In Part Two of "The George Bush Bet," Sandy proposed a bet in the amount of 100 pounds centered on the question of whether George Bush Senior ever served as a US senator, representative, or governor prior to becoming president. I said none of the above, and Sandy took the field. Part Three picks up with our search through the streets of London for the answer to this perplexing question.
Sandy and I turned around and headed back towards the
intersection we had crossed just a few minutes before. The light was in our favor, so we crossed
over to the corner on which Big Ben stood.
We passed beneath its towering presence, walking alongside the
Parliament building towards the next light.
“You know, I’m a Free Mason,” he said, continuing his interesting habit
of broad-jumping off into a new category of conversation for no apparent
reason. “Do you know what the Free
Masons are?” I told him I did, and that
I had long been curious about the mysterious society and in particular, the illustriousness
of their membership, which included Washington, Franklin and Jefferson, among
many others. I told him that my wife and
I had gone into the Masonic Temple in Philadelphia
once, but we had just missed the tour. “You
know, you’d make a good Mason. I can
tell about you that you’re a good man who’s interested in helping others. What’s your religious affiliation, if you
don’t mind my asking?”
I have to admit, there were several moments where I got the
distinct impression he was conning me,
this being one of them, but the simple sincerity with which he said things
seemed difficult to fake. I squinted,
scrutinizing his face for any sign of contrivance. He was looking at me expectantly, awaiting a
response. If Sandy was conning me, I decided, he was
earning every penny with his performance.
“Well, I was raised Catholic,” I replied, leaning subtly on the word ‘raised.’ I waited, as I
always did, to see if the other person picked up on the nuance of the
statement.
“Oh,” he replied. “In
that case I suppose you would join the Knights of Columbus.” I guess nuance doesn’t always translate well,
even when it’s in the same language.
But I was persistent.
“You know, I really don’t see that happening,” I replied. I smiled slyly and trotted out a favorite
line I had appropriated from one of my friends.
“I’m more of a roaming
Catholic.” I purposely added extra emphasis to the ‘ing,’ especially the ‘g’ sound, trying
to ensure that he didn’t skip right over it, assuming I said ‘Roman.’ He gave no indication that he appreciated, or even
noticed, the play on words. I gave up.
“Let’s cross here,” he said, and we stopped to wait for the
light to change. He turned to me. “Look, Kevin,” he said, suddenly and incongruously
serious, “you’ve got a lot of great qualities.
But you’ve got to learn to trust yourself. I can see you doing great things, but your
uncertainty is holding you back. Don’t
worry so much about being right. If
there’s something you want to do, just go ahead and do it. Of course you’ll make mistakes, but you’re
smart, you’ll figure it out and fix them as you go. Don’t hedge so much. Believe in yourself.”
I was astonished.
What just a moment before had been nothing more than casual, friendly
banter had suddenly, inexplicably taken a metaphysical turn into something I
could only compare to a special, heart-felt episode of “Oprah.” That he would say such a thing to an almost
complete stranger was astounding enough, but the conviction and seeming lack of
guile with which he said it just completely floored me. Was I so completely transparent that someone
could sum up my character and assess my personality defects in the same amount
of time it generally took to read a cereal box?
Were my character flaws so overwhelmingly evident, did they exert such
an obvious influence on my behavior that any average Australian Free Mason
antique dealer could identify them in the span of not more than fifteen
minutes? It was an existentially
troubling thought, to be sure.
You might expect that I would react angrily, or defensively,
or at least with some form of protest. Yet,
even though I had just been diagrammed like a simple sentence on a blackboard,
with subject, verb, and predicate displayed with shocking clarity, I couldn’t manage
to get upset. He spoke with conviction,
and yet without convicting me of my crimes.
And besides, I could fuss and fume all I wanted, but deep down I knew he
was right. What the hell. I live for deconstructive criticism. I just nodded and said, “Thanks. I appreciate
that.” He seemed pleased by my
response. His wide smile returned and he
slapped me on the back. “Let’s resolve
our bet.”
I leave it up to the reader to determine whether this bizarre
conversational detour was merely one more component of a larger con scheme or
not. I decided a long time ago to take
his words and actions at face value, perhaps to protect my own sanity. In committing this story to writing, I almost
didn’t include the preceding exchange, in part because I don’t want to give the
impression that I was in some way attempting to embellish the story, or trying
to add, in an artist’s contrived way, an extra dimension, an emotional depth to
what would otherwise be a simple, straightforward account. In the end, I included this peculiar bit of
dialogue simply because that’s what happened.
The way I chose to look at it, if
Sandy was a
flim-flam man, then he was the Renoir of flim-flam men, a master of human
psychology against whom I never stood a chance to begin with.
We made our way around Parliament Square and into the busy
business district north of there. We
initially followed Tothill Street ,
looking in each street level window and at the signs hanging along each side
street for a bookstore. By his
suggestion, we split up our searching duties; I took the right side of the
street and Sandy the left. As we looked,
he kept asking me if I wanted to change the bet in any way, which I declined
each time. He also asked numerous times
why I felt so confident in my answer, and continued to ask about the Bushes,
all questions he had asked before, just phrased slightly differently. I answered them politely and consistently.
He finally did branch off slightly into new territory of
discussion. “You know, I’m sure you’re
probably right about our bet,” he said as we jointly searched with
single-minded purpose, “but even if you happen to lose, don’t be surprised if
you don’t.”
That was certainly a comment which required further
explanation. “What do you mean, Sandy ?”
