Mike's Last Stand

The Mayor of North Beach, my former brother-in-law, confronts his political mortality

Mike Benton, on the trail

North Beach, Maryland
Not to be a drama queen, but we’ve lost a lot over the last several years. We’ve lost 1.1 million of our fellow citizens to COVID. We’ve lost our tolerance - both for being bored, and for each other. We’ve lost our patience and our tempers, our dignity and our minds. But the one person it particularly hurt for me to lose was Michael Apted, the British film director who left us in January of 2021. I never had occasion to meet him, mind you. But I was hopelessly invested in his work. For Apted was the architect of the greatest long-running experiment in the history of film, the Up documentary series.

Starting with the first film in 1964, Seven Up!,  the series initially set out with modest ambitions, taking the interview temperature of 14 schoolchildren who were seven years old at the time, with the intention of examining how social class would determine their future. The stand-alone initial film was directed by someone else – Apted was then just a snot-nosed researcher/Cambridge graduate, tasked with “trawling the nation’s schools for 14 suitable subjects.” But by 14 Up, which revisited the same children seven years later, Apted had taken the directorial helm. As he did every subsequent seven years, all the way to 2019’s 63 Up, when the “children” were now sexagenarians.  One of them, by then, had even died.

Long gone was the original mission of going on some socioeconomic, class-study safari. Something much more interesting had emerged.  As each subsequent film cut between earlier incarnations of its subjects, we saw a real-time representation of sand running through their hourglass: dreams realized, aspirations foiled, financial setbacks, parental death, divorce, mental illness – the whole shooting match. The vast sweep of life was displayed in two-hour installments every seven years. Beat that, Fast & Furious 10.

With Apted’s death at the age of 79, it’s unclear if the series will continue without him and we’ll get 70 Up in 2026 – there’s some talk that we might.  Meanwhile, I’ve been conducting a little 20-year-long Up-like experiment of my own.  I first met Mike Benton – who eventually became my brother-in-law, and then my former brother-in-law after his divorce from my wife’s sister in the early nineties  - in a community college human sexuality class. Both of us being academic underachievers, we were hoping  to pad our ailing GPAs, as well as to help comely coeds with their homework if they needed any assistance brushing up on the Gräfenberg spot.

Starting in 2002, and every four-year cycle since, Mike (whose full-time vocation is as a realtor), has run for local office in our hospitable burg of Calvert County, MD - still replete with farm fields and tobacco barns despite the exurban population push.  And I have been there to play his Boswell during each and every effort. Mike’s only prior political experience had been winning Northern High School’s “Best Looking” in 1984. And for a while – after he and my sister-in-law had divorced -  it seemed like his only electoral strategy was to win female voters over by dating roughly half of them.  (He remarried a little over a decade ago.) But his high school glory didn’t translate.

I saw Mike get crushed like a bug in his first race for clerk of court. He wasn’t even sure what the clerk did  - filing, maybe?  But he’d read about it in one of his daughter’s school papers. I tagged along for his next race to become a county commissioner (he got stomped in that one, too). And I was similarly present for his two successful runs for North Beach town council, and then for what became his ultimate victory. In our younger days, I used to jokingly call Mike “The Mayor of North Beach.”  But in our fifth and latest go in 2018, Mike turned into the dog who caught the car, actually becoming the Mayor of North Beach, a little town that snugs up against the Chesapeake Bay, where I often fly fish off the rock jetties, trying to trick stripers into bellying up to my artificial buffet before they head for deeper waters to winter. North Beach is Mike’s hometown, where he grew up poor, raised by his grandma in a cottage that he refurbished and still owns. Mike used to have to shimmy under their crawl space and warm their pipes with a hairdryer to defrost them in order to get ready for school. Now that he’s Mayor McCheese, it’s hard not to be proud.

North Beach has changed plenty since Mike was a kid. In the old days, it was renowned for the Three B’s – bikers, burnouts, and bay rats - the last of which pretty much described Mike, a roughneck kid who would still give you the shirt off his back. Many have seen him shirtless, in fact, since he occasionally enjoys getting naked when drinking copiously, the latter of which he does with some regularity. And even if North Beach is not now entirely gentrified, it’s getting there. The biker bars have largely given way to pet spas and gourmet cheese shops and the kind of restaurants that now advertise “fusion cuisine” without fear of getting ridiculed or firebombed by The Pagans.

