by Corey Van Landingham
I had come for the sexy Trumps. The Clintons in prison stripes. The Nasty Women and Bad Hombres, the Baskets of Deplorables. I had come to see how wit and camp and rage and an unseasonably warm October evening in Athens, Ohio—it was still 70 degrees hours after the sun had gone down—would collide during a 2016 election that was itself far from typical. Surely I would see Megyn Kelly’s tampons, or Birdie Sanders, or a cardboard-clad group posing as The Wall. There must, I had imagined, at least be some forward-thinking young men and women divining the future: Kanye 2020? But the celebration—as far as I had seen, wandering the streets of Athens—was practically devoid of election-related costumes. Not only were there none of the clever or crass puns I had envisaged, there wasn’t even a real Donald Trump. American politics, it appeared, had become too absurd even for Halloween.
Maybe the masses didn’t want to revisit the traumatic months that had preceded the last weekend of October. Maybe they wanted to forget the moment, in March, when Donald Trump, in an anti-immigration speech in which he promised to build a wall taller than the airplane hangar rising up behind him, read aloud lyrics to “The Snake,” a song from 1969 by soul singer Al Wilson. In it, a woman is described who takes in an injured snake, only to later receive a “vicious bite” after she has cared for him. She dies, and the snake has the last words: “You knew damn well I was a snake when you took me in.” This, punctuated by the emphatic jabbing of Trump’s fingers before a cheering crowd. One doesn’t need to use much imagination to trace who, in the context of that speech, is the woman, who the snake.
Other absurdities included Republican candidates making overt dick jokes in front of a national audience during a televised debate. (Trump responded by guaranteeing there was “no problem” down there.) In August, a man scaled Trump Tower with suction cups in an attempt to obtain a private audience with the candidate. Gary Johnson appeared not to have heard of Aleppo, and Hillary Clinton nearly fainted at a 9/11 memorial. The only thing that seemed to eclipse the vitriol surrounding Clinton’s use of her personal email server was the release of a 2005 recording where Trump, talking with Access Hollywood host Billy Bush, boasts about his ability to grab women “by the pussy” because of his fame. “I don’t even wait,” he says. “Just kiss.” While he received his generous share of backlash, including a renunciation from Speaker Paul Ryan, what continued to echo across his base was when Clinton, mired in the racist, sexist, xenophobic rhetoric of Trump’s campaign, called his supporters a “basket of deplorables.”
But that was all happening elsewhere. On the forty-third iteration of the annual HallOUeen Block Party—one of the largest celebrations in the country, held on the steps of Ohio University with tens of thousands of party-goers descending upon the small town—Athens was preparing for battle. Barriers were being fashioned, and already the main streets near campus were shut off to traffic. Even in the early afternoon, bars had their entire staffs ready to clock in. Subway exhibited a whole counter set up with paper cups of water for the eventual hoards, for triage. In daylight, the few undergrads wandering around in costume seemed oddly out of place. But so, I’m sure, did we.
I had driven up from Cincinnati to meet my fiancé, Chris, who was born in Ohio, but had never made the journey to Athens. A good friend of ours, Hugh, had recently begun a Ph.D. program at Ohio University and, along with a couple of his friends, we planned to witness the spectacle I had been hearing about since I moved to the state. However, unlike the others who were wandering the red bricks of Court Street, hanging out the second-story windows of Alpha Epsilon Pi, and carrying 12-packs of Natty Light like briefcases, we were all in our thirties, far removed from Greek life and dormitories and the particular undergraduate notion that no one had ever felt what you felt, done what you were about to do.
