Dirty Sexy Politics

Chapter 22 And Then There Was Rock Band

I woke up alone and the apartment was quiet, an echoing silence. So this is what defeat is like, I thought. Nothing and nobody and no sound.

We hadn’t made plans for losing. In the mind-set of our family, if anybody had ever said, “This is what we’ll do after we lose,” it could have jinxed everything.

Plans for winning? Oh, we had lots of those. My father had spent the last two years talking about nothing else—all the things he was going to do when he won, the things to fix, the war, the economy, health care. But now the talking had stopped. The rallies were finished. And I woke up in my parents’ guest apartment in Phoenix alone in bed and wearing my gold glitter dress and a smeared game face of election night makeup. I looked like I had been in a car accident.

My pain was dull but throbbing somewhere, way down inside me, like somebody had given me a shot of Novocain directly into my heart.

Where were my friends? They had gone, scattered off. Last I’d seen them, after the concession speech, they had come with me to the hotel bungalow for an after-party, where the campaign staff had gathered, the aides, the Bus Nazi, the Groomsmen. I was just trying to get through it, and looked for people whom I needed to thank and say good-bye to, like my tireless web designer, Rob Kubasko. But I lost heart very soon. I didn’t even have the energy to drink much. I was too sad and in shock. I felt unreal, like a person I was watching in a movie.

Shannon, Heather, and Josh had already left by then. I assumed they had wandered back to the ballroom of the Biltmore, where a far larger mass of people—thousands of volunteers, staff, donors, coordinators, speakers, organizers—were doing a grieving/celebrating thing that just seemed way too painful for me. I was supposed to stop by. I said that I’d stop by. Instead, I had gone back to my parents’ apartment building and fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

After a shower, I went downstairs in sweatpants and a sweatshirt and tried to find a car. I didn’t care whose car or what car. My parents and a bunch of campaign staff had driven up to our cabin in Sedona—either very late on election night or early in the morning. The doorman brought around a Toyota Prius, the only family car left, and I drove it straight to the Biltmore to find my friends. I was in a crazy mood.

I didn’t want to be alone, but I didn’t want to see anybody either, except Shannon, Heather, and Josh. I needed them the way I’ve never needed friends before. But the press corps was staying at the hotel and, more than anything, I didn’t want to be cornered and have to try to talk graciously about what it felt like to lose.

No more fake stuff.

I was done with that.

But while I was looking for my friends, I ran into Kelly O’Donnell, a TV reporter from NBC, and thankfully one of the normal people. Kelly was very sweet and sensitive, I remember that. But I couldn’t wait to get away.

Shannon and Heather and Josh were in various states of fatigue and inebriation when I found them. They were starving, too. So I brought them back to the apartment and fed them lunch. They started talking about election night and the parties I had missed—the drinking, chain-smoking, the madness and crazy stuff.

I started feeling a little frantic, just thinking about all the people that I hadn’t said good-bye to. All the people I might never see again. People who had meant so much to me. All gone, disbanded, people whom I had loved, and hated, and loved hating. You know what I mean. They had been my family and my whole world for seventeen months.

I hadn’t done anything right.

I hadn’t thanked enough people, or hugged enough people. The ending had slammed me. I had just survived it—like some kind of explosion—and not thought about anybody else but myself. I wondered when that would stop. When I grew up?

While we were eating, we turned on the TV—an addiction at this point. For the last four months it was always on, in every room, wherever we were. We expected to see Obama on the screen. But Sarah Palin was giving interviews in the lobby of the Biltmore. What? Why the hell was she giving interviews? Was the failed vice presidential running mate supposed to do that? My dad certainly wasn’t giving interviews.

We were shouting at the screen. I think somebody threw a pillow. Sarah was trying to continue her political career, or save it, we figured, and separate herself from my dad and his loss. She was trying to be her own person now, free from us, free of the campaign and my dad. I don’t know if that’s what she was doing, or thinking, but we decided it was.

