Well, here it is, the first meager workings of the book. This was written back in early December and meant to be a sort of preface/first chapter, written in past tense (as though I had already completed my trip and was going back over details that occurred before I left). It delves into how and why I almost gave up this project completely. Hopefully it does a sufficient job of explaining why. I would appreciate any constructive criticism, should you have any. Thanks. “Laura’s outside crying.”
“On the stoop?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”, I asked, knowing the answer.
“She thinks Bush is gonna take it. She says she’s given up hope.”
“Really. Well, we won’t know for sure ‘til tomorrow, right?”
I looked up at Max.
“Right?”
“Oh, god,” he pleaded. “Don’t you start crying, too!”
45 minutes later I was still perched on the edge of Max’s couch, not having moved since swallowing the possibility that George W. Bush would have eight years in office. One hand on the laptop scroll bar and the other in my mouth, diligently biting my nails, I looked up results for all the state congressional races. Max was outside, lighting each cigarette with the butt of his last, and I think he was praying, too.
Max was my supervisor at a software company that produced programs for government relations. We were busy noting the changes after elections, to update the company’s product the next day. All in all, it was a good feeling knowing that we were the low men on the totem pole, yet without us no one would have a product to sell. It was like a restaurant - the dishwasher may not be the most favored guy in the place, but if he walks out, you’re screwed.
It was midnight by then. I was watching the news ticker so long and closely that I had it memorized before long. As the results came in, I marked down the winners on a huge document on my lap. The two martinis and shot of Southern Comfort I downed in celebration at 10:30 - when John Kerry had 78 electoral votes to Bush’s 66 - were still knocking around in my brain, and I had accidentally marked my knees as winners instead of the electors on the charts a number of times. The only thought keeping me awake was one I had realized only as the first exit polls came back: when did faith and“moral values” become political giant killers?
As Peter Jennings interviewed expert after analyst after expert, I started to pray, soft and low. Actually, it was singing, but I meant it as a prayer.
“God bless America,”
“What we’re seeing is a result of the Bush campaign’s intuitive idea to implore the pastors...”
“Land that I love...”
“Obviously, the nation is quite against the idea of gay marriage, they do not want to allow any same-sex couple to receive the same....”
“Stand beside her,”
“Stem cell research, while the only hope for some suffering from debilitating illnesses, is still strongly opposed by the Christian right...”
“And guide her,”
“I didn’t see any young people at the polls, did you? That age bracket is all talk...”
“Through the night with a light from above...”
And so it went until commercial break, and I sang, “God bless America, my home sweet home” while calculating the cost of a one-way ticket to Toronto.
The alarm went off at 5:15 the next morning, interrupting a dream of me walking down the Champs-Elysee. Ignoring the irony, I rolled off Max’s couch fumbling to shut the alarm off, sticking my hand in an ashtray reaching for the remote. The TV showed me that the electoral vote count was up to 254 for Bush and 252 for Kerry. Ohio, Iowa, and New Mexico had yet to return their tallies. I found small hope in that.
My car had broken down the night before, so I took the train to Max’s place, since he was the only other person I knew who would be driving into the office at 6 AM. On the way in, we both seemed to have miniature psychotic episodes - a look of fear would generate our eyes, followed by sudden decrease in our jaw’s ability to fight gravity and a breathless sigh. This would cause the other to put aside their own anguish and spout random optimistic rhetoric, that, like our breath, just lingered then dispersed into the air. Even Max, who had been the rock of faith the night before, was starting to have doubts.
Faith is a tricky thing. Oxford’s Dictionary defines faith as: “1. Complete trust or confidence. 2. Strong belief in a religion. 3. A system of religious belief.” Oddly enough, it can be found on the Faggot-False page, in between “fairy tale” and “fajita”.
The word itself implies two different kinds of beliefs - one iconic and religious, and one representing everything else. I am more of an “everything else” girl. I’ve never had much use for the “He ascended into Heaven” bit. My faith tends to lie in the hope of finding good in every person rather than a man who turned water into wine. Unfortunately, I confuse hope and faith a lot. I also confuse “good” with “rationality”.
As of that morning I had been working for a year and a half solely to save up enough money to take this trip and write this book, 2 and sometimes 3 and 4 jobs at a time. It sounds impossible, but it was again an issue of faith. My faith lie in my frustration that the only qualities worth any publicity or attention were skinny, sexy, scandolous, and stupid. I was tired of sitting around a table with other college graduates and the conversation ultimately turning to Jessica Simpson. What about a single parent striving to put their kids through college? Or two people who got married because they actually love each other, even if they are poor? What about the face of an old man you see in a diner that holds a thousand stories of strength of generation we could never compete with? Why not extol them instead? There had to be more out there, better stories and far more interesting people. There had to be towns where neighbors still had Sunday dinner and people wrote actual letters rather than emails. There had to be more reality than what was offered on Reality TV.
And so I worked and saved, worked and saved. I gave up my apartment in the suburbs of Los Angeles, put my life in storage, sold my beautiful classic car - the one with the mint interior but the horrendous gas mileage - and moved all the way across the country (again), back into my parent’s house in Central Maryland, bought a dependable Honda, got a job as a waitress, another as a bartender, and another for Vocus Software. It was the cheapest way.
Of course it was weird living at home again - I had to share a bedroom with my 16-year-old brother and our dog - but it was my faith in this project that kept me going. It was as if nothing could shake it.
The fact that religious faith and its constant companion, “moral values”, crept out of their respective hallowed spaces and plastered themselves across the ballot that election year really burned me. The line between church and state was getting fuzzier by the day, and the nation seemed to be swollen with tension. Some really ugly things floated to the surface that had lain mostly dormant under a veil of political correctness. And, as the exit polls were released, the only thing I’d had faith in until that point - my book - suddenly seemed trite.
How was I supposed to get excited about driving around the country and finding all these wonderful stories of the beauty in everyday life when I had no respect for the majority of the people I would be meeting? They all seemed like bigots. Living in New York City, I would get honestly offended when my friends would refer to any person not living in New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago as backwards and uneducated. For the first week after the election, I wondered if they were right. I felt betrayed by the same people I had wanted so badly to celebrate. I felt punk’d.
I felt hurt, too, as though something loved had been taken from me. I gave up on my dream. I looked up apartment listings in Western Samoa and how long it would take to open a non-profit organization to clean the beaches. I priced new luggage, plane fares. I tried not to act like someone had died.
That lasted for five days. On Sunday, after a week of work at the office and putting in 28 hours at the restaurant, I excused myself from behind the bar, went outside, and wept.
I wept for the future, but more out of shame. How was it that my faith had been tested, and lost?
Then I remembered what it had been like before I started paying attention to politics, back when I was sixteen and in love with everyone and everything. That feeling had lasted until just before the election. If I could just get back to that innocent place, where I looked at people as people and not colored demographics, couldn’t I regain that adoration?
I realized then that my faith needed revising. Faith in nice strangers is great when you’re out to write a book on finding them, but it’s not enough - you have to have faith in yourself most of all, to keep searching for the silver lining even when it seems wrapped in shadows. Or if it turns out to just be bronze.
So I threw away the luggage store circular. I took sunsetapartmentsofsamoa.com off of my favorites list. I kept on working and saving.
I still haven’t found the lining. But it doesn’t mean I’ve given up looking. I haven’t lost my faith.
Take that, Jerry Falwell.