Still, we gathered at Hugh’s apartment early in the day. The cell towers were jammed from the flooding of guests, and we couldn’t get our phones to play the desired ‘90s rap hits of our youth. We set out toward campus, so that Hugh could give us a tour of the small town. We passed row after row of frat houses, each with an enthusiastic game of beer pong or flip cup or corn hole occurring on the front lawn, teems of students leaning precariously from the balconies, yelling loudly at their friends. We heard what we thought was a gunshot, but it was only an intoxicated young man dropping a cooler from the roof. Climbing up the hill to the university, dressed for the frigid Halloweens of our pasts, we were soon sweating profusely. Hugh searched for sustenance amidst the usual campus chains—packed Jimmy John’s, Buffalo Wild Wings, Panera. Chris was trying to ensure that we would have a place to watch game four of the World Series, where the Indians—his family’s beloved team—were trying to keep up the Cubs’ 108-year curse. It wasn’t only a Midwestern battle. It was an economic battle, too. If the Cubs won, so did the Northside bros with their Starter caps and North Face jackets. If the Indians won, so did the entire Rust Belt. Chris had driven all the way from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to watch the game in his home state.
Hours before the game began, the youth of Ohio was weaving in and out of campus watering holes. We ducked into a small, dark bar where Hugh ordered us syrupy, caffeinated shots to get in the mood. It seemed, in some sense, a kind of farce, our being there. Everything felt labored: our remarks about the not-so-outrageous costumes; our selfies we couldn’t send to our friends due to the excess data swirling around the air that afternoon. The shots we would normally have never taken. When we emerged from the bar, we all squinted. It seemed far too bright, far too hot, for the holiday. We descended the hill soaked in sweat.
***
Ohio University isn’t a stranger to the art of partying. In 2015, Playboy gave OU the high honor of naming it No. 1 in its ranking of the nation’s top party schools. Other than the Halloween Block Party (sponsored, one notes, by Four Loko), the magazine cites #Fest—the largest college music festival in America—and the imaginatively-named Bong Hill as boons for the campus’s ability to debauch, for its mastery of the Fête champêtre. On Court Street, .51 miles are lined with 23 bars. There’s a reason the school is dubbed OU OHYEAH.
Ohioans hear rumors of this particular Halloween revelry from a young age, and each year between 10,000 and 30,000 party-goers flock from all over the state to participate, nearly doubling Athens’ college-town population. The university allots around $100,000 annually for the event, paying overtime to facilities managers, custodians, traffic officials, and campus police. The city of Athens itself doles out between $50,000 and $65,000 each year, paying for extra police patrols coming in from other counties to help oversee the block party. OU students living in the dorms are only allowed one guest for the weekend, and their student accounts are charged $50 if the guests fail to register in advance. This fee helps fund an alcohol education course in which all first-year students are required to enroll. One of many, it appeared, the students had failed to master.
I’d posit that students might be alarmed at the amount apportioned from their tuitions for the 24-hour event, but that would be overlooking the fact that much of the student body would most likely list these festivities as major attractions for the university, perhaps the main reason for their enrollment. While it was once earnestly dubbed Harvard on the Hocking, the phrase now lingers with irony. “She’s probably going to end up at OU” isn’t an uncommon phrase surrounding students with a stronger penchant for partying than for studying.
One could see the allure, though, of an evening eschewing reality, especially for Rust Belt students feeling the rest of the country breathing down their necks in 2016. On the eve of November, though, deciding the fate of the election clearly wasn’t on their minds. People they knew, people they loved, perhaps even they themselves had been either ignored or ridiculed by the liberal elite, the politicians, and the media for months, and, staring down the final week of the election, they were going to get drunk. They were going to walk out of their colossal, neo-Federalist dormitories, across the campus green where the groups of elms still hadn’t turned. They were going to pass the Soldiers and Sailors Monument honoring the 2,610 Athens County citizens who served during the Civil War, head under the arched, stone gateway dividing campus and town with an inscription for those leaving the campus boundary:
SO DEPART THAT DAILY THOU MAYEST BETTER SERVE
THY FELLOWMEN THY COUNTRY AND THY GOD
And then they were going to join the swarms of their fellow students navigating the four, closed-off blocks dedicated solely to their carousal. Wielding large glow sticks stamped with the Four Loko logo, they were going to dance to the pulsing techno music coming from the nearby stage. They were going to high-five women wearing only LeBron jerseys, Pharaohs with golden staffs, men dressed in diapers chugging beers, a body-painted Uncle Sam holding onto the arm of a barely-still-upright Statue of Liberty.
