Woodrow Wilson (Gloria Swanson-TV Dinners in drag): “I AM big. It’s the pince-nez that got smaller.”

[Billy Wildest, Sunset of Empire Boulevard]

The year after his death, Woodrow Wilson’s Chosen People reach the Promised Land.

It’s a safe guess nobody ever actually called him Woody. One of the rare family anecdotes that humanizes our 28^th President – he had a home-and-hearth habit of donning a shawl and impersonating a querulous old Southern woman to amuse his kinfolk – is fairly disconcerting, not to say creepy. You imagine the double anachronism of Wilson’s Secret Service code name: “Norman’s mother is moving. Um, Norman’s mother has stopped moving. No, she’s got a knife. She’s heading for the bathr – OH CHRIST, IS THAT JANET LEIGH?”

Woodrow Wilson was still one of American politics’ secular demigods in my younger years, and not only among Democratic Party regulars before they devolved into being all rank and no file. (His gigantized features used to be convention staples pre-TV.) To the liberal-minded historians who ruled the poly-sci roost back then, he epitomized what must have been their most cherished fantasy. He was an austere professor turned the kind of idealist who can stuff it down millions of unexpectedly consensual voters’ throats and make them like it — for a while, anyway.

Too bad about the League of Nations and all that. On October 2, 1919, when Wilson had the stroke that put the Constitution’s bedside manner to the test for the next 15 months, the League’s looming demise turned him into the 20^th century’s pioneer martyr to excessively strenuous public speaking. I suppose Hitler could be argued into the same category, but who wants to be facetious about a Staunton, Va., saint?

When I made the juvenile mistake of going to Princeton – “I hate to tell you this after all you’ve been through,” says a Vonnegut character somewhere, “but you’re wrong again” – the university’s former president turned capital-P President was still the ideal academic boldface name: conscientiously revered, albeit with some jadedness, but also famous enough to be suitable for campus engraving. Granting an institution the affection its eponym had neither earned nor missed, the Wilson School of International Affairs, as it was until 2020 (!), was known as Woody Woo.

Yup, another titan laid low by intolerantly hooliganish antiracism. Because Wilson is most associated with New Jersey, thanks to Old Nassau and his 1911-1913 governorship of the state, he’s rarely thought of as a Southerner outside his native region, but come on. He was as staunchly – Stauntonishly? – Southern as rickets, pellagra, boll weevils, “Go Down, Moses,” spittoons, darkies or the poll tax. Not kudzu, though: something about kudzu hints at a promiscuously nonbinary anti-segregationalism.

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Those summer days, those summer nights.

When I was an intern on Capitol Hill in the great Watergate summer of 1973, Woodstein and them had surprisingly little interest in my shallow larynx. Instead, one of my make-work jobs was cooking up the answers to constituent queries that went out on official USS letterhead over the Senator’s “signature” when a form letter didn’t cut it. We kept a fat three-ring binder handy crammed with an anodyne Romneyful of those, individually laminated and numbered for easy dispatch to (and of) whoever Back Home thought they’d just hit the nail on the head or invented the wheel.

The wheel was often aimlessly studded with misshapen nails, now I think on it. I began to understand why many Senate staffers, whoever they worked for, invoked Back Home the way we now say “during Covid.” Quarantined in the District to their secret joy, they prayed the Beltway vaccine would work until their guy retired or was defeated, by which time they’d have networked or done Back Home enough service to guarantee they wouldn’t have to return there. True Washingtonians, by which I mean true graftees, live in dread of slipping up and telling outsiders that no, it really doesn’t feel like exile. Adding anymore will land them in Coventry for good.

To work, to work. An effortlessly genuine Beltway brat myself, meaning I’d been born in Germany on my State Department father’s shakedown tour, Back Home was as exotic to me as Xanadu, and not Charles Foster Kane’s either: the real one. No wonder leafing through the three-ring circus – sorry, binder – fascinated me no less than browsing a collection of haikus written by NASA to Mars colonists about the base’s problems.

It was also no help today. Songwriter and John Lennon’s Los Angeles Lost Weekend crony Harry Nilsson’s LP Son of Shmilsson had been released the summer before, and one of Senator Blank’s unhappy constituents – all Mars colonists were, so far as this Uranian could tell – was distraught about catching her children innocently chanting along with its masterpiece, “You’re Breaking My Heart.” She’d painstakingly Xeroxed and included the album’s lyric sheet, highlighting the offending chorus: “You’re breakin’ my heart, you’re tearing it apart/So fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.”

What can I say? I was 17 – seventeen! – and the man, or rather Princeton-bound young Uranian, had met the moment. My or rather Senator Blank’s thoughtful answers to constituent detritus went out unvetted by any staffer less irresponsible than myself, since they had better things to do even in August. I began to compose.

Senator Me, I assured her, shared her pain even at his/my safe distance. However, the First Amendment was the First Amendment for a reason, Mrs. Null, and any number of truly great works of art had offended people without being downgraded to anything less than truly great works of art: James Joyce’s Ulysses, for instance. Or this self-same summer’s art-house hit, Last Tango in Paris.

I know it sounds incredible, but it’s true. There really were art-house movie hits then, ones you could talk about at no risk of bewildering the folks Back Home. Granted, that was unlikely to be Mrs. Null’s most pressing problem when she read the Senator’s reply, although – after some reflection, be it said – I’d decided against citing Leopold Bloom sniffing Molly Bloom’s smellow melons or Last Tango’s butter scene to reassure her.

I must’ve had one heck of a butt fetish in those days, but let’s not get sticky about it. Duly retyped on Senate stationery by an automatic clackety-clacker untouched by human hands, untouched by human feet either when I added Senator Blank’s Autopen signature with a hovering pen hung Louise Bourgeois style above the foot treadle mine happily pump-pumped to animate it, it went out in that day’s office mail, never to be seen again by anyone but Mrs. Null.

And not even by her, so a certain Princeton-bound Uranian was soon frantically if pointlessly hoping. That poor woman! As if she didn’t have enough troubles enough, Mrs. Harriet Null-Legion must’ve thought either she or her Senator had gone nuts.

Had I? I still feel rotten about it over 50 years later, but what the hell. I was as echt-17 as they come, nowhere on earth is Back Home to a Foreign Service brat, and nobody should have let me within screaming distance of a Louise Bourgeois autopen machine. Least of all Senator Blank.

