America, You Sexy Bitch (16 page)

Eventually the topic turns to horror films, and we find plenty of common ground before going back to our hotel for a couple of hours to relax until leaving for our next destination.

When I get up to my room, one of my close girlfriends calls me to check in.

“How’s everything going with the comedian?” she asks.

“It’s going actually really great, but it’s only a matter of time before I really freak him out,” I say. It’s true, I’m just waiting for the time when I will drink too much and say too much, and Michael second-thinks this trip. I’m hoping that my impression of Michael being the kind of guy who rolls with the punches is holding true.
Nothing has really shocked him so far, and he’s been awfully amiable about guns and strippers. Maybe he’s more understanding of my point of view than I realize. I tell my friend that I wish I could be more like that, and promise myself to try.

 

Michael:
The fastest growing party affiliation in America is “independent.” People no longer wish to identify with either the Republican or Democratic parties because many of us feel like those parties don’t identify with us. Party loyalty, in my opinion, is a joke.

Why should I be loyal to one party over another? These are businesses, pure and simple. The business they are in is the big-money business of government. Any company that wants my patronage has to provide a better product than the other guy. For me, right now, that company is the Democrats. I like their product better. Not much better, but better. I think of it like this: Pizza Hut makes a better pizza than Domino’s, but they’re both pretty shitty pizzas. Well, what if Pizza Hut and Domino’s were the only two pizza places in the whole country? That would be awful, and that awfulness pretty much describes our political system right now.

The two party system seems antithetical to our whole notion of a free market. The game has been rigged in such a way that it’s almost impossible for a third (or fourth, or fifth) party to get off the ground. We wouldn’t stand for that in business, yet we don’t seem to have too much of a problem with it in our governance. Monopolies (or duopolies) are bad in the private sector and they’re also bad in the public sector.

I wish we had more political options. I wish the “marketplace of ideas” was really that, a marketplace. The problem is, even if we had a third party, it would be co-opted by big money just as fast as the first two parties have been. Money is the toxin running through our political bloodstream. Everybody knows this but nobody who can do anything about it is doing anything about it because they are the beneficiaries of all of this radioactive cash.

One of the things I will always admire Meghan’s dad for is that he tried. The McCain-Feingold Act of 2002 attempted to regulate
the use of money in political campaigns. The bill was challenged in the Supreme Court and largely upheld, but it hasn’t achieved anything. What we’re left with now, ten years later, are Super PACs and ever-growing gobs of greasy money flowing into the system like raw sewage.

Why are all these big money donors giving so much? I don’t think patriotism is driving them. The only thing driving them is big, fancy cars. And big, fancy private jets. And trophy wives with big, fancy tits.

So, no, I’m not loyal to the Democratic party. I’m loyal to my beliefs. Right now the Democrats come closer to embodying those beliefs than the other guys, but I don’t trust them because I don’t trust power. At the moment, the only thing I trust is that Cargill and Jessica are going to show us a good time.

 

Meghan:
Later that night we all go hang out at a bowling alley/ bar/karaoke place called Highball. It is one of the better places in America to have multiple kinds of good clean, albeit drunken, fun. Before I met Michael he insisted that he didn’t drink, and when I first met Stephie she said the same damn thing. I told them that I had spent two years on the road on my father’s campaign, and if there was one thing I knew about a good road trip, it’s that at some point everyone starts drinking.

When we get to the karaoke place with Jessica and Cargill and a few of their friends, I know that drinking is on the agenda if we are all gonna get up there and sing. I am, without bragging, the worst singer in the world. Truly, no one should be subjected to my singing, but when in Rome, one must partake. About two beers in, I am ready to get my Lenny Kravitz on, and get up to sing probably the worst version of “American Woman” in the history of bad karaoke.

