Frankenride 4

Artwork by Sean A. Garrison

4. The Clocks That Tell Time Backwards

Hi-Dies are frugal people, never more so than when the expenditure of state revenues is the only poker game in town. Before the wrangle about making “Sweet Lily Murdaugh” the state song became Crevecoeur’s annual nail-biter, the Lege’s bitterest showdown during my Senate years was the dispute over whether the Nice State ought to award itself a tourist bureau. The notion itself seemed imported from someplace we didn’t like, which tells you everything you need to know about the outcome.

Having been invited to Bourjaily – a rare visit to the Chomsky-addled enemy’s lair – to deliver that year’s Hannibal Lecture to our state’s chapter in verse and worse of the Mark Twain Social Club, I was in O-D for the squabble’s water-pistols-at-dawn opening. Opponents ridiculed the tourist bureau as the ultimate in putting on airs. “We’re not here for show,” the delegate from Mannix jeered.

In life beyond the Lege, the bill’s main sponsor was a prof at Eastern O-D U., as predictable an emporium for his Latin-suffix-y political views as that week’s stack of organic toothpaste on sale at Whole Foods. He got exasperated enough to say something memorable, an uncommon incident in our legislature. “For God’s sake, Guam has one” became the O-D TB enthusiasts’ overnight battle cry. All that fall, billboards arguing “Be Like Guam” or “Don’t Be Like Guam” fought it out from Crevecoeur National Airport to the Lily Murdaugh Hotel’s pretentiously valet-serviced parking lot.

The convincer was the prosecution’s case that we attracted so few out-of-state visitors a Visitor’s Center would be a real white elephant, with more than enough empty space available to be groped by seven blind tourists on its best days. In vain did Professor Russell Falls, a suspect Anglophile whose The Great War With All Mod Cons is considered a 1980s classic for its neo-Proustian revisits to the onetime Western Front’s first Best Western, Caporetto’s first capitalized luxury chalets and Gallipoli’s first Gap, try to hector his colleagues into seeing that encouraging the blind to lead more of the blind was what visitors’ centers were for.

He was no doubt thinking of the illustrations in The Great War With All Mod Cons that paired a Canadian corporal leading a file of sightless gas-attack victims at Passchendaele with Colonel Mustard’s beefy face from Clue. In Falls’ typically caustic revisionist view of the officer, he’d been traumatized by his World War One experiences into being tempted to what Germans called Lustmord. The Georg Grosz etching of a plumply mustachioed militarist hacking up a scarlet woman did suggest some intriguing overlap between the former enemies, and even Falls’s nay-sayers had to grant the candlestick was a real bonus.

Falls was silenced by Del. Shannon Runweigh’s (R-Butchertown) triumphant citation of Guam’s abysmally low ranking among U.S. tourist sites. But the truth was that the die had been cast before the Lege’s dyed-in-the-wool cast ever debated the topic. Everybody remembered Bunbury.

∞

One tetchy streak we share with several other states in the Lower 49 is that we’re picky about which eras we participate in. Kentucky has no choice except to feel sheepish about 1861-1865, since being the Civil War’s buckskinned eunuch is no Daniel-in-the-lions’-den boon to rugged self-esteem. During the heyday of the civil rights movement, Vermonters could be forgiven for feeling somewhat dunce-capped in the corner.

“Star-Spangled Banner” or no “Star-Spangled Banner,” California has never lost its mind over the War of 1812. It might help if our national anthem’s lyrics were in Spanglish. “Rhapsody in Blue” has never knocked people’s socks off in Nebraska either. Purple mountain majesties excite anti-royalist sentiment n New Jersey to this day.

We Hi-Dies never had much use for the Sixties. I should know, considering I was in college at W. O-D U. at the time. Sure, there were some ragged outposts of it in fucking Bourjaily, amounting to no more than a sort of indoor picket line for shut-ins. But our local NBC affiliate – WYMP-TV, ever the five-and-dime to the Tiffany Network’s WYOD – wouldn’t even run Laugh-In.

Like our fellow Midwestern and Southern holdouts, we got the afterbirths instead. Bunbury was one of them.

It was probably the most pathetic failed theme park anyone had ever seen. And can still see, because its let’s-put-the-US-back-in-detritus cheesy sham cottages and lackluster facsimiles of a nonsensical municipality cluster even today near what was once the Nice State’s first artificial creek and is now a paralytic river of wanton, random rubbish. Despite their kind’s well-known penchant for unbalanced after-hours alcoholism, the most disheveled department-store mannequins in the New World wouldn’t be caught live in Anna Christie’s Hair Saloon.

Bunbury’s “inventors” were all out-of-staters, driven here after dirty-mouthed Delaware, their previous last hope, decided there were some things it wouldn’t do for money even in Rehoboth. You could picture these dorks’ acid-damaged brains piecing together the idea that the counterculture’s ironic remnants could be salvaged by belated repurposing of an Oberlin MFA. The hired impersonators were all from out of state too, since Hi-Dies couldn’t get their heads around the concept’s applicability to a Nice State we all knew was a real place where we’d gone to high school, married, run for Congress, shunned having kids, developed drinking problems, and would die, not a construct.

The gap-toothed, ash-pale freckled redhead who was Huckleberry Finn’s mother was a junkie when Bunbury took her on and a prematurely toothless corpse in Crevecoeur when the cops dredged her up from Anthony Lake. Her affair with Norman Bates’s father had ended badly when he caught her living in the Pacific Northwest with a man named Flitcraft; you may remember the movie Shacked Up In Seattle. The peckerwood who’d almost raped Scarlett O’Hara on her way back from the sawmill had reformed, was the town’s Unitarian minister. The scapegrace Turnipseed twin whose car had run over and killed Charlotte Haze ran Bunbury’s fire department.

The real Clark Kent, who’d been found bound and nude outside Smallville’s limits after being kidnapped and quite possibly sodomized by a preternaturally strong young yegg in need of a metropolitan alias, still couldn’t believe what had happened to him. For both men, PTSD took many forms. All three generations of the overweight, astigmatic family whose members wouldn’t have known whether to shit or cut bait if Billy Pilgrim hadn’t become an optometrist lurched tentatively around. The trans woman and Joliet alum who’d made her fortune as an ex-con designing and selling bespoke mail-order dinguses to a client list headed by Myra Breckinridge and Barbara Bush was the richest shemale in town.

It couldn’t last. There weren’t enough blind men in our whole region of the U.S.A. for Bunbury to make a go of its pachydermal pallor, and far too few of them owned cars. So many of the overlooked states in the Lower 49 that seem bland when the rest of you can be induced to pay attention at all are repositories of cultural oddities nobody else saw any use for.

In Crevecoeur, Bunbury had left a stench in everybody’s nostrils. The bond issue that kept the sad theme park barely afloat right up to the eve of Reagan’s inaugural was universally reckoned to be the most uncharacteristically profligate misuse of public funds in Nice State history, because there were only so many ways real Americans could say “Up yours” to Jimmy Carter’s age of limits and prosper. This all too clearly hadn’t been one of them.

