Time 5:32 PM
I had been whacking golf balls for a good two hours after work in an attempt to quell the nervous pre-election condition that I had worked myself into. For weeks I’d been obsessing about the outcome of the election, which it seemed, had caused a serious pain in the pit of my stomach. I was convinced that this pain was a huge ulcer or possibly some rare GOP induced cancer. If my whacking golf balls aggravated this condition and killed me I figured the golf course wasn’t a bad place for this to happen. With trusty driver in hand I pictured myself crying out, “Power to the people,” as my last breath escaped my lips and I fell forward, my face coming to rest in a blanket of Kentucky Blue grass. Fortunately my heart withstood the added pressure of the election and I left the golf course in surprisingly good spirits.
I had planned to stop at home and change out of my sweaty clothes before voting but nixed the idea as I considered the time and effort involved in such an undertaking. “How long could voting possibly take?” I mused. I would get a good idea when I pulled up to the elementary school which was my voting place. The parking lot and adjacent streets were packed with more cars than the stadium parking lot of a P Diddy concert. I was glad I hadn’t left a roast cooking in the oven…not that I cook roasts but you get the point. It would’ve burnt into a mass resembling the burnt bread crumb that is George W. Bush’s callused heart.
Time 5:36 PM
I secured a book (Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut. I haven’t finished it yet.), a notepad, a pen, and several sheets of documentation, which I would need to cast a provisional ballot, and hopped in line.
.
Immediately the smell of cologne and perfume assaulted my nasal cavities and my eyes narrowed into watery slits. I wondered who in the Hell these people thought they were going to meet in the voting line. Perhaps this was a good place to meet women I ventured. Casually, so no one would see I lifted my arm, acting as if I was scratching the top of my head, and smelled my under arm. Quickly I lowered my arm. Showering might not have been a bad idea.
Someone up ahead of me was speaking Spanish so fast the sound of it was indistinguishable from the flutter of a humming bird’s wings. I think I caught the word Big Mac. Wait, that’s not Spanish. I believe the correct wording would be Grande Mac or something along those lines.
The line moved ahead ever so slowly and I found myself under an obnoxiously bright street light. I squinted from the reflection of the bald guy’s head in front of me which shown like enamel on God’s kitchen floor. I took a step closer, careful not to brush up against him, less he think me some sort of pervert, and looked at my reflection in his scalp. On my teeth I saw some of the chocolate protein bar I’d eaten in the car. I picked at it with my keys.
“Does your husband sculpt anymore?” An attractive woman in tight jeans asked another woman.
“I’d like to sculpt you in the nude…” Did I say that or think it? She didn’t look my way so I assumed that I was just caught up in my thoughts. I pulled my baseball cap low on my head just in case.
Time 5:48 PM
“Do you know what I heard?” another woman asked.
I looked up a few people ahead of me in line anxious to hear what the rather large woman with a towering beehive and wearing a brown macramé sweater had heard.
“I heard they’re turning people away from the polls for delinquent child support payments and parking violations,” she said throwing her hands up in the air.
“I hear they’re turning cabaret dancers away too,” I said with a smile.
The woman turned around, looked at me momentarily and then turned back around to complete her conversation. I could see my humor wasn’t going to win me any friends. It would be my guess that she had a George W. Bush tattoo just above her pubic hair line.
They guy in front of me with the bald head was wearing a Members Only jacket, which looked as stiff as shellacked tortilla. His movements were equally as stiff and I hypothesized he might have been born without joints. I thought I remembered reading about just such a condition in a Reader’s digest piece.
I looked up and the line in front of me which inexplicably seemed to have grown. “Is that possible?” I wondered.
“Super model, super model, super model,” some guy blurted out. I quickly looked around to see who it was that uttered this strange sequence of words but couldn’t pick anyone out of the voting line. That kind of freaked me out.
Small talk.
Yakking.
Chatting.
Time 6:10 PM
The bald guy in front of me still hadn’t moved, except to shuffle straight ahead in the line. I considered poking him with a stick to see if he was real and not some Republican robot sent to do me in. Calmer heads prevailed.