1. Nixon is Everywhere

I’m going to put on an old record, if you don’t mind. Let’s see if I remember how this damned hi-fi works. The needle’s kind of scratchy, but — ah, there we go.

You’ll rec­ognize those gliding saxophones, noncha­lant and sprightly. The voice, which has a vintage Buick’s lazy swagger — bourbon-ma­hoganied; Camel-catarrhed — belongs to an approximate contemporary of Richard Nix­on’s. I’m playing an alternate take of Frank Sinatra doing “Witchcraft,” of which, as it doesn’t exist, I own the only copy.

Those – wiggling – fingertips
Dartin’ eyes that never quit, ah
That sweaty upper lip … lt’s —

Saturday, September 20, 1952; Eugene, Oregon. The Republican nominee for vice president chuffed into town aboard his campaign train, the Nixon Special. Two days earlier, the New York Post had re­vealed that the junior California senator had had a secret fund set up for his benefit by his Orange County backers. The follow­ing Tuesday, he would appear on TV, hag­gardly protesting not so much his inno­cence as his virtue, his wife’s virtue, his little daughters’ dog’s virtue — the Checkers speech.

But on Saturday, in liberal, colle­giate Eugene, the depot crowd included hecklers with picket signs. According to Roger Morris in his magisterial Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician, “Two junior college students carried one reading ‘WILL THE VEEP’S SAL­ARY BE ENOUGH, DICK?’”

I’m an admirer of the Morris book, but I’ve always been miffed about that “ju­nior college” crack. My father, who was holding up the right end of the sign, was regarded as one of the University of Oregon’s more promising graduate students in American history. He’d gotten to college on the GI Bill, having, like Nixon, been in the Navy during the Second World War.

Nearly 20 years later, Jim Carson, in the Foreign Service by then, got sent over to the White House to brief Nixon on some bit of twaddle. At least as Dad reported it to us that night, back in the D.C. suburbs (we’d lived like kings abroad, only to learn on coming home that we were middle-class: bummer), he’d spent the session being disconcerted because Nixon, whose memory for faces was famously prodigious, kept looking at him with the strangest smile.

Bracing him­self for the presidential question that never came — “Where have I seen you before?”­ — my father glumly pondered the effect of his answer: “Probably on one end of a 15-foot sign.” We all laughed. We’d been raised as sec­ond-generation Nixon-haters.

Our cat was probably around somewhere, looking panicked. Checkers always did because a Siamese always is.

Vaulting into the bridge, Sinatra’s confi­dence breasts the pumping horns like whitecaps:

And al-though-my-kids-are-reading Ca-MUS —
When you de-stabilize Chile
My heart says “Yes, indeed, Tricky —­
Pro-ceed with what you’re making us do,” yes — it’s
Nixon …

On November 8, 1972 — the day after Nixon’s landslide reelection victory over George McGovern — my father was dying in Bethesda Naval Hospital. I went to his bed in the intensive care unit, telling myself that he ought to know about the results. He’d raised me to believe that such things were important, and I suppose that, for reassurance’s sake, I wanted to hear that he still thought so.

“Well, Dad, it’s all over,” I said. “Nixon won.”

My poor father! He was zonked on a smorgasbord of painkillers. Hopelessly con­fused, his yellowed vague eyes wandered. But he knew he ought to respond and finally bullied his brain into remembering how. Here’s what he muttered to placate me:

“Awful man.”

It would probably please him to know that those were the last words I ever heard him speak.

But many years later, I was telling an editor in Los Angeles that I thought a certain obstreperous celebrity’s behavior was Nix­onesque. Judith looked at me fondly, for which I’m grateful to her. And then she laughed: “Oh, Tom — everyone reminds you of Nixon …”

2. “A Swarm of Black Thing:” Yorba Linda

The Roger Morris biography is the best Nixon book, surpassing even Garry Wills’s Nixon Agonistes, because Morris is the only writer to recognize Nixon’s story as fundamentally Californian; that’s to say, a tale of the West. It’s true that Garry Wills can write rings around nearly everybody, but the problem is that Wills can also write rings around himself.

California is where beginnings end. To get there, we devastated a continent, butch­ering its inhabitants as we went. We’d used Africa as a human meat locker. We now spend our time fretting over just where we lost our innocence.

But the Nixons missed the epic. Missed the, shall we say, glamour. The Nixons came over after the Mayflower, on boats whose names no one remembers. The Nix­ons followed the wagon trains out West, looking for a good spot to put a grocery. The Nixons looked upon the vista that left stout Cortez agape, and thought, Now here’s a place for the grocery! Vistas are nice, but we’re too poor to enjoy them. There have always been more Nixons among us than pioneers.

Yorba Linda, California, the birthplace of Richard Nixon, is one of the bleakest, butt-­ugly places I ever care to never see again. In hot weath­er, it smells seared, as if whatever was real­ly there burned long ago and what’s here is a cobbled-together evasion of the unwelcomed or not fact. The people are nice in a wan way, like they worry what you’ll do if they aren’t.

At 10, writing to his mother — the family having moved to Whittier by then — Nixon produced his first contribution to the Nixon legend: the Good Dog Letter.

Dear Master,

The two boys that you left me with are very bad to me. Their dog, Jim, is very old and he will never talk or play with me.

On Saturday the boys went hunting. Jim and myself went with them. While going through the woods one of the boys triped and fell on me. I lost my temper and bit him. He kiked me in the side and we started on. While we were walking I saw a black round thing in a tree. I hit it with my paw. A swarm of black thing came out of it. I felt pain all over. I started to run and as both of my eys were swelled shut I fell into a pond. When I got home I was very sore, I wish you would come home right now.

Your good dog, Richard

Whatever else this is, it’s certainly what Morris calls it: “the pitiable cry and fantasy of a lonely boy.” By adolescence, though, nothing shows but determination — a deter­mination that often seems to precede any purpose even as it precludes any satisfac­tion. At Duke, where he studied law in the ’30s, Nixon was known as “Iron Butt” for his punishing study habits.

For the rest of his life, he treated intellectual diligence as a form of toughness. It was the credo of a man who staked more on his will than his gifts, considerable as those gifts were. He was, after all, the brainiest president of his century.

