eNewsChannels COLUMN: A guilty-as-charged politician gets advice about his court case. A campaign contribution is made to obtain more community service. This is how it works at the local level.
Note: all names in this article have been changed.
I was in one of the private consulting rooms of Mayfield Sports Training West when the wall phone buzzed. Tracy Frearson, the Registered Physical Therapist who was helping design my exercise plan, said “Excuse me a sec’,” and picked up the phone.
“This is Tracy. . . All right, put him on.” Glancing at me, Tracy said “This shouldn’t be a moment” then turned back to the phone. “How are you? . . . Great, thanks. What’s up? . . . Uh huh. I see. Well, I’m not sure I’d know . . . Styling gel? Uh, well, yeah, come to think of it, that would work. . . You bet . . . Hey, no trouble. Good luck. ‘Bye.”
Tracy hung up and turned back to me with a smile and a shake of the head. “Sorry about that. Kind of a wild and crazy guy.”
“Really? A customer?”
“No, no, he’s a neighbor. Actually, he’s my councilman.” And out came the name of a local political figure who the newspapers said was about to become a defendant in a trial. The charge would be statutory rape.
“Wow,” I said. “What’s with the styling gel?”
“He says his lawyer is going make the girl describe ——‘s genitals and, you know, his pubic hair. Somebody told him that if you leave styling gel on your pubic hair overnight, it’ll look different in the morning.”
I thought about that for a moment. “So,” I said, “he’s guilty.”
“Uhhh, yeah, I guess it looks like it. I mean I guess so!”
“Does that bother you?”
“Well, I don’t know. The girl was willing. She was underage for here in California, but not for some other states. It wouldn’t be a crime in some other countries.”
“Neither would cannibalism,” I said. I must have had great timing because that remark brought a burst of laughter.
“That’s right!” Tracy said. “But you know, some laws are weird. The whole system is funny. I mean, he’s a pretty good guy and the trial is only happening because the girl is being paid by some of his political opponents. And there’s that newspaper chain that’s picking up the tab for the girl to stay in a pretty nice hotel for this whole thing. It’s been weeks now. They drive her around in limos, she has press conferences, maybe she’ll write a book. Or I should say ‘write’ a book.”
“I heard hints about that, but it sounded like a threat,” I said.
“Exactly. Everything about it seems too much like a set-up to me. Gotta tell you, I hope he gets off or they just settle out of court.”
“Do you think this will end his political career?”
“Depends. Convicted and sent up, then he’s done. But if he wins, then he might be able to use the whole thing to his advantage. You know, ‘all the forces were combined against him,’ or ‘it was all a frame-up,’ that kind of thing. Could work for him.”
Evidently something was settled because the newspaper stories got smaller and smaller, and they moved further inside the paper and away from the front page. And then they just stopped. Never did hear anything else from the girl. The guy stuck around in politics for only a little while longer and then went back to his main business, which I believe was in real estate.
Spin
It’s easy to spin that tale in several directions. A sex scandal. A morality play. A gold-digger. A corrupt politician. A corrupt system. A money-and-power struggle. And so on. Perhaps there is some truth in all of those views. The fact is that most people want their political leaders to say one thing in public but do something else when it comes time to enact legislation, and the greed factor is often very high.
People want their politicians to talk about “fairness,” but what they mean is “fairness for our side.” People demand that their politicians make speeches about “equality,” but the reality is that they often mean “equality unless I need to buy my way out of trouble.” And the electorate insists that politicians stand up for “the good of the people,” but the reality is that they frequently mean “what’s good only for the good people like me.”
Money Talks
If you have the money or the time, you can examine the voting records of all the people who serve you in federal, state, and local governments. What you will find is this: at every level, we have the finest politicians money can buy. Let me tell you about one of those purchases. . . .
Several years ago, I worked on the advertising campaigns for a large chain of restaurants. The ad process is not relevant here except to say that my contributions involved writing the television commercials and acting as the ad agency producer. Which is not the same as being the unit production manager or the production company producer, but it’s still pretty good and you get to be consulted about most of the decisions involving the spots. Plus, you are on set or on location when the spots are being made.
So, along with several members of the ad agency, I am at one of the restaurants in the chain, one that will serve as the location for several commercials. While we’re there, we cannot help noticing that a curious dynamic is at work in the neighborhood. The main dining area of the restaurant is at the corner of an intersection that has become known as a meet market. Or sometimes meat market. However it’s spelled, it’s a hangout for male prostitutes.
The brigade of bods-for-hire resulted in a fairly steady stream of cars to the intersection, something the restaurant owner would normally have appreciated. But not in this case. Drivers were only cruising past to check out the available talent. The boys were usually stripped to the waist even in cold weather and they would loiter, cavort, preen, and occasionally fight right outside the restaurant’s large windows.
Cars would stop, conversations would ensue, and decisions would be made. Sometimes the guy would get in the car and be whisked away. Sometimes the guy would back away from the vehicle and the car would zoom off down the street.
