Excerpt: Disorganized Crime: An Election Year Farce

“Hello?” Paula snapped into the phone around a mouthful of stale donut. She was panting and out of breath by the time she located the phone under a sheaf of old newspaper pages. She was sweating from the late June steamy heat, seriously behind schedule and missing one shoe. True to form, the phone had rung at the worst possible time when she was struggling to get ready to get ready for a television interview and was searching desperately for one of her black pumps.

“Namaste, Parvati. I dreamt about you, last night and got a very out of balance and impure vibe. You haven’t been meditating at all, lately, have you?”
I should have let the damn thing ring! Paula had no energy to spare for dealing with her mother, the only person who still called her Parvati, right now. What was it that always alerted her to call at the worst possible moment?

“Your breathing tells me you’re out of balance and harmony and you’ve been eating red meat and sugar again, haven’t you?” Joyful Wisdom Nichols accused. “I can hear it in your voice!"

“You can hear sugar in my voice?” Paula asked around another mouthful of donut. She let out a wild laugh, thinking of her diet over the past few weeks which had consisted of fast food hamburgers and glazed old fashioned donuts all washed down with vats of horrible coffee. The only variation came on Sundays when she and Gino attended Church suppers. She wondered if Joyful Wisdom could hear the coffee in her voice, too as coffee was one of her pet abominations of modern American life. The only vaguely ‘natural’ thing she could be said to have eaten in recent weeks was orange juice Which was usually the sort made from concentrate.

“It’s not funny, Parvati,” Joyful Wisdom went on angrily. She alone persisted in refusing to use Paula’s legal name, and her son Scott would always be “Siddhartha” to her. “In Diet for a Small Planet—“

Paula grinned into the phone although she knew her mother couldn’t see her. She could almost smell the cloud of patchouli that always surrounded her mother over the phone. She had just thought of the way to both keep this conversation short, and to give her mother a horrible shock.

“I know, Mom—“ Paula cut off that line of inquiry with the precision of a surgeon. “The organic vegan diet is the only way to go for the sake of the world. But you know, on the campaign trail, you have to grab meals on the go. There just isn’t time to make my own tofu from scratch, any more.”

“I’m Mata-ji now, not Mom, remember?” Joyful Wisdom sniffed. “Wait a minute, who are you campaigning for? Politicians are a dime a dozen, Parvati. No matter how good their intentions may be at the start, Washington corrupts them all. It’s just a big sewer filled with money instead of shit. Activism is the only way to hold them at all accountable, you know.”

“Sorry. It’s just that calling you Mata-ji makes me think of you as Mata Hari,” Paula answered, knowing the comparison would annoy her mother. “Anyway, I’m the one who’s running for office this time.
“And I’m really sorry,” Paula lied, “but I can’t talk right now, I’m already late for an interview on TV.”
“I insist on speaking to Artie,” Joyful Wisdom sniffed. “Someone has to talk you out of this crazy scheme to sell your soul to corporate bullies.”

“Artie’s not here Mom—Mata. He’s in the hospital.” Probably the only time he should be grateful to be there, too, Paula added mentally.

“Visiting his thousand year old mother, no doubt. What does he say about this crazy idea of yours?”

“Artie’s not at the hospital Mata, he’s in the hospital as a patient himself. He can’t say anything about my Senate run because he’s in a coma.”

There was a long, bewildered pause on the other end of the line. “Your husband is flat on his back in a coma in the hospital and you’re running for the Senate? You have gone crazy!”

“Well, look who’s talking, Mata-ji!” Paula answered cheerfully. “The woman who gave birth to my brother on lime green shag carpeting at three a.m. in a room full of stoned hippies all ‘grooving on the experience’! Siddhartha even had a tie-dyed layttte. It just took me a little longer to reach your craziness level.”

“But why the Senate, and why now, Parvati?”

“To get health insurance, of course,” Paula explained as if that was why everyone ran for office. “I’ve tried to get health insurance in every other legitimate way, but if I can’t get it through ordinary means, it’s time to try something crazy. Congress members have terrific job perks. I want what they’ve got and if running for office is the only way to get it, then that’s what I’ll do.”

“Parvati, that’s insane!”

“Yes, isn’t it?” Paula replied. “It really underlines why we need better, more accessible health care in this country, doesn’t it? Anyway, sorry I have to go to my TV interview now, Mata. Nice to talk to you and give my love to Ganesh.”

“Wait until your father hears about this one,” Joyful Wisdom growled with the ominousness of June Cleaver holding discipline over Beaver's head. “Do you want him to come out there to the East coast and straighten you out, young lady?”

“Ganesh wouldn’t come out here, and you know it. He hates to fly. If you feel so strongly about this Mata, why don’t you come yourself?”

“I can’t” Joyful Wisdom sniffed. “Even if I weren’t on the no-fly list, I’m under house arrest again after getting caught trespassing at the Lawrence Livermore Lab and taking pictures. Can you believe it? The F.B.I. asked me if I was a Muslim! Me, a liberated woman! Do I look like any kind of Muslim to you?”

“I’d have to say you don’t, Mata,” Paula replied flashing on her mother’s flamboyant and shabby wardrobe, much of which dated from the seventies if not clear back to the sixties. “But sorry, I really do have to run. Namaste!.”

Paula hung up the phone quickly, and gave a little crow of triumph when she spotted her missing shoe over by the lumpy couch. The phone began ringing again almost at once, but Paula just stuffed her bare foot inside her shoe and grabbed her handbag as Joyful Wisdom began recording a furious message on the answering machine;

“Parvati, I know you’re still there! You pick up this phone and talk to me properly this instant, do you hear me, young lady---?”

Smiling, Paula plucked a second stale glazed donut from the box on her way out of the apartment, locking the door behind her as she went. Joyful Wisdom would rant into the phone for several more minutes, which would mean Paula would have a pretty entertaining angry message left on her machine to listen to when she got home from the latest round of campaign activities, tonight. No one could blend traditional maternal injunctions such as ‘do you hear me? young lady?’ with Zen psychobabble like she could. Paula was neither surprised nor very sorry in the circumstances that her mother was under house arrest, again. With her bent for social agitation, being in jail, under arrest, surveillance or subject to some sort of restraining order or other was the natural state of affairs for Joyful Wisdom, and it was hard to get truly alarmed about it, anymore. Paula had long ago disavowed all responsibility for bailing her mother out of jail or helping with her legal battles. All efforts to keep her out of trouble were ultimately fruitless, as Joyful Wisdom was happiest when she was being a thorn in the side of the established order in some form or other. It would also prevent her mother from flying out here to be underfoot during the campaign further complicating Paula’s life. The thought of trying to find a vegan restaurant that would serve the bizarre substances that her mother considered food in some of the one horse towns up and down the state would be nightmarish. A picky eater was liable to die on the campaign trail. Charles Darwin could have devised no more effective fitness survival test than the modern American political campaign.

As Paula started her car and hurried off to her TV appointment ignoring the car’s rattles and whines of protest, she realized her nervousness about the TV interview ahead of her had vanished as if she had trapped them inside the phone. Joyful Wisdom’s disapproval had changed her own attitude about this whole exercise. It was still insane, but it was her insanity now. It seemed to Paula a no worse manifestation of craziness than her mother’s willingness to hand-cuff herself to chain link fences to protest nuclear proliferation and all other ills of a militaristic world.