From the Journal
Cutting Turf
“I made at least a hundred phone calls,” says Ron, “but I only talked to four people, and none of them were yeses.” Ron’s the oldest organizer on the campaign—must be in his sixties—but also the least experienced. Apparently he quit his career as an investment banker a few months ago after deciding that he’d rather “live out his values”, and now he’s dragging the whole team down because he has no idea what he’s doing.
“Did you give it that extra half ring?” the campaign director snips.
“I most certainly did. Two and a half rings, just like you told us. Wish I could figure out why no one wants to talk to me.”
Instead of responding the campaign director adjusts his glasses. A blown-up poster of Rosie the Riveter is mounted on the wall behind his desk, centered perfectly for Zoom calls, and an IKEA bookshelf next to it displays a biography of Ruth Bader Ginsberg and several Jonathan Frandzen novels. It’s only dinner time where he lives, in San-Somethingor-Other, one of those techy Bay Area suburbs. What the hell is his name again? Cal? Brett? Jake? Since they’ve never met in person, Ollie doesn’t remember.
“How about you, Ollie?” Cal-Brett-Jake asks. Ollie shoves his drawing under the table and unmutes.
“Eighty-six calls,” he reports. “Talked to twelve people. Five yeses to volunteer.”
“Good work, Dude. That’s how it’s done.” Cal-Brett-Jake man-nods into the camera, which makes Ollie uncomfortable, and moves on to interrogate Maddy, the new hire who’s supposed to be rallying the liberal-leaning student demographic in State College. If any of Popular Voice’s managers actually lived in Pennsylvania, they might’ve realized that it takes three hours to drive there from Bucks County, where she lives.
The team call ends around 10:30. Ollie sloughs off his pants and boils a few packets of ramen, which he slurps down while finishing his data entry. At 11:15 he shuffles into the bedroom with his laptop, eats a Melatonin gummy from the package on his nightstand, and collapses onto the mattress. He scrolls through YouTube suggestions and picks a documentary called “In Broad Daylight” about an eight-year-old boy who disappeared mid-afternoon from his backyard in some boring, suburban-looking city like Omaha. They interview the kid’s mom, a middle-aged woman lathered in makeup and wearing an enormous rhinestone crucifix.
“Randy was a happy child,” she tells the camera. “Loved his family, his friends… loved to laugh and have fun. Loved God…”
She tries to start another sentence but can’t manage to fight back the tears. From here Ollie expects a series of interviews with detectives, journalists, prosecutors, and various members of the kid’s God-fearing family. They’ll all conclude that it isn’t safe out there, that you can’t trust anyone—not even your white, Midwestern neighbors. Those endings are Ollie’s favorite part of these true crime videos, but tonight he doesn’t last that long. The predictability of the plotline is too soothing. Within five minutes, he’s asleep.
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Continue reading this story in Volume 1, Issue 1.