Good Strange Things vol. 2

By October I was in a sort of altered state most of the time. I don't mean on drugs other than caffeine, which was certainly part of my state, and the occasional after-work drink. I mean I was fatigued in a way that I knew wouldn't go away fully into I really got to rest, and I knew that would not happen until after the election. At that point the election was just starting to appear on the horizon, but it was still a ways off. I accepted this reality without argument, which made me more able to live with it, but the work day rarely sailed by. I would generally go to sleep relaxed and wake up the same way, but once the day started all bets were off. There were days that I felt like I wasn't holding up my own body, rather I was draping it over the structure implied by my schedule and my superiors expectations. When I took a break, I relaxed hard and hoped it lasted, because if someone came into the office, I would jump back up and greet them.

I was finishing up a late lunch, waiting for me to tell myself I needed to get back to work on October 11th (gmail search), when a small, middle-aged, Indian (from India) man came in and started peering at the various things on the walls of the Richmond County Democratic Headquarters. He didn't seem to require any assistance, nor did he really look like he was looking to volunteer, so I let him do his thing and enjoyed the end of my break.

Eventually I gave him a "Hi, can I help you?" or one of those. We exchanged pleasantries, and he mentioned that he was from India. I told him that I've been to India, which was a shock to him. A lot of Richmond Countians hadn't seen much outside of the Carolinas, let alone another continent, let alone Asia. All of a sudden we were having a spirited conversation. He talked about how he liked all the Democratic candidates, how he came from Mumbai to here because his son lives here and has a clothing shop (I think). We talked about India, Gandhi, the poet Rabindranath Tagore, the Ganges- at first he didn't know what I was talking about because I was saying "the Ganges", and to him it's "the Gunga."

We talked for a while, and by the time we were done I felt refreshed. We quietly appreciated each other for unexpectedly providing a conversation that neither of us could have had with anyone else in Richmond County. I really don't have a problem with your typical resident of the RC, but I had seen a lot of them over the last two months, and to meet someone who fit a completely different description was very refreshing. I think he mentioned meditation at some point, and he had a subtle wisdom that I associate with meditators. As for him, I can only speculate as to how long it had been since he'd met a stranger who had been to his homeland, but I expect those were few and far between.

Eventually the time came for him to go and for me to get back to work, and the conversation came to a natural end. He stepped toward the door and then stopped and turned around, to say something. At that moment it was like everything up to that point was leisure time, but there was one point of business- wise little Indian men don't just wander into your office for no reason after all. He had a message for me, and he wasn't going to leave until I heard it. I looked up at him, and he said this:"I am sixty years of age. I am very healthy. No diabetes, no heartburn, no (something)."

I asked him how he does it

"Vegetables and hard work."
Somehow that was the perfect conclusion to the whole thing. I never saw him again, nor did I need to. We had given each other a boost, and he had passed on a little piece of truth to me. I wouldn't get many more, but life was expected to be hard then, and a little something like that every week or so was all I needed.

Inauguration Wrap-Up

So now he's president, and together we enter a brave new world.

The inauguration itself was... an experience. I'm definitely glad I went, but I'm in no hurry to do it again (not that the option is there). The area around our assigned security checkpoint had some signage, but not nearly enough. People found out where to go mostly by asking other people waiting in line. There were a few staff people who appeared infrequently, and had nothing but their own voices to try to direct people. After some searching, Rachel and I found our line. It went down one block, turned a corner, down another block, then turned into a tunnel (as in, the type that cars drive through on a normal day). Despite the knowledge that the inauguration crowd would be larger than all but a few U.S. cities, I still didn't quite have the mental capacity to anticipate the length of this line. It spanned the aforementioned two or three city blocks, went into the tunnel, went all the way through the tunnel and then a ways- probably the equivalent of another two city blocks- on the other side. I wasn't bothering to keep track, but we were probably in line for about an hour before we reentered the tunnel, and at least another two inside the tunnel.

It was cold, and it would have been an angry and miserable time had it not been probably the greatest cause for celebration I've ever seen in my lifetime. People were taking any excuse to be happy. At one point, a confusing and unnecessary backward curve developed in the line due to a few people lining up on a ramp leading into the tunnel, and a few more following their lead. Everyone immediately sensed that the curve should not have been created, but it couldn't be undone right away without a few thousand people backing up a few steps. Instead, a man with a deep booming voice (a shrill voiced person tried first, but her words weren't connecting) got everyone behind the part that curved up to wait patiently while the line gradually moved enough so that the people who were ahead of the others in line, but behind them in space to catch up, so that the line straightened out, and the curve, that was making us all anxious (line psychology) was undone. We all cheered. That might not be the normal reaction to getting a line of people slightly more organized, but on that day it was the only reaction anyone thought to have.

