GHOSTBUSTERS: The Return Page 8

Winston joined Venkman in front of the cameras. It was funny how different Winston looked in an expensive suit; Venkman had rarely seen him in so much as a tie. He had to admit, his fellow Ghostbuster cleaned up nicely. In Venkman's opinion, at least, the two of them genuinely looked like candidates.

  Winston was grinning madly, like a kid on Christmas morning. "Can you believe this?" he asked.

  "You know me," Venkman replied. "I'll believe anything."

  The photographer raised a hand to catch their attention. "How about a few warm smiles? Good. Hold it." He snapped off several photos in rapid succession. Venkman fought the temptation to hold up two fingers behind Winston's head. "Okay, now put an arm around Mister Zeddemore's shoulders. Great. Just like that."

  The past couple of days had been a whirlwind. With so little time to catch his breath, it all still felt like a dream to Venkman. However, even if it did turn out to be a dream, he had absolutely no intention of pinching himself to find out.

  "Okay, we need some serious shots now. Let me see some confidence. Come on, you call that confidence? There you go. Excellent."

  Growing up as the son of a pair of carnival barkers, Venkman had never really pictured himself taking a job that meant wearing a suit every day, let alone running for office. Then again, he hadn't really imagined himself on the faculty of a major university or chasing spooks out of Madison Square Garden either. And those jobs hadn't turned out too badly. Sure, they kicked him out of the university eventually, and Ghostbusters did go bankrupt a few times. By and large, though, it had been an incredible ride.

  "Good. Let's get the two of you shaking hands now. Doctor Venkman, can you move half a step to your left? That's it."

  Venkman wasn't really sure what his chances were in the election. Still, considering the free suits, free meals, and who knew what else that he'd be picking up along the way, it looked like he'd come out of this ahead either way, regardless of whether he won or lost the election. And if by some chance he did win...well, then the fun was just beginning. Not that he'd ever try to hurt anyone - well, maybe just that woman at the Motor Vehicles Bureau who kept sending him to the back of the line - but he had no doubt that he'd have ample opportunity to pick up a few perks along the way. After all, he'd have the New York City checkbook in his pocket and a deputy mayor who didn't know anything more about city government than he did.

  "Annnnnnnd that's the last of them. Thank you, gentlemen."

  Venkman and Winston clapped each other on the shoulder and stepped away from the backdrop that had been erected in the conference room. "A splendid morning's work, my friend," Venkman said. "How about celebrating over some lunch and cocktails?"

  "Sounds good," Winston replied, as they moved toward the door. "But maybe we should check in with Ray and Egon first, to make sure they don't need us."

  "Hey, they're professionals. They can handle things for a few hours. Why would they possibly need us?"

  "I guess. Can't hurt to check, though."

  John Fielding was waiting for them at the door. He shook his head. "Sorry, fellows. Not so fast."

  Uh-oh, Venkman thought. In his experience, the words "not so fast" were never good. For a moment, he wondered whether they'd at least let him keep the suit.

  "You're not done for the day yet," said Fielding. "Not by a long shot."

  Oh, is that all, Venkman thought with relief.

  "You still need to go through your first briefing session, and then we have to start your media training. Here." Fielding handed each of them a thick binder. At a guess, Venkman would have figured that each binder was filled with a couple hundred pages. His estimate would have been short by at least another hundred.

  "What's this?" Winston asked, opening the cover to glance inside.

  "Your platform," said Fielding. "That book contains your position on every issue that's likely to arise during the election. The blue page at the front of each section is a brief on the substance of the issue. After that, you'll find your position, the positions of your various opponents - you'll want to pay particular attention to Mayor Lapinski's, of course - and your three or four key message points."

  Suddenly, Venkman felt himself getting nervous. This was starting to sound like work. He held up a hand in mock defense. "Whoa, whoa, Johnny. Hold up a minute. Don't you think we're veering just a tad into overkill here?"

  Fielding looked puzzled. "Why's that?"

  Venkman hefted the thick notebook. "Well, this doorstop here. I'm sure the guys and gals in the back room put a lot of work into this. The binding alone is very attractive - you don't find this kind of black vinyl, three-ring binder just anywhere. But if all this thing does is list the candidate's opinions, then I think we can probably do without it, don't you? I am the candidate, after all. Who knows my opinions better than me?"

  Fielding's look of puzzlement had been replaced by an eyebrow raised in skepticism. "Oh. When you put it that way..."

  "I knew you'd come around."

  "Where do you stand on the Brooklyn sewer treatment bypass legislation?"

  "Huh?"

  "The Brooklyn sewer treatment bypass legislation. You're the candidate. You must have an opinion..."

