A moment of Zen?

[Where were we? Oh yes. My first day, training has just finished.]

We gathered outside of the office and milled about. (I feel weird calling it an ‘office.’ I won’t press the point, but I encourage you to imagine that there are little quotation marks floating around the word every time I use it.) Mike put a few of us together at the edge of the crowd – in our crew there was one other new girl and Alan who must have been in his late fifties – and I watched the other crews. I still didn’t have a good idea of who was a director, who was a staffer, who was brand new. Some of the youngest talked like they’d been doing this all year; some of the older people – and there were some who looked like they were up on fifty, sixty years old – stood around looking halfway comfortable. I listened in on some conversations, while scanning over the rap with half an eye. People talked about what turf they were headed to, traded stories, laughing at jokes that went a little too quickly past me.

We were soon on the subway, Alan talked loudly to Mike about the other day – “So yeah, I’ve missed quota a few days this week, but I’ve told Josh like five times it’s because they keep sending me to midtown! How can anybody make a decent buck in that place? I keep telling him, send me uptown, uptown! What can I do if they don’t listen?”

“Well, what about Chelsea, can you do your thing there?” Mike said, with barely a trace of impatience in his voice. Chelsea was where we were headed. All I knew about Chelsea was that apparently a lot of boys were from there.
Alan sighed. I noticed people on the subway noticing us.
“What did you make yesterday?” Mike asked.
“I dunno, something like…one fifty or something,” said Alan, mumbling so that I barely heard him.
“Alright, well today,” Mike said, “let’s say you do two fifty. Nothing heroic, just get yourself back on the ball. I did, let’s see, I did 425 yesterday. It was a pretty good day. I’m gonna do—“ Mike looked over at the new girl and I, “—five hundred. A cool five.”

“You guys,” he said to us, “you’re new so don’t really worry about it. Get the hang of it. If you score big, of course, that’s great for me,” he laughed, “but today you’re just out there to observe, remember.” As our field manager, I’d learned already, Mike would ‘bonus’ from the money that we made over our quota. Quota was something like $200 that day – “that’s pretty low,” I’d heard Josh comment to another director back at the office – so Mike would bonus a third of any money either of the newbies raised over that. “You guys have any questions about the rap?” I shook my head – I was pretty sure I knew it. I was looking over the extra sheets I’d grabbed, with information about Bush’s record on them.

“Do you use these?” I asked Mike. He shook his head, frowning. His clipboard only had the ‘statement of support’ sheets, the credit card forms, and the ‘tick sheet’ where we were supposed to tally the names and contributions of everyone who gave to us.
“Some people do. Not really useful for me – you’ll see why. Today, just focus on the rap.”

The girl canvasser asked me if I’d been doing this long. I told her it was my first day, and she said “Oh, mine too! I’m thrilled I’ve finally got a job. I mean, it’s great to do this work and all, but it’s really great that we’ll get paid pretty well. Not today, I guess. What do you think about that, us not getting paid today?”

I didn’t bother to tell her that I was on salary, as a director. I shrugged, and skimmed over the rap.

Our top priority is to put resources in to key swing states and reach every possible vote. The best way you can help is by…

* * *
When we came out of the subway, Mike and Alan scoped the street we’d been sent to. Mike shrugged – this’ll do.

We did a little huddle in the sidewalk, crossing our arms over our clipboards and scoping the street like it was a playing field. People rushed by us on their way into the subway. Mike explained that we would pair off, two on each side of the street. We would stand facing each other in the middle of the sidewalk with about ten feet of space in between. When someone was just about to pass our partner, we would put out the call. “Try not to get bogged down with people – if you need any help getting away from someone, catch my eye, I’ll be right over.”

