THE DAIRY QUEEN VOTE

I spent my cavity-prone years growing up in a red state. Stoned and apolitical ... and if Kitty Kelly is to be believed, that wouldn't make the adolescence of me and my pals that much different than the president's.

And while killing time as a confused adolescent in Small Town, Mississippi, I had a raging crush on a gal named Gwyneth, who I had first met at the Dairy Queen on the outskirts of town. Despite my offer for the two of us to share a joint and then split a Dixie-Belle Butterscotch sundae, any romantic teenage overtures were summarily yet gracefully rejected. Instead, she fell for my best friend, Beanie. I took it in stride. And despite any potential awkwardness on my part, the three of us were close throughout our teens, smoking pot every day after the bell rang and occasionally hitting the DQ. They even got married despite being too young to even vote.

A year later, when I was a senior in high school and most of the folks we hung out with had already dropped out and went to work at the Babcock & Wilcox plant making asbestos or something, Beanie was murdered. He was stabbed in the heart, repeatedly, with a butcher knife that was stolen from the local meat-processing plant. The police thought the homicide was an act of vengeance over a drug deal gone bad. It wasn't. Even though the murderer and the murdered were both prodigious dope-smokers, this small-town snuffing was over a soap opera-like love parallelogram. (Think "Harper Valley P.T.A." for stoners.)

It happened down on the railroad tracks - the ones that separate the so-called good side of town from the wrong side. The killing definitely happened on the wrong side of the tracks. Beanie was buying a six-pack and some munchies at the Junior Food Mart on Highway 45. He ran into Skeeter, his nemesis, there, and words were exchanged. Skeeter suggested they meet behind his house and settle things man-to-man.

Gwyneth was in the car, parked on the side of the road with the motor running, when the attack began. She heard the screams of "He's cutting me, he's cutting me!" and she ran out of the car to help. She witnessed Skeeter on top of a limp and limbs-akimbo Beanie, repeatedly plunging a cold blade into her husband's bloodied chest. Between thrusts, he took notice of her and stopped long enough to tell her: "I'll cut you too, bitch."

The local justice system was indifferent to the inhumanity of the blood on the tracks. The local police - who were some dumb-as-ditchweed stereotypical conflation of Buford Pusser and Barney Fife - felt that Skeeter had somehow done the community a service, what with two less "drug addicts" out on the streets - one in jail and one pushing up the proverbial daisies.

After the requisite plea bargaining and snitching, Skeeter told Buford and Barney that Beanie and I were the two biggest heroin dealers in town (umm, there was no heroin in that town ... if there was, both Beanie and I would've known about it). With this kind of maneuvering, Skeeter was found guilty of manslaughter, and sentenced to jail for a term of three-and-a-half years, pending time allowed for good behavior. The jail sentence also allowed for conjugal visits. Somehow, he convinced some bimbo to come visit him in jail, and he fathered a child while locked up in the hoosegow.

It was a travesty and the ultimate bum note in existential discord.

As all of this shook out, I was home one day listening to a Blue Öyster Cult record and waiting for punk rock to happen. My mom came home from work and told me that I needed to get down to the jailhouse.

"Why?"

"Because Gwyneth is down there sitting on the sidewalk, staring a hole into the side of the building. If looks could kill ... ."

So I walked down the street and found her there, just like my mom described.

She was now pacing and hovering outside of the jail where her husband's murderer dwelled. She was catatonic with rage. I held her and I pointed up the street and then I pointed down the street.

"Listen, Gwyneth. You need to focus on the things that you are in control of. What is happening on the other side of those jailhouse walls is beyond your control and will consume you. You can focus all your energy and emotions on an immoveable object, and nothing is going to change. On the other hand, what is within your control is down the road. My advice to you is to go down the road and fix the things that are within your grasp."

Shades of Robert Frost, she walked down the road. And so did I. I moved to California to play punk rock. Through the grapevine I heard that she got her life back. Got her GED, got married, had young 'uns, was divorced, and yet kept it together as a single mom. But her husband's murder taught us both this fact: There are bad seeds in this world and they are born evil. And if the system fails us and rewards the darkest tendencies in some of us, it is incumbent upon the rest of us folks to fix our gaze down the railroad track's parallax, and move along toward things that are in our control.

In 2003, when Secretary of State Colin Powell did his weapons of mass destruction dog-and-pony show in front of the United Nations, trying - in front of an armada of arched eyebrows - to summon international support for regime change of Baghdad, I thought back to Buford Pusser and Barney Fife in Small Town, Mississippi. I remembered their assertion that - based on evidence supplied by Skeeter - that Beanie and I were heroin dealers. The reality was we would buy a dime bag of weed from the black kids on Cottrell Street, roll a couple of joints out of it, and then re-sell what was left to white kids afraid to drive into the shanty side of town.

"Those aren't weapons plants," I remember saying aloud to C-SPAN, Colin Powell and his pointer and his photographic exhibits on an easel. "Those are fucking Quonset huts."

