blogger interrupted

Part 1 is here.

Part 2 is here.

After Tim Ryan’s stunning primary victory in 2002, my phone calls began to go unreturned. Took me longer to get answers to questions. Found out about campaign get togethers after they happened.  I went from triumphant campaign genius back to being just some guy waiting for his plea deal to go through.

One night that summer, I made it my business to stick around the campaign office in downtown Warren and demanded to meet with Tim and his brother Al, there, and now.  We walked to the quiet town square in the dark of night.

We all knew what was going on.  Two facts were beginning to be separated - Who Tim Russo was, and what he did for Tim Ryan.  It was time to make sure those two facts never came together again.  

I protested.  This could not last, I said.  The sooner we deal with it, the better.  I had still not been sentenced, and yet, here I was trying to somehow keep from being forced back into a closet.  

It was futile.

I reminded Tim of all the heart-to-hearts about how we’d change the world…together.  How we used to get lost looking for bingo games, me driving the candidate in the middle of the darkest February nights, talking about policy, issues, life, and the world.  What about all that?   It’s a safe seat, who cares?  What could possibly happen?  I almost begged Tim & Al to not leave me behind.

Tim let his brother Al be the heavy, the guy who guarded the secret.  I left the square that night completely numb.  I should have expected it, but didn’t.  I didn’t think Tim Ryan would do such a thing.  In the end, he was precisely the kind of person to do such a thing.  And only the first.

When the fall campaign came along, I managed to guilt trip something out of my secret role.  I convinced Tim to allow a British friend of mine, Jake Shaw, a filmmaker, to follow him around and do a documentary on the campaign.  I had told Jake, who I met while on the Labour campaign in 2001, all about this phenomenon called Tim Ryan, and begged Jake all summer to come to Ohio for the last two weeks of the campaign.  

The film would be my way of getting out of politics, and starting a new life.  The goal - become Democracy Guy, that media project I always wanted to pivot toward.  I would follow another dream, move a step away from the poisonous atmosphere of politics, where even a good friend like Tim Ryan couldn’t find a way to help me move on.

Jake, his girlfriend, and I, followed Tim around with cameras for two weeks, all while I continued to consult for the campaign.   I narrated, explained American democracy, and cracked wise into the camera.  The secret still got kept, and I pretended it didn’t matter.  Tim Ryan may leave me behind, but I’m headed somewhere else anyway.

More than two years passed while Jake edited the film back in England.  I anxiously awaited the one piece of this chapter of my life, the Tim Ryan chapter, that I could hold onto for real, that would be mine.  All while the new congressman went to Washington, and forgot I ever existed.  

Or at least I thought.

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