Except for the ex-impersonators, who’d have said and done almost anything to make sense of their wretched lives, nobody put much stock in the claim that Reagan had gotten the idea for Morning in America from us. It certainly didn’t seem like anything to take pride in. After all, just like Huck Finn’s mom and Norman Bates’s dad, those Oberlin fuckwads hadn’t even been from here, at least not originally.

The Cyclone Coney Island Misplaced

During my too-brief four months in Geenie’s supple mouse-muscled arms, when we did all life’s pleasures prove and etc., she loved to hear her lover tell all about O-D. Bunbury wasn’t her favorite story, though; the Bride of Hollow Sky was. My putative great-grandma fascinated her.

The whole Nice State was exotic to my soon-to-be-fiancḗe, easily outdoing the Land of Enchantment’s margarine-pale and salmon terrines of terrain and the multiple graves of Billy the Kid clotting its otherwise spare highway exits like lewd Cockney hookers asking untutored GIs if they cared to swap a pack of Lucky Strike Green for a knee-trembler. But I suppose almost anyplace in the U.S.A. can sound exotic if you’ve never been there except Boston. We made chatty plans, and of course nothing came of them before she was killed.

“It’s because the Bride really got it coming and going,” she Geeniesplained. “Kidnapped by Indians, shot dead by a white man. I bet her last thought was, ‘Shit! Did I leave anything out?’”

“She didn’t. Remember, she’d been Byawatha’s white-trash concubine for something like two years before he told the Hirsuit Council and Colonel Barber he was marrying her: two separate meetings, obviously. It was a political move to show he’d reconciled himself to Manifest Destiny. Or was going to be one, I’d better say.”

”Well, that sure didn’t work.”

“That’s just the thing. It did. Kidnapping and killing her had the same effect, because Byawatha became an abject man. No threat to the peace, no risk to anyone.”

“He must have really loved her.” Even Geenie could be a Hallmark-movie hophead at times.

“Nobody knows. He loved himself and she was the McGuffin ensuring his self-love had been, you know, well thought out. Not just an impossible dream, like most narcissism. Just ask Jesus.”

“Huh. I always figured that if the Indians and the Anglos ever agreed on how to solve a problem, this country would be even more screwed. But I guess she’d be dead either way.”

∞

I suppose it was partly the knowledge I’d never go back there with Geenie that made me shun the Nice State after my resignation. The Schroeder-meets-Schrodinger gotcha-now in play here is that I wouldn’t have had to resign if she hadn’t been killed. New York, L.A., New Orleans: those were my phantasmal American homecomings disguised as exiles. Like most American homecomings, all three were fibs.

To the extent O-D was home – and Montelḗon can be counted on to put in a bid in demotic Spanish, insisting that it alone represents la verdad about la vida most Norteamericanos are snugly euthanized against at birth – it’s gone. Talk about phantasmal! The Great Cyclone took care of all that.

“Hi-dee-hie.” Unthanked in the credits, Bucky Shore invented that Nice State adios decades before South Park swiped it to repurpose as shit’s big hello. O-D got no respect and wouldn’t until June 16, 2015. That’s when the most destructive storm in Nice State history coughed up a one-day death toll exceeding Chickamauga’s and cable omnivore network C-CON’s celebrated news-gluttonous anorexic, Katy Barthes-Dior, flew into Crevecoeur for the first and last time.

The respect was Coventried by snottiness from the git even before Wyandotte’s remaining population (13 dead within the city limits, 3,,800 newly homeless, Helen Wabash missing) had warily emerged to inspect the city’s new look. Quickly devised for the spring collection by nihilistic fashion darling Hieronymus Sacher-Masoch – “when I hear the word couture, I reach for my revolver” – it turned out to be big on random appliquḗs and birthday-suited, nomadic, ruthlessly roofless, debris-slurred Lego. The gala was car-deprived too except for my state’s ragged strange new God-given expressway, where a few previously owned immobilized automobiles were hung up on blasted trees and newly bipolar telephone poles.

“I think like most ordinary Americans, I expected the runway to be longer.” Katy Barthes-Dior was about as ordinary as the Death Star and a good deal less American than Princess Leia, but it takes all kinds in galaxies far away. Her complaint was “unofficial,” her odd self-excusing term whenever she said anything shy-making, but caught by an intrepidly cynical (they congratulated him at the Cynical Cabbies’ Lodge that night) Crevecoeur cabbie’s newfangled smartphone. She probably thought Hi-Dies didn’t know what those were, let alone could afford any.

Even though the surprised elements hadn’t had time to arrange more than an improvised welcome for her, her chartered jet had buried its sleek nose in Katy-bespoke rubbish and muck 50 feet past the tarmac’s end. No direct commercial flights from La Guardia or even Newark – let alone London, just her luck. She’d been waiting for that vacation in Belgium with Charles and Camilla on the 200^th anniversary of Waterloo, and she was in one helluva hurry to get this expedition to yet another homegrown Mars over and done with.

Katy’s dour bar-a-door C-CON stooge wasn’t fast enough on his feet or anyhow with his hands. “Who’d believe it’s the state capital? I mean, Jenny Sequoia just rules this damned place, don’t you think?”

Only then did a pink palm with no Nice State outline detectable on its creased map wrap the lens as Hi-Dies from Mannix to Bilko grunted, “Too late, bitch.” They weren’t prone to taking women’s name in vain when their wives were fetching TV dinners and not purple-prone on the daybed or a Marriott’s shag carpet, but it was an occasion.

∞

It’s time. Recalling Katie Barthes-Dior’s disdain for the state I once had the singular (I’ll say) honor of representing in the United States Senate, calling us yahoos who can’t speak French in our most terrible hour of need, has prompted me to an overdue clarion call.

You’ve probably noticed my flinching habit of guardedly referring to “O-D” or the Nice State. We Hi-Dies don’t like imposing ourselves, it’s that simple, and we also dread the rest of the Lower 49’s quadrophonically stereotyping guffaws. There’s a perennial fear of being told our state’s made up and we don’t exist. Yes, even when Chickamauga comes up; we don’t want to be crowingly razzed that the 22d Michigan lost 32 dead to our 23^rd O-D’s paltry 31, making us a sort of permanent Avis Rent-A-Car in the annals of Civil War slaughter.

It’s an article of faith with us that we killed and maimed more Confederates in Poe Field than those Mitten State, what a name!, assholes did in the whole affray, but of course that can’t be documented. The battlefield legend of Lily Murdaugh, sweet child of the waugh, just wins us eye-rolls and snickers in sports-bar trivia contests. Nobody cares that a Hi-Die car dealer invented the term “pre-owned,” or that John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt was our state’s first popularly elected Senator.

This tic, if that’s what it is, is almost universally shared by Nice Staters anytime we venture west of the Hirsuit, north of Crevecoeur, south of Flyover County or east of stuck-up Bourjaily, which puts on airs the way Gypsy Rose Lee peeled off sequins and shimmied. Hell, those Eastern O-D U. fuckers practically act like they’ve got a Metroliner station. Or worse, wish they did.

