Dragons - Chapter 43 (DRAFT)

I got out of there as quickly and as discreetly as I could. I wanted to avoid any possibly incriminating conversations with the other board members, but found that, on the walk back to the convention hotel, I couldn’t avoid such a conversation with myself.

What the hell had I just done? I had told Mary what had happened, but what else? Anything? Was I any closer to dealing with the issue that Wes Howard and Amy Crawford had created for us? No, I wasn’t. In fact, it felt like I was farther away than I had been before. Previously, I hadn’t known what I was supposed to do, but was free to act in any manner that I saw fit. Now I had passed the buck to Mary, and would have to wait until at least nine-thirty before I could take any action, and then it would have to be whatever Mary determined for me. Was that what I was looking for when I marched myself over to Eleanor’s hotel? To remove any responsibility that I might have for solving the problem?

That thought stopped me dead in my tracks, Gerald’s condescending voice ringing in the ears of my recently remembered past.

Oh, Christ, Alan, how old are you? A problem like this? If you bring it to her without a solution, she’s just going to blame you for it. Don’t you even know that?

No, Gerald. I guess I don’t. Up there in the heights of Eleanor’s seventy-five dollar breakfast and seventy-five hundred dollar view, the idea that this was my problem to solve had completely slipped my mind.

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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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The Invisible Bridge by Rick Perlstein

I can only assume that the title comes from the quote shown on the book’s first page. It’s attributed to Nikita Khrushchev, and described as advice he gave to Richard Nixon.

If the people believe there’s an imaginary river out there, you don’t tell them there’s no river there. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river.

Imaginary. Invisible. Guess that one must have been changed by the editors. Either way, the point is the same -- and it is a wonderful metaphor for this book’s main protagonist and the political divide he helped create.

That protagonist is Ronald Reagan, and the political divide he would come to straddle was first spiked by Barry Goldwater in Perlstein’s first book Before the Storm, and then split open by Richard Nixon in Perlstein’s second Nixonland. In The Invisible Bridge, Perlstein will help us understand how Reagan first leveraged and then would come to represent the essential divide of American politics -- the one between liberals and conservatives, the one that still drives so much of our rhetoric today.

A Polarity of Opinion

As usual, Perlstein’s preface provides a helpful frame that will help you understand his subsequent 800 pages.

Before Reagan had served a single day in any political office, a polarity of opinion was set -- and it endured forevermore. One one side: those who saw him as a rescuer, hero, redeemer. … On the other side: those who found Reagan a phony, a fraud, or a toady.

But this divide is not really about Reagan the man, as evidenced by the reaction Perlstein got from a “Reagan-hating” friend when he asked her to review his manuscript. She refused, admitting that she could not think straight about Reagan for her rage.

Her beef, and that of millions of others, was simple: that all that turbulence in the 1960s and ‘70s had given the nation a chance to finally reflect critically on its power, to shed its arrogance, to become a more humble and better citizen of the world -- to grow up -- but Reagan’s rise nipped that imperative in the bud. Immanuel Kant defined the Enlightenment, the sweeping eighteenth-century intellectual-cum-political movement that saw all settled conceptions of society thrown up in the air, which introduced radical new notions of liberty and dignity, dethroned God, and made human reason the new measure of moral worth -- a little like the 1960s and ‘70s -- as “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.” For these citizens what Reagan achieved foreclosed that imperative: that Americans might learn to question leaders ruthlessly, throw aside the silly notion that American power was always innocent, and think like grown-ups. They had been proposing a new definition of patriotism, one built upon questioning authority and unsettling ossified norms. Then along came Ronald Reagan, encouraging citizens to think like children, waiting for a man on horseback to rescue them: a tragedy.

This, pointedly, is the part that is not about Reagan, but about the larger dichotomous current of American life that he represented. When confronted with evidence of our own failing, two different sets of Americans react in two different ways. One wants to push through the ugliness and repair the damage that has been done. The other wants to ignore the ugliness and return to the days when such things weren’t talked about. Perlstein’s friend was in the first camp. Ronald Reagan was in the second.

The Protective Bubble of Propaganda

Again and again throughout Perlstein’s narrative we see these forces acting in opposition to one another. And the most compelling are when people in one camp are rudely confronted by the viewpoints of those in the other, often leaving them, and the reader, somewhat shellshocked by the clash.

Case in point is the effort during the peace talks that would eventually end the Vietnam War, when American housewives, somewhat as part of a political publicity stunt, worked honestly and diligently to secure the release of the prisoner-of-war husbands.

On Christmas Eve, three airliners leased by Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot lifted off. One, christened “The Spirit of Christmas,” bore fifty-eight POW wives and ninety-four of their children to demand a meeting with Communist negotiators in Paris. The others, christened “Peace on Earth” and “Goodwill Toward Men,” tried to deliver thirty tons of Christmas dinners, holiday gifts, clothing, and medical supplies directly to the prisoners in Hanoi.

But, outside the protective bubble of propaganda, the women were in for a rude awakening, which Perlstein conveys in a parenthetical comment..

(In Paris, the wives were lectured on truths stern-faced North Vietnamese diplomats considered self-evident: that the way to free their husbands was to prevail upon their government to stop the futile and sadistic terror bombing of North Vietnam, for which there was no sanction in international law. A wife asked: “What should I tell my son, age nine, when he asks where is my father and when is he coming home?” An apparatchik responded: “Tell him his father is a murderer of North Vietnamese children and that he is being punished.” The wives emerged too shattered to speak to the press.)

It’s not my intent to take sides here, to claim that one perception (that of American POWs as heroes) or the other (that they are murderers) is the correct one. I’m merely pointing out that the perceptual divide here exists -- and that like many of the political fights that swallow our ability to make progress, the divide is deep and unbridgeable (by spans visible or invisible).

But there is propaganda here, and propaganda is often comprised of lies of the simplest construction. To use Khrushchev’s phrasing, they are the imaginary bridges that politicians build over the imaginary rivers of their supporters.

As one immediate example -- and an example of the kind of revelations that come from reading Perlstein’s well-researched text -- is the issue of how many American prisoners of war were held after the war by the North Vietnamese.

Operation Homecoming had returned 587 American prisoners of war -- but for years Nixon had referred to 1,600 Americans being held in North Vietnam. That number folded in more than one thousand personnel, mostly pilots, who crashed in the dense Vietnamese brush and in previous wars would have been classed as “Killed in Action/Body Not Recovered” -- but had been reclassified as “MIA” so the president could make the North Vietnamese look bad for his Paris negotiations. Now the families of those other 1,013 were making insistent noises: what was the government going to do about them?

