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.

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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.