Though the red Solo cup could have been the unofficial mascot of the party, things hadn’t so terribly regressed. It was a typical block party, the chief of police said the next day. Nothing like the one in 2003—the “worst ever”—where the crowds ended up rioting, lighting couches on fire and throwing bottles at police officers and firemen.
Halloween, however, has almost always invited such destruction. As Nicholas Rogers notes in his comprehensive book, Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night, the holiday has strong ties to the ancient Celtic pagan festival of Samhain (meaning summer’s end) and its marking of the beginning of winter, a time when the fall crops’ bounty comes head to head with the blight that will mark the following colder months. This, then, was a liminal time. A between-seasons when the dead were said to be accessible. A magic fog was rumored to descend upon the Celtic citizens,obscuring the boundary between the real and the otherworld. Fearing the dark, supernatural powers coming out from the hillside sidhs—the mounds under which the spirits lived—the Irish constructed large bonfires to ward them off. In Druidic culture, there was a practice of auguring from the bowels of sacrificed animals in order to predict the harshness of the coming winter.
This connection to the otherworld, the crossing of thresholds between the living and the dead, has maintained the attribution of Samhain as a primary origin for Halloween. But the ritual practices of Halloween owe much to European celebrations of All Souls’ and All Saints’ Day as well. Festivals honored the souls of the departed, and in some churches bells chimed for those stuck in purgatory. Medieval celebrations revolving around All Saints’ Day found church-goers dressing up as angels, saints, and devils, and marching around the church. On All Souls’, parishioners observed chorus members imitating virgin women, perhaps beginning the traditions of masking, of social inversion, that would continue to characterize the holiday. In its Celtic origins, when Halloween became a season of misrule, role reversals and pranks were tantamount to neighborhood celebrations. Young townsmen demanded tributes to keep up the parties; those who didn’t contribute were publicly ridiculed and shamed. Throughout Europe, especially before the Reformation, Rogers finds, the practice of souling—with supplicants going to houses and asking for food in exchange for their prayers, and, later begging for soul cakes in return for songs—introduced more modern rituals of door-to-door solicitation.
There is no evidence of a firm root of Halloween in North America until the nineteenth century, when the increase of Irish and Scottish immigrants brought the festivities to the streets of Canada and the United States. Though it began as an immigrant Celtic festival here, the holiday was soon celebrated across almost all cultural divides. By abandoning more traditional ties to harvest, superstitions, and commemorations of the dead, the rise in trick-or-treating and costume wearing in the U.S. (i.e. the vast commercialization of the holiday) and the resulting inversion of social norms seems, perhaps, more akin to springtime celebrations of carnival than the original religious rituals of All Saints’ and All Souls’ (it may be noted that HallOUeen is second only to Mardi Gras as the United States’ largest block party). The festivities surrounding carnival, though, and the temporary inversion found in its revelry and masquerade, are of a hopeful sort. It is a holiday, after all, observing the passage of darkness to light.
***
In his description of carnival, specifically revolving around Roman Saturnalia, Mikhail Bakhtin writes that it “is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because the very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it.”
My voyeuristic notions, it seems, making the pilgrimage to Athens, may have been futile. Later that evening, walking back up the long hill from Hugh’s apartment toward the heart of the party, wearing my own costume (I was, in a cheap, red-laced teddy scrawled with psychological terms, a Freudian Slip), I could not so easily separate myself from the rest of the celebrants.
Bakhtin continues:
Moreover, through all the stages of historic development feasts were linked to moments of crisis, of breaking points in the cycle of nature or in the life of society and man. Moments of death and revival, of change and renewal always led to a festive perception of the world. These moments, expressed in concrete form, created the peculiar character of the feasts.