People were chanting and singing through the tunnel. At one point a wave went down the line. No one wanted to be in that line in the cold, but it just wasn't a day for being pissed off. That was a good thing, because things would soon get worse. We were in the line that made the news, because after we made it out of the tunnel (getting out of there almost felt like being born), down the block, around the corner... news started to travel that our gate had been closed- there was a problem with the metal detector (there were a few stories floating around, all we knew for sure was that there was an ambiguous security problem). That left several thousand purple ticket holders, many of them campaign staff and volunteers, in a huge cluster, wondering if and how they would get in.

Eventually the next gate over opened up, and everyone who had a purple ticket and a few people who didn't went for that gate. There was some order on the other side of the gate, but none on our side. It was literally a 180 degree crowd all trying to cram into the same small opening. I don't think anyone was trying to push forward, but there was literally constant pressure from the force of the crowd behind me. I was a little scared. It wouldn't take much for someone to get badly hurt or even killed. If someone fell, there wasn't necessarily enough space for people to back off enough for that person to get up. The crowd was getting more restless by the minute, breaking into chants every few minutes. The main ones were "Purple! Purple!" which I was okay with and "Let us in!" which I wasn't. They had a good enough reason to be frustrated, but it's not like the cops and staff managing the bottleneck could have done much more (though on the flipside, they weren't doing much other than looking perturbed and worried).

We made it in minutes before he was sworn in. After 8 years of horror and six hours standing in line, the long wait finally came to an end. People cheered, canons went off, and the Bushes got into a helicopter, and then an airplane that took them to a part of the country where George can leave his house without having to worry about someone kicking him in the balls.

I'm glad I went, but not so much for the swearing-in or even the speech. Years from now I'll proudly tell people that I was there, but the real treat was seeing an entire city so happy. There is no amount of celebration that could be too much for this. It's like the first real day of spring when you step outside and it feels warm and wonderful. After a winter that lasted more or less my entire adult life until Tuesday, this shot of sunshine feels better than the rest, and everyone in that huge crowd felt it.

One more thing: Everyone else has said this already, but I'm going to say it too, because it's important. We didn't deserve or get Obama because we had suffered so much under Bush, we deserved and got him because we worked for it. It happened to take an enormous amount of work but we can already see how worth it it was. I mention this because the things out there worth working for didn't end on November 4th. In fact, they became more available on that day. The sun is shining, and those of us who have spent a lot of this winter in hibernation might take a chance on waking up and taking the plunge into the big and amazing unknown.

Good Strange Things (vol. 1)

Once in a while, something magical happened. Amid the grey slog, in the middle of the trudge through the swamp, a burst of sunshine would appear, a moment infused with light and color would lift me up. Maybe it’s what happens when you work hard, or when you really need it, or in accordance with some sort of cosmic rhythm beyond my grasp- or maybe it just happens. I don’t know. I’m just glad that those moments do happen, not least because they had a funny tendency to show up when I was at some sort of low.

My car broke down (for the first, not last, time) one sunny afternoon. I was on the highway, not close to anything in particular, except for a house where no one was home. I called a towing service, and found a shady spot to wait. I had half an hour or so, and I took some time to think about the operation I was trying to create in Richmond County. I needed volunteers and I needed to up my voter registration numbers. I was short of where I wanted to be in volunteer numbers almost every day. At points I had some weekly participants who helped keep the flow a little steadier, but as a general rule I needed more volunteers than I had.

I took a minute to present my wish list to the universe. I don’t mean to get into a whole discussion about what that means, so I’ll just say this. This is not quite praying, or an attempt to make a deal with a higher force. It’s more of a “Hey universe, if you want to conspire some things in my direction, I could really use some volunteers and better voter reg numbers.” The trick to asking for something like that is to forget about it as soon as you’ve said your piece. If you hang on to your wishes, they can’t fly high enough to do anything. If this paragraph didn’t make any sense to you, don’t worry about it.

The tow truck came, and as it did I get a phone call from a woman who had gotten my name and number somehow, and wanted to volunteer. She was available to come in the very next day. Great. The rest of my day was spent dealing with my car situation and figuring out how I was going to get around until my car got fixed.

