Chapter 22: Ninety-day ultimatum
Ninety days can last a long time. In World War Two the military crafted officers and gentlemen from callow civilians in ninety days. Ninety days is how long the Liquor Board chairman gave me to voluntarily leave the agency, or be summarily fired.
His latest outrage: he saw me go over my board-meeting notes with a reporter before I dictated to word processing. As if deliberations were some dark secret and a reporter knowing decisions a couple days before formal publication was treason.
That the reporter was on deadline meant nothing to him — other than I cared more about media deadlines than his desire for secrecy. He removed me from all outside committees. Refusing a personal request from the Seattle mayor, for instance, to keep me on that city’s drunk-driving task force. He transferred my staff to fiscal, and designated someone else to take board minutes. Directed division heads to personally handle media calls, eliminating — he believed — need for an information officer.
Personnel told him civil service didn’t work like that. Civil servants in charge of regulatory divisions insisted on consulting me about what to tell reporters. When he literally confined me to my office, it caused traffic jams in the hall. Each chief refused to discuss media problems in front of his peers. The record was three lined up, one in with me.
Utterly frustrated by civil-service, his grand stratagem to chase me having failed, he wrote a horrible performance review. Gave me ninety days to leave or be fired using civil-service protocols. Said he wasn’t afraid of me, even if I was the most powerful man in the agency.
His assertion was absurd — civil-service was powerful, not me. At the end of ninety days he might or might not prevail. But I had been fired more than once out in that corporate world of which he was so fond. The bald threat scared me badly.
The governor’s traffic-safety director drew more water in Olympia than the Seattle mayor, and flatly refused the chairman’s mandate I resign from his drunk-driving committee. Rubbed it in by saying my services were required to help host a national drunk-driving conference. The governor sided with his director since he wasn’t enamored of the chairman just then.
The chairman had disregarded the governor’s orders not to take a European junket fully funded by liquor peddlers. Since board members were immune by statue to gubernatorial discipline, the governor had his press secretary tip off the media.
In one of those ironies of life, I wound up advising the chairman how to face the press upon return from his sentimental journey to World War Two battlefields. My advice, since he was rich, was to write a reimbursement check to the peddlers and publicly apologize for acting like he still was a corporate executive by taking the bribe. That would stem the damage.
The key reporter on the story demanded to see his check. The chairman said he’d meet in our Seattle warehouse to show it — but told the reporter when he got there he was too late, he’d already mailed it. The reporter accepted a check stub as proof. I was embarrassed for my old profession’s credulity, but let it slide.
In telling me I was free to attend the drunk-driving conference, the asshole just had to gloat. Said whether the reporter saw the check or not, there was no way he would ever find the payments liquor companies made his bank to reimburse his reimbursement. He got his free junket and escaped public shaming. And my advice helped him do it.
Nothing to do but go on to the conference. Midway through my ninety-day ultimatum I was in a Seattle bar drinking with the traffic-safety director’s staff. Our drinking was guilt-free since we weren’t driving anywhere. The first day’s keynote speaker was Candy Lightner, the original Mother Against Drunk Driving. At bar-closing time the deputy director told me the second day’s keynote speaker couldn’t make it due to a travel snafu.
There was an hour to fill, he said — and you’re the only person I know who can talk for an hour on short notice. I owed these guys for backing down the asshole chairman. I said okay.
Seven hours later, without notes, I was before a huge audience — an overflowing auditorium — my suit soaked with liquor sweat. I told stories about moving my agency into the middle of the fight against drunk driving. The fetal-alcohol outreach. Over-service training. Thinking like a science-fiction writer — or Big Brother — though I didn’t say either thing, I had facilitated the committee’s funding a program that computer-linked police breathalyzers statewide to liquor-enforcement headquarters: blood-alcohol readings of drunk drivers, together with names of the bars that cops identified as putting them on the road.
Agents who covered the licensed premises cops identified were instructed to offer employees over-service training — and caution licensees they were on our radar. Few turned down the proffered training. Not only to avoid agency displeasure, but because it offered some inoculation against lawsuits by victims, a new trend in drunk-driving crashes. I recommended other states seek similar help from their own liquor authorities.
Got a nice round of applause. At the ensuing coffee break, two highway-patrol majors I knew from committee work said I did the state proud. One, their legislative lobbyist, said it was the best speech he ever heard. Being me, I discounted his praise as hyperbole. At least I hadn’t embarrassed myself.
One of the female conference staffers said she was sorry I couldn’t stay for the whole thing and kissed me right on the lips. My startled response was automatic — I gave her my tongue. But she closed her lips and inserted a cautioning finger into the kiss: not here.
