David Wallace - Consider the Lobster - And Other Essays

Coming back up Bullshit 1’s starboard side, no laptops are in play and few window shades pulled, and the cleanest set of windows is just past the fridge, and outside surely the sun is someplace up there but the February vista still seems lightless. The central-SC countryside looks blasted, lynched, the skies the color of low-grade steel, the land all dead sod and broomsedge, with scrub oak and pine leaning at angles, and you can almost hear the mosquitoes breathing in their baggy eggs awaiting spring. Winter down here is both chilly and muggy, and Jay ends up alternating the heater with the AC as various different people bitch about being hot or cold. Scraggly cabbage palms start mixing with the pine as you get farther south, and the mix of conifer and palm is dissonant in a bad-dream sort of way. A certain percentage of the passing trees are dead and hung with kudzu and a particular type of Spanish moss that resembles a kind of drier-lint from hell. Eighteen-wheelers and weird tall pickups are the buses’ only company, and the pickups are rusted and all have gun racks and right-wing bumper stickers; some of them toot their horns in support. BSl’s windows are high enough that you can see right into the big rigs’ cabs. The highway itself is colorless and the sides of it look chewed on, and there’s litter, and the median strip is withered grass with a whole lot of different tire tracks and skidmarks striping the sod for dozens of miles, as if from the mother of all multivehicle pileups sometime in I-26’s past. Everything looks dead and not happy about it. Birds fly in circles with no place to go. There are also some weird smooth-barked luminous trees that might be pecan; no one seems to know. The techs keep their shades pulled even though they have no laptops. You can tell it must be spooky down here in the summer, all wet moss and bog-steam and dogs with visible ribs and everybody sweating through their hat. None of the media ever seem to look out the window. Everyone’s used to being in motion all the time. Location is mentioned only on phones: the journalists and producers are always on their cell phones trying to reach somebody else’s cell phone and saying “South Carolina! And where are you!” The other constant in most cell calls on a moving bus is “I’m losing you, can you hear me, should I call back!” A distinctive thing about the field producers is that they pull their cell phones’ antennas all the way out with their teeth; journalists use their fingers, or else they have headset phones, which they talk on while they type.

Right now, in fact, most of the starboard side is people on cell phones. There are black cell phones and matte-gray cell phones; one MSNBC lady has a pink cell phone her fiancé got her from Hammacher Schlemmer. Some of the phones are so miniaturized that the mouthpiece barely clears the caller’s earlobe and you wonder how they make themselves heard. There are headset cell phones of various makes and color schemes, some without antennas, plus the aforementioned earplug-and-hanging-podular-speaker cell phones. There are also pagers, beepers, vibrating beepers, voice-message pagers whose chips make all the voices sound distressed, and Palm Pilots that display CNN headlines and full-text messages from people’s different 1-800 answering services, which all 27 of the media on BSl have (1-800 answering services) and often kill time comparing the virtues of and relating funny anecdotes about. A lot of the cell phones have specially customized rings, which in a confined area with this many phones in play probably makes sense. There’s one “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” a “Hail Hail the Gang’s All Here,” one that plays the opening to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 op. 67 in a weird 3/4 up-tempo, and so on. The only fly in the ointment here is that a US News and W. R. photographer, a Copley News Service pencil, and a leggy CNN producer who always wears red hose and a scrunchie all have the same “William Tell Overture” ring, so there’s always some confusion and three-way scrambling for phones when a “William Tell Overture” goes off in transit. The network techs’ phones all have regular rings.

Jay, the official Bullshit 1 driver and one of only two regulars aboard without a cell phone (he uses Travis’s big gray Nokia when he needs to call one of the other bus drivers, which happens a lot because as Jay will be the first to admit he’s a little weak in some of your navigational-type areas), carries a small attaché case full of CDs, and on long DTs he listens to them on a Sony Discman with big padded studio-quality headphones (which actually might be illegal), but Jay refuses to speak on-record to Rolling Stone about what music he listens to. John S. McCain himself is said to favor 60s classics and to at least be able to abide Fatboy Slim, which seems broad-minded indeed. The only other person who listens to headphones is a 12M who’s trying to learn conversational Cantonese and whenever he’s off the Express sits way back on BS1’s port side with his Cantonese-lesson tapes and repeats bursts of inscrutable screeching over and over at a volume his headphones prevent him from regulating very well, and this guy often has a whole large area to himself. Travis, now again awake and in cellular contact with Todd up ahead on the Express, is in his customary precarious position at the very edge of a seat occupied by a wild-haired and slightly mad older Brit from the Economist who likes to talk at great length about how absolutely enraptured the British reading public is with John McCain and the whole populist-Tory McCain phenomenon, and tends to bore the hell out of everyone, but is popular anyway because he’s an extraordinarily talented cabbager of hot food at mealtime events, and shares. The Miami Herald pencil in the seat next to them is reorganizing his Palm Pilot’s address-book function by hitting tiny keys with what looks like a small black swizzle stick. There’s also an anecdote under way by a marvelously caustic and funny Lebanese lady from Australia (don’t ask) who writes for the Boston Globe, and is drinking a vanilla Edensoy and telling Alison Mitchell and the ABC field producer w/ earplug-phone across the aisle about apparently checking in and going up to her assigned room at the North Augusta Radisson last night and finding it already occupied by a nude male—“Naked as a jaybob. In his altogether. Starkers”—with only a washcloth over his privates—“and not a large one either, I can tell you,” referring (as Alison M. later said she construed) to the washcloth.

The only BS1 regulars not covered so far are at the starboard work-table that’s just past the edge of the crowded couch and behind the gang of techs at the front. They are CNN correspondent Jonathan Karl and CNN field producer Jim McManus (both of whom look about eleven) and their sound tech, and they’re doing something interesting enough to warrant standing awkwardly balanced to watch and ignoring the slightly mad Economist guy’s irritated throat-clearings at having somebody’s unlaundered bottom swaying in the aisle right next to his head. The CNN sound tech (Mark A., 29, from Atlanta, and after Jay the tallest person on the Trail, vertiginous to talk to, able to get a stick’s boom mike directly over McCain’s head from the back of even the thickest scrum) has brought out from a complexly padded case a Sony SX-Series Portable Digital Editor ($32,000 retail) and connected it to some headphones and to Jonathan Karl’s Dell Latitudes laptop and cell phone, and the three of them are running the CNN videotape of this morning’s South Carolina Criminal Justice Academy address, trying to find a certain place where Jonathan Karl’s notes indicate that McCain said something like “Regardless of how Governor Bush and his surrogates have distorted my position on the death penalty …” A digital timer below the SX’s thirteen-inch screen counts seconds and parts of seconds down to four decimal places and is mesmerizing to watch as they fast-forward and Mark A. listens to what must be unimaginable FF chipmunkspeak on his headphones, waiting to tell Karl to stop the tape when he comes to what McManus says are the speech’s “fighting words,” which CNN HQ wants fed to them immediately so they can juxtapose the bite with something vicious the Shrub apparently said about McCain this morning in Michigan and do a breaking story on what-all Negative stuff is being said in the campaign today.