Rules of Resistance

by I. M. Hunt-Logan

  He tells the story of a congressman from Kentucky, Ben Johnson (“the man was like a brother to me”), who was driven by the liberal media to commit suicide following unconfirmed allegations of an affair at the church where Johnson served as pastor.

  Corey grasps my arm and looks me in the eye. “Make no mistake, it was a high-tech lynching based on lies and half-truths. And it never would have happened if I’d still been driving Ben’s messaging.”

  He lets go of my arm and takes a moment to collect himself. The man is genuinely upset.

  I still feel the need to ask, “Why weren’t you still driving Johnson’s messaging?”

  Corey waves the question away. “He didn’t have the guts to go after her. I told him it was the only way, but he didn’t have the nerve. It was the end of him.”

  Further evidence that Corey is the guy to take messaging where others fear to tread.

  The Federal Election Campaign Act requires PACs to have a treasurer. Corey says he’d be happy to serve as the treasurer of record, which would allow me to remain anonymous. Corey can also serve as the PAC spokesperson. But his chief strength is to provide messaging strategy and marketing know-how to the PAC. He suggests we outsource compliance with federal election law to a PAC outsourcing firm, which, for a fixed fee, will provide a PAC manager. Finally, he suggests we have an assistant treasurer, a fairly standard PAC position, to provide backup to the treasurer. Corey says he’ll give some thought to how to fill the role.

  Corey’s plan will allow me to stay under the radar, something I’m pretty committed to. I want to be able to return to my left-leaning life in the Bay Area when all this is over.

  I’ve hired a lot of people at my various biotechs, and I would never have considered anyone like Corey Strutsky for those companies. He openly embraces a pugilistic, all’s-fair, ends-justify-the-means approach to campaigning. It is for precisely these qualities that I choose him for my Political Action Committee. After all, I don’t want it to succeed. Corey seems like just the man to push the messaging way too far. Far enough to turn off centrist voters. This guy is going to be a handful; there’s always a double edge.

  I have to admit, stepping out of the politically correct culture bubble of Bay Area biotechs is oddly liberating.

  7

  Tea Partying with the Central Valley Patriots

  Thursday, August 2nd, 96 days until the midterms

  I’m en route to Modesto to look for office space when Corey calls to ask what I’m doing that evening. He says there’s a Tea Party event near Modesto and that I need to be there to, as he puts it, “take the temperature of Congressional District 10.” He plans to be there and can introduce me to the local activists.

  The occasion is the monthly meeting (first Thursday of every month) of a sub-group of the Stanislaus County Tea Party, a.k.a. the Central Valley Patriots. Their website informs me that the group, founded in 2009 shortly after the Obama inauguration, is committed to ‘fiscal responsibility, limited government, free markets,’ and welcomes volunteers who ‘vary in race, age, religion,’ but ‘are like-minded individuals who are Constitutional Conservatives.’

  Partying with the Central Valley Patriots is about the last thing I want to do this evening. I’m an introvert, so it would be a hard sell to get me out for a group I know and like. But Tea Partiers? Still, this is what I signed up for, and people are people everywhere, right?

  So after checking into the Best Western, with the sun headed for the horizon, I plug the address Corey gave me into the Tesla’s navigation system and get onto Route 99 headed south for what is estimated to be a twenty-minute drive. The navsys directs me onto Bradbury Road, southeast of Turlock. Suburban Turlock disappears behind me, the area turns agricultural, with fields, fallowed and planted, passing by, until finally the navsys informs me that I have arrived, my destination is on the right. I turn up a long dirt driveway to a private home, a sprawling ranch painted mint green with white trim, isolated amid acres of almond orchards.

  A line of pickups is parked in a ragged row in the crabgrass on the side of the driveway, and I ease the Tesla into the end of the line. I’ve spoken to a fair number of Republican consultants and been to a Reed fundraiser in the Bay Area, so this is not my first Republican rodeo. But as I pass the row of pickups, it occurs to me that the Republicans I’ve met to date might be just the surface, the veneer the party presents to the world. The pickups, lovingly maintained, sport various bumper stickers, mostly having to do with the Second Amendment: ‘An armed man is a Citizen, An unarmed man is a slave,’ ‘Gun control is holding your gun with two hands,’ ‘Without the Second Amendment the rest of them mean nothing.’ In case English language literacy is an issue, they sport gun racks to drive the point home.