As I left the conference I thought more about the kiss and its implications than nice words from the traffic cops. I was bound for Hood Canal again, another conference the chairman had not been able to preclude. This one was for the agency’s enforcement officers.
In the animal farm the agency had become under the new Chair-pig, some pigs were more equal than others. The enforcement chief was one of those, and among my strongest allies. The chairman’s corporate background made him leery of people with badges. The chief had suggested transferring me to enforcement since the chairman didn’t like me. The board wouldn’t go for that, but the chief was too well-connected in the police world to annoy. So I got to go to the seminar despite my ninety-day sentence.
As if deliberately courting disaster in my secret life, I interrupted my journey for a night with the blowzy sociopath redhead. She was in one of her mellow sentimental moods, loving and wistful and pledging fealty. She bought me dinner at a fancy cliff-side restaurant with a wide Sound view, among prosperous well-dressed patrons. She was dressed, coiffed and perfumed like those big-city ladies of my childhood.
Relaxed and happy, she mused this was the life she longed for, not crawling around the guts of computer mainframes or making money on shady drug deals. Back at her place the sex was close to lovemaking as we ever got. At least she was “safe,” with a dark-sider’s knowledge of how to avoid STDs. This time she didn’t even snore. Woke me in plenty of time to shower and leave for the seminar. Kissed me goodbye, saying this was what it would be like to be married to her when I finally gave up my unofficial bigamy. Evidence, if I needed any more, she was dangerously delusional.
My sort-of plan all along had been to spend enough time with her to keep her dangerous ire in check. To avoid her retaliation when she came to the realization I was more or less scorning her. And hope her other men, or some new one, would eventually distract her.
As I headed toward Hood Canal, I was fresh out of ideas how to deal with her. It was one of those classic bright fall mornings you get in the Pacific Northwest before the rains set in. But my mood was bleak as impending winter.
Chapter 23 — Sea Change
ARIEL [sings]:Nothing of him…But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange…— c/f Shakespeare, The Tempest
Sea change. Noun. A striking change…often for the better — Dictionary.com
In six years of attending liquor-enforcement conferences, I had experienced many things. Street-cop gunfight survivors lecturing on situational awareness. A psychologist talking about the enormous unspoken stress of wearing a badge.
Once I helped manage an over-service experiment, where one agent drinking was paired with another, sober; the observer’s judgment of the other’s impairment measured against breathalyzer results. Educational and often hilarious. Most memorable was the breath tech’s report a tall buxom liquor agent blew point-12 though her observer thought she was sober. Tossed coins on the table: “Pick them up in descending order” — an old test for impairment. Her reply with perfect diction: “Descending or ascending?”She didn’t fumble the coins either.
In softball games after classes, headquarters-team members outplayed young, fit agents. I once overheard one say hit it to the fat old guy, no way he can catch it. At 240, bulked up from weight-lifting, I resented fat. But Beagle, pitching, grinned; I had been catching fly balls behind my back in practice. I confined myself to simpler Willie Mays basket-catches during the game.
Almost as satisfying was placing third in a practical-pistol match with my 9mm Smith. Beagle–they always invited both of us — took first, a few seconds faster with his own Smith. A guy who raced hydrofoil thunder boats in his spare time edged me, slower than Beagle. Faster than me because I worked from my shoulder rig under a suit coat, not an open competition holster. Beagle took his victory as a matter of course, dismissed thunder-boat guy as lucky because my groups were better, and said we showed the young badges a thing or two.
None of that prepared me for my final enforcement seminar. The chief had pondered negative emotional impact on his agents of enforcing unpopular liquor laws, and concluded they needed positive reinforcement. All we were told was we would see videotapes of Lou Tice, guru of New Age thinking, whatever the hell that was. The only clue offered was Tice helped train Israeli commandos who stormed Entebbe to free hostages from a hijacked airliner. I expected a bulked-up soldier of fortune with a bad attitude. What we got was a rotund former high-school football coach with the passion of a revival preacher leavened by a wry sense of humor.
He explained he became wealthy and powerful by opening his eyes and deciding what he wanted instead of just wishing — it really was that simple. If you can believe it you will see it, not vice versa. He said those Israeli commandos were so charged with positive thinking a marksman would have completed his shot even if clinically dead. Heady stuff.
My dissatisfied life may have left me vulnerable to his secular revivalism. The session tapes reminded me that all my life huge self-doubt colored my thinking. That I feared daring greatly because even success would be “ashes in my mouth” in the matriarch’s indelible phrase. The ninety-day ultimatum had vindicated her warning to never expect much of life. My health was in decline, my emotions in tatters.