But a day before he stands for reelection as Mayor of North Beach, Mike and I tuck in for the quadrennial debrief at Neptune’s – our old haunt where we consume hedonistic amounts of Billy’s Bad Ass Wings and draft beer and Irish Mules in copper cups. (I’m generally against fouling perfectly good whiskey with ginger beer, but since Mike found out he was Irish in a 23&Me test, he’s committed to the drink, so I help him celebrate his heritage.)

When we began our electoral odyssey twenty years ago, we campaigned more vigorously. Mike called it  “The Road To the White House 2016” back in 2002. But he’s since scaled back his ambitions. I rode shotgun as Mike was thrown out of supermarkets for campaigning without permission. Or as he stood for weeks at a time on the side of the road in the cold, waving at motorists with fingerless gloves, keeping his middle digit free to respond to drive-by hecklers. (A former Marine who never shies from a good fight, he was once punched out while standing at a urinal after smarting off to his drill instructor.) Or as he tromped through flower beds, knocking on doors, trying to meet as many voters as he could before the Redskins game started, while stealing and eating any Halloween candy left behind by rival politicians on door hangers if nobody was home.

When we started this series in our thirties, my youngest son hadn’t even been born. This year, he’s a college sophomore, about the age Mike and I were when we first met. But we’re both in our fifties now, showing signs of age:  Mike’s a little grayer, I’m a lot wiser. So we’ve eliminated all that pre-game campaigning nonsense in order to get to the main event we always enjoyed most – drinking until we can’t feel our legs, as we catch up and catalog our losses. There have been plenty of those.

Just since the last time we sat down at our same-time-every-four-years table, Mike lost his campaign manager, Panda,  a real-estate colleague and former wildfire-fighter (nicknamed after South Park’s Sexual Harassment Panda.)  “He moved to Colorado and married a psychiatrist,” says Mike, “which is good, because now he gets free meds.” Mike additionally lost a sister to cancer. His lovely wife, First Lady Tina, as he calls her, lost her father to COVID. And Mike prematurely lost a fireman nephew – more like his brother, he says – just hours after he’d stood on Mike’s deck, making plans for Uncle Mike to come over and tap his new Kegerator. “Uncle Mike’s job is to tap that keg,” Mike explains. When he found his nephew was gone – he lived four doors down – “I’m sitting in front of his house {before going in}, and my chest hurts. I’m like, ‘Motherfucker, man!’  How could he have died? He was just with me. Had a picture of him standing on my deck.”  Little Raleigh’s firefighter colleagues, carrying his coffin on the back of their truck, drove by his house on the day of the funeral, throwing empty beer cans in his yard in tribute. A nice North Beach touch.

Youth, we agree, is about addition. Adding things and people to your life. Aging often becomes about subtraction. Seeing many of those things disappear, often without warning. I haven’t lost nearly as much as Mike did since our last sit-down, but I’m still feeling the whoosh of time anyway. The very last piece I ever wrote for The Weekly Standard, where I worked for 23 years before our corporate-weasel owners snuffed the magazine in 2018, was about Mike’s last election. And now here we are again, doing the same, on our own. As Paul McCartney had it, Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Dah, life goes on, brah. It was an expression used by a Nigerian conga player of McCartney’s acquaintance. John Lennon reportedly loathed that wretched song. And even if I think McCartney was the superior songwriter, I understand why. But I get the sentiment behind it. So in that spirit, I order us two more Irish Mules. Can’t hurt. It turns out nothing hurts after about the fourth one.

Mike at rest, between Irish Mules

Mike doesn’t conventionally campaign much anymore, and yet, his entire life is something like a campaign. Which he found out the hard way during COVID -  no former North Beach mayor wrote an instruction manual for a once-a-century pandemic. Trying to balance safety measures vs. keeping the town alive (they didn’t lose a single business to The Plague), Mike says, “Err on the side of safety. My residents come first, period. Beat me up , yell at me, threaten me, call me this, call me that. At the end of the day, that’s why I get paid the bucks. All $18,000 a year.”  While being mayor is nominally a part-time job, Mike adds that  if you do it right, “it’s full-time, seven days a week. I don’t have a town administrator. I am the town administrator. I run everything.” The responsibility, First Lady Tina tells me, often keeps Mike up at night.

