Freak Power 2000

FROM PACK SQUARE IN THE middle of town, Morrison was walking down Lexington toward the Mystic Coffee place at the bottom of the hill, passing kids who every day, all day long, took the same walk from Pack to Lexington, down Lexington, back up to Pack, trudging along, maybe dropping into one of the hippie shops or pausing in front of an antiques shop long enough to start flipping out the owners. He wore his customary tiedye T-shirt, his Oakley shades, his baggy jeans. As usual, he was stoned. He opened the door to the Mystic and loped toward the back through a haze of clove-cigarette smoke. A kid on a couch called, “Hey, Ukiah, man, how’s the election going?”

Morrison blinked in the middle of the room. A soft blond girl named Heather was filing away on the kid’s fingernails. The kid’s knees were bouncing up and down, a riot of motion, but the rest of him was zonked and wiped out, like the rest of most everybody else in the place.

“No, man,” said Morrison, “that already happened. I already lost the primary.”

“Oh. Sorry, dude.”

Morrison shrugged. He’d got 249 votes, finished next to last in a field of eighteen. Not a bad haul, he thought, and pretty outstanding for a freak who didn’t spend more on his campaign than the five-dollar filing fee. But it would have been better if, two weeks before the vote, the cops hadn’t shown up at his friend Eve’s and hauled him downtown to place him under arrest. It was around 10:30 A.M., and somebody had apparently tipped off Wlos-13, a local TV station, because its camera was waiting for his arrival.

What viewers saw on the midday news was candidate Morrison, his face cut up and bandaged, and his right eye a swollen purple and green blob of gore. He was in handcuffs. He felt sure that the spectacle cost him votes.

“Yeah, well.” Morrison shrugged again and smiled his shy, appealing smile.

Heather said she would have voted for him if only she had remembered to vote. “You know where the kids are coming from,” she said. “You’re naked. And you can totally talk to the naked guy.”

Morrison tipped his head and said, “Be well,” which is how he always left it with people. “Be well.” He got something to drink and went back up Lexington, past Pack Square, with its shimmering reflecting pool and its needle-nosed granite monument, and down the hill on Biltmore toward the Blue Moon Bakery, where he used to work. He eased along. His voice was soft and lilting, in a Southern-cracker sort of way.

He had run a remarkably honest and forthright campaign, he said. Primarily, he had championed two issues. He wanted to see adult businesses get more of a fair shake in town, but mostly he wanted the city of Asheville to legalize pot. He had a vision of what this could mean. “Just think about it,” he said. “If you corner the market in the city limits and make it so you can buy pot here, everybody’s going to show up, drop off their money and leave — but not before paying a $3.50 tax on every single gram sold, and that tax is going to stay at the municipal level. You sell a lot of fucking grams, y’all going to make a lot of fucking money.”

He paused at a red light, then crossed over onto Pack Square and nodded at the big blinking neon sign that advertises the science center inside the Pack Place building. Walking underneath it, he said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea to be trying to lure people to take their eyes off the road right in the center of town. Somebody once threw a rock in it. I was glad for that. Very glad.” Had he been elected, that sign is something he probably would have dealt with. He would also have tried to help out the elevator operators inside City Hall. “Thing is, they’re not allowed to wear pants. Have to wear a skirt. Well, you walk in, they’re sitting, waiting to take somebody up, and you see right up their damn dresses. That’s wrong. It makes them uncomfortable. But nothing they can do about it. It’s the policy.” And then he’d probably try to legislate against the kind of lady he once saw driving, holding a cell phone and feeding her baby, all at the same time.

“I hate that,” he said, strolling through his town.

“Anyway,” he went on, “there’s a lot of shit I pay attention to. I think. I remember. I worry about the condition society is in. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, that’s why I know so much. Certain things are not right. And I’m here trying to change a little bit of that.”