ST. LOUIS—Three hours ago I was dropped off on the corner of a nameless university road and something called Forest Park Parkway. Three different police officers gave me contradictory answers when I asked where the media entrance was. Finally I wandered into campus without anyone checking my credential and walked under sinister, low-hanging grey and black clouds toward the towering arches of a building whose name I don’t know decked out in what looked like red, white, and blue Christmas lights looming ominously in the distance like Shirley Jackson’s Hill House or Aladdin’s Cave of Wonders. It was scary and surreal, and for a moment I was frightened—as if some atavastic impersonal force had been woken from its hideous slumberto render terrible and deserved judgement on all of us. In any case, it was a far cry from my morning, which began at 6:50 a.m. with a bagel and a pot of coffee and a nice glass of Moët & Chandon.
It is a strange thing to attend one of these debates as a publication’s only representative. Logistically everything is a mess, and you end up walking aimlessly across the lawn of a vast college campus in the cool autumn night with a beautiful Finnish radio producer trying to figure out why anyone would say to walk all the way to Knight Hall when the media filing center is two or three buildings back. Eventually, though, you find yourself in the athletic complex where you’re supposed to be and ask Tina what your wi-fi password is going to be.
"Wait, have you figured out your seat assignment yet?" Tina asked.
"Not yet. That’s up there, right?" I said, pointing about five feet further back.
She asked what publication I’m with and informed me that I had not, in fact, got a seating assignment because I had not asked the rate-card desk for one. This was baffling to say the least. What, exactly, is the point of asking for a media credential if it is not a given that at some point between 6:00 and 9:30 p.m. CST you will want to sit down and maybe write something?
Tina kindly explained that I was welcome to go one floor below the main filing center to the overflow room. I was thanking her when a husky gentleman walked up to the desk.
"Hey, I need to get five for CNN. Do I need to talk to Debbie?" he said.
As it turned out, he did not need to talk to Debbie, but he did get "five" for CNN. I’m still trying to wrap my head around what’s happened there. I understand having to fill out the rate card and turn over a credit-card number to get a spot for your satellite truck or your stand-up space for your TV interviews—but a seat? How could I have known this? Did I need to pre-register for the bathroom too? Hi, Matthew, I see you haven’t preregistered with the Commission for a urinal spot yet, but I think we might have something in Row 172, Bowl A9. One moment—sorry, six for NPR? Sorry, Matthew. You are welcome to use the overflow bathroom center, which is located behind a tree at the north end of campus.
To be honest, the overflow in the basement was not that bad. I had the entire row to myself here in the back. Nor did the men’s room require advance registration, though the door was veiled menacingly behind a flowing black curtain, like some kind of minatory portal to a parallel dimension. There were about 20 of us down there when I walked in—in the overflow room, I mean, not the Upside-Down. One guy was lying on the ground; another had two Budweisers in front of him. Where in the world did he get those?
"The Anheuser-Busch tent," he said.
Where in the world was that? I felt like a kid dropped off at a carnival with no tickets for the rides and no money for cotton candy.
According to signs I saw when I picked up my credential last night, the entire campus of Washington University is tobacco-free, a welcome contrast with the relaxed attitude of even the St. Louis bars that do not formally tolerate my loathsome habit. Tonight, though, no one was enforcing the ban, least of all the cop who bummed a cigarette from me.
"You got a whole bunch," he said. "Thanks. They take the edge off."
"They sure as hell do."
The wait for the main event was excruciating. Outside the hall a producer type and a cameraman from goodness knows what local news station were walking around until 10 minutes before the thing started.
"Just want to see if any late-arriving dignitaries show up," the producer said.
I hope he found one.
Finally the debate started. Clinton’s first answer is about how "America is great because we’re good." Trump said that he agreed with everything she said. Then Anderson Cooper accused Trump of sexual assault. Trump denied it and Clinton said he was unfit to serve and he reminded her that she thinks child rape is funny. After that it’s a sort of vaguely familiar blur: Trump is a misogynist; Hillary is a liar; Trump is too friendly with the Russians; Hillary is a crook in it for the money. The intermittent question-and-answer format was pointless, and I was happy when Anderson Cooper and Martha Raddatz put aside their self-aggrandizing fact-checking mission and just let the candidates call each other names. This was more clarifying as well as more entertaining. When Trump invoked Benghazi in order to turn his porno tweet into a silly credentialist argument about preparedness, he distilled the 2016 election and the country engaged in it to their hilariously banal essences. We are vulgar, we are frivolous, and we are wicked. This is what we deserve.
Many people have suggested in the past that Trump uses cocaine or some other sort of upper. I have never been convinced of this, but I think you could persuade me that he popped or smoked something tonight. He looked and sounded almost like his old pre-Hofstra self—jokey, confident, swaggering, evasive—but just slightly more restrained than he had been when he was bullying poor old Jeb Bush. But I don’t know very much about drugs. Either way, everyone is going to say that he was better than he was last time, which, I suspect, is just what he wanted all along.
When I walked outside after the debate it was darker than before but less menacing. Students and journalists were laughing and smoking and making plans for the rest of the night and I headed back to the spin area in the hope of asking someone wicked an imprudent question. The judgement did not come from the sky or from the hills or from the river. We are not even worthy of it yet.