A few seconds ago, the Gulf swallowed the sun. Now everywhere along the sidewalks and crawling up the building facades, sharp, black shadows are out marking their territory. But thing's are moving fast, the planet's gliding that short, snapping arc of wintertime and before I'd reached the Convention center, twilight's beginning to blur their sharp lines and muddy their dark intentions. 

I had a plan. Well, a piece of plan anyway. My only car key was buried, snapped off in the door lock and I was trapped, on foot, a hundred miles from home. Joining the scrum between the metal crowd barriers for a night, ostensibly, waiting for Obama tickets till the next morning would solve the motel issue - if not the actual sleeping issue itself. As for the two hundred and fifty bucks I'm looking at hanging on my sagging credit card for a new key, I'm banking that by tomorrow afternoon, a chance to hang with the big O will be the hottest ticket in town. How much are rock star performances fetching these days? 

The size of the line up had grown by twenty or thirty and snaked a third bend around the switchbacks. The crowd was calm. Strangely calm. A couple played backgammon, teenagers texted. Their parents remained motionless, placidly staring out from camp chairs and draining cheap sodas - only mildly interested in their surroundings. As if the whole scene was just another breeze of images moving too slowly to elicit response, that they were forced to watch because the remote had been lost in the couch. 

Where's the buzz? I'm here by accident and not particularly thrilled about it, but these people planned for this. Well, maybe after an few hours I'll look like that too. 

If there was any real excitement in the air, I'd apparently avoided its direct line of flight. I've seen more excitement in lines for the “Matterhorn” up in Orlando. There was a strange contentment I couldn't explain. I decide no to try, not now. Time later. There was work to be done. 

On the corner keeping tabs of things from his mountain bike, a city cop absently scrolled through his Blackberry. As with any project involving crowds, waiting, tickets or confusing situations in general, information usually decides the race. When it came right down to it, I didn't know much. Maybe sit down and wait was it? But a few well targeted questions toward the bicycle cop could save me the anguish of ignorance somewhere down the line. 

“Good evening.” I offered the cop my medium wattage smile I use is situations like this. There must be a plan. Prying actionable intelligence out of policeman isn't always profitable. I'd try the wide-eyed tourist approach. Less threatening, but then again, the odds of getting really inane responses geared for the vacationing Ohio crowd increase dramatically. With cops, it's always a crap shoot. 

“How can I help you?” He ticked his buzz cut just slightly my direction. 

Hmm..? Stern, non-conforming response, yet pleasantly disinterested. The tinted Oakley wrap- arounds stayed in place. No expectation of any actual sunlight reappearing for another twelve hours. 

“Everybody's lining up for tickets, huh? Expecting a big crowd?” 

While this approach sounds silly, these guys have a pre-shift meeting and crowd estimates, flow, etc., was discussed at some point. Among other things, I was trying to gauge the best time to get into line. Did I have time to grab a drink somewhere? With 1,500 tickets to hand out, two to a person, there wasn't much point in grabbing some cement with only fifty or sixty people in line. 

“I wouldn't know sir.” 

What, this guy with the FBI or something? He's big eared city cop for cripe's sake, not with the NSA. 

I readjusted. “Looks like only about sixty or so right now.” I said. 

Again, a purpose pitch. Was there an area I couldn't see up near the door or beyond? Sort of a false front so to speak? How many times have you been in a monster line and after three hours you look around the corner and realize you haven't even made it to the “real” line yet.? 

“50 or 60, If you say so sir.” 

Christ. 

I kept moving forward anyway. “But I guess, say if you got in line now, you'd be okay?” 

“You could try.” 

Obviously pointless. 

“What I mean to say, is, there's no big surprises coming, just get in line and grab a ticket?” 

“I'm sorry. I can't guarantee you'll get tickets sir. I'm just monitoring the situation here. I'm not with the ticketing office.” 

“Thanks, you've really been a big help.” 

What a prick. I know you're not with the fucking ticketing office Gomer. You're a cop, New Millennium Edition. And you're being a prick because you just can't help yourself. It's not even your fault. You have The Fear Gomer. You're so afraid you have make an idiotic comment to make sure I'm kept in my place. No surprises. 

Yeah, you have The Fear. Only you just don't call it that. You've been afraid for so long you can't even remember when it started. But it all makes sense when you call it “just going by the book”.. Doing your job. Feels a hell of lot better. But you're afraid of everything and everybody. All day, all night. 

But I'm not pinning all this crap on you. You come by it honest. You're part of very big club. 

