Getting started

It is Friday morning and I am in the New Voters Project office, firing a laser gun at a piece of paper.

I don’t think they like me here. I get cold looks as I wander through the dirty office, just checking things out, seeing what’s going on. They sense the tourist in me, and they feel my lethargy poisoning their dedication and strength of will. Their humorless attitude does not appreciate my wandering about, and their strides become brisker to compensate for my devastating failure. My identity and even my very right to be in the office were called into question by a suspicious beast as I forged the jackal pit of the door-to-door canvasers, and frankly I could see a hint of reluctance in the eyes of the person I had already met, whom I subsequently brought in to validate the legitimacy of my presence.

Eliot shakes his head at me and says “sit down” while selecting some papers from a pile in the middle of the floor. “Don’t fuck things up.”

“I don’t know why I keep fucking it up,” I reply. Eliot rips the laser gun out of my hand and shows me once again how to scan the barcodes on the pages and the reference code sheet in order to enter them into a database. Eliot knows me, and tried to anticipate and prevent this kind of trouble by assigning me to what he said was “mindless work,” but I have nevertheless let both him and myself down by registering what I figure to be around a 30% success rate with this thing. “That’s too close,” Eliot says, and I move the gun away from the page. “No, not THAT far.”

I tilt the gun sideways and fire three times at the barcode on the page, jerking my arm back and forth, feeling the imaginary shockwaves. This causes an error and makes me reset the program, but I do it again anyway.

“Hey, can I have one of those t-shirts?” one girl asks another girl who is seated in a chair adjacent to mine, unpacking them out of a box. She looks up and the natural smile fades from her face.

“Oh. Uh, well, well, we…”

“…oh, are they…”

“—yeah, they’re uh, they’re for—”

“Oh, that’s okay. No, that’s fine.” I feel an icy chill in the air.

“Do you want a poster?” the t-shirt baron offers.

“That’s okay,” with a wounded smile. She turns and walks away.

I drove in last night under the full moon. It happened as I had envisioned for the last two weeks, and even more than I had hoped, it was restorative, being out on the desert highway at night, in the middle of nowhere, looking at the outlines of the mountains in the distance. I felt my self (two words) coming back. It felt good. It felt fantastic, really, and I knew, at least, that for once I wasn’t experiencing a kind of disconnect with the knowledge of what I really wanted. It seems all too often that I’ll be after something or other, and then if I get it, well, what a surprise, it’s not satisfactory at all—in fact what I really wanted was the opposite thing. But this time I got it right. Wonderful. I arrived in Las Vegas and picked up Eliot five minutes before his birthday ended, and after having a drink with his coworkers we headed to our hotel, the Tropicana, where we spent an hour and a half getting to our room and where I finally drifted off into a turbulent sleep.

Things aren’t going so well on the laser gun front. I keep getting taken to an error page on the computer to which the gun’s connected and losing my place on the barcode sheets. I envision the final printout of my work, a travesty of thrice-repeated names and jumbled entries, and give up and get up and go get Eliot for help, which I’ve done too many times already. “How do you keep getting to this page?” Eliot asks, confused, curious and a little frightened.

“It’s not my fault.”

“No,” says the girl beside me into her cell phone. “No. No.” I wait through a pause. “No, I’m not going to Texas, not even for you. No. There’s nothing in Texas for me. I can’t go to Texas.” She is overweight and pasty, and she sounds convinced, almost haughty, but I wonder if I don’t detect a bit of uncertainty in her voice. “Yeah, that’s great,” she says with a smile, changing her tone completely. “Nah…..word, kid?” she asks the phone without even a hint of irony. And then switching back: “fine fine, no, don’t try to plan your life around me, just because I’m your best friend and I love you and you love me…” I turn back to my computer. She finishes her conversation with a sigh. She turns and announces to our empty room—and I, alone in the corner, stare straight ahead and pretend like I think she’s talking to someone I haven’t yet realized doesn’t exist: “You know what I could really go for right now? I could really go for some ABBA…”