Our defeat was just hours old, and still too painful, to us anyway—wasn’t she even heartbroken? But it was the very beginning of what would be months of postmortem, the beginning of Sarah and many individuals in the campaign not letting things die or the wounds heal. The fallout from the campaign went on and on and everybody except my dad would want to have their say. Including me.

Election night was like a fire, and when the ashes were left, there would be things that would rise out of them. Nothing is ever really over, it just evolves into something else.

I was supposed to drive up to meet my parents at the cabin in Sedona later that day. But I stalled—hating to say good-bye to my friends, hating to separate after all our months together. I couldn’t stand to think about it. But they had their own lives and careers to get back to. I knew that. But I asked anyway. Would they stay a little longer, get me through the next few days? They weren’t my employees anymore—staffers who were helping me with the blog or my hair. I was closer to them than I’d been to anybody.

They didn’t just say yes. They said they wanted to stay with me and weren’t ready to leave yet. I’m not sure they were telling the truth. But the gesture itself says everything. Shannon, Heather, and Josh stayed around to bring me back to life.

MY PARENTS HAVE A CABIN BETWEEN SEDONA AND COTTONWOOD, about a two-hour drive from Phoenix. While I drove, Shannon, Heather, and Josh rehashed election night, everything I had missed.

The Biltmore ballroom had been a big wake and split up into many smaller wakes, which went on all night. The Originals, people who had spent two years of their lives completely devoted to the campaign, found each other like magnets and didn’t let go. There was drinking and everything else, almost everything, including skinny-dipping in the Biltmore pool. I was hanging on every word my friends were saying, delighting in the gloriously bad behavior, until I saw blue and red lights swirling and flashing in the rearview mirror.

I was being pulled over.

The officer said I was going eighty-five mph. He asked why I was speeding.

“I’m sorry, Officer,” I said, handing over my driver’s license. “My dad just lost the election to Barack Obama.”

This is possibly the best excuse I’ve ever had for speeding. He gave me a warning.

Pulling back onto the highway, our conversation started up again, including a long analysis of crazy-sex—and what it is about. I remembered meeting a guy once who had done a “semester at sea” in college, traveling around the world on a cruise ship and taking courses. He told me a story about how the ship had encountered a terrible storm, so bad that they all thought they were going to drown. People were praying and freaking out, and scrambling for life jackets. He said the only thing that he could think about was having sex one more time before he died. He went around to random girls and asked if they were interested. He didn’t want to die doing anything else.

Election nights are kind of like that. The emotions are so strong and searing—the exhilaration or disappointment is overwhelming—and, no matter what, a part of your life is ending. Crazy-sex was a way to get through it, work it out, even honor and celebrate it. As much as my mom will be horrified to hear this, I understood what crazy-sex was about.

I wish that something so dramatic had happened to me, that my campaign celibacy vow had ended that very night—like the minute the campaign was over, I got drunk and tore off my clothes, skinny-dipped in the Biltmore pool, and then drifted off with a campaign staffer whom I had crazy chemistry with, and been attracted to the whole time, and then, we wound up together for the night. That would be the movie version. But there’d been no campaign staffer for me, not even one I’d had my eyes on. In reality, I went back home to the guest apartment and passed out in my gold dress.

The vow could end now, in any case. I was free to have sex again. When my sanity returned, life normalized, and I found somebody worth the trouble and risks, would it come back to me, after all these months?

Was it like riding a bike?

It was pitch dark when we arrived in Sedona. Our cabin is in the middle of the mountains, deep in a canyon, essentially in the wilderness. We crawled out of the car like bugs that have been hiding under a rock. We were like boat people—scruffy, tired, needing showers and sleep. The main cabin was empty, as far as we could tell, or my parents were asleep. But I needed to find them so they could tell us where to stay.

Looking for them, I wandered into one cabin and pushed open a bedroom door and saw Charlie and Judy Black under the covers, curled up in bed.

“Oops! Sorry!’

I love Charlie and Judy, and there was something so funny, and so classic, about standing in a bedroom in my ragtag state and coming upon those two in their pajamas.

