Last Blog On Earth

I realize this post will be meaningful only to those of you who know the joy of Dan Coffey, but I can’t help myself. I hope this was not funny only to me.

Coffey is an anti-Mike Aguirre gadfly who claims to be a lawyer of some kind and who also, despite being a Democrat, has kind of a bizarre fetish for Republican mayors—he had a particularly intense crush on former Mayor Dick Murphy.

Coffey likes to spend his time showing up at events that involve Aguirre. Today’s occasion was Aguirre’s press conference challenging the accuracy and completeness of a report issued by the state Attorney General’s office that included an explosive claim that Aguirre and his top deputies had told Mayor Jerry Sanders and members of his staff that Aguirre would go easy on the mayor on the Sunroad case in exchange for favorable budget treatment for the City Attorney’s office.

After the press conference—which, by the way, was made intolerably long thanks to KUSI’s Doug Curlee’s ceaseless badgering of Aguirre—I climbed into an elevator with Coffey and a few of Aguirre staffers. Coffey, in his usual passive-aggressive manner, had begun talking to me about Aguirre—something about lying to the press. He never really gets right to the point; he kind of encircles a topic with smug, cryptic references to this or that. After the elevator doors closed, I asked him who was lying to the press about what now? “Everyone lies to the press,” he said.

This was news to me. I mean, I know some people lie to the press, but everyone? That I didn’t know. I enjoy elevator conversation probably more than the next person—especially at City Hall, where people are forced to ride up and down randomly with other people. So, I began to engage Coffey on this topic.

But the elevator stopped on the 11th floor, where Sanders’ offices are. The door opens, and there’s Sanders with his entourage. I said, “Hey, Jerry, come on in!”

He smiled and declined, noting that the other elevator had opened and citing his preference for that one.

And immediately, right in the middle of our fascinating conversation about who lies to the press about what, Coffey hopped out of our elevator and darted into Sanders’ elevator.

The nerve! I suppose my elevator was a tad short on Republican mayors.

I can only imagine how stoked Sanders was to suddenly have Dan Coffey as an elevator co-passenger.

OK, so maybe I am the only person who’d find that little vignette amusing.