Expressed in concrete form was the glitter adorning bare legs of attractive co-eds. (The warm weather was particularly suited to this brand of masquerading; both women and men seemed to take it as a kind of dare to show the most skin. I had only ever seen so many men in underwear in San Francisco.) Expressed in concrete form was the group of Mets players hanging on to a season long-since ended. And what was more concrete, amidst the ongoing charade of the election, than the Zombie Jesus?
***
That wishful mask seemed especially resonant that night in Ohio, when much of the country was being courted by neoliberal myths of a classless society. And it seemed, too, as if the election season, especially one as divisive, as hyper-partisan as the one in 2016, was the antithesis of carnival, when lines of identity momentarily blur; nothing emphasized the deep gulfs of our country more than what one could barely still call political debate.
Or so I thought, especially as I faced, weekly, the students in my English Composition class at the University of Cincinnati. I had themed the course—bravely? idiotically?—around the election, and though I asked students to refrain from revealing their political stances—this to preserve my sanity and objectivity—it was soon obvious that the majority of the class supported Donald Trump. The majority of the class was also male; I only had three women in a group of twenty-two. There was an abundance of scare quotes around the words sexism and oppression and police brutality. There was an eerie obsession with the integrity of Clinton. But by the last debate, we were all exhausted.
As it was the first election in which every student in the class was old enough to vote, I asked them, one day approaching the election, if they were looking forward to that rite of passage. We had sunk deeply into discussions of summary and paraphrase, of proper citations, and I had ceased, I realized, to treat them like human beings.
“So are you?” I asked. “Are you guys excited?” Crickets. Grimaces. A young man in the back scoffed audibly. “I know, I know, it’s been a long election season,” I conceded, “but you’re all going to vote, right?” A couple students mumbled their assent, but many just stared. Finally, after an uncomfortable silence, my favorite student responded. “They’re both horrible.” The class nodded wearily.
Such was the state of American cynicism, with young voters fleeing the two-party system in a rate unparalleled since Ross Perot’s candidacy in 1992. This skepticism had evolved past healthy levels of reasonable dissatisfaction and formed into a kind of aggressive ennui. I wasn’t immune to it myself. Perhaps the absurdity of the election, the record high dissatisfaction with the candidates, had indeed the ameliorating effects of carnival. There wasn’t much my students and I agreed about, but we seemed to be joined in our disdain for the cartoonish political climate.
Regrettably, the last unit of the semester required students to create their own news show parodies. They were to take topics from their research papers about issues in the election and cast them in a satirical light, in the vein of The Colbert Report, or The Daily Show. The week before their videos were due, one group emailed me asking if they could change one of their topics. A student had been writing about the Sam DuBose trial, which had just resulted in a mistrial and had spurred protests around the city and palpable unrest on campus as well, with carefully phrased emails pouring in from university authorities about community and safe spaces and mutual understanding. The group of my students stated that they didn’t feel comfortable approaching that particular topic. There was nothing funny, they said, about police brutality.
And maybe it’s naïve to suggest any unifying aspect to 2016 partisan politics. The day after Halloween, charred bricks of what remained of the predominantly black Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church in Greenville, Mississippi were found spray-painted with the words Vote Trump. The church was 111 years old. In another absurd reversal, it was as if the country had, in the course of a few months, slid back decades. Infringements on civil rights such as this, as well as a Professor Watchlist monitoring educators espousing purportedly radical agendas, eerily evoked the ‘50s and ‘60s. In the weeks after Trump was elected, the University of Cincinnati was papered with fliers advertising an upcoming visit by Richard B. Spencer, a noted white supremacist. In a gathering celebrating Trump’s recent win, Spencer’s supporters were witnessed giving the Nazi salute while he shouted, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!”
Campus Republicans were to host the event at Cincinnati. “Join us,” the fliers implored, “to explore what it means to be an uncucked white in the current year!”
