Letters from Ohio

By Stephen Elliott, AlterNet. Posted October 4, 2004.

Editor's Note: Author Stephen Elliott is traveling across Ohio to conduct voter registration readings along with a group of writers including Dave Eggers, Rick Moody, Anthony Swofford, Vendela Vida, Julie Orringer, and Jim Shepard. The aim of their trip is to register college students to vote and create a list of students that would like to receive a reminder phone call from one of their favorite authors on election day. This is Elliott's – rather funny – journal of his trip.

Operation Ohio Day 5

I woke up early this morning, just after six, I'm getting back to my old ways. Ryan and I are driving to Columbus in a few hours, then a flight to Chicago, where I'll hookup with Chrissy Bell, and then to Iowa, Wisconsin, and all the rest. I'm an early riser, I think I always have been, so I'm jamming with my headphones on, playing the Scissor Sisters, Laura, over and over again. It's almost impossible to turn off a song with the line, This will be the last time I ever do your hair.

Ryan, Julie, and I are the only ones left, but Julie's parents live here, and Ryan is Julie's husband. A big part of me wants to stay in this state. It's so green and the weather is nice. I went to my first strip club in Cleveland, when I was eighteen, four years before I became a stripper myself, and fourteen years before Julie Salamon would refer to me as a "small man with a cloud of curly hair" in the New York Times. But the truth is I'm much taller than people think, 5'9", depending on the wind. As tall as Howard Dean, and he was almost the Democratic nominee. Otherwise I think Salamon did a reasonable job of explaining what Operation Ohio felt like, which was both manic and depressive, but maybe not as good a job off explaining what Operation Ohio is really about.

Greer, and Josh, left yesterday and Ryan, Julie, Ames, and I went to the ghetto looking to register a few more voters. We went to King Kennedy Estates, and when we told people where we were going they said, "Don't go there." But the residents were happy to see us. We got a couple of funny looks, but when we asked if they were registered to vote, and most of them were, or at least they said they were, they often said things like, "Thanks for doing this." A voter registration packet is the key to peace and protection in the ghetto.

Which is kind of what I'm talking about, in explaining what Operation Ohio really is. Nothing really feels better than registering voters, and even though I thought there would be more people, and we would register more, by the third day I was high as a kite, even as Josh threatened to ruin the whole thing, splashing around in the Orringer's fish tank, trying to grasp their exotic fishes in his frantic palm, I felt just great. And by the fifth day there just wasn't any other explanation for why I felt so damn good. It wasn't like I was eating better or exercising. The opposite really, I was secretly raiding the Orringer's Halloween stash of Hershey's and Reese's, drinking every night, two to three cups of coffee in the morning. And it might have been the good company. After all, it's a pretty self selecting group, people that are willing to travel to a swing state on their own dime to register a handful of voters. But I really think it was the act itself. Also, our guy won the debate.

Operation Ohio Day 4

Somewhere in this big house Andrew Sean Greer is sleeping. Josh is still in the room we shared, the fish tank unplugged, a pillow tucked below his ear and another between his legs. He says he does it for his spine. When I left the room the fish was stuck to the glass, its mouth open as wide as its body, its fins shifting slowly in the empty current.

We stayed up late last night, eating Japanese food and watching the debate. Ryan Harty, one of the great short story writers of our time, was worried about Kerry. I told him it was good he was worried. Because if our expectations were low then everyone's expectations were low and you win when you exceed expectations. And really, shouldn't we have high expectations of the sitting president? That shit about "I may never have heard of East Timor but I'll ask Dick Cheney, or Condi Rice" is not going to fly after you've already been president for four years. I was arguing with Julie's stepmom and she was like, "It takes time (to win wars, to improve the economy, to fix healthcare)" and I was like, "It takes four years, if it took more than four years you wouldn't be asked to run for re-election." But Julie's stepmom is awesome. Yesterday, before our reading, she showed me how to properly iron a shirt. "Do the back of the collar first, then the shoulders. The wonderful thing," she said. "Is that if you miss a spot you can always go back."

Stephen Elliott is the author of Looking Forward To It or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The American Electoral Process. Learn more about operation Ohio at

www.stephenelliott.com/ohio.html.

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