“Oh, is that a bookstore there?” he asked, stopping and
pointing across the street.
“Where?” I said, trying to follow his aim while wondering
what he was doing looking on my side of the street. It vaguely bothered me that he was invading
my visual turf.
“Oh, no, it’s not. It’s
a stationery store,” he said, resuming his brisk pace.
“Oh,” I said, trying not to show any irritation.
“Well, what I was saying is that even if you lose the bet,
I’d still like to give you something back.”
“I don’t know why you’d feel that way, Sandy .
A bet’s a bet. If you win, you
win. There’s no reason to feel bad about
it. I’m a big boy. I knew what I was getting into.”
“No, no it’s nothing like that. I just want to do something nice for
you. You said you’ve never been to Australia
before, right?”
“Right.”
“And you said that was a place you and your wife had talked
about going to?”
“Many times.” Where
was he going with this?
“Well, maybe you’ll be getting a Christmas present from me
this year,” he said grinning almost madly.
“Two tickets to Sydney ,
perhaps?”
Although he looked as sincere as ever, I doubted that he was
genuinely serious about it. I had
developed the sense since meeting Sandy that the world he inhabited was very
different from mine. Maybe things like
that happened in Sandy ’s
world. But he had already demonstrated
enough of a grasp on my world to know that things like that just didn’t happen there. I adopted a casual tone intended to convey
that, while I thought it was a nice thing for him to say, I by no means
expected anything to come of it. “Why
would you do that, Sandy ?”
“I’d like you to come out to Sydney .
Meet some of my friends. I could
pick your brain a little bit. Show you
around. It’d be a lot of fun.”
“I have no doubt about that.” I maintained my neutral tone, but smiled to
let him know I appreciated the thought.
“Still, it’s a little extravagant, don’t you think?”
“Ah, so what,” he replied.
“Just don’t be surprised if you get a little Christmas gift from Sandy this year.”
“Not if I win the bet.”
“Who knows?” he answered with a mischievous smile, shrugging
his shoulders.
Again the suspicious side of my brain returned to the
question of a con and how this little twist potentially played into his grand scheme. Maybe he thought I was about to take an
unexpected left turn down a narrow side street and disappear, and felt like he
had to do something to prevent me from slipping away. But that would run undermine my rapidly
expanding theory of him as a master of human manipulation, because I had no
intention of fleeing, and so could have given no unconscious signals away. Perhaps his talent for invention was so great
and so uncontrollable that he just couldn’t stop constantly elaborating on the
illusion he was constructing.
We continued walking up the same street. We were at least a half-mile from Big Ben by
now. He stopped again. “Is that a bookstore?” he asked, again
pointing to a building on my side of the street.
“I’m not sure,” I said, looking for a sign.
“Let’s go have a look,” he said, carelessly but successfully
crossing between intersections amid the whizzing afternoon traffic. I walked to the intersection and waited for
the light to change.
When I caught up with him, he was staring through the large
plate glass window. “It’s a library,” he
said, beaming. “Perfect!”
We went into the library and Sandy headed straight for the information counter,
which was towards the back. I looked
around. I had never seen a library quite
like this one before. It occupied the
corner of a building, and one side was all windows. Book shelves were crammed in every which way,
and the aisles were narrow and crowded.
The entire space looked no larger than an average sized coffee shop. The old book smell was strong. Sandy
returned quickly.
“She said we should try looking in reference. It’s
upstairs.”
“There’s an upstairs?” I asked. I felt bad for the people that had to come
here, fight their way around to get a book, and then fight their way back out
again like it was a crowded corner market.
There was no place to spread out, to get comfortable. It seemed like a diabolical form of torture,
all these books and nowhere to read them.
“There’s the stairs,” he said pointing to a spot somewhere
in the middle against the inner wall.
We made our way over to the staircase. At the landing we were forced against the
outside rail as a long line of school children funneled down. They were young, probably seven or eight
years old, and I exchanged looks with some of them as they passed. “Hi, kids, how are ya?” I said in my bright
American voice, pleased with the surprised looks, timid smiles, the low-voiced
chattering and high pitched squeaking it seemed to produce. The long procession
finally terminated with two teachers at the end. I smiled at them, but they looked past me as
they turned to descend the lower flight of stairs, herding the children before
them. At the first opportunity, Sandy was at the top and
looking for someone to ask for help. “I
think that’s reference, there in the corner,” I said as I came up behind him,
pointing towards the front where we came in on the first floor.
“Let’s have a look,” Sandy
said, weaving around a few scattered computer stations and book racks. I looked around before I followed; this floor
was the same size as the first, and though it wasn’t as crowded, it still had
the same packed in, claustrophobic feeling.
I tried to imagine what it must have looked like a few minutes before,
with an additional thirty children added to the mix. I was glad we missed them.
When I found Sandy ,
he was standing in front of a tall bookcase, browsing over the backs of the books. “Which of these do you think we should look
in?” he asked, eyes jumping from shelf to shelf in confusion.
“Well . . .” I began, and quickly put my finger on a “Who’s
Who in Politics” book. “Maybe something
like this.” I pulled the book out. “I wonder how recent it is,” I said, flipping
to the publication page to check the date.
“1996. Well, that should work,” I smiled at Sandy , pleased with my own fabulously quick
detective work. Usually for me, any attempt
to find a specific piece of information in a library inevitably became an epic
quest instead of a brief, direct errand.
“Hmm,” I said excitedly, “let’s hope this is an
international edition.”
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