Raining on Our Democratic Party (November 2016)
When I was driving from Warwick to Mobile, I’d passed the signs marked for Panama City Beach and almost instinctively veered off the exit. I thought “Oh my gosh. This might be my last chance if he’s still there!”
Then I realized that I really had zero time for that bullshit, so I got back on the road and back on track to Mobile. I was proud of myself for overcoming a weak moment and guiding myself back to see a friend.
I’d arrived in Mobile around 7 pm, and it was already so dark outside. All we really had time for was to party, and it was election night, so that made it pretty interesting.
She showed me the place that she said she worked, bought me a really spicy wrap called the Katy Peri Peri which was made with Peri Peri peppers. It was dripping all over the place and brought tears to my eyes, but it was so tasty. On the counter, there were also candied habañero peppers which Jesse said customers would stupidly grab handfuls of because they were free. He said it was fun to watch them cry after not reading the obvious warning signs.
I didn’t realize that Mia and Jesse both worked together. She was a bartender and he was a cook. They were both living in an upstairs room in Jesse’s father’s house which was one of the coolest, traditional American classic homes I’d ever seen. You could tell that the architecture was from a much older era, and I appreciated the charm that it had. It was well-decorated and well-furnished, and I lucked out by coming at a time when Jesse’s sister was away, so I had my own room to stay in.
Mia showed me around her downtown which she described as “a little sister New Orleans.” We bar-hopped across town and ended up in a place where there was a Democratic party being held, and was even being broadcasted live on the local news. We had watched the broadcast from another bar across town, and made our way to the bar known as Kazoola, to witness the broadcast in person.
The bar itself was named after a famous slave that grew up in Alabama and was known for its live jazz performances. It seemed that everyone’s jovial laughter and jubilant mood about the hope of our first female president quickly turned into anguish and despair once it was seen that Donald Trump caught up to Hillary Clinton and all the states after that started bleeding red too. Once we saw that North Carolina turned red, we knew it was over. It was extremely fitting for everyone’s mood that the musician sing “Purple Rain” by Prince, and I captured the memory of the sadness and support of everyone in the room.
Mia and Jesse had taken the loss extremely hard themselves. On the way back home, Jesse kept talking about how it was all a ploy to get Trump impeached so that we could have the real devil, Mike Pence in office. It was so unreal to see this orange man with no experience or qualifications to be our new president and leader.
That night, we all smoked a blunt to take off the edge, and so I could actually get some sleep. I must have slept really well because I didn’t even hear all the commotion downstairs when it was happening. Mia was so upset about the election plus drunk, that she wouldn’t stop vomiting in the bathroom downstairs, and when I left the house at 5 AM to go to New Orleans quickly before heading back home, I saw a trail of her clothes leading from the bathtub all the way upstairs.