Back at the Omni, Gomez said, “What'd you tell him?”
“pH. Went here last week and tested their pH and it was thirteen.”
“So?”
“So they're licensed for eight. That means they're putting shit into the river that's more than two times the legal limit.”
“Shit, man,” Gomez said, scandalized. That was another good thing about Gomez. He never got jaded.
And I hadn't even told him the truth. Actually, the shit coming out of fiasco's pipe was a hundred thousand times more concentrated than was legally allowed. The difference between pH 13 and pH 8 was five, which meant that pH 13 was ten to the fifth power-a hundred thousand times-more alkaline than pH 8. That kind of thing goes on all the time. But no matter how many diplomas are tacked to your wall, give people a figure like that and they'll pass you off as a flake. You can't get most people to believe how wildly the eco-laws get broken. But if I say “More than twice the legal limit,” they get comfortably outraged.
Zodiac
3
I HAD GOMEZ DROP ME OFF in Harvard Square so I could eat birdseed and tofu with a reporter from The Weekly. Ditched my cigar. Then I went in to this blond-wood extravaganza, just off the square, allowed the manager to show me her nostrils, and finally picked out Rebecca sitting back in the corner.
“How's the Granola James Bond?”
I nearly unleashed my Toxic Spiderman rap but then remembered that some people actually admired me, Rebecca among them, and it was through admiration and James Bond legends that we got things like free cars and anonymous toxic tips. So I let it drop. Rebecca had picked the sunniest corner of the room and the light was making her green eyes glow like traffic lights and her perfume volatilize off the skin. She and I had been in the sack a few times. The fact that we weren't going to be there in the near future made her a hundred thousand time - oops - more than twice as beautiful. To distract myself, I growled something about beer to a waiter and sat down.
“We have-” the waiter said, and drew a tremendously deep breath.
“Genesee Cream Ale.”
“Don't have that, sir.”
“Beck's.” Because I figured Rebecca was paying.
“The specialty is sparkling water with a twist,” Rebecca said.
“I need something to wash the Everett out of my mouth.”
“Been out on your Zode?”
“Zodiac to you,” I said. “And no, I haven't.”
We always began our conversations with this smart-assed crap. Rebecca was a political reporter and spent her life talking to mushmouths and blarney slingers. Talking to someone who would say “fuck” into a tape recorder was like benzedrine to her. There was also an underlying theme of flirtation-“Hey, remember?” “Yeah, I remember.” “It was all right, wasn't it?” “Sure was.”
“How's Project Lobster?”
“Wow, you prepared for this interview. It's fine. How's the paper?”
“The usual. Civil war, insurrection, financial crisis. But everyone reads the movie reviews.”
“Instead of your stuff?”
“Depends on what I'm digging up.”
“And what's that?”
She smiled, leaned forward and observed me with cunning eyes. “Fleshy's running,” she said.
“Which Fleshy? Running from what?”
“The big Fleshy.”
“The Groveler?”
“He's running for president.”
“Shit. End of lunch. Now I'm not hungry.”
“I knew you'd be delighted.”
“What about fiasco? Doesn't he have to put all that crap into a blind trust?”
“It's done. That's how I know he's running. I have this friend at the bank.”
The Fleshy family ran Basco - they'd founded the company - and that made them the number one polluters of Boston Harbor. The poisoners of Vietnam. The avant-garde of the toxic waste movement. For years I'd been trying to tell them how deep in shit they were, sometimes pouring hydraulic cement into their pipes to drive the point home.
This year, the Pleshy-in-charge was Alvin, a.k.a. the Groveler, an important member of the team of management experts and foreign policy geniuses that brought us victory in Vietnam.
Rebecca showed me samples of his flacks' work: “Many environmentalists have overreacted to the presence of these compounds...” not chemicals, not toxic waste, but compounds “... but what exactly is a part per million?” This was followed by a graphic showing an eyedropper-ful of “compounds” going into a railway tank car of pure water.
“Yeah. They're using the PATEOTS measuring system on you. A drop in a tank car. Sounds pretty minor. But you can twist it the other way: a football field has an area of, what, forty-five thousand square feet. A banana peel has an area of maybe a tenth of a square foot. So the area of the banana peel thrown on the football field is only a couple of parts per million. But if your field-goal kicker steps on the peel just as time is expiring, and you're two points down ...”
“PATEOTS?”
“Haven't I told you about that?”
“Explain.”
“Stands for Period At The End Of This Sentence. Remember, back in high school the hygiene pamphlets would say, 'a city the size of Dallas could get stoned on a drop of LSD no larger than the period at the end of this sentence.' A lot easier to visualize than, say, micrograms.”
“What does that have to do with football?”
“I'm in the business of trying to explain technical things to Joe Six-pack, right? Joe may have the NFL rulebook memorized but he doesn't understand PCBs and he doesn't know a microgram from cunnilingus. So a microgram is about equal to one PATEOTS. A part per million is a drop in a railway tank car - that's what the chemical companies always say, to make it sound less dangerous. If all the baby seals killed last year were laid end to end, they would span a hundred football fields. The tears shed by the mommy seals would fill a tank car. The volume of raw sewage going into the Harbor could fill a football stadium every week.”