An Obama Tale
It’s January 20, 2009 as I write this, the
day Barack Obama is getting inaugurated.
I don’t think what I have to say is really all that different from a lot
of people have said regarding the past election. And by now, a handful of people are probably
sick of hearing about it so I’ll understand if that group of folks decide to
skip this altogether.
In fact,
it’s not even really my tale, but the
tale of a cousin of a friend of mine.
The guy’s name was Tyrone Watkins and I don’t know exactly know what he
did for a living if anything. I first
came across him while visiting that friend I just mentioned. It was early 2008 and my friend and Tyrone,
like a lot of other people, were laid off (I guess you could call me one of the
lucky ones: instead of being out of
work, I got to stay up late at night wondering when the axe of unemployment would
next fall onto my neck).
It was late
afternoon to early evening and we were all just yakking (it was all we could
afford since we were too broke for beer and pizza). The news was on TV but we were all trying to
ignore it because we already knew the economy was bad. My friend Steve was about to change to
channel to “My Wife and Kids” when they had just announced that Obama had won
the Iowa Caucus.
We all
blinked and did a double take. Iowa? Iowa?
“Iowa?”
Steve said. “Do they even got black people in Iowa?”
“Yeah, they
have some, I guess,” I said. “I saw this
news story once about how they’ve been trying to get some diversity out
there.” Or at least I thought I saw a
snippet of such of news story. I wasn’t
as sure as I had sounded.
“Well,
shit, it’s just a fluke, anyway,” Tyrone said.
“It’s going to be just like when Jesse Jackson ran back in ’88.”
“You think
so?” Steve asked.
“Yeah,”
said Tyrone. “As soon as it even smells like his black ass is about to
get somewhere, white folks are going to wake up and vote for Clinton. Them folks need to let this Osama cat go and
get behind someone who actually has a chance to get elected.”
“So you
think Hillary’s going to get the nomination?”
“Yeah, with
all that experience she and her husband got, they going to roll right over his
rookie ass.”
“Damn,
dude, ain’t you going to give the brother no kind of credit?”
“Look, Cuz,
ain’t no way in hell this racist ass country going to put a black man in the
White House. Besides, Bill Clinton close
enough to being black as it is. We
oughta be happy with that.”
At this
point, I had decided to stay out of this conversation.
“Man, you
just wrong,” Steve said to Tyrone. “Just
plain wrong.”
“A’ight,
let’s bet then. Hillary Clinton is going
wrap this nomination up before Spring and ain’t nobody ever going to hear about
Osama or whatever the hell his name is again. Hell, we in the middle of a War
on Terrorism and some fool with an Arabic name thinks he’s going to be
President.”
This was
where the whole thing really got started.
And at this point, I should tell you that according to what Steve had
told me later, Tyrone liked to gamble.
Quite a bit. And all things
considered, you can probably guess Tyrone wasn’t very good at it, either; so
again, I can understand if you want to quit reading this and go fix a sandwich
or something.
Oh, okay.
Steve and Tyrone
had decided that Super Tuesday, the day when a whole bunch of states would have
their primaries at once, would be the day that the bet would be settled. I had decided not to bet and, yes, I’m still
kicking myself for that one. The day had
come and gone and it was still a neck and neck race between Clinton and Obama.
Those Obama
t-shirts started sprouting up around Memphis. They weren’t yet all the over the place like
they would be during the election and all the way up to Inauguration Day. But I could feel the slightly creepy
beginnings of a cult of personality coming on and it made me seriously consider
some third party come November 4. Not
that I had anything against Obama (and if I wanted to have any kind of social
life in this town I’d better not have).
I had run into Tyrone down at the
bus stop the day afterward and he looked absolutely sick. I could also sniff a bit of alcohol on
him. I wasn’t about to ask him how much
he had bet (and lost) because there were other people around and I hadn’t want
to reduce a grown man to tears. And I
was sort of tired of hearing about the campaign but Tyrone had been the one
who’d brought up Obama.
“Oh, they going to find some way to
fix it so he don’t win,” he said. “Osama
done got lucky so far, but you just wait.
Those superdelegates are going to hand the nomination over to
Hillary. We going to have another damn
Republican in the White House for four more damn years ‘cause ain’t no way in
Hell they going to elect a woman or a black man as President. How much you wanna bet?”
Again, I declined (yeah, I know, I
know) but mentioned that I was sure somebody or other were sure to take his
bet.
Apparently somebody did.
On the third of June, a whole bunch
of those superdelegates that Tyrone was so certain were going to just hand the
nomination to Hillary Clinton on a silver platter threw their support behind
Obama instead. Four days later, Clinton
officially shut down her own campaign and endorsed her former opponent.
I didn’t see Tyrone again until the
following Labor Day. I was still hanging
on to my job by a wing and a prayer. My
grill only saw two packs of hot dogs, two dozen hamburger patties, two bags
worth of chicken wings, and two bottles of barbeque sauce (enhanced with a
liberal amount of tap water) to cover them all.
I had regular sliced bread instead of buns, salad instead of coleslaw,
and more tap water instead of soda. Any
visitors who wanted booze had to bring their own.
