CHAPTER ONE: THE MAYOR
He stood in front of a cluster of microphones set up outside of City Hall on a late-August afternoon—a short, stocky man in his 50s, with slightly graying red hair, a nose bent to one side due to three years of amateur boxing in his early twenties, and a youthful, freckly face. He pressed his lips together in an attempt to smile. He was flanked by the First Deputy Mayor, his Chief Medical Adviser and the heads of the police and fire departments, all of whom were taller than him.
“Good afternoon,” he addressed the crowd of reporters and people standing in the plaza. “I’m back. Pease don’t kill the messenger.” The Mayor of San Francisco was known for his self-depreciating humor and the crowd chuckled with appreciation. “This will be a brief update about the pandemic. I am not going to bore you with a lot of statistics or other tedious information—unless you want me to!” He eyed the crowd with his patented “who me?” smirk, holding out his arms in askance. This drew another laugh, after which he quickly assumed a serious manner. “Today we have officially opened the thirtieth special clinic to handle the C-1 virus. If you or a loved one or a neighbor or a friend falls ill and has reason to believe he or she has the virus, please report or have her or him report to the nearest clinic and they will take care of you. I promise. We are passing out some printouts with the addresses of these clinics, which are located all over the city, and you can also find them online at clinics.gov. There is also a hotline you can call, and the number is also on the printout and online at clinics.gov. I want to assure you that all of us from the mayor’s office to the doctors and nurses at the clinics, to the SFPD and the SFFD are working tirelessly day and night and will not let this pandemic get the best of San Francisco.”
The crowd applauded joyfully. It was late Friday afternoon and the sun was sinking behind the dome of City Hall. The mayor gazed into the crowd and noted the looks of concern on the faces of people and he thought: They are depending on me! What if I let them down? He took a deep breath and had another thought: They don’t know that I’m a needy nerd pretending that I know what I’m doing. They don’t know I am faking it. I obviously need to talk to Dr. Sonnenschein about that some more. But for now, just keep smiling.
The C-1 virus had swept across America for over a year, leaving behind millions of sick people, a number of whom had died from the sickness. Mayors of cities across America—from Abilene to Zelienople--were doing their best to handle this emergency that had alarmed the country and the world, but no mayor had attacked the virus with more energy than Mayor Joey Mercutio (or Mayor Joey, as people called him). Mayor Joey stood out from the other mayors not only because of the fervor with which he did his job, but also because he was an awkward, lovable fellow with his patented self-effacing manner and engaging sense of humor. He was a man of the people, who often appeared in casual sweats and sneakers at his press conferences, and kept people laughing even in the hardest of times. Also, unlike most politicians, who wrote books on politics, he wrote poetry, played jazz piano and quoted from Dostoyevsky. From the beginning of his reign as Mayor he had had a love affair with the city of San Francisco. He looked out at the crowd of several hundred people now and smiled bravely and gave the thumbs up gesture. “We have got this!” he said. “This puny, pushy little demon does not have what it takes to defeat San Francisco. We will stay ahead of it and unite against it until it shuts up and goes away!” He took a quick jab and an uppercut and left hook at the head of the imaginary virus in front of him and the crowd laughed again.
He finished by waving at the crowd and stepping away from the microphones, then skipped down the stairs and wandered through the crowd shaking hands. He was followed by three security agents. As he shook hands with one young woman with sensitive brown eyes, she said to him, “You’re the only politician I trust!”
“Thank you,” he replied.
“You’re welcome!” she said, patting his arm.
An hour later, as he was going over some memos in his office on the second floor of City Hall, he heard the first news report. Roy Bacon, the First Deputy Mayor, rushed into his office holding up a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle. A banner headline screamed out from the page, “Intern accuses Mayor of Inappropriate Behavior.”
“What the hell is this?” Mayor Joey asked, squinting with irritation at the newspaper.
