Tough Titty said the Kitty, the Milk Tastes Good...

Stately, plump Robbie Jackson passed the tub of his grandmother’s fried chicken round as we sat around our picnic blanket on the lawn outside Independence Hall on the afternoon of the Fifth. Margaret, in her signature yellow suit, was mixing relieving cocktails of bourbon with chamomile tea (which Robbie took iced, no bourbon). Frank Belloc, combat psychologist, had procured some fantastic, pink-ribboned brisket from Lucy’s. No one talked about politics.

I spent the morning making cipaille, the famed layered meat pie from my homeland, and, how could it be otherwise, poutine. Yeah! Fried potatoes and cheese curds, with brown gravy! Seriously!

Margaret and I exchanged knowing glances; Podesta and Emanuel. The Beanpole Elect was still making the sharp, incisive decisions.

We supped and lolled. The weather was a touch cooler, the skies a little grey, but there was a human electricity that could not be denied; between us friends, between each and every passerby, a connection, and understanding. I was jealous. Even as I was accepted that day, in this moment, for the first time in my adult life I wished I could be a proud American! Nom Dieu!

Bertie Ernesto appeared, coming round the hall from Chestnut Street, striding across the great lawn with a contagious spirit, two giant thugs behind him, between them all sacks of Geno’s cheesesteaks, which they handed out to any and all comers. There were still plenty by the time they got to us.

So much work to be done. But for today…

Election Day Brunch, eleven am. Twelve hours, at least, to go...

“I hope this is the last goddamn election where I have to vote for a Democrat,” said my old friend and former producer, Robbie Jackson told me at brunch this morning, twirling his tall glass of ubiquitous iced tea with his large, sturdy fingers. I knew he didn’t mean he was looking for the next best Republican.

Margaret is sleeping in this historic day, having voted ‘absentee’ back in New York. I hadn’t seen Frank Belloc yet. Bertie Ernesto had not reappeared since his abduction by right wing Italian American Goombas a few nights ago. I was massaging my skull with my hands and nursing the hangover with a Bloody Caesar, which took some doing getting the clamato out of them.

“I want to see the goddamn Republicans shatter,” said Jackson, never one to mince his militant black, libertarian words. “And then for that to carry over into the Democrats. In two years, after Pelosi steers that ship into the rocks like Nancy Fucking Hazelwood, I want to see the remnants of the GOP come nipping at the heels of Congress in 2010 and for the Dems to fold like down syndrome origami. Then, and I don’t mean to come down on my brother, Barack, but then we get to really dig into the change I want to believe in.”

“Election reform, third party system, addressing the death penalty, our reliance on corporate hegemony, education reform,” I say. It’s going to be a long day.

You can be Frigthened, It's Ok.

“Her it is,” slurred Frank Belloc, combat psychologist, in the corner of the bar on Sansom Street, wiping his hand down against his beer after Margaret had gone off to stupored sleep, as though he was brushing off the bottle its own tears. “They’ll say, ‘we meant this’, if they lose. They’ll pose it in these terms, they’ll say, ‘hey, we knew we’d never get there, only that we’d let you run and let you win, but didn’t we give you a show!”

“Nom Dieu!” I stammered, watching the bar, the apathetic tender, the slowly streaming in regulars on a Saturday night at this downtown watering hole. “And they try and say there is a pendulum, a way of the left and the right swinging back.”

“Fuck them,” Belloc told me, and I knew who he spoke of; the hundreds, perhaps the thousands who said, who said in ’04, who say in ’08, that these things just come and they go, they turn and they pivot according to some arrhythmic pulse none of us are ever privy to. "Those who have whistled past the graveyard, who won’t get it, if Obama wins. It’s a battle. That’s why we are sitting here right now; this whole fucking thing could go landslide, it could go too-close-to-call and get stolen away. We have no way of freaking knowing.”

“It comes down to 10:15 to 10:45, with the panic point at eleven,” I slurred myself, dreaming of my cheapish bed rented a block away. “We watch the early exit polls start to merge with the returns, we look to Pennsylvania as the stronghold, hope for Ohio, pray for Florida, but if we miss, then, ok, take PA, take the tri-state, get early and good things from Colorado, and then it’s all good, no? Nothing but the sunny west coast coming through?”

Belloc rinsed his face in his own hand’s sweat.

“And if Virginia falls? The trifecta of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida? Then it gets, suddenly, a little tight. What will Missouri do? North Carolina? Then, every single fucking state makes a terrible difference!”

I was surprised to hear this kind of talk from my old and very composed friend; the man who calmed the thrill out of Chris Matthew’s leg, who talked Olbermann down from the ledge when he was removed as anchor.

I went to bed that night, draped in the empty down warmth of foreign covers, the flat screen of my room’s TV riveted to news, deeply conflicted, wondering, half hoping against the odds that this one time… the argument was finally going to work.

Volunteers in Pennsylvania...

Margaret and I stood at the end of a prodigious, snaking line wrapping around the carnival fury of Geno’s, in South Philly, beneath the flashing, colored neon lights, our hunger for cheesesteak only slightly muted by the constricting polls. Ohio. Massive calls for volunteers here in PA. Margaret tried, vainly, to instruct me in the proper method for ordering the sandwich.

“You just say, I’ll take a ‘whiz, wit’, that’s all you have to do.”

“And where may I order a side of broccoli rabe? I have the feeling this steak sandwich with the fried onions and the unnatural cheese sauce will require a little of the ‘gastro-scouring’, no?”