More rounds of Bud Light are ordered, and Michael sings a hip-stery Radiohead song that I think was popular in the nineties, mostly showcasing just how different he and I are, though honestly we have quite a bit in common on the tone-deaf front. Next up,
Cargill does an insanely fantastic rendition of Digital Underground’s “Humpty Hump.” But I am most pleasantly surprised when my girl Stephie lets her karaoke hair down. She even starts drinking a little, and kills on Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats” with me. She is awesome, and I think finally really getting comfortable with me. No one should let Stephie’s adorable, innocent, Nermal good looks fool them; this is a girl who is down to have a good time and play. She’s like Michael, rolling with every situation. I look around at them and tilt my beer towards a toast, happy that our little crew is starting to feel like a family. Buzzed off beer, in a sweaty karaoke lounge with some film nerds in Austin. Is there really any other place this could happen?

 

Michael:
The thing about Austin is that it’s the kind of town that
would
have an all-in-one bowling alley/cocktail lounge/performance space featuring a mentalist/poker room/karaoke emporium. If that sounds like hipster nirvana, it is.

The Highball is populated entirely with guys sporting ironic facial hair, and girls in vintage sundresses. Needless to say, everybody has clever tattoos. I might be the oldest person there, although to be fair, I am still
very
good looking, even at my advanced age. Actually, now that I think about it, I might be the oldest person in all of Austin.

This is definitely a young city. Cities with big art scenes usually are. The average age is 31.2, as compared to 35.5 for the United States as a whole, which is impressively young considering the state government is located here and politicians, as everybody knows, are old farts.

The Cargills have invited some of their Austin buddies to join us at the Highball. We occupy one of their seven karaoke theme rooms and get to the serious work of belting out off-tune versions of the greatest hits of the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and today. Meghan, of course, sings a spirited version of “American Woman.” (“Spirited” =terrible.)

I sing a note-for-note, perfect, heartbreaking version of Radiohead’s “No Surprises.” When I am finished, not only does the entire
karaoke room stand in unison to applaud, but so does everybody within the entire state of Texas.

That isn’t true. What is true is that I am a horrible singer and were it not for the enormous quantities of Bud Light in my system, I would not have the courage to sing at all. If you’re wondering how many Bud Lights it requires to get me to sing Radiohead at your next function, the answer is two.

Yes, I am a lightweight, a source of considerable amusement to Ms. McCain, who drinks her Bud Lights with a sense of purpose. Until this trip, I almost never drank beer at all because I do not like the taste, and I certainly never drank Bud Light because it seemed kind of Whisky Tango to me. But here’s the thing I discover at the Highball: I
like
Bud Light. In fact, it might be the only beer I actually do like. Meghan
only
drinks it because she has some family allegiance to the brand. She is the one who gets me into the stuff and I have to say, if you’re only going to drink one watery kind of shitty beer that will still get you buzzed, Bud Light is definitely the way to go. I love it.

After hours of pitiful rock ‘n’ rolling with Austin’s least talented singers, we finally tumble from the Highball at closing time. Cargill and Jess drop us at the hotel and I doze off, excited to meet up with Cousin John the next day.

Yes, tomorrow is finally the day we pick up our RV and driver. No more flying. No more soft living. From here on out, it’s the open road for us, every single mile. Hard road living, that’s what we’re going to do. I mean, not so hard that we won’t spend every night in a comfortable hotel because sleeping fourwide in a rented RV when your driver likes having orgies with famous comedians is taking things a little too far.

The RV place is located on a depressing strip of highway somewhere just outside of Austin. We drive past it twice before realizing the used car outlet we keep passing is the place. There they are: a short line of white Cruise America RVs aligned along the baking asphalt.

Cousin John is already there, standing next to a particular model and patting it like a dog. He flew in from Aspen this morning, and he greets us as we get out of the car. He’s a big guy, probably about six feet, 220 pounds, dark wavy hair, and a broad round face.