  "Well, uh, sure," Venkman stammered. "In the, uh, matter of the Brooklyn sewage treatment..."

  "Bypass legislation."

  "...bypass legislation, I'd have to say that, uh...sewage plays a major role in the City of New York. And one thing's for sure: If you have sewage, you're going to have to treat it. And, uh, treat it well. So if you want to, uh, bypass the sewage..."

  Fielding watched Venkman with his arms crossed and a bemused smile on his face.

  "Yeah, all right," Venkman said, deflated. "I'II read the book."

  "Thank you."

  Venkman flipped idly through the binder, pausing at individual pages more or less at random. "But I'm not so sure about this whole business of you guys telling me what my opinions are. Over the years, I have managed to come up with one or two of my own, you know."

  Fielding sighed. "Peter, you're a smart guy. You hold two Ph.D.'s, right?"

  "Right. Psychology and parapsychology."

  "Good. Then I'm sure you can follow this: The candidate is the public face of the campaign."

  "Right."

  "But that's just the public face. The candidate's not a one-man show. He's representing the needs and interests of the entire party. That means the things that come out of his mouth have to be aligned with the positions of the party." Fielding tapped his finger on the cover of the binder. "Every word in here was crafted by experts working behind the scenes. They understand these issues far better than you and I ever will. You just need to trust them, okay?"

  "I suppose."

  Just then, Winston chimed in. "Actually," he said, "the sewage treatment legislation is pretty important. If it passes, it runs the risk of raising toxicity levels in the water by a good forty percent. Not to mention the possible health risks for children living around there."

  "Yeah?" said Venkman. He started to flip through the binder. "What page is it on?"

  "Oh, I don't know," Winston replied. "I didn't read about it in here."

  "Then how do you know about it?"

  "They were debating it in last week's city council meeting. I saw it on cable."

  "You watch those things?"

  "Absolutely. Don't you?"

  "Uh..."

  "Peter, those guys on the city council are making decisions that affect all of us. It just makes sense to stay on top of it," Winston said. "Like that whole budget fiasco in the Transit Authority a few months back. Now, that was a mess. Money being mismanaged left and right... I'll tell you, if I'd been there, I'd have been all over those guys."

  Fielding nodded in appreciation. "That's very impressive, Winston. More and more, I can see that we made the right choice bringing you onto this ticket."

  "Thank you, sir."

  "We're all going to be working together closely for the next several months. Call me John "
>
  "Thanks, John."

  "Now, the good news is that you two are big news. The press has been clamoring for interviews," said Fielding. "We need to keep that heat going, so we've scheduled a full slate of interviews for you tomorrow."

  "What's the bad news?" Winston asked.

  "You need to be ready by then. That means media training today. And it means - " Fielding tapped the hefty binder in Venkman's hand " - you have to get through all of this by tomorrow. I wouldn't count on any of us going home early tonight."

  As Fielding and Winston continued to talk, Venkman stared at his running mate in disbelief. "Money was being mismanaged left and right?" "I'd have been all over those guys?" What happened to Winston? Since when did he know so much about this stuff?

  Or could it be that Winston had been interested in these sorts of things all along, and Venkman just never noticed? It wasn't as though he'd ever spent a whole lot of time pondering Winston's political views, or the ways Winston spent his spare time.

  Either way, the most likely result was a serious crimp in Venkman's style. He wondered if there might be a way to turn things around. Maybe Ray would make a more clueless deputy mayor...

  But no, it was too late for that. He'd already publicly announced Winston as his running mate. Besides, he liked Winston. This all seemed to mean so much to the guy. Much as it might make his life easier, he just couldn't pull the rug out from under him.

  None of which meant that Venkman had to give up his plans, of course. It just added a complication that he would have to work around. It was the price of friendship, he supposed with a sigh.

  Venkman watched Winston and Fielding paging through the binder. Winston was saying something about school reform and fiscal responsibility.

  Friends are a pain, Venkman thought.

  It's good to have friends, Winston thought.

  He knew full well that he wouldn't be standing here in a fancy suit if it weren't for Venkman. Peter was the golden boy who was the party's first choice. More and more, though, it seemed as though the party boys considered Winston to be an asset, too - and that felt pretty good. Either way, though, he didn't mind tagging along for the ride.

  Actually, it was an attitude that had served Winston fairly well throughout his adult life. Growing up on the streets of Brooklyn, he never really imagined himself running for office...or even chasing ghosts, for that matter. With Winston's father working construction, the Zeddemores hadn't had the kind of money or middle-class lifestyle that folks like Ray or Egon had grown up with.

