independiente, capítulo ciento y ocho

The Campaign

Chapter 22

I drink, therefore I campaign

                                                                                                Believe it or not,

I’m reaching the end of this thing. I’ve already got both an ending and an epilog rolling around in what passes for my brain, but before I get there, I’ve still got a couple of months to write about and a few more stories to tell. There’s an odd duality in my memory of the last few months of the campaign; my sense of that time is both compressed and expanded. It went by so fast––I blinked, and it was Labor Day, the universal starting gun in American politics; I blinked again, and it was the day of the debate; again, and it was Election Night at Scholtz, and it was all over except for sweeping up.

But those last ninety days also seem somehow longer than my sixteen previous months on the job combined––all those dawns-to-midnights, so action and people packed,  leave an impression of a much longer period of time.

I have to admit it: I was having fun––check that: I was having a motherfucking blast. By that August, the staff was (mostly) a humming machine, expertly functioning (mostly) in spite of both our candidate and senior staff.  We (mostly) (somewhat) knew what we were doing, and we’d settled into a hard groove doing it.

Oh, it was a mad jumble––in no particular order, here’s what my neurons are firing: yard signs, road trips, bad commercials, good ideas thumbs down, bad ideas thumbs up, GOTV, SOS, CCs, RCs, parties, drinking, Green Muse, meetings, pressers, stupid, irredeemably bad shit pouring out of Kinky’s mouth, movie nights, Houston, Lubbock, Fort Worth, putting Waco down, hard, putting Petulant Dick down, harder, working late into the night, working early in the morning, working in the store, working in my office, working at home, working, working.

And drinking––did I mention drinking?

I can’t make this claim anymore, but up until that time, I’d never been much of a drinker. I’d had my moments, sure, but there’re two ways to live life on the road: on alcohol, and not on alcohol, and I’d chosen the latter, which is a big reason why I was able to stay on it, so long and ever so hard, for the better part of two decades. It wasn’t because I’d taken some imagined moral high ground––as it happened, at the age of 17 I had unwittingly sort of inoculated myself with a massive martini overdose.* These days, I find myself on a kind of beer quest, fascinated by the astonishing variety of independently brewed beverages. A guitarist friend pointed out: It’s like your taste in women and music––you like ‘em complicated…shit, even your dog is complicated.

True, dat.

I get enough daily exercise that the tasty little devils actually help me maintain my weight­––every time I stop the pounds drop precipitously, so what’s a boy to do? Eat ice cream? Nah, I’m lactose indifferent. I like the buzz––even with the high test brews I gravitate towards, their sheer mass is such that I get very happy but never (almost never) out and out drunk.

The blame, if you want to call it that, accrues to me, but the source of my beer quest can be traced back to the Field team instructing me in their youthful art of depressurizing. By then, I had lost my musician’s association of booze and workplace––a life lived among drunks had done nothing to encourage me to join them––and I came to at last appreciate the social qualities inherent in the drug.

The very things that make booze such a shitty choice as America’s #1 drug of choice––motor impairment,  judgment inhibitor, true self revealer, Dutch courage grantor––have a net effect that explains its perfection as a tool for political workers:

You just don’t care.

Now, you can be a sweet-natured drunk like me, or a foul-tempered drunk like you, but the thing is, when you’re under the influence, you really don’t give a flying fuck, do you?

If you’re working on a political campaign, you’re in the people business in a big way. Constant interaction with voters, volunteers, concerned citizens, pissed off citizens, donors, journalists…you have to be careful! Don’t lead with your mouth! A witless remark, an insensitive aside, a half-assed attempt at humor–– even the lowliest staff member can inflict amazing carnage on a campaign. The fact that Kinky made a point of being politically incorrect only made things more delicate for the rest of us. Rarely did a day go by that didn’t find me walking back some lunkhead bullshit my boss had uttered: No, ma’am, Kinky doesn’t really believe in his Five Mexican Generals plan––he’s speaking to the truth that the Mexican government has a responsibility here, too…

The thing was, Kinky did sort of believe in the idea, but (like so many other politicians’ staffs all over the world), it was our job to kill the motherfucking thing. **

All that carefulness, all day long, day after day, always trying not to make things worse––it can wear you out. I lived in a world of big and sensitive toes. So the regular, ah, Staff Development Meetings we instituted in Field taught me to enjoy that loopy carelessness particular to alcohol. It’s not that I needed to say a bunch of mean shit about puppies or children––mostly, at our regular soirees, I seem to remember being in the kitchen all the time––it was the booze-granted what the hellitude. It felt good. Being among people I trusted––people, who, I think, trusted me––meant we could all relax, take a mini vacation from our necessarily sensitized existence.

I guess. In vino veritas, right? Inhibitions lowered, you’re bound to reveal more of your true self. In the cups, Big Laugh laughed more. Guns Up became more forthright––thoughts she’d normally keep to herself would come tumbling right out. You could see the surprise on her face: Did I say that? followed by a little smile: That felt good. Rutger’s odd TexJersey accent would practically turn into a purr. Bowdoin’s sense of humor, normally exceedingly dry, turned downright silly. Ong Ak, in many ways our true leader, was at once warm and aggressive––sometimes someone unexpected would turn up late and she would mount a small military operation, clearly ready to take the poor bastard out if they posed a threat to her crew. Big Springs trended lugubrious, with a sometimes alarming (but medically explicable) complexion change. Michigan liked things under control, so I really don’t know what kind of drunk he was. Harvard introduced whiskey and storytelling to the proceedings, and if things got darker because of that, well, they also got more interesting.

But it was mostly wine––I’d generally buy a few bottles, grab a couple of six packs of Shiner© for the beeristically inclined. Folks’d show up with various contributions and augmentations. Our Staff Development nights were mainly about hanging out and eating and getting a mild buzz on. It is true some nights were buzzier than others––there were times I tried to talk someone into not driving, and truthfully, I should have simply taken keys away, or something, but I didn’t.

All in all, a fine bunch to drink with––those evenings we spent together are among my best memories of the campaign. There was only one night that saw things turn mean and ugly, but that’s a story for another time.

How often did we Develop, anyway? Pretty regularly, it seems like, but (perhaps tellingly) I don’t remember. Weekly? Surely not.  Just from the various, if relatively few clear memories I have, I’d guess more like once or twice a month. What I do remember is that just about everybody showed up, just about every time, the notable exception being Petulant Dick, who, after attending a couple of our early shindigs, never attended another, although he was always invited. The path to his fondest wish––to hang out with Willie Nelson forever and ever is probably the most accurate summation I can offer of his cloudy campaign goals––clearly did not run through Field, so he had no interest in us.

At the time, I was maybe a little surprised at Field’s willingness to be with coworkers (most especially, me) on a Friday or Saturday night, but in retrospect, thinking about my own friends and relations outside of the campaign:

Everyone else in my life, no matter how much I cared for them, was a civilian.

_______________________

*Written, you’ll see, during an experimental beer break, something I do regularly to find out if I’m addicted. Somehow I’m always a little disappointed that neither body nor brain seems to care one way or the other.

**It’s hard to know where to start, critiquing the Five Generals Plan––I’ve never found a single angle I liked about it––but Kinky always did have a hard time grasping the concept of sovereignty, also a subject for a future capítulo.

independiente, capítulo ciento y siete

The Campaign

Chapter 21

It’s all my fault

1. Merch ubiquity

Remnants remain. To this day I regularly see our bumper stickers on cars of a certain age. I played at the AllGood Cafe up in Dallas a couple of weeks ago, and it pained me to see a poster right there on the stage––every time I looked over at the guitar player stage right, there he was, my old boss Kinky Friedman, staring back at me. The next day I played at the Continental Club here in Austin, and when I bellied up to the bar to grab a beer after our set, there he was again. The familiar twinkle in his posterized eyes seemed to say something far different:

Future me will embrace Rick Perry, you miserable, deluded fuck.

For a long time after the campaign, you could drive past our old headquarters and still see the big sign we had commissioned, mounted atop the business signage-type pole by the main entrance. It was maybe thirty feet tall, big enough to be seen at some distance, high enough to be seen from the freeway flyover that rises right next to it.

The building we occupied must be tough to lease out­­––it’s been mostly vacant in the intervening years––so it wasn’t that strange that no one took the trouble to pull down our colorful and (at least until light bulbs started giving out) well-lit sign. But it was downright weird when our building was resurrected as a campaign HQ ahead of the ’08 primary and the new tenants left Kinky’s Guy Juke-rendered image to loom over their doomed campaign.

The Hillary Clinton for President Campaign.

Our Ft. Worth office manager Jimmy beneath the ATX HQ roadsign

In my building.

Under a Kinky sign.

The first time I drove by there after her staff opened up shop, I thought I was hallucinating––had I gotten so accustomed to seeing it that my brain simply kept it there? ––so I made a big freeway loop and came back, this time on the frontage road. Sure enough, there it was, bigger than Dallas.* As I edged by Hillary’s headquarters, looking closely to see what her staff had done to make it, well, more Hillary-ish, and I was surprised to see the Gov Bug, in all its hot pink glory, still parked in the car wash bay at the back of the parking lot.

Goldern thing stayed there the duration of the Hillary Clinton Campaign

2. Boobitude: a reflection on mistakery

Of all that I learned during the course of the campaign, what surprised me the most was the quality of the opposition. Going in, in a kind of wonky way I was almost looking forward to the savage beating I expected from the Democrats and Republicans. I was anticipating ruthless and implacable political machines of great efficiency.

That ain’t the way of it. I guess I should’ve known––a quick list, off the top of my head, to demonstrate fundamental boobitude of our leaders, and by extension, those who work for them:

Watergate. WMDs in Iraq. Gore in 2000. John Edwards. Reverend Wright. Vietnam. The Second Amendment. The Great Depression. The Great Recession.

I could keep typing for days.

Think about the McCain campaign against Obama––if I’d been allowed to script their demise, I would’ve never been able to devise the self-torpedoing shit they came up with! And his people were pros? Despite their many fumblings, Obama’s people seemed like geniuses next to the McCain/Palin horrorshow (a few days after he chose Palin, I wrote in these very pages:­­­­­­­­­­­­­ “­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Intense loathing of Republican Party prompts McCain to steer the Straight Talk Express right into a ditch.”).

