Closet Governor

Gary Perkins

Description

A peeping tom, death threats and a young gay reporter make a closeted governor?s first months in office a living hell.
Closeted Lieutenant Governor George Vantage is sworn in as governor after the sudden resignation of the incumbent but soon finds himself threatened by an anonymous caller eager to expose the "faggot governor."

Reporter Michael Harrington views the new governor as his ticket onto the front page of his newspaper. He knows firsthand that Vantage is gay but he also senses that there is a bigger story.

Jason Covington is a peeping tom who gets off watching the new governor sleep. His antics end when security cameras catch him spying on Vantage.

Harrington thinks things are going well until the state patrol tracks the young man caught on security cameras to Harrington's apartment. Then his story on the governor's son and a gambling bill hits the front page. Soon Harrington becomes part of his own story when he answers his phone and a voice on the other end threatens to kill him if he doesn't back off.

The situation explodes when Vantage wakes up and sees a silhouette in his bedroom window. Security guards shoot from below and Vantage grabs his gun and shoots without thinking. A body crashes through the window exposing Vantage to all.

Sujets

• LGBTQ+
• Northwest
• Gay
• Seattle
• Fiction
• Olympia
• Washington

Informations

• Publié par: iUniverse
• Date de parution: 23 août 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780595774104
• Langue: English

Extrait

CLOSET GOVERNOR
Gary M. Perkins and Hal Stockbridge
iUniverse, Inc.
New York Lincoln Shanghai
 
 
Closet Governor
 
All Rights Reserved © 2004 by Gary M. Perkins
 
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.
 
iUniverse, Inc.
 
For information address:
iUniverse, Inc.
2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100
Lincoln, NE 68512
www.iuniverse.com
 
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The Olympia, Washington depicted in this book is fictional. Though it bears certain resemblances to the real city, it is a creation of the authors’ imagination. In no way are the events, individuals, businesses or governmental entities depicted in this novel to be identified with actual events, individuals, businesses or governmental entities.
 
 
ISBN: 978-0-5957-7410-4 (ebook)
ISBN: 0-595-32604-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 0-595-66654-X (cloth)
 
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
CHAPTER 1  
CHAPTER 2  
CHAPTER 3  
CHAPTER 4  
CHAPTER 5  
CHAPTER 6  
CHAPTER 7  
CHAPTER 8  
CHAPTER 9  
CHAPTER 10  
CHAPTER 11  
CHAPTER 12  
CHAPTER 13  
CHAPTER 14  
CHAPTER 15  
CHAPTER 16  
CHAPTER 17  
CHAPTER 18  
CHAPTER 19  
CHAPTER 20  
CHAPTER 21  
CHAPTER 22  
CHAPTER 23  
CHAPTER 24  
CHAPTER 25  
CHAPTER 26  
CHAPTER 27  
CHAPTER 28  
CHAPTER 29  
 