I laughed and couldn’t stop. It meant so much to me.

My first post-election laugh.

THE NEXT MORNING MY DAD WAS SITTING BY THE POND, alone, making phone calls. The trees behind him were so beautiful, golden and red, autumn colors. The air was dry, chilly but sunny. He had a sheet of paper in front of him, a long list of names and phone numbers on it.

Just seeing him, like that, made me cry. There was something about how all alone he was too. The night before, he had been surrounded by what felt like millions of people and now he was all alone sitting by our pond with his sunglasses and dorky Dad sweatshirt on making phone calls and being stoic.

The aftermath. This was going to be the worst part, wasn’t it?

I walked over to him slowly, told him I loved him, and gave him a hug.

Then I found my mom, and asked her what my father was doing, and she said that he was calling supporters and big donors to thank them. She looked really tired but hanging in there for all of us. She was wearing jeans and a sweater and I remember thinking it had been a long time since I’d seen her in cabin clothes, casual stuff, the kind of thing she liked to wear at home.

“Where is everybody?” I asked. Charlie and Judy, Steve Schmidt, Rick Davis, and everybody else had gone back to their families that morning. Only Brooke Buchanan, my dad’s tireless press secretary, was left, along with my parents, my sister, Bridget, and my friends. My brother Jack had gone back to the Naval Academy that morning. My brother Jimmy was heading back to Camp Pendleton, where he was stationed.

That afternoon, my dad started grilling. It was his therapy. He grills steak, chicken, hot dogs, hamburgers, and basically any other kind of meat, poultry, and fish imaginable. He is a grill master, and loves feeding people. He loves it when we really load up our plates and keep coming back for more.

Suddenly food became the focus of our existence. We feasted as though we hadn’t eaten in two years. Meat, big meals, everything he could grill, several times a day, and even though I started to feel really full, I kept eating. We only stopped to sleep.

Eating and sleeping.

Sleeping and eating.

We returned to the essentials. We let our bodies be exhausted. If you are doing nothing all day, you make more time for food.

Getting dressed seemed like a big effort, so we stayed in our pajamas all morning, and our sleepwear evolved to a form of in-between wear, comfort clothes like sweats and T-shirts, my ubiquitous UGG boots. We all looked raggedy and who-cares. After Brooke left for Colorado—to see her parents, her dog, Maddie, and go skiing—it was down to me and Bridget and my friends with Mom and Dad.

Sitting around the lunch table, we came up with a game called “What Cindy Did Next” where we dreamed up things for Mom to do now that the election was over. We decided that she should try out for Dancing with the Stars, and she smiled, her first smile since the election. We kept the idea alive for days until we’d almost convinced her.

After lunch, we slept.

We woke up, and ate again.

Dad’s dry ribs. This would be my last meal if I had to pick a last meal. And I ate his dry ribs like it was. He grills them with lemon, garlic, and other “secret ingredients.” It takes hours and hours and always reminds me of my childhood. Dad grilled an onion for me too, he always does, because I love, love, love onions so much. This is his special thing, just for me: an onion wrapped in tin foil with a lemon on it.

And then, we discovered Rock Band.

WE WERE AVOIDING THE TV NEWS FOR THE OBVIOUS reasons. And after so many months of being obsessed with the news cycle, we wanted to see if we could live in a world without one. It was really strange at first. Somebody voted that we watch movies, but I nixed that idea, fearing they might be too emotional.

The big TV screen in the living room was looming over us, so we decided to try playing Rock Band. All the equipment was just sitting there, left by Bridget or my brothers. I had never played it, or anything like it, my entire life.

For those of you who don’t know, Rock Band is a video game where the players use drums, a guitar, and a microphone to play along, or sing along, to rock music. It’s a competition, and a tiny bit like karaoke, except you are judged by how well you can hit the notes on time, and sing the words. Actual talent is beside the point.

Once we got into it, there was no stopping us. Hour after hour, day after day, we played Rock Band in the living room—from the moment we woke up, after going into town for Starbucks coffee. My dad would be grilling outside on the deck, and inside, in our pajamas, we played Rock Band.

