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“What office did you have in mind, Charlie? Alderman, councilman . . . ?”

“We think you should be aiming higher.”

“Congressman?”

“Uh-uh. We want you to be the American Rhinoceros Party’s 1988 candidate for the White House. Bill, we want you to run for president.”

“Cool.”

To be honest, I didn’t say “cool.” Truth is I just stood there, waiting for the punch line. They were serious. No one in the room believed I could win a single vote unless they held the election in an asylum. They did think, though, that my candidacy could generate enough publicity to make their party known throughout the United States and help them to register more American voters as Rhinos.

Peck’s Bad Boy wanted to jump in, to pull the ultimate prank. I asked what issues we would run on. A member handed me a sheet of paper outlining a party platform that one Rhinoceros candidate later described as being “two feet high and made of wood.” Included among the planks:

A proposal to abolish the environment rather than protect it on the grounds that it took up too much space to keep clean.

A law that banned companies from pumping oil from the ground. The reason: the party believed that oil bubbled below the surface to keep Earth running smoothly on its axis. Withdrawing any more of the lubricant might cause the planet to grind to a halt.

A plan to bulldoze the Rocky Mountains so that Alberta could receive a few extra minutes of daylight.

An alternative plan to move the Rockies one meter to the west as a make-work project.

A motion to sever Montreal from the rest of Canada, declare it an independent island state, and tow it down to Florida during the winter months.

A law that required car companies to put outsized wheels on the back of every vehicle so that drivers would always be riding downhill and conserving energy.

A proposal to paint the White House pink and turn it into a Mexican restaurant.

A ban on guns and butter, since they both killed.

A plan to conserve energy by lowering the boiling point of water. Not by any scientific means but by simply declaring that the boiling point had been lowered.

I only had to read the document once before agreeing to sign on. After a round of handshakes and beers, one of the professors marked the occasion by presenting me with a geodesic girder. He had lifted the artifact from the American Pavilion, the futuristic dome Buckminster Fuller had designed for the Montreal Exposition back in 1969. Welders had forged the steel link into an L shape. Nine prongs emanated from its center, like the points of a starfish, and the piece must have weighed seventy-five pounds. The professor strained to budge it off the floor.

The gift touched me, though I had no idea how anyone in the room knew of my affinity for Fuller. Made me wonder if they already maintained a Bill Lee dossier in their files. One thing about the girder troubled me, though. Most political parties handed out key rings, banners, pencils, or T-shirts as souvenirs. This bulky item struck me as a tad extravagant. I immediately made my first vow as a candidate: to economize on all future campaign spending. That would not be a difficult promise to keep, since we had no campaign funds to spend. The Rhinos made it clear that raising money for the presidential run would be one of my chief responsibilities.

At the end of the meeting, Charlie asked whom else I wanted on my ticket. “There is only one person for the job of vice president,” I told him. “Hunter S. Thompson, the original gonzo journalist. He knows more about vice than anyone in the world, and if you read his book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, you’ll see he understands the inner workings of America’s corrupt political system like nobody else. He’s our man.”

A few days later the Rhinos issued a press release announcing Thompson as my running mate. Without asking him. Oh, they tried to contact Hunter, but either he did not return Charlie’s calls or someone had given the Rhinos a wrong number. There is no time to lose when you are trying to foment