Hillary’s efforts seemed nearly as inept, remember? Her ego-mad husband was staggering around the country, misspeaking at every turn, while she––in every way a serious and intelligent woman, I believe––mainly managed to convey whininess and arrogance. What about the Bosnia we-landed-under-sniper-fire thing? Never mind her own shoulda-been-highly-sensitized bullshitometer failing to edit the words coming out of her mouth, you mean there was no one on her staff that spoke up and said, Uh, Hillary? ––there were people there that day, remember?

Leaving Kinky’s sign up over her Texas campaign headquarters wasn’t the worst thing her people did, not by a long shot, but it was indicative. Details matter. The old saw “Don’t sweat the little shit (it’s all little shit)” is some terrible fucking advice for a political campaign. You have got to pay attention. If I’d been Clinton’s guy in Texas, I would’ve taken that sign down and had our ridiculous trailer removed first thing. I would’ve climbed that fucking pole myself if I had to.

They did, change it, eventually––after it’d become a small joke around town:

Ouch

Finally tossed over the Kinky sign, emblematic of her campaign: late, sloppy, and half-assed.

I offer these observations as a message of hope and possibility––

Political Axiom # 28: If you don’t believe one person can make a difference, you’re overestimating the opposition.

3. How do I love thee? Let me county the way (okay, that is one suck-ass chapter heading)

All of which leads me to a discussion of counties. Stay with me now…

There are 254 of them in Texas. Harris (that’s Houston) has about 4 million people living in it, Loving about 60. In the course of acquiring the signatures needed to put Kinky on the ballot, I made it our business to get at least one signature from every last county––and we did, with Guns Up and Cathy Cadillac bringing in the last holdouts.

Our campaign was organized around counties, presided over by campaign-selected super volunteers called County Coordinators, advised and supervised from Austin by Regional Coordinators––all Field Team members. Under The Pro, the counties were organized in six (I think) regions. When I took over, I reduced the number to four. There wasn’t anything wrong with the Pro’s model––I just felt I had four natural Regional Coordinators and that the less time the other two spent talking to Texans, the better (although that wasn’t how I explained it at the time). My four: Rutgers, West Texas and the Panhandle; Big Laugh, South Texas (including San Antonio, the second largest city in the state), Big Spring, southeast Texas (including Austin AND Houston), and Ong Ak, North and northeast Texas (including Dallas/Fort Worth).

Of course, we didn’t have every county organized––far from it––but we had someone in place in well over half of them, and certainly all the main population centers in the state were covered. If (and I’m just making this up, but it sounds reasonable enough) .5% ––1 in 200––of any population is politically active, and if, in 2006, a tenth of that population wanted to work for Kinky, who would show up at a Loving County meeting? A severed toe? A sideburn?

Our particular organizational structure meant that we had tremendous variance from county to county. You might think anthropomorphizing a county might be taking it a little too far, but I swear they had personalities that didn’t just emanate from the coordinators.

At least not completely—they were expressions of the collective subconscious, somehow. Bexar County (San Antonio) was the well-scrubbed teacher’s pet whose hand always shoots up––Me! Oh me! Pick me! Tarrant County (Fort Worth) was the grumpy old fuck that shouts at you to get off the lawn. Smith County (Tyler) was (maybe this was just me) the divorced mom in the neighborhood that makes all the prepubescent boys feel like their pants are too tight. Lubbock was the youngest son, sensitive to all slights. El Paso was the street guy that has conversations with invisible people. Harris County (Houston) was like John Travolta in Urban Cowboy––wild and uncontrollable at first, but then it turned around and got its shit together.

And Dallas––o! Dallas, thou bane of Nineveh! Contrary to any preconceptions you might have about the city, our Dallas was the unselfconscious hippie chick that flow dances in front of the band.

In Dallas, they just…improvised. Even though I was often (more often: Ong, who had Dallas, Fort Worth and Tyler to deal with) the one that had to make the call to get them to stop creating their own t-shirts or try and convince them to actually keep track of contributions, it was my favorite county group. They got stuff done, and they hardly ever complained––and when they did complain, they usually had a pretty good reason.  Contrasted with the regular geriatric gumming out I got from my Fort Worth people, at once so needy and demanding, Dallas’ freeform self-sufficiency was downright refreshing.

4. Quicksand

But not to Nineveh.

I’ve made fun of her glacial pace––she was detail-oriented to an exquisite degree––but when you work for someone as impulsive as Kinky, that can be a very good thing. She wasn’t the only one––The Counselor, for example, tasked with the insane flea-herding task of trying to turn our free jazz interpretations of campaign spending laws into coherent Ethics Commission filings, had to keep sharp and minute focus––but where it was a matter of professionalism for The Counselor, for Nineveh it was a matter of genetic predisposition. And when it came to campaign art––that is, our t-shirts, posters, bumper stickers and yes, the big road sign, she was fiercely dedicated to getting it right. Her background in the music business made her especially attuned to the world of record covers and the artists who make them (she was a good friend of Guy Juke, aka Blackie, aka De White­­, to whom we owed our iconic image of Kinky).

By way of example, here’s the original album cover that became our central campaign image:

The image, more or less as the artist envisioned it

Behold the degradation of image:

Despite Nineveh's intense efforts, the colors lost their 'pop' ...

Further:

This pink was so far off that I think she had a stroke when she saw it...

Look at the three images, side by side, with an eye to skin tone–Kinky, Lebanese Kinky, Lebanese Kinky frequenting a tanning salon:

Left to right: Kinky, tanning bed Lebanese Kinky, Lebanese Kinky

Implacable or no, you can see for yourself: Nineveh was in a constant battle, and I don’t think she ever felt like she ever actually won, exactly––at best she was holding off the worst abuses. Some of the difficulty had to do with analog artists creating analog colors––they just don’t show up in the digital realm with that subtlety (or at least they didn’t in 2006, a million years ago in computer terms). A larger part of her problems simply resided in the cluelessness, laziness or incompetence of the various printers we dealt with: It’s yellow, right? What’s the difference?

It wasn’t that I couldn’t see the difference––she’d hold up damning evidence of color indifference, eyes blazing––See? See what these wretches have wrought? ––and I’d think,

It’s yellow, right? What’s the difference?

It’s the dark side of the detail-driven––on which details will you obsess? I appreciated (no, I really did) that she stood up for that pink, that yellow, but the sensation I remember most clearly from that time (so strongly I’m feeling it again, right now) was of falling. Election Day was the ground, rushing towards us with the speed and finality a parachuter must feel when he pulls the cord––and nothing happens.

Instead of addressing ‘chute malfunctions on the way down, we were studying our fingernails.

Again: yes, you have to pay attention to details––the question is, which ones? Every second I spent telling Dallas, No, you can’t make powder blue t-shirts emblazoned with a happy gnu saying

Glory be! I’m voting for Kinky!

(not really, I can’t remember what they actually came up with) was a second lost to a detail that might’ve, oh, I don’t know––gotten more votes? With the sand in the hourglass dwindling––oh, yeah! my metaphor! ––with the ground rushing towards us, why were we wasting time feuding with county coordinators about motherfucking t-shirts?

But the problem wasn’t Nineveh, given to micromanaging digital colors, bathroom cleaning schedules, types of #4 coffee filters (bleached? unbleached?) and candidate scheduling with equal obsessiveness. The problem was that she was

lodged

right

in the middle

of everything.

When Jewford effectively took over the campaign––in many ways a positive development, given the quality of boobitude (there it is again) that preceded him––Nineveh, by virtue of executive fiat and The Senator’s complete abdication, just sort of defaulted into the position of central authority on the campaign staff. Jewford, chief of staff and chief accountant, was mostly gone, on the trail with Kinky, and her word was (rightly) taken to be his.

That’s administration and money, right there.

In addition, she was in charge of Kinky’s schedule, which effectively put her in charge of (or at least gave her tremendous sway over) Field, press, and fund-raising. The few scraps of campaign functionality that were left––padlock choice, grout cleaning policy, pigeon shooing––inevitably accrued to her as well, because, as I think she would’ve been the first to admit, no one else could manage, well, anything nearly as well as she could.

At the very center of our campaign, then: administrative quicksand. If you wandered into it, you were going to get stuck.

At the very center of our campaign, then: an advocate for Kinky the musician, Kinky the writer, Kinky the merch begetter.

What was it like on the other campaigns? I can’t be sure of the specifics, but I can tell you this: it’s not so much that you win elections––it’s more like you lose them less than the other guys. Details matter––like this one, for example: the word “rally” was virtually absent from the campaign vocabulary. Events, fundraisers, golf tournaments, silent auctions, Art Car Parades, gigs…all these were bandied about, constantly, but “rally” ––and its close correlative subject, “voter,” were almost unused.

It wasn’t for a lack of trying on my part. I regularly tried to insert the dad-blamed voter into our planning, but my superiors just couldn’t see what they were missing.  That’s the way of structural defects––you don’t see them until it’s too late.

Top-level structure of the Kinky Friedman for Governor Campaign:

Kinky’s emcee/Borsct Belt sidekick/piano player Jewford was Chief of Staff. Jewford’s significant other Nineveh, working essentially as a booking agent, served as his day-to-day proxy.

The campaign director was The Senator. Resolutely he dozed.

Sidekick+Booking Agent+dormant director. There you have it. The campaign was Kinky-centric, and nothing I said or did was going to change that.

Every campaign is candidate-centric, you might say––it’s the name on the yard sign! Fair enough. It was Kinky’s campaign. But top staff treated him like an entertainer, not a candidate. Jewford, Nineveh, The Senator­­––they acted exactly the way road managers, booking agents, and managers have behaved in bands I’ve been in.

Political Axiom # 29: Enabling is how you get a musician on the stage––but it’s how you cripple a politician. (cf. Hillary Clinton, 2008)

Fans and voters are very different creatures. I don’t think everybody gets that. I don’t think Kinky did, I don’t think Ad Man did––and I’m positive Jewford and Nineveh didn’t. As a fan, you surrender ego and primacy––at least a little, right? But when you pull that curtain behind you in the voting booth, you become a selfish motherfucker: what’s the very best thing for me? Success in politics depends on getting that fundamental point. Kennedy’s famous formulation:

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.

was just the purest (and most brilliant) kind of bullshit. What can I do for my country? Fuck that! I want: no taxes, perfect roads, safe schools, a kickass volunteer military, plenty of money, lifelong employment, assured retirement, affordable healthcare, 8 square meals a day, a warm place to shit and superb plumbing to take it away! ––oh, and I don’t want to stand in any lines, either!

