I never expected to have to calm down a busload of elderly Polish illegal aliens in this or any lifetime. I certainly never expected to have to do it in the name of the Republican Party and Bob Dole. But sometimes you’ve just got to step up and be a hero.
The year was 1996, and the month was August. It was two days after the end of the Republican National Convention, and I was involved in the first colorful adventure of my journalistic career. Actually I wasn’t really a journalist yet – just a smartass 20-something guy from Chicago who had sweet-talked my way into helping both Bill Clinton’s and Bob Dole’s presidential campaigns – but what happened that day wound up becoming the launching pad for the rest of my life so far.
I had grown up in a highly political, and highly conservative Republican household in Little Rock, Arkansas – one of the most diehard Democratic hotspots in the country. My father had fled Poland, and he drilled an intense hatred of Communism and a zealous love for America’s craziest Cold Warrior, Ronald Reagan, into myself and my three siblings. To him, anyone who didn’t embrace Reagan’s nuclear-weapons doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction was a Commie and a weakling.
I drank the conservative Kool-Aid throughout my growing-up years, even becoming president of my high school Young Republicans. I tingled with pride as George Bush senior vowed “no new taxes” and nearly wept as he described his vision of a “thousand points of light.” (Bear with me.) We were so caught up in the magic of it all that we even visited New Orleans during the 1988 convention despite the fact that we weren’t even delegates – just so we could be near all the excitement. To hold these views in a city so opposed to them meant we had a passion that bordered on zealotry.
But by 1996, I was hopelessly cynical. George Bush HAD raised taxes after all. I had also been jaded about the FIRST Gulf War, wondering what we were doing worrying about a little country called Kuwait that no one had ever even heard about before – just like Vietnam. I also hated Clinton because I’d grown up in Arkansas, and once out, I never wanted to think about that state or any of its leaders ever again. Besides, I’d served him popcorn once in a movie theater and the man insisted on so much extra butter that he actually said “I want you to hit it til I tell you to stop.” Not only did I feel sexually harassed, but he wound up asking for 15 squirts of butter – a horrific amount that I will never erase from my mind. Suffice it to say that I was a Ross Perot voter in ’92.
My favorite movie of all time is “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” and I had spent the past decade since its release learning how to sweet-talk and scam my way into events, just like my hero. And so I decided to see what would happen if I tried to pull off an election-year gag beyond compare: I called the Chicago headquarters of both candidates and said that I was the son of an immigrant and was raised to believe that each man – Bob Dole or Bill Clinton, depending on who I was speaking to – was the greatest living American politician, and that I would do anything to help them get elected.
The reason why I wanted to do this so badly was admittedly unusual and deeply personal: I had just begun performing stand-up comedy in Chicago a year before, but yet I was terrified of crowds and what the strangers in them thought of me. I ultimately had a meltdown on stage one night and wound up getting a shrink.
The shrink was an elderly Frenchman named Antoine Rousseau who had an accent that would confuse Inspector Clouseau. Dr. Rousseau said that NORMALLY, he’d tell someone who’s afraid crowds not to engage in a career field that involved performing in front of them. But he could se I wanted to do comedy too badly to ever stop. So he asked if there was something I could do to stand out from other comics and build my self-esteem that way.
I told him I had written humor columns in college back in Texas but thought no one in Chicago would give a yokel from the South a break. Dr. Rousseau said it was time to prove myself wrong. He assigned me to find something funny to write about, hand it in to him and he’d mail them to the city’s 4 main papers and see if one would buy the story and help me prove I could be funny my own way. The idea was that If I could succeed in print, I’d feel special and start having more confidence performing.
So I called both the Dole and Clinton campaigns because as cynical as I was about politics, I still wanted to see a campaign from the inside and how I could scam the professional con artists we call politicians in return. I wanted to take them for as much fun, access and free swag as possible while doing as little as I could in return. I would be the Anti-Volunteer.
Amazingly, both campaigns were thrilled to hear from me. I went two-for-two with my phone calls and was invited by the Dole campaign to help out with a quote-unquote “very special” event: riding a bus down five hours to the state capitol that Saturday morning to the Illinois State Fair, where Bob Dole and his running mate Jack Kemp were going to be making their first appearance after the convention.
I had to show up at 7 a.m. outside a Catholic church to board what I thought would be an old school bus, or even worse a church van, but instead turned out to be a tour bus worthy of rock stars. Swank seating and multiple coolers full of beer and food awaited me inside, with a TV screen hanging above every row for our private viewing pleasure.
But one thing seemed strange: as the campaign workers handed us our supposedly homemade signs to wave at the rally, I was the only person saying “Thanks” – in English, at least. Everyone else around me was at least 80 years old, spoke Polish and seemed to only know two words in English: “Dole” and “Kemp.” And they learned THOSE words only because the workers led them through a repetition rally in which they yelled only those two names out, over and over, before letting us board.
Granted, we were in Chicago, where there are more Poles living than any place on the planet outside of Warsaw itself. But something was fishy about this, probably a game of Hold A Sign-Get A Green Card. Yet before I could really take note of it or get out of the situation, my mind, eyes and heart returned to the vast quantities of free beer. I also was stunned to realize that, despite Bob Dole’s usual Republican yammering about Hollywood’s corrupt values and sleazy entertainment, we were going to be treated to free video screenings of Jackie Chan’s R-rated chopsocky fest “Rumble in the Bronx”, followed by the James Bond film “Goldeneye,” in which the female villain crushes men to death with her thighs. Ah, hypocrisy!