The next day I got a call as I was getting up from “Jon.” I met a lot of people and it was hard to keep track of all of them, so I pretended to know him until he told me that I didn’t. He also told me that he could bring me 40 filled-out voter registration forms that day, and that he had 200 more. Let me put this in perspective: my quota was 13 a day. I was generally happy with anything double digits for a given day. 20 or more was golden. My single day maximum was around 30- maybe lower. I was happy enough to be able to get into my office that day. To have someone hand over numbers like that out of the blue left me speechless. On top of that, when Jon came by the office to give me the forms, he gave me the names and numbers of about 10 really solid volunteers. Not every one panned out, but even 3 solids is a huge boost.

That’s how it happened so often. I would scratch and claw and grind for results, and it was never quite enough, and then someone would walk in and give me everything I needed. That happened a few times on the volunteer front, but the other two occurrences that come to mind didn’t get me any volunteers. They were strange and powerful though, so stay tuned.

Belligerent Rednecks and No-Good Muslins (and Xmas with family and friends)

I had a lovely Christmas dinner at a family friend's place in our neighborhood in Brooklyn. The main sources of entertainment for the occasion were a Hollywood writer, his 3 year-old daughter and Max the cat. The hostess, who I've known since I can remember knowing people who are my parents' age, explained how the cat had come to its comfortable existence in Brooklyn Heights after growing up on the streets of Islamabad (I would explain, but I think that story will be better in your imagination). She finished the story with "and that's how we ended up with an Islamo-terrorist cat." I feel awkward printing that in a public forum on flat text, because it looks bad, but in the context of friendship and mutually understood liberal leanings, it was nothing more than a throwaway joke (she later backed up her claim with the evidence that Max had torn up a feather boa that very morning).

Later, I got to thinking about why that joke makes any sense at all. If the cat had been from Britain, maybe be would be a "stuffy intellectual" or maybe if Max was Hawaiian, he would be a "surfer cat." He could have been an Indian yogi cat or a Japanese robot cat. As it was, he had immigrated from Islamabad, so he was an "Islamo-terrorist." I want to make clear, in case it's not already, that the jokemaker does not think that the Middle East is packed to the brim with terrorists, and that if there's any commentary in the backdrop, it has to do with the loose usage of that sort of term that's infected too many conversations, both public and private.

It made me think about the rumors about Obama and his background that penetrated into some corners that not a lot of information reaches. "He's the antichrist" said a student from the community college. "You're voting for a Muslim," said a guy in a Walmart parking lot. My favorite was the secondhand story I heard of an old man holding up a sign that read "Obama is a no-good muslin." That's right, folks. Our next president is secretly one of these:

And a no-good one at that.

Over the course of the campaign I sometimes thought about why the muslim rumor took hold. For instance, I don't think it would have worked to call him a Soviet spy. I bet you could have made (certain) people believe that he's plotting something with Robert Mugabe, but I don't think that story would have gone viral. No, a totally false rumor of that kind needs to play off associations that have been pounded into the zeitgeist. The same connection of ideas that allows my liberal friend to make a joke about her Islamo-terrorist cat allows others to make people actually believe that we have an Islamo-terrorist president. The string of logic, as I understand it, goes something like this:
1) He's a black man with the name Barack Hussein Obama.
2) He spent part of his upbringing in Indonesia
3) He's a muslim
3b) He's a terrorist
Optional- 4) He's the antichrist

If you want the more fleshed out version you have to throw in a few details and a picture in between 2 and 3, and a Bible passage or two between 3 and 4, but I think the bare bones picture is more interesting and descriptive, because for so many people, the whole picture clicks into place very easily, especially the step from 3 to 3b. Some of them had details, and some of them didn't, but the basic picture was what mattered.

I came across the full range of beliefs and opinions over the course of my 3 months in Richmond County. There were two people that stick out in my memory. One was a man I spoke to going door to door on a beautiful late afternoon in September. He seemed reasonable, and at least somewhat informed on the campaigns and the issues. He liked Obama better on the economy, healthcare, education, foreign policy... and yet he was leaning toward McCain. Why? Well, he'd been getting these emails from friends and family, about how Obama was a muslim and a terrorist with a purely anti-American agenda. He wasn't sure if they were true, but what if they were? Could we really risk having such a radical as our president? Obama was potentially better, but McCain was safer. I chatted with him for a while, and maybe brought him back toward the middle, if not all the way to my side (I, to my surprise, really took to the persuasion part of the job). He was fascinating to me, because he seemed perfectly reasonable and informed, and yet he had been roped in by the extremist noise. Before him, my concept of people who believed those rumors could more or less be summed up as "belligerent redneck." He forced my ideas about that to become more amorphous and open-ended.

