Thursday, January 7, 2016

The Day I Bribed Voters With Taffy.




The man appeared to be in his 50s.  He had a drinker’s rosy nose and watery eyes as he emerged from a bar in the strip mall where I had my field command post for voter registration and petitions entrenched:   two folding chairs, a small table,  a ration of coffee in a thermos and my lunch in a sack, plus a big dish brimming with wrapped taffy as bait for grownups with  sugar powered  kids in tow.
 
I recognized the man for what he was: an alcoholic.  Social drinkers are not half blitzed at ten o’clock in the morning.   I know.  I wasn’t a social drinker either, and I can spot a kindred spirit at 50 feet on a clear sober day.  I snipered his attention as he made eye contact and asked if he was a registered voter.

“No, I hate politics,” he said, emitting a fog of   80-proof breath.  My nose told he  was a scotch drinker, and not the good stuff either, but the kind  you can buy by the half gallon for under ten bucks.

I reached for a registration form and a term limits petition, asking if he was a resident of Sacramento County.

“Yeah, so?”

Fine. If he hates politics, then he’ll be interested in throwing the rascals out under the term limits petition I just happen to have right here. I told him to have a seat.

He sat down.  I explained that if is not registered, he can’t legitimately complain about Premier Hussein Obama of Kenya or Commissar Better-Red-Than-Dead Pelosi taking away our guns and forcing women to abort their unborn darlings if he’s a conservative, or about Lunatic Right Wing Evangelical Bliss Ninnies in Congress if he’s a left wing remnant of the screwball Sixties.

“I hate ‘em all.” he said.    I changed the subject.    You can only push an alcoholic so far, so I asked if he had been in the service, sensing he had.

“Navy,” he said.

Same here.  We compared sea stories and swapped lies for a few minutes.  He relaxed and I started asking questions and filling out forms, giving the man what alkies want as much as they want booze:  attention

He wound up registering as a Republican and signing all four of my petitions: the term limits for state legislators; the dedication of vehicle registration fees to road repair; the limiting of state park admission fees to the upkeep of state parks; and a sin tax on tobacco that ups the cost of a pack of smokes to over six dollars per pack, supposedly for cancer research.  I say supposedly because, for all I know, the tobacco tax monies will be siphoned off for bullshit executive conferences in Nassau.

We both had a feeling of accomplishment when he left after doing his civic duty and boosting his blood sugar with a handful of taffy.  I was also four dollars richer.  I may be a lifelong Democrat/Indepedent/Commie Pinko Kneejerk Liberal, but I'm also a flinty-eyed realist.  The Republicans paid a dollar per signature.  The Democrats paid twenty-five cents, the cheap sonsabitches.

Next a nice lady of advanced years and bottle blonde hair, clad in a leopard print jacket and matching shoes, strolled by.   I recognized her as a volunteer at the branch library where I pay my overdue fines.  I asked:  Candy, little girl?

“Mike!  What are you doing here?”

Being a nuisance.   Sign my petitions or no taffy,

“What are they for?

I explained each one.  She liked the term limits petition, which she signed, but declined the taffy.   In return, I promised to run up another overdue tab at the library. That’s my small way of  helping to keep the system open, since library funding is always the first to be cut when the semi-literates in local government go on budget cutting sprees.

I really did not want to stop the next man who walked by.  He was and elderly black man wearing an I Heart Jesus cap and what appeared to be a five pound silver crucifix on a chain around his neck.   I figured I might be in for an ecclesiastical mugging right there on the sidewalk, but I stopped him anyway.

He did not preach.  He did not proselytize.  But he did sign my petitions and invited me to attend Sunday services at his AME Baptist church.

“We have a young Caucasian minister, no more than 30 years old, ” he said.    “He sticks to the Bible and doesn’t act like a fool in the pulpit.  The deacons didn’t want to hire him at first, on account of his age and his race, but now they all like him.”

He declined my taffy offering, but slipped me a schedule of Sunday services and resumed his journey to Calvary, or maybe just across the parking lot.  To him, I imagine, they were the same thing.  I supposed he was on his way to Calvary and redemption every day, every   hour and every minute of his life.

Another Christian stopped by later, drawn by the taffy heaped in my Holy Ashtray Of Wrapped Candy Offerings.  He was also black.  He appeared to weigh about 250 pounds and had the wide permanent smile and vacant look of a mildly chronic mental defective.

"Hey, O.G!” he said, meaning Old Gangster or Original Gangster, a polite term young blacks use to address old farts like me.  “Are you a Christian?” he asked.

No.   Not at all.   But I did not say that.  I just asked if he was registered to vote.  His mind was elsewhere anyway. judging by his answer:  “Is that candy free?”

Sure.  Help yourself.

“What are the yellow ones?”

They’re banana flavored.

“How about the blue ones?”

They taste like Windex

“Huh?”

Those are licorice. I don’t know why they’re blue.

He pocketed a handful and smiled down at me for a minute or two.    I said nothing.   A group of teenaged girls accompanied by an adult woman with a baby carriage began setting up a cookie kiosk nearby. Girl Scouts, dammit.  The little dears have a way  hijacking my potential petition signers.  But this time they rescued me.  I made eye contact with the saintly blockhead and nodded in the direction of the cookie Scouts.    He took the hint and left to make a raid on their thin mint stash.  

