The Day I Voted For Bus(c)h

“Are they gone yet?” I asked from the back seat.

“No—not yet,” Apes spoke from his reclined driver’s seat. “Just stay down!”

I couldn’t help but poke my head up for another peek at the driveway—Eric’s parents were still there, but hopefully not for long. “When are they supposed to leave?”

“Eric said they usually leave before 7,” Lew mumbled from the passenger side. “Unless they heard him come in and realized how fucked up he was…”

The time was 6:45 AM on November 6^th, 2000 and the acid we took the night before was still hitting pretty hard. We’d tripped for hours, but had been driven from our Hazel St. refuge a little while before because some people (not us) had to work for a living. Hopefully this plan worked…

Lew’s expanded gaze never left the side-mirror. “They’re leaving!”

“Fuck, yes!” I cried out.

“Shhhhh!” Apes hissed from the front seat; the coast wasn’t clear—yet.

Tail-lights flashed on Eric’s mom’s car then his dad’s, followed by those wonderful white reverse lights as if beamed from heaven above. Both parents drove away with no idea that their son was about to invite three drug-crazed delinquents into their home.

“Holy shit!” We jumped out of the car, dashed up to the door and pounded it as hard as we could. “Eric! Let us in!”

“Alright, alright!” Eric screamed from the other side of the threshold.

“Now!”

He allowed us into his house, our pupils dilated portholes to an imploded universe, but that was nothing to address—we’d officially secured sanctuary for another couple hallucinatory hours.

“You know today is election day?” Apes reminded us.

“Oh, yeah?” I was nineteen, so this was the first time I was of age to vote in a Presidential Election.

“Well, let’s fuckin’ go vote!” Lew screamed. “Where do we do it?”

“Uhh—the polling place is right up the street at St. Mary Magdalen’s,” Eric enlightened us. “But won’t there be, like, a lot of people up there?” Paranoia threatened to pounce.

“Don’t worry about it!” Lew brought him back to non-reality. “I think voting starts at seven—we should go up and check it out! Eric, you got anything to drink?”

“Err—not sure, man…”

Lew disappeared into the kitchen, hoping to heist a soda or some orange juice, but what he found made him FREAK OUT. “Holy shit!!!!”

Oh no, what happened? Was something wrong? Was Lew losing it? I ran into the kitchen to discover Lewy wasn’t going screwy—he was absolutely elated. There in the fridge sat a pristine pack of Busch beer—twenty-four unopened bottles of bliss, their contents captured from a mountain stream, just waiting for Eric’s dad when he got home…

Too bad the poor bastard would never come close.

“Eric, let me get one of these!” Lew called out.

“I don’t know, guys—” Eric protested. “Those are my dad’s! Err—he’s gonna be really pissed if—”

“Don’t worry about it!” I consoled him. “We’ll replace ‘em—no problem!” And it wouldn’t have been a problem if only one of us had been twenty-one at the time, of course.

“Okay…”

We cracked open the first round of brews and Eric grabbed some CDs out of his room to blast on the living room stereo. The obvious first choice was Black Flag’s “The First Four Years” album. We stood in a rough circle in the living room, cheers-ing and slamming the suds, screaming along and pumping our fists while the Flag pummeled through “Nervous Breakdown,” “Fix Me,” “I’ve Had It,” and, (you got that right) “Wasted.”

“Fuck! I need another beer!”

“Me too!”

We chugged through the next round, the next round, and then the following one. “Jealous Again,” “Revenge,” “White Minority—”

“Hey!” Eric shouted from the kitchen. “There’s no more beers!”

“Oh, crap…”

I did the math: between the four of us at six beers each, we had killed the entire case in exactly fifteen minutes, which was a record at the time for our degenerate asses. “Yeah, but don’t worry,” I reassured him. “I said we’re gonna replace it!”

“Errr… okay…”

We all went out front for a smoke and to watch the sun rise. A school bus full of voting-ineligible brats drove past on the way to school. We pointed at them and laughed like lunatics. “What a bunch of suckers!”

“Fuck ‘em!” Lew declared. “Let’s go vote!”

“Hell yeah!”

We walked up Maitland Avenue to Mary Magdalen’s Catholic Church and saw a line wrapped around the building. Though we’d just been listening to “White Minority,” it was certainly the Caucasians that made up the mass of this polling center. As it turned out, 81 % of the people who turned out to vote in that election were white—but only 51% of voting-eligible people showed up at all.