* * *

The sun is setting and all of us here at the phone bank are getting tired and delirious from trying to get one hundred strangers to definitively commit to attending two rallies this weekend. What exactly these rallies are, no one has told me—it hardly seems important at this point, especially when held up against the common notion around the disgusting office that the guaranteed attendance of a hundred young kids we cold-called will lead to the attainment of a vague and anonymous but lofty and long-pursued goal. We sit with lists and call people who live on streets named Midnight Ride Dr. and Pinnochio Ave. and Wonderful Day Rd. and Cowboy Fiddle Ct. “Okay, Jose, so we’ll see you at eleven, okay?” Eliot tells his phone, his free hand pressed against his temple. Eliot and his friend Jesse have entered into a momentary contest, calling people from the same list and racing for telephonic connection, and this confirms my previously held belief that these people aren’t just after an altruistic general victory, as their aura might suggest, but are in a small way hungering to deal a crushing defeat to someone. But I’m glad to see that; hell, I know that feeling, and as far as I’m concerned it’s far preferable to the austere attitude that prevailed around the office. It seems like people are lightening up: I’m now an accepted presence in the office, and I’ve even been offered a smile or two—and thank god, because frankly that attitude was engendering some spiteful ideas in my own head, and I was already dreading having to explain to Eliot why I had to cut his phone lines and break his laser guns into tiny shards in order to teach the ugly people with whom he had regrettably associated himself a much deserved lesson.

Lo and behold, the hundredth person commits to attend the rallies, and suddenly the core group, reduced in number to six or seven now, bursts into applause and laughter, music plays from a computer (something someone has been waiting for with his finger on the button) and a fierce jubilation sweeps through the room as the folks can relax for a moment and enjoy a rare tangible result of their efforts, before a hush falls over the room and the smiles fade away and the final objectives of the whole deal creep back out of the shadows, and the talk once again turns to what has to be done next. I myself was responsible for one hundred and forty-five phone calls, but did not draw a commitment from a single person—nor did I have the opportunity to try out the angle I felt would be most persuasive: that people in need or want of sexual contact could not afford NOT to attend these rallies, at which dozens upon dozens of worked up 18-24 year-olds would be stomping purposefully around, endorphins flowing, looking for, whether they acknowledged it or not, an immediate physical outlet for their freshly stoked seething purpose-laden passion.

Eliot and I get back to the office from dinner, it is dark, and the sleep deprivation and insane tempo of this whole thing has apparently affected these people’s memories, because they’re sending me back to work with the laser gun, even after this morning’s debacle, which ended with my fleeing the office with my tail between my legs and being forced to watch television in the hotel room for an hour or two. I start to work, and suddenly, as though their disregard for my earlier failure had endowed me with power and cunning, I become a master with the laser gun. I tack the reference code sheet up on the wall so I can shoot it head-on face to face with the appropriate aggression, and I scan packet after packet of voter registration forms with the swiftness of an assassin and the grace of a gigantic mythical swan. I let go of the gun and it is coated in sweat from my palm—victory sweat, triumph sweat. I’d consider licking it off the gun if someone was around to pay attention to me.

Now, the deal I made with Eliot was, I would put in a good six hours a day for the Cause, but here I am, at hour number eight, and still going strong. This isn’t like me….why don’t I want to leave? Why aren’t I desperate to run away?

A moment of conversation overheard in the office:

F1. Why aren’t you smiling?

F2. “Why?”

F1. Yeah, why aren’t you smiling…?

(PAUSE)

F2. Well, because I’m going through a really shitty time in my life.

F1. Oh.

F2. Yeah, that’s why.

F1. I’m sorry.

F2. You should be.

It’s nice to be in a situation where I’m not the touchy one. And now I’m thinking about leaving after all. Well, these extra two hours are still a victory. A step in the right direction.

<>
I move from one room in the office to another, then another, and am confirmed in my previous impression that the mood has lightened, that spirits have risen. In fact, as I wrote that sentence I was sprayed with canned string. Hell, maybe before I know it these people who seemed so dour and exhausted just this morning will be engaged in nefarious sexual exploits and screaming their voices horse with orgiastic glee. At the moment, though, everyone is simply sitting around, scanning pages, listening to music, conversing quietly. They seem to be content—their brows are relaxed, their heads at rest upon their necks. They sit easy.

It’s a moment of calm in the midst of the storm.