Tyrone had had to talk his mama
into making some potato salad for him to bring since his wife had left
him. And the only reason I’d known about
that at all was because Steve had told.
“I heard he lost a couple of his unemployment checks gambling with some
shady characters and that’d been the last straw for her,” he’d said. “She took the kids with her, too.” In all honesty, I could’ve done without
hearing that. With the economy the way
it was, I don’t know why Steve thought I was really interested in hearing
anything more about people’s misfortunes.
And Steve and Tyrone must not have
had anything else in their lives because they were talking about the campaign
again. “Damn,” he said, “Democrats done
shot themselves right in the foot this time.
You see how Ol’ Osama’s numbers drop after Palin’s speech at the
Convention. He’s going up against the
Republicans now and McCain’s got mad experience. How much you wanna bet that by the time they
have their first debates, this race ain’t even going to be close? McCain’s going to be leading in the polls
like 70% to 30%. At least.”
The moment Tyrone had started
seeking takers on this new bet, I made sure I stayed in whatever part of the
apartment he was not for an hour or so.
Some people just refused to learn and even with cash being tight as it
was, I just didn’t have the heart to take the poor man’s money so easily from
him. And everyone there at my place was
tactfully forgetting how certain Tyrone had been that Obama wouldn’t even get
that far.
Anyway, it’s pretty easy to guess
what happened next. On Friday, September
26, Obama and McCain had the first of their debates in Oxford,
Mississippi. And as the race was nowhere near the blowout Tyrone
had predicted, he had lost his bet again.
He had also lost his some of his hair color, his once all black hair now
had some very visible streaks of grey.
I found this out a week before
Halloween when I ran into Tyrone at the bus stop again. By now, Obama was damn near everywhere:
t-shirts, caps, children books, even a whole satellite channel dedicated to
nothing but his economic plan. Cults of
personalities were eerie enough but when you get one centered on a politician I
really start getting the creeps.
“You know if Osama gets elected
they going to assassinate him, right?” he said with obvious glumness and with
no solicitation from me whatsoever.
“Those two skinheads they caught yesterday was like, you know, a test
run. They are just not going to let—”
“Okay, Tyrone, enough,” I cut
in. Now he was just ripping off Chris
Rock and doing it badly at that. “First,
you said Iowa was a fluke. Then you said Clinton
would beat him for the nomination. Then
you said McCain was going to just blow him away in the election. And you lost every time you took bets on
those things. And those two skinheads
were a pair of high school dropouts and all-around failures at life who thought
it was a brilliant idea to put on some white top hats and white tuxedoes and
shoot up a predominantly black school before driving on to take out Obama
and—get this part—brag about on their
MySpace page first. The idiots might as
well have called the Secret Service in advance.” Now maybe I was a little too harsh with him but
the joke had run itself into the ground and was now more than six feet
under. “Why can’t you simply admit this
one’s not going to be so cut-and-dried?”
Tyrone looked a little hurt but he
kept right on with his spiel. I heard
some desperation in his voice. “Look,
man, I’m just trying to keep it real with all these dreamers out here. They’re just setting themselves up for
another big letdown.”
“Maybe, maybe not. My crystal ball’s in the shop.”
“Oh, you might think this is funny
but how much you want to bet—”
“No, I don’t want to bet anything, Tyrone. And here’s our bus, by the way.”
I next saw Tyrone on the morning of
November 5, day after the election. I
was headed out the door for work and he’d met me coming out of the apartment
building.
“Damn, man, you still going to
work?” he asked me.
“Uh, yeah, Tyrone. It is
Wednesday.”
“Mm. Thought since your boy Osama won you’d call
in black and be out celebrating.”
Who I voted for has no real bearing
on this story so I won’t reveal it here.
Also, it wasn’t any real business of Tyrone so I didn’t tell him either. “No, I went to bed halfway through McCain’s
concession speech. Bills won’t pay
themselves. What’s up?”
“Oh, I uh come to see if I could
borrow a couple of dollars.”
By this, it was pretty clear to me
that once again Tyrone had found a taker on whatever bet he had been about to
make with me at the bus stop a few weeks before. And even if he hadn’t come to
tap me for a couple of dollars, I could see he had lost that bet.
This time he’d lost a foot in
height, the bass in his voice (gone from high baritone to alto), and all the
brown in his eyes (they were now a ghostly light grey). He was also translucent in the middle; I
could just make out passing traffic behind him.
I really didn’t feel like seeing his internal organs so early in the
morning, so I thrust a ten into his hand and kept on stepping.
And it’s January 20, 2009 and Tasha is being cute as all
get out on TV. Economic slowdown or not,
a million plus people have crammed themselves into DC for the Presidential
Inauguration. Seeing the genuine tears
of joy on people’s faces, like the elderly people in wheelchairs so happy to be
alive on such a historical day, has (at least for the moment) made me question
my initial cynicism about cult of personalities. I think I can stand to be happy for at least
one day.
As for Tyrone, he’d made some other
bet about Obama the other day or so. I
don’t know (and don’t care, to be honest) who took him up on it. This time he’d lost some important
chromosomes and turned into a parrot, which his mom keeps now.
And the fool still keeps saying “Osama”.
Copyright © 2009 by
Anthony Anderson