“How ya’ doin’?” he booms as he wraps his beefy hand around mine before launching into a story about the hotel job he just quit, his trip to the airport, the flight, the lady sitting next to him, finding the place, the heat, and his bike, which he thought about bringing but did not, and maybe he’ll just pick up a fifty-dollar bike somewhere on the road so that he can bike because he’s been doing a lot of biking, in fact that’s how he gets around Aspen, biking, fifteen miles back and forth along the Rio Grande, if you touch his ass you’ll see that it’s made out of granite. I do not touch his ass.

Throughout this monologue, Meghan cannot stop laughing. She has to turn away and cover her mouth because she is laughing so hard. When he finally stops speaking, her face is scarlet from the effort to still her uncontrollable mirth.

“I love him,” she whispers.

Stephie appears to be in shock. Her normally globular eyes are practically bugging out of her skull. As for me, I am bewildered. What the hell is this guy talking about?

Before we leave the parking lot, Cousin John has one more thing to add: “Rule number one on the RV. No number twos.”

That I understand.

We say our goodbyes to Cargill, and then we are off to Houston for a quick stopover before going on to New Orleans. We are officially on the road good and proper. From here on out, we will bump along every single mile, the four of us in our foul-smelling RV, whose air-conditioning seems to barely be functioning on this hundred-degree day. The road!

Cousin John gets lost leaving the parking lot.

 

 

 

Michael:
We spend the first hours in the RV getting acclimated to our new home. We stop at a Wal-Mart to stock up on Pop-Tarts and pretzels and cans of Pringles and a plastic bag of spinach for Stephie, who is an insufferably healthy eater. Meghan and I wheel a big squeaky shopping cart around the store. “You want to go see the guns?” she asks. She’s obviously taunting me, thinking I’m going to say something about how pissed off it makes me that Wal-Mart sells guns.

“Absolutely.”

Over by the ladies’ underwear section is the big spinning rifle case. Meghan explains to me the differences between the various firearms, but they all pretty much seem the same to me. They’re all big pointy sticks that go “boom,” just with different paint jobs, different attachments and scopes and butt stocks (I think that’s a rifle term, but if it’s not, it’s just funny to say “butt stock”). Maybe some liberals get all bent out of shape over Wal-Mart selling guns but I don’t care. As long as Wal-Mart’s not selling anything illegal, more power to them. If they decide to open a double-headed dildo section tomorrow, I’ll be okay with that too.

(It would actually be interesting to see if the same conservatives who defend Wal-Mart’s right to sell firearms would be equally accommodating if it were to start selling double-headed dildos.)

We catch up to Cousin John wandering around the bedding aisle. He’s bleeding all over one large flip-flop. I don’t know how, but he somehow cut open his big toe sometime between the parking lot
and the Wal-Mart. There’s more blood than there should be and it doesn’t seem to be letting up.

“Part of my brains are coming out of my toe,” he says, sopping up the blood with a paper towel. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m an EMT and I’m fine.”

We are already unsure of Cousin John’s competence. Seeing him bloodied less than three hours into our time with him does nothing to alleviate our concerns.

While we load our groceries, Cousin John fiddles with the GPS. He plugs in the address for our hotel in Houston and we set off. I fall asleep for a little while and when I awaken, we are off the main highway, driving along a narrow, bumpy road through some dingy Texas town. The sun is going down.

“Where are we?” I ask.

Meghan shoots me an evil look.

Wherever we are is not Houston. Cousin John pulled off the highway a while ago because “the GPS told me to,” and now we are somewhere. Not lost exactly, but taking the slowest possible route to our hotel.

“This GPS isn’t worth shit,” says Cousin John. He unplugs it from the lighter and hides it in the glove box.

Nobody says anything as John navigates the big RV over two-lane Texas roads. We pass low cinderblock houses and Sonic restaurants. We are only a couple of hours behind schedule but the mood is turning grim. John turns on his iPod’s selection of good-time stoner music: Bob Marley, the Eagles, Dave Matthews. Worse, he sings along.

Meghan looks like she might punch him in the throat.

My own emotions are mixed. On one hand, it will be horrible if we are stuck with an incompetent pothead driver for the next two and a half weeks. On the other hand, it will be hilarious.