| Fernando Rivas
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| Bill's Visit Before Bill Clinton was washed away by the Monica Lewinsky debacle I had the opportunity to be a few feet away from him in the Rainbow Room restaurant in New York City, up close and personal, if you really want to know. I suppose it would be as close as I would ever come to real power. Mind you, I’m not complaining. As a captain in the now defunct Rainbow Room I was pulling in about fifteen hundred a week then. Not bad for a survivor of the Mariel boat lift of 1980. In fact it was downright ironic for me to be that close to power, in the midst of wealthy politicos and society’s creme-de-la-creme. If power has a face it’s the face of the secret service men who watch the crowd around the President. It is a cold face, like a steel mask that will not bear humor or friendliness. I saw that face look me over several times that day though it was worn by several different men in suit’s. Men who had coils of wire spilling from one ear. They looked me over the way a predator might look at a potential target, their sharp hawk-eyes coming to terms with the incongruity between my dark skin and my caucasian features. I have sometimes been mistaken for an Arab and that’s not a good thing to be mistaken for these days and especially not by the U.S. Secret Service. The faces of the Secret Service men were in sharp and direct contrast the President’s own face, his warm smile, his easy-going Arkansas demeanor, his sure-footed almost arrogant walk which surely earned him the slick-Willy logo long before the common knowledge of his sexual escapades ever did. There was, in this contrast, a reminder that control, or to put it on simpler terms, the pecking order, is as much a part of humanity now as when the Pharaohs whipped several pyramids out of their slaves. Those who control need not stoop to the level of those controlled by them who do their bidding. They can be graceful. They can afford a smile, even if the source of said gesture is a consideration more of rating points than an actual empathy with another of the same species. The affair that day, a five-thousand-a-plate fund-raiser, was an excuse for city politicians of the Democratic persuasion to slap themselves on the back for Bill’s succesful re-election. On hand too were the usual show-biz legends and has-beens always out for an opportunity to keep their careers in the limelight of the public eye or to put them back in there if they’d been absent. After a couple of speakers tried their hand at boring the audience and after the exquisitely expensive food was served and after the swing band ran through three or four tired old big-band charts it was finally Bill’s turn to speak. The room went real quiet except for the distant rattle of dishes in the kitchen. The intensity of the security men went up one notch. Their eyes as they looked around were harder and sharper. Some of them pressed one ear, tilted their heads, turned toward the walls and muttered into their lapels. Bill’s speech was well written and professionally executed. There were no grammatical embarassments, no Nixon-like stumbles. He sounded calm, natural and in control. His voice was even but not monotonous, deep but not reverberant, pleasant and not phony. He spoke of his visit that day to the Bronx, to an area which in the seventies could easily have been mistaken in photographs for post-war Berlin. On this glorious visit Bill had seen that the area had been rebuilt and business was thriving, drug-use was down, crime statistics dwindling. The inhabitants had re-discovered their pride and re-built their homes, children had hopes for a brighter future. In short, Bill’s speech seemed to say, it was expected that a colorful hot-air balloon carrying Dorothy and Toto would shortly arrive. If not Dorothy and Toto certainly Lucy and Ricky with Fred and Ethel following close behind. Or perhaps some new Hollywood fantasy or sitcom would arise to represent this hispanic renaissance. To listen to Bill that day was to be unaware of what was really going on. Sure, out on the banquet hall a few fat cat hispanics had made it. How they had made it was open to question but surely it resembled the methods used by the Italians and the Irish and all those who had already climbed the American spiral staircase of fame and fortune. But by and large the overwhelming numbers of the unaccepted still struggled out there with their own past, their own lack of perspective, and a staggering deficiency in basic skills and education. A little cosmetic work on the cityscape wasn’t going to change that basic reality too much. Still, slick-Willy gave us hope. He gave us something to look forward to while his security men stared at us as if we were ducks in a shooting gallery. And me? You may wonder how someone with such education (a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Harvard) ends up at the Rainbow Room in a 1940’s waiter’s costume listening to the President of the United States spout banalities and cliches about the latino population of New York City; how, after such mental gymnastics as it took to learn not just English but seven other languages and graduate with honors from such a prestigious institution, I am still no higher than a notch from the men wiping the stainless steel counters downstairs in the raw steam heat of the kitchen. Maybe it was my name that held me back. Arnaldo de la Fe. Maybe such a name did not inspire the confidence that is an absolute pre-requisite of a high-paying position. Maybe such a name made those wielding the power to grant me such positions uncomfortable that a hispanic arrived recently on their shores could write papers about the poetic interaction of characters in Shakespeare, or show them aspects of philosophical argument in the poetry of Wordsworth that had never been perceived. Or perhaps it was my thesis, dealing as it did with the way modern American English had been drained of spiritual connections by decades of mind-numbing materialistic campaigns to sell product, resulting in the often mindless non-speak of politicians and bureaucrats or the twisted simplicity of rap lingo. Or maybe it was just my own antisocial, misanthropic and incosistent behavior, my need to escape being defined, which ran contrary to being a good academic. I guess I just pissed a lot of people off. The wrong people. And so it was the free-lance life for me. An article here, an essay there. Some poetry that won awards and rarely got published. A novel that spun out sub-plots like web-cords from a spider’s ass. And waiting on tables to pay the rent. Yeah. Maybe it was just the way I was. The way I saw things that held me back from really capitalizing on my talents. Or maybe it was the odd things I sometimes