When Nixon, as a young lawyer, started wooing Patricia Ryan, he would chauffeur her to Los Angeles for her dates with other beaus, and then grimly return to collect her afterward. There is no record of whatever thoughts he may have had in the interims.

Like her husband, Pat Nixon came from near penury — worse in her case than his, actually. In a rare slip of self-discipline, she once bridled at Gloria Steinem — “I never had it easy, I’m not at all like you” — having incorrectly but revealingly assumed that Steinem was born privileged.

During Nix­on’s presidency, she was, like him, widely derided. But she must have been a woman of considerable forbearance. One fact that never came out until her death last year from lung cancer was that she’d been a furious closet chain-smoker­ — as, for that matter, was Jacqueline Kennedy.

During World War II, Nixon served as a supply officer in the South Pacific. You sort of want to picture him standing on shore, watching as Jack Kennedy’s PT boat flashes by.* But for what it’s worth, Nixon’s unglamorous labors were undoubtedly more help to the war effort.

This also seems to have been the only period of his life when he was relaxed and socially at ease: being Lieutenant Nixon took the chore of being Nixon out of his. hands. Like many idylls, it couldn’t last.

Today, no one thinks of the late ’40s as years of revolutionary ferment, but in many ways they were. Spawned by the wartime economic boom, armed with the GI Bill, Ameri­ca’s modern middle class had reached the scene. Before settling down to enjoy their hard-won tract homes and TV sets, the usurpers conducted their own reign of terror.

____________________________________________________________________________

*As indeed I did around a decade later. See my 2003 novel Gilligan’s Wake, Ch. 2, “The Skipper’s Tale.”

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Our postwar politics are usually described in terms of Cold War paranoia, but a lot of the red-baiting and witch­hunting was underway before the Russians ever got the bomb. In the overlooked interlude when the United States enjoyed a nuclear monopoly, something else was go­ing on, or also going on: the dislodging of an old order.

The purge’s targets were the patrician gentleman’s club that had assumed that running the country was its preserve, with the traditional cry of “Treason!” as the pretext. In Nixon — “the ultimate self-made man,” as Garry Wills called him — the newly assertive postwar middle class found its churlish cynosure, a Robespierre of the raw new suburbs.

Back in Whittier, some well- heeled local Republicans, the self-styled Committee of 100, recruited the returned vet to run for Congress against the local squire: amiable, pipe-smoking Jerry Voorhis, who’s gone stumbling off into history’s footnote-hills without ever having known what hit him. As he always would, Nixon ran hard and ran dirty. But to him, smearing Voorhis as a fellow traveler probably didn’t even seem vindictive, just diligent. Campaigning, which he hated, was a test of his mettle, and he would always rather get caught sin­ning than relenting.

The Hiss case came in ’48. Like all Nixon’s subsequent crises — always his favored term for situations involving himself — it took shape as both a morality play and an oddly inverted class struggle. Its psychological underpinnings were all out of whack with its surface dynamics. I might as well admit that if anybody can get me rooting for Nixon, it’s Alger Hiss.

Elegant, well-con­nected, and supercilious, the accused Sovi­et agent was a New Deal golden boy, an iron of the Establishment. Yet what Nixon the glowering bourgeois avenger had against him wasn’t his betrayal of his class but his class. The outsider was saving the Establishment from the insider.

Nixon’s so­cial resentment fostered not radicalism but militant, strident, more-conventional-than-thou conventionality, He placed thumbing one’s nose at convention among privilege’s hoity-toity prerogatives. He was right.

Once again, he cut corners, diddling the evidence where the undiddled truth might have won the day for him. The Congressional prosecutor, not the defen­dant, was the one who behaved throughout as if the pack was breathing down his neck and desperate remedies were in order to compensate. Even as president, Nixon would cling to nailing Hiss as what a later generation would call his defining moment in self-apostrophizing language the same generation might recognize as less appropriate to a political vendetta than a therapeutic breakthrough.

1950: the Senate race. He ran against Helen Gahagan Douglas — another upper­-crust darling to be given her comeuppance, attacked as the “Pink Lady,” sent reeling. Even if the charge wasn’t true – and it wasn’t – she, like Voorhis and Hiss, deserved to be brought down for having made Nixon feel small.

Two years later came the vice-presi­dential nomination, the slush fund, Check­ers. After the success of Nixon’s speech had cornered a furious Eisenhower into keeping him on the ticket, Ike patronized him even as he welcomed him: “You’re my boy.”

He stayed one for the next eight years, doing the partisan chores Ike disdained, feeding the partisan faithful the red meat Ike despised. His reward was the 1960 presidential nomination, and Ike was grudging about giving him even that. After Nixon lost that November, classy Jack Kennedy is said to have delivered a famously cutting dismissal: “No class.”

In 1962, Nixon ran for governor of Cali­fornia and lost, disastrously. Nobody be­lieved he had any interest in governing Cali­fornia. (They were right.) After his defeat, he lost control. He met the press, and saw a swarm of black thing.

“You won’t have Nix­on to kick around anymore,” he told it.

3. Hate

How wrong he was, and still is. We’ll never get done kicking him around.

Oh, how we hated him! New Frontier parents and their New Left kids can agree: nobody was ever hated with the zest we brought to hating Nixon. Joe McCarthy aroused too much fear for hate to gain ascendancy. Ronald Reagan mostly inspired an Invasion of the Body Snatchers dread that one day we’d relax our vigilance and end up liking him.

But hating Nixon was lovely. You felt good about life when you hated him. There are still millions of people in their forties and older whose political self-esteem is founded on their hatred of Nixon. (I hated him first. Well, I hated him more.)

Yet it had a special emotional timbre, this hate. It meant a lot to us. It was savagely contemptuous without managing to sound dismissive. It insisted on finding him not only wicked but ridiculous, not only evil but absurd. It was strident and obsessively ran­corous, but we’d have been baffled had any­one suggested that there was, or could be, anything excessive about it.

It was strangely reassuring, this hate. So long as we could hate him, we had no doubts about our­selves. It was appealingly familiar — he’d al­ways been right there in our faces, as grasp­able as the morning toothbrush. It was —

Intimate.