Politics, you see, is a service industry.

5. Get me a motherfucker to blame, right now

So! Who was to blame for our major dysfunction? Five years ago, I would’ve fought you on this, but with all this time to think it over, with all this time I’ve spent observing campaigns from a newspaper-ey point of view, I gotta say it: I blame me. I saw what was going on at the time. I got it. I even spoke up about it, from time to time. What I didn’t do––and I should have––was force the issue.

Would it have worked? Could I have changed the culture?

Fuck if I know. Maybe. Maybe not. The point is I could see what was going on, and I didn’t do everything I could to change it.

I’m not saying I was the only one who knew––I think just about everybody knew exactly where the quicksand pit was––but you have to understand: with a perpetually absent candidate allergic to anything that even remotely resembled administration, with a campaign director determined to drink and nap his way until he could return to the Great White North, Jewford and Nineveh held absolute sway over the campaign. Nineveh decided who was naughty and nice, and Jewford signed the paychecks. Fuck with them at your peril––we’d all seen the results. Rolling heads. Bloodstains.

They were autocratic.There were four places you could occupy in their Royal perception: with them, against them, in contempt, or neutral.

The ‘with them’ group was decidedly small:

Me, and Rose.

I’m sitting here trying to think of anyone else, but that’s it, that’s all I’m coming up with. Not even Willow made the cut, and she was on Nineveh’s immediate staff. Everybody else existed in a constantly shifting judgment matrix: neutral with, neutral with mild contempt, against but necessary, and so on, a semi-paranoid, wholly disconnected maze.

Besides Kinky himself, I think I was the only one who might’ve been able to alter the course of the campaign, to put us on surer footing for what was to come. It wasn’t because I was wonderful or exceptional or nice or good or kind or capable, it was because I was willing––I’d been willing since my first day, putting my shoulder to any task that needed one. A year and a half later––with all kinds of help, of course––I’d filled buildings with furniture and computers, cleaned bathrooms (a little less help there), gotten us phones, found us a whole IT department in one man, chilled out ten thousand crazy civilians, de-postalized a potential psychopath, pushed loose cannons off the deck, isolated and quarantined Kinky hangers-on and sycophants, stopped leaks (all kinds), disrupted sexual harassment, done the shopping, changed the light bulbs and made the coffee.

It just happened that way. Firing me would’ve been a hardcore action, for real––Kemah and I once had a serious discussion about backing up my position, in case I died, or something, but I never did put together any To Whom It May Concern instructions––it was too difficult to summarize, too much to take a couple of days I didn’t have to codify my job.

It would’ve taken a lot more than me vigorously hollering about our uncampaign to get me fired: with me gone––

––it sounds like I’m overstating it, doesn’t it? It’s not that the campaign could not survive without me––it would’ve been just fine, thank you very much––I just think there was hardly anyone, least of all Jewford, Nineveh, Kinky or The Senator, that wanted to contemplate the ramifications of me, gone.

I was the one motherfucker who knew more or less where everything was.

Which means I had the power to at least try and change things.

And I did.

A little.

Sometimes.

And that, patient reader, is not enough.

_________________________________

*In fact, it was rather smaller than Dallas–that’s just one of our colloquialisms for “very large, indeed.” “Bigger than” is pronounced biggerd n, i.e. Biggerd n Dallas.

independiente, capítulo ciento y seis

The Campaign

Chapter 20

A Christmas Tale

I was driving us home from…Utah, maybe?––I can’t remember now. Somewhere out west, for sure––I’d dropped us into New Mexico from Raton Pass, cutting across the bleak but oddly beautiful northeastern corner to get us into to Texas.

It’d been a long road trip, at least two months out. We’d been in Nashville and Boston, New York and New Hampshire, Detroit and Dayton. We’d crossed the Midwest, too­––Chicago, Des Moines, Kansas City, all in the illogical scatter of a travelling band’s itinerary. St. Louis was in there, too, but we’d hit that fine town early in the tour, on our way east.

It was two days before Christmas. Chris and I had our wives and children to see (a considerable portion of our van had been given over to gifts by then), drummer Buddha Mills his loving and extended network of family and friends. I was therefore intent on the task of delivering us. I’m a long haul specialist, and I’m good at it: I focus on the road, refuse distractions, and drive. The main problem I have is lead-footedness. I’ve moderated somewhat, but back in those days I pretty much kept the hammer down all the time. We all drove that way. It fit with the band’s culture, and with the crazy distances we were expected to cover. I had a stopwatch we used to calculate our speed, since we were pegging the speedometer at 90 on the Ford Aerostar vans we rented. Lord, we’d ramp those poor bastards up to the shuddering edge of their capacity––one time in Wyoming I got a ticket for going 112 m.p.h. The cop said he was putting in his contacts when we shot by him, fast enough to buffet his car, and at first he didn’t believe what his blurry vision was telling him.

The band had a policy that did nothing to slow us down: we paid traffic fines out of the kitty.

That night in late December, I was slicing through the cold air on I-30. It was late, 11:00 or so. Home by dawn, maybe––we were out of the panhandle, crossing into Taylor county, 20 or 30 miles from Abilene. I wasn’t going flat-out––a sedate 80, 85 mph––when the familiar lights hit me.

Fuck me.

I pulled over right away, of course, gathered rental papers, insurance, driver’s license, rolled down the window, then put both my hands on the steering wheel.

Just the way cops like it. Shit, it’s a dangerous job, and I respect the people who do it, even if I have occasionally found myself at odds with them.

These cops––two, sharing a patrol car––were from a nearby little town called Merkel. My mom was born there.  Cop #1 stuck his head in the van, took us in: a couple of fuckin hippies up front, a huge black guy lying down in the back. He gave a sniff: weed? Alcohol?

As it happened, we were clean.

ish.

––Hey, officer, how ya doing?

Do you know why I pulled you over?

––Oh, yes sir, I was driving way in excess of the speed limit, and I apologize.

No evasion, no bullshit. It’s the last thing they expect, and it always resets the cop/civilian relationship, so fragile in those first moments.

Still, the inevitable questions followed. Alas, each answer I gave ensured more scrutiny. It was inevitable. Musicians.  Going back to Austin. Those two bare facts right there are taken as probable cause by every constabulary on earth.

I’ve done the popo dance so many fucking times. I’m nearly as good at it as I am at driving across the country––so good, in fact, that I knew the precise moment when this cop and his partner made the decision to engage in a full-on search of the van.

You fellers got any drugs in this van?

And my mind magically conjured a picture: it’s after a gig at the Off Broadway in St. Louis, back in October. We’re at a friend’s brownstone, a great local drummer named Jim. We have shared an illegal smile, and now we’ve stepped outside, saying our goodnights and fare-thee-wells as we walk to our van, and I realize I still have a tiny remnant of our fellowship between my fingers. Rather than throw it on the ground, I drop it into my glasses case––

––where it had languished, lo those many weeks, completely forgotten––

––until the very moment the cop asked me the ever-popular question. My memory flash was undoubtedly accompanied by the faintest of flickers on my face, but for these cops that work the highways and byways of our great nation in the throes of a drug war, it doesn’t take much. He saw it.

So I lied. Nossir, nothing like that. Admit or deceive? It was 50/50, honestly, and that time I went on the chance my tiny little remnant would elude detection. Worst case scenario was the same, either way: me, spending the night in jail.

Step out of the van, please.

An hour later, we were still outside the van, seated well off the shoulder of the freeway in the cold north wind. A couple of more units had shown  up, county and state, and together these intrepid law enforcement officials had taken everything out of the van. Everything. Amps, guitars, drums, Christmas presents. They didn’t have any dope-sniffing dogs available––it was a meticulous hand search. They frisked us, as well, even going so far as to check my glasses case––it was in an inner pocket of my winter coat––but it was a soft, black case that had had my regular and sunglasses pressed in and out of it countless times, mashing the little nubbin of contraband deep into a dark corner, so they missed it.

Finally, one of the cops came over to me and said, I know there’s something here, and we’re going to find it, and even though they were already giving up on the van, I believed him.

They’re going to search us, I thought, and this time, they’ll be frustrated and embarrassed, so they won’t miss a thing. So while they were futzing about with the gear, I decided to make a move, and I slowly and carefully pulled out my glasses case, removed the glasses, and shook out the inoffensive little clump of paper and organicism, planning to grind it into the dirt and winter-yellowed grass.

YOU SONUVABITCH! I GOT YOU!

He was crowing, so delighted with himself, so silly in his triumph, that I had to laugh in spite of my predicament. They’d had all three of us facing forward, and unbeknownst to me, one cop had stayed in the car with the sole job of keeping an eye on us while the rest searched.

Foiled again, my evil plans for the destruction of traditional American values uncovered! Fuck! It really was kind of funny, though––the young cop, a rookie or close to it, holding up his tiny and ridiculous prize for the others to see.

Well of course I took the rap––it was mine, no one else’s, my bandmates had no idea I had it (true enough; neither did I until the fateful question). I even apologized, to everyone, band and policemen alike: man my age, trying to get home to his family for Christmas, wasting everybody’s time, holding up my comrades, wasting taxpayer dollars…

…I was sincere. I felt like shit. Not afraid of jail, or possible penalties––even in Taylor County, Texas, 1/20^th of a gram of dried up goof in a mangled shred of paper isn’t going to get much of a rise out of the legal system. Just–––

Shit. Fuck me. What an idiot.

Off I went, handcuffed in the back of County’s car, to be processed at the Taylor County facility. Chris and Buddha, bless them both, promised they wouldn’t leave my sorry ass in the hoosegow and pledged to bail me out as soon as they could get to a judge.

_______________________________________

I want to pause right here and tell you: believe it or not, this entry is about the Kinky Friedman campaign. Furthermore, this story is true in every particular. Thank you.

