Handbook to Field

[part one]

‘I begrudge that pervert his happiness.’
-E.B. Farnum, Deadwood

Feels good to be in a public cafe with children screaming and carrying each other around and falling down and ignoring their parents. A young woman hovers before me with a demitasse and I think for a deranged second that she’s interested in speaking to me so I put my finger up, like that's a natural response in any culture. She just grins and says non, she’s looking for the table number that goes with the coffee she's trying to deliver and it isn’t mon. Soixante. Table soixante pres de la fenetre, that's where I want to sit but I'm not yet confident enough to ask.

It’s about two weeks since I arrived in Montreal and the consequences of the new regime taking over in the U.S. are just becoming clear. New wounds, old ones reopened, the horror, can you believe it, holy shit what a monster, et cetera. Were I still there I would not be out to coffee pretending everything is cool.

This weird lumpy seat I'm in looks like it was fancy in someone's drawing room forty years ago and found its way into a thrift shop, then a basement, then got pulled out when the owners who made a bakery in this space decided to go the recycled route with the decor and it suits the place and me just fine.

*

On January 20, 2009, a million people gathered in D.C. on a very cold morning and many of us, even those of us who worked for the campaign, were denied entry or validation for the tickets we’d been given, but we moved with the flow, and people were singing, and sometimes we were arm in arm for warmth, and now we were under an overpass and if there had been an explosion or a panic or a stampede it would have been catastrophic, but instead we emerged into the gray light to see vendors selling t-shirts and socks with the president’s face on them and boom boxes playing Sam Cooke and we exchanged hand warmer packs and even when a fence had to be taken down so all fifty thousand of us could take our place on the Mall it was done peacefully and the cops were polite and accommodating and it's impressive now to know that such a large nonviolent gathering in that place must have felt like an insult to certain persons of interest.

Inauguration Ball. There were several of these, I think. Field organizers, a couple thousand from all over the country, gathered in the Armory in D.C. to share space with the new President, the First Lady, celebrity surrogates, political luminaries we all answered to but rarely met, and to watch Jay-Z perform. I remember the beer selection was bad. Arcade Fire played ‘Born in the USA’ and I felt at that moment all the stress, the mania, the sense of having been swept up by history lift for the first time in months. After the concert I found myself near Sarah Neufeld, the violinist, mumbled out a few words of appreciation for her instrumental side project Bell Orchestre, and she heard me and smiled and started to say something back before she was pulled away to do road tripping rock star things. Now I’m in her city and for the last seventeen years I’ve listened to her music nearly every day. And it’s cold out and an historic blizzard, whatever that means, has essentially shut down the city and I’m watching the snow blow by sideways in invisible gusts and the drifts are piled up so high it looks like I’m in a garden apartment in Chicago when in fact this place is on the ground floor and everything up to my sightline outside is white and powder and dangerous looking and erratic.

In the months and years after that I really believed things were better and were going to get better, that we’d be flying around in zero emission electric vehicles and resting on a firm memory foam mattress made of free and universally accessible healthcare. I had to believe these things because I was delusional and self-diagnosing and on and off meds and doctors to prescribe them, just like my neighbor Laura the multimedia artist who sat out on her fire escape and smoked every morning which is how we became good enough friends that we traded meds when the other one was low, both of us at the whimsy of university health plans, and this was all fifteen years ago now and situations like that seemed temporary, we were just always on the verge of something better, that's what we had worked for, me and Azam and Jenny and Jennifer and Cockhouse Magee, that's why we went to Michigan, why I went back to No Rivers to organize communities or whatever the hell we were doing and it destroyed my relationships and my sanity and any illusions I had about finding sobriety and the people in those towns were outrageous and I was right there with them and even though I was younger I really can't believe I would get up at 8 in the morning wherever I was sleeping and just meet with whoever was free and give them assignments and lists of doors to knock on and that shit would go on for like sixteen hours until I passed out somewhere else knowing I would have to wake up and explain to my regional supervisor in Ann Arbor why my numbers came up short even though I was working harder than I knew how, and how much time did I spend going back and forth along that state highway from one bleak town to another?

*

Inspired more than anything by my disgust with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and their gang of clowns I got a referral through a friend who’d been with the campaign since the Iowa Caucuses. Had a phone interview with a guy in Detroit, told him about my enthusiasm for organizing things like roasts and kickball leagues and how we’d banded with the neighbors on our block to force McDonald’s to comply with zoning laws. When I got hired I quit the bar job I’d been wanting to quit anyway and went back to Michigan. After a brief orientation at a church in Lansing I was assigned to a part of the state where I had no family, no connections, had never even noticed on maps.

(to be continued)