“That’s the way we do things in Wayne County, buster.”
Relegated at last to janitor, I would have no choice but to scrub. But that was in the future. Right now, our new president-elect was addressing the country. My vols were weeping with joy. The arc of the moral universe was bending toward justice at last.
THERE IS NOTHING QUITE LIKE ELECTING A PRESIDENT AND THEN moving back in with your parents. I can’t say I recommend it. On the campaign trail, I was treated like an all-star. In my childhood bedroom, I spent my nights staring at faded summer camp certificates declaring me Most Improved.
It wasn’t just inside my mom and dad’s apartment that I felt demoted. New York City’s stream of small humiliations reminded me that I had become a kind of human plankton. Brooklyn lumbersexuals cut in front of me at food trucks. Briefcase-wielding bankers sideswiped me on their way to work. I had no job. I had no career path.
All I had, really, was an envelope. It arrived in early January, oozing exclusivity and class.
The Presidential Inaugural Committee requests the honor of your presence.
Thick, expensive card stock. Letters embellished with loops and tails. The year written out in full: two thousand and nine. I had never possessed anything so fancy.
Along with the finely printed note came a pair of invitations, one to the official ceremony at the Capitol, the other for an inaugural ball. I guarded my tickets as fiercely as Charlie before his chocolate-factory tour. And for good reason: with the swearing-in just a few weeks away, scalpers were charging up to twenty thousand dollars for an inauguration package like mine. I could have made a fortune on Craigslist. Yet I would sooner have sold a kidney. While the rich and well connected scrounged for access, a twenty-two-year-old with a Koosh basketball hoop on his door had the most coveted tickets in town. What better proof that a brighter future was at hand?
I didn’t go to D.C. hoping to land a job with Obama, any more than a Phish fan goes to a Phish concert hoping to land a job with Phish. Still, not long after receiving my envelope, I decided it was time to move. With five days left in George W. Bush’s second term, I zipped my precious tickets into my suitcase. Then I added five button-down shirts, two pairs of khakis, and the tuxedo I wore to prom. I still had no career path. I still had no plan. But hope and change were on their way to the nation’s capital. In that case, so was I.
HOURS BEFORE INAUGURATION DAY DAWNED, I MADE MY WAY TO downtown D.C. It was brutally, freakishly cold. As I followed the instructions on my purple ticket, walking toward a designated meeting area near the Capitol, I shivered despite my puffy coat.
To make matters worse, when I reached the rendezvous point, it became obvious police hadn’t reserved enough space. Thousands of freezing former organizers were being crowded into an enclosure no larger than a basketball court. By 7 A.M., chemically speaking, we had become a solid.
Yet penned in with my fellow campaign veterans, I didn’t feel self-pity. I felt pride. While so-called VIPs might demand special treatment, the new Washington had no room for outsize egos. We were all created equal. Now we stood an equal chance of being crushed to death. How much more egalitarian can you get?
I was laying track on this high-minded train of thought when a whisper began to ripple through the crowd.
Jesse Jackson. Jesse Jackson? It’s Jesse Jackson!
I didn’t think there was space for a squirrel to move among us, much less a broad-shouldered mountain of a man. But here he was, a giant of the Civil Rights era, all six foot three of him, coming toward me in an enormous black greatcoat. To my amazement the crowd parted, creating a kind of human corridor, and Jesse Jackson did not walk through it. He strode. His expression was less imperious than magnanimous, as though he were posing for a portrait he planned to give away. Expensive wool swished against the nylon shell of my jacket. I stood awestruck, too stunned to speak.
That’s when I realized something: the living legend wasn’t the only one making progress. A sneaky little man had inserted himself into the reverend’s wake. He was middle aged, with a white, bushy mustache, a hat he appeared to have borrowed from Indiana Jones, and a firm grip on the back of Jesse Jackson’s overcoat. While the rest of us pressed against each other, he zipped along like one of those fish that clean the bellies of sharks. Our eyes met as he passed me. With his free hand, he gave me a wave.
“Hey hey!” he cried. Before I could stammer a reply, the corridor of humanity closed behind him. The sneaky little man disappeared.
The rest of us resumed waiting. A half hour later, we were told to line up in a tunnel beneath the National Mall. If we had been at the post office, this is the point when someone would have thrown a chair through a window. But on Inauguration Day there were no complaints. We formed a queue of shivering purple-ticket holders several blocks long. It was only after another hour passed, and we still hadn’t budged, that a new whisper began worming down the line.
They closed the gate. They closed the gate? They closed the gate!
It was true. Not long after Reverend Jackson passed us, a mishap occurred at the purple entrance. Secret Service shut it down. My only hope of seeing the inauguration now was to find a TV, and fast. I ducked out of line, chose a direction, and ran until I reached a bar.
In the tunnel, my neighbors were intoxicated by the historic nature of the moment. In the bar, my neighbors were intoxicated because they’d been drinking since 6 A.M. The place combined the macho chaos of a frat house with the undersexed intensity of a debate team. Each time a female legislator appeared on C-SPAN, catcalls filled the room.
“Nancy Pelosi’s hot!”
“Dianne Feinstein’s hot!”
For some of my fellow ticket holders, this was the precise moment when hope calcified into cynicism. By the next morning they even had a name for the tragedy: The Purple Tunnel of Doom. And while I didn’t share their sense of full-blown catastrophe, even I had to admit that something had changed. A few nights later, I was waiting to enter the Staff Inaugural Ball when someone blatantly cut in line. It was Miranda, a fellow Ohio organizer.
“Everyone does it,” she informed me.
Our movement has no place for line cutters, I thought. But part of me wondered if she and a tiny man with a white mustache knew something I did not.