CHAPTER 1  
The artifacts of George Vantage’s life were spread out on the ornate dining room table before him like a body ready for viewing: real, but dead. All meaning and emotion had been drained out of each item. The people in the photographs stared up at him with an unknowing emptiness. They were his family and friends, yet he did not know their souls and they surely did not know his.
His abusive parents looked out from one photo without inflicting the terror they once had. His ex-wife’s all-too-knowing eyes failed to see beyond the edge of the snapshot taken on their honeymoon. And the unflinching confidence was gone from the smile that once seemed to beam out from the photograph he had taken of his son at graduation. George could not make the photographs on the table connect with his current self; it was like seeing soldiers looking out from Civil War tintypes: they were a part of history, but not a part of him.
The newspaper headlines that once jumped from the pages of his scrapbook now belonged to history as well. Each page a part of a past that could not be revived. Vantage elected to the legislature; Vantage takes the state senate seat; Tacoma’s Senator Vantage elected lieutenant governor; Vantage reelected. He saw his name in the headlines but he did not see himself.
He pushed the scrapbook aside and pulled a newspaper toward him. He ran a hand over his thinning brown hair and then forced himself to focus on the newspaper, folded and resting like a place mat before him. “Fausto gets Education; Vantage to be Governor in days” read the headline, with a picture of Governor Fausto shaking George’s hand at the State of the State speech less than a year earlier. The newspaper, delivered that morning, focused most of the front page on the meteoric rise of forty-four-year-old Governor Joseph Fausto. Fausto had gone from the Seattle city council to mayor to King County executive to governor without letting a term expire in any of the positions. With just over a year left in his current term—and no higher office open at the time—Fausto seemed stuck in the Executive Mansion next to the Capitol Campus in Olympia. Now Fausto was heading to Washington D.C. to become Secretary of Education and George was headed to the Executive Mansion.
George reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. He unfolded it and placed it on top of the newspaper before him. Printed in large font with a laser printer were the words, I KNOW WHO YOU ARE. The paper had been slipped under his hotel room door within a few hours of the phone call that let him know he was to be governor.
Suicide had never been an option for George Vantage. Not when his parents terrorized his youth. Not after killing a man in Vietnam. Not during his divorce. Not even during the dark days when he came to know his true self; the self no one else could ever know. Death was never an option. But now he felt that death was the only way to get out of life before life collapsed in on him.
Life had always been a series of conflicts for George Vantage. Conflicts with his parents, and between his parents, had turned to conflicts in war. War was replaced by conflicts in marriage and marriage had been replaced by the conflicts of politics. His outer dreams pulled him to new glory; all while inner conflict tore him apart. Inner conflict shackled his outer dreams, thought George. It was why his rise in politics had slowed so much over time.
The gun that George had purchased was small. He looked at it in his hands and thought about the weapons he had held in Vietnam; this was a toy by comparison. It was shiny and new looking with a short barrel and a smooth handle. It looked delicate, not lethal. It was everything George Vantage had fought against his whole political career.
As a child, George had feared the rifles that his violent father kept in the hall closet. In war he feared the weapon in his hands more than the ones the enemy held. In politics he had used his war hero status to blunt the criticism of his anti-gun crusades in his early years, but he had moderated his position by the time he ran for statewide office.
Now he returned to his earlier position that some people should not be allowed access to firearms. At least, he now thought, Lieutenant Governor—soon to be Governor—George Vantage should not be trusted with a gun.
But George had a gun. Buying it was as easy as he had always claimed it to be; he simply stopped at a pawnshop on his way back from the airport and flashed some bills at the clerk inside. The clerk went to a back room and soon returned with the dainty little gun that George now held. No questions were asked.
A ringing noise tore through the house and George jumped as if the gun had gone off. But the sound was of his telephone ringing on the stand near the stairs. Five rings and the machine picked up.
“Dad?” His son’s voice came through the answering machine in the hall at the bottom of the stairs. “I’ve tried your cell phone but you must have turned it off. I just want to congratulate you. I’m very proud of you. Call when you“
“Tony,” George said after he picked up the receiver next to the answering machine, “can you believe that your Dad’s gonna be governor?”
He tried to make it sound light, but his voice broke and he let out a long sigh at the end.
“Dad, are you handling this okay?”
“What’s to handle?”
His son said nothing.
“Tony, I’m fine!” George said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Dad,” Tony started, “I know you.. .you freak out at times like this. You can’t be thrilled.”
“What? Why not?” George glanced across the room to the gun on the dining room table. “I’m a politician, son; being governor is a good thing.”
“Cut the crap, Dad!” Tony said. “You know you hate it when people recognize you; how are you going to like everyone knowing who you are?”
“Son, I hate to burst your bubble but half the people who work in state government don’t know who the governor is,” George answered. “They know the treasurer, but only because he signs their checks.”
“Even so, you are going to lose a lot of privacy.”
“Don’t you want your dad to be governor?”
“Don’t use me like that!”
“What?”
“Don’t use me as your excuse to take yourself out of this.”
“Tony, I’m going to be governor whether or not either of us likes it.”
“Okay, then let’s make it work,” Tony said. “I’m coming down tonight.”
“Can’t we wait until morning?”
“By morning you will be bouncing off the walls.”
“I will not.”
“Remember when you decided to run for lieutenant governor?” Tony said. “You changed your mind five times before you announced. You were practically suicidal. If I hadn’t talked you.”
“You win,” George said. “I’ll make up the guest room.”
George hung up the receiver and looked at the answering machine next to the telephone. He pushed play and listened again to the message that had been waiting for him since he returned.
The voice on the tape was muffled and distant:
Faggot governor better be good...
Faggot governor better obey...
Or everyone will know that the governor’s a faggot.
George Vantage returned to the dining room and looked across the remnants of his life and almost death. He put away the photographs and the newspapers. He put away the gun. There would be no way out, he thought; he would have to live with what was handed him. At least while Tony was around.
George watched his son walk from his pickup to the front steps of George’s Victorian house. Tony, thought George, was everything his dad wasn’t. Tony was tall and handsome; confident and carefree; open and unassuming. There was a truth about Tony; an integrity of identity that permeated his being.
“Dad, you’re wearing a tie,” Tony said by way of greeting. “You’re not pretending to be a fifties sitcom father again are you? Real people don’t wear ties at home, you know.”
George smiled as Tony gave him a hug and then headed into the house.
“I didn’t have time to stock the refrigerator,” George yelled at Tony’s back.
“Sitcom humor too...you really need to get out mor