  The group’s website claims religious inclusion, but some of these trucks sport the ichthys, those intersecting arcs that look like a stick drawing of a fish, sometimes with the word Jesus filling the body. And one of them is coupled with a bumper sticker that reads, ‘For every Jew a .22.’

  It’s starting to look like the Central Valley Patriots welcome all religions, so long as they’re Christian.

  A group of four men linger around the last pickup in the line, smoking. The collection of cigarette butts on the ground suggests that this is the designated smoking section. They watch me approach in silence, eyes narrowed. Not the typical welcoming committee at a political gathering. Did I get the address wrong?

  “You lost?” asks the man nearest me. He’s barrel-chested, over two hundred pounds, not all of it fat. He eyes my shirt with something approaching a sneer.

  I’m suddenly aware that my shirt, which I’d chosen because I think of it as casual since it’s navy and worn with the hem untucked, is pressed and custom-made. All my shirts are custom-made. I imagine telling Fat/Muscle Man that I have really long arms, that I can’t buy off the rack without my wrist bones sticking out beneath the cuffs of the shirt. I imagine that would go over really well. I bet that would be about as welcome a one-percenter excuse as ‘my legs are too long for economy,’ otherwise I wouldn’t spring for business class. As if anyone over the age of ten has legs short enough to be comfortable in economy. The shirt, which is a marker of belonging in my Bay Area haunts, feels like a target on my back here in the hinterland. My skin prickles where the shirt touches me.

  “I’m looking for the Central Valley Patriots,” I say, and watch two of the men exchange a look.

  “That your Tesla?” says Fat/Muscle Man, drawing out the word Tesla so that it sounds as if it has three syllables: TAH—Es—La.

  I start to worry that my fair hair and hazel eyes are insufficient camouflage from folks who might as well have ‘white supremacist’ tattooed on their foreheads. ‘That your TAH—Es—La?’ feels like code for ‘You a mud person?’ Even though they’ve watched me drive the car onto the property and walk the hundred feet from where I parked at the end of the drive, I have a powerful desire to say, ‘Tesla? What Tesla? I don’t own no stinkin’ Tesla!’

  If Imogen were here, she’d be up in his face, screaming, ‘Yeah, goddamnit and I’m part-nigger, what’s it to you? Is this the fucking Central Valley Patriots or not, you fat, fucking redneck?’

  But I’m no Imogen. So I say, “Uh, yeah. Is this the Central Valley Patriots meeting?”

  “Not a lot of Teslas in the North Valley,” he comments, grinding his cigarette under a work boot and getting to his feet. The others follow suit and now they’re standing around me. I can’t tell if I’m being paranoid, or if I’m about to get the shit beaten out of me because I drive an environmentally responsible automobile. Fat/Muscle Man takes a step closer, crowding me and eyeballing me, cigarettes and bourbon on his breath. Where the fuck is Corey?

  “Meeting’s about to get started,” says Fat/Muscle Man. “Let’s head inside.”

  I’m wondering if this is really a good idea after all. Out in the open seems safer. Inside raises the possibility of acts of violence best conducted out of sight. But I
’m surrounded. Also, it seems impolite to reject the invitation, and these boys seem like the sort to take offense. So I enter the lion’s den with my redneck escort.

  We file through the front door, the screen door banging behind us, directly into a long, narrow living room, already full. A couple dozen men and a couple women (which I take as a good sign) fill the chairs and couches and stand in small groups: mostly middle-aged, and, (surprise!) to a person, white. It appears that the Central Valley Patriots welcome all races, so long as they’re white.

  Conversation pauses as I and my escorts hover at the edge of the room. It feels as if everyone in the room is looking at me.

  And finally, finally, Corey Strutsky emerges through the archway from the kitchen, doing a double take when he catches sight of me.

  “Is that Isaiah? Iz Whitman, folks, the young Bay Area Patriot I was telling you about. C’mon through, Iz.”

