first mayoral debate 2011

Mayor Dave meets the Hart Camp.

The Candidates

appearing in alphabetical, rather than biased, order

John Blotz

Dave Cieslewicz

Dennis DeNure

Nick Hart

Paul Soglin

eternal sunshine of the drunken mind.

Chasing a story

I woke up staring at the ceiling. Greg was asleep beside me. I couldn't remember arriving at his apartment, but that was pretty normal. Steve always let us drink more than we needed and stay later than we should. My mind was prone to moments of blackout drunkenness just around bar close, coming back into consciousness sometime after landing at home.

Then I realized that I didn't remember the night at all. Nothing of what we had done once we started to get drunk, nothing after something like one a.m. That was unusual.

I reached a hand below the blankets. I was fully dressed, still in the jeans and shirt and belt and bra that I had worn the night before. He was snoring beside me. I had no headache. My head was clear, save for the sudden confusion of the hours lost. I couldn't remember getting very drunk. Where had the night gone?

I slid out of bed and tiptoed into the hallway. The house was silent; we were the only ones there, as we had been among the only ones left in the city on this Wednesday before the holiday weekend.

Just outside of the door to the bathroom was a full glass of water sitting on the floor. In the bathroom, I sidestepped a small patch of puke on the floor, then avoided the bit on the back of the toilet seat. My scarf lay on the floor a few inches away. I checked my face in the mirror. I looked good, just a bit of dark makeup gathered below my eyes, but that was normal with the layers of mascara and eyeliner it took to give my eyes the character they deserved.

I searched the bathroom and the kitchen for some sort of cleaner and towels, and finally settled for the roll of paper towels from the kitchen counter and the Windex from below the sink. I scrubbed the puke from the toilet and the floor. I noticed whole french fries and black olives caked into the drying bile. My lunch; I guess that makes this mine. I didn't usually puke, but it made sense along with the blackout. Why had my lunch not digested? I had had two meals and some unknown number of beers and whiskeys since lunch; why would I vomit whole pieces of that food?

I dumped the glass of water and refilled it. When I went back into the bedroom, Greg was drunkenly awake and looking at me.

“I don't remember anything that happened after one a.m.” I told him.

He flashed me a dopey smile. “No? Oh, this will be good...I can't wait to tell you the story...” but he turned his head and fell back to sleep without another word.

I traced my steps backward through the house-- from the bedroom, down the hallway, through the kitchen, into the living room, to the front door-- and gathered my things along the way, trying to piece together the night to no avail. My computer lay safe on the kitchen table where I had left it before leaving, untouched. My purse was tossed to the couch in the living room, contents spilling out, but all intact nonetheless. My pen was tucked into my journal, and the last line written was the last one I remembered writing:

Made it to the Argus, finally getting drunk.

But I was still what I would call sober when I wrote that, and there wasn't a trace of my usual drunken scribbling to follow. My coat was discarded just inside the front door, with my camera inside the pocket, no filth or damage on the coat and no pictures on the camera. Not a bit of the story to be found.

I was confused. I felt absolutely fine, and I had no memories of wicked drunkenness or any sort of debauchery. As far as my mind was concerned, I had had a quiet night of drinking a few whiskeys and woken up healthy and safe. This was not going to be good for my mind's drinking habit.

I checked the clock. Eleven a.m. Shit! I had to work in half an hour. Eight hours. I felt that I should be dreading this; I should be hungover. But I wasn't; I was ready to work, ready to move. I was only regretting that I wouldn't know this story for another eight hours.

I showered and changed. I had started to keep a change of underwear, a brush, and mascara in my purse in case I didn't go home at night. I pulled a t-shirt out of his closet; some band I hadn't heard of, a black shirt with skulls on the front. My coworkers would know that this one wasn't mine, and I liked that. I pulled my cardigan over the t-shirt, piled my things into my purse, retrieved my jacket and scarf from the floor, and trotted to the nearest corner to catch a bus downtown.

This had been our first unusual move last night. We rode a bus downtown, rather than drive. We immediately relinquished all responsibilities for our drinking selves onto the city we were entering. It was four in the afternoon, and we had exhausted our motivation for work with hours of story edits and website updates in the living room of the boys' empty apartment. Christmas was around the corner, and we faced a weekend of family and sobriety. Comedy was canceled for the night, and everyone we liked had already left town. We had a full bottle of American Honey Wild Turkey Whiskey-- bourbon with the spirit of Hunter and the wisdom of the new generation.