The obituaries are calling Nixon’s psy­chology a riddle and a mystery, paradoxical and baffling. That’s a laugh. He lived ex­posed to us. We knew him like the backs of our hands.

Maybe we hated him, but most Americans had a hard time pretending that they didn’t understand him. Then again, we also had a good time pretending that we didn’t understand him. But well, whatever, never mind.

That callow, censorious tyro in ’50s newsreels, making his voice empty to make it sound big, whose ghastliness was that he was behaving like a gangster in hopes of winning America’s approval and knew no other way of winning it: Savonarola as a go-­getter. The self-consciousness, lashed by in­visible whips, that made him seem most hypocritical when he was trying to act hu­man, eyes flickering with a baffled suspicion that these atrocious shenanigans were what some sadist had devised as the native clog dance of congeniality.

That awful, grimac­ing discomfort with himself — holding his body, as Greil Marcus once described Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel, as if it were an enormous clubfoot. The wonderful actor Lane Smith, who played Nixon with beauty in an otherwise dithering miniseries adaptation of Woodward and Bernstein’s money-following The Final Days, remarked that mimicking Nixon’s body language left him with back and muscle cramps for months. And geez — don’t you wonder what it did to Nixon?

He was our ugliness. We knew it all along, as the Who’s Roger Daltrey brayed. “Sir, there’s a cancer on the Presidency,” said John Dean in the Oval Office, doing his lickspittle best to ignore the heav­ing, purple-fisted mass of malignancy that sprawled across the desk from him, forcing itself to blink out an ingratiating smile through its ooze.

He was what we’re like when we’re alone; he was always alone. Nixon went through life clutching his brain like a pis­tol – only a pistol, when everyone else had been given brand-new machine guns. How unfair! That must be why he refused a res­pirator at the end. He wouldn’t have want­ed to face the world weaponless.

“Who could love Duddy Kravitz?” asks Duddy Kravitz scathingly. Who could love Nixon? His daughters did: Julie out of devotion, Tricia from ambition. And Pat Nixon, I sus­pect, understood him, which is a form of love.

He seemed to like playing the piano. Otherwise, the record of his life includes not a single instance of public warmth, ease, enjoyment, pleasure, humor. (He couldn’t laugh at himself — too many others had.) Only the resentment was authentic.

Those who saw him in private recall ges­tures of awkward kindness that usually, touchingly, took the form of consolation. Alexis de Tocqueville, so often nudged awake by quote mongers like me that he has yet to get a decent night’s sleep in the grave, said that he’d seen more unexplained personal unhappiness in the United States than anywhere else in the world.

Nixon had devotees: William Safire played Bernstein to his Charles Foster Kane. He had peers, who accorded him a grudging professional respect. Did he have any friends?

Garry Wills once confessed his puzzle­ment that Nixon, a certified intellectual, chose to surround himself with thugs. Jesus Christ! Did Wills not attend an American high school? I know why. All of us knew why all along.

As president, his idea of relax­ation was to hang with Bebe Rebozo, whose brains were in his tan: a good-time dullard, pure Miami — a bit like Brezhnev. I often wonder what they talked about when they plodded the beach at Key Biscayne, Nixon in sand-filled wingtips. Was it like Of Mice and Men: “Tell me again about the Demo­crats, Dick.” Or perhaps more wistful: “Tell me what it’s like to have fun, Bebe.” Tell me what it’s like to be stupid.

What was Nixon to his fellow WASPs? Why, don’t you know? He was our Jew — our Wandering Jew. Of course, we had to revile him, in his stubborn industry, his bleak and somehow sinister tenacity, his loneliness. He knew America’s ultimate secret, which is that Santa Claus is the star of The Merchant of Venice.

That could incidentally account for Nixon’s own coarse and somehow over­acted, overcompensatory anti-Semitism. It would have been just like him to recognize the affinity and, not needing any more es­trangements, shrink from it. If anti-Semi­tism is the socialism of fools, as German Social Democrat August Bebel once said, hatred of Nixon, in its virulence, often ended up looking and sounding uncannily like the good liberal’s substitute for a pogrom.

It served the same purpose, anyway — that of redefining the troubling self one so inchoately despises as Other. Consider how determined we were to deny Nixon not only dignity but humanity: Plastic man! Hollow man! (Self-manufactured man!) We needed to see him as a golem, because only that would absolutely prove that he was no kin to us.

If nothing else, we gave him the bitter right to ask, “If you prick us, do we not bleed? … And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” And to warn, “The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.” The Shakespeare character to whom Nix­on was most often compared used to be Richard III, but that was just lazy­-mindedness taking a cheap shot: same first name, they’re both wicked, yar har har. He’s Shylock.

Here’s dignity at last. Shakespeare had set out to write a crowd-pleasing anti-Se­mitic caricature. But then, carried away by the humanity intrinsic of his genius, he created lit­erature’s first great antihero instead. Maybe we, in our inadvertent 40-year collaboration with Nixon, did the same; what dark gran­deur.

What drama he gave us. (They were crises.) He never let us down: he was our Nixon every minute, the poor man. He nev­er stopped working at it, no matter the circumstances. “Do you know why Bach is better than Brahms?” the grizzled, not-a-­crook former president demanded of a star­tled Gary Hart not too many years ago, when they were seated together at a state funeral. “Bach is tougher than Brahms.”

How we needed him. When Nixon re­signed, longtime liberal shill Richard Good­win made the perfect joke: “Now I know how all those kids felt when the Bea­tles broke up.”

4. The Nixon Presidency, 1969-74

Driving home the afternoon of the day Richard Nixon died, I heard the truculent voice of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Ronnie Van Zant on a D.C. oldies station. “No, Wa-tergate it does not bother me,” Van Zant, who’s dead as a doornail himself, was sneering. “Does your conscience bother you — tell me true. . . Sweet Home Alabama – “

Granted, in northern Virginia, where I now reside once again — I last lived here the year Nixon resigned — you can hear “Sweet Home Alabama” on the radio pretty near any old day. We have no songs of regional pride of our own, having no region­al pride. But last Friday, I couldn’t help wondering if some DJ was offering up a tribute.

Remember the Silent Majority? You probably do: they haven’t shut up since. Gore Vidal was the first to note that Nix­on’s coinage had been Homer’s term for the dead.

