Hanging with the Republicans

My friend Avi has a fantastic piece in Salon on working "undercover" as a security guard at the RNC. It's well-written and devilishly funny. Here's a teaser, but do yourself a favor and read the whole piece, it's great.

2:50 a.m.
At the RNC, the truth-telling starts somewhere around 3 a.m. Delegates who were on-message when they left for their parties at 10 p.m., return too hammered to walk a straight party line.

"How you doing, dude?" one of the drunk delegates says to me as he pulls out a cigarette, almost emptying an entire pocket in the process.

"To tell you the truth," I reply, "my pants are way too tight on the waist. They're killing me."

He gives my pants a glance.

"There's a lot of hot chicks here," he tells me in a failed attempt at a whisper. He reeks of chardonnay. "You cannot spring a woody here, dude. Your pants got no give, know what I mean? It'd be totally obvious. Gov. Palin is staying here -- you gotta be careful. You get what I'm saying? You can't get wood on the job."

"Thanks. I got it," I say.

One of his pals chimes in.

"Gov. Palin is hot, dude," he says, collapsing onto a bench in front of the hotel entrance.

Even in their lusty, alcohol-fueled swoons, these young politicos still call Palin "governor." In a way, this reverential horniness is sort of endearing. But mostly it's just creepy. Sitting on the bench, the young man leans his head back and squeezes his eyes shut, trying, and failing, to stave off vertigo. "Total MILF."