  And the room exhales.

  Or maybe it’s just that I exhale. Maybe I’m just being paranoid.

  8

  Personal and Electoral Integrity

  Thursday, August 2nd, 96 days until the midterms

  The evening’s agenda is a single subject: Election Integrity, with guest speaker Helen Gundy, widow of Ammon Gundy. The two, who ran a custom rifle business, had crafted a dog and pony show on the alleged voter fraud that they contend cost Ammon his election. In the wake of Ammon’s death, Helen now soldiers on alone.

  A heavy but energetic woman on the far side of sixty with a white bob and glasses, Helen reports how she mailed out a survey to 14,000 voters who registered as Democrats the year her husband’s race was stolen from him. She notes the surveys were in English and Spanish.

  She recounts stories of speaking to hundreds of people who reported being bused into the district from ‘East LA’ to vote multiple times. (It wasn’t clear how she located the hundreds of people in ‘East LA.’ She could not have reached them through her district’s voter registration information, which would, by definition, have addresses in the district.)

  She reports on people having multiple registrations by using small variants in their names. All of her examples are Spanish-sounding names: Jorge and Jorge Junior, living at the same address. I glance around the room to gauge how this is going over and find the crowd nodding and tut-tutting at the horror of Latinos voting not once but twice!

  This seems a bit of a stretch to me. Seems to me there’s a more benign explanation than voter fraud here. Before adoption made me Isaiah Whitman, I was Isaiah Sinclair, Jr. For a time, I lived in the same big house in Mānoa as my biological father, Isaiah Sinclair. Admittedly, it was a brief time, before Dad ran off with a woman from Hilo, never to be seen again, and we lost the house. But if Dad had been less faithless, it’s possible a time would have come that both Isaiah Sinclair, and Isaiah Sinclair Junior, were registered to vote from the same address on Lanihuli Drive. For that matter, Imogen Sinclair the First, as she liked to call herself when she was little, might also have been registered there. Not Mom, of course. Faithlessness had nothing to do with her cancer and, of course, she kept her maiden name.

  I listen to the presentation with my hands in my pockets, shoulder propped against the arch through to the kitchen, hoping to be inconspicuous. I try to keep an attentive/neutral look on my face, as I wonder at Helen’s ability to pack so much racial animus into a presentation in which she never says the words Hispanic or Latino. I don’t know the area, but after the presentation, I bet I could guess where the Latinos live. They’re the districts that Helen Gundy points out as hotbeds of voter fraud: Bothun, South Broadway, Arbor Estates. The room responds with murmurs of concern; they understand exactly who those people living in those neighborhoods are.

  The finale of the presentation is Helen Gundy’s report that she found no evidence, none whatsoever, of Republican voter fraud.

  Given that Helen only contacted Democrats, it’s not clear to me why she expected to find evidence of Republican voter fraud. But the room erupts into applause, and I don’t want to give Fat/Muscle Man another reason, beyond my environmentally responsible car and my beautifully tailored shirt, to dislike me. I clap along with the crowd, a golf-clap, to assuage my feelings of ho-ishness, but a clap nonetheless.

  As if he’s reading my thought bubble, the guy standing next to me says, half under his breath, “Huh, I thought she only sent surveys to Democrats.”

  I’m so surprised that I turn to look at him, a lean guy on the far side of thirty, sporting well-used cowboy boots, a flannel shirt, and the deep tan and crows’ feet that don’t come from Cabo, but from time outside, and lots of it. At which point, Corey, who’s applauding as enthusiastically as the best of them, tucks his head towards us and says, “Iz, have you met Darryl? Darryl, meet Isaiah.”

  9

  Darryl

  Thursday, August 2nd, 96 days until the midterms

  As the meeting was winding down, Corey insisted we go grab a beer. He suggested the Board Room, in Modesto’s revamped central dining district, but Darryl said there were too many ‘hipsters’ there.