Truculent was the word for them. Nixon diehards often seemed moved to support him out of pure spite, relishing how he stuck in liberal America’s craw. They didn’t really act as if they liked him any better than we did; they just enjoyed the perversi­ty of rooting for him anyway, because they knew that liberal America scorned them as much as it scorned him. How sad for Nixon that his admirers held the same opinion of him as his enemies.

Having internalized the elite’s contempt — liberal America’s great sin in the ’60s, as stalwart Ronnie Van Zant well knew — their only available substitute for the pride they’d been denied was to say that they liked being trash, and give the finger. Nixon was the finger.Yet however enthusiastically his followers adopted his sense of rankling injury as their own, Nixon — as he well knew — remained a supremely unlikely, discomfited vessel for Jacksonian populism, even of this revanch­ist, mutually debasing sort.

His vision of governance, after all, was loftier. He was the last American president to unqualifiedly en­dorse the Great Man theory of history. He believed in mighty captains, like the primar­ily European statesmen he took as his benchmarks: De Gaulle, Pitt. He dreamed of a wise and splendid equanimity, nobly steering the nation.

Instead, Nixon brought the idea of lead­ership into possibly permanent disrepute in this country. The loss may be accounted more his tragedy than ours because he was the one who revered it. As we fumble to­ward alternatives (First Actor? Chief Clerk?), everyone since has seemed to be impersonating a president, with variable as­surance and conviction. Whatever else you think of Nixon — or of the notion of mighty captains, for that matter — he’d have had no trouble conversing as an equal with Riche­lieu or Disraeli.

That can’t be said of his successors. “The last of the titans,” a friend who’d always despised Nixon, the way classy people do, surprised us both by blurting one afternoon a couple of summers ago. We laughed ruefully.

My mom got herself all horrified once at the prospect of her youngest granddaughter acquiring a tattoo. “Classy people don’t get tattoos,” she grumped at me plaintively, begging for an affirmation that this was still true.

Because she was my mom – and old, and mulish, and scared because she’d once prized feeling savvy above being kind and everything puzzled her now – I didn’t say what, in one formulation or another, I’d wanted to scream at her since my birth: “Mom, classy people don’t use words like classy.”

My God! She’d have died right there in the back seat of her son-in-law’s new car in Louisville, a city she’d never expected my sister’s marriage to drag her, her! at. Never to. Of a broken heart, just in case you’re wondering.

In office, Nixon had one moment when he was able to realize himself as the hero he’d always dreamed of playing on the world-historical stage. That was the open­ing to China. Elsewhere, for all his skill, the foreign-policy record is too grim to be grand.

Chile was a crime; Europe, by and large, a blunder (declaring a “Year of Europe,” as Nixon and Kissinger did, is a dead giveaway that slights were the norm). And then there was Vietnam.

One interpretation of Nixon’s conduct of the war has it that he staunchly undertook the ignominious chore of extricating us from the unpopular commitment his predecessors had made. The other sees him as a monster, awash to his hips in blood. What if they’re both true?

The invasion of Cambodia, the mining of Haiphong harbor, the Christmas bombing of Hanoi — or “the bombing in the second half of December 1972,” as Kissinger delicately puts it in his Diplomacy — all these were defended as necessary pressures to force the enemy to negotiate. But Nixon, with his fetishistic phobia about being called a quitter, would not have been Nixon if he hadn’t nursed a wild, mad hope that the next throw of the dice would achieve the impossible instead and win the war outright. Hundreds of thousands of mostly Asian people paid with their lives for his iffy self-esteem.

Domestically, the policies he tried to pursue cut just as harshly against his private grain. Having squeaked into office largely through pandering to racial backlash, he sought to govern according to a perceived consensus that had, in hindsight, an unexpectedly liberal hue. From our post-Reagan vantage point, it’s astonishing how much of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society Nixon left intact — and not just from caution, but on principle. Meanwhile, in the basement, his men were drawing up the wiretapping or­ders and the enemies lists.

All right, then: Watergate. Listen, kids. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that Nixon was unjustly hounded from office — that’s a bunch of horseshit. But don’t ever let anyone tell you that it wasn’t done with glee, because that’s a bunch of horseshit, too.

That pious guff in the history books about dark days, anxious conclaves, somber pomp? Nonsense! We were euphoric. It was a two-year joyride. Ding-dong, the witch is dead!

But —

“But you said she was dead,” Dorothy blubbers.

“That was the Wicked Witch of the East,” says Glinda, in the dulcet simper of the ineffable Billie Burke. “This is the Wick­ed Witch of the West.”

(I bet you think I just mean Reagan. You’re wrong.)

Still, for Nixon’s sake, two questions need to be asked. First off: was he great?

I could take the easy way out, but. . . Swallowing hard, I will say that I often suspect he was. But then, I also think that until this country learns how to say “great” and “awful” in the same breath, it won’t ever understand its history worth a damn. Until, that is, we admit that Dorothy Gale of Kansas, who is all of us, has a thing for dressing up as the Wicked Witch of the West.

The second question: was he crazy?

In America? Compared to who? Mi­chael Jackson? Stonewall Jackson? Cotton Mather? Henry Batshit Adams? Ernest Hemingway? Good old Bill Faulkner, who once snapped at his tearful daughter that nobody remembered Shakespeare’s chil­dren? Abraham Lincoln, one of Nixon’s more maudlin attempted self-identifications, who if he were alive today would be getting Prozac slammed into him by the bucketload? Death-loving, pill-popping JFK?

Elvis?

5. Jesse Milhous Presley

I have the photograph on a T-shirt I bought at the Nixon Library, where it’s sold with this rubric: “The President and the King.”

As they shake hands, Elvis looks pretty zonked. Greasy eyelids, puffy jowls. That stupid championship belt. Nixon looks un­comfortable, and what else is new?

They could be brothers.

Elvis, of course, never knew his twin, Jesse, who died at birth. Nixon’s fun-loving big brother Harold, the family darling, died of TB at 24. Both Elvis and Nixon doted on their mothers, calling them saints. But they both heard trains in the night.

Two good boys gone bad. One was best when he was bad, but never believed it. One was bad even when he was good.

I often used to think that Sam Shepard should have written this play back in his prime. When he did, it was called True West. Two brothers fight it out over which of them is the other. Shepard just changed the names.