It was a lie, like many on the political right, that would take on a life of its own.

[U.S. Representative] Clem Zablocki, meanwhile, opened hearings on the Vietnam “Missing in Action” issue. The point was to debunk a spreading fantasy. It failed. That 1,300 men were still counted as MIA was just an artifact of misleading statistics, he said: from the testimony both of the returnees and of the North Vietnamese, we know “there are no missing in action or prisoners of war in Southeast Asia at this time that they believe are alive.” Which only meant, to many POW-MIA families whom the White House had politically organized for cynical reasons in the first place, that Congress was part of the cover-up. “Why are you willing to believe the enemy on this subject when they do not tell the truth on any other subject?” the Corpus Christi, Texas, chapter of the National League of Families soon raged in a letter to the Pentagon. “The fact is, you have no proof our men are dead.”

Like the lie of welfare cheats described in Before the Storm, and like the lie of forced busing described in Nixonland, this seems to be another one of those political lies that spawned a movement -- years, if not decades, of angst, agitation, and activity focused on bringing home men who would have otherwise been assumed dead. All but for the carefully placed words of a conservative icon with a particular axe to grind.

Political Lies

And if I can take an aside inside of an aside, I found here in Perlstein’s text what might be the first appearance of what I consider the biggest political lie of them all. In a bitter re-election fight while in the California governor’s mansion, Reagan was caught talking out of both sides of his mouth regarding an economic stimulus plan.

It was true that his statistics did not add up. In fact they contradicted each other -- a circumstance he dispatched with the casual blitheness that drove his opponents insane. They claimed his plan would create deficits. He responded it would produce $41.5 billion in new revenue over the next decade and a half. But at that, he also stated that the plan’s intention was to give the state less money to spend.

Did you catch it? The great lie? It’s this: Tax cuts create more tax revenue to the government because of the stimulus effect they have on the economy. Reagan would play that phony card again and again during his political career, and because he did, now there are legions who believe it as gospel.

Want another? How about this classic chestnut?

“The proposition had the surface appeal of the politicians’ favorite, but false homily,” the [Milwaukee] Journal patiently explained, “that says government should ‘live within its income’ like everyone else.”

I mean, my household has a checkbook, right? I can’t very well spend money unless there’s money in my checking account. Right?

Wrong.

“Government in fact is not like everyone else, but uniquely different. It alone can, and must be able to, determine the level of its own income, through the taxing power. To equate its financial situation with that of a private household is utter illogic. To say the resources of a sovereign government shall be chained forever after to whatever the tax laws happen to yield at a given moment in the past is dangerous nonsense.” A government, they said, was a vehicle for sorting out human priorities. “Reagan’s demagogic ploy would have gone at them all backward, by starting with an arbitrary, pre-fixed revenue ceiling regardless of what had to be done and who would get hurt. And it’s always the poor who get stuck worst under that kind of tax philosophy.”

Exactly.

And in a broad sense, it is important to note that, while these lies were first being told, there were many who saw the truth of what was happening. Let’s go back, for a moment, to the Republican veneration of the POWs and those “MIA.”

That same day, the Yale psychology professor Robert J. Lifton, who a decade and a half earlier had helped explain how Communist captors had “brainwashed” American POWs during the Korea War, argued in the New York Times that it was the American people who now were being brainwashed -- in the very act of sanctifying men whose job was “saturation bombing of civilian areas with minimal military targets,” but who were now held up as vessels of “pure virtue,” propaganda tools for the “official mythology of peace with honor,” in order to prevent the possibility of “extracting from this war its one potential benefit: political and ethical illumination arising from hard appraisals of what we did and why we did it.”

And there it is again -- that desire to make the conflict mean something, to finally pass through it and into something more noble and life-affirming. To avoid the simpler retreat into the illusionary grandeur of what once was.

Ronald Wilson Reagan

Into this breach steps Ronald Wilson Reagan. A man Perlstein aptly describes as…

...an athlete of the imagination, a master at turning complexity and confusion and doubt into simplicity and stout-hearted certainty. Transforming his life, first in his own and then in others’ eyes, into a model of frictionless ease -- and fashioning the world outside him into a stage on which to display it -- was how he managed to fly.

It is Reagan’s drive towards simplicity and stout-hearted certainty, not just in rhetorical framing, but in how he interpreted reality, that has had such dangerous consequences for our republic. Living today, almost forty years after Reagan’s first election as president, we still see these consequences on display, enshrined in the Republican party and the minds of those who support it. Not everyone sees the danger today, but then, in the 1970s, even then there were those who were able to see it for what it was.

During the beginnings of the Watergate scandal, for example, Reagan had a hard time understanding what it was that the burglars had done wrong.

The marquee editorialists granted Nixon the benefit of the doubt. … [J]ust about every commentator and official of any significance united in a new consensus: Watergate was something historically awful -- and the men responsible, whoever they turned out to be, were louts.

Everyone, that is, except Governor Ronald Wilson Reagan of California.

He offered his thoughts after greeting a group of high school visitors in his Sacramento reception room. … It all was part of the usual “atmosphere of campaigning,” where pranks were just part of the game. “They did something that was stupid and foolish and was criminal” -- then corrected himself: “It was illegal. Illegal is a better word than criminal because I think criminal has a different connotation.” He said, “The tragedy of this is that men who are not criminals at heart” had to suffer. It saddened him “that now there is going to have to be punishment.”

Sorry, can’t resist my own editorial comment here. “Men who are not criminals at heart.” As if such a thing could be honestly said about political hacks of whatever stripe. But, fortunately, for this Reagan was roundly ridiculed in the press.

NBC’s John Chancellor smirked, “Reagan, who talks a lot about ‘law and order,’ described the burglars as ‘well-meaning individuals committed to the reelection of the president.’” Tom Wicker [of The New York Times] used Reagan, “that exponent of law and order,” as Exhibit A in a sermon about what happens in a world run according to the Gospel of Richard Nixon, where good guys were always good no matter what they actually did, bad guys were always and everywhere ontologically evil, and no one will be safe until “‘we’ crack down on ‘them,’ occasionally adopting their tactics.”

Ronald Reagan divided the world into good guys and bad guys. Richard Nixon and his team were good guys. So they could not have done evil at all.

But like many of his acolytes today, being scolded in the press didn’t seem to affect Reagan’s affection for simplicity and stout-hearted certainty. Indeed, any lie told in service of the “good guys” was just one more “truth” that Reagan would be responsible for creating.