Reflection and See-Through
Outside the restaurant, when the lighting conditions were just right, the boys would admire their reflections in the restaurant windows because the large panes of glass would appear to be wall-sized mirrors. But inside the restaurant, the dining patrons would be treated to the spectacle of a gaggle of man-whores combing their hair, adjusting their short-shorts, rubbing pimple cream on their faces, and so on.
Depending on where you were seated in the restaurant, the primping and posturing might be taking place just a few feet from your plate of spaghetti. Which would lead to strange dinner table conversations:
“Dear, would you like some more wine with your — good heavens, what’s going on? Can he see us? What’s he doing, trying to rub away his acne? He looks alarming. And that hair looks dirty! Now what’s that one doing? Accck, is that a cold sore? Waiter! Waiter, what’s happening here?”
“Yes sir, more garlic bread?”
“What? No, what is that out there?”
“Just, uh, the neighborhood, sir. It’s, um, very colorful.”
“Check, please.”
Drug Deal
When a couple of the boys decided to do a drug deal right up against the window, many patrons of the restaurant skipped more than the garlic bread. A shirtless guy wearing skin-tight shorts with the pockets torn off doesn’t have too many places to hide dope. So now the restaurant diners were watching two men practically pressed up against the window as one unzipped and pulled a baggie out of his underwear. The conversation I overheard went something like this:
“Why are they huddling up against the glass like that?”
“It looks like they’re hiding something from the other boys on the sidewalk.”
“Can’t they tell we’re eating in here?”
“It must be like the windows at work, where you can see out but people in the courtyard can’t see in.”
“This is terrible. These people should be rounded up and sent home to their parents.”
“Some of them might be adults.”
“Well, anyway, it’s very annoying and I think something should be done so that — wait, what’s he doing? Oh my god! He’s pulling something out! Don’t look, Betty! I’m calling the cops! Waiter!!!”
But the waiter is already being accosted by four other customers.
Cost of Doing Business
As you can imagine, business began a steady decline for that restaurant. With barely-suppressed anger, the restaurant owner made some phone calls. Over a period of a few days, he placed calls to the corporate headquarters of the restaurant franchise operation, the local police department, the Chamber of Commerce, the Mayor’s office, and his City Councilman’s office.
The restaurant corporate headquarters said call the police. The police said they would be right over whenever a crime was in progress but they didn’t have the manpower to try enforcing loitering laws.
The Chamber of Commerce also said to call the police, as did the Mayor’s office. There was more of a reaction from his local Councilman, who had this to say: “Protecting citizens and business owners has always been a priority with my office and I will, if re-elected once again, strive to resolve this terrible situation affecting our neighborhoods, but as you know, running a political campaign can be a somewhat costly endeavor. . . . ”
Thus it was that the restaurant owner made a donation of a few thousand dollars to the campaign of a man he barely knew and hardly thought about up to this moment.
But almost immediately, police cars began rolling to a stop outside the restaurant, checking I.D.s, hauling away the underage boys, running background checks on the others, and scaring away the cars that were cruising past the intersection.
One aging hustler (he must have been twenty-one at least) made a terrible mistake in dealing with the cops. It wasn’t his demeanor that caused the trouble. You can have a contemptuous attitude with police officers and they will stay calm. It wasn’t his speech, although it was abrasive. You can yell about your rights or scream about harassment and the worst that will happen is that you might be told to shut the hell up.
While they checked his I.D. and ran his name through the computer, the cops quietly told him to behave himself. He shouted louder. The officers said they’d have to run him in for disturbing the peace if he kept on causing a scene. But the jerk continued to berate the cops at the top of his lungs. The two officers looked at each other for a moment. First one shrugged and then the other. They moved to handcuff him. That’s when he made his appalling blunder: he angrily spun around, flailing his arms at the officers and attempting to push them away from him. Not a good idea.
I have talked with police officers about these demarcation moments. “There is a precise second when everything escalates,” one told me, “where we all move up to the next level and something gets very, very serious. It’s funny, because usually all someone has to do is follow the officer’s instructions. You might just have to present some I.D. or wait to see if there are outstanding warrants. You might be looking at a breathalyzer test. You could be facing being taken in for questioning. But all of these things are pretty straightforward. The minute you make any move that could be threatening, you have moved to a mandatory arrest and your life might just be changed forever.”
On the street in front of the restaurant, I witnessed a demarcation moment when the guy flailed his arms at the officers. You could see a strange reaction in one officer’s eyes. I’m reading into this, but it seemed to me that the cop was saying to himself, “You dumb ass. All you had to do was control yourself but now you want to be the one dink we use as an example for the others. What an idiot.”
Two weighted nightsticks whipped through the air, one going in under the guy’s ribs, the other clipping him behind the knees. There was a “whoomp-craack” and he was a pile of skin and bones gasping for breath on the sidewalk. From that point on, the evening was a bit quieter around the restaurant.
In the days that followed, patrol cars made that intersection a regular stop on their rounds. The hustlers went elsewhere, and perhaps the entire dance played out again in a different part of town.
Article is Copr. © 2012 by John Scott G and originally published on eNewsChannels.com – all commercial and reprint rights reserved.
