I moved down here to Terre Haute, Indiana (a city which yes, has correctly predicted the presidential election winner every election since World War II) three months ago, from my hometown of South Bend, Indiana, and in this entire three months, I have yet to have a day whereupon I had nothing to do. Every single ascension of the sun has begat at least ONE obligation for me, whether it be work, school, my other thing I’m doing, LOOKING for a job, finishing up moving, cooking for my mom and her boyfriend… it’s been all obligations all the time.
This, of course, has spawned a lot of drinking. Ironically, on election night, I just FELT like an alcoholic: it was like there was a beer-bottle-shaped-hole swimming around in my blood. I’d spent the obligatory eight or so hours doing school related things, soon to do the same thing the next night, and I just had to duck out to the bar two blocks away from me for a beer, which turned into three, sitting there.
But hey, it was election night. There’s this vaudeville clown on the TV, Donald Trump, whom, I’ll admit, I’ve never actually heard talk in my entire life, and I still don’t plan on it.
But one day I SAW him talk. I saw the crow’s look in his eye, like an animal in furious defense, I saw the jaundiced expression, everything all mummified over from years and years of desensitization to the needy, to minorities, to America.
Well, as many of us know, or anyone who reads The New Yorker, Trumpie hadn’t been doing so great in recent years, starting, at the latest, in 2014. He’d lost almost all of his casinos in Atlantic City, maybe from people actually waking up and prioritizing what they do with their money, who knows. Or maybe they just got sick of the SOUND of casinos — all that clanging, all those inane, robotic exclamations from machines, the veritable noise machine right before you, the crowds of pickpocketers, the whole thing one big luck of the draw. It’s dark in casinos, so people can go there and hide their embarrassment from the rest of the world.
Well here it is. At 11:30 pm, 11/08/2016, Trump still to me is just a joke, and this election is just a comedy act, which is why I’ve spent the previous year reading things like Carrie Brownstein’s Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl and Rob Sheffield’s On Bowie… I’ve pretty much abandoned looking at my New Yorker subscription, which seems to depict this money hoarding oaf on every cover. How many times can we beat a dead horse?
I get done with the one bar and decide to walk over to wear I work, which is just two more blocks down. I’m gonna bit** to my co-workers that the Carolina Panthers aren’t even in the top 20 in the NFL power rankings. This is what I’m pi**ed off about, at the moment.
I get in there, and boom, there’s Fox News on every single TV. We’re talking 12 or so TV’s. I ask for them to put sports on one of them, they can’t.
I see strange people everywhere. I see this dude who doesn’t look like an everyday working dude… he looks like somebody who should be on The Big Bang Theory. Everybody seems baby-faced, and dismissive of me when they see me.
I end up making friends with a couple dudes from town, taking a shot of Fireball and doing a weird “Fireball” chant I just made up… but slowly the whole thing’s sinking in. The results keep trickling, Donald Trump might actually win this thing.
Something inside me dies. I feel one day closer to my funeral, when they will bury my body underground, my heart no longer beating. I feel that this thing in my hand, this burning drink that makes me forget, that gives me an escape from reality, is my greatest asset.
The people are assembled there as if they are watching sports. It’s really no different. I do not hear anybody going on diatribes about how great the candidates are going to be. It seems mainly a matter of bracing oneself against the inevitable conflict of life, and piling up hidden facts by way of subterfuge, to unleash in a monotone upon whatever sucker is dumb enough to actually talk to you. The guys I was drinking with were bit**ing about the school board… why the fu** not? Maybe they made it so you can’t skateboard down the school entrance, I dunno. I dunno why anybody would care about the school board, when we’re about to have a failing casino tycoon with no political experience as our president.
Walking home later, I’m a little less pi**ed off about the Panthers not being in the Top 20. I stop to pi** behind a building, trying to stay free of all the night perverts, etc. I get home and get a craving for Casey’s, a place I used to make fun of for being like “country pizza,” but which actually bangs out some dope late-night drunk munchies to rival all. I get there and it hits me — this really is a uniformed existence. These people working in here, they’ve got uniforms on, and this Casey’s is exactly like all the other ones… at least, its GOAL is to be exactly like all the other ones. And now me, walking out, I’m just a man. I’m just like the dude on American Psycho, or Saw. If I smoked weed, I’m even crazier. I’m just not like everybody else, and that’s all that matters. The climb to the top, something we all might have thought about a time or two, is so long and convoluted that many, many times, you just come to pity people — the workers, the killers, the misfits that grace our streets in this fine nation, in the heartland — people who would gouge out your eyes given the legality of that act, the stomped-on, and the stompers. Get ready to know that with more pristine certainty than you ever have before, America.