“Apparently some intern has accused you of kissing her,” Bacon answered. He was a tall, skinny young man with a nervous smile who wore round glasses with blue, translucent frames that accented his baby-blue eyes. Together, he and the mayor, with his short, stocky build, made an odd couple.
“Who accused me of kissing her?” Mayor Joey asked. His voice was puzzled. It was the last thing he would expect anybody to assert about him.
“They don’t say.”
“Really? They don’t say who the intern was? Some intern makes an accusation and the reporter doesn’t identify who she is? That’s messed up.”
“That’s what they do,” Bacon said, nervously. “They always do that. They protect the accuser’s identity.”
“That’s preposterous. I’m not a kisser. I’m too ugly to be a kisser. Tom Davidson is a kisser,” he said, referring to a movie star who had recently been involved in a scandal. “Look at this nose,” he added, standing sideways to profile his long, crooked Italian nose. “Who would want to kiss somebody with a nose like this?”
Mayor Joey was usually able to use humor to deflect, but on this occasion all he got was a weak chuckle from Bacon. “It’s a political thing. The election is coming.”
“It is definitely a political thing, because I would never kiss an intern.”
“I know you wouldn’t. Everybody knows you have always been a supporter of women’s causes.”
“Let me see that story.”
Mayor Joey took the newspaper in both hands and sat down at his desk to read it. His eyes were at first incredulous, then outraged as he scanned the article. “She says I shoved her against the wall and kissed her without her consent!” he read. “That’s not me! I’m too short to push anybody against a wall.” He smirked at Roy and Roy laughed a little. “Oh, my God! She says she was horrified! She says she was hypnotized. She says she was pulverized. She says she was frightened to the edge of her being! Really? The edge? She says I am a hateful, bigoted, sexist creep! She says the kiss was nasty, cloying and beastly. She says my tongue was an icky, yucky, snake in her throat. She says my breath was so rotten, scuzzy and sleezy that she almost fainted. She says my eyes were looking at her with a hideous, vulgar and misogynistic leer. She says my nose was bent toward her at an offensive, opinionated and arrogant angle. Where do they get all of this stuff? She says it was like the sun went down that day and never came up again! She says she hasn’t been able to trust men since then or take a leak or eat wheat bread. Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” He threw the newspaper on the desk and jumped up. “She wasn’t frightened to the edge of being! My interns are all strong young women. I pick them because they’re assertive. They might be frightened but not to the edge of their being! That’s ridiculous!”
“I know,” Roy answered. “It’s unbelievable.”
“That’s not me. Nobody’s going to believe her. People know me. I would never shove a woman against a wall. I’m too scared of women to shove any of them against a wall. I’m too much of a geek to horrify anybody. Even if I did kiss an intern, she wouldn’t be horrified. She’d be annoyed maybe, that a needy nerd like me would kiss her. But not horrified.”
“You’re right! You wouldn’t do that,” said Bacon. “Everybody knows that.”
“It’s insane!” said Marvin Meeker, the Second Deputy Mayor, who had walked in carrying his own copy of the Times. Meeker was almost as short as Joey and had a mostly bald crown with a little tuft of hair on his forehead that curled down to his brow. He always had a meek smile on his face. “It doesn’t make sense. Whoever she is, she must be lying. I don’t mean to degrade your interns.” He smiled with satisfaction at his meekness.
Mayor Joey paced back and forth a few times and as he did so, he was suddenly overwhelmed with hurt and chagrin. He was thinking about all he had done in the first two years of his term. He recalled how he had fought to balance the budget, remembering how he had been applauded for being the first Mayor to bring the budget into the black in 73 years. He remembered how hard he had battled to get 27 shelters for women built throughout the metropolitan area with nicely furnished rooms and nutritious meals, and where all residents were given free counseling and legal advice. Then he remembered how he had turned an old suburban auditorium into a walk-in shelter for homeless women. (He had originally planned a coed shelter with one half for women and one half for men, but that was voted down by the City Council, which was comprised of 27 women and one gay man.) This spacious shelter, protected by an iron fence, was a place...
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