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.