I voted without incident around 7:00 A.M. EST. When I got back to the car I noticed the gas gauge was bouncing on empty. So I drove a few blocks to the filling station, where something happened that made my day.
I drive a decent looking car and I dress nice and I'm a white guy. The attendant is a young black guy. He stands at my car window while I look for my Exxon card. I can't find the damned thing, so I am rooting around for it in my nice expensive wallet while he waits.
Now, I don't know what the guy is really thinking while I root around in my wallet. After ten seconds go by, he's probably not thinking anything bad. After twenty, thirty seconds I imagine he's getting impatient. After a whole minute he must be thinking something like Hey, asshole, you sit there in your nice car and your cashmere fucking overcoat looking through your fat fucking upper middle class wallet while I stand out here in the cold waiting on you for twenty minutes like a fool. By the time I finally find the card the guy looks really sullen and pissed. He fills my tank, gives me back my card and the charge slip, turns away.
"Hey, man," I say to him, "you vote?"
The guy turns. There is a terrible expression on his face, mostly anger. A white dude in a suit--asking me questions about did I vote! Oh, man--
"Yeah," he says in a fuck-you tone, "I voted."
I give him a big fat grin and a thumbs up and tell him:
"Well, I just did too. I voted for Obama."
The mask drops from his face. He's so happy he looks like my long-lost cousin. He looks like he wants to hug me. He gives me back a bigger, fatter grin, the kind of grin that says "Hey, come on over for supper sometime soon and meet the family," and he says:
"I did, too."
I drive away, and the two of us are still waving and grinning so much I nearly hit a light pole.