We closed our computers, cracked the bottle open, and started to move. I gathered my tools for the field while he filled two flasks with the whiskey. We each poured a glass on the rocks to down while we pulled on our coats. I tucked the flask into my boot and raised my glass as he made his way toward the door.

A toast. He raised his glass to meet mine from across the room. “Let's go find a story!”

We took a bus into the center of the city that was completely deserted for the holiday and wandered around looking for the story of the night. Nothing was happening; every bar, restaurant, and coffee shop was closed early, and every interesting person had already left town for their obligatory annual moments with distant family. And it was cold. After an hour of wandering, we were headed down State Street to see what was on the other end. I finally admitted to myself that there would be nothing down there but an expanse of empty campus, and I stopped and turned back east and said, “Do you want to just go get drunk somewhere?”

About halfway through my shift, Greg was waking up; I started to get texts. Pieces of the story, along with his complaints of a hangover that lasted until six p.m.

Do you remember falling asleep at the bar? Nope. That seems awfully unprofessional of us. But we had been awake since nine a.m. and drinking since four in the afternoon. So, it wasn't surprising that we passed out around close. My latest memories were of sitting very quiet and observing the bar around me, becoming drunk and too sleepy to entertain any of the conversations directed my way. We had accepted two shots from friends passing through and ordered one round of our own to share with Steve.

I can't believe I got so drunk after three shots! I sent to him.

We drank seven rounds in an hour, he replied.

I didn't remember those last four. But I did remember greeting Jim and Courtney just before my memory cut off, and Joe pointing to us from across the bar and summoning Steve his way. And Johnson and his girl walking through the door. And Steve with that Whiskey look in his eye. Drinking on the Square with Greg is a dangerous game; they all know him and love him too much.

“We've come home,” Greg uttered as we settled onto our barstools at the Argus.

We had wandered the city trying to do something else, trying to avoid the same old business of Wednesday nights for this crew, since the holiday had forced us out of our routines of work and class and pizza and comedy and drinking. We made the trek around the Square, played in the snow, and searched the city for a story where there was none to be found. We fought the magnetic pull from the Argus for hours as we tried to decide what to do with our night off. There was nothing on the Square, nothing on State Street, nothing at the Comedy Club, nothing on campus. This was turning out to be the worst goddamn botched assignment ever. We sipped from flasks of American Honey whiskey to keep sharp.

We wandered into the 'Dise, like all of the other barflies with no families that night. We were drinking PBRs, and the service was slow and uninterested, and we were bored. We weren't even being served fast enough to get drunk. Boredom in winter in Wisconsin is what will make you fat. There is not a thing to do but to eat food and continue to sit and drink.

After work, I made my way to the Square to meet Steve and Greg. I needed to get the rest of the story, and they seemed to be the ones guarding the details. I walked through the Argus doors just as they were calling last call. I ordered a PBR and three shots of Jameson and settled into my stool. Steve walked into the bar from the kitchen, caught my eye, tossed his head back, and laughed out loud.

“God dammit, Steve!” I passed him a shot. “What the hell happened last night?”

“Oh, don't worry,” he replied. “You didn't do anything too terribly embarrassing, except puking on the corner of the bar.”

I raised an eyebrow and glanced to Greg. He nodded in confirmation and added, “I puked, too. But I made it into the garbage.” He pointed to the trash can beside the bar.

Steve laughed again. “Yeah, you were both puking mushrooms. It was totally gross.”

So, I hadn't been the only one vomiting undigested food. It must have just been that kind of a day. The superfluous order of deep-fried mushrooms we ended up sharing at the 'Dise had been purely to entertain ourselves, in that it's-winter-in-Wisconsin-so-what-do-we-do-but-eat-fatty-food-and-drink-beer kind of way. They must have just barely settled into our stomachs, layered and undigested atop the copious amounts of food we had already eaten that day, stirred up by American Honey, Jamo, and PBR. “Gross” was right.

Greg closed the door behind his final customer, and we drank the round of shots.

Steve slammed his shot glass to the bar. “You Gonzo motherfuckers!” he exclaimed. “She's puking on the bar, you're puking in the trash...You're fucking perfect for each other.”

I caught Greg's eye as he turned to start cleaning. He grinned and said to Steve, “Say what you want. Tell whoever you want.” He gestured in a circle over his head and mine. “This shit is Gonzo.”