The other opinion that comes quickly to my mind was from a conversation that I overheard in a diner. I was waiting for my food while a family next to me discussed the election. Father, mother, parents' friend and older brother were all solidly for McCain. The one holdout was younger brother who I silently cheered on while he held his ground despite attacks from all sides. The quote that forced me to stifle a response and a lot of laughter came from older brother. They were discussing Mr. Obama's shady past when he said something that proved to me that whatever these ideas require to take hold, clear definition of terms is not on the list:
"I don't think Obama is a terrorist, but I think he's maybe a little more of a terrorist than McCain."

Fish Out of Water

On a sunny day in Durham, I learned unexpectedly (and not the hard way) about what happens when a plane crashes in the ocean. It was during my six-week campaign fellowship that preceded my hiring as a paid staff member. Being a fellow was different from being a staffer in that I 1) wasn't paid, 2) was in Durham, not Richmond County, 3) would not necessarily continue on to the election as a staffer, and 4) did not feel the psychotic pressure of being a staffer. As a fellow, I hustled more and was better at voter registration than most of the fellows I was working with, so I got high marks from the higher-ups, and I could relax when I felt like it. As a staffer, I was expected to kick ass everyday, I was rarely the most competent person in the room, and I got daily reminders that if we screw this up, the world is fucked.

So anyway, one Sunday afternoon, two fellows and myself were running our first door-to-door canvass. Once we got our volunteers trained and mobile, I went out with another fellow to do some canvassing ourselves. Along the way, we met an old white guy in this mostly black neighborhood who asked me for change, and, I think, registered to vote. Later, when we were gathering our things once the canvass had finished, he wandered over to where we were and started chatting with me.

One situation that occurred a lot with this job is the one where someone you don't know well decides to talk to you forever and ever. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think this happens a lot more in the South. Sometimes it was really excruciating, especially when I had things to do, but this guy was interesting, and I felt like I could make myself useful by listening to him so that everyone else didn't have to, and could get other things done. He talked to me for about ten minutes, and he was, to say the least, an open book.

He was a broken-hearted fish washed too far inland, but he had stories to tell from it. He was divorced, and his wife wanted him back, but he had caught her with another man, and he couldn't risk being so badly hurt again. From what I could tell, the girl could only temporarily satiate him anyway. The only thing that would truly heal him is water.

The person who comes to my mind when I think of that man is the father character in Big Fish. I feel a strong personal connection to that character, because he had a deep need for water and telling stories, and the two seemed connected in an abstract but meaningful way. This guy was similar, except that i bet if he was back in the water, he wouldn't feel the need to tell his stories.

We happened to be by a public pool while we talked. He was surprised that there could be a pool in the area without him knowing about it. He would have preferred an ocean, but he had no means to travel, and a pool in the neighborhood was worth knowing about.

When I spoke to him, he was without money or employment, but in his past he had had possibly the most adventerous real-life job I have ever heard of. He was a rescue scubadiver for the navy. Meaning, among other things, when a boat sank or a plane crashed in the ocean, he would dive after it to try and save people. He told tales of rescuing people and sharing on an oxygen tank so that they could both make it back. He once won a bet by staying underwater for two minutes. He showed me two different scars from shark attacks. They were marks of achievement. Those wounds may have been the only physical thing he had remaining from his previous life.

Some stories, maybe even most, are best when we stop telling them. I don't mean the zingers we bring up for laughs at parties, I just mean the echoes of the past that play out in our bodies and minds. This guy was different. He practically was his story. His tales of who he was gave his existence a skeletal framework. Still, I can imagine him diving off of a helicopter, plunging into the ocean and all the dust accumulated in the wrinkles of his skin washing away.

Wake up Song

I have a bunch of posts at least half way done for this blog, but for some reason they haven't made it up yet. There's one about the guy I was staying with, another about a guy I met in Durham, and another on church. Those will show up eventually, but I was inspired to put down a few words about something that happened tonight.

In the first post on this blog, I wrote about how I'm not sure how to handle all the thanks and praise I've been getting from friends and strangers for my work on the campaign. At the time, it made me feel awkward, because I wanted to respond with something like, "Honestly, I was just doing my job, and probably a lot of other people would have done it better." That's not what I would say of course, but it was always lingering behind my words. I've gotten better at taking in the thanks of others, but there was still something external about it. The praise only affected me to a point, and my responses came from that amount of depth, and no further.