Before becoming a politician, of course, Reagan was an actor, famous mostly for the bit parts he played under several studio contracts. His break really came not from the movies (Bedtime for Bonzo be damned), but when he began lending his familiar face to political causes, first on behalf of democratic candidates.

“This is Ronald Reagan speaking to you from Hollywood. You know me as a motion picture actor. But tonight I’m just a citizen, pretty concerned about the election next month, and more than a little impatient about those promises the Republicans made before they got control of Congress a couple of years ago.”

He went on to flog the Standard Oil Company for reporting a “net profit of $210 million, after taxes, for the first half of ‘48 -- an increase of seventy percent in one year”: proof, he said, that Republicans were lying in their central election claim: the claim that the postwar epidemic of inflation had been caused by higher wages -- not “bigger and bigger profits.”

This was boilerplate liberalism, circa 1948. What was extraordinary was the way he found to illustrate the argument. Noting “an Associated Press dispatch I read the other day,” he introduced America to one Smith L. Carpenter, who “retired some years ago thinking he had enough money saved so that he could live out his last years without having to worry. But he didn’t figure on this Republican inflation which ate up all his savings. So he’s gone back to work.” He paused for ironic effect: “The reason this is news is Mr. Carpenter is 91 years old.”

Here was that soon-to-become trademark skill: illustrating abstract questions of public policy with true heart-tugging stories from genuine folks. Or rather, apparently true. Generations later, when a wondrous technology would let the complete contents of dozens of newspapers be searched in less than a second, the fact could be told. And that fact is that none of these dozens of newspapers ran any Associated Press dispatch about someone named “Smith L. Carpenter,” nor anyone else who went to work when he was ninety-one years old because inflation ate up his savings.

What troubles me most about this strategy, I think, is not so much that it is a lie. Lies are pretty common in politics. This lie, however, is a lie in service of an ideology -- one that, evidently, can’t be effectively communicated without lies. Framing stories are one things. But making up facts like this has created a slippery slope that our politics today is still trying to fight its way back up.

But that’s only the first step -- making up facts that support your ideological position. The next step, and the more insidious one, also mastered by Ronald Reagan, is framing your made-up facts not in the complex reality that surrounds us, but on an overly-simplified moral foundation.

He framed economy measures, where he achieved them, not just as cost savings, but as shimmering moral advances -- for instance his success paring the budget of the state’s mental health system. It was, his budget aides suggested, one area where a 10 percent reduction could easily be realized -- given that the number of mental patients was already plummeting due to new medical advances like tranquilizing drugs. First in 1967, and then again in 1972, thousands of positions were eliminated from the state’s Department of Mental Hygiene. He called that in a 1972 speech a “new approach to the treatment of the mentally ill that has reduced the number of patients sentenced to a hopeless life in our asylums from 16,500 to 7,000”; and who could object to that? Harried, baffled psychiatrists, it turned out, one of whom later recollected how “Reagan with one bold, brilliant stroke abolished mental illness in California,” and hospital staffs were required to turn away the most broken people imaginable: “Back to violent alcoholic families. Back to angry spouses … to rag-filled grocery carts … to sleeping in moldering cars. Back to the community of cocaine-crazed friends and pitiless dealers awaiting them outside the hospital gates.” The apparent earlier, salutary decline in mental patients requiring hospitalization, it turned out, had been a mirage -- because the ones who were left were the ones unresponsive to the new procedures, and had always required by far the most care. The hospitals themselves had always been understaffed in the first place. The reductions were a plain and simple nightmare. And yet Reagan proved able to blithely deny a problem existed. When a visiting expert from Sweden called a ward in Sonoma County the worst he had seen in several countries, the governor accused the staff there of having “rigged” the poor conditions to sabotage his planned cutbacks. “We lead the nation in the quality of our mental patient care,” he simply said, “and we will keep that lead.”

None of it is true -- but because the narrative it supports is a moral one, then all of it must be true, and any evidence to the contrary is part of a subversive plot to undermine our moral advances. See how wonderfully circular that is?

And the glimpses inside the Reagan family life are just as twisted and phony. Throughout Perlstein’s narrative, occasionally one of the Reagan children will speak up, revealing with a transcendent knowing what it must have been like growing up in that house. Here, for example, is something from Patti Davis.

“I had been taught to keep secrets, to keep our image intact for the world,” she wrote in a memoir. “Under our family’s definition of ‘loyalty,’ the public should never see that under a carefully preserved surface was a group of people who knew how to inflict wounds, and then convincingly say those wounds never existed.”

So there are lies of political calculation. But then there are also the lies that make you think that Reagan really did live in a reality that he was unaware was of his own making.

“I have called attention to the fact that when I was a sports announcer, broadcasting major-league baseball, most Americans had forgotten that at the time the opening lines of the official baseball guide read, “Baseball is a game for Caucasian gentlemen,’ and in organized baseball no one but Caucasians were allowed. Well, there were many of us when I was broadcasting, sportswriters, sportscasters, myself included, [who] began editorializing about what a ridiculous thing this was and why it should be changed. And one day it was changed.”

And indeed, he had called attention to that, in 1967, in a televised debate with Robert Kennedy, when he told the same story about baseball. In the interim, if anyone had bothered to point out to him that there was no line in the official baseball guide asserting that “baseball is a game for Caucasian gentlemen,” or had pointed out to him that he stopped broadcasting baseball in 1937 and the sport wasn’t integrated until 1947, the intervention clearly didn’t take. He was still telling the story in the White House nine years later.

Blithe Optimism in the Face of Chaos

It’s important to remember that Perlstein’s book largely details Reagan’s primary fight against Gerald Ford for the 1976 Republican nomination, not Reagan’s eventual election fight against Democrat Jimmy Carter for the 1980 presidential election. This means that many of these lies of political calculation and moral certainty were told to better position Reagan not against the Democrats, but against his fellow Republicans. No matter. After all, they are all just demagogic tools to help acquire and concentrate political power. In that world, everyone that is not the candidate is at least one kind of enemy.

Here’s a quick excerpt from when both Reagan and Ford sparred on the campaign trail in the Lone Star State.

Privation, though, and the president’s insults -- and receptive foot-stomping Texan audiences -- turned out to concentrate Reagan’s mind beautifully. Ford hadn’t even opened his campaign at the Alamo when Reagan claimed he’d seen a transcript of some obscure testimony from the State Department’s negotiator in Panama, Ambassador-at-Large Ellsworth Bunker, to the Panama Canal Subcommittee of the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee, which Reagan said laid out the administration’s intention to “give away” the canal. He would say that the Panama Canal Zone was “sovereign U.S. territory, every bit the same as Alaska and all the states that were carved from the Louisiana Purchase.”

