It’s New Year’s Eve, folks. The Big Night. The Night that Matters. The night that is symbolic of your whole life. If you don’t have a good time on New Year’s Eve, what can you expect of the ordinary days to follow? Puts a lot of pressure on people.
You’ve heard that song: “What
are you doing New Year’s, New Year’s Eve?”
It’s been a week since
Wayne’s been home. A week since Caesar King made his appearance, and, you might
say, rejuvenated our friends, especially, the ladies. Oh, yes; they’re going
wild. They haven’t seen anything like Caesar, except maybe on television, and
nobody’s turned them on like he has since they were in college.
The man’s like quicksilver. He
slips through their fingers. They invite him to lunch, he comes, he mesmerizes,
and he flits off like a butterfly to the next Mam’selle. He’s had ribs with
Melissa, chicken with Doreen, and if it were summer, he might have had
watermelon with Ann. She came third, and the other two had used up the obvious,
so she served him vichyssoise; he looked French to her.
With each of these ladies, he
behaved immaculately. He oozed sex appeal all over them, and never touched a
hair. He told them stories (never about himself.) He left his seat, he strode
around the room, he performed a pleasing political paean, and sat back down to
the ribs, to the chicken, to the soup.
He didn’t say anything they
didn’t already think, but the way he put it was uplifting. He talked about how
important each separate and unique person is, (you, for instance) how people are
best qualified to decide for themselves, what’s good for them. That people are
basically good; groups of people – not so much. “Grouping removes us from our
fellow man, and substitutes for him, a stereotype. Instead of loving a race, a
gender, a religion, a political party, a social philosophy, we must love each
other, and not just in the holiday season, but the whole year round.”
They couldn’t agree more. It’s
Christmas, so he sounds like Jesus. He wants to spread the word, and none of
them have any problem with the word he wants to spread. They’re women, after
all. Women want to be treated like individuals, and they don’t generally want
someone else to tell them what to do. His little speeches empower them.
Caesar thought it best not to
mention his affiliation with the Tea Party. No reason for him to, really. It’s
all informal. He’s never signed up; he just helps them out. No need to mention
it. If he had, they might not have heard a word he said. And he wouldn’t have
been there in the first place dining on beef and wings and potato/leek soup. Besides,
the Tea Party is just another group. He’s going to go it alone. One individual.
So whose New Year’s Eve date
is he going to be? Doreen’s the only single lady. But he’s staying in Melissa’s
guest room; Steve invited him. Wayne isn’t staying in the house; Melissa won’t
have him. And Dr. Wise told Doreen that it wouldn’t be wise for her to
have him, so Wayne is sleeping on a couch in the Winery.
Caesar spends a lot of time
there. He and Wayne walk around the grounds together with glasses of sweet new
wine to warm them. Caesar is coaching Wayne so Wayne will not be a detriment to
his proselytizing.
“You have to come up with
rhetoric that embraces change,” says Caesar, opening his arms wide and holding
his head up to heaven. “Change from what we’ve got now. There isn’t anybody who
doesn’t want that, even though we don’t all agree on what we’ve got, and what of
it we want changed.”
And, “You have to coalesce
your general sense of outrage into a framework that actually addresses the
things you find so outrageous.” In other words, he has to do something to
change things.
Wayne’s working on it. Whenever
something infuriates him, and that happens any time he happens upon a piece of
news, he tones down the mounting fire, and tries to channel it into a
constructive thought.
So… what can he do? He can
think of how he’d like it to be; no problem there, but how in the world can he
get from here to there? The only people with any power are politicians. He’s no
politician. No matter how many lessons he gets from Caesar, he can never be
Caesar.
But Caesar can be Caesar. Caesar
can be his politician. Yes. That’s the ticket…
There’s going to be a small,
refined party at the Winery. No children. The children have their own plans,
and their rides to those plans, and their parents don’t have a lot to say about
it.
Caesar is pleased to discover
that he doesn’t have to pick one fair lady over the other. Melissa and Doreen
have arranged it all. He and Melissa, who is wearing a gauzy green gown, pick
up Doreen in a long, red, strapless. He sits between the two at the big table,
and they share him exquisitely. They’ve had a lot of practice.
Dr. Wise is here, but he’s
been keeping his distance. It would not be wise for him to appear to be
pursuing a patient who was involved with another patient, though she certainly
doesn’t look involved tonight. Not with Wayne, anyway.
And Wayne is so quiet. Everyone
is seated, Dr. Wise across from the buxom red dress, Wayne across from the
green, so they can keep their eyes on their women who are sandwiching Caesar. And
between them, across from Caesar, is Brittany Brown, seated between Wayne and
Wise.
It’s a lobster dinner. Donny
and Ann are at opposite ends of the table, supervising the serving. Ann is in a
white caftan, with a red-sequined lobster running diagonally the length of it. She’s
been feeling so good, she went to the hairdresser and came back a redhead. Her
hair exactly matches the lobster on her dress. She’s taking particular pains to
make sure Caesar King has everything he could possibly want (“Don’t be shy;
just ask.”)
How come Brittany is here
without Steve? Steve’s at another party, that Brittany declined to attend
because she wanted to get a good look at the man who walked out on his friends
and family because of his beliefs. So she and Steve had a fight, and this is
how it turned out.
Steve’s at a party that Natalie
invited them to, and that’s where we’re going now. It’s way out in the boonies,
up a dirt road, in the basement of the gate-house to an old farm that the
lawyer-grandson-heir has not yet sold. He rents it to Rick Zapata, a
respectable member of the college community. Who tonight is hosting a party
that was arranged Christmas Day at the Winery, when he left the main party and
went to get high with Natalie and Billy the Kid.