He walked to the other side of the street with Alan, and the girl and I looked at each other a little helplessly. We stepped lightly to the middle of the sidewalk, shifting on our feet; I was suddenly aware of the flow of traffic on the street, it wasn’t moving with individual people but as a pattern – one person every fifteen yards or so, someone passed every twenty seconds. The girl cleared her throat, looked around, picked up her posture with a bit of a jerk, and looked over at someone passing on my right –

Hi, do you want to help –

The person was already beside her, and hadn’t reacted in any way. The call died coming out of her mouth – whether it would be ‘elect Kerry’ or ‘beat Bush,’ she probably didn’t even know. She looked at me with exasperation already on her face – I shrugged. I looked past her – two people on the block, about twenty seconds away. I played the interaction out in my mind in advance – remember the rap, introduce yourself, set the scene, ‘record numbers of people already on board,’ then the Ask… here he comes, call right when he’s behind her… he doesn’t see me, he’s looking this way but he’s definitely not making eye contact, he looks kind of familiar…wait a minute, is that --

I figured I was just imagining at first, but it was a strange enough thing to imagine that I froze up and gawked, standing in the middle of the sidewalk like I was there for the hell of it – then, when he was about six feet away from me, short with a baseball cap on and grayer hair than I expected, I was sure enough… and then he was gone –

It was Jon Stewart.

I stood there as the next person walked by me too, while I replayed his passing in my head to make sure…the girl in front of me was still having trouble getting the whole call out to people. I walked over to her – “That was Jon Stewart!”
“Did you get him?”
“What? No! I was totally not ready…I froze!”
“I heard someone canvassed Carson Daly the other day.”

This report failed to impress me; I was still busy kicking myself for having such terribly slow reflexes. I don’t know that there was any other person in the world who I could possibly have wanted more to give me money to beat George Bush, and here he walked by me just as I was dipping my damn toe in the water. A mean joke. I wonder if he would have stopped; maybe he would have given me a nod, thumbs up, although I dunno if he’d given money; maybe I could have made him laugh with some witty shout.

The girl looked behind me and abruptly called out – Hi, do you want to beat George Bush? – and this time her mark actually slowed down, so I backed away. A couple more people passed by in my direction while I stood there still. I looked over across the street at Mike and saw his stance – legs spread as wide as his shoulders, arms by his side with his clipboard hanging wide – and mimicked it myself. I tried to clear my head.

The next person, I’m calling the next person –

The front door of the drug store next to us swung open and a tall man in a sharp suit stepped out. He walked swiftly toward me, and I made eye contact with him and called –

Hi, do you want to help beat George Bush today?

I was late, he was already at my side, but this guy responded – unfortunately.
“Are you a faggot too, like John Kerry?”

He was behind me before his retort was finished. I paused, then said to the empty space in front of me – “No, sir. Have a nice day.”

Nobody else heard our exchange, but it hung in the air. The interaction replayed in my head like the one with Stewart – the man’s face taut with a scowl, his gait forcing forward through my span on the sidewalk, his comment defensive and taunting and angry and ugly and stupid – until it dissipated in the air and I looked back down the street to the next people walking toward me. That was not so bad, actually, I thought…in fact, that was totally easy. I’d come to face the Opposition, and here on the street at least it was raging but impotent. And Josh was right, if any of these other people had heard him say that, they would have given to me – just to spite his hate.

“This job,” I thought to myself after a minute, “is awesome.”

* * *
The guy, my first mark, was not much of a Chelsea boy, I guess. Nobody could mistake John Kerry for a fag – if there was a Queer Eye for social charms, few politicians would benefit from it as much as John Kerry. (The New Jersey governor McGreevey, though– he would make a fine, strapping and dapper campaigner, I am sure…)

It was a brute, reflexive reaction, and one that I provoked unnecessarily. I would soon learn that people coming out of doors simply don’t make good marks – not that this guy was going to give me money in any case, but he was quicker to snarl, just as someone sympathetic would have been quicker to brush me off – as people are passing through doors, crossing over thresholds, they are guarded. It’s best to get them as they are cruising forward in a holding pattern that can be interrupted and then intercepted… that or they will ignore you completely, which is as far as you’re concerned the second best reaction you can get from a person.