Your Next-Door Neighbor Is a Dragon (10 page)

Investors, supporters, well-wishers, and people who planned to attempt to shoot the blimp down with rocket launchers could track its progress on the blimp’s website. A map displayed its current location and regular updates were made to its schedule of appearances depending on the funds raised by the LLC.

“It’ll fly right over the interstate on the way to rallies and cities,” Tucker said, marveling at the huge flank of the blimp. “People will see that.”

“And then they’ll Google Ron Paul?” I suggested.

“Right,” Tucker agreed.

“From their car?”

“Well, they’ve got phones you can Google on,” he said.

“While they’re driving?”

“People do it,” he said, growing a bit irritated. “Or they could be stuck in traffic. Or what if they’re a passenger?”

“Then they could Google Ron Paul on their phone,” I suggested.

“Right,” Tucker agreed. “Or write it down and Google it when they get home. Or…”

He trailed off and never finished the thought.

“Can I ride in it?” Taylor asked, and started to run toward the blimp.

I watched as Tucker chased her around the field, reaching after her and always stumbling a few steps behind her like a Keystone Kop. People were posing for photographs behind the big Ron Paul
REVOLUTION
sign with the blimp in the background. I’m pretty sure I saw a woman with a monkey on her shoulder.

A bearded man with wild black hair was sitting in the grass playing a bongo and chanting, “This is what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!”

I wondered why democracy did not have any black people or hot babes.

“Your blimp is hella gay!” Taylor squealed.

Tucker still lagged behind her. His shoes were beginning to clot with mud.

“I could run her down,” someone suggested behind me.

I turned and was looking a chestnut quarter horse right in its brown eyes. The man who made the offer was sitting atop the horse, dressed in cowboy hat and patriot regalia, an American flag in one hand and the reins of the horse in the other.

“I think he’ll catch her,” I replied.

“I was just kidding.” The man chuckled.

He sighed and surveyed the sparse crowd. He seemed satisfied, maybe even impressed.

“We’re gonna kick some ass this year,” he assured me.

When the Ron Paul blimp finally launched that morning an uneven cheer went up from the crowd. The white blimp looked like a suppository as it rose slowly into the unwelcoming gray sky. The man on the horse rode back and forth with the American flag. People took pictures and laughed.

“You can’t stop something like that,” I heard someone say.

The Iowa caucuses were less than three weeks away.

The Salad Days

It was cold early January in New Hampshire, a scant three days after the 2008 Iowa caucuses and two days before New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary. The whole state was lousy with journalists and politicians.

Early polling favored Barack Obama to take the state on the Democratic side following his upset in Iowa. John McCain, who famously beat George W. Bush in the 2000 Republican primary, was polling ahead of Mitt Romney on the Republican side.

The other story in New Hampshire was Ron Paul, riding high on the news of his fourth-quarter fund-raising and his surprising 10 percent performance in the Iowa caucuses. No one outside his rabid supporters seriously expected Dr. Paul to win the state. It had a long history of libertarian leanings and the overwhelming (some would say overbearing) presence of his volunteers in New Hampshire suggested strength, but he was just too far behind in the polls.

None of that mattered to true believers, including my friend Todd Glenn. Todd was a diehard Ron Paul supporter, a Paulite, as he proudly referred to himself and his friends volunteering for the campaign. He was in New Hampshire supporting Ron Paul and had convinced me to join him, purely as an observer, to “see what was happening.”

I was an unapologetic Obama supporter, which was fortunate because the Obama volunteers had an unofficial neutrality agreement with the Paulites. Both groups loathed Hillary Clinton’s mobs of thuggish middle-aged supporters and most of the Republicans, so it was an unspoken bond that extended to politeness between the two groups.

It was a quiet détente in the frozen north, small favors that weren’t orchestrated by either campaign. I heard of charitable Obama canvassers passing hot coffee and doughnuts to Ron Paul supporters shivering on a street corner. In return or just by chance, Ron Paul supporters were reluctant to tear the signs from the hands of Obama supporters during the inevitable visibility scrum behind live TV broadcasts, but woe betide the Clinton supporters.

