In a grimy rail yard outside Ybor City, a shoeless former senator hops off a freight car with practiced ease and makes his way through abandoned cigar factories to the grimy Interstate 4 overpass. “Screw you, Mitt Romney,” he mutters over and over again. “Screw you in the face.” It is his mantra now. At the bottle-strewn, urine soaked overpass, he is greeted by an honor guard of Florida hobos in soiled SANTORUM 2016 t-shirts who escort him to the hobo camp behind the convention center, where he is speaking on Tuesday night.
Meanwhile, at an exclusive beach resort in Clearwater, crawling with expensive whores, a corpulent former House speaker splashes his fore-appendages listlessly in the azure waters of the Gulf of Mexico. There is an emptiness in his soul that no amount of boiled Gulf shrimp can fill. This was supposed to be HIS time! HIS convention! HIS ascension! Instead, the party is going to nominate a charmless man-bot.
At the Hyatt Regency, this charmless man-bot, Willard Mittonicum Jackasticus Lannister Romney, Lord of the Robo-Men, realizes to his embarrassment that the Presidential Suite is already booked. No one is in it–the Obama campaign had booked the suite months ago, just to screw with his head. Except for the occasional on-break bellhop smoking a joint, the room will be vacant for the entire convention. The distressed governor’s reservation is in fact for a crappy 7th floor room between the elevator and the ice machine. The governor yells at the desk clerk, “It’s not even a private elevator! I’ll have to share an elevator, like a peasant!”
When he gets excited, his emotion chip over-modulates his vocal emulators, giving his voice an unpleasant barney Fife-like edge. GOP chairman Rinse Pubis’s polling mages know that this tone does not poll well. Pubis tries to sooth Romney. “Patience, my president-to-be! We must be calm!” the oily little chairman purrs. It’s no use. The clatter of the ice machine will keep Romney up all night. His wife shrieks at the desk clerk, but all this will accomplish is ensuring that for the next four days of the convention all of their room service food will be throughly spat upon.
Across Tampa Bay, at the other end of the Pinellas peninsula, by the beach at Fort De Soto, a wraith that cannot die stares forlornly out into the gulf. The sting of the windblown sand and salt reminds him of his long ago home, and a simpler time, before the darkness, before the curse. The lost gold of Osiris drives him, and he has failed yet again. An anger he has not felt in centuries boils in him.
He raises his arms, and mutters the ancient words the dark seas have not heard for millennia. If that fool Romney will deny him the crown that is rightfully his, he will have his vengeance. Far out to sea, the winds pick up, and a dark storm rises. The undead shaman that stoners call Ron Paul leaves the beach, and drives back into Tampa in his rented Hyundai. The Hyundai is surprisingly pleasant to drive. The GOP convention will not let him speak, so he is going to give the keynote speech at the annual convention of Ayn Rand devotees, Atlas Shrugs cosplayers and weed-enthusiasts, the Gathering of the Shrugalos. The storm builds. If the Republicans won’t listen to him, the Shrugalos will.
At the Holiday Inn Express Brandon, by Busch Gardens, Tim Pawlenty, the former governor from Minnesota struggles to check in. “Hi!” he tells the bored University of South Florida student manning the front desk. “It’s me, the old T-Paw! I have a reservation!” The desk clerk assumes that Pawlenty is a Star Trek cosplayer who calls himself T’Paw, here for some sad second-rate sci-fi convention. He’s seen all kinds.
Pawlenty doesn’t seem prosperous enough to be here for the GOP convention, and he’s not weed-smelly enough to be a Shrugalo. Sadly, there is no reservation for a Mr. T’Paw. Or a Mr. Pawlenty. Or a Governor Pawlenty. The governor’s problem is that he doesn’t really have “people” anymore. He had to use the internet himself to get a reservation, and, like many other things, he’s just not very good at it. In tears, he retreats to his rented Chevy Cobalt. He will park by the wharf and cry himself to sleep in it later that night, until the thugs guarding New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s hover-yacht drag him out and rough him up, mistaking him for one of Shoeless Dick’s hobos.
Hundreds of miles away, at the Holiday Inn Express Broward, near Miami, a night desk clerk will mark a Mr. T. Palaminty as a no-show, and charge the old T-Paw for a night’s stay, just like the fine print that Pawlenty ignored said he would. The storm builds.
Coming Soon:
Shoeless Dick Speaks!
Night of the T-Paw!
Congressman Catfood!
Speaker Newt’s Favorite Cuban Recipes!