He would say it, and the Texas foot-stomping would commence; it was something to behold.

Even though it was not true.

The 1904 treaty granted the United States not sovereignty but “right, power, and authority” there “as if it were the sovereign of the territory,” a crucial distinction: if a baby was born to a foreigner in Alaska or Louisiana, that child would be an American citizen, certainly not the case for Panamanians who gave birth in the Zone.

Tell that, though, to a foot-stomping Texan. You might get stomped upon yourself.

It’s clear from Perlstein’s pacing that he believes all this lying -- against political ally and opponent alike -- is leading to something critical. It isn’t the 1976 presidential election, because in The Invisible Bridge, that rather anticlimactically ends after Reagan’s eventual loss to Ford and Ford’s eventual loss to Carter. Reagan’s brand of facetious optimism would not rule the day in 1976 -- but, of course, if would four years later in 1980. Everyone in the media and in the political establishment would see its transparently false foundation, both in 1976 and in 1980, but the America that Reagan was talking to would change almost irrevocably in those four years. As Perlstein summarizes near the end of his work, in 1976…

America had not yet become Reagan’s America. Not yet. Reagan’s America would embrace an almost official cult of optimism -- the belief that America could do no wrong. Or, to put it another way, that if America did it, it was by definition not wrong. That would come later. But signs were already pointing in that direction.

Certainly they had been there in the Bicentennial celebration, when Americans surprised themselves in their simple patriotic joy -- as if Watergate, as if Vietnam, had never even happened; as if the nation’s economy had never in fact been held hostage by Arab oil sheikhs; as if the Church and Pike committees had never revealed the nation’s security agencies as cold-blooded outlaws.

And here is what [journalists] Evans and Novak [who thought Reagan and the Republicans should distance themselves from Watergate and Nixon] had not understood: that Reagan’s refusal to wax morose about Watergate was not an impediment to his political appeal. It was central to his political appeal.

At the beginning of 1973, the editor of Intellectual Digest explained on the Today show what was different about the time when the POWs went off to war and the time when they returned: “For the first time Americans have had at least a partial loss in the fundamental belief in ourselves. We’ve always believed we were the new men, the new people, the new society. The ‘last best hope on earth,’ in Lincoln’s terms. For the first time, we’ve really begun to doubt it.”

We’ve come full circle. Perlstein’s angry friend -- who felt that Reagan and all who followed him avoided a needed catharsis of the American experience -- is grinding her axe in much the same way all of Reagan’s political enemies have, be they Democrats or Republicans.

And here was an answer to the Ford aide who was so frustrated that this campaign even had to be fought, even more frustrated that it had become so close. Every time a major distinction emerged between the two candidates, the nub was what kind of nation America was. The Panama Canal issue, for example. Ford’s argument was, fundamentally, that the world’s rules must apply to America as well, that the way America had all but annexed the sovereignty of another nation was an embarrassing and dangerous relic of another time. Reagan’s riposte: the world’s rules did not apply to America at all -- for into the hands of America God has placed the destiny of an afflicted mankind.

These, then, are the seeds of the new conservative movement -- the one that would begin with Reagan and which is still limping along today. And it’s fundamental ground rule?

Don’t doubt. Blithe optimism is the face of what others call chaos had always marked his uniqueness -- at least since, around the time of his tenth birthday, he began mastering the art of turning the chaotic and confusing doubts of his childhood into a simple and stout-hearted certainty. It marked, too, what made others feel so good in his presence -- and what drove still others, those suspicious circles for whom doubt was the soul of civic wisdom, to annoyed bafflement at his success.

Today, we have a word for this phenomenon. In homage to its prophet, we call this kind of confident conservative gospel (and all the lies, to ourselves and to others, on which it is built) Reaganesque.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 42 (DRAFT)

I didn’t know what to do after Gerald’s drubbing down. I mean, I knew what to do next—go find Mary and tell her what happened. That was so obvious that I wasted no time in excusing myself and leaving the three of them behind in the staff office. But in the bigger picture I really didn’t know what to do.

I did know that Gerald shouldn’t have spoken to me the way that he had—that no one should ever speak to their boss that way, especially in front of other staffers. But everyone was so used to Gerald breaking the rules, and what he had said made so much sense, that I hadn’t the gumption or presence of mind to do anything about it. How could I have legitimately called him out? All he did, in his own colorful way, was remind me of my responsibilities—of the things I should have taken care of without being told. If I had tried to reprimand him, to slap him down for speaking out of turn, I’d have looked like an even bigger fool than I already felt. Especially, I knew, in Bethany and Angie’s eyes.

The plain and simple fact was that I was in over my head. As I rode up the elevator to Eleanor’s suite, after running like a scared fool down the street to her hotel, that reality firmly hit home for the first time. I wasn’t cut out for this. I never asked for any of these supervisory responsibilities. They were simply thrust upon me after demonstrating my competence in managerial positions and my willingness to stay with the company. I hadn’t received any training. There was no management school that the company sent promising candidates to. There wasn’t even an orientation session for new supervisors. Just learn by doing, that was more or less the philosophy, and the learning part was optional. Just do. Just perform. Just do what we expect you to do without us ever even telling you what it is.

When the elevator doors opened and I stepped out onto the colorful carpeting of the VIP floor, I still didn’t know what I was going to say. Despite everything I had just experienced, I wasn’t even sure what I was doing or why. Tell Mary what happened. That directive was still imprinted on my brain, but why and what for wasn’t at all clear. As I moved down the hallway, my eyes focused on the space ahead of my shoes, the patterns of color seemed to twist and swirl as I passed by, combining with the early morning fog to make me slightly dizzy. Before I knew it, I was standing in front of Eleanor’s door, room 2600, the Commodore Suite, a ridiculous name, perhaps, for a woman more interested in fresh flowers than the nautical theme that dominated the decor, but apropos of Eleanor’s unrelenting style of command and control.

I raised my hand to knock, but then remembered the glowing button that served as a doorbell—a doorbell, yes, the suite was so large it needed a doorbell. No guarantee that someone standing in the waterfall shower in the marble-tiled third bathroom would even hear my meek little tap-tap-tapping on the door. I raised a finger but stopped, catching movement out of the corner of my eye. The suite’s service door was open—not fully, just barely ajar because someone had turned the metal bar that served as a chain lock outward, preventing the door from closing completely. Through the crack I could see someone moving, most likely, based on the clothes, a hotel employee.