While Mike’s town hall desk is littered with color-coded stacks on everything from beach-dredging to sidewalk improvements to anti-flooding grant paperwork, there is no task too small to cross his radar and spring him into action. He has to make sure the beach-rats don’t fish the koi out of the decorative ponds along the boardwalk. He runs over to the Bayside History Museum when someone calls and reports that a black snake has invaded the restroom. Mike bare-hands it and walks it several blocks over to a nearby park to set it loose, much as he recently did in my house when I was gone, fishing hours away. A black snake entered our sanctum after a big storm that must have flooded him out, and my completely freaked wife called Mike to remove it, since she’d seen him do it before (Mike’s a bit of a snake-whisperer). “She was upset because I let him go right behind your house in the woods,” Mike laughs. “She asked if I could take him further away.” Perhaps back to North Beach.

Though a lot of faux populists have bloomed like a bad rash the last few years, Mike’s a true man of the people. He walks the streets of his town two days a week with a trash picker and a five-gallon paint bucket, snatching up litter such as the discarded used pregnancy test he recently collected. He figures someone tested positive, didn’t like the result, then threw it out their car window. “Because that’ll solve the problem,” he cracks.  He figures his family lives in this town, so he might as well pick up the trash instead of stepping over it or waiting for someone else to do so.

Likewise, he wakes up nearly every morning at 5 am (“because I can’t sleep – I’m old”) to walk over to The Bakist for his 6 am cup of coffee. Then he heads down to the waterfront to hang with the much older men in their seventies and eighties. “They drink coffee, talk shit, change the world,” Mike says. Maybe he brings them coffee, or a pie, or meat that he gets from his Department of Public Works guy, who is also a farmer. “It’s the best meat you’ve ever had,” brags Mike. “It’s grass-fed. There’s no stupid in it. I have an eighth of a cow coming tomorrow!”

He doesn’t do it because he’s mayor. He does it for fun, because he vibes off the people he serves. Some of them don’t even realize he is mayor – it’s not like he wears a Mayor McCheese sash or anything. One of his regular sunrise coffee-companions is Wayne, a Vietnam vet. He has an artificial leg, and gets up at midnight “because he doesn’t want to dream,” says Mike. “He has PTSD, he dreams about Vietnam. Wayne hands out candy at the boardwalk. He’ll say {to passersby}, ‘Would you like something hard in your mouth?’ I’m like, ‘Wayne, we can’t be doing that!’ He’s 77 years old. What are you gonna do?”

Mike is such a man of the people, he even drinks with the people. Often, too much, sometimes, resulting in wrestling matches. Not polemical ones. Literal ones. He recently took on his Marine step-son’s 22-year-old buddy – a 6’5” former collegiate wrestler – in the back yard after a robust bender. Mike went sumo-style, down to his underwear – things were probably coming out that shouldn’t have. Mike admits that it’s kind of sad: “At 56, your ball sack is like six inches longer than it is at an earlier age. You could almost tuck them into your socks.” Though First Lady Tina boasts that he held his own. Ever supportive of the mayor, she has also had to collect Mike from nearby watering holes a couple times in the last few weeks.  A hazard of the trade. When you’re the People’s Mayor, everyone wants to buy you a shot.

Neither is Mike above having impromptu town-hall meetings when constituents stop by to talk to him when he’s floating/drinking in his backyard above-ground pool.  “We’re outside all the time,” says Mike. “Just come by and say, ‘Hey mayor, I’ve got a good idea.’ Cool. We’ll talk.”

On the North Beach ballot, local candidates do not list any party affiliation. Mike’s a registered Republican, but that’s just fine by him, as he’s disgusted with his own party, nationally, and both parties generally. If we once used to joke about him being on the Road to the White House, those dreams have gone up in smoke. He doesn’t even want to go to the House of Delegates now. Being mayor’s great, he says – even if the pay sucks. You actually get to solve people’s real problems, and relate to them as human beings, instead of as pawns in some futile political chess match, one which is never won by either side, but in which everyone else seems to lose. Most of the mayors he knows in the state feel the same. They’re problem-solvers by nature, because in a small town, you have to come face-to-face with the people whose  problems you’re not solving if you don’t. You can’t just be Marjorie Taylor Greene, doing nothing aside from going on TV to set your hair on fire. “Stop pointing fingers, stop saying ‘the other side is this, the other side is that,” laments Mike.