The Tice tapes hit me like a bolt of lightning. In a coffee break I said as much to Beagle. His Braininess, as I called him for his pride in his Mensa status, was amused. He reminded me our tribal negotiations earned an invitation for inclusion in Who’s Who in the West — and I treated it as a scam. Mentioned other things for which I received praise, but discounted. He had ascribed it to false modesty. Now, he said, here you stand acting as if Tice offers some big revelation about superior performance.
But he did. I soaked up Tice’s stories about his own awakening like a sponge. About being a so-so coach with a losing record who just knew kids on his teams couldn’t play well. How his standard playbook was run the ball and hope the ball-carrier can at least not fumble. The lopsided losses that seemed inevitable until he had his sea-change in attitude and asked his players for advice.
The thing I recall is the receiver who danced with frustration in the end-zone play after play, game after game, yelling throw it, throw it. Tice reviewed game tapes. Sure enough, it was there to see if he had ever looked. So next game he called a pass play. He said what he saw was a feeble, wobbling arc like a dying bird — that settled safely in the arms of a boy he knew could not catch. Touchdown. By the time other teams realized his was no longer a pushover, their string of victories had them believing they could not lose. They seldom did.
Wonderful stories. Seminar facilitators, from other police agencies, jokingly called it “getting that old-time religion.” They cautioned us that previous seminar participants had been so pumped they either immediately excelled — or were fired by superiors fearful of their new self-assurance. Or quit to pursue what they now knew was their life’s work.
My “excelling” already had me under threat of being fired. As for my life’s work, I long ago foreclosed starving in an attic to be a writer. Not even a sea-change of Tice magnitude could alter that. But right in front of me was much I could do. I left the seminar ready to face the life I had with new vigor and purpose. I was bad as a born-again Christian wanting to spread the good news.
First targets were my children. My young daughter looked at me like I was insane: “Now you’re going to ruin our lives because you went to some seminar and got these weird ideas!” Instead of being put off, I was delighted — she was displaying precisely the kind of cynicism I taught her. I said the matriarch would be proud. But I had a better idea now, she’d see. My son, ever-practical:“That’s fine, dad. But it’s almost hunting season. You need to sight-in your rifle. We need to string decoys and practice with our shotguns.”
Everything they said pleased me. What a wonderful family I had! Chloe smiled a trifle uncertainly, holding back from a sense of self-preservation. She’d seen my moods fluctuate before. I observed her with new tenderness. Maybe I couldn’t bail out of the institution we’d built to become a writer again. But by God and Tice I could re-dedicate myself to that institution, to this family, to her. I was no longer fearful of the chairman’s ultimatum. I would ride it out and fight for my job — and my family.
I hired an employment lawyer and readied myself for the approaching ultimatum. The division head who’d become intermediary between the board and me passed the word I wouldn’t go quietly. He had been at the seminar too, and had a sea-change of his own. He shaved off his goatee, stopped smoking and decided he would open his own private lobbying firm. Legislators had encouraged him for years but self-doubt held him back. I said he would make a good poker player, because no one would guess he lacked confidence. He said guys like you never get it about self-doubt. Best laugh I’d had in a long time.
Out of the blue, I was invited to a job interview with the highway cops. Their chief was under intense media scrutiny due to an activist trooper’s union, their agency’s reputation besmirched. They wanted somebody to fix it. The speech I gave at the drunk-driving conference had been a put-up job — an audition. But like most bureaucracies, they’d dithered too long. My interview was the week a new governor was elected.
The troopers’ union had campaigned openly for this new guy when he promised them a new chief. One of their bumper stickers was: Have you hugged a trooper today? Have you even SEEN one? It alluded to the present chief’s obsessive “metrics” for shifting troopers far from their homes and usual beats to places his statistics said needed them. In Northwest lore that sticker was famous as the seventies recession billboard: Will the last person leaving Seattle — turn out the lights.
Their guy won. The detested chief was a lame duck when I got my job offer — which came the day before the chairman’s ninety-day ultimatum was up. Two hours later my agency’s personnel manager told me “the clock has stopped”on the ultimatum. I had my job as long as I wanted it.
A previous me would have suspected my phones were tapped. The new me just channeled Tice and said “thank you.” I relished my secret triumph all day. Took the family out for a nice Mexican dinner to celebrate.
Back at work I said “yes” to the highway cops, submitted my notice of transfer to another agency, and went home to honor my son’s request to get ready for hunting season.