  Instead we land at a bar named the Branding Iron. It’s tucked between a barbershop and a used instrument store, in a strip of run-down, single-story commercial space on McHenry, no evidence of gentrification in sight. The place consists of a long, dark, narrow room with a laminate bar running the length of it, and pool tables in the back on the way to the restrooms. It being after ten on a Thursday evening, there are only four or five guys in the place, three of them sitting alone at the bar. Darryl leads us to the far end of the bar, hitching a boot over the foot rail.

  “Sorry, I missed that. What’s your name again?” I ask.

  “Darryl New Ick.”

  At least it sounds as if he said ‘New Ick.’

  “Now, this, this is a bar,” says Corey. “This is authentic.”

  I take a look around. I can’t say I get the ‘authenticity’ of the place. Is ‘an endless supply of Jägermeister,’ as a sign over the bar promises, ‘authentic’? My experience: folks who talk about authenticity a lot are often anything but. The Branding Iron is a dive bar, and there’s nothing wrong with a dive bar.

  Darryl lifts a hand from the bar to signal the bartender, a twenty-something with long, fair hair, an abbreviated top, loads of eye makeup, and a nose ring. Her eyes skim over Corey, to sweep back and forth between Darryl and me, while she slides coasters in front of us.

  “Darryl,” she greets him, then tips her head in my direction. “This your fancy brother?”

  Startled, I check out Darryl in the mirror behind the bar, noting the commonalities: six feet, lean build, dirty-blond hair, hazel eyes. The same be-on-the-lookout description would round us both up. We make embarrassed eye contact in the mirror, catch the recognition in each other’s eyes, and burst out laughing.

  “Nah, nah, Charlene,” says Darryl, grinning, “This is Isaiah. He’s not my brother, he’s . . . a friend.”

  I’m still smiling as I reach across the bar to shake Charlene’s hand.

  “Alright, friend Isaiah, whatcha drinking?”

  ‘Friend.’

  It’s such a trivial politeness. But after spending a couple hours among the Patriots, it takes a lot of the tension out of my shoulders.

  “Pint of Stella.”

  Corey is evidently feeling left out because he inserts himself between Darryl and me at the bar and plants a big haunch on a barstool.

  “Well, Charlene, you are a sight for sore eyes.”

  Charlene dead-eyes him, but Corey plows on. “I think you’ll find I’m very friendly, and if you wouldn’t mind, I’ll take a margarita. With salt.”

  Charlene turns to Darryl, asks, “Beam and a Bud chaser?” and gets a brief nod in reply.

  The Branding Iron is evidently Darryl’s local, the place where the bartender knows his name and his order. Our drinks arrive, and Corey insists on paying. He slides Charlene a twenty, and Charlene slides Corey a few dollars change, tapping it twice bef
ore retreating to the far end of the bar. I wonder how there could possibly be change from a twenty for two pints, a shot, and a mixed drink. Talk about value.

  I, as I mentioned, am an introvert, and Darryl is clearly a man of few words. But Corey, Corey is a committed small-talker and he’s good at it. He begins talking sports. He tells a Stanley Cup anecdote, then an NBA one. It’s almost like watching a stand-up comic. He inquires after Darryl’s wife, and her work at Stanislaus Memorial Medical Center, which apparently is going okay, because Darryl says, “S’okay.”

  Corey moves on to inquire after Darryl’s young daughter, and Darryl comes alive, describing at length taking the daughter to dinner at an Italian restaurant for her birthday, just the two of them.

  “Riley wore her Tinkerbell costume—it’s the only thing she wants to wear. When I pick her up, she comes running out to the car, just bursting—wait, I’ve got a picture, you gotta see . . .”

  Darryl messes with his phone, then holds the phone out to Corey.

  “Gorgeous,” says Corey. “In a couple years, that little cutie’s gonna be beating the boys off with a stick. There’s really nothing like daughters. Nothing like how they look up to their daddies.”

  As Darryl bends over his phone, Corey catches me watching him. Late in the meeting at the St. Francis, Corey assured me he was free to spend as much time in Modesto as I’m willing to pay for. He told me he’s divorced and estranged from his adult daughter, so there is little to tie him to DC. Now Corey twists his face into a look of mock horror. It’s funny, but my gaze slides away, as if by not looking at Corey I won’t be complicit in making fun of Darryl New Ick’s little girl.