Yet there’s another, sadder reason for our shyness now. Because it’s gone – not just to me, but gone for everyone, thanks to the Great Cyclone of June 16, 2015 -- the name has become almost as sacred and taboo as its Hirsuit forerunner, Tintanetmiloo: the Land of Lost Remembrances. So let me whisper it, the tip of the tongue tapping the teeth on the D before expiring in a fricative welter of soft violet sighs: Ohidiana.

Oh, my Ohidiana. Among my home-away-from-home home state’s other claims to fame, we routinely trounce the other Lower 48 in having the fewest newborn girls named Diana. My God, can you imagine the chaos, the corridor confusions and embarrassments amid the clanging lockers, squeaks of new bras, cascading textbooks and snuffling – not shuffling -- Keds? Have you not spent one day in an American public high school, for Pete’s sake?

Don’t you ever tell me I didn’t love this fucking country.

Most renowned white citizen: Orville Ford Kaukacher (1899-1955), three-time tuxedoed Governor in the Great Foyer of Crevecoeur’s Casper House and Ike’s all but designated Secretary of Transportation before his misfortunate demise in a prematurely experimental electric-hybrid prototype, the Ohidiana Scooter. DeLoreans are beneath contempt to us. Runner-up, Colonel Edward Barber: Lily Murdaugh’s literally embattled fantasy common-law husband at Chickamauga, postwar founder of the Barber School For The Blind, and vengeful tracker of the Bride of Hollow Sky in the famously foul October of 1873.

Most celebrated indigene: Byawatha, inevitably. He’s one of our two paradoxically ice-cream-pale representatives in the U.S. Capitol’s shadowy Statuary Hall and also the less controversial of the pair. War chief of the Hirsuits during the doomed final fight against encroaching white men that began in the ruins of Fort Thunderbird and ended in crimsoned water lilies at the Clash at Coffin Creek, broken man after my putative great-grandma got shot right between the eyes on October 31, 1873, proud owner late in life of a cigar once half smoked by Ulysses S. Grant. If only by Hi-Dies, he’s said to be the original model for a wooden commercial sculpture that was widely imitated once upon a time.

The name of his Iago, the renegade Hirsuit who kidnapped the Bride of Hollow Sky to fuck up the fragile peace with the U.S. Cavalry and Jason Robards, the military governor of the badlands still unincorporated at press time of the Wyandotte Ives-Courrier’s debut issue on July 4, 1876 – understandably Custer-crammed, but finding room for the aged Byawatha’s obituary – was maudit in the Nice State: unmentioned, for instance, in Our Ohidiana, the ninth-grade civics textbook that vied with Miss Heide and easily outdone Mlle. Bornes for my endlessly dividable 13-year-old attention. But the playground rumor that hegseth was a Hirsuit obscenity meaning He Who Sucks The Penises of True Warriors had us tittering like schoolboys, because we were.

Best-known songwriter: Ralphie, who else? Composing the tunes and libretto for The First Hundred Years: From Byawatha to Ohidiana at a precocious 27 years old for our state centenary in 1925 put him on our map if no one else’s. “Sweet Lily Murdaugh” is the only one of the pageant’s songs to have much of a shelf life, but it was restaged every five years until 2015, with increasingly politically correct revisions and augmentations that set many a Hi-Die’s teeth on edge.

For instance, it was probably true that the young Sieur de Crevecoeur (1617-1639) had been Bernard St. Flacon’s lover before the Christmas 1638 expedition to find the future Crevecoeur Municipal Reservoir’s headwaters ended so tragically, thanks to unexpectedly inclement weather. Still barely able to cultivate a mustache, the lad died of what was then known as pink fever or fièvre puce, a 17^th-century precursor to the more terrible Yellowjack whose devastation of 1852 New Orleans future Civil War diarist Jezebel Jefferson Davis recorded with such horror. But old-school Nice Staters didn’t necessarily want that stuff thrown in their faces, let alone their kids’ faces.

Reminders that Ralph Laughlin’s dad, onetime 23^rd Ohidiana Infantry Corporal Casimir Szlaszeck, had been a transvestite right up to Chickamauga cut no ice with so-called traditionalists. But the real issue in the debate over which Hi-Die should join Byawatha in Statuary Hall in Washington revolved around whether the Nice State should honor a suicide and inveterate pre-Pearl Harbor pussyhound, two not unrelated facts, when Edward Barber and Orville Ford Kaukacher, among others, were available and, so to speak, unemployed.

What with one thing and another, the Hirsuits’ war chief didn’t get a companion until 1982, and the choice gladdened a few, only seemed obvious to some, and startled many. After all, nobody was even a hunnert-percent sure my great-grandmother was real. Or had been at one point, or whatever.

But it’s true we really were the TV-Repair Capital of The World for a while in the God-love-‘em 1950s, so there. No other state contended for the title, but as Chief Byawatha murmured in his last publicly recorded statement, feebly gripping Grant’s by now gray stogie as his wooden statue was unveiled outside Rudyard’s Smokes & Stationery on Chickamurdaugh Avenue, Saget-obeyi-bagunto-wedo.

Translation? “There’s no place like home.”

7,000,000 Cicadas In May

This herky-jerk, false-start, stopgap memoir is no doubt my crepuscular try at hopping on the nearest available bandwagon. Everybody’s doing ‘em now; I expect Judge Crater’s tell-all Krakatoa, West of Belgrade, Maine any day. Unless I miss my bet, it’ll be seductively introduced by the nonagenarian Lindbergh baby, who has spent all these years effectively disguised as Cher.

It’s a peculiar variant on cutting off my Charles Schultz-ified nose to spite Dan Quayle’s face that I’m a collector of Vice Presidential memoirs: Cheney’s To Felch A Nation, Mondale’s The Unfelched Heart. A special favorite in the guilty- pleasures category, as I suppose it should be called, is Aaron Burr’s most likely bogus If I Did It, “completed” by Gail Hardaway.

Gail’s fallen on hard times the way her Pillsbury Doughgirl mouth once fell on my stubbornly flaccid penis at the Rosslyn Arlington Hilton in a room overlooking the Virginia end of a bridge that shall be nameless. The Potomac has no visible motion even in daytime, let alone at midnight. She’s got no one to blame but herself for that fiasco, since she insisted. I’m not sure what degraded me more: failing to get it up for Gail’s beanbag-breasted, wide-buttocked body or agreeing to appear with her on a panel at the Newseum marking the 20^th anniversary of Geenie’s disappearance and, as we knew by 2011, murder.

We’d even watched her DVD with a snowflake-worn jacket of “Morgan’s Adam,” the five-year-old CSI episode fictionalizing Geenie’s, my – and, I suppose, Gail’s – case. She must have been the only human being (I use the term loosely) on the planet to own it, and she clearly knew the silly thing by heart. She scoffed when I wanted to turn it off and indeed said “Not a chance.” And this woman was puzzled when I couldn’t perform?

But later for that; now it’s Gail’s turn to be marooned, ass still hiked in limbo to make herself seem implausibly vulnerable. I was cataloguing Vice Presidential memoirs. Quayle’s own One Potatoe, Two Potatoe is predictably indigestible, joker-riddled with typoes as prominent as bubos. Flunked McGovern veep Tom Eagleton’s Ten Days That Sent Me Back to The Booby Hatch doesn’t even belong on the same shelf, really. I bought it remaindered for schadenfreude.

