By noon on Election Day, the only real question was How Many Liberals Had Hung On. A few had come over, as it were, but those few were not enough to form the other half of the nervous power base we had counted on from the start. The original idea had been to lash together a one-shot coalition and demoralize the local money/politics establishment by winning a major election before the enemy knew what was happening. Aspen’s liberals are a permanent minority who have never won anything, despite their constant struggles ... and Aspen’s fabled “underground” is a far larger minority that has never even tried to win anything.
So power was our first priority. The platform—or at least our public version of it—was too intentionally vague to be anything but a flexible, secondary tool for wooing the liberals and holding our coalition. On the other hand, not even the handful of people in the powernexus of Joe Edwards’ campaign could guarantee that he would start sodding the streets and flaying the sheriff just as soon as he got elected. He was, after all, a lawyer—an evil trade, at best—and I think we all knew, although nobody ever said it, that we really had no idea what the bastard might do if he got elected. For all we knew he could turn into a vicious monster and have us all jailed for sedition.
None of us even knew Joe Edwards. For weeks we had joked about our “ghost candidate” who emerged from time to time to insist that he was the helpless creature of some mysterious Political Machine that had caused his phone to ring one Saturday at midnight, and told him he was running for mayor.
Which was more or less true. I had called him in a frenzy, full of booze and resentment at a rumor that a gaggle of local powermongers had already met and decided who Aspen’s next mayor would be—a giddy old lady would run unopposed behind some kind of lunatic obscenity they called a “united front,” or “progressive solidarity”—endorsed by Leon Uris, who is Aspen’s leading stag movie fan, and who writes books, like Exodus, to pay his bills. I was sitting in Peggy Clifford’s living room when I heard about it, and, as I recall, we both agreed that the fuckers had gone too far this time.
Someone suggested Ross Griffin, a retired ski bum and lifelong mountain beatnik who was going half straight at the time and talking about running for the city council ... but a dozen or so trial-balloon calls convinced us that Ross wasn’t quite weird enough to galvanize the street vote, which we felt would be absolutely necessary. (As it turned out, we were wrong: Griffin ran for the council and won by a huge margin in a ward full of Heads.)
But at the time it seemed necessary to come up with a candidate whose Strange Tastes and Para-Legal Behavior were absolutely beyond question ... a man whose candidacy would torture the outer limits of political gall, whose name would strike fear and shock in the heart of every burgher, and whose massive unsuitability for the job would cause even the most apolitical drug-child in the town’s most degenerate commune to shout, “Yes! I must vote for that man!”
Joe Edwards didn’t quite fill that bill. He was a bit too straight for the acid-people, and a little too strange for the liberals—but he was the only candidate even marginally acceptable on both ends of our untried coalition spectrum. And twenty-four hours after our first jangled phone talk about “running for mayor,” he said, “Fuck it, why not?”
The next day was Sunday, and The Battle of Algiers was playing at the Wheeler Opera House. We agreed to meet afterward, on the street, but the hookup was difficult, because I didn’t know what he looked like. So we ended up milling around for a while, casting sidelong glances at each other, and I remember thinking, Jesus, could that be him over there? That scurvy-looking geek with the shifty eyes? Shit, he’ll never win anything . . .
Finally, after awkward introductions, we walked down to the old Jerome Hotel and ordered some beers sent out to the lobby, where we could talk privately. Our campaign juggernaut, that night, consisted of me, Jim Salter, and Mike Solheim—but we all assured Edwards that we were only the tip of the iceberg that was going to float him straight into the sea-lanes of big-time power politics. In fact, I sensed that both Solheim and Salter were embarrassed to find themselves there—assuring some total stranger that all he had to do was say the word and we would make him mayor of Aspen.
None of us had even a beginner’s knowledge of how to run a political campaign. Salter writes screenplays (Downhill Racer) and books (A Sport and a Pastime). Solheim used to own an elegant bar called Leadville, in Ketchum, Idaho, and his Aspen gig is housepainting. For my part, I had lived about ten miles out of town for two years, doing everything possible to avoid Aspen’s feverish reality. My lifestyle, I felt, was not entirely suited for doing battle with any small-town political establishment. They had left me alone, not hassled my friends (with two unavoidable exceptions—both lawyers), and consistently ignored all rumors of madness and violence in my area. In return, I had consciously avoided writing about Aspen ... and in my very limited congress with the local authorities I was treated like some kind of half-mad cross between a hermit and a wolverine, a thing best left alone as long as possible.