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.