We took turns trying all the instruments—the guitar, and singing parts, and the drums. Then a pattern developed, where Heather played the drums because she was a drumming savant—the minute she first tried them. Shannon always got to sing the Courtney Love songs, and Josh played so much guitar that his fingers bled one day. He taped them up in Band-Aids and played on.

My best songs reminded me of the campaign, Garbage’s “I’m Only Happy When It Rains” and Oasis’s “Don’t Look Back in Anger.” I pretended I was Shirley Manson. I am really not a singer, at all, but when you don’t care and just sing your heart out, it has a way of feeling like something real and compelling and transformative is happening in the room.

We took short breaks sometimes—just sat in the sun on the deck. Sometimes, if my dad wasn’t on the deck, we’d talk about the election. When he was around, we didn’t. Nobody did. You couldn’t raise the subject. It was too painful.

Eventually we became so into Rock Band, it was the only thing we were able to think about. We lived to play. Our conversations started being only about Rock Band. We bickered over the singing and who wasn’t hitting the notes. Sometimes my mom or dad would come into the living room and want to talk, and interrupt, but we just continued to play. We were Rock Band obsessives. One time, our neighbors in Sedona, the Harpers, came over and watched a bit, and made a few jokes with my parents about how into the game we were. But we were really serious about Rock Band by then, and didn’t laugh along. To us, it wasn’t a joke.

That was it. That’s how we passed the time, in the dry air and sunshine of Sedona, in the shadow of the red cliffs. Instead of appointing a transition team and cabinet secretaries and inaugural chairperson, and giving thousands of volunteers and Republican staffers jobs in a new administration, and taking over the reins of power from George Bush, my dad grilled me onions and made his dry ribs. My mom laughed at the thought of being on Dancing with the Stars. I sang my heart out and played Rock Band with the best friends I ever had.

MOMENTS OF REALITY SEEPED INTO THE BUBBLE OF MY little world, though. Once, we went into town so Josh could cash his campaign check before going back to LA, and when the bank teller saw the check, issued by the McCain Campaign, she said we’d all done a brave job and she had voted for Dad, and Josh got emotional.

Another time, we went into town to get our nails done. The nail salon was really dinky, so we took turns, went in shifts, because there were too many of us to get done at once. Bridget was finished, and about to leave, when a woman in the salon asked her if she was “John McCain’s adopted daughter.”

Now, if you have ever met Bridget, who is sweet and incredibly modest, you would know instantly that she isn’t into having a famous father.

“Yes, I am,” Bridget said.

“He lost the election because of Sarah Palin,” the woman snapped.

Bridget came to find me outside, where we were drinking our coffee, and she told me the story. Seeing Bridget was upset, Heather, who never loses her cool, became enraged. We call Heather “Little Buddha” and things like that, because she is a laid-back Californian and Zen personified. But she went striding into the nail salon and found the woman and asked, in a loud voice, if she was the one who’d just been talking to Bridget.

“Who are you?” the woman asked defensively.

“I’m Heather.”

I’m Heather. As if that made a difference to anybody. And then Heather started yelling. “This family is going through a really hard time—can’t you imagine that? And this is the first time they are venturing out into the world and you start laying into a seventeen-year-old girl about why her dad lost the election? That is so uncool, so insensitive. What’s wrong with you?”

Bridget and I were hugging each other in the car. After a few minutes we started to drive away and Shannon and Heather rolled down the windows and turned up the radio. I don’t remember what the song was exactly, something cheesy like Britney Spears’s “Toxic.”

The car picked up speed and the dry high desert air rushed in and blew on our faces. We were singing at the tops of our lungs. Singing at the blue sky. Singing at the mountain and the lush canyon.

Arizona is my home. I was back home again. The campaign could crush me and take over my life or I could find a way to be better for it. I inhaled the fresh dry high desert air. My wounds were open, and still sore, and I was feeling alive again.