Americans are neurotically afraid strangers, Blacks, Mexicans, people with weird hair, funny hats, the Truth, thick accents, Halloween candy, hitch hikers, Al Queda, getting wrinkles, France, China, India, small snakes, big dogs, lightning, rogue meteors, being poor, peanut butter, Karl Rove, Charlie Manson, death, life, South American produce, global warming, rising seas, talking in airports, Muslims, and a thousand other things in an ever growing list that only ends when it gets to the biggest fear of all – the unknown. Which, thanks to a few wing nuts, includes just about everything today.

 Every bite of that flak jacket underneath your Polo shirt reminds you danger is everywhere. You're never safe. You can't be human because that's too close, too personal, too dangerous. Keep 'em at safe distance. In your hopelessly over-trained over- psyched mind, there's no situation that can't suddenly escalate out of control. You've seen the training films, you've blasted the cardboard bad guys popping out at the gun range. That shit happens. Mistakes cost lives. It could happen at any minute. So trust nothing, they're all suspicious. Any extension is over-extension. So you do the minimum. Stay in control. And that's all that really matters. Control. 

And the next time you see ten or twelve cops beating a black guy into the ground you uniquely understand. Because you get it. Not like some people who just don't understand Procedures. Those cops were all just making sure things stayed under control. Procedure. Humanity, common sense? Old School.

 I walked away shaking my head. But it wasn't the kid's fault and I knew it. I pushed away the black meat thoughts in my brain. He had his orders. It was the way he was raised. The New Millennium Edition Game. Everybody plays. Certainly we know the rules by now.

 It was time to make my decision and I wandered into line. I found my little spot in the world and sat down.

 There's just not much share with you about waiting in line. The tail-end of cold sweep pushed up the river and kept the flags sputtering and irritated most of the night. The temperature dropped down to the forties and if if weren't for a good chunk of Styrofoam I'd picked up and very kind hearted lady with a feathery blanket, I would have frozen to death for sure. I didn't sleep a wink. The lady by my side slept very well indeed.

 Most of the local TV news stations came by and did some brief stand-ups asking people where they were from and why they were there. None of it any more interesting that a few minutes of screaming after Willard Scott gives the weather from location in Des Moines.

 A rough count put my position at about 150^th in line. By around ten pm, judging by my own position, another five hundred or so had joined us.

 The crowd was almost singular in their class. At least half of them were young people out for a lark. Old blankets, cheap coats and hats. A good many, especially near the front of the line, we're family groups of local Blacks, whom by judging in the usual way, were lower-middle class, and almost to person carrying a special patina of pride the rest of the crowd may have lacked. Many of those families brought their young children to wait until the cold became too much, and they were lifted sleeping or cranky and taken away over the barriers back home. Part of the experience.

 For a long time I lay still wrapped by a blanket , under the cold high moon listening to pluckings of Reggae speaking in the night. It was hard to listen to Redemption Song. Because as I mouthed the words watching a small Black woman sleep upright in a wooden chair, I knew they were not for me. Words so long in coming, they were nearly worn through.

 The eerie optimism mixing with the Florida chill, and the soft voices of families straining in the stillness, waiting for a chance to see, for themselves, a black man named Barack step onto a stage just a few feet away from themselves to the tune of Hail to the Chief.

 This place I had come to was crumbling. Hope is the only replacement for hopelessness. It was coming to Fort Meyers. Tuesday. I looked around at the tired faces and they would wait....just a little longer.

* 

If there's anything better than seeing the sun after a desperately cold night, it was feeling it on my face. The wind had finally shifted and was blowing in peppery and warm from Cuba.

 People had continued to join the line light throughout the night. In the darkness I could hear the gathering voices but I was unprepared, and nearly stupefied, by the time the light exposed the madness that had assembled.

 With the tables and chairs and TV truck and reporters, cops, medics, fireman, photographers and bad craziness everywhere, it's hard to get a handle on the numbers of people waiting in line, but as I estimated my little group now hunched near the front of the line was about 5% of the total, a couple thousand was my guess.

We began crawling toward the doors towing our blankets and chairs and in some cases each other around seven. By eight the pace quickened, and by a few minutes after nine we were racing past the pick-up windows to grab out tickets. I hungry and stiff as I made it back to my truck a short distance away in the parking lot to drop of the night's supplies. I would return with my camera to get a few shots and then maybe I'd get a feel for the market price for my Obama tickets.