I was left alone to contemplate what Christ said about the least of His bretheren and the conversion of Saul on the road to Damascus.  But I did not think that any road to salvation, and especially to Damascus these days, is lined with taffy and cookie vendors. That would make slow going for pilgrims seeking green pastures, still waters, and a house of many mansions.
 
-oOo-

New Face For An Old Queen - rerun



The boss called. “Mike, can you do a medical run in the morning? Eight o’clock pickup?

“Oh sure. Where to?”

“The surgery center in Cameron Park. Take the sedan. You’ll pick up a patient and his caregiver at that gated complex near Hurley and Morse. Know the one I mean?”

“Ooooh yeah. Geezer Gulch. Everyone there was born during the Taft Administration. The gate never works right. Yes, I know the place.”

“Good. Be there at eight. The guy is supposed to be in surgery at nine. You’ll wait, then bring him and the caregiver home.”

“What’s his problem?”

“Plastic surgery of some kind. People coming out of plastic surgery don’t want anyone to see them, so keep that in mind.”

“Got it. No bar hopping on the way home.”

“Good lad.”

The caregiver met me at the gate. The keypad code to open the gate did not work, and the patient was not answering his phone. I expected as much, except for the caregiver.  She was not a Filipina. Almost all caregivers attending the elderly are from the the Philippines. I suspect they are grown there as crops, like plantains and mangoes. But this caregiver was a large white woman with a smoker’s cough and a messy car. Empty cigarette packs and fast food wrappers on the dash. She couldn’t get the gate code to work either. So far, events were unfolding in a normal limousine fashion. The clock was ticking, traffic was increasing and no one could reach the patient.

Then the world’s oldest living queen appeared at the gate. It was our patient. His age was indeterminate but very advanced. His hair was a shade I have only seen on the backs of orangutans.

“Hello,” he said in a voice so faint that it could’ve had feathers. “You were supposed to come to my door.”

I explained that his gate code didn’t work, so we couldn’t get to his building, and we had been trying to call him on the phone.

“Oh I had the gate access disconnected and I never answer my phone,” he said with the screwball logic of the elderly. “You should have come to my door. I’m 84 years old and I don’t like walking long distances.”

I’m accustomed to dealing with dotty seniors. I’m almost one myself. You can’t win. I simply apologized for my careless ineptitude and gave the old fruitcake the pleasure of being magnanimous and forgiving, then boarded him and his caregiver in the car. The caregiver asked, “Well, John, are you looking forward to getting your facelift?”

“Oh my yes,” John said, "I’m having my eyes done and my jaw done too.”

There is no vanity like elder vanity. And no one, not even an opera diva, is more self-absorbed about appearances than an aged homosexual. Not even me, and I’m pretty vain. I even admit to considering a face lift myself, looking in the mirror at the roadmap of life's turnpikes and dead ends on my once pretty little face, but discarded the idea. I might wind up with eyebrows permanently raised in astonishment, like Bob Dole after his facelift, or emerge from the surgical suite looking like a bald Joan Rivers.  I'll just make do.

That night I drove the boss and his guests, two married couples, bar hopping in the 17-passenger Ford Excursion. The couples were in their late 30s. The women wanted to dance. The men did not want to dance. The women had a lot to drink. The men had a lot to drink. The more the woman drank, the more they wanted to dance. The more the men drank, the more they did not want to dance. The women found other dance partners. The men found more alcohol.  This was not going to be a happy evening. What is it with women and dancing anyway?  To me it's just a zipperless sex and not nearly as much fun as the real deal.

Their last stop was Harlow's on Sacramento's busy J Street. I dropped everyone off and hunted for a parking spot in limousine limbo, where I waited for the boss to call on my cell phone.

At such times we limo drivers catch up on our reading. We snooze. We review our lives. We reinvent memories. I was accepting my third or fourth Medal Of Honor from President Kennedy when the boss summoned me back to Harlow's. I double parked at the curb, taking a slight pleasure from boxing in Honest Mohammed's Jihad Taxi. Mohammed would try to hijack my passengers by grabbing their luggage when I drove airport shuttles. Now it was payback time.

The boss met me at the curb. “They’re fighting.” he said of his guests. No surprise there. The women had been housebound with kids for years. Their men were 90-hour-a-week piledrivers of high commerce. They now find themselves married to strangers. Worse, the strangers are drunk.

A voice shouted my name from a high place. I looked up at a second floor window to see one of my last week’s passengers dancing by the open window; a tall, beautiful redheaded stripper moonlighting from her job at Hooters. She was part of the entertainment in Harlow’s private party room upstairs.

“Hey, Mike Browne!” she yelled again, and did something interesting with a water bottle as she danced.

 My boss was impressed: "Wow! Do you know her?"

“Not really,” I said. “She and her friends chartered a stretch a week or so back. I think they all work for Hooters. This one is probably freelancing.  Just your basic, average Catholic girl trying to make bare ends meet in a bear market economy.”

“I’ve got an end I’d like her to meet,“ he said, staring up at her water bottle ballet. “She seems to like you.”

“Naah. She’s just playing. I’m older’n her daddy.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” the boss said. “Maybe you could wear makeup and look younger.”

“Or I could dye my hair orange and get a facelift.'

“What?”

“Never mind.”

-o-