offered a short laugh. “Love ya, kiddo. You know it. And if they all turn out to be a pack of lunatics, I’ll still be here with the dog.”
Chapter 2
Cade
Street hockey was the first thing to go. Up until Jill came along I’d spent every Sunday afternoon on my Rollerblades on the closed-off section of Pennsylvania Avenue that fronted the White House. The other guys who showed up for the pickup games were mostly young Capitol Hill staffers, people I’d worked with in previous political campaigns or knew from my internship the summer before. There was a rare glory to battling it out with hockey sticks in the shadow of the White House, skates clunking and whirring, our shouts and cheers carrying into the air that rose to the surreal blue D.C. sky. My body felt strong then, my spirit light. As a kid I’d spent every winter ice-skating on the frozen quarry lake, so I was a pro on skates, and aggressive on the court besides. Girls watched from the sidelines, rooting from the spectator space along the tall iron fence. When I scored a goal, they cheered, and I loved it. Arrogant as it might be, I was a junkie for adulation.
And then, for Jill. Jill who had no interest in power, who did not find the city exciting. Jill who had crash-landed in my life during a season when the crush of school, the constant lack of money and the pressure of that season’s campaign were all conspiring to make me snap. I needed fewer obligations, not more. The consolation for being a campaign volunteer, working like a cult member with the stakes so high they made wealthy men break out in a cold sweat, was the sex. Late nights stapling signs together in a small office get really monotonous. Trudging around neighborhoods knocking on doors, working the phone banks. You want to blow off some steam. These opportunities crop up for very hot, very random sex in interesting locations. I looked forward to it every year. And yet there I was, giving all that up, even giving up street hockey to spend more time with Jill, because I ached to be with her all the time. It was dumb love, and I knew it, and I didn’t give a shit even remotely.
In any campaign, if you’re aspiring to be a legislator yourself one day, you do it in part for the connections. In life you can never, ever underestimate the power of networking. Same goes for making enemies—make a good-faith effort not to piss people off any more than absolutely necessary. This was a lesson I sure didn’t learn at home. My father was the Coos County Regional Grand Champion in pissing people off. He was a farmer—one who did sorely little to network with the locals, the way farmers ought to—but mainly he just picked fights with the people who rented storage units from him at the U-Store-It owned by my family, and gradually he sold off his other commercial real estate holdings because his business relationships got too contentious. He and his brother, Randy ran a shooting club. When Dad’s friends there started acting like a bunch of drunk jackasses Randy objected, and instead of working it out, Dad just told him to go suck it. From a political-science perspective this is not the kind of thing we call “effective collaboration.” But then a few years ago Dad had a stroke—brought on by smoking, yelling at everybody, or maybe the locals putting a hex on him—and he’s been pretty docile ever since. He’d mellowed somewhat even before that, mainly because my sister married a similar asshole and so my dad handed over the crown to him. Dad kind of took the role of Queen Mother Asshole, so after that he just showed up at special events to wave and be an asshole for old times’ sake.
I learned a lot from that example. If you want to break bad with people and determine your manliness by how many people avoid you, then you get to live in a pile of disintegrating lumber a stone’s throw from the Canadian border, eating the saliva of everyone who prepares your sandwiches locally. The life I wanted was not that one.
What drew me to Mark Bylina’s campaign was not strictly the connections or the networking. It was the fact of him being an environmentalist Republican. In my opinion that’s where the future of the country is headed. This country