I got this email from my friend Maggie telling me that she neither knew nor liked any of the Texans running for Senate, so she wrote in my name. Then I got another email saying she mentioned it to her sister Toni, who said if she had thought about it she would have done the same.
My rather thoughtful reply can be seen beneath the chopstick-swirled Lo Mein drenched in orange chicken sauce:
Well, Maggie, that's too bad. If she had, it might have worried the Republicans enough that they would put out an ad against me. Not a big one, mind you, but with all the Koch money floating around, someone might have broken into a fortune cookie that said "It is rumored that on one occasion ZedMont twitted Barack Obama." I don't twitter but the person who got the fortune cookie would not know that. Unless it was my wife.
In which case I would have told her "Wow, this is getting serious. Griff (Maggie's husband) may have voted for me too! I'd better get working on my concession speech." And she would have got up and walked around the restaurant asking people what their fortune cookies said, on account of the election, she would say, and they would have looked at her like she was crazy, and frankly at that point, there would have been some evidence for it.
She would insist they break their cookies open while they were still eating their Kung Pao or whatever. People would get angry, and the management would run out yelling in Chinese and pointing to the door and I would try to explain that my wife sometimes gets overly exercised over trivialities and besides I hadn't finished my General Tso's chicken which, by the way was four peppers hot when I had clearly ordered three, but by then the police would have arrived.
While the cops were questioning me in the midst of all the clamor created by the customers loudly and in various languages demanding their money back (English being a second or third language for some of them) with the restaurant staff screaming a mixture of Mandarin and Cantonese as well as Spanish (they had hired some Latino cooks for the sake of diversity, which would also explain the Chilaquiles Foo Yung), and pointing at the sign that says "No refunds, this means you" in at least 15 languages, my old colleague Sam would walk up and tell the cops he knew me well and he was a U.S. Customs Special Agent or used to be, and he would explain the entire Homeland Security fiasco and what it did to his beloved U.S. Treasury Department version of the Customs Service, and then he would tell them his word should be all the proof they needed that I was innocent, just like in the old days before Homeland Security!
All the while Zedmilla (my wife) is still hassling the customers, but the cops don't know she's my wife or what is going on because they don't speak Chinese either, and think she's just an irate vegetarian complaining to fellow diners that she got REAL chicken instead of tofu, and that the other customers are responding with their own indignant outrage in whatever language erupts from the depths of their ire when they become absolutely furious about something important to them.
Then I would share a cell with Sam for a few days until Zedmilla learned enough Chinese to figure out that the cops had taken me away. But before she could bail me out, Sam would recognize his old assistant U.S. Attorney pal walking through the jail, who just happened to be talking to an about-to-be-laid-off Austin-American Statesman reporter with absolutely nothing else to do than wander cell blocks with AUSAs, and the AUSA would chit-chat with Sam a while and then go down accompanied by his old assistant DA buddy and talk to a judge and explain it had all been a big mistake on account of fortune cookies, and the judge would order us released. After the two prosecutors had left his chambers, the judge would slowly shake his head for at least 5 minutes while pondering his 40-year-old decision to choose law over venture capitalism.
But while Sam was talking to the AUSA, the reporter would be talking to me, and he would have gotten interested in my story, and after I got out, he would have written a column about it on the front page with a picture of me in jail with a three-day growth of beard and greasy hair at the exact moment I was spitting out jail food (his usual photographer had been laid off already), and it would include my concession speech in its entirety.
And in that speech I would have excoriated every Republican I could think of, not failing to mention how Rick Perry had allowed the regular streets to sprout potholes almost but not quite big enough to swallow his lavishly renovated mansion, while he frittered away time and money extracted from the Democratic middle class building more toll roads for his wealthy donors' comfort and the longevity of their luxury vehicles' suspension systems.
And so I would become famous (in Travis County) for my allotted 15 minutes, proving right then and there that Andy Warhol, despite his rather pedestrian IQ, was precisely correct in his prediction of the future, which is more than the entire Bush administration could ever have said and what does that say about THEIR collective IQ? So, you see, there are consequences when people like Toni fail to vote for the right person. Dire consequences.
Names have been changed to protect the innocent, as well as at least one guilty.