Gore’s Can’t Anybody in This State Count? was barracked by the WashPost reviewer – Gail, as it happens – for failing to deliver the good-humored anti-Florida chaffing the title promised. I admit the 75-page recap (those charts!) of “The Constitution and The Internet” was tough sledding even for me, who’d shared a men’s room with Al countless times. Or especially, since he was widely agreed to be at his larkiest and most devil-may-care in that setting.

Off the V.P. track and among the cicada Brits, Tish Naughn-Shenshall’s Won’t She Be Savage – the title is from Lewis Carroll – is likable, breezy, and even touching, especially in her reminiscence of an unknown 22-year-old Oxford undergrad named Hitchcock Britchens of whom great things were expected until the boy died of premature-onset cirrhosis on Remembrance Day with the fax confirming his New York reservation at the Algonquin in his hand, Too bad; Tish humanized Hitch enough that I wondered how he’d have made out here.

For perhaps obvious reasons, I’m a good deal less partial to Katy Barthes-Dior’s The Clocks That Tell Time Backwards. Her visit to Ohidiana goes unmentioned, but forgive me for snorting when she writes that, of all the lessons she learned in herd decades of anorexically trotting the globe in search of news nourishment, the greatest one was tolerance.

∞

Really? I know something about tolerance by now, Ms. Barthes-Dior. Of all my cities, New Orleans does it best, and not just because a service economy requires constant truckling.

New York and L.A. get boiling shoals of tourists too and both of them rate flat zeroes in my book. Washington regards its annual summer-only visitors with the same grim amusement we’d – sorry, they’d – feel toward 17-year cicacas who’d gotten their genetic schedules bollixed by a rogue Xerox machine and thought it was their destiny to swarm us every spring, not just at indecorous but widely spaced intervals.

Bob Dole squinted and tersely humphed his way through two or three cicada invasions before quitting the Senate in ‘96 to lull voters into wondering whether our party’s Presidential nominee-presumptive might be or could become a human being of sorts, not the sardonic Beltway gargoyle his Senate colleagues loved. It didn’t work, people barely noticed outside Washington, and frankly, I was preening myself by then as a connoisseur of which Senate resignations were necessary. Mine was, Bob’s wasn’t, starting over was anathema to him and it showed.

It didn’t help that he went on acting like a Senator after he wasn’t one anymore, but Bob always was a homing pigeon in falcon disguise. Definitely not my problem, with the latest proof being how gratefully I’ve settled into my latest, comically professorial new life in the Marigny after my jetsagged exiles, but from what?, on two coasts Hi-Dies would shudder at, knowing nothing of either but staunch in their suspicions of both. If you ask me, missing Washington, DC, is like mourning a lost clubfoot. Dole should have listened to the cicadas.

Nobody had much choice about that during my exposure to their infestation of the prematurely sticky spring of ‘87, just five months – there’s that dateline number again, with the window fast closing on zapping the hell out of awkward pregnancies with what were then safe and legal abortions unless you opposed the procedure on principle and safety could go hang – five months after I’d trounced a Democrat so hapless and fiscally inconsequential I have trouble recalling his name to Ferrari my way to my thumping re-election. The problem is that nobody has ever deciphered what the cicadas are trying to say as they thrum like EKGs in the wild. Probably they’re just venting all the psychological gibberish they’ve stored up during their 17 years underground, making it hard to tell if they think we’re their shrinks or they’re ours.

I suspect incoherent prophecy is the bane of every cicada’s short life. If they were uselessly striving to tell me en masse I wouldn’t finish my second term, sorry but no speaka da lingam and so forth. Four years after they’d given up and shut up until 2004 brought them back, by which time I’d be long gone, not that I could have guessed it, the magic word I was still savoring was incumbent, which to any politician is a plum that somehow stays intact and juicy no matter how many times you’ve bitten into it.

The cicadas might have been throatily declaring that they were secretly features, not bugs. In the meantime: squish, impatient brushoffs, Middle Passage-packed windshields on every street, tin thrums. I wondered one hot morning how many Americans lived all the time in hellishly personalized versions of these maddening irritants, unbeknownst to us Senators.

It’s beknownst to me now, but I don’t grant interviews anymore. For one thing, who’s asking?

Tax Day With The Cub Scouts

As I may have said already, one benefit of being a United States Senator, even a mediocre one, is the way a sense of self-consequence magnifies familiarity without giving it a chance to take up its trad obsession with breeding contempt. Even after a decade-plus in the often idle saddle, a calm flood of And they’re all here for me, because of me cured my mind’s rovings every time I put in an appearance in R-286.

Saving only seasonal changes in my gals’ wardrobe and an occasional abashed intruder, some teenage page who’d just delivered an insignificant message from the House, all was immutable on April 15, 1991, as it had been and, knock wood, always would be: my staffers moving in relaxed slow motion, soft deep-brown couch and glassed-in bookcases arraying law books and directories. Stalwart photographic portrait of myself in solo color, somewhat less stalwart gallery of Senator Me with more prominent Washington worthies and less prominent Nice State ones.

Framed 23^rd Ohidiana flag, glamour shots of the real-life industrial workers, rolling cornfields, Civil War memorials, and statue (not the cigar-store version) of the Injun chief who’d combined to inspire the abstract versions quartering that flag. Offscreen telephone rings and soft clicks from bulky desktop computers, sounding velvet-tamped as if they were polite piano keys (we were a long way from iPhones and laptops as slender as aluminum Treblinka Twiggys), completed my welcome.

To fit in – yes, I know that sounds odd – I’d prepared my Senator-among-his-intimates face: modest ingenue smile, teasing (who, about what? Everyone, nothing) eyes, the whole “Never mind me, I’m just the Senator” act. Knowing I’d modeled the look on the introductory shot of Orson Welles in The Third Man added a note of self-consciousness, but that didn’t seem out of place here and I knew for a fact Monica Heide had never seen The Third Man. I’d asked, trying to sound casual.

The eternally, knock wood, consolatory sameness of of everything was weaponized rather than marred by just one topical aide-memoire, replacing Friday’s Crayola’ed Titanic glug-glug. It was so trifling – to me, not him – that it would have slipped my mind instantly if it hadn’t gotten entwined even more instantly with my instant recall of Geenie flipping over on Room 202’s bed to show me her helplessly disputative shoulderblades, the twinned hometowns of the only faintly indented spinal rivulet that ebbed just short of her infinity symbol.

Besides being tax day, which nobody needed reminding of, today was unique among 1991’s Mondays in being the actual 128^th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination. Republican legislators are supposed to affect knowing the date by heart, but not this one. I’d forgotten until Pyrite of Kiwanis apologized on Friday for fudging the date. “We discussed it, pretty heatedly too.”

Going by his tone of voice, when it came to tense discussions, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the whole darn Pentagon couldn’t hold a candle to the Gettysburg Kiwanis Club in an uproar. “But a majority voted that getting butts in seats” – with my Senatorial presence certifying it wasn’t taboo, he thrived on that nugget of rough insider lingo – “was sure to be some sort of Oedipus [he meant Sisyphus] donnybrook on a Monday. Everybody’s working all day, and looky here! We got fourteen, not even all of them members.”