Apes began a poll of his own. “Hey—who ya gonna vote for? Who ya gonna vote for?” he asked random people in the queue, but for some reason, no one wanted to answer him. Everybody ignored him for the most part, but he was definitely rubbing those Democrats and Republicans the wrong way…

I looked around and realized—Oh, shit! We’d lost sight of Lew! “Where is this guy?” I began to worry—fear began to inform my nerves. I looked to Apes for guidance, but he was off in his own political world.

“You, ma’am—,” he projected the journalist he would someday become, “who are you voting for this morning?”

Still, no one responded, so Apes decided he may as well reveal his own partisanship. “Well, I’ll tell ya who I’m voting for,” he proclaimed. “I might as well vote for what I had for breakfast…” He hoisted the last half-empty beer bottle out of his jacket. “I’m voting for Busch!” Apes took an administrative swig of the swill as Lew burst out of the Church.

“I just tried voting but they wouldn’t let me!” he cried out to the crowd. “Democracy is a sham!”

“Oh, my God—they’re drunk!” the lady Apes had just harassed called out—she didn’t know the half of it.

“Well, is this even your polling station?” a concerned citizen asked Lew.

“What’s your district?” another chimed in.

I decided to assuage everybody’s civic fears. “No, it’s okay,” I calmed them. “We’re not even registered to vote!”

These people were sickened. Most shook their heads and muttered curses like “God bless America.” We’d made a mockery out of them and the entire system–blown double-barrel nose-loads all up and down Lady Liberty’s gown. “Somebody should get one of the officers over here…”

That was our cue to high-tail it back to Eric’s house. “Man, those people were really bummed out, huh?”

“That’s what they get for not voting for Busch…”

“For sure…” Apes gave me a ride home as the acid wore off, then the rest of the crew went to Lew’s house where I presumed they would discuss politics more as they huffed Duster and lived happily ever after.

Of course, that day was the start of a great controversy. Al Gore claimed that he should have won the election and demanded a recount in Florida. After that, the Supreme Court ruled that Bush had won the election by only 537 votes—a super slim margin for sure. Would the world be a different place if we hadn’t been so fucked up the night before and voted for Gore? This is, if we had actually been registered to vote in the first place?

Probably not.

Was I even qualified or knowledgeable enough as a criminally insane nineteen-year-old to lend my voice to democracy with a single vote?

Absolutely not.

I actually hate voting and feel like a fool when I do. I’ve been informed by someone I love dearly that I’m allowed to feel this way because of my privileges as a white male in America. It turns out that everybody I know who doesn’t vote, or votes for a write-in candidate such as Roky Erickson, also happens to be a white male. The most common argument I hear from my fellow white males about why they don’t vote is that all these politicians are all the fuckin’ same, which I agree with for the most part.

However, I’ve come to the understanding that’s not exactly true.

Had I been more informed in 2000—if I’d have known that a vote for Bush was really a vote for Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, the Military Industrial Complex and an Endless “Military Engagment” which has destroyed the lives of so many Americans and Iraqis all so that G.W. could make his daddy proud, I would have definitely filled out a ballot that day and marked it for “Gore.”

And considering my elementary view of politics, I’ve since come to embrace an ideology I can understand—Ian Mackaye’s methodology of deciding on a Presidential candidate, which is basically this:

Whoever ends up becoming the President of the United States is the person that this country deserves. We deserve it because we either voted for this person, didn’t vote at all, or allowed our votes to be cheated. But no matter how much we deserve this person, the rest of the world does not. Therefore, Mackaye chooses to vote for the candidate that is least likely to go to war.

Makes sense to me. However, Obama launched airstrikes or military raids in at least seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. As a matter of fact, he also sent 30,000 troops over to Afghanistan right after accepting the Nobel PEACE Prize…

So, with that being said, I’m sticking with my own juvenile (delinquent) philosophy for this upcoming election. I maintain that the best way to pick the candidate is to picture yourself on that school bus we pointed and laughed at while tripping our asses off on the morning of Election Day, 2000. Try to envision you’re on the way to high school and about to vote for Senior Class President. Who would you rather see elected—the rich kid that feels way more entitled than everybody else? Or the somewhat-creepy dude who occasionally brushes up against your ass in the hallway while getting a sniff of your hair?

I know who I would vote for…