Elvis, despite being Nixon’s junior by a good many years, is clearly the older brother: been there, done that. The younger brother has had to build a personality from negation, out of the bits and scraps of empty space the older one left free.

It constricts him. By now, he often mistakes the constriction for skin.

But if they’re brothers, then they must be sons. It’s obvious Elvis is the Prodigal Son. For him, they killed the fatted calf. Judging from his waistline, he’d already eaten it, all by himself. Slurp! Yum!

Though forced to embrace him, the other son feels scalded. But I’m the Good Son, he thinks. I’m the one who stayed. I did all they asked, terrible though it was. Where’s my fatted calf?

Tonight, alone, his floodlit brain will screech: What more do they want from me! But they never wanted him.

For that, how they will pay.

There was one other big difference between these men.

Never thinking twice about it, the King believed in the American Dream.

The President, to his despair, could not.

5. I Am Nixon

Really, it’s the funniest thing. Turn on the CBS Evening News. Doesn’t Dan Rather look and act just like his old nemesis, Richard Nixon?

But then, a couple of days a week I can’t be any too sure I’d buy a used car from myself, either.

Last Sunday, I called my mom, and her husband answered. Don is a cheerful Re­publican, and he and my Democrat mom con­stantly spar. They still argue about FDR at Yalta. They’re nuts.

“So are you in mourning?” I teased him.

He chortled. “No. But your mother’s all broken up.”

What’s to become of us, now that Nixon’s gone? (My wife just came by: “I’ve got to check the papers. It’s been three days. If anyone could do it . . .”)

I wonder what music they’ll be playing for him Wednesday afternoon, on that seared lawn in Yorba Linda. Something tougher than Brahms. I somehow doubt it will be this — though we could all sing along, to the tune of “Joe Hill”:

I dreamed I saw the Wicked Witch,
Alive as you or me

“But Witch,” I said, “you’re 10 years dead”
“I never died,” says she

“I never die,” says she

What’s going to be on your head­stone, old artificer — old Scratch? HERE LIES A SWARM OF BLACK THING. LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD. I think that I would nominate the words Nabokov used to end The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: “I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we are both someone whom neither of us knows.” ❖

Let’s kick this tribute off with a confession, because those usually put everybody at ease — one of her lesser but genuine goals in life . Whitney Houston’s cover of “I Will Always Love You” always gave me the horrors, because turning a sweet song of self-abnegation into a braying display of one’s superior vocal cords struck me as at best a debatably attractive way of making the song one’s own. But Dolly, who was nothing if not politic, always made a point of sweetly praising Whitney’s version.

While also seeing fit to incidentally mention, cough cough, that it had made her enough money to buy Florida back for Spain. That’s why I will always love her.

Or one of the thousand reasons. It’ll tell you everything you need to know about my acute awareness of country music in the spring of 1977 that I knew her only as some singer Hunter S. Thompson seemed to like, as he saw fit to mention her as a cassette-tape consolation in Los Angelesc after Nixon’s win in Fear And Loathing: On The Campaign Trail ’72.

It may get into TMI about my acute awareness of etc. that I vaguely guessed she must be some sort of cult jazz chantoozy. Those gals seemed like the soulful breed of songbird I guessed Hunter – we all called him Hunter then, our acquaintance with him seeming more intimate than actually knowing the guy would be – was likely to resort to when he was too down in the dumps to live vicariously through Mick Jagger instead.

Did I learn better that epochal spring? Uh-huh. I flipped for Dolly the second my college pal Cindy Read introduced me to Best of Dolly Parton, the second of two hits compilations – differentiated only by Vol. II’s missing “The” – she’d released in 1970 and then 1975. Since my own babble about how great she weret was pretty damn uninformed, here’s critic Robert Christgau summing up the self-same LP in his Consumer Guide:

In her productivity and devotion to writing Parton is like a nineteenth-century woman novelist--a hillbilly Louisa May Alcott. What’s best about her is her spunkiness and prettiness (Jo crossed with Amy); what’s worst is her sentimentality and failures of imagination (Beth crossed with Meg). And this is the best of her best. At least half of these songs have an imaginative power surprising even in so fecund a talent – images like the bargain store and the coat of many colors are so archetypal you wonder why no one has ever thought of them before. The psychological complexities of “Jolene” and “Traveling Man” go way beyond the winsome light melodramas that are Parton’s specialty. And even when the writing gets mawkish--”I Will Always Love You” or “Love Is Like a Butterfly”--her voice is there to clear things up. A+

Isn’t that expert Little Women analogy pretty darn genius-y itself? You betcha if you’re asking me, which it so happens you are whether you like it or not. But little did I know, as Louisa May Alcott her-own-self might phrase it, that just a few months later, Robert Christgau his-own-self would be shepherding me (I’d only turned 21 that May) into the ranks of professional rock critics in the pages of the Village Voice’s old “Riffs” section.

I had no idea why he saw promise in a young clod until I read in his memoir Going into The City decades later that he’d always hankered for a son named Tom. Funnily enough, he just happened to mentor and/or boost several of us T-boyz-to-men around then, and brother, will I always love now 84-year-old Bob. If my folks had named me Elmer, I’d be lucky to have ended up writing ad copy for Tom Petty, Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee, or America’s Funniest Home Videos host Bob Saget instead.

The Dean, as we all called him – it reflected our awe of the man much better than our acquaintance with him did – was much too savvy to trust me with a Dolly record, though. So I wound up reviewing 1978’s Heartbreaker, one her earliest, most game – and least convincing – bids for a pop crossover, for ineffable Paul Nelson his-own-self at Rolling Stone and not the Voice. While I’ll always love Paul (1936-2006), he shoulda been shrewder than to trust me around a Dolly record either.

Not the way you’d think, though. I was still only 22, and many a four-eyed young dickhead with no social skills whatsoever (for self-protection, we tell ourselves not to trust anyone under 30 who has them) has first tasted power as a popcult reviewer. I was unhappy with Heartbreaker, because I was a gabba-gabba-hey punk zealot then and pop crossovers of any sort were anathema to me. I’d have to do some sloppy fast footwork to rationalize the Ramones-their-own-selves making the identical move on 1980’s End of The Century.

