And, honored by his honors (all the more splendid for his not having known about the national competition or such categories in the first place, or even all that much about the project itself, and all the more moving for his having merely signed off on it — signed off on? — their having come to him not so much a sign that he’d cashed in on other people’s efforts as much as a tribute to the smooth functioning of his department), by his Academy Awards in Gutters and Pavements, in Markers and Street Graphics, and his Lifetime Achievement Award in Mowing the Lawn, continued for a time to press his campaigns.
His shame campaign.
The oversized, non-removable Day-Glo stickers he’d have had the city slap on the windows of trucks and vans, of commercial vehicles double-parked in the street, tying up traffic, the sample copy for which he’d written himself. (“This vehicle is double-parked in violation of city traffic ordinances and has been appropriately ticketed. Citizens who feel they have been personally inconvenienced, either by being unable to move out of their parking spaces, or by being denied access to parking spaces which might otherwise have been available to them, or by being unduly held up in traffic, are, in light of the selfish disregard shown them by the other driver’s lack of consideration for his neighbors, encouraged to take down the name of the company, its phone number or address when available and vehicle license plate number, and report all such incidents to the appropriate authorities.”) If he’d been a mathematician or scientist such a solution to so longstanding a municipal problem might have been termed elegant — he didn’t mean his copy, his copy was merely a detail, an example, an instance, a first draft; he put no great stock in his copy; his copy could always be improved — so he was disappointed, though not surprised, when the city fathers to whom he’d shown mock-ups, complete, right down to Druff’s improvable text on the Day-Glo sticker and its permanent bond shaded in on the verso, had thrown up objections that were, well, political. (“Yes,” said the mayor — Dick’s “guy” and “old hack” of the morning’s reminiscences—“that would do the job all right, but those vans and trucks that block up the traffic are doing deliveries, dropping stuff off, picking stuff up. This is commercial traffic you’re talking about, acceptable lifeblood traffic. We have to deal with it. You’re mixing babies and bathwater, what do you call it, apples and oranges. Good government is knowing who should get the tax abatements.” A shot, Druff thought, a shot and a hit. “Yes,” he said, “I see what you mean, Mr. Mayor. I’m old and stupid, too caught up by ancient history and old times. Maybe what appealed about my idea was that it was so purely an adaptation of the eleventh of my Fourteen Points, ‘no senseless scraping,’ brought up to date.” The mayor brushed away Druff’s dismissal of himself. “Now now,” he said, “it’s a good idea. It is. Maybe its time hasn’t come but it’s a good idea,” adding, too cruelly for any absolutely first-rate pol, thought Druff, “and whenever my City Commissioner of Streets feels he has another one up his sleeve, I want my City Commissioner of Streets to feel free to stop the presses and let me know.” Saying “my City Commissioner of Streets” as in ancient history and old times he’d said “my opponent,” for, yes, this was he, his old opponent from the Lincoln-Douglas. And might have assured Hizzoner right then and there that Druff would no longer trouble him with any more bright ideas from that sleeve of his. Which he didn’t because you never ever made a campaign promise you didn’t absolutely have to.) But abandoning the last of his promotional schemes right then and right there, returned to the easy status quo of Awards Banquet ante.
For the rest of the morning Druff accepted phone calls and answered letters, working routinely within the soft parameters of the job description. Twice he had fifteen-minute meetings, one with the department’s chief engineer, who’d been assigned to draw up plans for an enclosed walkway above Kersh Boulevard where three or four months earlier a young woman, a foreign exchange student from Lebanon, on her way back from campus to her dormitory after an evening lecture, had crossed not at the corner but at one of those push-button traffic signals in the middle of the block, and been killed by a hit-and-run driver. The engineer had shown him blueprints (“What’s this,” the City Commissioner of Streets said, “sheet music?” Then asked the engineer to rough the bridge in for him in terms — no cross sections, no esoterics — Druff could understand. “This won’t fall down, will it?” he’d asked. “No? You don’t think so? Well, what can we rely on if not our informed guesses? Go ahead, put a crew together.”) and now reported back to him that it was his, the chief engineer’s, understanding that the city was unwilling to proceed with construction until the university agreed to pay the costs on whatever was built on university property. The second meeting — Druff had forgotten that it had been scheduled for today — was with a lawyer, some bagman type from the university. He’d come with its sealed, lunatic bid. “Obviously the school regrets this tragedy, but isn’t this all a little like locking the barn door after the dish has run away with the spoon?” the fellow said. “The city should never have put up a pedestrian-activated traffic signal in that spot in the first place. It fair screamed ‘attractive nuisance’ to any beered-up kid who chanced by.” However, in the interest of putting all this behind them, he’d told Druff, the university was willing to help out, but preferred that the university’s builders be engaged on, well, the university’s buildings, that this was essentially a city project and that city contractors ought to be used on it, and it needn’t bother that the walkway be built in conformity with campus style, that a strictly neutral municipal architecture would serve, it was a matter of indifference to the university if the city failed to match its distinctive and rather expensive limestone. Druff, who smelled kickback the minute the guy opened his mouth, thanked him for coming and told him he’d convey the university’s position and get back to him with a decision.
If I live long enough this is how I’ll spend the rest of my life, thought fifty-eight-year-old Druff on the downhill side of destiny, folding his stale, foul, used-up juices into a clean handkerchief and placing three or four fresh leaves from his pouch of chewing tobacco into his mouth. It was not a disagreeable prospect. A sedentary, lackluster office life held no terrors for him. The worst that could happen was that he’d be bored. If it was too late for anything to happen to him, why that was all right, too. Enough had happened to him already. He suffered from two or three major illnesses — heart disease (three years earlier, he’d had bypass surgery, after having a heart attack years back); spontaneous pneumothoraxes (four times a lung had collapsed on him; it was, they liked telling him, a young man’s disease; runners burst blebs while they were still in their teens); and peripheral circulatory blockage in his legs (wounds, below his knees, took forever to heal; a stubbed toe could turn into gangrene just like that). Also he couldn’t always, or even very often, get it up. What was more troubling was that he didn’t very often even want to.