Things were just peaceful enough between the two groups that I was able to hang around with Todd without drawing any unwanted confrontations from his new friends. A few asked me about Obama or confessed hope that he would win the Democratic nomination. Most of them just shrugged when they heard I supported Obama or said something like, “At least he isn’t Clinton.”

Todd and seemingly five hundred Ron Paul supporters were staying at the house of a widowed farmer. The bowlegged old farmer asked to be called Wicket. He smiled constantly, wore overalls and flannel shirts, and had the scraggly chinned look of an extra from the Robert Altman version of
Popeye
.

On the evening I arrived, Todd showed me to a patch of floor and gave me a blanket and a cloth sack of clean laundry to use as a pillow. Wicket trundled around his packed living room, dispensing steaming black coffee from a silver pot. He offered warm creamer packets and sugar from the kangaroo pouch of the apron around his waist.

The Paulites were pale, overgrown men. There was a roughly even distribution of chubby twentysomethings with terrible facial hair and skinny twentysomethings dressed like they were from the dorkiest chapter of the Nation of Islam. The room was packed with loose hormones directed at the handful of younger women staying at the farmhouse. You could see the polite fear in their faces as they were separated from each other and surrounded by little groups of awkward suitors.

Older, longtime libertarians, many of them locals not planning to spend the night at Wicket’s farm, made up for their lack of youthful enthusiasm with a crystallized burning hatred of both Bush and the Democrats. They stood off to one side, gathered around a battered sofa, and discussed gun rights and secession. The older libertarians watched the kids with a mixture of bemusement and, oddly, low-key hostility toward the latecomers to libertarianism.

The buzz at the farm that night was that Dr. Paul was being “silenced by the media” and particularly Fox News. There was a Fox News Republican debate scheduled for the following night and Ron Paul had been excluded from the proceedings with little explanation. The Ron Paul supporters justifiably pointed out that both Fred Thompson and New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani were polling worse than Dr. Paul, yet both were invited to the debate.

The bad news of the debate was tempered by a bit of good news. A few of the volunteers staying at the house had word that Ron Paul was going to be hosting a live town hall in Manchester, New Hampshire, to counterprogram the Fox News debate.

“It’s gonna be tomorrow,” said a bearded man in his mid-twenties I knew only as Junior.

“Tomorrow night?” I asked.

“Same time as the Fox debate,” he replied. “And they’re gonna put it on the internet, too. Ron Paul 2008 dot com.”

“Who needs Fox!?” Todd exclaimed.

Junior grinned. His eyes glistened like black buttons in the poorly lit farmhouse. His face was still reddened from visibility walks in the cold.

“Y’all gonna go?” Junior wondered.

“Hell yeah,” Todd replied, and then looked to me. “Right? Right?”

It was weird seeing Todd, a perpetually sick manic-depressive, acting so enthusiastic about anything, let alone an elfin old man from Texas. How could I deny him the one light in his benighted existence?

“Of course,” I replied.

“Awesome,” Junior said. “Hutch is gonna be there. It’s gonna be awesome.”

It was not awesome, I will go ahead and lay that out there right now. Hopefully that doesn’t spoil the end for you too much.

I woke up the next morning sore to the bone from lying on the hardwood floor. The room was hot and smelled liked B.O. and farts. My hair was plastered to my face with sweat and my arms had red marks from the rough wool blanket Todd gave me.

Most of the Paulites were still sleeping, but Wicket was up and bustling around the farmhouse’s large kitchen. Most of the appliances looked to be from the 1950s, but he had a large stainless steel-fronted refrigerator.

“My younger brother makes venison sausage,” Wicket said, and opened the freezer to show me piles of frozen sausages. “Want some eggs?”

I took a plate of eggs and sat at the table, shoveling the undercooked yellow clumps into my mouth while two pale and stricken-looking girls sent text messages.

“Do you have a car?” one of them asked me.

Todd didn’t even have a car. I shook my head. The girl returned to desperately texting, no doubt trying to find some sort of escape from the rural colony of gassy hornballs with bad facial hair. I wished them luck.

I finished my sloppy eggs and took my plate over to the sink to wash it off. Wicket was still scrambling eggs in a huge nonstick skillet almost big enough to serve as a wok.