_______________________________________

So it was probably close to 2:00 AM by the time I was being processed at County. I was looking forward to inked fingers, a couple of flattering photographs, and a cellmate that smelled like piss. My near future held plenty of humiliation, but it’d be low grade, as those things go. I was philosophic, mainly just feeling the extra hours away from my daughter and my lovely wife––I’d get through all this just fine.

But other forces were at work, that night.

The cop checking me in to this particular hard rock hotel didn’t pay me much heed, at first––another dumbass on another Friday night, whatever, but when he finally looked up, he took in my still-handsome mug and said,

Hey, I KNOW you!

I was a little startled. My mom was born nearby, but she’d barely even lived there, and there were no connections––

You play bass with Ted Nugent!

At this point I felt like I was dreaming.

I seen you play with him, two, no, three times! Ted-motherfucking-Nugent, man!

_______________________________________

It was true. Ted, enamored of both Chris’ virtuosity and the band’s ferocity, had sort of taken us under his wing. A summer or two in the future would find us out on the road with him and Bad Company for four months, but for now, we’d done some random shows with him here and there, he’d loved us, and over my strenuous objections, the decision was taken to allow the association.

Ted lives in Texas now (a natural fit), but at the time he still lived on a big spread (or whatever it is they call it up there) up in Michigan. We had a mutual friend, a businessman and occasional concert promoter in Abilene––that’s how Nuge heard about us––who was also a bow hunter, and Ted liked to come down to Texas and kill shit––javelinas, mainly, I think––with his old pal. Well, one thing led to another. At first we opened for Ted, who folded a concert into his hunting trip. Later, we became his backup band when he ventured down.

Ted Nugent has certain message, as you may know, and it’s fair to say that I find it repellent. In point of fact, all the big, good words––abhorrent, anathema, like that––fall short of expressing the revulsion I feel for the evil shit that pours out of his mouth. But I don’t have to agree with you to play with you, and I have to admit playing with Ted was a hell of a lot of fun. Say what you will (and I will, too), that motherfucker rocks. And the association had put us in front of some of the largest crowds we’d seen in those early days, teaching us valuable lessons about making big gestures and playing to the cheap seats.

Ted himself was a kind of Rock Yoda to us. One time, after we’d played just a couple of shows opening for him and Bad Company on the shed circuit, Ted came into our dressing room in Cincinnati. He’d watched us come out and play confused 30 minute sets and made the decision to intervene.

We didn’t have opening-opening band shed experience, you see. We were a four-hour-a-night roadhouse blues machine, and we didn’t understand how to represent ourselves in a half hour for a corporate-sponsored shed quarter-full of people who almost reflexively wish you were dead simply because they’ve never heard of you. It takes a different approach, let me tell you, and honestly, we were foundering.

So Ted walked in, swung a chair around to sit in backwards, naturally, and he prefaced his rock advice thusly:

Boys, I may not know everything, but I know all things Ted.

_______________________________________

Cops and Nugent love each other. The wherefore of that is surely self-evident, but that night––by then, it was Christmas Eve––the full measure of cop/Nugent love was revealed to me.

No fingerprints, no picture. Cuffs taken off. The policeman that was supposed to process me instead jerked another guy out of a cell so I’d be alone, and told me, Wait here. The guys are gonna flip.He walked away, then hurried back. Hey, you want a coke or something?

I am not making this up.

Forty-five minutes, maybe an hour went by, and the cop comes back and takes me out of the cell, and leads me into county copland, a scatter of desks in a big room. He must’ve put out an All Points Bulletin, or something––fifteen, twenty cops hanging around, their pink, shiny faces turned towards me, and I proceeded to answer questions about Ted.

Ted Nugent, the Justin Bieber of the Taylor County popo.

I am not shitting you. I answered questions for twenty minutes easy:

What’s Ted like?

––Well, he’s a real funny guy, and a helluva guitar player.

Does he carry a gun?

––Oh, yes, he’s got a Glock nestled against the small of his back. And that’s just the one I know about. [Laughter all around]

Have you seen him shoot his bow?

––

Well, it just went on and on. I knew my audience, and spoke only in the most glowing terms about the guy, leaving certain things out–– like the fact I’d fought both Chris and the record company tooth and nail about having any association whatsoever with Ted the Bile Spewer, and lost. It’s possible I made some shit up, even––I saw Nuge kill a bear with his teeth––I had a roomful of law enforcement officials eating out of my hand.

And that was it. I was outta there, no record, no penalty, no fines, nothing. Off the books, like it never happened. Somehow I found the boys, or they found me––this was well before cellphone ubiquity––and we were on the road again by sunrise, home for Christmas.

_______________________________________

I still haven’t sorted out all my reactions to Kinky’s …what to call it, even? His acquiescence to Rick Perry? His betrayal of all of us who worked for him? His pandering to a bad guy? How do I reconcile the generous, funny, sharply intelligent guy I know with a man who could commit such an act of destruction?

I can’t.

That’s the way of it, sometimes. If you can’t support a duality––at least––you’re barely human. If you love somebody (okay, I fucking admit it) and you see them do something awful, do you quit loving them? I’ll grant you maybe it depends, but mostly, for your sake, I hope your answer is no.

Once upon a time, there was a guy named Ted Nugent, so opposite me in my beliefs that we might’ve been from different species. I detested everything he stood for. I never wanted to play with him, or meet him, or get to know him. Then, despite all my strenuous objections, all that happened anyway.

And despite myself, I liked him. I still do. If he walked in that door right now, I’d laugh and try to give him an awkward man hug. He’d say some sarcastic shit about my bald head and show me a picture of a llama with one of his arrows sticking out of its eye or something, and I’d hate it, just as I hate his far-right-of-Rush-Limbaugh bullshit––but I’d still  be glad to see him.

Once upon a time, there was a guy named Kinky Friedman.

independiente, capítulo ciento y cinco

The Campaign

Chapter 19

I read the news today, oh, boy

Reporters show up for work every day, whether there’s news or not. The local beats always offer something to write about––crime and potholes are eternal.  But if you’re a political reporter, or a member of the punditry, you may have to get creative––you gotta write something.

At the same time, if it’s August in Texas, actually getting out there and hitting the pavement to find the stories can be a wilting prospect. The handwriting may have been on the wall five years ago, but the awful carnage had not yet started––few could foresee just how deep the cuts would go, or how many jobs in journalism were going to simply vanish. It was therefore still possible in 2006 to encounter a species nearly extinct in 2011: the lazy reporter.

No kidding: one time, I took a call from a reporter from a fairly large paper––it wasn’t meant for me, I just happened to be walking by the reception phone:

“Say, what’s the website for Kinky’s campaign?”

Of course, that was below and beyond, but at the time I was quick to make a cynical assumption about the general quality of the members of the Fourth Estate. No surprise there––the relationship between political campaigns and the media is textbook dysfunctional: mutual need and loathing.

For most of the time since the campaign, I’ve worked for a major metropolitan newspaper; I’ve lived and breathed on both sides now, and the combined experiences have softened my views of both politicians and reporters. Regardless of affiliation or ideology, most in both professions are trying hard to do a good job. That may be hard to believe, but it’s true. And within the larger circle of the well-intentioned, there’s a smaller (but bigger than you might think) circle of talented, hard-working people. At her core, a good reporter is neither liberal nor conservative so much as she’s skeptical. Good politicians (by which I mean people effective at governing), regardless of the necessary noises they make to satisfy the majority they need to keep their jobs, are mainly practical.

But all of them, good, bad and ugly alike, are human, and for a Texas reporter in August, it’s only human to pick up the phone, or get on the Internet, or do just about anything to satisfy the Content Beast in air conditioned comfort.

Don’t get me wrong––tons of good stories come in those ways. But it’s also true that there’s nothing quite like beating the rugs to get the dirt out. For a reporter that might mean poring over unbelievably tedious public records or cowering from gunfire behind a shattered wall––it all depends on the story. Any reporter worth her salt will tell you, though: the best stories are out there. You have to go get them. And you have to be willing to change directions, because often the story that needs telling is very different than the one you set out to write.

From that August, some of the headlines from around the state:

Campaigns take a summer break

You can feel the cool air from the vent in that headline: look up the candidates’ schedules online––gee, they aren’t really hitting it all that hard––call one campaign flack or another for a quote or two to end your piece, and voilà! 350–400 words on A6 and a happy editor because he didn’t have to do a damn thing.

In point of fact, the campaigns weren’t really taking a break. Maybe some candidates were, but if September 1 really looms as the start of the silly season, do you think anybody was taking it easy? The shoe leather, go out and get it question would be: What are campaigns doing to get ready? ––followed by actually visiting campaigns, talking to volunteers––

––melting in the fucking heat.

Strayhorn staff use is raising questions

This was one of those stories that a reporter writes after getting lucky––you have to frame your Open Records request just right––then other newspapers pick it up, then every other campaign issues statements about the inherent evil of the offender, then the offending campaign stonewalls with some sentence that says absolutely nothing, then it turns out the other campaigns are really doing it too––and just like magic, a whole week’s worth of new stories have been generated!

––and hardly anyone outside of political and media circles pays the slightest attention.

The story about Strayhorn using her staff at the state comptroller’s office for campaign work was solid air conditioned journalism. Sifting through piles of documents, teasing the details out that make a story––it ain’t easy, trust me.  And in looking more closely at her record, reporters discovered she’d given a 128 million dollar tax refund to Texas Instruments after hearing from their tax consultants, who, oddly enough, had given her more than a million and a half bucks in campaign contributions in four years. Naturally, all the other campaigns immediately started kicking the shit out of her. The Senator went so far as to file a criminal complaint against her, although the AG’s office said it wouldn’t act until after the election. Besides the usual stonewalling, Strayhorn engaged in the classic Austin insiders are out to get me tactic, sort of glossing over the fact that she was as establishment as they come.

I work with some really good reporters––one of them is literally an investigative reporter; that’s his job description, and that’s what he does. Each is very different in their methods––their interview techniques, their research habits, even the way they type––but I’ve noticed one odd trait they all share: when something big shows up, they don’t speed up, they slow down.

The Strayhorn story was a classic candidate for slowing down: go deep into the numbers, ask more questions, develop more sources––another month’s work might’ve proven devastating.

Is it the media’s job to devastate?

Oh, yes.

Instead, the story evaporated, ignored, in the August sun.

