At the parade May 19, 2013

 

  

 Fate or something akin to it brought me face to face with RR yesterday at the Memorial Day parade in Secaucus. He had set up a lounge chair on the sidewalk around Paterson Plank Road about a block up from the bridge over Route 3.

I was hurrying to get to the head of the parade when I saw him.

He looked exactly as he had in the photo from the Virgin Mayor’s fundraiser, just sadder, more isolated.

She was not with him; he was there with his two kids, yet just as telling, neither was his wife, making me think of all those poems she’d posted, about suburban life, about the relationship that had fallen apart.

Was this the man she was writing about the whole time? I had discounted it; but there in the middle of Secaucus I began to wonder if perhaps I was wrong in doing so.

The wife’s absence said a lot about his marriage in the way he resembled a number of estranged husbands, many of whom stood along the same stretch of road, using the parade to bond with their kids.

While she (the poet) may have liked parades, she wasn’t about to get mixed up with his kids – no matter how glowingly she had portrayed them a year and half ago when she did her puff piece on him.

A lot of water has gushed under that bridge since then.

What I could not tell from seeing him is where he currently stood with her. Was he the romantic partner she had melted over and then rejected, refusing to give up her own identity to become part of “we” with him?

Was he still her grand protector the Small Man once portrayed him to be? Had he become her principle ally now that the public safety director was gone?

RR nodded at me and called me “Mr. Sullivan.”

The fact that we both knew each other on sight said a lot; the fact that neither of us flinched said even more.

Was this really the man who orchestrated the plot to take over our office and use us to strike back at his political enemies, perhaps even getting his job back as a cop?

Seeing him in the flesh, I began to think it was not possible for him to have orchestrated such a complex and cunning plot – although I had no doubts about his ability to sway people.

I just could not see how he could fool someone as smart as she was; if anything, I might have suspected it to be the other way around, using the old routine she used with the rest of us, pumping up our egos to make us believe each of us was more important than we actually were, in order to make herself more important.

Since he was still a player inside the Virgin Mayor’s machine, he still had his uses for her – perhaps one more stepping stone in her move to trickle up – but to where? Could she really believe she might become the right-hand woman for the mayor, indispensable the way she had been in all those previously jobs?

RR didn’t even flinch when I told him how impressed the freeholder had been with him and his new position as head of the parking authority.

“We have a nice small authority,” RR told me proudly, making me wonder if the ploy to butter up the Freeholder might not have been a ploy at all, despite claims inside the Virgin Mayor’s camp to have pictures of the freeholder with prostitutes.

RR seemed too petty a character to play the main role in her ambitions, and too inconsequential to have hatched the kind of plots that people gave him credit for – getting his own guy as county prosecutor, bringing down the congressman.

He was big talk, but as others pointed out, he rarely delivered.

Yet, if RR isn’t the mastermind, who is?

The list of names of political insiders rushed through my brain along with the photographs she had taken of each at the recent fundraiser.

Even she wasn’t capable of such schemes, even though she might have taken advantage of them.

Suddenly, I found myself feeling sorry for RR, realizing he was just one more victim.

I wished him good luck and then moved on, but later made a point of taking his picture as he applauded the parade, the younger of his two kids cuddled in his arms.

He was fighting to keep his little piece of success after so many years of frustration, and seemed to be utterly alone, no wife, no poet, just his two kids to share that special moment with.

 

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