DAVID: Yes, please.
Confinement didn’t suit Monster, who immediately began beating his paws against the door in an escape attempt. Before he could succeed, I rushed my backpack up the stairs and into my room on the second floor.
The following morning, I sprinted in terror from my bedroom to the car. Then I drove to an Obama for Ohio office on the city’s east side.
In campaign euphemism, I had been assigned to a “base area.” In English, that meant residents were overwhelmingly African American and that many of them didn’t vote. Every four years, well-meaning white people appear in these neighborhoods like cicadas. They knock on doors. They hand out flyers. Then they return to their burrows to eat acai berries and purchase Jonathan Franzen novels they’ll never read.
The Obama campaign hoped to replace this unseemly practice with something better: self-sustaining, locally run organizations, links in a nationwide chain. In some places, the plan worked. Where it didn’t, people like me were called in to “layer” the organizers in charge.
I wish I could tell you I recruited all my volunteers locally. But with numbers to hit, and little more than a week until polls opened, there was no time for the high-minded principle of 2008. A few days after I arrived, Jacqui arrived with two friends in her ancient fiberglass Saturn. Others soon joined our yuppie militia, bidding farewell to their Brooklyn nonprofits or taking leave from well-paid jobs. Even the supporter housing was bourgeois. Jacqui was assigned a room in a mansion belonging to a pair of cheerful white attorneys and their lovable Brittany spaniel.
Yet this style of campaigning, while hardly poetry, had its moments. One morning my friend Stephanie was sent to knock on doors with an eighty-four-year-old woman named Beulah. As they left the office, the redheaded Brooklyn lesbian in vintage clothing towering over the shrunken matriarch known locally as “Mother Carter.” I wondered if we weren’t asking too much. But the next day Mother Carter returned in her orthotic walking shoes. She would knock on doors all afternoon, she said—just as long as she got to team up with Stephanie.
That’s the best part of fieldwork: with so much on the line, bridges build themselves. And as they do, the entire universe shrinks to just a few square blocks. For the first time in months, it was easy to ignore Nate Silver. In fact, I didn’t check FiveThirtyEight until the final Friday of the campaign. To my relief, I learned our odds were improving. Victory was once again within our reach. More at ease than I’d been in weeks, I fell into a peaceful sleep.
I awoke at 2 A.M. Something wasn’t right.
In my sleepy haze, it took a moment to figure out the problem. It was the outside of my stomach: my skin felt like it was on fire. Just the aftermath of some strange dream, I figured. Still, to be safe, I turned on the lights and lifted my shirt.
I had never seen anything like it. Across my abdomen were row after row of red bumps. In the center of each was a puncture wound. It looked like I’d been assaulted by a madman with a thumbtack. With horror, I recalled Norma telling me the dog often slept in this bedroom. In a worst-case scenario, I had bedbugs. In a best-case scenario, I had fleas.
Pivotal moments in a relationship are rarely the ones you expect. On our first date, I wondered what Jacqui looked like naked, and whether we had the same taste in TV. Never once did I ask myself, “Is this someone I can turn to in case of infestation?” Now, one year later, I could think of nothing else. When she answered my 2 A.M. phone call, I practically wept.
“This is going to be fine,” she told me, although I could tell she didn’t believe it. “Here’s what we’ll do.”
If you’re like me, you have never disposed of a body. After that long night in Cleveland, however, I’m confident I could. From a cabinet in Norma’s bathroom, I pilfered trash bags and duct tape. I put my clothes in the bags, tied them tight, and covered the knots with tape. The trash bags went into my backpack. My backpack went into more trash bags. More knots were tied. More tape was taped. Once outside, I placed everything in my trunk and sped off.
Jacqui was waiting for me at the doorway of her mansion, and she immediately took charge. On her orders, I stripped to my underwear and ran straight for the shower. Then I stuffed as much clothing as I could in the dryer, leaving the rest in the car. Once our DIY extermination was complete, I passed out on the deliciously soft sofa in the living room, dreaming of lies to tell my new host and hostess in the morning.
With that, Get-Out-the-Vote weekend began. The final four days of a campaign are always a blur, and these were even blurrier than usual. There was the persistent unease that came with parachuting comfortable white people into a neighborhood they were unlikely to revisit. There was the realization that, despite these moral compromises, we still did not have enough volunteers. And there were the insect bites, which stung rather than itched and grew more painful every day.
With so many sources of discomfort, we had no time to reflect on what was happening. We knocked on every door in the neighborhood once during the weekend, once more on Monday, and twice on Election Day itself. Before we knew it, polls were just half an hour from closing. That’s when my BlackBerry vibrated.
Run!
It was the e-mail sent to all field staff in the waning moments of a campaign. Grabbing walk packets, Jacqui and I drove to a row of small brown houses, where we each took a different side of the street. I knocked on door after door, searching for would-be voters. No luck.
Finally, at 7:26, just four minutes before polls closed, I heard shuffling from a living room. A woman appeared in a robe and sandals. She was registered but hadn’t voted yet. I was thrilled.
“You’ve got to go now!” I told her.
“Nah-ah,” she said. “I’m not voting.”
“But the election’s going to be very close,” I reminded her.
“I told you,” she said. “I don’t vote.”
This was truly a fairy tale ending. A nonvoter! A last-minute conversion! All she needed was someone to believe in her.
“This election is so important,” I implored. My voice dripped with emotion. “Ohio’s going to be so close. Your vote could make a big difference.”
In the movie version of my life, this was the moment when she raced to her polling place. In the my-life version of my life, it was the moment when she called me an asshole and told me to get off her porch. And with that inspiring exchange, time was up. The reelect was done.