Handbook to Field (2)
[part two]
Organizers slept on chairs and in lofts and if you had an office in your territory sometimes you slept there. I stayed with Gary, a guy with health problems (never knew the details but he smoked a lot and stayed home in jogging pants and the same green button down all day). He'd greet me in the morning with "we gonna kick their asses today or what?" Then he'd cough a lot. Ann, a nurse and teacher in Jackson with two friendly huskies. Shawn and Jonathan who I stayed good friends with for years and were probably the best volunteers I had. Young guys and technically Out but I’d known them for months, crashed on their couch a few times, tippled whiskey with 'em, and it never occurred to me that they were a couple until I was at their apartment and they were arguing about car insurance. I really just thought they were bonded straight dudes but they were encoded not to show their affection around those parts. Sometimes I slept on my mom’s floor in Ann Arbor. For a few days toward the end I had an empty apartment that a previous organizer had rented. It had a coffee maker and that was all the ritz I needed. Once or twice I splurged on a Discomfort Inn until I saw a bedbug and that was enough of that.
One office was a big open loft space near the old state prison wall in Jackson. The day I showed up the organic grocery store was going out of business. News of the impending recession had just hit and the economy was tumbling fast. The owner was pushing hard her remaining jars of twelve dollar local honey. In that same spot I saw the first and only hummingbird hawk moth I've ever seen and if you don't know what that is you haven't seen one. Changes a person. Makes you believe in ridiculous things like democratic socialism.
There was a big rally in Battle Creek and we only got a day or two's notice. I worked the lines streaming into the minor league baseball stadium. Everyone was cool and well behaved. Both Obamas and both Bidens showed up and our guy in Battle Creek who had a serious stutter introduced them to the whole crowd of like sixteen thousand people and he got it all out without a single hitch. I didn't get to meet any of them and when it was over I just wanted to get back to my territory and find a corner to crawl into for the night.
The organizer in charge of the Jackson office kept a litter of dead kittens in her freezer. I don't remember why. But it's absolutely true that she did that. She also mysteriously lost her voice after she was told she wouldn't be singing the anthem at the Battle Creek rally. I hung around there for a couple weeks before it became clear I would need to embed myself deeper in my territory to get anything done.
The Coldwater aka CH2O office was an empty retail space on the main strip in town – ‘next to the Dally Tire’ was how everyone described the location. Everybody needs to get their tires did. The head of the local democrats was an octogenarian architect named Jerry. He was a gentle guy with a good sense of humor and bad teeth. He’d designed his own house in a style that made knowing the size of the place from the inside an impossible task. The hallways and doorways were all curved so that you could never see into the next room. Maybe that’s a metaphor but I think he was just a cool creative guy and had a chance to build something that had been in his brain for a long time so he did it. He helped me out by setting up their campaign office a few months early, giving me a space to work out of. In this place all the Democrats knew who all the other Democrats were. They were the minority, and most of them were educated or had come to town from somewhere else, like Jerry.
The VP of the party was a lady named Sandy who was married to the superintendent for several schools in the county. This guy was an outward facing Republican who supported Obama and he would give me on the sly the names of teachers he knew were good candidates for recruitment. They had a prize bulldog Sandy toted around with her. That was her hobby, driving around the Midwest to dog shows with this little animal that seemed totally clueless even for a dog and wore a diaper due to inbred incontinence. They had a house on a little lake and I stayed there a couple times but she kept the cable news on at full volume all night and it was terrifying. One night though they let me stay there when they were out of town and me and Deputy Phil (more about him in a bit) got shitfaced on booze and I went down and stood up to my knees in the lake in the early fall with the moon on the water.
The local party's main purpose was to sell tickets for their annual jubilee and as far as they were concerned that's what I was there for too. Thing was I had quotas - contacts - to make every day so unless selling tickets transmuted to door knocks or phone calls I had no interest in their fundraising efforts. We resolved this tension by agreeing to have a big event at the fairgrounds the night of the jubilee as it coincided with one of the big televised presidential debates. I placed call lists on every table and asked the attendees to call a few people on the list so we could put them on our GOTV lists. None of them did that. My mom came out and sang some meaningful songs for everyone and it was a big deal and I wore a suit for the only time on the whole campaign and when it was over I had to take a phone call from my regional supervisor and explain why my numbers for that day were so dismal.
Most of the looks I got from locals were variations on sneers. Some folks wanted to know if I got paid. The answer hurt or helped my credibility depending on who was asking.
The neighboring county was even more conservative. This is where Blackwater was founded and a bunch of other shitbag initiatives and individuals presently involved in tearing apart the civilized world got their starts there. The local Dems chairperson was the most high strung woman I’ve ever met. In that place, especially in town where the neocon think tank college was, it was risky to identify as anything other than Christian Republican. She was scared to meet with me in public and once we were at the library in this reading room off to the side because it was the only safe place to talk as far as she was concerned. A thirteen year old kid came in to browse the Young Adult section and she motioned for us both to stop talking, paranoid that he was a spy dispatched to listen to our conversation. Soviet style shit. Or 2026 America style shit I guess.
(to be continued)