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out of my mouth.”
    â€œBeen out on your Zode?”
    â€œZodiac 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 mush-mouths 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.”
    â€œHow’s Project Lobster?”
    â€œWow, you prepared for this interview. It’s fine. How’s the paper?
    â€œThe usual. Civil war, insurrection, financial crisis. But everyone reads the movie reviews.”
    â€œInstead of your stuff?”
    â€œDepends on what I’m digging up.”
    â€œAnd what’s that?”
    She smiled, leaned forward and observed me with cunning eyes. “Pleshy’s running,” she said.
    â€œWhich Pleshy? Running from what?”
    â€œThe big Pleshy.”
    â€œThe Groveler?”
    â€œHe’s running for president.”
    â€œShit. End of lunch. Now I’m not hungry.”
    â€œI knew you’d be delighted.”
    â€œWhat about Basco? Doesn’t he have to put all that crap into a blind trust?”
    â€œIt’s done. That’s how I know he’s running. I have this friend at the bank.”
    The Pleshy 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 eye-dropper-ful of “compounds” going into a railway tank car of pure water.
    â€œYeah. 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 …”
    â€œPATEOTS?”
    â€œHaven’t I told you about that?”
    â€œExplain.”
    â€œStands 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.”
    â€œWhat does that have to do with football?”
    â€œI’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