The primaries were hot like the night that falls swiftly during wartime in the Sangre de Cristo mountains.
Voting was heavy. Then, it was light. Those who could not face it cast absentee ballots.
The candidates were still sweating and leaping for the favor of the beautiful superdelegates. Their supporters were sweating too and making pie sounds among the fiery blogs that lurked patiently in tall grass for the old newspapers. He walked among them lamenting his lost youth.
Then there was a cantina, and it smelled like honesty.
The cantina was dark. In the dusty space above the bar there was a man talking. The man had a nickname like a bird and his voice made him hurt where he had been broken. Cable. Cable and news and the fair-haired boys who had taunted him with their white teeth long ago. Liars. He cursed.
He had not thought about Washington in many years. Clinton had been there. Clinton and many, many bottles of the sharp, crisp Red Bull that the Beltway insiders drink in the hot noonday sun. Why, he thought, were so many of them named Clinton?
He motioned the barkeep to pour a double and settled into his evening drinking pose, his ragged clothing making nothing sounds.
It is written on the body that there are five things that make a man happy. There is food and there is drink. There is work and there is friendship and then there is love. And there is the un-brokered convention. So that makes six, he thought to himself.
The thing about living in blogs was that you could stay hungry for a long time and barely notice because of all the dancing in the dark. Hunger was good discipline for a blogger and you learned from it.
He thought he had it all on this holiday until he looked across the room at the girl with the long black hair. Written on her body was a single question - You votin' for Hillary?
He tried to tell her about the winds and the big hurricane he had known, the one they called El Grande Hurricane, but she said that sounded like a girl's drink and it made her sad.
He knew what she asking and she was not asking for the liquid poison that can make the words flow and she did not mean the white powder that can make strong men dance in borrowed shoes and she did not mean the weeds that are smuggled by old men across the river and in through the sea.
He looked at her close and she smelled like hope and fear mixed with dirt.
"No."
"Why not?"
"It's been done."