Gandhi #7: Mayor for a Day

Almost Comatose
by Gandhi Mangler


It's the final Saturday in October. It's six in the morning. It's cold and I'm dragging a ballot box and other election material up the steps of the town hall. I don't live in this town and I don't want to live in this town. I didn't volunteer to work at the polls for thirteen hours, but I didn't object to being volunteered to work for money. Hey, I can use the $130 for superfluous things like nicotine gum and alcohol.

This county-wide election is strictly about "the children." The only question on the entire ballot is, in essence, "Do you want property taxes to be raised to pay for $23 million dollars' worth of school building improvements?" I think it will pass because people in this county are stupid. I didn't vote, but I would have voted against it. Children shouldn't be given nice things; they destroy them.

Anyway, someone opens the door for me and I see four strangers -- strangers too damn lazy to get paid for getting the election material. I will be in the mayor's office with these people for thirteen consecutive hours. Three of them have worked for previous elections, one for thirty years. I've never done it. I barely payed attention to the half-hour training film. I'm at least forty years younger than each one of them. I've had an hour of sleep and I appear disheveled. So, naturally, they make me the leader.

While hastily skimming the procedure manual, I tell them what to do to prepare, what their tasks are, and where to sign all the bureaucratic forms. I officially open the precinct at 6:30 but only one person votes in the next two hours. Meanwhile, I sit. My place is the mayor's crooked swivel chair behind his faux-wood mayor desk.

Relaxing behind this "Viewmate" monitor with week-old post-it notes, generic office phone, cigarette-burned keyboard atop a May desk calendar, and full ashtrays, I think, "at least this mayor isn't crooked like the last one." A crooked mayor wouldn't work in such filth.

For the next eleven hours, I listen to the old people. One is a sixty-year-old prison guard who drives convicts between the jail and the courthouse. He has some nice stories to tell about rapes and a man who was sent through the industrial dishwasher.

One lady in her sixties is a braggart, mostly about her son the doctor (it took him thirteen years to become a doctor--I wouldn't brag about that) and her vacation trips (Alaska is not a vacation in my book). She talks for a long time. The second lady, in her seventies, is overly concerned about the cats and dogs she sees in the yard of the house across the street.

The third lady is the quintessential crone. I don't know if she is in her eighties or nineties, but she claims to have enjoyed the Coca-Cola with the cocaine in it: "Coke used to taste great." She knows everyone in town, where they live, where they used to live, what work they have done on their houses, how old their children are, and what occupations they have. She even knows what their sexual preferences are, especially if they're "queerbaits."

I listened to every conversations and I only heard the word "nigger" once. That's probably a record in this precinct. I don't really know why the area is populated with so many racists -- there has only been one black family in that town, ever. These four strangers demonstrated to me how worthless their lives have been.

It's apparent that few people care about "the children." Only twenty-four people voted there and of them, only two women were of child-bearing age. One of them was so enormous that even if she got someone drunk enough to fertilize her, the goddamn baby wouldn't have room to grow with all that lard stuck to her internal organs. Regardless, the proposal was rejected by a large margin. Maybe the stupid people I see all the time are the ones who don't vote.


"I really should move away again." - Gandhi Mangler

"Hollywood has avoided making films that deal with communist totalitarianism, while movies about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust are produced with regularity. Are Stalin’s victims not victims enough for a film?." - Taki Theodoracropulos