Therefore, any statewide or national ambitions have been sapped. He’s all wrong for that, he reasons. “I don’t hate the D’s enough, and I don’t love the R’s enough.” Which is now the name of the game. The only way to get ahead. Choose a side, and wage war on its behalf. As is the case with so many people of moderate temperament these days, Mike feels like he’s stuck in political purgatory. “I think anybody far right or far left is crazy. You need to be in the middle,” Mike says, if you want to accomplish anything for all of your constituents, instead of just half of them.

That’s not the way the game is played anymore – maybe it never was. But he sees it more clearly now than when he was a Young Republican, which is why he says he’d never make it in Annapolis or beyond: “It’s not because I can’t make decisions. I make them every day of my life as mayor. More than most of these people in Annapolis make in their fucking lifetime.” But the decisions he makes, he says – be it bulk toilet paper procurement or tree removal when roots are buckling sidewalks – are for the common good. Not to slake his party’s bloodlust. He’s not naïve. “You’re not gonna make everybody happy,” Mike says. “I can give away free ice cream tomorrow, and somebody’s going to bitch there’s no chocolate.”

But it’s almost, he says, as though the more useful you want to be, the less useful you are, because uselessness has become the coin of the realm. “I would have no problem going to Annapolis, but I’d have to pick a party.” And even if you’re a member of his party, “I’m not going to agree with you when you’re fucking wrong.” Which is not the answer the team ball players like to hear. And which is why he knows in his bones that “I have no future in politics. In real estate, yes.”

So he reckons he’s done after this run, win or lose. If he loses, he will not ask for a recount or squawk that there was voter fraud.  Nor will he run again: “If I lose this time, that means the residents didn’t want me now. They’re not going to want me four years from now.  So no, I’m done.  I’m going to stand on top of town hall, streak, get drunk, and tell everybody to kiss my ass.”

And even if he wins – mayors aren’t term-limited – he figures it’s probably the right thing to do to step aside after this next term. “I’ll be 60 after this term,” he says, still 20 years shy or so of where our national frontrunners, who can’t let go, are at the moment. “I think eventually, someone gets too old. Not physically. Their ideas. Eventually, my ideas are dinosaur ideas. I will stay on to help” – Mike will still pick up trash and pass out hard candy – “but I don’t think I should be in charge.” For all his potty-talk, Irish-Mule consumption, and semi-naked wrestling tendencies, Mike almost sounds……humble. A sure sign he isn’t long for this political world.

ON ELECTION DAY, I stop by the local elementary school to do something that I, a lifelong Republican, have never done before – to cast a ballot for a Democrat for governor of the state of Maryland.  I barely even know the Democrat’s name (Wes Moore, for the record) or what his platform is. For all I care, he could be for mandatory drag-queen story hours in Vacation Bible Schools. That wouldn’t stop me. For this year, my old party has turned me into a one-issue voter: if you’re for denying election results – as were nearly 300 Republicans who were on the ballot this year – you are my sworn enemy.

And since Maryland’s Republican gubernatorial nominee, Dan Cox, is a QAnon-loving  election denier (a man that term-limited governor Larry Hogan, a reasonable Republican who I’ve voted for twice, called a “whackjob…..I wouldn’t let him in the governor’s office let alone vote for him for the governor’s office”), I vote for the other team with a clean conscience. Though I was saddened to do so. For a guy who once threatened to start a support group called Apathetic’s Anonymous (I just didn’t care enough to get around to launching it), my own team had turned me into something I never thought I’d become: a spite voter. I’d like to pretend I was just motivated by civic duty. But the real truth is I was motivated by seething vengeance. I just wanted to hurt Cox like people like Cox have hurt my country.

On the way out, I spy a woman who used to teach with my wife, back when my wife was a public school teacher. She is standing under the Democratic Party’s tent, passing out candidate literature. I ask her, in this amped-up political season, if she’s seen anything unusual. She has, she told me. Just a few minutes before I got there, some middle-aged guy in a truck stopped in front of her, rolled down his window, and yelled at her and her tentmates, “Fuck all of you and Hillary!”