It was getting cold. I shifted. This waiting wasn’t really as exciting as I thought it would be. I wondered where are the bully Republicans that fueled my heroic fantasies were? The fantasies in which I rescued Democratic damsels from fat pasty white Republican evil doers driving oversized pick up trucks and fifty foot long Cadillacs with big bull horns secured to the hoods.
I grew bored. My stomach started hurting again. I started thinking that if they wouldn’t let me vote on a provisional ballot that I just might cause a scene. My registration had mysteriously been purged from the voter registration list. Further fantasies ensued, one of which involved me swinging on a climbing rope in the gymnasium above the voting machines and snatching up all the Bush votes and then crashing out through a window onto the top of my vehicle and driving off into the night.
I took a few more steps forward and for the first time could see around the corner of the elementary school. I noticed about ten senior citizens sitting in foldout chairs that I hadn’t been able to see before. They greeted people as they left the building and were obviously there in some sort of official capacity. I clenched my keys in my fist. Were these the Republican tough guys that were supposed to try and thwart voters? I wondered.
A laboring Buick came careening into the parking lot barely stopping before it ran through the fence surrounding the school’s basketball court. An older gentleman wearing pastel blue pants and white loafers rolled out of the driver’s side door. He hobbled around the massive automobile and popped the trunk open exposing a six foot long cooler.
“I’ve got the sandwiches,” he said, happily rubbing his hands together.
He ever so carefully, as if diffusing a cooler full of explosives, lifted the lid to expose the Fort Knox of sandwich reserves. I’d never seen so much processed luncheon meat and white bread crammed into the trunk of a car in all my days. The other official looking senior citizens jumped up from their seats and surrounded the trunk.
“I’ve never just eaten sandwiches all day before,” a woman with metallic grey hair and wearing a pink sweat suit said.
Judging by the proportions of her physique I harbored suspicions that she’d participated in many an all day sandwich eating binge before this election day but in a country where overeating is the national sport she would have only been considered a third string bench warmer on the American team of obesity. I turned my attentions to the cute girl several people ahead of me and made eye contact. She quickly took out her cell phone and acted like she was talking to someone.
Time 6:23 PM
Still bored. I wondered why it was easier to buy a gun with the intent to kill than it was register with the intent to vote.
I pulled my pants up. I wondered if anyone would notice me scratching myself but before I could make a decision my phone vibrated. It was a text message from a right wing buddy of mine telling me Bush was leading the election. I turned my phone off .
I saw a wheelchair and thought for a moment about hijacking it, faking some injury. I started to move out of line when I saw I middle aged man making for the chair. “Bastard,” I mumbled under my breath. He grabbed the chair and pushed it over to an elderly woman leaning against the school building. She collapsed in the chair. I didn’t buy her feeble act for a moment.
Time 6:45 PM
I’d been standing so long I didn’t remember the line moving. I only noticed every once in a while that I was not in the same place.
I completely blacked out on my feet for a while. How long? I’m not sure. When I came to I was standing at the top of the steps in front of the doors leading to the gymnasium.
Just inside the doors I could see the PTA had set up several folding tables. They were pedaling carbohydrates in the form of triple layered confections and high octane lemonade.
“Diabolical,” I said. “They keep you in line for hours, starve you, and then over charge you for baked goods. Someone could go into sugar shock eating this crap.”
The guy in front of me turned his head for the first time all night and this maneuver looked not unlike that of a hoot owl, although not a wizened hoot owl. He stared straight into my eyes.
“It’s for the Parent Teachers Association,” he said, his lips turning white. “I think it’s clever, making money for their association feeding these hungry people.”
“Did you ever stop to think that they created these long lines by purposely slowing down voters so they would be starving by the time they got into the gymnasium? People are naturally weak and powerless to walk past the cookies and cakes and pies. Don’t be so naive. It takes a will power like the one I possess to be able to walk right by those tables full of buttrey baked goods without even blinking,” I said.
“Next,” a woman called.
“Wait, one second, I need to get some brownies,” I said.
Time 6:55 PM
“I want to cast a provisional ballot,” I said proudly.
