The Longest Goodbye

I woke with the taste of Jameson’s still in my mouth, overstaying its welcome like a corpulent mother-in-law four days after Christmas who still can’t get the hint. I sat up from the couch I’d been sleeping on, feeling a sudden kinship with that sorry sap Lieberman. Now we both knew what it felt like to have been thrown under a bus.
It was a new day for some, but for me it was just November 5th and I was just trying to stay clean in a dirty city that never sleeps or picks up its trash on time. There’d been a lot of talk about Change last night, Change I could believe in. But the only kind of Change I believed in was the kind that came out of the end of a .38 I kept underneath my pillow. It wasn’t the kind of Change you’d want to be on the wrong end of either. But I had to hand it to Obama. He’d been cool as a cucumber in a springtime salad the entire campaign. The best man had won, but that didn’t say much when your opponent was a beady-eyed cripple ready to take a dirt nap any day now. The grizzled, hollow-eyed mutts on cable had said it was a landslide, but a St. Valentine’s Day Massacre was more like it.
I lit up a cancer stick off the burner on the stove and my mind went to the Alaskan dame. She was pretty, fresh, like freshly fallen snow. But the kind of snow conceals something icy just below the surface, something treacherous. Something that can make your boots lose their grip on the asphalt jungle, sets your arms and legs windmilling until you faceplant in some frigid sidewalk filth-slushee. Women like that are trouble. I guess McCain learned that one the hard way. I’d like to say they were finished, the lot of them. But Republicans are like genital herpes, no matter what you do, they always come back, they always flare up and ruin your night just when things seem to be going well. This wasn’t going to be no honeymoon for Obama, that was for sure.
I looked out my window, the Lord of Flatbush, surveying my kingdom of perpetually sagging packages stores and mealy-mouthed barbershops. McCain was snuffed, we had won. This was finally ours. Obama and his gang would be stomping into the White House any day now and Bush would be out faster than a war criminal dodging a subpoena. It should have been a time of celebration. A day to put on your best suit and drink mint juleps until the room spun like a carousel.
But me? I was sober and wondering where my next paycheck was coming from. Because “recession” is just another name for nothing left to loot.