This Election Day, like every Election Day, I entered the sanctum sanctorum of the voting cubicle, searched my conscience, remembered that I’d left it in the car, then voted for my own amusement. This time, I pulled the lever for a state-senatorial longshot named Jesse Peed. It felt exciting and dangerous—“Jesse Peed” being not so much a name as an accusation.
But voting scatologically isn’t my most hallowed Election Day tradition. That would be riding with my former brother-in-law, Mike Benton. He might have quit my wife’s sister 25 years ago, but he’s no quitter. Every four years since 2002, he runs for something in our exurban Maryland county, to mixed results, which I then detail in these pages.
I’ve cataloged how Mike was tossed from grocery stores while campaigning without permission, how he ate the candy left by rival politicos on door hangers, how he held signs along the highway in fingerless gloves, leaving his middle digit free to respond to detractors. I stood with Mike when he was stomped like a grape for both county commissioner and clerk of the court. I drank champagne with Mike—or at least Natty Bohs (the local champagne of beers)—when he cruised to victory for two terms as a town councilman. A realtor now and former life coach (Zig Ziglar is Mike’s North Star), he has set his sights higher than ever this year. Mike is running for mayor of North Beach, the once-working-class hamlet of watermen and bikers now rapidly gentrifying as a tourism hotspot along the Chesapeake Bay.
“I’m a beacher,” Mike says with civic pride, having grown up here during dodgier times both for the now-family-friendly town (“If you went to a local bar back then, there was a chance you’d have to fight your way out”) as well as himself. Raised by his grandmother on 200 bucks a month in a cottage that he now owns as a renovated rental, Mike remembers crawling under the house to warm up frozen pipes with a hairdryer in order to wash up for school.
As we duck into our favorite dive bar two days before the election, along with Mike’s campaign manager, Panda (nicknamed after South Park’s “Sexual Harassment Panda”), I remind Mike how much things have changed since we began this quadrennial odyssey. Since 2002, we’ve both had new kids, and he has a new wife. Back then, social media didn’t exist, video stores did. I ask Mike how he’s changed.
“I drink less,” the hard-charging former Marine says, ordering his fifth Irish Mule of the night. He’s on a Jameson kick lately after DNA-testing. He found out he’s 51 percent Irish, along with being German and “.0008 percent Jewish . . . which is why I’m going to let you buy everything tonight.” Political correctness was never Mike’s strong suit. A compassionate conservative who used to job-coach down-on-their-luckers at the local unemployment office, Mike was Trump before Trump, though the president has sort of stolen his mojo. Saying whatever was on your mind used to be the province of fringe candidates. Now, it’s just the province of candidates.
On Election Day, Mike is a raw nerve. Usually gregarious and carefree, he snaps at Panda for yelling at a motorist who nearly mows us down in a crosswalk as we campaign outside the town council building, which doubles as a polling place. Panda was just protecting me as we made a “refreshments” run to my car—I recently had knee surgery and am hobbling around in a brace, making this year’s election the Battle of Wounded Knee to the Benton camp. Mike yells that we only have two hours left, and we should not be alienating potential voters right in front of his bête noire’s tent. His fellow councilman and mayoral rival Randy Hummel (who Mike says stopped speaking to him since the mayor’s race kicked off) eyes us warily while chain smoking Pall Malls. Team Benton wonders what kind of forward-thinking candidate still smokes in public, as we drink bourbon from open containers.
Panda, who claims he’s been fired by Mike no fewer than six times for infractions such as asking Mike why he’d ruin perfectly good whiskey by pouring ginger ale in it, is a rangy, bearded realtor who used to fight wildfires out west. He came to Maryland after getting sick of watching friends die for 16 bucks an hour. I ask Panda how working with Mike compares with fighting fires as part of the Santa Fe Hotshots. “It’s the exact same thing,” Panda says. “You never know when the wind is gonna shift, and he’ll completely freak out or blow up the hill, and you’re fighting for your life.”
Mike’s nervous, he admits. This one matters more. “I’m nervous about losing, I’m nervous about winning. There’s 157 mayors in the state of Maryland. I could be one of them. That’s a big deal, man.” He’s got plans for North Beach, but not too big. Because that’s always the problem—that’s Randy’s problem. They welcome the tourists so promiscuously, they forget the townies. They always want to get bigger, instead of just better, serving the people who choose to live there. Still, Mike’s series of 90-day plans, scrupulously laid out on his phone, encompasses everything from photographing the town’s Christmas-tree lighting with a drone to installing gravity drains on Bay Avenue. Be a global warming denier all you want, Mike says, “but that bitch is rising.” The water level of the bay ain’t sexy stuff. Just the stuff of governance.
I ask him what he’ll do if, as one of North Beach’s favorite sons, he loses this popularity contest. “I’m moving to Israel to fight for my people,” he vows.
The polls close. We file into the town hall building for the announcement. Mike fretted needlessly. He smokes Randy, 248-191. In a crowded meeting room, I try to raise his hand in victory, but Mike forces it down. This is no time for touchdown dances. Now his real work begins. Years ago, I used to call Mike “the Mayor of North Beach” as a joke. And he used to joke that he’d be lucky to get elected dog catcher. But now he’s the dog who caught the car. The joke is on us.
Mike drinks less at the after-party than I’ve ever seen him drink in my life. I have no such compunctions, since after all, I’m just one of history’s first-rough-drafters, forever cheering or jeering from the sidelines. But the new mayor of North Beach, Mike Benton, is the man in the arena. “It’s easy to say you want to be the man, but once you’re the man, well, f—! Now you’ve got to step up,” he says. “It was theoretical, it was hypothetical. But now I’m the mayor of the town that I grew up in as a kid, the town that I love.”
Even five Irish Mules down, it’s sobering.