Deciding slipping in the service entrance made more sense for the task I had come to perform, I did exactly that, finding myself in a small kitchen area, surrounded by granite countertops and trading dance steps in the small space with a hostess from the banquets department, someone I had briefly met at the Board’s reception the night before, a woman named Matilda who was in charge of all services in Eleanor’s suite.

“Good morning, sir,” she said. “Can I help you with something?”

“No,” I said, looking past her and knowing she was too polite to tell me I had come in the wrong door. “I’m not here for the breakfast. I just need to tell Mary something.”

“Mary?” Matilda said.

Also in the kitchen space stood a chef in a white outfit and a tall hat making crepes to order on a small portable grill. On the opposite side of the serving counter a VIP I didn’t recognize stood, plate in hand, and beyond him, out of the suite’s main parlor about thirty other people stood—most of our Board members and a dozen or so of our organization’s major sponsors—gathered in small groups of three or five, champagne mimosas in most hands.

“Sorry,” I said. “Mrs. Walton,” knowing that was how Matilda had most likely been trained to think of her. “Is she here?”

“Yes, sir. Mrs. Walton was the first guest to arrive.”

I’m sure she was. I spotted her across the room, deep in discussion with Eleanor and Gino Del Monaco, our primary contact with our foremost sponsor. That’s what this VIP breakfast was all about—part thank you for the support offered by our sponsors throughout the year, part venue for negotiating deals for next year.

Matilda handed me an unasked-for mimosa, its bubbly orange color glowing in a gold-rimmed champagne glass. I took it without thinking and stepped out into the suite. The VIP waiting for his crepe gave me a passing glance, but I blew right by him, leaving the smells of fresh ingredients and propane gas behind. Part of me wanted to charge right up to Mary and get it over with, but I knew that wouldn’t fly. Gerald might have convinced me I had to tell Mary what had happened, but no one could convince me it would be wise to tell anyone else at this breakfast reception. I had to first catch Mary’s attention and then get her alone for a few minutes.

I positioned myself in a place I thought Mary could not miss seeing me and then waited for her head to turn the right way. When it did her eyes passed over me with clinical detachment, observing more than seeing, recognizing my presence and, rather than showing surprise, expertly calculating what my uninvited appearance portended and assigning me a prioritized position in the hierarchy of tasks she needed to accomplish at this function. Appropriately categorized, she turned away from me and back towards Gino.

“Good morning.”

It was Paul Webster, the immediate past chair of the Board and the one who had questioned me at the Board meeting yesterday. He had appeared unexpectedly at my elbow and nearly startled me out of my skin. He was wearing the same blue suit he had had on the day before, but now with a bright red tie.

“Hello,” I said to him, keeping my eye on Mary.

“I didn’t think you were invited to this thing.”

Now I turned more fully towards him. His tone had been playful, and his face equally so. He wasn’t so much the enforcer but a co-conspirator. At least he was trying to be.

“I wasn’t,” I said, trying to keep my voice as neutral as possible, and taking my first sip of my mimosa. “I’m just here to tell Mary something.”

“Everything all right?”

My heart skipped a beat, the champagne bubbles seeming to expand painfully in my chest. The last thing I wanted was to tell Paul what was going on. Cursing myself for not being better at small talk, I did everything I could to turn on the charm.

“It’s nothing,” I said casually. “Just a report from our morning staff meeting. How are things here?”

“Scripted,” Paul said bluntly. “Same as they always are.”

“Is that bad?” I asked, knowing that’s just how Mary liked things.

Paul seemed to think about it for a moment or two, slurping an ice cube from his mimosa and rolling it around on his tongue. “No, I guess not,” he said, crunching his molars down on the cube. “Not if we expect to raise the money we need for next year’s programs.”

I largely agreed with him. Getting the corporations who supported our organization to part with their money was one of Mary’s prime functions—and she set-up functions like this at the Annual Conference to best accomplish it. A whole series of seemingly casual but carefully planned interactions would take place at breakfast this morning, and the balance of the day would be taken up with closed door meetings with Mary, Eleanor, and people like Gino. One by one they would meet and determine how much would be offered in the year ahead—how much, what for, and in return for which favors and what recognition. It was all a kind of game, but one with serious consequences. One less commitment, one reduction in the level of support could mean the abandonment of programs and the layoff of the staff that organized them.

“And it looks like Mary is reeling some in right now.”

I smiled politely, desperately wanting to get out of the conversation but unable to come up with a graceful way of doing it. Luckily, I thought, Mary would come to my rescue. In just a few short seconds, her discussion with Gino appeared to come to a cheerful end, she directed Eleanor towards another potential donor, and she made her way across the shag carpet to where Paul and I were standing.

“Good morning,” she said upon arrival, nodding to Paul, but zeroing in on me. “Alan, is something up?”

“Just my morning report,” I said, trying not to be too obvious about cocking my head in Paul’s direction.

“Yes?” she said, trying to play along but clearly not understanding the game.

I looked at Paul.

He got it. “Hey,” he said suddenly. “I think one of our sponsors left a big pile of money under the piano in the other room. Why don’t I go pick it up while the two of you talk business?”

Mary gave him a smile that expressed neither warmth nor humor, and we both watched him go.

“What are you doing here?” Mary asked in a terse whisper as soon as Paul was out of earshot.

I placed my mostly full mimosa on the tray of a passing hostess. “There was another incident with Wes Howard last night.”

I hadn’t rehearsed anything. I hadn’t even thought about how to begin. The words just came out of my mouth.

“What? Where?”

“At some karaoke bar. He was there with a whole bunch of our staff. And…”

My hesitation must have made Mary look suspiciously around the room. My eyes followed hers. No one seemed to be paying any attention to us.

“And?” she said, stepping even closer to me.

“And, Amy Crawford was with him.”

The look that passed over Mary’s face told me that even she had not foreseen such a circumstance. “What is she doing here?”

She. Bitterness towards a vanquished foe, returned unexpectedly to battle.

I told her I didn’t know, that I hadn’t even seen her, that I had recognized her from the maniacal cackle that had risen up from the bowels of the karaoke subbasement.

“What were you doing there?”

It was only then that I told her about the phone call from Caroline, they way Bethany and I had picked her up from the bar, and the things she had and hadn’t said about Wes Howard.

Mary took the information in silence, her head nodding as her calculating accountant’s brain worked on processing it all.

“So,” she said eventually. “Neither you nor Bethany witnessed any of this alleged behavior.”

“Well, no,” I felt forced to confess, “but there must have been a dozen or more other witnesses. Caroline said that most of the junior staff was down there with them.”

“Have you spoken to any of them?”

