thought of ditching school and following her to some apartment or a Red Roof Inn. I wanted to watch them. I wanted to see something that wasn’t lonely. Tossed-around sheets, a belt lying on the floor. I wanted to know what they said, how they left each other, who watched the retreating back of the other. How do you part? Why would you ever? Even for an hour? Even when you know that the next day, at some appointed hour, you will have it again?
Got to go. My husband’s running for governor.
Pampkin droned on. He had his shoes off and was sitting there in his unmatched socks, his toes quietly wrestling each other.
“Or put it this way. An old tree. Its roots are dried up. But you can’t know this. You’re not a botanist, a tree surgeon, or Smokey the Bear. One day, a whiff of breeze comes and topples it. Why that whiff?”
I couldn’t hold back a loud yawn, and Pampkin looked down at me on the floor. He wasn’t startled by the rise in my shorts. He wasn’t startled by anything anymore.
He asked me directly, “You. Little fella. You’re as old as Methuselah and still you don’t know squat about squat?”
I shrugged.
Pampkin took a gulp of old coffee. “Exactly,” he said. “Exactly.”
And either I stopped listening or he stopped talking, because after a while his voice got faint and the morning rose for good.
Pampkin died twelve years later, in the winter of ’92. (The obituary headline in the Chicago Sun-Times ran: AMIABLE POLITICIAN LOST GOVERNOR’S RACE BY RECORD MARGIN.) I went with my father to the funeral. The Pampkins had never divorced. We met Mrs. Pampkin on the steps of the funeral home in Skokie. All it took was the way they looked at each other. I won’t try to describe it, except to say that it lasted too long and had nothing to do with anybody dead. They didn’t touch. They didn’t need to. They watched each other’s smoky breath in the chill air. Facing her in her grief and her wide-brimmed black hat, my father looked haggard and puny. He turned away only after more people came up to her to offer condolences. I don’t know how long it went on between them. I’m not even sure it matters. Does it? I now know it’s easier to walk away from what you thought you couldn’t live without than I had once imagined. She was taller than I remembered, and her face was red with sadness and January.
“Don’t look so pale, Ray,” she whispered to my father before moving on to the other mourners, her hand hovering for a moment near his left ear. “Mike always thought you were a good egg.”