That was when he was still trying to save face about the turnout. Closing his eyes to Technicolorize 14 other faces, only moderately interested but there, really bucked him up. His Pyrite peepers popped back open two seconds later, not wanting to risk an overdose.

“Not members meaning what?” It’s always a mistake to pass up tips from a pro.

“They paid!”

“I didn’t and I’m not from here.” Geenie’s idea of joining the let’s-cheer-the-poor-guy-up campaign may strike you as mysterious, but she understood the decisive point. She was young, pretty, svelte and even (when the mood struck her) pert. She had a nice smile, she was from Washington, and she was talking to him. Him! I’d known that feeling once. “It was worth every penny.”

∞

My memories of Pyrite of Kiwanis, a/k/a Alan Nunn, not having traveled well – in fact, not having traveled at all – I’d reforgotten by Monday that Abe was due to get himself shot all over again in Ford’s Theater tonight. But as I’ve said, Monica had evolved a system over the years to hint I might have forgotten this or that detail embroidering my routine.

Her desk operated on the same principle as the Hirschorn or the Natty Gal, as we called the National Gallery. The memorabilia that summarized, humanized, her and hence me for visitors was primarily permanent, but an unspoken part of my daily routine was that my eye, collaborating with her steadfastness. would fall on whatever temporary objet she’d found to circle an invisible calendar in red.

So my glance turned gaze found itself confronting a greeting card fronted by a leering caricature of Lincoln. With a grin he’d never worn in life that turned him into Boris Karloff grievously miscast as an Amish farmer, he was producing a white rabbit from his stovepipe hat. No less incongruously, the message read “Happy Birthday!!” in purple sparkles.

“Christ.” I felt as jovial as an untasted Bloody Mary whose celery stick was still fresh, damp, and firm. “Did I get my anniversaries mixed up in Hagerstown?”

Correcting that slip would only make it more glaring, so I didn’t. But Monica looked satisfied anyway. “I did my best at People’s Drug,” which was – how long ago this was! – was five years from renaming itself CVS. “Maybe regrettably, I wouldn’t know, they don’t sell greeting cards of John Wilkes Booth playing Mark Anthony in Julius Caesar.”

“That is a goddam shame.” I was buoyant today, and Monica could undoubtedly guess why, I wondered how she’d gotten home after leaving the Hagerstown Players And Crab Boil’s evisceration of Stephen Sondheim’s inflated reputation. To think people always said his musicals were so dynamic they could survive even staging by a hermit and a talentless cast.

“It doesn’t matter. Everybody thinks it’s a picture of Edgar Allan Poe. In an odd mood, I grant you, but he was wacky. I save Poe up for Halloween, but then everybody thinks it’s a picture of John Wilkes Booth.”

“Six of one, Heidi. Six of one, Any other news?”

“Yes. A pack of very elderly Cub Scouts – yes, yes, I know – tried to barricade themselves inside the Lincoln Memorial last night for what they called a ‘camp-in.’ I thought we should monitor that because it seems they’re from the Nice State.”

“Were they on the schedule to meet me?”

She made a show of glancing down as minimal as Father O’Brother putting dessicated lips to ID’ing crucifix for the gazillionth time. “No.”

“Well, keep them out of here if they want one. Cub Scouts past retirement age are part of what makes this country seem so damn silly to the rest of the world. Not the main culprits, but still. Anything else?”

Her mouth wrinkled in decorous distaste, as it always did when people’s odder biological imperatives were forced on her consciousness uninvited. “Ye – es. It just came out. Some silly intern at the Post called the Metro Police vice squad on George Fwill last Monday,”

I had no way of knowing I’d be in their clutches myself four months later. “What for?”

“Nobody can say! She walked in and he was –ah – pleasuring himself with the Princeton Alumni Weekly. Not an accident, he’d summoned her. It was time for her weekly quiz on Bartlett’s Quotations.”

“I – oh, of course! It was Opening Day. He always goes nuts when baseball season starts.”

∞

Monica always knew when I was done a minute or two before I did. She tried to wrap things up by briefing me about my non-upcoming nonlunch with Gary Conduit, but I zipped past her too glibly to get her heads-up that he’d written me a rain check. Pretty insultingly, considering I had no idea why he wanted to have lunch with me or thought he deserved one.

It seemed his secretary had gotten me confused with Bob Packwood (R-OR), which used to happen a lot. Just less often than it might’ve if Bob hadn’t been senior to me by a dozen years, the tax maven I most certainly wasn’t, and the most likely next chairman of the Finance Committee if we held the Senate in ‘92 or failing that, took it back in ‘94.

All that made him the plum asset I wasn’t for a lowly House newbie like Conduit to cultivate when he got the rare – hell, unique – chance. That’d show the folks back in Fresno or Solvang, the guy should feel chuffed I even knew his fucking district was in California, that he could reach across not only the aisle but the House-Senate DMZ.

Concerning Packwood, I suppose there was a mild purely physical resemblance. But you learn fast in Washington that all happy Senators look alike. As I was to learn too soon if not too late – I’d been around for Abscam and the furshlugginer Keating Five, after all – unhappy Senators each look miserable in his or her own way.

If I’d had a warning I was to be Conduitless if not terminally lunchless come noon, then 12:30, and then one P.M., fuck you, Gary, I’d have spent the rest of that Monday morning thinking up pretexts to ask Geenie to bring me the latest Government Affairs bumf that she’d conscientiously read and I never would. No, not even on a New Yorker desert island with nothing else to divert me, one orphan palm tree sticking up and Great Whites circling.

Instead I was all but snoozing as Bucky droned through a pre-Conduit brushup on the likely reconciliation-bill vote. His voice didn’t sound like a sewer grate now, more like a malfunctioning radiator in the next room. He never sang show tunes in R-286 unless we were trapped there past twilight and the Scotch had come out.

I knew the cheat sheet myself and got only one mild surprise. “Packwood for, Kennedy against, Gary Hart on the fence, Thurmond gaga and –”

“Wait. Ted’s in favor of identity theft?”

“Only in Dallas. No – he thinks the final bill could use more teeth.”

“If it had any fewer, it would look like a daguerreotype of some hillbilly’s grandmother. But it wouldn’t have gotten out of committee otherwise, Ted must know that.”

“Yep. Not on this side, not the denture version over wherever in the Cannon Building Gary Conduit lurks upside down between meals. Or during them, leastways today.” Bucky glanced up at the wall clock or tried to, forgetting he’d already had been doing that before he decided to go histrionic on me.

“I don’t know why the guy wants to have lunch in the first place. And you know – I had to scratch lunch with Tommy Pynchon.”

Bucky had a high tolerance for that kind of joke. “Bummer.”

“We met playing checkers by mail when I was the boy mayor of Wyandotte. But face to face at Obelisk? That would’ve been new.”

“You know what they say. The grass is always greener on the other side of the Hill. With envy, if you’re Congresswoman Lynn Martin or Representative Tom Tauke.” Both were Republican House members who’d lost Senate races last year to Democrat incumbents. Incumbents, incumbents, that sweet word.