“Hillary had no response,” deadpans one of her cohorts. “I’ve been doing this for 20 years,” says my wife’s former colleague, “and I’ve never had anything like that happen. For the first time in my life, I was speechless.” We laugh it off, as though it were funny. But it makes me a little sick. We don’t talk to each other like that around here. Or at least we didn’t used to.

I catch up with Mike right around dusk, a few hours before the polls close. He’s standing a mandated distance away from the polls in front of a senior apartments building, waving at traffic, trying to eke out every vote he can. He is doing so with the same awful “Got Mike” sign he had when we launched his political career 20 years ago. It was supposed to be a play off the “Got Milk?” slogan, then very popular, though I pointed out to Mike at the time that without the question mark, “Got Mike” sounded like someone had seized him after he did something borderline illegal – say, wrestling naked in public – and was trying to make a citizen’s arrest. Likewise, the sign is canary yellow, and colorologists say that yellow is the color of sickness and alarm. “With me, you pretty much get both,” Mike offered in his own defense.

I join his last re-election stand, hauling a cooler full of refreshments. We don’t want to get popped for open containers – even if I know the mayor and could probably get the ticket fixed. But this election cycle, above all others, is no time for sobriety. As I nurse a drink, Mike’s cousin, Boo Boo, walks by with her dog. I haven’t seen her since the 2006 cycle. Back then, she told me Mike used to drink too much at local watering holes, and then “ran stark naked through the bushes.” I ask her if he’s outgrown that. She says he has. I ask her how long ago. “In his fifties,” she says. I remind her that he’s in his fifties, now. “Oh,” she says.

Mike’s face is chapped red from the windburn he has suffered from waving at traffic all day – he’s been out here since 6 am. He tells me I haven’t missed much in the way of excitement. Aside maybe from the semi-irate woman who stopped by to complain that she heard he was ending her Social Security payments. “I told her, ‘call the feds. It’s not me. I can paint your curb or clean up your leaves.’ She goes, ‘Oh, I still voted for you.’” It helps to be a townie.

Mike tells me I barely missed his opponent, presently a town councilwoman – she showed up to vote for herself, and then left, not even bothering to campaign on election day.  Mike’s not crazy about her. She once came into his office, informing him she didn’t vote for him for mayor. He says she’s the only councilperson he doesn’t get along with, and from the others, who are flocking around him, slapping his back and voicing support while running for re-election themselves, that appears to be accurate. I didn’t get the chance to interview her, but her online bio appears to have been written by a LinkedIn bot. Lots of talk of being a “results-oriented professional” and “implementing goals and objectives” and “measuring performance.” Boring! Have you ever wrestled someone in your back yard with your balls tucked into your socks? Of course she hasn’t. Maybe that’s why North Beach has “Got Mike.”

And it’s why they’re sticking with him for four more years, even if he says he’s come to the end of his political road. Which also makes me kind of melancholy. Will electoral politics lose someone who could’ve helped, instead of hurt?  Will North Beach lose its preeminent bar-crawler/nudity champion? (First Lady Tina says he deeply wishes to move to a cabin in the mountains.) Will I lose the excuse to every four years or so, talk to a former member of my family who is family no more, but who still feels like a member-at-large? As we file into the town council meeting room, the results are read, and Mike Benton is re-elected Mayor of North Beach by a vote of 240-146.  I stick my tape recorder in his face, asking him to say something profound, to poetically encapsulate our 20-year electoral odyssey.

He looks at me like I’m full of crap, offering, “It’s time to go drink.” It’s refreshing to see someone remain unchanged by success.

Triple Bonus Tracks: In tribute to Mike’s Irish Mules, here’s a beautiful Irish traditional, “The Humours of Whiskey,”covered by Irish singer Hozier:

And here’s one of the great aging songs of all time, Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide.” Covered by the Bourbon Revival Band in bluegrass-y fashion in what appears to be their back yard. Along with their dog, who makes an appearance by the end.

And lastly, a man who understood tacking on those road years, The Possum himself, George Jones, singing “I’ve Aged 20 Years In 5.”

Bonus trailer: The aforementioned 63 Up trailer, from Michael Apted. See the entire series. The best time you’ll ever spend as your own life ticks away.  

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