***
Who wouldn’t, then, want to dress up as something from another world? While I didn’t see the election-themed costumes I had eagerly anticipated (they existed, surely; as our group of friends retreated to a bar for most of the evening to watch the game, we undoubtedly decreased the sample size of possible costumes witnessed), what I did notice was the myth. Gladiators, Power Rangers, Medusas, Jesuses, sexy Santas, angels, devils and the like were out in full force. There were togas. There were swords. There were elaborately-braided goddesses. Trump and Clinton may have represented, in some manners, deep-seated corruption, but the crowd in Athens was tapping into narratives with much more history.
According to the National Retail Federation, the superhero costume was the most popular choice among children that Halloween. For the majority of the age-set out past nine, however, Batman characters reigned supreme. Especially poignant, in the year after Freddie Gray’s death, and only weeks after Keith Lamont Scott was fatally shot by police in Charlotte. Were all the Batmen some commentary on police brutality? Batman, after all, always left corporal punishment up to the courts. But even more significant is the need, in the Batman narrative, to go outside the law in order to do justice. When our systems were corrupt, when our police couldn’t necessarily be trusted with the great responsibility and power we had bestowed upon them, a character who turned his back on more conventional strategies of justice, who did, indeed, do evil to achieve good, was admittedly desirable. How this might manifest in our real world, and outside the pages of comic books, outside of the big screen, was still unclear. The July killing of five Dallas police officers offered a tragic alternative.
The desire to transcend the law may have manifested in a different form in Rust Belt states like Ohio. Deep skepticism of the government led Donald Trump—a political outsider, he liked to remind the American people again and again—to be seen as a new form of vigilante justice. But Trump promised a myth it didn’t seem he would actually deliver. While he vowed to “drain the swamp” of political lobbyists in Washington, the weeks following his election showed quite the opposite; there were plenty of Washington insiders in his list of appointments.
I’m skeptical, though, as to whether or not these ties to current events were intentional. I saw just as many people dressed up as The Joker. Even if there wasn’t a conscious connection between the costumes of 2016 and the year itself, there was a discernible shared ethos; much of America, like The Joker, was contemptuous of “the schemers” of Washington, and wanted, too, to show them how pathetic their attempts to control things really were. “Some men,” Alfred Pennyworth warns Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight, “just want to watch the world burn.”
Were we, too, just part of some twisted social experiment? Attracted by a whiff of anarchy, had we welcomed The Joker’s chaos into our lives, our election? Was that how desperate we had become? The Dark Knight has its fair share of absurd role reversals. In the hostage situation at the height of the film’s action, kidnapped doctors are misleadingly the ones wearing the clown masks, targeted by the SWAT team. The Joker’s posse of clowns are dressed in scrubs and white coats, ready to attack. Two ferries—one holding an entire prison’s worth of inmates, one full of innocent citizens—hold the fate of the other’s cargo literally in their own hands; each is given the detonator wired to the other boat’s bomb. Those not in orange jumpsuits make ballots, hold a vote. Ultimately these citizens of Gotham, in deciding not to blow each other up, show—as Batman tells The Joker while dangling him from the top of a skyscraper—that the city is full of people who were willing to believe in good.
What did our vote show that we were willing to believe in, in 2016? Our America, it seemed, given the detonator wired to the White House, had decided to blow itself up.
Anarchy, in some form or another, was anticipated by authorities throughout the country, with recent terrorist attacks in Nice, Brussels, and Paris. Creepy clowns had been harassing people all over the states in the weeks before Halloween (schools closed in Cincinnati because a woman reported being attacked by a man in clown costume). Attacks were particularly rampant in poor Midwestern towns. Here, I suppose, were masked individuals taking matters into their own hands. But what was their message? The Joker’s social experiment, however sadistic, had a point.