Bell attacks governor on state park funding

A classic example of our codependence: one of the candidates’ staff does some research, looking for something to hang on the front-runner, finds a good angle, puts out a press release and the papers run with it. In this case, it was a pretty okay story––fucking with parks is liable to generate more heat with your average voter than, say, a staff-is-being-put-upon-by-its-boss story, which is, after all, generally true of everyone everywhere. If you’re a reporter hoping to keep your shoes from melting on 130-degree pavement, you can see the appeal: the bulk of research is done––all you have to do is call a couple of officials, get comments, ditto the campaigns––A section, page 2! Maybe even page one, if it’s a slow news day. Maybe your assignment editor can force a photographer to drive out to a state park somewhere and take a picture of a broken fence, or something.

It’s easy to see how the park funding story could’ve also been real dynamite with more effort. Perhaps the major story about Texas in the first couple of decades of the new century: structural deficits are causing our state to bleed out. Tracing the origins of those structural deficits (yes, it was known, if not widely reported; Strayhorn herself offered a dire and prescient warning), going out and interviewing park rangers, scouts, cost and benefit analyses, and comparisons with other states’ spending levels­­ would’ve given the story real legs, but, just like the Strayhorn story, it just wandered off, perhaps addled from the heat.

(Our comment on this particular issue? “‘The governor does not have the power single-handedly to increase funding, but he’s not putting pressure on the Legislature to make parks a priority,’ said Friedman spokeswoman Press Goddess.

‘We don’t have an actual (park financing) plan at this point,’ she added.”)

Of course, you could write anything that popped into your fool head about Kinky––he was a summer-shunning reporter’s dream come true. But with just a little work, you could turn that thermostat down––

 

ELECTIONS ’06: TEXAS GOVERNOR Can Ventura’s team do it again? Aides put a wrestler in governor’s office; now they’re in Kinky’s corner

––and hear that compressor kick in. It’s a legitimate piece of work, as far as it goes––you make an observation: Hmmm, Kinky’s got Adman and The Senator working for him. So you call the campaign, you call Adman––hell, call everybody, throw in a couple of outside and opposition pros, and then you cobble together a nice little think piece about whether the Minnesota Miracle (that’s not exactly what Minnesotans were calling it after Ventura’d been in office for a couple of minutes) could happen in Texas!

Well done, sir!

except…

Ventura’s team?

Get the fuck out of here.

I mean, we were happy to have the media believe that, but the truth is the campaign functioned around and over and through those guys. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone on the campaign that saw them as much of anything beyond a wrong-headed, even naïve obstacle. After Jewford cut his pay, Adman had faded way back, but in convincing Kinky to never ever say anything of substance, he’d done his damage. All that was left for Adman at that point was to produce a trio of the most laughably inane, say-nothing TV spots I’ve ever seen.

Don’t believe me?

I’m serious.

The Senator­, the Jessie Ventura team member installed as campaign manager, briefly and inexplicably awoke from hibernation to file that complaint against Strayhorn, but soon enough our shared office wall was again vibrating from his snoring.

For my final AC submission:

CANDIDATE CHAT Kinky Friedman
Fourth in a series of editorial board interviews with Texas gubernatorial hopefuls

In this last (2010) gubernatorial election, with perfect (and justified) hubris (is it still hubris if you don’t fail?), Governor Perry flat-out refused to meet with any editorial boards, as telling a reflection on the current state of newspapers as anything in recent memory. There was no penalty––zero––to him for simply refusing to answer questions. Hell, he refused to debate, period­­––and still stomped the guts out of his opponent, Democrat Bill White.

Lacking, as we did, ten million in the bank (hitting all the TV markets in Texas back then was a million dollar a week proposition), we relied heavily on our candidate’s colorful quotability, so when, in early August, The Dallas Morning News asked Kinky to come in for a chat, we of course jumped at the chance, and the perfect beat-the-heat approach to journalism was achieved: a few questions assembled, the answers then transcribed by some intern.  Not a drop of sweat. You can read that bit of work here, if you’re so inclined.

I don’t blame you if you’re not.

___________________________________________________

Great journalists are as rare as great alto saxophonists, painters or brain surgeons. But deep cuts in the workforce along with tremendous increases in workloads have scrubbed the profession, creating a remarkably high level of skill among the survivors. I’m sitting here trying to think of one hack among the many reporters I know (and I know a bunch of them), and I’m not coming up with one name. It’s popular to diss the mainstream media, but if you think no one’s reporting anything anymore, you’re simply not reading enough.

The thing that interests me about those stories from that August isn’t their shortcomings––it’s easy to sit here with five years’ perspective and make judgments­­––it’s how different each one might’ve been. It’s not a knock: news stories are remarkably similar to music gigs––you spend all day getting there, then it’s just over. They come, they go, and like gigs they’re hard to remember for very long.

___________________________________________________

As you may have noticed, I’ve been trying to write a factual history of the campaign I worked on. It has ballooned to book length. At times I’ve sweated bullets trying to unpack my heart and brain, and at this point only death will keep me from getting to the end of my story. But I gotta tell you:

I’ve gotten it all wrong.

Based on memory, emails, contemporary news accounts and conversations with others, I’ve tried to tell you a true story, but I’ve missed the capital T Truth of the thing. I sometimes wonder if maybe the only way for a writer to really get to the true is to write fiction, but deep down I know the real truth: I just don’t have the chops.

___________________________________________________

A reporter (or her editor) gets an idea for a story. She makes some calls. Some get through, others don’t. She reads a little background, gets a perspective or two. She digs up some documentation­­––not all of it, some of it­­––and (clock ticking, the clock is always ticking) sifts through it. If it’s a daily, sometime in the afternoon she starts writing. All too soon (and deadlines are getting earlier and earlier at newspapers as production staff gets cut back along with everybody else) her story will have to be in. By early evening, her work is done. She’s very quickly become conversant with a topic, a mini expert, even, and just as quickly, she’ll move on: new day, new story. And if she’s any good, she’s achieved a version of the truth.

___________________________________________________

The biggest headline that early August for those of us who were toiling away on the campaign?

Texas gov. debates scheduled for October

independiente, capítulo ciento y quatro

The Campaign

Chapter 18

The Peasant

Conventional wisdom has it that voters don’t start paying attention until after Labor Day. In Texas, people are wrapping up vacations, getting the kids ready for school, hiding from the blistering heat, daydreaming about football––who the next governor might be is the last thing on anyone’s mind.

I remember reading a few stories in newspapers that August characterizing the various campaigns as being “on vacation.” Maybe the other guys were, but we sure weren’t––I was putting in long hours every day, and I wasn’t the only one. If people were going to suddenly start paying attention in early September, we needed to be ready.

And we needed money.

To raise every possible dime, we kept the store open six days a week––Saturdays had turned out to be good retail days, with people wandering in, often tourists from other states––or countries. I remember making a German couple come back with an American so they could buy an armful of Kinky swag through him.

Keeping it open meant someone had to be there, of course, but who wants to sit around in a store on weekends? No one from senior staff, of course––aw, hell, motherfucking no––and I was reluctant to press underpaid underlings or volunteers to come in. Nineveh felt no such compunction, however, and at her usual molasses pace decreed we schedule it out, a task that fell largely to Rose.  Those Saturday shifts quickly became a form of currency, to be traded freely––no one wanted to be there, humoring the civilians as they bought our merchandise––our little dolls, our puerile slogans, our catchy graphics.

Since I was usually there anyway, I often took shifts, just to get people some much-needed time off. Take a little pressure off, you see––good for morale. At some point we put a computer out on the floor of the store on the big fold-out table that faced the door, and I passed many an hour there, catching up with emails and phone calls between greeting citizen shoppers, our twist on retail politics.

I’d been working alone in headquarters after hours and on weekends for many months by then. Running Operations and Field were both people-intensive gigs, so those quiet times were critical––not just for trying to catch up (I never did do that), but also for thinking ahead––not to mention preserving my tenuous grip on sanity.

Forty hour work weeks? M through motherfucking F ? ––that shit makes no sense to me. Before joining the campaign, I’d been a hard-working musician, spending hundreds of days every year on the road, so the notion of holidays and weekends was a little foreign to me, okay? In music, if there’s a job, you take it––you never know when the gigs will dry up.

And maybe––just maybe––I’m a bit of a workaholic. I’m a little dubious about defining myself that way, though: are those Pakistani dudes that are always at my convenience store workaholics? What about the Mexican guys that build…well, everything in Texas? Are they? I come from peasant stock, man––when there’s work to be done, you do it.

But there was something else was at work in me, that August.

______________________________________________________

The sun would hit the windows and glass door entrance to the campaign store just so at a certain point in the late afternoon, and the light would refract in a peculiar way. I had that already-familiar I’m in an aquarium feeling and I looked up from the computer, surprised it’d gotten so late.  It was going to be dark before too long.

There had been no customers for an hour or two––I’d been sitting in an uncomfortable plastic chair, typing away on a vintage computer, completely absorbed. So I locked up, turned out the lights, and headed back to my own office through the silent emptiness of our big block of a building. I figured I’d get a little more work done at my own desk––faster computer, ridiculous-looking but comfortable chair (I bequeathed that thing to Rose after the campaign­––I wonder if she still has it?), and my burgeoning iTunes collection––by then I had the ‘Cello Suites, The Goldberg Variations, tons of Joe Pass, The Miseducation…all sorts of goodies to blare out, and no one to bother. On my way, down the hall past Rose’s and Nineveh’s offices, across the big floor, I glanced to my left at the Field suite in the southeastern corner of the building––

––and stopped, transfixed.  Maybe I was a little punchy––it’d been a long year––maybe the aquarium glow in the store had opened some neurological synapses, but there was something in the way the light was slanting through those windows, the way the motes of dust hung in the air, that just locked me to the spot.

It has happened to me a handful of times in my life: unexpected moments of perfect stillness and harmony and clarity and balance.  Once I was in a hammock in South Austin. Another time I was at the foot of an unnamed peak in Peru. One time it came over me way out past the waves, off the southern tip of Kauai.

Perfect peace.