No master at to-everything-there-is-a-season in those days, I groused in print that “my” Dolly – like hell she was or can be even now, only partly because damned fools need not apply – sounded on Heartbreaker like she’d had a lobotomy or something. Something would have been a far, far better way to go. Even juvenile me fretted once my review saw print, still a startling and often chastening experience then, that it was too bitchy.

Or worse – infinitely worse, to a jumpy newbie writer – just plain ignorant. Luckily, besides being nasty and brutish, at least my pan was short.

That’s when future Dolly biographer Alanna Nash her-own-self did the kindest thing anybody ever did for a jumpy newbie writer. This one, any-hoo. I didn’t know Nash from James Boswell, but we ran into each other at the RS office soon after my crass review came out. I confided my fears (too bitchy, ignorant, so forth) and she confided back I shouldn’t worry. Dolly’s Nashville friends not only privately thought the same of Heartbreaker, but – I hope memory isn’t garbling this – had told Dolly her-own-self so.

I will always love Alanna Nash.

Maybe peculiarly, considering we both live in Louisville now – she’s from here and I’m not – she and I have never met again IRL. But we’re Facebook friends, which is how come I know her phone’s been ringing off the hook since Dolly doffed her coat of many colors. But she’s still too broken up grieving her Dolly – and if anybody has a right to that possessive, she does – to talk to reverential journalists (reverential of Dolly, not Alanna her-own-self) worldwide.

What Nash undoubtedly knew and I sure didn’t in 1978 was that Heartbreaker would end up as a blip in Dolly’s Napoleonic trek from achieving mere dime-a-dozen legend status to transcending mere $1 billion-a-dozen icon status at a mythic level equaled in wondrousness, white-people subdivision, only by Elvis his own self. When Whitney Houston was still in rompers, His Own Self wanted to cover “I Will Always Love You.” But Colonel Parker, predictably, wanted half publishing rights in exchange, and Dolly, whose lovability is and the hell with saying was only exceeded by her fierce protection of her fiduciary, artistic (and mythic) independence, regretfully told Parker nah. Then, by her own account, she cried all night.

Dolly scarcely holds her own, if that, with Elvis in cultural ubiquity, not to mention(ca-chung!) sales. Nobody does, but she may well exceed him in consensus. One pal quoted critic Lester Bangs’ famous line after the Big E died – “We will never again agree on anything the way we agreed on Elvis” – and allowed as how he had his doubts about that. His point was that we do agree that way on Dolly.

Let’s not forget that Mr. Hunka-Hunka Burning Li’l Abner was scorned by sophisticates in his glorious prime as an untutored and unpedigreed Dogpatch hick. (Sound familiar, Daisy Mae?) He was getting dismissed if not pitied, for Jesus H. Presley’s sake, as an untutored, unpedigreed has-been until he shocked the world on August 16, 1977 – here you come again, that summer, looking better than a bygone epoch has a right to -- by reminding it that what he had been, still was and always would be was immortal. Let’s also not forget that a fine synonym for unpedigreed, at least in this country, is unprecedented.

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Alison Bechdel, Dykes to Watch Out For, 1985.

Named for cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who slipped the concept – proposed by her friend Liz Wallace, she says – into her alt-weekly comic strip years ago, the Bechdel Test cheekily evaluates movies as feminist or non- depending on whether at least two women characters are featured discussing something other than their relationships with men. American political writers flunk a not dissimilar challenge in evaluating leaders worldwide these days.

We limp along, applauding or decrying France’s Emmanuel Macron, South Korea’s Lee Jae Myung or Canada’s Mark Carney without knowing beans about them except for one vital thing: their relationship with Donald Trump. Why should we care about anything else they do? It’s all about whether they’re DJT sycophants or DJT adversaries, because Trump’s deli offers them (and us) no other choices.

As a steadfast admirer of Carney’s approach to things adversarial – he’s been affable, unflappable and droll in coping with The Other White-Meat Country to his immediate south – I’m as guilty of this as anyone. Until five minutes ago, I couldn’t have told you squat about his policies regarding Canada’s indigenous First Nations, say, or his position on Israel. Now I’ve checked, and they’re – duh – unbenighted but cautious. No problems so far, right?

He’s a good less appealing as an unrepentant AI booster and backer of data centers, a stance which would put him on the level of a nice fellow discriminating among the 10 Plagues of Egypt – “I’m against killing firstborn sons, but locusts and frogs are A-OK with me” – among US progressives, not to mention repentant red-state MAGAns. Still, whadja expect? Once an enabling economist, always an enabling economist.

I do know, among other pluses, that Carney is bilingual. That means, poor booby, he’s yet another suitor for Penelope’s hand in Anglophone Canada’s ultimate fool’s errand, which is to forever strive in vain to keep the Québecois happy. Look, if they wanted to be happy about anything, they’d never have invented poutine, okay? End of story, incidentally featuring a cameo from Charles “Vive le Quḗbec libre!” de Gaulle as Odysseus.

To my admittedly only semi-trained ear, Carney’s French is pretty good. Nevertheless, I’ll avoid the temptation to compare his two-tone fluency with our current POTUS’s waxing inability to speak any known language whatsoever. That would be committing the Bechdel Fallacy, my piggyback codicil to Bechdel and Wallace’s eponymous test. We really shouldn’t judge other nations exclusively by comparison to Trump’s USA, but we do.

Then again, aw – who says so? You and what Canadian army, Mon-soor C? Since Trump himself delights in denigrating our (increasingly former) allies’ militaries as well as our own, I should point out that mostly volunteer Canadian contingents were renowned gut fighters in both world wars. They’ve also done battle beside GIs in conflicts from Korea to Afghanistan, winning the traditional American expression of gratitude: contemptuous ignorance Canucks were even involved.

Songs of weself: nightmare terrorist Renee Good and. . .

Foreigners indulge their own version of a Bechdel Fallacy when they assume – understandably, I grant you – that Trump is America and America is Trump. Jews here and elsewhere are now getting it in the neck in a far more virulent way from those who, taking their usually unwitting cue from Bibi Netanyahu, equate Judaism with Israel. Among the many things Hasan Piker either doesn’t know or pretends he doesn’t know is that anti-Zionism is a pretext that permits him to excuse and practice anti-Semitism, not a cause of it.