“I’ll just order,” she barked as we shuffled beneath the pantheon of celebrity photography that lined the eaves of the building. “For the both of us.”
“I’m going to need a drink after this,” she said. “I will not feel safe or in the clear at least until the very early hours of Wednesday. Pierre, it comes down to education, look at the numbers. Education and prejudice. It’s not racism; racism is the implementation of policy promoting a racist agenda. You can talk about the institutionalized racism woven in the very fabric of our social infrastructure all you want; these people in Youngstown, Ohio, in Johnston, Pennsylvania, they are acting on lifelong prejudices fostered by sub-par educations and cultures of low expectations. This entire election is coming right down to it again, not red states or blue, but red people, blue people. And race is an issue, maybe the issue. And I can’t believe that we are saying it again, that this election is going to finally be the one that is driven by record turnout; record turnout by the youth and Black Americans.”

“Yes, ma puce,” I told her. “But isn’t there every reason to believe it now?”
“That’s what we’ve been hearing since 1972. I’ll believe it when I see it.”
There was a commotion up at the corner, about ten feet ahead of us. For the first time we noticed there was a table set out right in front of the order window, piled high with McCain/Palin paraphernalia and manned by thick necked, how you say? ‘Goombas’? And there was Bertie Ernesto, my half-brother, rattling his vocal saber at them.

“Two weeks ago, the Obama Campaign Headquarters in South Philly had to be evacuated! What is that about? Threatening letters? Mysterious substances? What is going on here?”

“Don’t say anything,” I cautioned Margaret quietly.

“But he’s your brother,” she said.

“Half-brother,” I reminded her. “I am too hungry to let his antics stand in the way of this cheesesteak.”

The ‘meatheads’ began to poke Bertie firmly in the chest, emphatically iterating the old clichéd tag lines about islam, socialism, domestic terrorism.

“Domestic terrorism?! You don’t hear a thing I’m talking about, do you?”

Margaret fished out her purse at the window as the older, pony-tailed woman waited. “Two whiz, wit.”

Shortly, a man on the line produced two, foot long heros, wrapped in paper.

“Pierre! What are you doing?!” Bertie called out to me. “You can’t eat here! These people are facists! Hate mongers!”

“Don’t look back,” I admonished Margaret. “Just move on. Where is this hot sauce you speak of?”

“Pierre! Brother! Do you hear me? You cannot commerce with these thugs!”
We walked along, down past picnic tables of young white youths, sating themselves with fried ribeye. I allowed a brief glimpse back in time to see Bertie grappled round the chest by some progeny of Rocky.

“Don’t forget what I told you about this sauce. It’s an absolute killer,” Margaret said, dabbing her sandwich with tiny drops of it, like a dainty woman applying perfume. I shrugged her off and gave it a few good presses over the steaming cheese sauce and chopped steak and onion .

We walked away from South Philly and I discovered the very grave wrong I’d committed in not listening to Margaret, w/r/t the sauce chaude. The unholy burn attacked from six different angles, tears running, nose clearing, throat stripping. My entire face was aflame.

“I just want to go back to the hotel,” she said, “sidle up to the bar and wake up Wednesday morning, good news or bad. Another part of me want to strap into return coverage, booze-less; cold and rational, and watch what this country is truly capable of. Watch it panic and fret, take the advice of its divisive preachers, turn from reason, turn from logic and settle into the scrotum crunching safety of the fear culture.”

“Sacre’Poutine! Nom Dieu! I’m dying, ma puce! I’m dying! This is one of the greatest sandwiches I’ve ever had and it’s killing me!”

Margaret ignored me as we turned north on Broad Street.

“On the other hand, I walk through most of this town, through most of the blue states and a good number of the red, and I can see there’s a chance. I can see a morning where that sick fuck, Sarah Palin, sits dejected in her hotel room, a moose taco half eaten in her lap and not even the toothless grin of little Piper can revive her. A country ready to start again.”

I nodded, tears streaming down my face, mouth afire, wondering if Tuesday night held such delicious horrors as this cheesesteak had.

And Counting...

Sacre'Poutine! Lord above, I'm sitting in a merde Starbucks in Pennsylvania, exclusively for the wi-fi, my ears bleeding from the droning music, my tongue deadened by the oil sludge coffee, but I was told this is where the story is and so here I am.

My half-brother, Bertie Ernesto, has been feverishly working the phone banks from Bucks County to Wilkes-Barre bothering old ladies and invalids about their commitment to change and do they know where their polling places are, and do they need a ride on Tuesday? I have never had the propensity for the 'cold call' and, though I wish I could help, can merely wait on the sideline, straddle the bar and wait as the news cycles roll over one another like a Katrina tide.

Philadelphia is an interesting model for the USA of the Post Racial Electorate, no? Every time I'm here I see a congeniality in the street interactions of whites and blacks missing from other American cities. In New York, of course, ANY interaction between ANYONE is predicated on 'what are you trying to take from me?' and 'are you going to harm me?' And places like Portland, OR, or San Francisco where whites are performing obscene yoga postures to demonstrate their liberality before their African-American brethren; here you always get the sense, politics aside, that this is their city (all of theirs) and there is no big deal about all that.

In fact, to sit at a bar on Chestnut Street, you'd be hard pressed to realize you are in a 'battleground' state at all. The bartender shrugs that he doesn't have the money to get out to Arizona to help, the patrons laugh about Palin's latest antics. Bertie Ernesto assures me in measured panic that their is much to be concerned about, but you just aren't seeing it here.

I have determined the panic marker for Tuesday night. At ten-fifteen, I estimate, we will have seen a good hour plus of exit polling before the returns begin to pop and flash across the eastern seaboard; they have to be in line with each other right away, for me, in order to Quell the FEAR. I predict it will be a night of AT LEAST medium panic well into the morning of the Fifth. Nothing is certain.

Margaret facilitates from cynicism to pure despair. She's meeting me tonight for a cheesesteak at Geno's. Poor puce, I fear for her sometimes. More from the road.