At that point in the campaign, I had every right to be completely burned out. At the point in the campaign I should’ve been one crispy motherfucker­­––and truth be told, two weeks before my little Nirvana happened, I was. I would’ve made it to the end, I think––I’m a tough guy, and people were depending on me––but I was flagging, no doubt about it.

What a difference a day makes. Doors I’d closed, locked and bolted that led into rooms I’d boarded and shuttered were thrown open, and the sunshine flooded in. Everything felt brand new; everything had heightened texture and detail. It was still settling in on me, that Saturday in early August, when I stood, transfixed by bliss, staring at beams of light through a dirty window:

Oh, shit. I’m in love.

A year and half’s hard work behind me, three grueling months left––I should’ve been running on fumes, exhausted, but instead I was unbearably cheerful, happy and energized. And on top of being thoroughly Cupidified, the––what? gods of campaigning? ––had seen fit to bestow on me two minutes of Perfect Bliss, which, if you’ve never experienced it, is like a month off in Tahiti.

I was alive. I was having fun.

What an asshole.

I’m only now realizing just how irritating that must’ve been.

independiente, capítulo ciento y tres

The Campaign

Chapter 17

The Tribe

I didn’t really think of it as team-building. They were already a team, and a good one. The first little party I threw for Field after we turned in the signatures was mainly motivated by gratitude.  I knew they’d never get much in the way of thanks from Kinky or any of his senior staff––

––and I’ve been sitting here trying to type why that was, starting sentence after sentence, but neither my fingers nor the tiny brain they are allegedly connected to seem to have an answer.

Maybe their ingratitude was a kind of repressed embarrassment.

Taken singly, three moves made in the course of the petition drive––hiring Fuck and Ureen, letting The Pro go, and continuing to pay heed (and treasure) to Adman––were indefensibly stupid, but together (and they were inextricably linked) they formed a nasty little troika of bad judgment. The Field team––not singlehandedly, but indispensably––vaulted over this exceptional wrong-headedness and delivered to the campaign its finest hour.

It’s (in some) human(s’) nature(s) to resent the very people that have saved your ass. And if you’re the boss, it’s easy to forget why you’ve enjoyed success––in defiance of physics, credit rolls uphill. But to enjoy the fruits of others’ labors, it’s sometimes necessary to create little fictions, and with those little lies it sometimes becomes necessary to belittle or marginalize the very people who have left you sitting pretty.

Whatever the real reason, I wanted to offer some puny acknowledgement for a job well done, that’s all, so I threw a party one Friday night––I made a big pot of marinara, threw together a big ass salad, bought a few pounds of pasta, some Italian sausages, a big loaf of bread and some cheap wine. At that first little shindig (if memory serves, and it’s an indifferent servant at best), several other campaign folks dropped by––it was by no means closed­­––but at the end of the night, it was just us.

The Tribe.

A tribe––at least in the way I mean it here––is tough to define. I looked it up, thinking I’d use the dictionary entry to launch this capítulo, but it doesn’t satisfy. A tribe is above all a feeling, I think: Someday you’ll understand you were in one.

______________________________________

I’ve been in bands all my life, of course, a few for years. Greezy Wheels is a family––it has all the characteristics. The Chris Duarte Group was more like a fire or SWAT team––not in militaristic terms, but in the way we took our objective––which was to flat-out tear it up on stage, then move on before anyone quite realized what’d hit them.

Only one was a tribe, though, and as I think about the tribe that formed within the Field team, I’m reminded of that band, the only other time in my life I’ve had that particular feeling.

The Vanguards was just a band, at first. It was only after several extreme setbacks, many shared hardships, and a number of, ah, communal experiences that we found ourselves transformed into a tribe.

I first realized it in a big, crowded club with an electric roof in San Francisco. We’d played a great set for an appreciative crowd, but after we finished, the atmosphere changed: the music became mechanical, the clientele got glassy-eyed and slack-jawed. It went from being a rock club to a shitty cocaine meat market. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! ––it was just time to go. But the band, a sextet at the time, was scattered all over this big, 3-storey joint, filled with hundreds of people. I was on the first floor, and as I scanned the room, murky with smoke and disco lighting, I immediately spotted the others, who immediately spotted me. We all made the same hand gesture––hold your four fingers out straight, then open into a ‘V’, index and traffic, ring and pinky. Repeat. It meant “Let’s split.”

In that moment, I realized: we’re a tribe. Six wildly different personalities, but we shared a particular consciousness. In addition to our sign language­­––opening and closing that same ‘V’ more quickly meant “Let’s eat”; pointed downwards, thumb between a peace sign meant “I need to pee,” and there were many others––we had a shared vocabulary, an ethical code, a certain way of dressing, an affinity for the West, a taste for the big big, a bizarre preference (for musicians) for sleeping under the stars to getting hotel rooms…

…none of which was ever discussed. It just happened. Our tribal nature was a fact well before I ever realized it, and that tribal feeling remains with me to this day, even as we are scattered by years and estrangement and death.

______________________________________

From time to time in these pages I’ve alluded to various myths: from King Arthur to The Lord of the Rings––even Star Trek! ––in all such stories, the fellowship is sensed before the bonds are formed. Long before I assumed Field directorship, the place I found myself the most often was in the west wing of our first headquarters, where Field resided. Just as often, they’d stop by my office. Ostensibly, there’d be some business we’d be conducting, but there was something else going on, notable as much for who didn’t feel the pull as who did––unconsciously, a circle was being formed.

Perhaps it all sounds a little mystical, but I often think you can substitute ‘complicated’ for that word––magic isn’t the inexplicable, it’s the unexplained. The universe features some mighty complex relationships: I can explain neither this computer nor the fingers typing on it:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

I’m not only comfortable with that idea, I’m in love with it. Sitting here, now, in this room, big windows to either side of me, I can see only trees, buffeted by a strong north wind here all the way from Canada. Outside, it’s 100 degrees, or close to it, but that wind means change, nonetheless: a change in temperature, a change in season, a change in me. Time is passing. My end approacheth, near or far, but soon enough, that’s for sure, and the explanations I can offer for any of it­­––the wind, the trees, the hot sun, the change of season, the physics of time, the animation of life and what lies beyond it––is so incomplete that for all I know I may as well be a fearful mayan or a crazy christian.

So I’m left to describe the Tribe, but not explain it. First came fellowship. Then came shared experiences. Then the fellowship was threatened––with dissolution, or worse, with Fuck––and I stepped forward, not to lead, but simply to save. Then came hard, satisfying work together, then––at frequent and regular gatherings we called parties but were really more like powwows––came shared food and shared drink.

Lots of shared drink.

I think communal mind-altering has more than a little to do with how a tribe gets formed, but it’s just a component. Somehow, a culture was formed out of forces both random and highly specific. There were a couple of Field team members that weren’t of the tribe, even though they were often present in every way. I think you had to have a special feeling for everyone in the tribe. Not love, not even like––something more like a willingness to pick up a spear and try and hold off a saber-tooth tiger on behalf of the Others…but that’s not precisely it, either, although I think it’s closer. If you only …felt…kinship? to one or two or three, indifference to one, hostility to another, you couldn’t be in the the Tribe. Somehow, you had to be all the way in. Yet we each separately cared deeply for many others on the campaign. I adored Rose, but I don’t think she ever gave us a thought. Friday, dear to me, well-liked by all, would join our rituals and excursions from time to time, and greatly enjoy herself, but she never had…or felt… whatever it was.

Ah, fuck, I’m making a mess of this.

The tribe, as it emerged that summer, was PolySci, Rutgers, Guns Up, Ong Ak, Big Laugh, and myself. On the Field in that snapshot but not in the Tribe, by their own choice, were Big Springs and Dick. Dick’s allegiances were always elsewhere––I think he always thought it mostly his bad luck that he was stuck with us. On the other hand, in my view, Big Springs really was in the Tribe, but held himself apart, as humans sometimes do. There’s a certain surrender required when you’re folded into a tribe, and I think he could never quite bring himself to that point.

I get it: for good or ill, I, too, have held myself aloof.

The Tribe wasn’t fixed, though. Almost as soon as we made that (mystical) crossing, Harvard and Michigan came right in. Others enjoyed the tribe, but didn’t join; still others resented it. But there was no cliquishness to it: we weren’t even really aware of what we’d become at the time––or at least I wasn’t.

That night, at that first party, we identified our emerging and complex allegiance. Some interior force, as old as our species, directed us to join together. We had a purpose to serve, and perhaps some small destiny to fulfill. And when our time was finished, we disbanded, as did the other tribe this life has given me. But deep in my heart I still carry the same feeling for both tribes, an ancient and mystical connection:

I’d snatch up a spear to defend any and all.

independiente, capítulo ciento y dos

The Campaign

Chapter 16

Love and politics

The main thing I remember about July of 2006––almost the only thing: I dove off the cliffs of Acapulco into the deep blue water.

No, I climbed K2––and got hit in the back of the head by a comet.

No––I was simply working on the campaign, trying to defeat Rick Perry, and this plump little half-naked fucker with wings put an arrow right the fuck through my heart.

Yes, that’s right: your faithful narrator fell in love.

No, I’m not going to go on and on about it, and no, I’m not going to tell you who set my poor heart beating so (okay, okay, a hint: he had a hairy back––and I didn’t mind!), but I can’t leave it unremarked––this is a personal history of the campaign, after all, and to leave out the fact that I spent the last months of it floating about 3 inches off the ground would be disingenuous.

But there’s more to my admission of love-struckitude than lending verisimilitude or emotional resonance or whatever fucking thing to my story.

Recently, I opened up my browser to see this on Twitter:

Oh, Kinky RT @TexasTribune: “These days, I would support Charlie Sheen over Obama” bit.ly/no1zPe #2012

That’s what Kinky said: he’d support Charlie Sheen over Obama. If you follow the link, you’ll eventually get to his little essay in The Daily Beast (sorry, I don’t have the stomach to take you there myself).

Charlie Sheen, eh? That’s just stupid, of course, but unsurprising (if a little sad) from the guy I used to work for after seeing him kiss Tea Party ass last year.  Follow that hyperlink and you’ll see I already ranted, and I don’t seem to have the energy to re-rant.

What makes this…  Oh, fuck me, alright, here it is:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/24/kinky-friedman-rick-perry-s-got-my-vote.html

Kinky’s new best friend: Rick Perry.