“I’d have missed hell out of Tom Harkin –” D-IO, if you’re wondering. Ran for President in ‘92, didn’t get far once the New Hampshire primary left him eating dust. Bill Clinton was the intruder there. “We come from the same world.”

“I thought he didn’t like you.” The depth of Bucky’s Monday anomie was measured by the mild interest he showed in Tom Harkin as a topic for gossip.

“That doesn’t matter when you come from the same world.” Harkin would have been startled by the claim of affinity, may I safely say. We’d barely spoken, settled for paranoid alone-at-last nods in Senators Only elevators. But I did enjoy him in larger spaces than that.

Even a grin starring my A-plus teeth couldn’t save the bromide. As the wasted lunch hour grew drowsy in its dotage, we were both on the verge of admitting we were bored. That’s a far worse sin on the Hill than experiencing it.

He recognized his cue and stood up with a flourish of the wattle-scarred yellow legal pad he carried whenever he couldn’t affect to be burdened by printouts of more dignified, less interesting paper. Seen only in a flash, the complex, he’d even had time to cross-hatch it!, doodle of Robert Redford exhibiting a monster erection whose engorged head resembled Dustin Hoffman’s puzzled pan looked like Bucky at his impermissible best. He was the closest and only thing we had to a gifted cartoonist on staff, routinely did everybody’s birthday and less effusive bon-voyage cards.

Sans monster erections or their Hindenburg-breasted R. Breadcrumb distaff equivalents, of course, not even on my birthday when he must’ve been tempted to go wild. The exception was Senator Frodo’s own bon-voyage card, dated Oct. 31 ‘91 and unrestrained by either my very average equipment or, perhaps more tactfully, by the fact that Geenie’s breasts were, had been, almost as slim as his preferred sex’s in my, odd slip, their adolescence.

Bucky’s excuse for pornifying my departure was relief that neither I nor he had been jugged. “Being an accomplice after the fact is practically the definition of a press secretary’s job. Usually before the fact, too,” he reminded me as he (in private) presented the card, in which he appeared and still does as a quizzical but devoted pair of eyes peeping over the bed’s edge.

Unless he stopped at the office Xerox machine for old times’ and posterity’s sake, impatient for the latest staffer to quit making copies of his c.v. – my office gals had TCB’d that with more dispatch, but there weren’t as many of them – nobody but the two of us has ever seen that drawing. Nobody will until it pops the dry-as-dust eyes of the Library of Congress’s elves in mortician’s clothing once I’m a handful of dust.

Call it megalomania and you’ll be bellowing the sky is blue next while they look around for an XXL straitjacket. But nearly all of us deed our papers to the Library of Congress if no more lucrative offers are forthcoming, and for once I’m no exception.

∞

As if paying his respects to a TV script – though not CSI: “Morgan’s Adam,” which was to make him wretched by Mini-Me’ing his role down to a three-line bit — Bucky paused significantly at the door.

“Um, boss? Maybe Conduit wanted to eyeball that cute little bimbo from Governmental Affairs you’ve got on the hook.”

“One thing she’s definitely not is a bimbo, and she’s not on the hook. She’s not even in the water, Bucky. I do grant you she’s cute, not that I’d know of course.”

“And little. The word in the halls, which is our Capitolese pidgin for on the street, is that she’s started coming around a wee bit more often than is necessary. Only to brief you on the latest excitements up in 340 Dirksen, I know, I know. Not to debrief you just yet.”

His timetable was behind the curve by just nine sweet hours, I thought giddily. (Where was she? Why couldn’t she have thunk up a figleaf excuse to come brief and debrief me today, of all Mondays? No wonder I didn’t like them, I couldn’t trust that day. Was Never On Monday the little bimbo’s furshlugginer motto? Etc.)

“Bucky, she’s a nice kid. End of story.” And beginning of pornographic Room 202 reel he’d never glimpse, so I thought. “I like getting acquainted with Hill virgins before they’re too jaded to pay attention to me.”

“That’s what Humbert Humbert said, or maybe it was Gilles de Rais. I never did get those two sorted out. Now you know why my SAT scores were so sucky.”

“What do you think I hired you for? We’re a good team because I’m stupid too.”

That was dancing on thin ice with a heat wave on its way. But I couldn’t let Geenie’s shoulderblades and barely furred nape distract me from something I needed to recall less hypothetically right now. Unlike most of my staff, Bucky was very good at his job.

He was warning me, and it wasn’t even the first office reprimand I’d heard since the day a not-yet-Geenie Geenie showed up and explained she was my new Governmental Affairs liaison. The earlier reprimand had come from Monica, who’d held the yellow-light gig ever since her first gummint paycheck from the City of Wyandotte in February, 1973.

That she was senior only to Bucky among my pittance of veteran staffers was no doubt in part because, ever since leaving the womb made her pause a smidgen too late to reconsider, she’d been a believer in a concept he was as unacquainted with as lust for Kittney Wayne, Playboy’s September ‘76 Playmate of The Month: circumspection. True, Bucky made that a low bar to clear.

Voicing concern was at once the trickiest and most thrilling part of Monica’s job, as it didn’t make her uneasy so much as give her unease a terrific alibi to throw caution to the winds and expose itself to a startled world sans housecoat and bulky and fumble-precluding undergarments. She’d slipped a preliminary lapel off one shy shoulder as early as the first of April: “I think somebody’s making excuses to see you.”

Her mouth wrinkled in mild, what a news flash, and aspirationally comic – good luck with that, Heidi – distaste. But distaste for what exactly? Me, Geenie, me, sex in general, life writ large? Two weeks before Hagerstown, those four-I-mean-five categories had already merged into one in my mind.

“People make up excuses for this and that their whole lives, Monica.” I only called her Heidi in public, a split-screen effect she’d long since learned to tolerate, see the logic of, or just rationalize. No doubt all three cats looked alike in the dark of her seldom welcome-matted mind. “You should have heard how inventive I was on the phone just this morning with the Butchertown Chamber of Commerce. I had to explain why I wouldn’t – erm, erm, erm, couldn’t – fly home to share my red-hot thoughts on the Civil War on Barber Day.”

Butchertown was Edward Barber’s birthplace, little as he cared to cop to it after Chickamauga. It wasn’t called PTSD when he was alive, or even when I was if the cutoff is my first House campaign.

I’m still awkward with the term. Unaware of Montelḗon, which was how I wanted it and still do, America would laugh its head off if I claimed I was a victim of it and therefore know whereof I speak. Then again, I no longer speak in any forum save Room 185 of the New Orleans School of Government, so no huge abhorrable vacuum in the cosmos there.

“You did?” Monica’s other priorities had crowded into the forefront, as Monica’s priorities would be bound to do during a cyclone if she survived it. (She didn’t, didn’t have to; she’d died three years earlier.) “You surely remember that you’re up for re-election a year and seven months from now.”

“Re-re-election, and fuck ‘em.” I knew she’d hate that, but I’d had to bite my tongue when she said “Surely” and vengeance wasdth mine, saidth the Lord. “I lost every precinct in Morticia de Rigueur County by nine or ten points and that was in ‘86, not ‘80.”