“Go over there to the woman in black,” a man with a stoma sitting at a long table said. I tried not to stare but had never seen seen many people with stomas so it was hard not to look. I wondered if he was talking out of the hole and just moving his lips for effect. “Over there,” he said, pointing with his pen.
“Oh, yeah, right,” I say peeling my eyes away from his neck hole.
I made my way to the woman in black. She was on her cell phone and from the bits and pieces I gathered she was talking to someone at the court.
“Hi, I need to fill out a provisional ballot,” I said.
“What do you have there?” she asked.
I handed her my documentation and explained my situation. She took my paper work and started talking on the phone again.
Time 6:15 PM
I waited, counting tiles on the gymnasium ceiling. “One…one thousand seventy eight-“
“Next,” the woman in black said to me after some time.
“Me?” I asked.
“Yes, you,” she said.
I knew the look the woman in black was giving me. It was the sorry but no cigar let me down; a version of which I’ve encountered many times when hitting on women in bars.
“But you see,” I said pointing to my papers.
I pleaded and begged, recited obscure patriotic quotes, and was on the verge of performing the tap dance sequence that James Cagney did while he sang “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy” in the movie Yankee Doodle Dandy.
“Can’t you see—”
“You don’t need to raise your voice,” she said.
“Right, I’m not raising my voice at you,” I said. “I’m just frustrated.”
“Okay,” she said, with a sigh.
She got back on her cell phone with the court and I started counting ceiling tiles. “Two thousand sixty-eight—”
“Here you can fill out this provisional ballot,” the woman in black said. “Go over to that table on the other side of the gym.”
“Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you,” I said.
She took a step back.
I took the packet which seemed to be as much documentation as I filled out when applying for a mortgage. For some time I read and reread the cryptic instructions, not quite sure what they were trying to get at. I wondered if someone was trying to confuse me and keep me from voting. With the paranoia setting in fast I quickly glanced over both shoulders and under the table and seeing no one paying particular attention to me filled out the voting sheet, signed it, and sealed it in the two envelopes provided. With the state of education in the United States being so abominable I couldn’t possibly believe that many eighteen year olds graduating from high school would be able to decipher these instructions and fill out the forms properly. I made a mental note to write a suggestion to election officials in Pennsylvania and ask them to consider a voter pop up book. Something George W. Bush would understand and at the same time be entertained by.
I waited with my sealed envelope. Bored again I checked out the dilapidated voting booths. I suspected George Washington might have laid his wood teeth on the little shelf just inside some two hundred years ago when he was voting.
“Done?” the woman in black asked.
“Yes,” I said handing her the envelope.
I stood there for a moment not quite sure what to do. Had the climax to the pre-election madness just passed me by without me really noticing it? I suspected it had since I’d just voted. I felt cheated, like I’d just opened my eyes and found the girlfriend I’d been hugging in my dreams was nothing more than a goose down pillow. It really wasn’t as satisfying as I thought it would be but of course I knew I would do it again.
“You can leave now,” the woman in black said.
“Yes, right, thanks,” I said, hurrying past the line of people waiting to vote and out the door.
Time 7:28 PM
On the way out I noticed people sitting in folding chairs spread intermittently about the parking lot. They were guzzling Gatorade & water, wiping sweat off their foreheads like they just ran a marathon. They’d been standing in a voting line for Christ’s sake.
Weaving quickly in and out of cars I made it to my vehicle and raced home. I purposely avoided the television figuring if the worst case scenario came to fruition, Bush was re-elected; I didn’t want to know until the morning. I equated my decision to avoiding a dagger slowly being driven into my heart over the course of an evening if the election results came in with George Bush in the lead or waiting until morning, if George Bush had won, and having the dagger thrust into my heart in one violent motion. I chose the later and went to bed.
Time 11:29 PM
It would be a night of little sleep as I dreamed Bush had been elected again and continued to ignore the environment, education, women’s rights, the poor, etc. I awoke terrified but quickly realized that it was a new day, that it had just been a nightmare. Not until I’d fixed breakfast and turned on the television did I realize that it wasn’t a dream. My eyes were open and the nightmare was on my television screen squinting at me through two beady little eyes. He held up four fingers to indicate four more years in office and for some inexplicable reason my dogs began to howl and I joined them.
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