Tonight all that was nowhere on my mind when I went to see a friend's episodic, gay soap opera. Every week they perform at a bar that has an upstairs part with a stage. I'd been there once before for karaoke night when I delivered a stirring rendition of Sweet Jane. The show follows the drama and exploits of a bunch of gay folk in Chicago. I was lucky enough to see the musical episode. Toward the end, completely unrelated to the plot, a character ran on stage and said "I've been living under a rock for the last month, who won the presidential election?" At that moment the cast broke into an ode to Obama. It was funny and silly like most of the rest of the show, but in those 20 seconds of song I found myself feeling unexpectedly proud. When Obama won I was happy that he would be the next president, and that the journey was over. When he started naming cabinet positions, I got excited because it made the idea of him being president more real to me. When the gay musical interrupted itself to be happy about his victory, it hit me in the chest. No one (that I know of) has ever felt the need to write and perform a song in celebration of something I was a part of.

My mind is satisfied knowing that we have a president who may just be able to steer this country through the layered, textured mess we find ourselves in, but my body doesn't know so much about that. It can't taste the recession. It can't see the wars. It can't touch the issues around where we get our energy. It heard the song though. It heard it and it liked it. Feelings source from our bodies and while the rules of bodies are logical, they are often hidden from our conscious minds. I could tell other people that I prefer that they thank me in song, but it might make more sense to tell myself that a lot of people are really happy about this, and some of them are just going to read the New York Times and thank the Obama staffers they happen to come across.

The Lyon King

If you are ever driving south on highway 177 in North Carolina, and you pass the border into South Carolina, use the driveway of the closed down gambling house* to turn around, and drive back to the last driveway in North Carolina. You'll see a house with a vegetable garden, a few horses milling around and maybe a truck parked on one side of the house. Knock on the door, and say you're my friend. You might want to time this so that you show up around dinner, but don't tell Lyon I said that.

*Right across the N.C./S.C. border are a million little casinos and gaming houses that sprung up when South Carolina made them legal about ten years ago, and then illegal about five years after that. The end result is a whole bunch of very colorful abandoned buildings that once provided gambling at a minimal distance for N.C. residents. Lyon could have walked to them.

Lyon and Christian Bell opened their home to me from the middle of August through the election. I had room, board and much appreciated company for that entire time. Lyon often said that he wished he could have done for the campaign, but he probably did more than anyone in Richmond.

Before I moved in with Lyon, I was living on the outskirts of Fayetteville with a charming Honduran family. I would have stayed there through the election if it didn't take me an hour and a half to get to Richmond County. That family had hosted other staffers and was a known commodity. Unfortunately, the campaign hadn't identified any potential hosts in Richmond County, so I had to find one on my own. I wasn't really sure how I was going to do this, but I figured I should host a couple of volunteer events and get to know people before saying, "By the way, mind if I crash at your place for the next 3 months?" I was going to have to ask that question to someone, but cold calling for voter registration drives was hard enough.

Then, one night during call time at the Fayetteville office, "Bell, Lyon" came up on my list, and my practiced thumbs entered his number. I soon realized that I had the volunteer you fantasize about during call time but almost never get. He had helped during the primary and was willing to do whatever he could from now until the election. We chatted for a bit, and eventually he asked me where I was staying. I said Fayetteville, but I was looking for a place more in his area. "We have a spare room," he said. He had known me for ten minutes.

His generosity didn't end there, and I can probably thank him for whatever scraps of sanity I had as the campaign dragged on. No matter how strange and crazy my day was, no matter how many strangers had yelled at me, or how much my numbers fell short, I had Lyon and Christian and Lyon's cooking to come home to.

And that's to say nothing of the fact that they were probably the most cultured people I met in my three months in Richmond. They had traveled all over the world, worked (as producers, designers, creative consultants) with a zillion music celebrities (the Jacksons, Mama Cass, many more that I can't remember). Lyon had met three sitting presidents and sometimes talked about Bill Clinton's charisma. They had lived in L.A., Paris, Japan, toured Europe... and yet, there they were on the same plot of land that they grew up on.

Lyon, after leaving Richmond County as soon as he could, swore he'd never go back. There was a big world waiting for him, and for a number of reasons he needed to move on. It took him decades before he had to retract that statement, but his mother was ailing, and of his many siblings, Lyon was the one to leave what he was doing and return to take care of her. Mrs. Bell passed some years ago, but Lyon stuck around. Now he's taking care of Christian who suffered a brain aneurysm in Japan, and hasn't been able to live alone since. If it sounds like he is trapped at home, just as he was at the beginning of life, know that deep down, Lyon is a caretaker. He takes care of people, not because he is trapped by his circumstances, but because he is obligated by his own soul.

There's more to say about him, he's a fascinating man, but that's enough for now, and perhaps you'll hear some of his stories if you ever find yourself driving south on NC 177.