Excerpt from Fury & Grace

*** This is an excerpt from my memoir Fury & Grace. I wrote the book when I was fresh out of the union. Writing has been a way for me to look for myself under all the grandiosity, narcissism, and self-absorption that shines through in these words. They make me cringe, but I’ll stand by them as a faithful record of what these events were like for me at the time, and what I was like at the time. I hope I’ve grown a bit. ***

Montpelier, February 5-8, 2012

“I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the Most High. But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes. Psalms 82:6-7 (King James Version)

“After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true.” Mr. Spock, Star Trek: The Original Series, “Amok Time,” 1967

It was time for me to start the event. I walked through the back doorway of the Capital Plaza Hotel, just across the street from the gold-domed capital building, and into the banquet room. This was a political fundraiser for the Vermont AFL-CIO and the Teamsters, and as the AFL-CIO president, I was the emcee. I saw the lovely and tempting open bar that I stayed away from and the hors d’oeuvre that I meandered toward. Only some lonely slices of tomato were left. People had eaten the mozzarella cheese slices and the basil leaves. I couldn’t blame them for leaving the tomatoes untouched.

The lights went down, but not so low that I couldn’t see all these people who knew I might soon be labeled “Disgraced former union president.” The political blogs were running with a story that the state Senate president said I had threatened him by slipping a scary piece of paper across his desk in a private meeting. Well, it had been a private meeting, there was a desk, and I had slid a piece of paper across it. But there was nothing scary about it. It was just a brag sheet about all the work the union had done to get him more power. We’d given them out to legislators by the stack. Now he was calling on the state attorney general to investigate me for extorting and intimidating a public official. I felt sick, but it was a performance and so I would say my lines, and people would laugh where they were supposed to laugh.

The plan was that I would first introduce Governor Peter Shumlin and then, after he spoke, I would make a speech about the former governor and presidential candidate Howard Dean before presenting Dean with an award. That was the plan. But the two governors had a different plan. They didn’t want an amateur like me hanging around on the same stage as them. Instead of handing it back over to me, Shumlin introduced Dean with the award speech I was supposed to deliver, and then he presented Dean with the award. They just took over the event and cut me out altogether.

It was so outrageous a hijacking that I admired it. That’s politics; you do whatever you can get away with. When you’re outmatched as I had just been, well, you eat the broken glass and pretend that was always the plan.

When they were done, I dragged myself back on stage to close out the evening. I looked out at the crowd. It was a good turnout. Even the lobbyists who worked against us had shown up. Shumlin and Dean both said from the podium that they supported us. People had happy looks on their faces, or maybe just drunken looks. Either way, they laughed at my little jokes.

I had worked hard to get here. I started in a quiet job as a college librarian and when the union world energized me, I leaped right in. Three years of keeping the books as treasurer taught me how the AFT Vermont union worked. After five years and sixty contentious board meetings squalid with infighting, I finally had what I wanted. I was on a stage, people had voted to put me there, and I had titles. And so I wanted more. At the same time, I was president of that one union, I became president of the Vermont AFL-CIO, a union of unions.

I needed to prove to myself that I wasn’t a useless fat slug. I needed people to write my name down on pieces of paper and vote for me. I needed to see my name in the newspaper. I needed the titles. I needed to defeat people. Half the reason I ran to be president of Vermont AFL-CIO was so I could defeat the woman who ran against me and crush her lifelong ambition to win that office. I relished every second of it. I needed to fight the world until everyone who opposed me lay twitching on the floor. It didn’t matter that much to me that neither she nor anyone else knew they were bit players in my story.

The union world is rough, and I figured those who ventured into it should prepare themselves. I included myself. I needed to pass this bill so I’d get the praise for it. I had to win. I needed to make the patronizing legislators who opposed us eat sand. I suppose I might have had just a bit of rage stored up somewhere inside me.

I looked at the audience in the Capital Plaza Hotel the way I had looked at every crowd I had to address since a long-ago but never forgotten scene on a grade school playground: as a potential lynch mob. My way had been to get the mob on my side by charming them, making them laugh, and finding ways to be smarter. I had a lifetime to develop unconscious instincts for how people act, what moves them, and where they’ll go when they do move. In the union world, all these skills came to the forefront. They became the explicit tools I used and developed. I needed all these people to love me, and I hated them for it.

****

Two days earlier, on Sunday, I had woken up obsessed with the Vicodin I knew I could find in Daddy’s medicine cabinet. My periodic back pain was good for maybe one prescription every few months, and besides, as far as I was concerned, using painkillers to kill pain was a complete waste of their potential. I wanted to feel the first half-hour or so of the subtle onset of warmth when the dope hit my blood until the full dose, well, the full quadrupled dose, made its way through me to my brain. Then the Vicodin would supply only irritability and sleepiness. Not a very good drug, but it was the only one I had access to.

I just wanted to dull my mind and figured that if I didn’t buy dope off the street, I wouldn’t get into trouble. The fatigue from more than a decade in the skin of a quiet librarian and the five years I had already spent wearing the dragon scales of a union boss was too much. It was hot under all those layers of persona. Perhaps it was that extra weight of all that psychological armor that had given me the back pain I needed to qualify for a prescription.

