This is a special and unusual edition of Works Progress because one of us (Mark) has a new book out about lying New York Rep. George Santos. You can check out “The Fabulist” here; The Guardian calls it “an ideal stocking stuffer for political junkies and voyeurs.”
While the paragraphs below aren’t fiction, they come from a Google Doc labeled “SANTOS MORNING WRITING” in which I started drafting copy about Santos back in the spring. It was basically a repository for observations from the previous day’s reporting, and I tried to write it the way I write fiction—without stopping, just getting material on the page. I didn’t end up using much from this Google Doc but looking back on it now, I did find some great snippets that made it into the book in other forms—like the way Santos would pout if he didn’t like a Ferragamo purchase, or how I talked to a neighbor of Santos’s dad who had a “good morning” relationship with the father. The little draft below is from one of my attempts to learn more about Santos’s dad, and it gives a sense of some of the economic pressures that shaped Santos early on—something that was quickly apparent once I started knocking on doors.
-The Editors
One Tuesday I drove to an apartment in Queens affiliated in public records with Gercino dos Santos. The building’s front door didn’t close well and the upshot of that became immediately clear: while I waited in the foyer for someone to answer my buzzing, a rat squeezed its way in. At first it stayed on the bottom stair while I buzzed different units, its tail strangely motionless. Then it climbed one stair up in my direction. It did not respond to me stamping my foot or shouting, inexplicably, “eyy.” We stayed there for a good thirty seconds eying each other until someone buzzed me in. Clearly the rat, if it wanted to, could have followed, but it didn’t.
Down the long hallway on the first floor there was a small candle burning in front of a worn brown welcome mat. The flame flickered while I read the many pieces of paper stuck on the billboard wall along the hall. The messages included an NYPD notice about the increase in burglaries in the area, and the capitalized warning, “BE SAFE AND BE AWARE.” A COVID-era notice told the tenants that management had received some questions from tenants about April rent. “We will work with you,” the sign said. It included information about onetime payments from the federal government and what tenants could expect to receive. “We’re all in this together and all deserve safe and clean housing.” A pre-printed city poster gave instructions on how to “stop bed bugs safely.” On the back of the main entrance door, where the rat had decided not to enter, a handwritten sign admonished tenants to make sure the door was closed “in order to prevent thieves and intruders on this premises”
On the second floor, a lonely white flower brightened the dusty landing. No one answered the door at Gercino’s apartment, but on the way out a woman said there were “lotta Indians” in the building, when asked if Gercino might still live there.
The distance from this to the Hamptons world that Santos pretended to live in felt much farther than the highway-ribboned drive itself, which I proceeded to take, the traffic approaching the onramp even worse than normal because in the left lane, a man with a cup was trying to encourage cars to stop and drop him some quarters. A child-sized pink bicycle was balanced carefully against the median next to him, tassels streaming from the wind of the cars.
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