Boomsday

Ireland? Pointless. Appealing in a way, since his great-grandfather had come over and spent his life working in a coal yard in South Boston. You probably didn’t have to spend too much actual time in Ireland. But then the Irish press would hate you.

He ran it by Lisa that night after some cosmic coitus. (She was working their way through the third edition of The Joy of Sex and had found a position called “la grande morte.”) Her only comment-about the ambassadorship-was, “I wouldn’t have to, like, learn a language or anything?”

That would be one advantage to London or Dublin, Frank considered. Then he thought of all the paperwork. His fellow Owl Steve Metcalf had been nominated to be ambassador to some utterly pointless country in Africa and had spent $150,000 on lawyers filling out the four-hundred-page financial disclosure form-“Please list all stock and securities traded in the last 40 years”-only to be humiliated in front of some grandstanding senator who asked Steve what countries his country shared borders with. Uh…well, Senator, I’m certain that the embassy has people who, uh, stay on top of issues of that, uh, nature. A bit embarrassing, considering that the country was an island. Steve never quite recovered socially.

Frank was in the process of mentally writing off an ambassadorship when his private phone rang. “This is the White House operator…”

“Frank? Bucky Trumble!”

They always managed to a

“The president and I were just talking about you. He asked me to give you a call, in fact.…”

Chapter 16

Randy’s speech on the floor of the Senate had the predictable effect: It got him on the nation’s front pages and the evening news. The Times denounced him in unusually harsh personal terms. (“It appears that the junior senator from Massachusetts may have left more than one body part in the muddy fields of Bosnia.”)

But it also got him invited on the late-night shows, which, studies now showed, provided over 80 percent of the nation’s youth with 100 percent of their political information. The idea of aging, self-indulgent Boomers killing themselves rather than becoming an oppressive financial burden to their children and the nation was not anathema to these young viewers. In fact, to them it sounded like a darn good idea. They especially liked the part where the government would eliminate all death taxes so Mom and Dad’s money could flow straight to them.

Cass accompanied Randy to New York City for the Letterman and Jon Stewart and Colbert shows and to Los Angeles for the Jay Leno show. Randy might excite vituperation in older, more serious-minded TV hosts, but to them, he was a million-dollar gift certificate, proof of the existence of a bemused, smiling God. They loved him.

Letterman asked, “Aren’t you the one committing suicide here?”

Randy replied, “Maybe. But if I can convince a majority of the U.S. Senate to commit suicide along with me, this country would be a whole lot better off.” They loved everything about Randy: his fu

Within a week of Randy’s TV blitz, the media was treating Voluntary Transitioning, if not with respect, with less reflexive derision. Adjectives such as “outrageous” and “despicable” and “unthinkable” that had been initially Velcroed to the phrase were now replaced by “bold” and “revolutionary” and “dire yet deserving of discussion.”

An editorial in The Washington Post made the paradigm shift official: “Whatever else Senator Jepperson is up to, we’re begi

One night in New York during their media tour, Randy summoned Cass to his hotel room, ostensibly to go over the next day’s schedule. It was late, and she very well could have begged off, but she went. When she walked in, the lights were turned down low, Patsy Cline was singing “Three Cigarettes in an Ashtray” over Randy’s iPod speaker, and she saw the neck of a bottle of Dom Pйrignon protruding from a frosted ice bucket in a way that seemed, well, suggestive.

There was Randy, sitting on the edge of the bed, wearing an expensive silk kimono.

“You wouldn’t make a one-legged man chase you round the room, would you?” He smiled.

Cass had known something like this was going to happen. There had been a few signals. A few di

A few days ago, she’d said to him, “Why do you want to be president?” He’d told her about the day of his acid epiphany in the lobby of the JFK Library.

“You want to be president because of an acid trip you took?” she’d said.

“It’s not such a bad reason, really. Have you ever taken acid?”

“No,” Cass said. “My life is enough like an acid trip as it is. When you do a

“Why?”

“I’m not sure the country is ready for a candidate who says he wants to be president because he swallowed a triple dose of LSD while staring at a photograph of John F. Ke

“I think the country would welcome it.”

“Well, we could find out. If you’re wrong, at least it will be over quickly. Like by noon the first day.”

Randy considered. “You could be right. And that’s a pity. I think there’s a hunger out there for the truth. That’s why I think we’ve come so far with this nutty idea of yours. It’s so fresh.”

“You do this pronoun shift. You may not even be aware of it. If it’s a ‘bold idea,’ it’s ‘ours.’ If it’s a ‘nutty idea,’ it’s ‘yours.’”

“Grammar Nazi. Would it be enough to say I want to be president to…”

“I’m listening.”

Randy said, “I was about to say, ‘To give something back,’ but it sounds so pathetic. What it really boils down to is, I’d like to be in charge for just five minutes. Balance the books. Get us out of debt. Be nice to our friends, tell our enemies to fuck off. Clean up the air and water. Throw corporate crooks in the clink. Put the dignity back in government. Fix things. What else…? Can’t have Arabs blowing up our buildings, certainly, but I now know that we don’t need to be sending armies everywhere. Among other things, it’s expensive.…”

“I’m sorry, were you talking? I went to sleep after ‘balance the books.’”

“It’s not that bad. What do you want me to say? ‘Bind up the nation’s wounds, with charity toward all and malice toward none’?”

“I think we need to work on it.”

“Evidament.” Randy sighed.

“No French.”