Barreling down the freeway, surrounded by my father’s fellow countrymen as they sang Polish drinking songs, yelled at the TV screen and drank enough to shut down a brewery, I knew this would be a special day. The idea was to get everyone as rowdy and demonstrative as possible, and the Republicans were surprisingly adept at their mission.
We screamed and chanted our way through the rally, and afterwards I repeatedly tried to get a photo in with Dole and Kemp. Only they weren’t exactly posing for me. As they moved through the crowd, I followed along from about 2 feet away like the famed film psychopath Travis Bickle that Robert DeNiro played in “Taxi Driver,” repeatedly snapping off-balance photos of their heads as I went. Finally, a couple of Secret Service guys had enough and I got a great action photo of them coming towards me with their arms outstretched.
I’m no dummy. And the State Fair was otherwise lame. So I clambered back onto the bus for the ride home, where all the Poles got themselves even drunker and rowdier – to the point where the bus driver finally pulled over the bus in the middle of a highway rainstorm because he simply couldn’t take the pressure anymore.
And that’s when a female Asian campaign volunteer tried to get the crowd to shut up via microphone and instead broke down crying. I was amazed at the power of my elders, but I still betrayed them because the woman asked if anyone there was bilingual – and I was the only one to stand up, walk to the front and save the day.
Grabbing the microphone, I barked out a childhood scolding my mother had given me countless times but which I barely understood: “Prosze! Chee-ho! Shaddai!” meaning Please! Be quiet! Sit down!” Incredibly, they listened and then gave me a round of applause to boot. The girl wiped her tears and said, “Thank you,” as I posed for a dramatic picture, smiling in front of the crowd of my waving fellow countrymen.
I came to realize that the day had been one long bizarre and cynical exploitation of my countrymen. The Republican Party that claimed to oppose illegal immigration had just used about 50 of the hardest drinking aliens on earth as drunken cheerleaders for their shameless cause.
But that was nothing compared to my Democratic adventures. I was told to come to a meeting at an unmarked location – a rented loft located directly above the city’s prime drag queen revue – and undergo an orientation speech and have my picture taken for a photo ID and FBI background check. I thought they would find out I registered Republican and would kick me out on principle. But amazingly, I was called two days later and told that I was in the loop. If I agreed to volunteer for three shifts during the Democratic Convention – which was being held right there in Chicago! – I could get free passes to prime parties and even a night in the convention hall.
The best thing that happened, though, was my discovery that the hotel headquarters was located literally two blocks away from my Dilbert-dayjob office. Looking out my window over Lake Michigan, I could see all the layers of security – boats, trucks, helicopters, and even rooftop snipers – whetting my appetite for the excitement to come. And for that week, despite the fact that I hate wearing suits, I dressed to the nines each day and snuck into the Sheraton Hotel before work, on lunch breaks and after work. America’s most powerful politicians and journalists were there and I had a photo ID that enabled me to be waved in and meet them!
Growing up in the relatively small city of Little Rock, I had dreamed of fame and moving in power circles, not knowing if I’d ever get my chance, but suddenly here it was.
So what was my big duty with the convention? Hopping into an unmarked rental truck and driving through Chicago’s infamous Lower Wacker Drive – the underground home of some of the greatest chases in film history, from “The Blues Brothers” to “The Dark Knight” – in order to deliver 15,000 handmade signs to the Union Center convention hall. Better yet, we were given a special government-security clearance notice that we were allowed to show any police officer who attempted to pull us over for speeding or reckless driving, overruling their ticket or arrest in the name of the federal government!
This was like giving an alcoholic keys to the Miller Time brewery and saying have a good overnight stay. We could do ANYTHING we wanted on the coolest street outside of the Autobahn – and bobbing and weaving through traffic at about 75 miles an hour, we took full advantage.
And once we dumped those signs off and signed our paperwork to prove we did it, we kept driving recklessly all over Chicago for the next four hours before our literal Get Out of Jail Free card expired at midnight. Don’t judge me – we were working for the President!
Did I lift a finger to help the rest of that week? Hell no! I had my badge already and had gotten my girlfriend a volunteer gig distributing passes for the parties and convention hall. I made sure she snuck away 2 extra passes to everything, from the Al Gore and Clinton speeches to the parties that were packed with so many odd collections of celebrities I felt like was walking through a live-action “Simpsons” episode. There was Bill Maher, over there was Richard Lewis, then ooh look Olympic legend Carl Lewis! And holy crap, while running across Planet Hollywood to meet Billy Baldwin, I almost tipped over Tipper Gore! This time, a different set of Secret Service goons were coming towards me before I abruptly decided to call it a night.
Being amid all the stars night after night was amazing. I had grown up addicted to letterman and had dreamed of someday having my own show. To mingle with the stars seemed like my dry run for greatness. Best of all was Richard Lewis, who not only posed for a picture for myself, but learned I was an aspiring comic and wound up grabbing me to pose in photo after photo for strangers, like we were a comedy duo or frat brothers at a keg party. When he signed his autograph, he wrote three words I’ll never forget: “Never look back.”
I taped those words to my computer screen at work for the next six months before rising them as the inspiration to quit them as the inspiration to quit my Dilbert day-job and pursue writing full-time.
For just as Dr. Rousseau had hoped, my account of my bipartisan adventures did sell on my first try. It kicked open the doors to my career today and while I remain skeptical of the people our parties nominate, I have developed a renewed passion for politics whenever a truly different voice – a Ralph Nader, a Ron Paul – comes around.
Did I stay too long at the fair? Who’s to say – but one thing I know is that that day at the fair has stayed with me.
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