Due to these threats, presumably, there were more Athens authorities present at the block party than in any other year. Much like the use of carnival in the past—where the poor could revolt against the magistrate, upturn their lots, their towns for a week and go virtually unpunished—this was an acutely regulated form of fun. As the chaos of American politics reached an all-time high, the expected chaos of the Block Party seemed relatively mild in comparison. Elsewhere, the week before the election may have appeared Bosch-like. But here were a bunch of adults (technically) operating collectively, and mostly considerately and cooperatively, inside a closed system. Authorities—both Athens and campus police—punctuated every corner. Waiting outside while Hugh was in line for a late-night sandwich, we saw cops on horseback, four in a row, with a gaggle of drunk girls petting the horses’ soft muzzles.
***
While for a brief period in the 1970s the event was acknowledged by the town, with police officially closing the streets, a high number of arrests (124 in 1978) made both the university and the town revoke their affiliation. The people of Athens, however, continued to swarm the streets illegally, until 1990 when the event again became city-sanctioned; they realized it would happen with or without their blessing. Which is how they came to regulate the event as much as possible. There were 44 Halloween-related weekend arrests by Athens police. 69 were made by the OU police department. University events from open swims to open mics—not to mention the two stages, each boasting five hours of concerts—attempted to assuage unbridled, unchecked debauchery. There were 37 calls for service to Athens County EMS, down from 43 the year prior.
Police presence wasn’t the only aspect of the holiday to see a rise in 2016. Halloween spending was at its all-time highest, reaching an anticipated 8.4 billion dollars, an increase of 1.5 billion since the previous year. 2.5 billion was to be spent on candy. Over three billion dollars were estimated for costumes alone. Apparently we all needed a night of fantasy.
And wasn’t Trump masquerading as a Republican, anyway? His mercurial shifting from Republican to Independent to Democrat to Republican throughout his career certainly suggested as much. The day before the election he appeared in Sarasota, Florida to deliver his closing remarks. In his hands he held a rubber mask of his own likeness, dangling it right next to his face. “Beautiful,” he called it, before tossing it into the cheering crowd. “Is there any place more fun to be” he asked, “than a Trump rally?”
And wasn’t the one percent dressing up as radicals too? A few days before Trump’s appearance, Beyoncé’s back-up dancers donned blue pantsuits, à la Clinton, at a rally in Cleveland. The two women grasped hands before the crowd after Beyoncé’s performance of “Formation.”
***
What was real, and what was artifice? This was a question my students would return to again and again that October. “How,” they asked me, “do we know who is telling the truth?” I wished I knew. Just days after the election, the Oxford English Dictionary announced the international word of the year: post-truth. This is defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” How fitting, for a year that saw the rampage of “fake news”—where pure lies were masquerading as the truth—spread across the Internet. The proliferation of stories such as Clinton’s use of a body double, or that an anti-Trump protestor was paid thousands of dollars to participate in public dissidence, or that the Pope supported Trump made it increasingly difficult to debunk these fictitious accounts. Some of my students wrote about Clinton ordering a hit on a federal agent. Others about her failing health disqualifying her from office.
Their Facebook accounts, with the News Feed and Trending Topics features, told them this was true. In the (false) case of the Pope’s endorsement, that story was shared over 100,000 times by users of the social media platform. While Facebook, as well as Google, received scrutiny for their inability and refusal to exert editorial control over these stories, after the election it came out that there were larger forces at play; The Washington Post reported that the fake news also received support from an elaborate Russian propaganda campaign. Even when these stories fell apart factually, their buzzworthy nature had done too much damage. The truth was past repair.
When I asked my class what was most important to them in a presidential candidate, one of the young women—normally quiet, reserved—spoke up. “I want a candidate who seems like they truly believe what they’re saying.”
***
After the election, grieving Democrats expressed frustration with the polls. They felt as though they had been lied to. At 7:59 p.m. on November 8th, a close friend who worked in D.C. for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee texted me to say that he and his coworkers had popped open the champagne. “We won Florida,” he said. “Networks won’t call it for a while but we got ourselves a lady prez.” They were terribly wrong.
