The second installment of my cousin Sam’s story of a summer spent in Arkansas, where he was basically hanging with the hippies and organizing unions. Go, Sammy. PS, when I was living in Portland, Sam was my only friend. Apart from our other cousin, Steve (also a Jew). Portland was not so good.

Hey Sam,

Tried to resume my letter earlier today at the Central Library but had difficulty finding a place to sit comfortably that didn’t put me in direct eye-line with a masturbating miscreant. Also attempted to go to the bathroom only two encounter two folks with very large backpacks copulating in the stall. My presence did not interrupt them, but theirs prevented me from urinating and ultimately writing.

Anyway, back to where I left off:

Spangles was the bane and delight of my time in Fayetteville. For the first few weeks every twelve to fifteen minutes she would find a way to mention her fiancé Chad. Alex, my buddy who brought me down to Arkansas, and I questioned the mental capacity of this Chad, as well as the validity of his existence. Spangles was in the process of converting to Judaism to marry Chad who had only recently discovered through an evening course in genealogy that he was really Jewish. Spangles took great joy in telling Alex and I, actual Jews, a wide array nonsensical half truths about Judaism. She met once a month with a Rabbi who traveled to Fayetteville from Tulsa to preach to Spangles, Chad, and 8 other Northwest Arkansas Jews. We immediately questioned this roving Rabbi’s teachings when Spangles corrected our pronunciation of the knotted bread served on the Sabbath (“No, no, no. It’s pronounced CH-allah,”).

Spangles, besides being an aspiring Jew and volunteer patriotic themed hospice clown was also compulsive chain smoker and Diet Coke drinker. She would waddle into the office in the morning, either in a denim skirt that regrettably came to where her knees presumably were (though no visual evidence could confirm there exact placement) or cargo capri pants and a shirt whose seem rested just below her belly button and a 2 liter bottle of Diet Coke wedged in each of her moist underarms. She would need to replenish by lunch. She smoked the American Spirits in a black box, which smelled terrible. But that wasn’t enough, because at some point going outside the office to smoke 20 to 40 times a work day became too much and so she purchased an electronic cigarette from the internet.

She would puff on this piece of plastic with an orange LED light at its tip maybe every two minutes and then exhale this white vapor. It was supposedly odorless, but alas it reeked of compulsive desperation, which smells faintly of sulfur and belly button lint.

I suppose that is enough about Spangles, for now. I shall conclude in my direct discussion of her by saying that I will always remember her as flatulent and racist. She didn’t dislike black people, she just didn’t want any near her cigarettes or purse. And just because she didn’t want Mexicans talking to her, or breathing the same air she weezed, didn’t mean she didn’t respect their proud cultural heritage. Oh, oh, oh, and she was the fattest vegetarian I had ever scene, one who I never saw eat a green vegetable. She was also an ardent Hillary Clinton supporter.

Alright, so what exactly was I doing working for the union in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where there are barely any organized labors (and zero SEIU members)? Well, it would seem I was initially part of a vanity project for the union to show Senator Blanche Lincoln (A Democrat who might as well be a Strom Thurmon Dixiecrat) that she should toe the party line a little more closely. The way the union was going to do that was to organize a grass roots campaign to get Arkansas (whose membership in organized labor is again, miniscule) to call her to support something called the Employee Free Choice Act. EFCA basically makes it easier for worksites to vote on the decision to unionize by allowing for something called a card check vote, which is like a absentee vote. It allows workers to vote from home. It also stiffens penalties for employers who fire employees for vocally supporting unionization or for voting to unionize ( a common practice). Word from the SEIU folks in DC was that the Senate would vote on this bill as soon as Al Franken was seated, which happened the first week I arrive in Arkansas.

With a 60 seat majority, EFCA was supposed to be a slam dunk. Alas, it soon became clear that it would have to follow health care, which no one really thought would take too long.

Unfortunately this is how the opposition explained the bill:

So Alex, Spangles, the guy who sucked, and I spent our days cold calling democrats, knocking on Obama supporters’ doors, and brining together a coalition of Fayetteville’s crackpot leftist fringe groups to get their weirdoes out supporting social justice for organized labor. What sort of “progressive” organizations did we work with on a daily basis? The Omni center, which was made of thirty octogenarians who believed world peace could be achieved with positive thinking right there in Fayetteville. These were the sorts who still had trouble understanding why they could not lift the Pentagon off the ground in the 1960s.

The other groups we worked with were Green Party of Northwest Arkansas, which was lead by an eccentric university staffer who took lunch every day at Pizza Hut, and had for 12 years. His group had considerable crossover with the city’s chapter of NORML, who would eventually become members of the Omni Center upon receiving their AARP cards. Spangles was in charge of campus outreach to the University, and all of its progressive organizations were pretty creaped out by her wide set eyes, flat nose, and thunderous smokers cough that set off a tsunami of jiggling flesh. Have I mentioned she smelled?

The weirdoes who worked with us were weird, but not half as weird as the groups that we encountered at the Fayetteville Market. A brief digression: why must we equate dirty with organic? Anyway, amongst the mumbo-jumbo peddlers who set up booths next to ours at the farmers market were the Scientologist of Arkansas, the guy who wants everyone to give him American currency in exchange for Fayetteville Bucks which are now redeemable at 17 local businesses, the Humane Society which has 15 year old junior varsity cheerleaders in uniform lead shelter dogs through the market collecting donations, a husband-wife reiki team, and an old hillbilly with a drawn-on sharpie mustache and two foot wide sombrero selling the world’s worst breakfast burritos. Nobody at the farmers’ market wore closed toed footwear but Alex and I. It was a parade of foot funguses and ingrown maladies. Dirty feet, smelly feet, diseased feet, all loose.

As for our office, old 66 Sunbridge, it had belonged to a family of Scandinavian chiropractors the month before. According to the guy who sucked, who had rented the office, the Chiroprators, had fled the country in the middle of night after a visit from the IRS. Their names Katinka, Rolf, and Belinda Vanhouvelle were still on the door, as was the marquee that read “We Sell Health.” The place was half painted a bland sand color by the leasing agency and an festive lime left by the Chiropractors. One could see where they had ripped the the x-ray machine right off the floor in one of the offices. My office had its own bathroom, but no windows. This seemed like a boon at the time, but proved to be a regrettable choice. That maxim about shitting were you eat holds true…