“Nine point two was the countywide average, so please try rounding down before you crucify them. They’re trying, aren’t they?”

“I only did worse in Bourjaily. Fuck them, too.”

Only my former English teacher knew the festering reason the easterly, Amtrak-envious burg the Ohidiana Famous Writers School called home ranked high among my bugaboos, and she wouldn’t divulge it on pain of death. She’d shared my agony.

Look, I knew “The Bride of Hollow Sky” was a callow try at rendering my putative ancestry in fiction. But Are you kidding?? would’ve been cruel even if they’d paid me the collegial courtesy of writing it in red ink. not a glued-together kidnap note. Question marks in two different fonts, everything.

“Maybe you’ll get your chance next summer.” Except for once in November 1980, that was as close as MonicaHeidi ever came to being lewd in my hearing. That told me she was truly angry someplace hidden in her cranial murk.

“Nah. They only send us guys as summer interns.”

“’Well, if they’re willing to take that risk, then – so be it. Does that get us back to the uh, other matter?” She’d gone back into office mode prematurely, signaling duty alone made her ask.

If you think it’s not easy to sound brusque and pleading at the same time, I could do it in my sleep back then. ““No, it doesn’t. It won’t. I think she’s just excited at getting to go into a Senator’s office and talk to a real Senator. I don’t think it matters to her which one of us it is.”

“It does to me and she’s awfully young. I mean for Washington. I wouldn’t know about Alamogordo.”

“Monica, trust me. Neither would I.”

Talk about a self-inflicted scalpel to the perineum. I didn’t know anything about Geenie’s sex life, wantonness, girl-on-girl showcases?, before sunup-ruddied cacti and a 757’s fiery wing gave way to Thomas Jefferson in stone by February’s cloud-icepicking afternoon light. Yet perturbation’s idiot wind slunk back to its minibar-sized iron lung without venting. On instant replay, the cost – then – of that twitch of recognition struck me as no more pricey than a handful of nickels tossed at a tollgate’s metal basket.

More to the very temporary, but aren’t they all?, point, I seemed to have gotten Heidi back on the Harbinger ‘92 bus. She’d boned up enough to say Alamogordo and not “New Mexico,” but that dinged no alarm bells yet either.

“Okay. So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye.”

Her forays into the alien camp we happy POWs called Humor were always on starvation rations. To be fair, she and I did come from, represent, a state whose full meal of German-Americans led out their puzzled lives in golden landscapes dotted with too many French place names. I’d bet anything The Sound of Music was the only movie she’d ever watched twice since her utterly unimaginable girlhood.

Playbills Para Los Muertos

It’s just as well the Ethics Committee never knew Monica could’ve shared a few firsthand tidbits about Gettysburg and Hagerstown. Everybody took it for granted that the vanished girl from Alamogordo and I had driven up there on our own, and I didn’t disabuse them. I wanted to stay in charge of the Hagerstown narrative. But the reason Geenie and I hadn’t been able to so much as mimic relaxing until we were safely inside Room 202 was that we’d been a trio on the way up.

As soon as the new gal at Governmental Affairs obliviously took the shotgun seat – “I got scatterbrained,” Geenie said later. “I’ve been on a lot more dates than I’ve been in cars with Senators” – Monica knew she’d been cast as a chaperone if not beard. Wouldn’t she have looked hilarious wearing one, like Ahab, I thought out of the blue. No idea why.

Heidi watched Maryland and then Pennsylvania vie to lay claim to each other’s tourist-perfumed mist – cocoa butter vs. hand-churned butter, anything for a cummerbund in Cumberland or a buck in Bucks County – from behind us, arms folded and mouth clamped as if the power of speech had never been part of her job description. Unlike Geenie and I, who were still wondering, Monica knew exactly what we were here for.

Giving the lie even to that Imperial goatee of uncertainty, I was concocting explanations for when we got pulled over. Didn’t know whether my interrogators would be cops or the huge enforcers in the recesses of the Gettysburg Kiwanis Club, now a mental warren of goonish turnkeys, interrogation cells, filthy communal toilets and homosexual anal rape, right up my not quite virginal keester. The members looked so bland in public, but etc.

Why, exactly, had I brought a 24-year-old Jean Seberg impersonator – one who didn’t even work for me, not technically let alone directly – to attend a speech across state lines hailing Abraham Lincoln’s death at the hands and subsequently jump-sprained right foot of Sic Semper Tyrannis’s No. 1 fan? Whether the trip was ostensibly official or political, hadn’t I betrayed my indecent haste by anticipating the date of Lincoln’s death? Inspector Javert wanted to know. So did Lavrentiy Beria, master of Lubyanka Prison, whose facilities weren’t a patch on the Gettysburg Kiwanis Club’s serpentine horrors. He’d been promoted, not exiled.

Jav, Lavrentiy. We’re all men of the world and never mind which one. This young woman, whom I barely knew [the random true part, I’d just realized], had expressed a child’s fetching interest in seeing ex-President Eisenhower’s nearby farm. Had Ike really died there?

No, he hadn’t. No truth at all to the rumor Nixon had shot Eisenhower with a stagy cry of “Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell” before leaping aboard a passing Amish buggy disguised as a friendly Quaker out to persuade them to share their trade secrets. What did they know he didn’t? But Geenie’s junior – no, senior; no, master’s – thesis revisiting Abe Lincoln’s murder had hit a glitch until her parole officer at James Mason University in Harrisonburg, VA, definitely not Harrisburg, P-A, suggested a trip to Hagerstown, Hagerstown?, no, Gettysburg might jar loose the originality hidden in the cloudless mind of this young woman, whom I still barely knew.

As a sidebar, just in case her mind stayed unjarred and Prof. Heidi Hardaway flunked her on this one, she also happened to be an aspiring seamstress, tailoress?, on fire with her not-yet-guild’s curiosity about the overlooked civilian men’s fashions of the Civil War. What if Abe Lincoln, far from being the homespun great emancipator of never too reliable lore, had looked a bit of a Beau Brummel to Ulysses S. Grant’s sleepless eyes when they conferred at City Point in 1864? Golly, would that set the sclerotic academic Establishment on its ear.

Speaking of Grant, downing a gallon or so of rotgut Scotch in one gulp right now would be grand. We were still only 20 whole miles from Gettysburg. So I did so in spirit, chucking an invisible jug through my instantly repaired side window. Any unseen hobgoblins, who wouldn’t know Glenlivet from Shinola but loved sucking air anyhow, could share it amongst themselves as they waited for a lissome, dewy-vulvaed, nonexistent space cadet to wander down the road.

I reminded myself that in Gettysburg, Geenie would be generically exotic and otherwise not noteworthy, no more so than myself as guest of honor or for that matter the nameless Latina re-enactress who’d vanish a few hours later from the harmless lobby past Pyrite’s and my appreciative but socially eunuchized eyes. Any Senator would have an entourage, however whittled down by the event’s triviality. Any such entourage would be all but mandated by Congress to feature an attractive young woman who looked helpful without indicating why help was needed.