It was spoken like an accusation. I could practically feel her rhetorical finger poking me in the chest.

“No,” I said meekly. “I thought I should talk to you first.”

Mary nodded, her eyes starting to scan the room again. “Okay,” she said, her attention still out there among the VIPs. “I need to finish a few conversations up here. But we need to talk.” She brought up a wrist and glanced at her Cartier watch. “Where can I meet you at...oh, at nine-thirty?”

I looked at my own Timex watch. Its was six minutes after seven.

“Ummm,” I said, trying to recall the details of the hectic schedule I had on this, the opening day of our Annual Conference. “The staff office?”

“Where is that again?”

I gave her the room location and she nodded. “Okay. We’ll talk then.”

And then she slipped away, her eyes having never fully reconnected with mine. I watched her move purposefully towards a small circle of other people, interject herself into their conversation, and receive a warm welcome and a round of happy handshakes.

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

Stop Selling Vanilla Ice Cream by Steve Van Remortel

I’m pretty sure this book was sent unsolicted to me by the author. That happens sometimes. A business consultant has a new book out, and it gets sent to me in the hopes that I’ll read it and hire the consultant for my association, or more likely, to speak at one of the conferences my association conducts.

This one came with a hand-written note from the author.

Eric,

I am confident Stop Selling Vanilla Ice Cream will bring tangible value to you, your association and its members. I look forward to the opportunity to meet with you.

Those who plan -- profit!

Steve Van Remortel

5/9/13

Well, sorry, Steve. Not only did it take me about six years to get around to reading the book you sent me, but now that I have, I’m pretty sure I won’t be asking you to speak at any of my association’s conferences.

That said, Steve’s hook is still a good one. He says it’s all about radically differentiating your company’s product or service from the “vanilla ice cream” served by your competitors. “Stop Selling Vanilla Ice Cream,” then, is a call-to-arms, to get you as the business owner to create and deliver a competence that creates a clear differentiation for your organization. And the only way to do that, he says, is to optimize the talent in your organization.

That’s the concept. Define your business in a way that clearly differentiates it from its competition, and then develop the people in your business so that they can most effectively deliver on that differentiation. And, like most business books I’ve read, that comes in the first ten pages.

The remaining 280 pages are then focused on a detailed process -- the Stop Selling Vanilla Ice Cream Process (which he never, ever abbreviates or refers to as anything else but the Stop Selling Vanilla Ice Cream process) -- which, frankly, includes just about every conceivable strategy-setting and/or management technique that we’ve all read a hundred times before.

He treats it very much like his system -- but in fact, it is everyone else’s system, cobbled together into one mega-system. Maybe that has some utility, but, frankly, I sometimes got lost in all the steps and exercises.

Here’s something that jumped out at me.

Finalize the values and beliefs statements of the organization.

This is from fairly early on (page 122 of 283), and appears on one of Steve’s chapter-ending lists of “Action Items to Complete the Process.” He did talk about the importance of values and belief statements in the aforementioned chapter, but only in a kind of passing way. When I saw this on the list of action items, I immediately asked myself: “Why? Why does Steve want me to do this? Will he have me use my values and belief statement as a filter for decisions that I will need to make later in the Stop Selling Vanilla Ice Cream process?”

I decided to keep my antennae up, looking for further mentions of values and belief statements. He has them in his system, but what purpose will he have them serve?

As far as I can tell, there is only one more mention, 28 pages later, in the context of one of the sample clients that Steve profiles in his book to better show Stop Selling Vanilla Ice Cream in operation.

Rashelle suggested action plans to “live” the values: Connecting Cultures would post the values and beliefs on the office walls and website and make them part of the orientation process for new employees. I captured those action plans and added them to the sixty or so already on the list, reminding the team of the importance of verbalizing the insights and action plans that pop into their head as we work our way through the process. It is extremely important to document all the action plans as we proceed through the process: at the end of the process we will use them to build the department plans.

“It’s important that these values and beliefs are presented for everyone to see,” I said. “One of the action plans I would suggest is determining how to communicate and use these values. This is an awesome start, and it provides us the opportunity to provide more role clarity for our team in executing the plan.” The team agreed with the values and beliefs statements Rashelle presented and accepted responsibility to see them carried out.

Is that it? Is that all you have to say about values, Steve? Have them, post them on your website, and use them in the orientation process for new employees? Oh, and write down on your action plan “determine how to communicate and use these values.”

That, truly, is an awesome start. Now, can we get back to Not Selling Vanilla Ice Cream?

+ + +

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 41 (DRAFT)

There was a staff meeting scheduled for early the next morning. Staff meetings had been planned for five-thirty every morning during the Annual Conference. It had been Mary’s idea.

“It’s an opportunity, Alan,” she had said to me, standing behind her gargantuan desk deep within her office, just hours before she was leaving for the airport and her flight to Miami. “Don’t pass it up.”

“An opportunity?” I said, suspicious at Mary’s very use of the word. Based on previous experience, it had the portends of ulterior motives. “An opportunity for what?”

“An opportunity to bring people together,” she said, exactly as if she thought such a thing was a good idea. “To help communicate instructions and information, and to remind everyone they’re all on the same team and need to support each other.”

Now I knew she was up to something. “Mary,” I said evenly. “You’ve been to the Annual Conference before. You know it pulls everybody in a thousand different directions. Exactly when are you supposed to bring everyone together?”

Mary was rummaging through her handbag, a sleek, aerodynamic beast that doubled as her briefcase. “First thing in the morning,” she said cavalierly, as if it didn't matter to her in the least, obviously more occupied with the items going in and coming out of her bag. Slinging it over her shoulder she looked me dead in the eye and said with all seriousness, “Start the day out right.”

Indeed. Needless to say, I was not surprised when Mary failed to show up for any of these daily meetings. Staff morale and team building was my responsibility, after all, communicated throughout the company not so much by Mary’s words but by her actions—like not showing up for staff meetings. Such trifles were beneath her; her valuable time much better spent on important things like molly-coddling Board members and their voracious egos. But although she exempted herself from these functions, dreadful consequences awaited anyone with equal temerity. It was a nice formula. It pretty much prevented me from ever succeeding.

I tried to keep the staff meeting the morning after Club NOW on as much of an even keel as possible. It was five-thirty in the morning and everyone staggered in as if in a fog, reflexively shielding their eyes from the harsh artificial sun of the fluorescent lights, and immediately grabbing a danish from the small continental breakfast or pouring themselves a cup of coffee from the ten-gallon thermos provided by the hotel catering department. As I waited for everyone to caffeine up my thoughts were helplessly occupied by the cruel mathematics of the situation. Two dozen danish at thirty-two dollars a dozen and ten gallons of coffee at seventy-five dollars a gallon. All of it with eight percent tax and delivered with a twenty-three percent service charge.