The Gate House is a fooler. It’s
got two stone rooms and a basement the water runs into and out of. However,
once you’re in that basement, you step through a door that leads to what Rick
has turned into an underground studio. It’s a big room, once a factory for
making barrels. It’s been sound-proofed, water-proofed, and intruder-proofed,
with a periscope camera that comes up over the roof and surveys the road and
the surrounding woods.
There’s a blast of sound as
we enter the big room. It’s the Jimi Hendrix solo from “All Along the
Watchtower”. As our eyes get accustomed to the dim light, we see a raised
platform, and on it, in a black T-shirt, his hair shining silver, and his
muscular arms glowing gold, is Rick Zapata, in the back, pounding away on the
drums. Off to one side is a very tall, very skinny kid with shoulder-length
hair, his long back curved protectively over his guitar, his fingers moving a
mile a minute. On the other side is Cousin Stanley from Connecticut playing
bass. Cousin Stanley looks like a stock broker, but don’t let him fool you. His
only office is the park.
And sitting cross-legged on
the floor, in the corner up front, hidden by the door when it opens, is Natalie,
in camo pants and jacket, next to a big canister from Connecticut, rolling
joints. She’s been at it for a while; tiny sparks of fire dot the sitting,
standing, dancing, listening crowd. The music is too loud for talking unless
you yell.
There are a whole bunch of
people here we don’t know. County musicians, old and young, from then and now,
from here and there, in a weird assortment of clothes, from Hippie to Hip-Hop,
from Punk to Goth. And among the youngest, a fair amount of body-piercing.
We’re not staying. We wanted
to see where Steve was, and there he is. Oh, look. Billy the Kid is with him. Hey,
Doreen! Melissa! Do you know where your kids are? Yes, we are definitely
getting out of here. For all we know, soundproof and waterproof or not, aromatic
smoke and raucous sound are seeping out of all the seams, and that rooftop
camera is going to see some action.
Back at the ranch, folks. And
look at that, will you? Things have loosened up a bit at the Winery. We must
have stayed at the studio longer than we thought, but I’ll damned if these
people aren’t dancing, too. Joan Jett’s loving rock-and-roll here, and the
ladies are bumping and grinding to her deep, rough voice, while the gentlemen
watch. There was an attempt made to get them on the floor, but led by Caesar
King’s staunch refusal to show them what real dancing is like, to give them a
taste of the boogie-woogie, Wright, Wise and Harris breathe a sigh of relief
and watch as caftaned Ann, her red lobster wriggling, lithe Melissa in swirling
gusts of green, and full-figured Doreen, in body-hugging red, gyre and gimbol
in the wabe.
Caesar, though jumping
inside, stays seated. He’s not going to lose the men, to please the women. You
won’t be seeing him break-dance, or play basketball. You’ll be seeing him play
it cool.
Like right now, five minutes
to twelve, as he excuses himself to go the Men’s room. He will not return until
the hour has struck, the ball has dropped, and the kissing is over. Smart man.
Where’s Brittany? Oh,
Brittany bailed and headed over to
Rick’s. That was probably her car we passed on our way down the hill. She was
feeling out of place among the opulence, a traitor to her cause. Her jeans and
silky shirt will feel better getting down and dirty with the musicians.
Wayne was a disappointment. He
refused to talk politics. And she had such a good opener. She’d prepared it
just for him. During the salad course, she leaned over and said, “Do you know,
that for the trillion dollars that Obamacare is going to cost, you could pay
four million doctors the German state salary of $250,000 a year? If those four
million doctors saw 15 patients a day, in one week they could see every man,
woman and child in the country. One week. Medical care is cheap compared to the
scam this government is running.” She sat back, pleased with herself, and
waited for his reaction, as he realized how much a trillion dollars is and how
much you could do with it.
She saw his eyes light up,
the muscles in his hands tense. Then the light died and he relaxed. She was
talking to the new Wayne. The quiet Wayne. The non-controversial Wayne. The
Wayne who has to find a new voice, and hasn’t yet. “Interesting,” he said. Then
he turned back to his salad.
Over lobster she turned to Dr. Wise, who has
been annoying her with his fence-sitting, and said, “How are you going to spin
this? The Mayo Clinic, the most prestigious, the most helpful, the most
advanced, hospital complex in the country is excluded from almost all the
health exchange networks; it’s too expensive for them. So now people who
didn’t have insurance, but could get charity, AND people who had insurance
before, but now have to have Obamacare, are going to be deprived of what’s
thought of by many as the top, the ultimate, the if-they-can’t-fix-it-nobody-can.”
Dr. Wise recognizes someone
who has recognized his technique, and takes up the challenge. “Easy,” he says. “Charity
is dropping off everywhere.” As an aside, so as not to appear partisan (he
can’t help this) he says, “Of course, we know why; it’s because the government
has taken over charity. But put that aside, you have to be rich just to travel
to the Mayo Clinic. You practically have to move in there with your family. Working
stiffs can’t afford that. The Mayo Clinic is an option of the rich. They can
pay for it out of their own pocket, or they can suffer with the rest of us.”
At least this guy is talking.
Brittany says, “A lot of the big advancement in medicine comes from
experimenting on rich people who don’t want to die. Where could you get a better
lab animal?”
She isn’t waiting for an
answer. She pushes back her seat, excuses herself, and on the pretext of using
the ladies’ room, picks up her coat which she’s stashed in a convenient place
just in case… and goes out the back door, to her car. Adrift between two
parties and two years.
But now… the big screen
lights up. There’s the ball. And there it goes. 2013 out the door. And we with
it, to breathe in the fresh air of the New Year.