"AMERICAN BY BIRTH ... SOUTHERN BY THE GRACE OF GOD"

- Bumper sticker, seen on a semi tractor-trailer parked outside a truck stop in Meridian, Mississippi

The only Democrats to have been elected president since Jack Kennedy's skull was blown to gumbo and the Beatles hit the American Top 40 have been those born south of the Mason-Dixon line. Dixie, baby. And even back then, over 40 years ago, JFK - the last Northeastern intellectual sworn to uphold the constitution - had the common sense to load the ticket with a good old-fashioned, ´´ mean-as-a-briar patch, Protestant Texocrat, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

It could be argued that John Edwards was added in 2004 for balance to the last failed Democratic campaign for leadership of the Free World, but he cuts no muster in the Deep South. For all practical purposes, Edwards was Joe Lieberman sans yarmulke. But back in the day, JFK's guys knew what Karl Rove knows. To take the South, you need to hitch your wagon to an absolute pigfucker of a politician.

I thought about all of this, a couple of days before Labor Day, when I returned to visit Gwyneth in Small Town, Mississippi. Coincidentally, it was the weekend of the local Howlin' Wolf Blues Festival, and the entire town seemed to be gearing up for the production.

I hadn't been to see her since when Beanie died. That night I drank beer in her backyard, at a gathering lit by citronella and kerosene torches, and serenaded by the mating calls of frogs. She had called everybody we both knew, and I hung out with a smattering of friends who I had not seen in a coon's age, and who had survived the last quarter of a century by not dying in car crashes, nor OD'ing, nor going to jail. As I asked about what happened to old so-and-so, it turns out that some of our mutual pals and acquaintances had joined the Army Reserve or National Guard. Others avoided the outsourced-slash-Wal-Mart economy by hiring themselves out as private contractors in Iraq.

As the torches' kerosene canisters ran dry, shadows grew on a moonlit Mississippi night, and the supply of low-carb domestic beer began to dwindle and gather at the bottom of the ice chests. We drained our brews and toasted those who had ended up in the Middle East for Uncle Sam, just trying to maintain order in their lives and stay ahead of the game.

The subtext of the toasts was this: Let's hope none of our old friends get their heads cut off by militant Muslims.

That was the extent of the political discussion.

The next morning, under murky skies, Gwyneth and I went out in her Jeep and visited some antebellum bridges and some Civil War battle sites, with our final destination being the cemetery where Beanie was buried. En route, we drove around with top down along the dirt roads on the outskirts of town, where we used to cruise at night and drink beer, smoke sticks and listen to Lynyrd Skynyrd tapes. We motored past an old shanty among the soybean fields where Howlin' Wolf was born.

"I guess it took a generation or two for the Chamber of Commerce to figure out they could make money off of a dead black man," I said to her.

"Well, it is a little unfashionable to throw festivals for some of the rest of the local heroes."

I knew she meant legendary figures like Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and cavalryman who - in a fit of pique after his brother was killed in battle - had single-handedly killed three Yankees with his saber. This happened down the road a piece in Okolona, but Bedford's brother was buried here in a local graveyard, same as Beanie.

Once at the cemetery, we smoked coffin nails and tended to flowers.

"You know," I mused. "I kinda' fail to see the difference between a raider like Forrest - a guy who was always outnumbered, but always found some dastardedly way to even up the odds - and what the Arab extremists are doing nowadays, in the name of an equally fucked-up cause."

"It is kind of ironic that nobody in Mississippi is making that connection, isn't it?"

"I think it was Ulysses S. Grant who said they must see Forrest dead, even if it breaks the treasury."

"I don't know. You always paid more attention in history class than I did."

Gwyneth said her worries were more than just breaking the bank ... it was more about her kids being the same age as we were when Beanie was killed.

She mentioned her concern for them getting drafted. "By Mississippi standards I'm probably considered way too liberal," she said. "I disagree with that and I resent it; it's just that there are many agendas that concern me greatly. But I worry about supporting Kerry. I don't really know where he is coming from."

"You're not too liberal. You're too smart. You learned firsthand how some scumbag criminal could tell the police whatever it is they want to hear in order to justify their agenda."

The skies turned darker and colder and it began to mist. We talked about Ahmad Chalabi, Halliburton, Sudan, and the upcoming election. She told me she was too young to understand what was happening during the last time America had a military draft, but she was "researching my options for the purchase of real estate in Canada," if the current administration is reelected.

"You watch too much television," I told her. "But you're right: This war is a farce and a fraud. Look at Beanie's grave. The poor son-of-a-bitch died over nothing but some petulant little punk's out-of-control ego. What a waste."

"People aren't done dying because of that," she said.

We walked around other graves. I found Bedford Forrest's brother's grave in a section flanked by a Rebel Flag and marked "Confederate Dead," and pointed it out. We didn't say much.

"You do know Kerry/Edwards is a dead player from the jump," I whispered.

"Who else am I going to vote for?" she shrugged.

"I don't know. All I know is that the Dems will never win until they put a real Dixiecrat back on the ticket." We watched the Stars and Bars get wet and flap in the wind. We were too dumb to get out of the rain.

"Every successful Demo ticket since FDR featured that combination," I said, ignoring the weather and her shivers. "The only way a Kerry package will take anything beyond the Left Coast and a couple of pockets of progressive intelligentsia would have been to convince McCain to turncoat."

"The thinking man's Republican war hero," she laughed.

We put the top up on her Jeep and went into town to eat some barbeque at the Little Pig. Across the street, the old Dairy Queen had changed hands, been re-modeled and turned into a McDonald's - just another sign of progress in the New South.