I kept it brief. There were about twenty of us, standing in a rough circle in the tiny, out-of-the-way meeting room we used as a staff office. I thanked them. I reminded them of the twenty-five breakfast sessions that would be starting in an hour, the big plenary session that would happen after that, and then the grand opening of the exhibit hall. I asked for and received updates from the people running the registration desk and overseeing our interactions with our exhibit decorator and AV provider. I thanked them again. And I told them to stay in contact over the walkie-talkies we had rented, to call for help when they needed it, and to respond when others called for help. Then I clapped my hands, and they broke away like a losing football team leaving the huddle. They left behind their empty coffee cups and plates of half-eaten pastries, piling them up on a catering tray as they filed out the door. It was over. In ten seconds there was no one left but Bethany and Gerald and Angie and me.

“What was that all about?” Gerald asked.

“What?” I said, not understanding his meaning.

“That,” Gerald said with emphasis. “That little pep talk you just gave at the end. Is that supposed to make people forget about what happened last night?”

I traded a glance with Bethany, and her eyes looked worried, like Gerald was likely to reveal some deep family secret. I looked at Angie and met her bullet stare with as much feigned ignorance as I could.

I decided not to deny that anything had happened. “How do you know about what happened last night?”

“Everyone knows about it,” Gerald said testily. “My god, Alan. Caroline’s not here this morning. Did you think her absence would go unnoticed? The rumor mill is in full force.”

“And what is it saying?”

“That he raped her.”

It was Angie, her gruff voice slicing through the bluster Gerald had been pumping into the air. Bethany gasped, her hand coming up to cover her mouth, and then an oppressive silence descended, deep enough to hear the conditioned air rolling through the ductwork above the ceiling.

“He didn’t rape her,” I said with as much confidence as I could muster. I knew he hadn’t, but in the face of Angie’s flat declaration, I couldn’t help but doubt even myself. Given who Wes was, and his checkered history with attractive young staff members, it was surprising how believable that rumor seemed.

“Then what did he do?” Gerald said immediately. “The staff has the right to know, especially the young women. He’s obviously done something inappropriate; maybe illegal. What’s being done to protect the others, to prevent him from doing it again?”

Maybe it was the look that came unconsciously to my face, the look that revealed the pale fluttering I suddenly felt in my belly.

“Oh, Alan,” Gerald said with aggrieved disappointment. “You haven’t done anything, have you? What happened? Did you think you could lock Caroline away in her hotel room for the rest of the conference and everything would just be fine?”

I found it really difficult to respond to that accusation. I didn’t want to admit he was right, even though I knew I would be hard pressed to prove anything else had been on my mind. I didn’t have a plan, and hadn’t realized I needed one until Gerald started pressing me to produce one.

“I’ve got a meeting to run here, Gerald.”

I thought I was being strong, but if I’d had some time to think about it, there probably wasn’t anything I could have said that would have been worse than that.

“Oh, Jesus, Alan. Fuck the goddamn meeting. Did anyone check on Caroline this morning? Are you sure she’s even still in that hotel room? Or that she isn’t lying in the bathtub with her wrists slit?”

“I did,” Bethany said quickly, rushing more to her own defense than to mine. “I stopped by before the staff meeting. I heard some water running so I called her on her cell phone. She said she was fine, but wasn’t up to facing people today.”

“Did you expect her to?”

“I wasn’t sure,” Bethany said. “Maybe.”

“Do you know what he did to her?”

“He didn’t rape her. To hear Caroline tell it, he just got a little fresh.”

Fresh. Another June Cleaver word. I smiled in spite of the circumstances.

“Do you think this is funny, Alan?”

“No, Gerald,” I said, turning overly serious. “I don’t think this is funny at all.”

“Does Mary know about this?”

Again, it was Angie, stabbing her words into the air like an assassin. If her use of the word ‘rape’ had charged the situation, her reference to ‘Mary’ had set it on fire.

I blanched. There was no other word for it.

“Oh, dear god, Alan. She doesn’t know? You didn’t think to tell her? She owns the fucking company—don’t you think she’d like a heads-up when one of her people is sexually harrassed?”

To be honest, it had never occurred to me, but I couldn’t very well admit that now. Hearing the shock and anger in Gerald’s voice, it was obvious that such a thing should have occurred to me, that as the most senior representative of the company present, such a thing should have been second nature to me, should have been as obvious as the need to get Caroline out of there.

“It was late,” I said lamely. “Too late to call her. I was planning to brief her this morning, as soon as I saw her.” And then, thinking I was clever, attempting to head the next question off at the pass, “This isn’t the kind of thing one wants to leave on someone’s voicemail.”

“Call her, Alan.” Gerald’s voice was stern, frustrated, I sensed, at having to school a supervisor less experienced than he. “She’s going to want to hear about this as soon as possible.”

“She’s at that VIP breakfast this morning,” I said, my tone unconsciously communicating that I knew she ordinarily wouldn’t want to be disturbed at such a function.

“Then go see her. And, whatever you do, don’t just bring her the problem. Bring her the solution.”

“What?”

“Oh, Christ, Alan, how old are you? A problem like this? If you bring it to her without a solution, she’s just going to blame you for it. Don’t you even know that? You have to come up with the solution. You have to tell her how you’re going to fix it before you even tell her what’s wrong. How’d you get as far as you have if you don’t even know that?”

I didn’t like his demeaning tone, even less so with Bethany and Angie standing there as silent witnesses, but he was right. If he hadn’t been so right I probably wouldn’t have allowed him to speak to me that way. But what he said was obviously right, so right that I couldn’t legitimately call him out for simply calling my attention to it. I’d look the even bigger fool than I already felt.

“You got real responsibilities here, Alan. And you’d better start seeing to them.”

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

Memento Mori by Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark is apt to make her readers uncomfortable.

So begins the Editor’s Preface in the torn and battered paperback copy of Memento Mori that I picked up in a used book store in some forgotten city. Was it Wilmington, Delaware? It might have been.

They get the feeling that they, as well as her characters, are being sharply and relentlessly scrutinized, and this creates in them a mixed sense of involvement and unease. Indeed, her readers, like some of her reviewers, are never quite sure what Miss Spark is up to. Her novels and short stories are brief and unsentimental. The dialogue is overheard with something that is not quite malice, yet as her people speak, they give themselves away; they do this not in a phrase or even a chapter; it is a cumulative process. As one reviewer has remarked, it is not so much what she says that is fascinating; it is waiting for what she will say next. And all the time Miss Spark herself seems to stand by, cool, disinterested, and not in the least inclined to help either the character or the reader.

