All of it swirled away in one afternoon. The conniving bitch he had married stabbed him in the back. She found out about his indiscretions. A truly loyal politician’s wife would have kept it to herself. Not his wife. First she screamed at him for a week. She said he humiliated her. “If you’re going to go screw around, couldn’t you at least find somebody attractive?” She thrust the photo of Sabrina in his face. “This one is built like a bodybuilder.”
“He’s a construction worker and a very sweet man.”
“But he’s a man,” his wife harped. “Why’d you marry me if you’re into cross-dressing men?”
“Men who are into cross-dressing men aren’t the kind of men who get elected to high office,” Dowzall explained, very reasonably, he thought.
“So you used me.”
“Well, yes.”
That set her off again, wailing like a siren. He tried being reasonable. She had a pretty nice life as the first lady of New Jersey, didn’t she? Wasn’t that good enough? Apparently it wasn’t. She just kept screaming, and come morning she filed for divorce. The divorce papers got the newspapers on the trail of the nature of his indiscretions, and pretty soon he was outed in front of the entire damn state—Dowzall’s Dirty Deeds.
The backlash was intense—especially when Greg “Sabrina” Uddersholf and Derek “Jasmine” Gorey sold video recordings of their private sessions with Dowzall to a maker of porno DVDs. They were distributing
It saddened Oscar Dowzall. He had sort of expected his wife to turn on him, but he never thought he would be stabbed in the back by Sabrina and Jasmine. It shook his faith in mankind.
In a twinkling, Dowzall was a pariah. Even his own party distanced itself from Governor Oscar Dowzall.
“What’s the problem?” Dowzall demanded. “There are other gay politicians.”
The state party chairman chuckled grimly. “It’s not that you’re gay. It’s that you cheated on your wife with a pair of cross-dressing masochists and had yourself filmed being tied up and dominated. I don’t know how to start calculating your lapses in good judgment.”
“Homophobe!” Dowzall shot back.
Whatever. He was out of office so fast they had to Fedex him the clothes and toiletries he left in the governor’s mansion. Far from enjoying the easy lifestyle of a retired politician, with classy dinner parties and wealthy peers, he was outcast and snubbed. He tried getting speaking engagements, but the only ones who would have him were the fringe groups. He found himself taking two thousand dollars to deliver a half hour of commiseration at the monthly gathering of New Jersey Cross-dressers in Crisis. He felt like a cheap, depraved whore—but not in a good way.
One thing they couldn’t take away from him—his knighthood. He’d worked hard for it, and it was going to be his salvation.
One of his guiding principles as governor had been his insistence that New Jersey was just as good, with just as much to offer, as New York. New Jersey loved him for his tenacity in this regard. He had argued with reporters, with heads of foreign nations, and even with famous late-night talk-show hosts who were known for constantly making fun of New Jersey.
Jersey had everything New York had, only better. All the advantages, more benefits. New York was just bigger, that’s all. That’s why everybody thought of New York first and New Jersey second.
“Or not at all,” the gap-toothed talk-show host replied. He got a big laugh for that one. Jerk.
“The point is, we’re as good as New York City,” Dowzall had insisted.
“The point is. New York is a city and New Jersey is a state. You can’t compare them.” The talk-show host thought this was all a big joke. “It’s like New York is the apple and New Jersey, I dunno, a cigarette butt.”
Another big laugh. What an asshole.
Such ridicule only spurred on Governor Dowzall. He demanded equal treatment for New Jersey, in all forms. He lobbied the federal government for highway- improvement dollars on par with New York—although it had fewer miles of federal highway. He publicly berated the executives of Kartoons for Kids channel for their
When the mayor of New York City was honored by the British government with a knighthood—simply because he stayed cool and collected in a time of crisis Dowzall was ticked off. Just because he was on the television a lot, just because he was the mayor of New York City, he got a knighthood. Dowzall did a lot of public speaking himself during that time of crisis, and none of the damn TV stations bothered to pay attention—even the Newark stations!
