Threeway, Epilogue (pt. 1 of 3)

In which Pipp and Kriegman flail about and settle in. "Threeway" continues in serial form with a link to buy the book at the bottom of the post. To catch up on prior segments, start at the bottom of the blog. Enjoy. Tell your friends.

THREEWAY: A Short Novel for a Long Season

by

STEVEN LUBLINER

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogue, and descriptions are the author’s creations and are not to be taken as true. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental. All incidents depicting, suggesting, or referring to public figures or other historical persons are also fictionalized and are not to be taken as true.
Copyright © 2016 Steven S. Lubliner
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1530971292
ISBN-13: 978-1530971299

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
Prologue: The Personal Is Political i
1 Fillmore Pipp’s Boner 1
2 Big Mel Kriegman 16
3 Hi and Bye, Connie and Herb. 32
4 THE BROWN BAGGERS!! 40
5 Mittelpunkt 43
6 Mandy 51
7 Mandy In. Mandy Out. Mandy In. 66
8 Authenticity 75
9 Momentum 79
10 Brother Paul 88
11 Inevitability 98
12 Win. Lose. Repeat 108
Epilogue 112

Epilogue (pt. 1 of 3)

Alone in the White House, a lame duck with no more campaigns to taint, Fillmore Pipp frequently gave his agents the code. He soon became the first president to be divorced by his vice president. When the divorce was final, Pipp became the first president to appear on “The Bachelor.” He sent Stengel as his John Alden to woo for him.

Stengel did his due diligence and had a fine time. He picked two nice girls for the president to test drive. Pipp himself appeared on the finale to propose to one of them. There were tears and a diamond. Three weeks later, Pipp dumped the girl as tradition demanded and thus was revenged on them all.

When Pipp’s wife moved out, she took the children and the First Dog. The First Chickens raised for added folksiness had been slaughtered the second Pipp won. At the end of his term, Pipp walked out of the White House for the last time alone, except for the Secret Service detail that would dog him to the end of his days.

He strode to the helicopter that would fly him to his new life, waving at the adoring crowd. Flashing on the old image of Nixon giving the victory sign even in his darkest moment, and thinking, oh so briefly, of Mandy and the Brown Baggers, Pipp was seized with the powerful urge to flip a double bird and drop a load. He refrained. If he started, he might not be able to stop.

As he whirled off to the unknown, Pipp pondered a change of political scenery. He had liked being president. It was still all he knew how to do. Now, condemned to live apart from his family, with only a big, empty house to putter around incompetently in, the long, limitless void unsettled him.

The Constitution prohibits a president from being elected to more than two terms. If Pipp switched parties, was he really the same person? What if he had a sex change? That thing of his, such as it was, had done him more harm than good. If a man is ruled by his dick and the dick is gone, is the man a different person, constitutionally speaking? What if he had a religious conversion or his brain was transplanted into a robot? A well hung robot, what then?

All interesting questions. The greater truth was that Pipp was tired. He had lost his taste for big ideas and lacked the fortitude for grand schemes. If he died without ever again having to stand for something, he would be happy. He took some business accounting and electronics repair courses at a local junior college. They didn’t pan out. The Secret Service and their security requirements caused so much disruption that the school asked him to leave.

Pipp would have been lucky to make Gentleman’s Cs. The accounting class went so badly, Pipp started to think it really was his fault the budgets proposed in his name never balanced. In the electronics class, Pipp fell in love with soldering. Had he known about it sooner, soldering would have been a potent metaphor for the duty of government to inject itself into national affairs to bond the fragments of a broken country. Soldering. It sounded like soldiering, with its emphasis on unquestioning duty. Soldering. Sweet, beautiful soldering. Pipp’s love went unrequited. He couldn’t solder worth shit.

After junior college, Pipp flailed about with education initiatives and charitable adventures abroad. None of it was a good fit. Eventually, Pipp hit bottom and did the only things left to him in this world. He played bad golf for his party with rich donors, and he wrote a book and made millions of dollars. The book tastefully acknowledged the affair with Mandy but did not go into it. Taste would go out the window with the next book. Pipp had learned something about restraint.

--

Bitter defeat taught Mel Kriegman that a man should not stray from his roots. What followed taught him that you can’t go home again. Kriegman tried to re-immerse himself in the world of rootless travel, drugs, and sex. This new baptism didn’t take. Being the wrong kind of inauthentic—too rich, too famous, too impotent, too old—he was not welcome. Buying a banjo and learning some mournful tunes didn’t help.

Kriegman could cruise along for a while with each group because most of the kids didn’t recognize him, but inevitably, someone would drop his pack, and say “Fuck, man, you’re the guy who ran for president. My dad voted for you, dude. That’s fucked.” When everyone agreed how fucked that was, Kriegman would grab his stuff and slink away. After a few cycles of this, he took the reins back from Donaldson and glumly resumed his role as a titan of industry.

All too soon, Soylent Green’s standard joke was that he was nearly an orgasm away from the presidency. Two years after the election, Meltzer Kriegman, Oskar Abramowicz of yore, died of a heart attack while beating off in the shower. A splintered wooden ruler was found in the shower with him. Seltzer Meltzer had been right one last time.

The only will of Kriegman’s that could be found was from the early days of his conversion. It provided that his assets be sold off, converted to hard currency, and buried with him in a lead box. Though duly witnessed and notarized, it was successfully challenged in lawsuits filed by Donaldson and the Brothers Abramowicz, who had loosened up over the decades and sued in service of their very nice third wives, their even nicer mistresses, and everyone’s children and grandchildren.

“Why didn’t he come back to us?” the brothers lamented at Kriegman’s memorial. “This prodigal son of our father, our sweet Oskar. We would have welcomed him. Nothing’s more important than family.”

There was an empty spot at the table where Kriegman should have presided. They could almost imagine him there, just like he was forty years ago, the legend they had read about, gently serving his herbal creations to strangers that became family, sitting with forced composure, gamely fighting the silence that had now consumed him. In their vision, though, it was not tea he offered up any more than it had been on the campaign trail. It was money. In absentia, his legacy assured, Kriegman kept on keeping on.

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