“Don’t worry about it,” Wicket said as I reached for the faucet. “I’ll wash ’em all once they’re done.”

“Oh, thanks,” I replied.

He leaned over to me a bit and said, “If ya hurry upstairs you can get a shower before the hot water is all used up. Only enough for a couple more of ya.”

I heeded his advice, showering quickly in the claw-foot iron tub located upstairs. It was relaxing to wash off all the sweat and I knew I probably smelled terrible. Unfortunately, I was soon sharing cramped quarters with seven other folks from the farmhouse who had not bothered or been able to catch a hot shower.

Transportation into town was an issue and several of the more rugged Paulites set off on foot down the country road in the direction of Manchester, where the town hall was to be held in the evening. It was over three miles of brutal cold slogging through plowed snow banks that had a hard crust of overnight freeze. The alternative was walking on roads with no lane markers.

I’m not even sure they made it. If you’re ever in Manchester and you see a Sasquatch with a Ron Paul toque, well, you know who he ate.

Thankfully, Junior provided us with a ride into town in a cargo van owned by a Ron Paul supporter with a roofing business. Eight of us piled into the back, sitting on stacks of roofing tiles and overturned buckets stained with frozen tar. Most everyone smelled like day-old corpses washed up on the banks of a tropical river.

Without a well-organized volunteer corps like the Obama campaign, the Ron Paul campaign operated as an activated militia. This worked fairly well in New Hampshire, where the grassroots support for Dr. Paul was well established.

The van dropped us outside a Quiznos on Elm Street and we hooked up with other volunteers already milling around chanting the clever Ron Paul slogan, “Ron Paul! Ron Paul! Ron Paul!” There were maybe two dozen of them being led by a Jewish kid named Eli who never got off his cell phone the whole time I was there.

The plan, from one of the other chanters, was to gather as many supporters as possible and then begin marches back and forth in the more heavily trafficked areas. A few cars honked their horns at us, whether in support or in derision it was usually hard to tell. People seemed to be chanting and waving their signs to stay warm.

This was the pattern for most of the day, with occasional breaks to eat or warm up in one of the restaurants in downtown Manchester. The real excitement came whenever our group ran afoul of another group of supporters.

There seemed to be a particular hatred for followers of Mitt Romney. Many of them were imports from Massachusetts or Mormon paratroopers from Utah, dressed in new ski coats and neckties. The Ron Paul supporters, many of them locals, detested this sort of carpetbagging. They shouted “War monger!” or chanted “Mitt should quit!” when Romney’s supporters wandered into earshot.

The “brought in” rumor also circulated about Clinton’s supporters and to a lesser extent Obama’s. Only Ron Paul supporters were considered genuine. I opted not to mention the fact that most of the people staying at the farmhouse were from out of state.

The closest things came to getting ugly was an incident around two in the afternoon. Five Giuliani supporters drove up in an SUV and decided to follow behind us holding Giuliani placards. There were two college-aged kids and three adult men that looked to be of Italian ancestry. I doubt they were Mafiosos, but the word spread that they were for obvious reasons.

Ron Paul supporters, Todd included, began to heckle them for losing the Iowa caucuses and being so far behind in the New Hampshire polling. This heckling continued for several minutes with the Ron Paul supporters drowning out any chant the Giuliani supporters tried to start.

Finally, a young woman with stringy brown hair began to yell at the Giuliani supporters about 9–11. Earlier in the day the ringleader of our group asked her to knock off some 9–11 conspiracy theory evangelizing. In close proximity to Giuliani’s “minions” the urge became irresistible.

“Giuliani and Bush caused nine-eleven!” she shouted. “Three thousand people died so we could fight Bush’s war! Giuliani is a terrorist!”

“War criminal!” someone added from the back.

This was too much for one of the Giuliani supporters. He hurled his placard Frisbee-style at the woman and charged the nearest man. That happened to be Todd, someone who has been in several fights and won none. Todd had just enough time to yelp before the Giuliani supporter leveled him with an open-handed slap to the side of the head.

“What now, motherfucker!?” The man shouted. “You all are the fucking terrorists! Who’s a fucking terrorist now?”