I’d have to admit that I had an opposite reaction to the text -- maybe because I had the benefit of reading the Editor’s Preface and being tipped off to her intentions. I knew exactly what Miss Spark was up to, and I did not find it in any way interesting.

The theme of Memento Mori (the Latin words mean “remember that thou must die”) is old age -- what British critic V. S. Pritchett calls, in his new introduction to this special edition, “the great suppressed and censored subject of contemporary society.” One reason writers avoid the subject of old age is that it makes them and their readers uncomfortable.

This, despite the fact that I began reading this book shortly after my father died -- indeed, started reading it on the airplane down to my now-widowed mother’s house in suburban Phoenix, and consumed a good chunk of it late at night as I lay in her guest bedroom reflecting back on a day of experiencing bittersweet memories and of making sterile funeral arrangements.

The cast of characters in the book are almost entirely elderly, and one by one they each start receiving a series of annoying prank phone calls, in which the caller cryptically and only says to them, “Remember you must die.”

Those telephone calls may create a common panic but they do nothing to purify or change the hearts and minds of the hearers. They go their set, seemingly predestined ways with the malice or jealousy or acquisitiveness -- or even goodness -- that not even the prospect of death can do much to alter.

And this, evidently, is what Miss Spark is “doing” in the novel.

Her oldsters may not have much nobility but they are indisputably human. And if the book does nothing else, it demonstrates how hard it is to approach tranquility at the end of a long life marked by the deceits, subterfuges and willful departures from ordinary decency that plague all men at all times.

That’s intriguing, and it should have struck me as doubly so at that particular moment in my own life -- as the universal that it describes would be as true about my own father as it must be about me and everyone else on the planet. But I think it’s worth noting that here I have quoted only what the editor has said about Miss Spark’s words, and none of Miss Spark’s words themselves. In many ways, if I were to try to summarize my reaction to the book, it would somehow hinge on this reality. What people say about the book is far more interesting than the book itself.

+ + +

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 40 (DRAFT)

Going back inside Club NOW was like entering another world. Outside it was clear and fresh, the night shining bright with excitement, the hopeful sea air mixing seamlessly with the best expectations of the city. Inside it was dark and stale, the sense if not the sight of grime coating everything, hard people and soft furnishings alike.

I steeled myself and tried to enter this world with a clear sense of purpose—but I still didn’t know what I was facing or what I would be called on to do. Were there people to save? A dragon to slay? And what weapons did I have at my command? My wits? My fists? As my overactive mind sorted through the variety of possible scenarios I saw myself beating up on Wes, slamming my fist into his face and breaking his jaw, and kicking him in the back as he lay curled up on the floor, and I couldn’t decide if that was ridiculous or inevitable.

One of the bartenders caught my eye. Like the bouncer he was heavily muscled and wore a tight polo shirt. He looked at me with an inquisitive glance, his eyebrow lifting with three shaven stripes along its length, signaling that he was ready to answer a question or take a drink order, whichever I preferred.

“Where’s the karaoke bar?” I asked, loud enough to be heard over the dance music, and feeling like a gunslinger in one of those spaghetti westerns.

“Downstairs,” he said, his words coming to me more through the movement of his lips and the tilt of his head, the pulsating music drowning out his actual vocalizations. It added to the surrealism, like maybe Sergio Leone had hired an Italian extra to play the Cuban bartender in this scene. I turned in the direction he indicated, and I saw a wide flight of stairs heading down. It was flanked by two pillared banisters, each topped with a carved eagle, their hooked talons gripping the heavy oak, their wings extending wide, and their beaks and grim stares greeting anyone foolish enough to rise up out of the depths. A wooden sign, faded and in need of repainting, was hung crookedly on the lip of the upper floor directly over the stairs. It read, “Karaoke - 8 PM to close daily.”

About halfway down the stairs the bellowing Karaoke music from below met the pulsating dance music from above and again I felt suspended as if between two worlds. There was a landing up ahead, and a sharp turn to the left, and after that God only knew. The voices I heard were almost entirely female, and their raucousness conjured up in the mind a prurient image—a chorus line of deeply intoxicated women, arms wrapped around each other in bacchanalian excess, incoherently shouting the words to a pop anthem, and Wes Howard in the center of them all, prancing with them like a satyr, squeezing their flesh and rubbing his crotch against them whenever the opportunity presented itself.

I steeled myself against the distasteful possibility, looking as forward to confronting Wes and his coven as I did to removing dead mice from the traps I put out in the garage. As my foot touched the landing, however, I stopped—frozen in place by the braying and unmistakable laugh of Amy Crawford, howling out over the din like the shriek of a banshee.

Amy Crawford? My mind raced to keep up with the beating of my heart. Amy Crawford? Didn’t Don fire her? What the hell is she doing here in Miami Beach?

It didn’t take long for me to realize the answer to my own question. Just one heart-stopping plunge into a pit of understanding too deep ever to think of climbing out of again.

Jesus...Fucking...Christ. She actually is sleeping with Wes Howard.

I felt a slap on my shoulder and someone hustled past me on the stairs. “Hey, Alan,” a man’s voice said from somewhere outside my consciousness. “You coming down to join us? The ladies are really getting wild tonight.”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He was around the corner and down into the Karaoke den before I even knew who he was, and it wouldn’t be until much later that I would connect enough dots to realize it was Jeff Hatchler, treating me like the fraternity brother all men in that situation were, regardless of their position above or below you.

But I didn’t move for many more seconds, dots of far greater import connecting themselves in my head like a computer virus running amok in my synapses. She’s sleeping with Wes Howard. That’s why she’s here in Miami Beach. She’s probably staying with him at his hotel, going out drinking and getting it on every night. He’s middle aged, rich, and married, but his wife’s not here, and she’s single, aggressive, and hot as hell. What’s to stop them?

Certainly not me. It was less like I decided that and more like it had been decided for me. This was out of my league. I was a supervisor—with Susan and Michael gone, supervisor to probably half the women down there—but the worst I’d ever dealt with was people not showing up on time and taking things that didn’t belong to them from the office refrigerator. This was something entirely different. This was automatic termination. This was illegal. This was downright dangerous.

Not thinking that I would come to regret it, and not realizing just how scared I was, I turned around, hopped up the steps two at a time, and got my ass out of there.

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/