Mama and Daddy would be at church. They lived less than a mile from me. I could slither down the hill, through their front door, into their medicine cabinet, load my pocket with dope they’d never miss, then slink back up the hill to my home and no one would be the wiser.

You’re a crackhead if you do that, a voice in my head told me. Stealing dope from your parents, that’s a definite crackhead move. But, I argued back, it would just be Vicodin. It’s not crack. It’s not meth. It’s just souped-up Tylenol.

I had had two days without alcohol or drugs, and I was still surprised at how bright and clear the world looked through sober eyes, even the snow that Vermont’s political class dirtied as they made their way into the capitol building to get on with whatever mischief filled the legislature’s calendar for the day.

Daddy had sold his childhood home in Oklahoma City so he and Mama could live close to my family with our four kids. It had been almost a month since I had last seen him. He’d caught an infection from a botched knee replacement and was writhing in pain his doctor refused to acknowledge. Mama was frantic not knowing what to do to help him.

Now, Daddy was made of strong stuff. He had been a staff sergeant in the Army and spent three years in Vietnam. He had been an air marshal during the first wave of terrorist attacks on airliners in the 1970s. He had lived forty years with crushed vertebrae from Vietnam. And I had seen him perform his own tooth repair at the kitchen table instead of going to the dentist. Never in my life had I heard him complain. So if he had Vicodin it was because he needed it to function. But so did I.

When I walked into their kitchen, I glanced at the table and saw a clear plastic container of the cherry tomatoes they had never stopped offering me. There in the living room was his place on the couch, festooned with heating pads and cushions. Good, I thought, now he knows what it’s like to suffer. He was full of God’s love, he gave me life, and I thought it was right that he suffered for it. I had wanted them to sell their house and move to Vermont. Now that they had, I couldn’t be anything more than cordial with them. Arm’s length was as close as I could get. When I tried to be friendly, I felt a black rage rise up and stop me.

Somehow I left without stealing the Vicodin.

****

On the day of the fundraiser event, my heart thumped as I pulled into the union’s parking lot about a block down the street from the state capitol building.

We needed Howard Dean to help us out with some legislation, so we had decided to invent a labor award to give him. If you want to lure a politician to an event, give them an award. It’s not fair; they can’t resist. When Dean said yes, Governor Shumlin agreed to speak as well. Those two would, in turn, draw most of the legislators and lobbyists we needed.

I worked on my speech and the little things to say when I introduced tonight’s speakers. I’d think of something clever, write it down in my pocket notebook, say it out loud, realize it wasn’t clever at all, start over, and then copy the whole thing down a few times so I’d remember it. I couldn’t think unless I could pace around the office. Like a lot of offices in Montpelier, the home base for our organizers had been converted from a shabby and rambling house. Maps and charts hung on the walls, cheap printers and cheaper snacks were everywhere. This was no professionalized union office, lush with healthy potted plants. This was a campaign office where people got things done. Our plants were all dead. On the table, I saw a small paper plate with a slice of withered tomato on it. This was my union-boss kingdom.

For the two years I had been president of AFT Vermont, a union of nurses and college professors, I had gotten used to waking up with my glands squeezing adrenaline into my bloodstream, but this week was particularly aggravating.

I was taking a break from procrastinating on my speech when the emails started coming in telling me to stay strong. No one says that unless you’re screwed. That’s how I found out I might be under investigation.

I had picked the worst week in the history of the world to stop drinking. I felt the adrenaline hit my lungs like the meth I used to shoot into my veins. But that was more than twenty years ago, and I was sure that a bit of recreational Vicodin was completely different.

My stomach filled with clay. I had been through one federal Department of Labor investigation when I first became treasurer of the union just a few years earlier. They had been looking into things that had happened before I was elected. Still, I had had to shepherd that investigation until we were cleared. This was different, though. This investigation would be about me personally and the union’s political activity.

We hadn’t done anything illegal and were not guilty of anything worse than being obnoxious, which in the union is what they pay you to be. None of that mattered, though. The threat of an investigation would have a devastating effect on our plans.

Then I remembered today’s event. In about two hours I was going to have to go over to the Capital Plaza and enter a room full of hundreds of people who would have all heard about this paper-sliding fiasco, and I’d have to get in front of them and emcee the whole farce while they were thinking about how I’d look in an orange jumpsuit. That’s what I figured, anyway.

I wanted to Rumpelstiltskin myself into the ground. I couldn’t even have a drink.

I put on my pea coat and slowly made my way down the icy steps. It was going to be like the kids calling me lardass on the playground all over again, except there would be no recess-ending bell to save me. I was going to have to go down there and just do the stupid thing no matter what. What was the alternative? Cancel it? Turn myself in to the FBI? Yes! I did it! I gave a piece of paper to him! It all seemed so ridiculous.

It was stupidly cold for February, but the Cap Plaza was only a couple of blocks away; just far enough to lose a nose to frostbite. I made it into the hotel and back to the banquet room. I looked in just long enough to see that everything was set up and people were starting to arrive. Then I ducked out the back because I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I walked along the tracks and counted railroad ties for a while, thinking of Neal Cassady getting high and dying on tracks just like these. I waited for showtime.