Loose Cheeks: The old gray adam

 
 
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Loose Cheeks: Hot Tips
By Lucas Smithereen
Loose Cheeks Senior Editor
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The old gray adam
Loose Cheeks’ ace investigative reporter A.J. Gangle was dozing with his feet on his desk when the phone rang.
“Gangle,” he said.
“Did you hear about the child …” the nervous voice on the line asked, going on into the same story Gangle had been hearing for weeks. It was the only thing interesting in the entire primary election campaigns but it was barely interesting. The nervous voice’s version was standard, an illegitimate child in a neighboring state, a mom possibly from Southern California.
Breathlessly, the caller hung up. Her final words were, “Your phone’s probably tapped.”
Once more, Gangle went over what he knew.
There is a candidate, Gray Adam or Adam Gray, whatever. Gangle preferred “Gray Adam – The Man in the Middle, Neither Left nor Right.” Neither Red nor Blue: Gray.
Whatever.
This Adam had a mother with a reputation for destroying every organization she took over and an uncle, twin of the mother, who had a reputation for being a professional political hack that couldn’t make anything happen but could stop anything from happening. Apparently, they wanted to set up a dynasty and the candidate was their front.
Then there was the larcenous aunt.
There was the rumor about the candidate’s child and its mother, neither of which are mentioned in the copious, slick campaign leaflets. This campaign litter was produced at the cost of hundreds of thousands from Capitol lobbyists who loved the kid, a candidate neither left nor right, but gray, without convictions and therefore amenable to people who serve in our Capitol without term limits, the lobbyists. Then there were possible blackmail angles on the kid, whose life had not been as savory as his campaign litter suggested.
There were two different stories. One made the mother a blond from the Stanislaus County part of the 21st Assembly District, or a redhead from the Merced County part of the district. The location of the mother and child varied from someplace inside the district to Arizona with a few bets on Santa Barbara County.
Everybody was whispering but nobody was talking because they were afraid of the mother, the uncle, the larcenous aunt, or all of them. Gangle chortled as he dozed off again, hoping to sleep all the way through the election of this year’s dipdoodle version of politics.