No Account Recount
December 1, 2000

So here I am Raiford Starke. This week instead of making up the news for the Starkansaw Tribune, I'm gonna report it. I've been holed up at the makeshift press center - on the first floor of the Starkansaw Municipal Government and Sausage Factory - with 300 other reporters. All our eyes are glued to the TV set watching the West Memphis County vote recount, live from the sixth floor.

It was definitely democracy in action - my Uncle Sam Quentin, head of the Demagogue party - holding each ballot up to a bare light bulb, eyes staring through the chads and pimples, the scrapes and tallywhackers, the gruels and conads, barking out the winner for each one, forming the words like flatulence from an old German Shepherd: "Grrrore!' "Buusssh."

And there was my girlfriend Lowella writing the result on a yellow legal pad, stained from the runny parmesan of the Little See-saws pizza molding at her elbow. My father, Alcatraz Starke, was on the other side of the table; he either nodded or objected with each bark from Uncle Sam.

Dear old dad is head of the Repablum party. And he objected each time Uncle Sam said "Gore." Uncle Sam let them all go. I only saw him reject one ballot - an old yellowed 1960s voting card.

"This is the ballot of John and Yoko," said Sam. "Rrrrrejected! Next . . . "

The "objected to" ballots then went into a special box, guarded by my high school Spanish teacher Cruella De Fluer, a giant of a woman with hands the size of Yogi Berra's catcher's mitt and a tendency to sing at the end of any event. She was humming up a storm. And I swelled with civic pride, among all the out of town reporters, at just how doggone fair and patriotic my home county could be.

Outside the complex, the Gore and Bush protesters were segregated from each other, as one side taunted the other from opposite ends of the street. The Gore people seemed kind of disheveled, disorganized and actually flea-bitten as they were haphazardly whooping and barking and waving makeshift signs that read - "Save the Unborn Chads" and "KIDS - Keep It Dimple Stupid." While the Bush brown-shirts were marching in New World Orderly lockstep with their various placards proclaiming everything from "Al Gore is an Eye Sore" to "You Don't Know Dick Cheney About Bush!"

Somebody tapped me on the shoulder. "Phone's for you," said a hack from the Immokalee Informer.

I put the phone up to my ear and smiled. I could hear that familiar sounding node-ridden Elvis drawl crooning on the other end. "I got a little file in my pocket on my favorite ding-a-ling - who better do me a little favor before I send him to Sing-Sing . . ."

"Bubba, is that you?" I said in mock confusion, for I knew that indeed it was that ol' hammer swingin,' brassiere slingin' ol' frat boy buddy of mine from Grope, Starkansaw - Bill "Bubba" Clinton. I knew what he was calling for. He wanted his good buddy Raiford to pull his legacy out of a sling again.

We exchanged a few barbs and good-ol'-boyisms until ol' Big Mac Chompin' Bubba finally got to the point. "Look here, good buddy, it's boogie time again. That Dufus Gore has darn near cost the Demagogues the election with his lame campaign. You'd think the first thing he would've done is ask Bro' Bubba for some help, but no-o-o-o - he wants to be his own man! Now we're stuck in this here pretzel lock, with G. Dubya's cajones staring us right in the face. So I need your help, good buddy. I need you to help tip the scales in our favor. I need you to go on a little fishin' expedition . . ."

He gave me directions to a place right on the edge of Starkansaw called Big Cypress.

I made an excuse to the fourth estaters watching TV and leapt into my car. Thirty minutes later, there I was with Gore's campaign manager, William Daley, in the hand counting chickee. There was veteran Seminole Color Guardsman Steven Bowers, at attention with his AKC 47 at ready, protecting the ballot box while Joe Don Billie, Daisy Buster, Jeremiah Hall, Henry John, Nancy Motlow and all the good citizen/volunteers of Big Cypress were counting the ballots one by one - "Thah me hen . . . touk lee hen . . . tou che chen . . ."

An honest, accurate, SLOW hand-count. Imagine that. Bill Daley and me knew right away that this dog wasn't gonna hunt. We needed to drum up some Gore votes and we needed to do it fast. Suddenly we heard some yelling from the alligator pit. We ran over and lo and behold saw an open ballot box, chads strewn all over the place with Swamp Owl, Gator John and Swamp Esther wrestling ballot cards out of the hungry gators' mouths.

"These gators've swallered a lot of votes," said Owl. Poor Bill Daley looked like he was about to break down and cry. Where some people might see a bunch of cold-blooded, pea-brained reptiles, all Daley could see was a bunch of disenfranchised Gore voters. "We could have carried Florida with those," he bellowed.

"Not to worry," I said.

I grabbed a couple of ballot cards stuck together with some minor indentations on them. "Gentlemen," I said to the Gore operatives, "You've heard of the 'butterfly' ballot, well out here in Big Cypress, we got a little thing called a 'med-fly' ballot. Observe."

I slapped that gator on the tip of his snout and he hissed and opened his mouth just enough for me to shove the "med-fly" ballot in. I slapped him again, he opened his mouth a little and I pulled the card out. "Well looky here," I said as I pointed down near the beast's head, "Gator chads! Viola! Fourteen votes for Al Gore on one ballot!"

The fellows looked at the chads and then inspected the ballot cards. The gator's teeth had punched right through the boxes all around Gore's name. "Man," one of the operatives said in amazement, "I've never seen a ballot puncher quite like that!"

"Boy," I said just flashing him a gamblin' cracker's grin that only wished it had more teeth missing, "You don't know a dang thing 'bout gator fishin,' do ya?" And with that we grabbed up all the unpunched ballots and kept feeding them to the gator until we decided that we had made up for the missing ballots.

Now all we had to do was fax the results to Secretary of State Katherine Heiress in Tallahassee. It was almost five. I cranked up the 1987, oil paper, Sony brand, all purpose, grease-leaking, carpet-staining, squiggly-lined fax machine. Slowly, but surely, the paper that would change the country slid through the machine.

"It's done," I whispered into the phone. Bubba whooped and hung up.

I roared back to the Starkansaw government complex, and found the reporters whooping and hollering, pounding their keyboards like it was a tenderizing contest. I looked at the TV monitor and saw dear old Dad and Uncle Sam in a headlock. Ballots were strewn all about the room.

"What's going on," I asked the Immokalee hack.

"Ms Heiress rejected the gator ballots. Got there two minutes late. Dubya is the winner."

"I can't believe it," I cried, "I refuse to believe it."

But it was true. The sickly operatic sounds of big ol' Cruella de Fluer, singing up a storm, could be heard through the walls.

-- Raiford Starke is a South Florida-based bluesman who is currently looking for a job on the Bush Cabinet.

© December 1, 2000, The Seminole Tribune