All of Cannon smelled like barbecue.
The Joseph Gurney Cannon Building was technically on the House side of the Capitol. Since Gene was employed by the Senate side he didn’t have any real business reason to be over at Cannon, but he liked long boarding around the tunnels of the Capitol complex when he needed to think. And sometimes he wandered the upper floors too. These spaces were open to the public because they housed representative’s offices, but they were often quiet, forgotten, the domain of freshmen who drew high numbers in the office lotteries and seasoned statesman who liked to irritate OSHA by setting up small charcoal grills on the balcony of their offices in Congressional Siberia.
It was a bit early in the season for Representative Steve Pettridge’s annual show down with the fire code, but Gene appreciated it nevertheless. It made him think of summers by the pool and cool Mexican beer. He wondered who he’d have to blow to get an invite to Pettridge’s fifth floor balcony barbecues. They might be the most exclusive events in town.
Gene made sure his staff badge hung across his arm so that it dangled in the air but that any passerby in the hallway could see it clearly. It was bright green—signaling he was to have 24 hour access to the halls of power, 7 days a week—with an unflattering picture of him in a white rectangle dead center. It had been set on a clashing sky blue lanyard with white lettering that read United States Senate.
He was sitting on a window ledge. A view below him of Cannon’s stale gray courtyard—vents sprouting from it like saplings across its empty expanse. It was like a parking lot where no one was allowed to park. His knees were drawn up to practically his chest, a battered hardcover copy of Speeches of Adlai Stevenson with a Forward by John Steinbeck sitting against his thighs. He was reading, but mainly he was thinking and wasting time. The nice part about doing this on the House side was that he was unlikely to run into anyone who would object to his procrastination. His extended lunch break could only and would only be interrupted by a suspicious Capitol Police officer unnerved by hallways being used for anything other than dead space to transit through.
But then … that was why he made sure his badge hung over his arm, facing out towards the hallway, where anyone and everyone could see it.
Sometimes he would sit and read in the Longworth Dunkin’ Donuts or wander over to the gift shop where they sold Congressional hot sauce and Christmas ornaments of the Capitol among other trinkets and bric a brac. Gene had lots of ways to waste time.
When he was hard at work it was mostly running various models of how various draft appropriation bills might be scored by the Congressional Budget Office. Trying to find the right combination of factors to make the answer to the question how much will this cost the American people? politically palatable for different Senators. He reviewed their markups, their set asides. All of the large appropriation bills started on the House side first and therefore offered fewer opportunities for black magic in the basic structure of them, but sometimes the Senate conference position made his Oracle of Dirksen routine applicable even there.
CBO almost always overestimated how much things would cost, but not usually by much. Perhaps two percent at most. Still two percent of trillions in spending was billions of dollars. The rounding errors in this place boggled the mind.
After three years he could fall asleep in the middle of his job and still finish his work twice as fast as anyone else in the office. He got a little restless, then he needed to give his colleagues/rivals a sporting chance.
He was lucky the Chief Clerk Phineas Johnson was too busy being frustrated with literally everyone else to care. A six-four, former Navy aviator, Johnson was an imposing figure. Everyone called him by his old call sign Bambi, which did not actually make his steady dead-eye stare any less intimidating. It only took Gene two months to realize that Bambi wasn’t actually trying to intimidate anyone at all. He’d just become accustomed to keeping his reactions off his face.
“How did you get the nickname Bambi?” Gene asked once. He knew enough about the military to know that call signs were never cool. Even when they sounded cool, which admittedly “Bambi” did not, they were never cool. It was a hazing ritual than anything else. More often than not they were dirty or funny wordplays on a person’s name.
Circum, last name Scism.
Hi-Ho, last name Silva.
Blow, last name Jobins.
Glory, last name Hole.
Banana, last name Hammock.
Salad, first name Cesar.
But there was nothing obvious about either “Phineas” or “Johnson” and “Bambi”, so Gene figured it was an embarrassing story. Which his boss had no trouble confirming.
“How did I get it?” Bambi repeated. He seemed to be vaguely aware that he was speaking.
“Yeah.”
“I got chased by a whitetail buck while on liberty.”
“What?” Gene laughed.
“It was mating season,” Bambi said flatly, emotionless. “That makes bucks kind of stupid … also I was a bit drunk at the time.”
“Oh my God … did you get violated by a horny animal?”