Fucking unreal. Everything we ran against: cronyism, the dismantling of education, the evisceration of the middle class, racism, sexism, hatred, christian fundamentalist superstition…oboy: come to Texas––Rick Perry’s legacy is here for all to see. His performance as Governor––and the evil excesses of his party, pals and appointees––has left our state stupid, barefoot, and pregnant.

fingers…twitching…  must…rant…

Nope. Whatever anger or hurt or feeling of betrayal Kinky’s embrace of Rick Perry provokes must yield to a more pressing question:

What the fuck was I thinking?

The question runs like a polluted river through this whole memoir, and it’s time I answered it. I know, I’ve taken it up, now and again, but here goes, all in one place:

• I was the liberal version of a pissed-off Tea Party fuck: I was angry at the Democrats, I was angrier at the Republicans, and I thought a strong showing from an off-the-wall candidate would send a powerful message to both: Govern, motherfuckers;
• With the Governor in Vegas, we might could get something done: If somehow we went beyond a strong showing––if, miraculously, Kinky won, I was sure he’d be the most hands-off governor not just in the history of Texas, but in all the world, ever, past and future, parallel dimensions, everywhere, everywhen. Which meant that, if I was given some sort of position, I might actually be able to accomplish something;
• Foxhole Syndrome: The campaign had almost nothing to do with him, and he almost nothing to do with it: I was there for my coworkers;
• Job Joy: I was good at it, okay? It felt good, learning new things, discovering new capacities––for the previous 30 years, more or less, I’d rambled all over creation playing bass, and now I was doing something different, and doing it well;
• Paycheck: Ugly, but true––bills must be paid. Parties must be thrown.
• Eye-blurring self-deception: You make a certain investment in something, or somebody, you see, and after a time, you simply…adjust your filters. It’s an old story in politics, as in love: that pol you work for (that man you love) turns out to be a [insert adjective here], but you’ve entwined life and livelihood and self-image with the fucker, so let the compromises begin;
• I was floating above the ground like a Hovercraft of Love: For the last several months of the campaign I was in love, Jack––my heart soared like an eagle; it ran like a cheetah; it bumped and thumped like a ’68 Impala in East LA––and things that might’ve given me pause (things that’ll be examined soon enough in these pages) even with all the delusions and justifications collected above simply couldn’t get past that crazy catnip feeling I had. I was head over motherfucking heels, and the whole world glowed…

Well! If that ain’t a sorry-ass list! Not to defend myself––I don’t feel much worth defending right now, as I absorb Kinky’s sickening suck-up to Perry­­––but because this little man has effectively taken a shit on every single person that I worked with––that worked for him––I will point out that his true colors were slow to emerge. His mealy-mouthed prayer-in-school bromides aside, his language (to the extent he deviated from his mostly meaningless string of one-liners) was uniformly progressive. He frequently spouted deceased Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone’s (the man The Senator replaced, appointed by Jessie Ventura) well-known remark “I’m for the little fellers, not the Rockefellers,” he was sort of reasonably steadfast about a woman’s right to choose, rather more forthright on gay marriage and the death penalty.

When the racist charges began to surface (don’t you worry, faithful reader, we’re getting there), I was outraged: Kinky’s no racist! ––but do you know why I really said that? ––more pertinently, why I believed  that?

Because I’m no racist; ergo, I couldn’t possibly work for a racist. You see what I mean? I never went to Kinky and questioned him closely on that––or any––issue. I made a lot of assumptions.

So: am I bitter? Has my former boss let me down?

Fuck that. I let me down.

Over the long course of writing this memoir, I’ve had quite a few conversations with other people that worked on the campaign. Now is as good a time as any to offer the standard caveat:

The ideas and memories presented here are mine and no one else’s.

But my various conversations with other former staff have done much to clarify both memory and understanding. For insight into Kinky’s apparent devolution since the campaign from a slightly cranky progressive to a fawning FOX fuck, one particular talk I had with a former staffer was revelatory. I don’t think she’s read this, or if she has, sporadically, so awhile back I was telling her about a particular posting––the Tea Party ass-kissing entry, referenced above, I’m pretty sure––and how I’ve been pretty hard on Kinky.

“He deserves it,” she said, “but I have a different view of it than you. You see a guy that believed one thing, then changed directions––like there’s some kind of progression, you know?”

I nodded.

She took a drag off her cigarette. (I let people smoke in my house, even though I’ve long since quit––what can I say? –– I’m sympathetic towards beleaguered minorities.) “The thing you’re missing is that he’s the loneliest person I have ever known in my life.”

She went on: “Think about it: he ran for governor, came in fourth, then went around questioning the count, remember?” We both laughed. “And on some level, he was serious! ––all those people that are always telling him what he wants to hear, laughing at his shitty jokes, telling him how great he is, how they and everyone they know voted for him––part of him believes all that crap. But at the same time, he’s so smart––he has to know that it’s bullshit, that underneath all that sucking up, there’s nothing.

“Who loves him? Do you?”

I shook my head. No, I can’t honestly say I ever loved the guy…

“Does he?” I shook my head again. I was starting to get it. The man’s self-loathing was palpable. Take it from a fool who knows.

And he we are again, back where I started: Love. Brimming with it at the end of the campaign, I couldn’t credit the little clues he was beginning to give out about himself.

I’m in love; ergo, the world is filled with love.

_________________________________

Half believing everyone loves him, half knowing no one does, he reentered politics in 2010 as a Democrat––many of whom loathed him, believing (mistakenly, I believe, but you know how beliefs are) he was responsible for inflicting more Rick Perry on Texas (and now, conceivably, if the universe really has it in for us, the country, and the world). Then he was team-playered off the governor’s race in deference to Bill White, then he stepped into the Agricultural Commissioner’s race, where he was stomped in the Primary by a mean-spirited little toad by the name of Hank Gilbert (who was in turn slaughtered in the General Election by incumbent Todd Staples).

All the while––even during our campaign, Kinky was appearing on FOX. After the campaign, he became one of the regular loudmouths-in-a-box that make up so much of all the cable news stations’ programming. Fox loves people who agree with them––hell, don’t we all? But they really make you feel extra special there, you can just tell––part of the secret handshake club and all that.

And so it was, perhaps, that Kinky, looking for love in all the wrong places, finally found a place where he could at last feel the warm glow of love.

Not knowing that warmth sometimes comes from other places besides Love…

________________________________________

So: Am I giving the guy a pass, even after he took a shit on everyone that worked so gruelingly hard for him?

Well, when I started typing this, I had just read his vicious and cinder-hearted sneer, and I was outraged. He’s entitled to his opinion concerning…well, anything, of course, as am I, but Rick Perry? And call it “respect” for an “adversary”? Rick Perry? What the fuck did Texas ever do to Kinky––besides make room for his eccentricities, that is?

But now, days (and drafts) later, I realize: we didn’t love him.

Kinky Friedman is irrelevant. The Charlie Sheen quote is just another nail in a cheap, plywood coffin. I can’t say I’m sorry I worked for him––there was so much love in those days! And the fact is, we did hurt Perry, and we used Kinky to do it.

My only regret is that we didn’t hurt him more––we could have, you know.

Lovingly.

independiente, capítulo ciento y uno

The Campaign

Chapter 15

Soshul Meedya

How much things have changed: September 2006 was when Facebook went from a college-only network to the Any Old Schlemiel, planetary-wide behemoth we know so well today. Do you remember? Before then, you had to have a college email (or what, be in an FB-invited high school network? –god, it seems like decades ago) to be on the network. Mainly because of our college-age Field team members (all but two—Dick was 30-something, Big Springs closer to 40) and interns, the campaign already had a sizeable presence on Facebook.

Volunteer coordinators Big Laugh and Ong Ak (interns and civilians, respectively) worked seamlessly together to ease fresh and eager workers into the political machine we were building, and part of their process must’ve been to identify affiliations and fold them into our ever expanding networks.   

I think. I mean I know they had a big hand in it, but in the way of such things I suppose it also bubbled up on its own to a large degree. Our earliest Internet organizing tool was via Yahoo Groups, really little more than an HTML-ey offshoot of that Model T of web interaction, the ListServe.  It served its purpose well enough in its county coordinator capacity, but the problem was it was top down, not bottom up–which is of course the direction grass grows. You couldn’t readily find those Yahoo Groups, and even if you did, you couldn’t get in: you had to be found, then invited. Attracting new voters—and volunteers, and donors—requires that particular chaotic infectiousness that Facebook does so well.

All virus-like and all.

From the beginning, we played close attention to college campuses, knowing that our only chance lay with masses of non-voters voting. And nobody doesn’t vote like American youth doesn’t vote. But Kinky had definitely captured the imagination of many students on Texas campuses, at least among what I’d call the smart-ass, sarcasm-loving set—which is of course a significant portion of any university population–and along with the politically attuned, highly motivated C’mon-kids-we-gotta-VOTE! students, we meant to capture every single hungover, bong sucking, oh-is-today-election-day? vote we possibly could.

So when Facebook went public, we were not just ready—we were there, Jack, and the instant we could, the instant FB went public, we had an official page up and running. The other campaigns took their cue from us, but they never matched our presence.

Presence is one thing; knowing what to do with it is another. It was our great good fortune that not only did we number among ourselves many early adopters, we also had a first adopter in Harvard. He was there at the birth of the goddamn thing, which I’d argue was as much a cultural as it was a technological matter. Kids can tell the difference between some campaign managing, banwagon-hopping I-read-about-social-media-in-Political Fuckhead Quarterly type and a page attended to by one of their own.

At this point in history it’d be ridiculous for me to sit here and offer philosophical points about Facebook (750 million users? What?), but at the time its potency was not obvious to everybody, least of all political campaigns, so there was a perfunctory feeling to the other candidates’ pages. One of our odd strengths was our lack of the traditional iron-fisted, control freak campaign manager—the main thing The Senator wanted from me, as both Field and Operations director, was to leave him the fuck alone. Another was the fact that Kinky himself detested the very idea of the Internet, calling it the Imp of Satan, or some fucking thing like that. And although Jewford and Nineveh despised Ureen, I think they’d nevertheless been infected by her notion that Field was essentially useless after Kinky got on the ballot—it was all about TV going forward.

