Me and Joe on the line

The vice president comes to Tulsa

The Monday before Vice President Joe Biden came to Tulsa, Michael Whelan, who is now with the DNC Finance Committee,  sent me an Instant Message, asking if I wanted to attend as his guest.

A large white awning, placed by the Secret Service, covers the entrance on 6th, between Main and Boulder. Inside, on the check-in table, different colored wrist bands: multicolor and purple, maybe one more—white, I think—for VIPs, people admitted on the rope line.

I get no wrist band.

The Penthouse at the Summit Club is as it should be. Mahogany table tops, servers with perfect hair, windows with perfect views, rooms with perfect bars and perfect food.

I see Michael.

“I can’t thank you enough for this.”

“Some day, and that day may never come, I’ll call upon you to do a service for me.”

Be my friend, Godfather.

Behind the podium and lectern, where the vice president will speak, three American flags.

The event is to start at 2; it is 1:45.

“Barry,” Michael asks a little after 2, “can Carol borrow your phone so she can record my introduction?”

“Sure.”

“Better still, you do it.”

“Okay.”

“Let Barry in,” Michael tells the security guy by the rope line. I am let in.

Moments later, Michael bounds to the stage. 

He talks of the vice president, not just as a great man, but a good man—Uncle Joe, he reminds us. “This is a big … deal,” Michael says, gently mocking the time Biden told President Obama (after ACA was approved): “This is a big fucking deal.” 

The vice president, we’re told, will be here soon.

I decide not to move. I am on the rope line, a place I shouldn’t be. I am behind two women, in front of two others.

At 3 p.m., I get a text from my girlfriend. “His plane just landed.”

“I have to get back to work,” I hear one of the women behind me say.

Another half hour passes. I need a Diet Coke, a bathroom, Tylenol. 

“Would you hold …?”

“Yes,” the woman behind me says.

I return minutes later. More people now. I maneuver my way back behind the same two women.

I think about loosening my tie. I don’t.

People, who have paid big money to see the vice president, come out from behind the curtain to the left of the podium, take seats. He is in the building.

Former Mayor Taylor comes to the podium, talks about Democrats, the party, the energy in the room.

He appears.

Thinner than you think, but the smile is all Biden—broad, white, perfect teeth—almost too many of them. He speaks from notes he doesn’t need, makes jokes he’s made a million times, gently criticizes Bernie Sanders for demonizing billionaires, and talks of his family, including Beau, his latest dead child. He sees an infant in the audience, says to her, pointing at her, “I promise you”—and here his voice is softer; he is now talking about cancer, “in five years, we’ll have something. If not a cure, then manageable.” Beau died of cancer back in June. Biden’s first wife, Neilia, and their child, Naomi, were killed in a car crash in 1972, a month after winning his first senate victory. Naomi was 13 months old. Biden said at the time, he knew by the ring of his phone something was wrong. “You just know.” 

A cellphone goes off.  

The vice president takes the mic out of the stand, leaves the lectern, hops down. He addresses those to his left, veterans in wheelchairs. “These people,” he says, pointing to everyone else, “will see more technological advancement in the next five years than we’ve seen our whole lives.” He loses his place once or twice, but it doesn’t matter, for he knows more than he’s forgotten. He is comfortable being Joe Biden. His gray hair combed back, the bald spot pronounced. The suit looks like it came off the rack. He comes back to his father, uncle, mother. He impersonates them; the accent is the same, regardless of gender. It’s Western Pennsylvania. He’s proud of it, proud of them. For reasons not entirely clear, I start thinking about Mario Cuomo, but not the 1984 speech at the Democratic Convention, pushing back against Ronald Reagan’s Shining City Upon a Hill, but the one in 1982, at his first gubernatorial inauguration, when he talked about the nation and his father, an Italian immigrant from Queens with calloused hands, and a fallen tree in the Cuomo front yard. 

“Dad, he said, “the tree’s dead, forget it. ‘Shut up,’ the father said, ‘We plant, she’s gonna grow.’”

It grew. 

And in Albany that day, legislators cried. 

“The Chinese premier asked me once,” says Biden, “to describe America in one word. I told him: ‘Possibilities.’” 

And then he looks again at all the babies in the room.

He apologizes for going long. 

“Thank you. God bless you.”

Applause. 

He then jumps down off the podium, again, and moves to his right. The Secret Service swarms. 

“Hands out of your pockets, please,” one agent says to me, tapping me on the shoulder. 

“If he comes this way,” I say to the women in front of me, “I’m reaching between you.”

They laugh.

He poses for more pictures. His smile lights up on cue, a smile that’s rehearsed, but not disingenuous. He holds some of those babies. 

He is now five people from me.

I need to say something, ask something. Don’t be a fanboy, don’t mumble.

Three people … two.

He is in front of me. Inexplicably, the women move aside. I hand someone in his detail my phone. 

“You know,” I say, shaking his hand, “you’re better than Mario Cuomo at this, at what America meant to that generation, to that promise.”

“Cuomo was very good,” he says, smiling.

“Yeah, but you hit another chord.”

“Thanks.”

“I have to ask you,” I say—because I, too, know about the sound of that phone call—“about fathers and sons.” 

Yes, this is what I want to know. 

“Go ‘head.”

“I lost a son, too, and I saw you on Colbert, talking about loss and being president and it killed me, so would you give it up—give it all back, the vice presidency, all of it—to see your children again?” 

The smile is gone. He stops pumping my hand, but doesn’t let go of it. He closes it in his and pulls them both to his chest. His eyes well up.

“In a heartbeat. Just to see them one more time. Yes.” And he says it again. “Yes. How’d your son die?” 

“Drugs.” 

He shakes his head, closes his eyes.

I don’t know how to characterize this next moment without exploiting it, ruining it, but the vice president of the United States, this 72-year-old man—this great, good man—blindsided by memory and life and a stupid question and too many untimely funerals, is crying. His hands are now grabbing my forearms. Joe Biden, in this moment, is not a man with ten Oklahoma Highway Patrol motorcycles, three Tulsa Police Department cruisers, seven black sport utility vehicles, two vans, two ambulances and a Jeep waiting for him downstairs on a closed 6th Street. He is a father of dead children and holding on. 

I can see people watching him, watching us, waiting for him. He needs to keep moving. 

I hug him; he hugs me.

A look. A nod.

“Take care.”

“You, too.”

And he is gone.

The vice president of the United States, Joseph R. Biden, has a rope line to work. The smile slowly comes back.

For more from Barry, read his article on Donald Trump's Oklahoma campaign manager.