I'd already decided to keep one of the tickets. I'd be seeing Obama. But truth was that no matter the circumstances, I was alone in a strange town. I didn't have any particular person give the extra one to anyway. And to be grudgingly honest, after a fifteen hour wait on the sidewalk shivering through a freezing night, the idea of handing one over to some anonymous soul may have secured me a little better vantage point in Nirvana, but it didn't sit well. I had my plan laid out.

I shot a few quick pictures of here and there. Then a voice crackled over a loud speaker set up on a balcony overlooking the crowd. “For all those still waiting in line, all of the tickets have been given out. Thank-you.”

 I expected to hear a a collective groan, but instead there was silence. The greatest portion of the crowd standing in line had never moved from where they'd started. But at first, and still even now, I wasn't surprised. If I had been number 150 or so, at least 90% of those in line had been out of luck from the start. Frankly the cruel part of me was wondering what they thought they were doing there in the first place?

 After the crowd had thinned out, I meandered around and surveyed the residual chaos of cans and trash and the occasional broken hearted Obama fan. Most everyone left, disappointed, but they left.

But it didn't take long before a small and growing group of disgruntled ex-customers had formed into a circle. The chants began. “WE WANT TICKETS! WE WANT TICKETS ! I hurried over for some action shots not really thinking much about it. I didn't recognize any of the angry mob from my fellow all-nighters so it was hard to be very sympathetic for the ones who'd showed up this morning.

As the chants became louder, the TV news crews moved in for the “story”. I couldn't blame them. Covering a bunch of sleepy people, stationary in line for 15 hours wasn't the exactly the stuff of Edward R Murrow. 

I walked over to check it out. Near the edge of fuss, I met a news anchor who'd I spoken to off and on briefly throughout the night and early morning. She was applying some pancake keeping an eye out for a good interview. 

The chant's was getting louder. WE WANT TICKETS! WE WANT TICKETS! Hmm...They want tickets. I wonder how bad? But as the crowd became a little more aggressive, I put those entrepreneurial thoughts to the side.

 That was about the time my mouth out distanced my brain. 

“Hey Holly,” I poked the reporter, speaking in my off-the-record voice. “You think I'd make it out alive if waved these tickets for sale in the air.”

 “Whaaat? You've got tickets!” The make-up swab fell to the ground. “Are you saying you have tickets and you're going to SELL THEM?” 

I still failed to accurately gage the urgency of the situation when I casually replied, “Yeah, sometime. At least one. I've got an extra.” The huge shoulder held Sony TV video camera had already swung into place.

 The reporter became frantic. “But you got those tickets for free! People have been standing in line all night! Then she turned toward the camera. “This Holly B___reporting live from the Bay Shore Center when they've unexpectedly run out of tickets and many people here are angry with this situation. I'm standing here with a man who has just received FREE Obama tickets and is ready to sell them.” 

“No you're not.....” I cut in quickly.  By this time I saw the disaster looming and I was gone. 

“SIR!SIR! Don't you want to tell us why.....” her voice tailed off as I retreated toward the throng.  Before I fired off another picture,  I heard the sounds of her tiny heel tapping toward me, camera in tow.

I was again with her face to face. 

“Look Holly...piss off okay?” I moved away again. But not far enough.

 “How do you feel? So many people want tickets?” 

“How do you feel? Are you telling me YOU didn't get tickets Holly?”

 “No, I didn't.” 

“So....hey then, you should be happy I've got one for sale. What do you want me to do? Give it to charity?” 

“Would you do that?” 

“Yeah...okay then. I'll donate it to charity. My favorite charity.” 

By this time the subject of my interveiw had attracted a few ticketless onlookers. Time to go. I turned away and left as the camera panned as the the meanest capitalist in Florida escaped like a beaten snow leopard into the mist. 

*

 
http://www.winknews.com/news/local/39317647.html

(for the curious, Roy Hobbs on air) 

A couple of hours later I was filling up a considerable empty spot with a cheese burger a tiny downtown joint when I looked up at the 12 O'Clock News. There was the meanest guy in Florida on the faded TV above the counter. Whats next? I've still got to get out there and sell a ticket. Incognito might be a little tough. 

For the first time in many hours I had a comfortable moment to think about the events of the night. But really only one thing kept drifting to the top and floating there like elegant justice.

For all the disaster and avarice and greed and corruption, where power and influence are the coin of the realm, with all the greed-heads and pink-faced monsters roaming America stealing and soiling nearly everything she's got left; my county's still a place a guy can be sleeping on the sidewalk one night, and then the next, walk up and share time with the most powerful man in the world.

Next: The Key, The Tickets, and OBAMA