Which may have been true enough ­­–if we were going to ever have anything even remotely resembling TV dollars—and we weren’t.

But that combination of indifference, hostility, and delusion at the top left us underlings at the bottom with near complete autonomy on the new frontier. I can’t claim any visionary stature­­—I simply noticed that the Field team seemed to know what they were doing, and I let them do it.

Brilliant strategy, if I say so myself—I recommend you try it.

Political Axiom # 27: If someone on your staff appears to know what the fuck they’re doing, let them do it.

Seems obvious enough, doesn’t it? But campaign managers, like generals, almost always fight the last war. Hold on there, partner, you might say—you guys came in last, maybe y’all should’ve fought the last war, too.  Fair point, but the truth is, just about the most unlikely candidate for Texas governor imaginable pulled down something like close to half a million votes, and our youth-driven, bottom-up sophistication with that new-fangled world wide web thing played a large part in what I now see as our startlingly successful failure.

Thinkest thou I protest too much? Mayhap, motherfucker, and I’ll concede there’s no way to prove how many votes resulted from our ground-breaking use of social media, but I can attest, first hand, to its usefulness at organizing—if Kinky was going to be at your college, or simply in your college town, our hyper-activated politico collegians knew about it and turned out en relative masse.

I can’t actually remember whether we fucked with MySpace, which is telling enough in itself, I suppose, but we probably did­­—the main thing is we were plugged-in, turned on, and ready to go. Harvard found among the volunteer/intern ranks (henceforth, if I remember, volunterns? Interteers? We’ll see) a few like-minded folks and launched (forgive my shudder) a semi-official blog. I say semi-official because approval for the thing never went higher than me. It would’ve only provoked a lot of over thinking, likely followed by categorical refusal. That sort of overcontrolling anality may have its place on a focused, disciplined campaign, but with Kinky rolling around the decks, it was unlikely the bloggers would do anything except lend us a rational aspect that didn’t actually in fact exist.

So I read and approved the posts prior to publishing–for a time, until it was clear my instincts were correct: these smart, serious, thoughtful young bloggers all would’ve made better governors than our actual candidate.

Thus the summer progressed, June into July: Kinky travelled around the state, appearing at fundraisers set up by scheduling despite Nineveh’s astonishing talent for gumming shit up. Thanks to Press Goddess’ skill and his own hypnotic sway over the summer-stoned media, Kinky garnered far more features, interviews, radio and TV appearances (read: free coverage) than his opponents–but magically without actually ever being asked any substantive questions. The Merchenaries fulfilled, the fund raisers struggled, the County Coordinators whined about the fuckers at HQ in Austin, Kemah answered stupid IT questions, The Senator golfed and snored, Jewford viewed any and all with suspicion, The Counselor struggled to contain all our frivolous ways (or, if it was too late, justify them to the Ethics Commission’s satisfaction), while I furiously tap danced on a narrow plank as a distraction so the Field team could continue in its attempt to organize the state, from scratch, by whatever world wide wacky means we could find.

independiente, capítulo cien

Capítulo Cien: Alternate Universe  

Capítulo cien.

Chapter one hundred?

What the fuck? Or, as they (oughtta) say in France, Quoi le fuque?

The little dialogue that pops up after I hit the ‘publish’ button told me this’d also be my three hundredth entry, which offered a shock: if a writer is simply a person who writes, I’ve clearly become a writer.

(I don’t feel like a writer, I feel like a tongue-tied lout; nothing comes out the way I want it)

But I don’t want to be just a writer, any more than I wanted to be just a bass player—I want to be good at it, and so (in much the way I learned to play) I started writing. No lessons, no creative writing workshops, just write. As with playing music, this approach is the long route to craft, but the quickest way to voice, which is the only thing that actually interests me. It’s not like I have a lot of time left—I’m 53 years old.

And still a long ways from any kind of voice.

Anyway, these pages have turned out to be a kind of workshop. Independiente—a behind-the-scenes telling of Kinky Friedman’s run for governor of Texas in 2005-2006—unexpectedly took over the workshop, and at this point only my demise will keep me from writing my way to the end. But this 100^th chapter/300^th entry thing feels significant somehow, so I wanted to write something for the occasion.

Yesterday afternoon, on my way home to teach a bass lesson, then have a long rehearsal with the trio you can hear in the previous entry, I biked through the Capitol grounds, and it came to me:

What if Kinky had won?

What follows is of course completely imaginary pure fantasy,

An alternate history:

___________________________________

Wednesday, November 8, 2006

2:37 PM

Oh, my fucking head.

Getting drunk last night was preordained. We’d worked oh, so hard, for oh, so long, but I think everyone even remotely connected to the campaign knew it was over. If it was a funeral for the campaign, though, it was a New Orleans funeral—we were gonna by god celebrate. But when the results started coming in, disbelief gave way to shock, which turned into exultation, and when the Big Three—Strayhorn, Bell­—and finally, reluctantly, painfully, Perry—conceded, one after the other, our wake turned into something more like a riot.

I have no idea how I got home—I don’t remember anything after that last toast Kinky gave to staff in the party room at Scholtz’ …but evidently I drove… my car’s parked right outside my door (I mean right outside; it’s on the sidewalk of my townhome-ish apartment, the bumper an embarrassing inch from my neighbor’s wall)(note to self: watch that shit, son, you’re part of the Governor’s Office now), but something I do remember from earlier, when I was an alcohol-burning, joyous, pre-blackout drunk is kind of telling, I think:

Sholtz Bier Garten is nestled in the complex of state office buildings north of the Capitol, and as such, Texas State Troopers have jurisdiction in the neighborhood, not the APD. These guys wear boots and brown and khaki and Stetsons, and they carry a little bit of a paramilitary vibe about them—probably because they rarely have to deal with all that regular cop shit. They’d fully manned our event—in addition to the large, boisterous, hard-partying Kinky crowd, every major news organization was there, even though it was universally assumed we’d lose, so there were production trucks, satellite uplinks—the works, lining the block. (When Kinky was declared the winner—the local ABC affiliate KVUE called it first—there was a mad rush to move resources from all the other Election Night parties, leaving the other candidates with one camera and a disgruntled reporter)

ugh.

–sorry. I’m gonna go throw up, then eat about 4 aspirins and take a nap

4:15 PM

well, that’s better. It feels weird, not being at the office. I just opened emails and listened to my messages—I’m going to be on the phone for the rest of the day. I don’t think anyone else has answered their phones, either, and the media is going nuts.

Anyway—where was I? —— last night, drunk, but not yet blacked out, right?

Okay, so there’re these extra rooms at Scholtz’, large and small, and one of the smaller ones has a door that opens right next to the main door. Well, I was wandering around with a glass of Spaten Optimator, and a group of us decided to step out the door to accommodate a couple of smokers. I’d totally forgotten I had a glass in my hand, and was happily following the others out, when one of the Troopers roughly grabbed my (not beer-carrying) arm and growled he’d arrest me if I went out that door. Hey, I’m a law-abiding guy (mostly), you know? — and I was about to apologize, when one of our County Coordinators (I think) told him,

“You’d better be careful, officer, that guy you grabbed is a big shot in the governor’s office,” slurring “governor” and sh-ing “office” —sounded like gunner and offish—

…and the cop let go of my arm. Quickly.

It mattered.

…

…

and I glimpsed roads to glory and hell, all in the same instant…

10:48 PM

Of course, here I am—I wound up at the office anyway. TV was camped out, along with a gaggle of print and radio guys, outside the locked gates, hoping someone would show up. They’ve been doing updates out there, trying to figure out how to frame the reporters in a shot with our huge, impossibly high pink and yellow campaign roadsign.

The biggest news—that Kinky’d beat unbelievable, impossible odds, that we’d stunned the GOP, stunned the Dems, and taken the election—was almost dwarfed by headlines he made when, after his acceptance speech, Shannon from the AP had hollered out, “What’s next, Kinky? Are you going to Disneyland?” to raucous laughter.

“Fuck, no,” Kinky said from the Garten’s stage, his voice raspy over the PA, “I’m going to Vegas.”

Not even governor yet—Inauguration’s not till January—barely elected, and he’s already pissed off Evangelicals, protectors of children’s delicate sensibilities, opponents of gambling… I dunno, Disney, probably, the Chamber of Commerce…

It’s going to be a fuck of a ride, that’s for sure.

So the big, Pearl Harbor-sized type (no kidding)

KINKY WINS

above the fold of every newspaper in Texas (and a few elsewhere, as well—shit, it was front page, albeit calm and sedate, on the New York Times)

had, beneath it (and the near-universal shot that Cabluck shot of Kinky, both hands aloft making Vs, chomping on a cigar), a smaller, but still pretty massive headline, under the fold, some variation of:

New Governor uses ‘F’ word, says he’s ‘Going to Vegas’

I told the assembled reporters that we could all look forward to a more decorous and less foul-mouthed governor in the future, but that Kinky (although he’d never admit it; he predicted he’d win) was as shocked as anyone to be standing there last night before Texas and the world, an improbable victor, and that his excitement had led to an unfortunate choice of words…

blah,blah, blah

Press Goddess is nowhere to be seen today. I guess the whole campaign is nursing at least the hangover I’ve got (well, notJewford and Nineveh—but they went to Vegas, too, hahaha). We’ll all get back to work tomorrow. After my brief statement, I declined further comment (how quickly we learn), turned down all requests for interviews, locked the gate behind me, went into The Senator’s office (there’s a TV in there) (you’ll never guess where he went!), and sat down with a dozen newspapers, flipped through the news channels, and tried to absorb it all through this motherfucking recurring headache. Then I went to my desk and started sorting out calls and emails.

The work is just beginning. We’ve got a state to govern.

Thursday, November 9, 2006

12:05 AM

Rutgers called. Most of the Field team is standing outside my door, bearing beer and wine and wondering where the fuck I am.

“Wait for me,” I said, “I’ll be there in 15 minutes.”

______________________________________________

(I’m going to continue this 100th alternate universe chapter from time to time—I’ll let you know when I add to it)

The Smell of a World that is Burned

It’s my 299th post, and the next capítulo is numero cien…seems like 300 and 100 oughtta coincide somehow. This recording will come down soon, give a listen (it ain’t Chasm anymore):

Music by Trip Trio