And so were the polls. Reports and articles about the phenomenon of a silent majority—people who wouldn’t identify themselves as Trump supporters but who voted for him in surprising numbers on election day—circulated widely. But the real problem seemed to be a sort of cultural blindness. Throughout the course of the election, there was an insular feedback loop of politicos, pollsters, and pundits who were talking about the people without talking to them. Which gestures back to an alarming inability for much of America to discuss class, to a neoliberal failure to reach or even understand issues plaguing the Rust Belt. It wasn’t that the polls had lied, it was that we didn’t believe the anger. We made fun of it. We wrote long form journalism about it. We thought it was a myth.
Trump’s routine touting of a white, middle-class nirvana, one that hadn’t existed for decades, that perhaps had never existed, was equally duplicitous. He was marketing a very specific breed of American nostalgia, one he knew to be close to the hearts of men and women in the Midwest. One need not look far past his campaign’s slogan to witness how simple he made it sound. Who wouldn’t want to make America great, regardless of whether one could agree on when “again” was?
***
Sunday morning, retracing our path up the hill that was then covered in Solo cups and Domino’s pizza boxes and so much broken glass and horse shit you couldn’t avoid stepping on it, I wondered if we were the merely the voyeurs we had painted ourselves to be. Or were we, too, hoping for some anesthetizing pleasure, partiers a little late to the party—ten years older than the swarms of co-eds stumbling across the red brick—carrying with us more than a healthy amount of nostalgia for the insouciance of our youth? Maybe we just wanted to get plastered for a night, too.
But despite how many mixed shots we took, we couldn’t get drunk enough. The spectacle wasn’t all that dazzling, too many couples had bought the same chintzy Peanut Butter and Jelly costumes, and most of the bars were full. On Court Street, born-again Christians attempted to convert the masses.
At the end of the night, when the police conducted their final sweep of the streets, the remaining crowd allowed themselves to be pushed back home, wherever that was. Apparently, the party ended around 2:45 a.m. But we were back at Hugh’s, sleeping on the floor like we once did in our youth. We woke up with dry mouths, sore backs.
Chris and I rolled up our sleeping bags and left our friends still sleeping. We walked a concrete path by the river, stopping every now and then to swat away the gnats that shouldn’t have still been hatching this late in the year.
On our way home from breakfast the next morning, we ran into a local man depositing his mail into the post office’s blue drop box. He asked us, rolling down his window with a sly grin, how the evening went. “A lot of Trumps and Clintons, I imagine?”
What I hadn’t realized was that I had, in fact, seen Trump everywhere. He was in the elision of political costumes, in the desire to stray from “business as usual.” He was in the men dressed as large foam penises. He was in the sexy nuns. He was in the Cleveland Indians uniforms and the police standing idly by, joking with each other, coffees in hand. He was in the impression that this was a form of escape.
But other than the hangovers that surely plagued the student population the following morning, other than the minor misdemeanors, the regrettable hookups, the broken glass that would take a week or two to fully disappear, little else remained from the party. Out of town guests retrieved their cars, parked across town at the fairgrounds. Vomit-streaked sidewalks were hosed down. Class was still held on Monday. The government was about to auction off Ohio’s only National Forest—56 miles east of Athens—for fracking, and Donald Trump, despite the absence of his countenance from the party, had, in some sort of electoral apocalypse, won the election.
***
The rest stop a few miles out of town was pristine. I bought a Coke. The flag waved silently from the top of the flagpole, and, as I drove off, the local country station was live-broadcasting a NASCAR race. The announcers, at the Martinsville Speedway, were gearing up for the imminent 500 laps. Which is another type of myth in America.
Corey Van Landingham is a contributing editor and regular book reviewer for West Branch. She is the author author of three books of poetry, including Reader, I, which was published last April. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry from Stanford University, she teaches in the MFA program at the University of Illinois.