planned and executed. Like the novelty fountain pen I had bought a few days before and filled with black india ink right after I’d filled out my security clearance questionnaire for Bill’s visit. I could feel it’s weight inside my long-tailed, lime-green, post-World-War-II tuxedo jacket vest pocket as Clinton wrapped up his speech and the applause rose to a moderate crescendo in the wide well-lit space that was the Rainbow Room. Outside the afternoon was clear, the tops of the buildings magically drifting on the last bit’s of sunset. Bill had his best demographic-swaying smile and he was returning to his table, where Hillary, then still in the dark about her husband’s questionable activities in the oval office with the female intern, waited, a picture perfect Presidential bride... and as Clinton moved I reached for the weapon in my tuxedo pocket and moved in sync with him knowing that I would have very little time before the hawk eyes of the Secret Service men would fix on me like laser-tracking beams. T he fact that others had started to mill about in the room at the end of the speech helped me maneuver right into the President’s path without seeming out of place. And in any case I did not call attention to myself because I was just another waiter moving between the richly set tables and the elegantly dressed guests. It would have gone perfectly had not that stupid woman reached up and grabbed my sleeve. “Excuse me, young man,” she cackled. She was an old upper New York crust aristocratic crone. The kind that seemed to grow up out of the Rainbow Room carpet like mushrooms. “Can we get some more wine at this table?” I tried to pull my sleeve from her hand but in my careless haste her huge sapphire ring snagged on a thread from my cuff and she made an odd gasping sound. In the next second she was toppling from her chair and the President’s eyes were drawn to mine. I yanked my arm up from the woman on the floor and the sleeve of the tuxedo jacket ripped as I pulled out the trick fountain pen with my other hand and made straight for Bill whose expression seemed no longer smug, no longer safe. By then every secret service man in the room had been galvanized into action. Bill was no longer in control. Later I would see that same look in his face when he faced the cameras and gave his first ‘I’m-sorry-about-the-mess-with-Monica’ speech on TV. Only those people in the immediate area saw that something insane was happening. A woman cried out: “No!” I raised my goofy three dollar fountain pen and aimed it at Bill, but just as I squeezed the bulb that shot the ink out of the pen’s tip a powerful arm seized mine and deflected the aim of my weapon downward so that the black jet spattered all the way down Clinton’s white shirt and blue dress tie, all the way down on to his belt and the top of his pants just before another massive pair of arms pulled him down to the ground. Tables and chairs and glasses and china exploded and clattered and people screamed and tried to get out of the way. And then I was smashed and run over by the whole team of suit’s, steel arms pulling my legs out from under me and heavy crushing hands smacking into my head and pushing my face and shoulders down hard against the carpeted floor. Mariel had been something like this. Before you could get to the boats that were waiting to take you off the island, Castro’s supporters waited for you with sticks, bats, boards anything they could hit you with. It was like running a gauntlet. The milicianos also had German shepherds straining on their leashes that snarled and tore at your legs as you ran past. I saw a man pulled to the ground and beaten then dragged away. When I went through the Mariel gauntlet they did not strike out because I was only a child then and my mother was with me. All we got was the fury of their insults, the wet hiss of their spit on our faces. Afterwards, back in the Rainbow Room, the secret service guys hauled me away into the locker room upstairs, my feet never touching the ground. In the struggle one of them had broken my arm and I was groaning in pain. “What the fuck did you do it for?” they asked. “Stupid spic motherfucker.” “Take the piece of shit to a hospital...we should just throw him out the fucking window.” “Crazy asshole.” The long and short of it all is I got put in Bellevue for observation and ended up playing chess with the doctors for a couple of months. I was angry because it had all been kept out of the news. The secret service had swept the incident under the rug and me along with it. I was nothing more to them than an annoyance, undeserving of a trial, undeserving of any attention whatsoever. Later I would learn of many cases like mine. There was a guy in Chicago who had tossed human excrement (perhaps his own) at Gerald Ford. Some woman in Fresno had smashed her car into Reagan’s limmo, and that was after Hinckley pulled his far more serious and impossible to bury stunt in front of live television cameras. Bush had been buzzed by some lunatic in a plane while he was fishing and bombarded by leaflets painted with smiley faces. The secret service guys told me I was lucky they hadn’t just shot me full of holes like I deserved and that I should come nowhere near Washington D. C. or anywhere else the President happened to be. “Next time we see you we won’t be asking any questions,” they said. And I know they meant it. So was it worth it? When I watched Bill’s impeachment proceedings two years later I was working in an Argentinian restaurant in Queens. By then the Rainbow Room had folded. Not that they would have taken me back if they’d stayed open, me or my lime-green tuxedo which now hangs quietly in the closet with a torn sleeve and an indelible black smear of india ink across it’s right shoulder. At the dive in Queens there were only two waiters, me and an old Peruvian called Sergio. There were only twelve tables and there were roaches in the kitchen. I watched Clinton undone by his own linguistic foibles and then forgiven, his hair growing whiter and his face more drawn and less confident. Sometimes I was pissed that I didn’t make the six o’clock news and that I couldn’t write a book about the ‘event’. I felt that my waiter’s jacket shared a certain symbolic relationship with, if not the world-wide notoriety of, Monica’s infamous blue dress. I was angry that a silly gullible intern could sway the whole world while my suave and poetically intellectual trick with the novelty fountain pen went completely unrecognized and unappreciated. But more often than not I just catch myself laughing on the subway on my way home from the cheap restaurant in Queens while I work out still another sub-plot in my never-ending and hitherto unfinished novel. |
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