Pyrite and his Florsheimed cohorts would think the explanation for her presence was too obvious to rate scrutiny. While the premise her opinion rested on was altogether different and beyond the Gettysburg Kiwanis’s wildest dreams, Monica’s mute version of the identical reaction had been alternately on display and Caligaryheartlessly dungeoned ever since we’d stopped on Columbia Road to let Geenie hop in.

For once, I prayed Heidi would get buried under an unseasonable avalanche. All’s well that yodels as its voice gets fainter, Klara. And for once, reading my mind while I was still working out the Braille of it, she blizzarded herself, not literally. Slipping away unnoticed at intermission, she saw only half of the only play Geenie and I would ever attend in tandem.

Gigi wasn’t available, of course, to join me for the one in which I starred in absentia. A dual part, half a fellow who’d been inexplicably detained chatting with Brecht at the Romanisches Café in Berlin about how much we both hated Cocteau and the other a dipsomanic’s invisible rabbit. Harvey Godot, that was me as the Ethics Committee inquiry ground on.

Why did I keep imagining Geenie sitting beside me, half avid playgoer and half droll auditor of her own foreshortened life? Because if she’d been there, I’d have been safe. Wouldn’t have given a damn what became of me otherwise.

It was really too bad she was dead! Notice I’d placed us in the audience, just as we had been in Hagerstown, and in real life Dole had made damn sure I wouldn’t testify.

“It doesn’t go well, Craig. Maybe if you were well liked, but pigs fly in the ointment or whatever. It’s a firing squad full of guys you were in Basic with before Pearl Harbor. Believe me, you remember who won the marksman’s badge.”

∞

It was just lucky Monica Heide bailed in Hagerstown and not midtown Manhattan. She’d have been ostracized there with stony stares. Skipping out on irreproachable Angela Lansbury and lithe Len Cariou, the expert stars of the last Broadway hit Helen Bradshaw and I ever saw together? The nerve, the gall. Monica didn’t know nothing’s rarer than experts who seem to be enjoying themselves.

Helen was back here in Amtrakland after one of her ever more frequent visits to Wyandotte as I prepared to vault upward and run for the Senate, and I thought a quick New York overnight might make us easier in each other’s company. Or just help keep heart-to-heart, doe-to-hart, Helen-to-Harbinger conversation to a needles-and-pins minimum.

It did, but what she said outside the Uris Theater afterward – in the hearing, in the hearing!, of New Yorkers who knew their Broadway bibles chapter and verse, Sodom and Gomorrah telling West Side stories in Camelot – might have chilled me if the night hadn’t already been on the gusty side deep in its black-canyoned side streets. “Well, thank you, Mr. Man,” her affectionate shorthand for Congressman. You know I love Stephen Sondheim. I really think he’s got promise!”

That wasn’t the dealbreaker. Of course not, and she’d laughed awfully fetchingly as she said it. I did too because her smile looked really nice in the contrasting blinding brightness and black winding sheet of West 51st Street at Eighth. Besides, jokes about Sondheim still being promising weren’t quite infra dig even though their corniness quotient compounded daily.

Helen’s only glaring mistake was to call him by his full name. Depending on their assumed or affected level of intimacy, to New Yorkers he was either Stephen or Sondheim, not always placed on the spectrum at the end you’d guess. But Helen had to go on and say more next, her voice carrying like a 747’s takeoff straight to Dubuque even if only one person heard it that deafeningly.

“I do like him. But what’s funny is I don’t know anything about his personal life. Marriages, children?”

She’d known Bucky Shore for over five years, she half shared and half tolerated his love of show music, and she could still say that, like a dummy trying to work solo after the jelly-bellied ventriloquist fled. I wasn’t sure how to answer and luckily didn’t have to as I hailed, we entered, and she and I shared a cab to the Wellington. It had a lot of witless other guests in it.

Helen prattled happily as if nothing had happened. Her head nestled into my armpit, one ear happily hunting for the focal point no armpit has. Maybe Tom Cruise’s do, but I bet the right one is easier than the left one to locate; his left shoulder has a shifty look. You can’t nestle in the same armpit twice, as Heraticlus once sniffed.

“Truly, thanks, Craig. No more Mr. Man for you, not tonight.”

I knew what that harbingered. Afterward – that word so beloved of novelists of a certain vintage, drunk with gratitude at dodging a description they know they’d botch – I slept on safe ground in only mildly mussed sheets. I was positive Helen would never dream of guessing the sex had been unsatisfactory for us both, not just her husband.

What did she have to compare it to, aside from earlier double-solitaire reshufflings of unsatisfactory sex with me? I hoped so, I wished not, I was muddled, I was distracted by film-at-eleven of her going nuts in the sack with Bucky, Bucky?!?

She’d never done those things with Mr. Man. Or Craig, his rival since our Hollow Sky nuptials. We’d goddam near invented destination weddings, just didn’t know it. All the same, being Helen, she cut right to the chase years after our divorce when I tried out being droll about my revealingly ambitious, stay with me, panic at her Sondheim gaffe.

We were at the gingerly stage of turning everything about our prior lives together amusing, which works more often than you’d think. It doesn’t with Liz Fowler unless you get off on malicious wit. I don’t on hers, just mine, and anyhow she refuses to divorce me,

“ Are you trying to tell me you were gay?”

Like everyone else since Y2K flubbed its apocalypse, Helen tosses that word around as if it’s as neutrally American as Tinker to Evers to Chance. She’d just never tossed it at me until then.

“I wasn’t! Or ever, beyond any reasonable doubt. You know me, hon. I was thinking of my career.”

“Why? Not a lot of gay voters in O-D. Out ones, anyway.”

“More than you’d think these days.” Sure, like I’d been there even once since Monica’s funeral. “But I wasn’t thinking about them necessarily.”

“Oh, Christ.” She ransacked her brain to find out just how well she knew me; came up with the right answer, too. “The Veephood.”

Ding!

“Yup. Barring some awful national tragedy I’d have to pretend wasn’t making me go ‘Yippee’ inside, I figured that was about as high as a grin and my boyish snub nose could get me.”

“When? I mean, how early?”

“The night I won the Third District and you finally stopped being too excited to sleep.”

“I was pretending and got tired of it. I’d done that lots of times before. Oh, lots, Craig.”

Have I mentioned we’d agreed that everything concerning our married lives was funny?

“I know,” which I hadn’t. “Maybe it was earlier. But mayors, even Boy Mayors, of cities lots bigger and famous than Wyandotte blow up really fast on that speedway. Just ask John Lindsay or fucking Rudy Guiliani.”

“Yup.”

“And that was after 9/11, too. If he hadn’t been such a nasty bald Italian clown, it would’ve been a walk in the park. A walk in the park!”

Then I chortled. “What?” Helen asked.

“I just remembered a story Bucky told me once. He and another guy were commiserating and Bucky heard himself say, ‘Let’s face it, being a faggot in Ohidiana’ – you know he always talked that way on purpose – ‘is no walk in the park.’ They were in McLean Memorial Square at midnight! He said they both laughed so hard Bucky forgot to blow him.”

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