  It was Winston's mother who had encouraged him to go into the service after high school, so that he could get a decent education on the government's tab. Sure enough, a few years later, he came out of the military with certification in electrical engineering...not to mention small arms training, a black belt in karate, and a stint in the Strategic Air Command ECM school.

  With the military behind him, Winston fully expected to put his engineering background to work when he came home. What he didn't expect was to find the economy in what the President was referring to as "a downturn," with hardly a job to be had. Winston's father's connections helped him land the occasional construction job, but even those were few and far between. And there was only so long that he could live off Mama Zeddemore. He started off searching the want ads each day for electrical engineering jobs. But after a while, he was searching for any job at all.

  So when he saw the ad for an "ectoplasmic containment specialist, he had no idea what the job might be, but he figured he had nothing to lose. Whatever it was, they were looking for candidates with weapons training and either military or law enforcement experience. He had plenty of military experience, all right. It was probably some kind of security job, he guessed.

  Even today, he still smiled at the memory of what passed for his job interview. The whole thing had consisted basically of Janine asking him one question: "Do you believe in UFOs, astral projection, mental telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, spirit photography, fulltrance mediums, psychokinetic or telekinetic movement, cartomancy, phrenology, black and/or white magic, divination, scrying, necromancy, the theory of Atlantis, the Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle, or in general in spooks, spectres, wraiths, geists, and ghosts?"

  Winston's answer had been a simple one: "If there's a semi-regular paycheck in it, I'll believe anything you say."

  A few minutes later, Ray, Egon, and Peter had come swooping back into the office. Business was booming, and they were up to their ears in phantoms. Before Winston could so much as say a word, Ray told him he was hired. From then on, his life became a mad rush of ghoulies, ghosties, and things that went bump in the night.

  Winston never expected to spend the next several years doing what his mother affectionately referred to as "running around with a bunch of white boys, hunting spirits." A religious woman, she was always just a little uncomfortable with what he did for a living, despite his repeated assurances that his employers were scientists, not black magicians. Still, her discomfort didn't stop her from cutting out every news item that mentioned him and pasting it into a scrapbook about her son, the Ghostbuster. By this point, she was up to her third book.

  When Winston called to tell her about the latest little twist in his career path, though, his mother's reaction was a whole different ball game. She hadn't believed him at first, of course. Deputy mayor? She thought he was pulling her leg. And, to tell the truth, he couldn't blame her; he was having a hard time believing it himself.

  Once she realized that he was telling the truth, though, she was fit to bust. She was so overwhelmed that he had to hold the telephone receiver away from his ear to avoid going deaf from the excited shrieks. Her own son, possibly the next deputy mayor of New York? She couldn't get off the phone fast enough so she could call every single relative, living and dead - and then run up and down the block to tell the neighbors. Winston hadn't stopped grinning since then.

  He had always known that his mama was proud of him. But now, he finally felt like he was living up to it.

  That was why he was determined to make sure that he and Venkman won this election. It wasn't for the fame, which he suspected was part of Peter's reason for doing it. Winston's primary motivation wasn't even to help people and make a difference, although that was certainly a big piece of it.

  No, the main reason he wanted to win the election was that he didn't want to let his mother down.

  * * *

  By the time Doctor Peter Venkman, candidate for the office of Mayor of New York, got home that night, he was beat. It was well after ten o'clock when he stepped out of a taxi in front of his apartment building. He was used to late nights; in fact, he was far more of a night person than a morning person. But tonight, his brain was suffering from information overload. After a day of photo shoots, briefings, and media training, his head was swimming with facts and opinions about public utilities, tax rebates, and garbage strikes. All he wanted now was to take a hot shower, leave a couple more apologies on Dana's answering machine, and hit the sheets.

  "I sure do know how to live," he told himself.

  Venkman stood there on the sidewalk for a moment. He moved his head around in a circle and rolled his shoulders a few times, trying to loosen up the tension in his neck. It helped a little. Feeling a bit better, he took out his keys and let himself into the building.

  Once inside, he paused to open his mailbox. He pulled out a handful of envelopes and flipped through them as he climbed the stairs to his apartment. "Bill. Bill. Junk mail. Junk. Junk. Fabulous offer to win big. Bill."

  The long day made the flights of stairs seem even more steep than usual. He wondered whether there were elevators in Gracie Mansion. There weren't all that many floors in the mayor's residence - certainly not as many as there were in the high rise apartment buildings that so many New Yorkers lived in. But, he figured that, as a city-owned building, the mansion probably had to have at least one so that it could be considered wheelchair accessible. Well, if it doesn
't he decided, rounding the next landing, that's going to be my first order of business when I take office.