When the USA’s good old ox is the one being gored, variations on the belief predate our current Slaughterhouse-FU by decades. Try telling a French child of Marx in the 1960s that we didn’t all pay tithe to Coca-Cola. Or, in a more hopeful but equally misbegotten illusion, that our anti-Vietnam Left’s welcomely anti-American (sic) virtues couldn’t be more stirringly epitomized than by Saint Hanoi Jane Fonda, someone most U.S. patriots — left-leaning ones included — wouldn’t have trusted to vote for dogcatcher.

We also knew “documentarian” Michael Moore was an egregious tub of Lawd-above lard who wouldn’t know an ethical principle from a poem by Archy And Mehibatel’s QWERTYUIOP-hopping cockroach, but Fahrenheit 9/11 won the Palme D’Or at Cannes. Note to printer: insert mighty sigh here.

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Oh, that damned 1970 biopic. It looks authoritative even when it’s disingenuous or cloddish. Director Franklin J. Shaffner was no artist, but he knew how to make arrant crap look imposing, and George C. Scott is, well, George C. Scott – a baleful genius at dominating scenes even, or especially, when they’re balderdash. Patton has to be one of the most confident bad movies ever to come out of Hollywood.

It may go without saying that, like most men my age, I know the stupid thing practically by heart. But it didn’t make me admire that megalomaniac jackass any better. Never have, never will.

The standard take on Patton, which the movie enshrined, was and is that he was a pain in the keester who was nonetheless a brilliant general. The implication is that a great commander virtually has to be one to perform as the other. Performance is the key word here, and call me and my fellow naysayers spoilsports for thinking Patton was a pain the etc. who was a very unreliable general except when the winds of war obligingly tailored themselves to his unhuge artisanal toolbox of skills.

He performed best in the Allied chase across France after the Normandy breakout. Nice work if you can get it, pally, since his Third Army was mostly rounding up broken bits of a Wehrmacht that had irreversibly cracked after two months of grim hedgerow tenacity. His fabled pivot to relieve Bastogne during the Battle of The Bulge was a triumph of American logistical, not combat, know-how. He met no serious resistance, the battle having already turned in the Allies’ favor.

When he did and it hadn’t – at Metz and elsewhere along the German frontier from September 1944 to March ’45 – he was as stymied, teeth-gnashing and blunderbussed as every other senior American commander. His earlier dash to Palermo on his breaks from smacking GIs around during the Sicily campaign was such a showboating waste of men’s lives that even adulatory Patton had to call him on it in the indignant person of Karl Malden as Omar Bradley. Malden always did indignation with the offended quiver of a defrocked priest turned put-upon Good Humor man: even when he was playing priests, I mean. This was a canny way of ensuring audiences wouldn’t take his stern-jowled reproaches of “George” too seriously.

In fair weather or Macbethian foul, Patton was most dependable in meeting the dramatic challenge of being an unfailingly obnoxious dork. Was his battlefield “genius” worth the tsuris? Nah. Whether Eisenhower’s decision not to ship him home in disgrace after Sicily was a good judgment call or a poor one is debatable, but cashiering the slap-happy braggart was an outcome the American public of 1943 might have applauded; they were by no means as abjectly reverent as their Multiplexible kids would be. Neither were the vets who’d served under him.

Personally, from my armchair eyrie, I wouldn’t have let him anywhere near command of anything bigger than a regiment. Preferably of his beloved cavalry, letting him placidly while away World War Two guarding Wyoming. But he’d probably berate and abuse the horses until the desperate beasts made a crazed break for Manitoba and he had them machine-gunned en masse for cowardice in the face of the enemy: him.

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Hail and, one more time, farewell: Mess Assistant Second Class and Navy Cross winner Doris “Dorie” Miller, 1919-1943.

With Ronald Reagan as, perhaps unsurprisingly, the only exception – and RR was pretty gaga by then, so screw it – no living American President has ever had a major naval vessel named after him. None has while still in the White House.

Franklin Roosevelt won his aircraft-carrier bumper sticker soon after VJ-Day in 1945, but he’d died that April. Ditto JFK, Truman, Eisenhower, and Gerald Ford. Not to mention (duh) Abraham Lincoln, whose name may ring a dim eight bells if you happen to be afloat and in uniform at the moment.

Although reportedly on the all-aboard boards IRL, the USS William J. Clinton isn’t scheduled to smack the surf until 2036. Secretary of Labor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Monica Lewinsky-Fauci may have mellowed enough by then to crack a champagne bottle over its snout. Take that, Bill!

Now mellow enough herself to think everything’s funny, 89-year-old Hillary Clinton-Begala gaily invites her pal Mons to join her at Paula Jones’s Crab Shack for après-ship canapḗs and Virgin Chelsea mocktails. And so on.

The USS Obama only exists thus far in a video game: Tour of Duty: Black President, or whatever the heck it’s called. (In fact, it’s ToD: Black Ops II, which I had to look up because I got bored with armchair blazes of all-thumbs glory midway through that one. Featuring heroic French Resistance fighter Manon Batiste, who was given to reproachful sighs every time my clumsiness got her blown away again, the ancient Medal of Honor: Underground is still my hands-down if not hands-up FPS fave. But I digress.)

In other words, Donald Trump breaks the mold and gloats inanely over its shattered pieces yet again. Just this morning, I promised my girlfriend Sherry I’d cure myself of mumbling “It can’t get any worse than this” while scanning the news. It did and I did within the hour.

You’d think even Trump would be embarrassed – okay, let’s scrub that ridiculous premise and start over. More accurately, we should have known we could count on this White House to stay oblivious to the hamena-hamena effect of naming an aircraft carrier after our 45^th-47^th President while the one named for our 16^th was re-enacting the 272d day of Voyage of The Damned in the Persian Gulf.

The USS Donald J. Trump is sure to have a shitload more gold appliquḗs in the wardroom on its Return to Epstein Island: This Time It’s Personal shakedown (I’ll say) cruise. But the food will be worse because having nothing but 300,000 moldy Big Macs in the galley is sure to trigger scurvy, rickets, bluejacket-straining corpulence and finally cutlasses. Plus venereal disease if JD Vance is aboard, because why stay home for vindaloo when you can contract brucellosis at sea?

As you may have read, the Navy’s newest floating abattoir was going to be named the USS Doris Miller until kowtowing to Dear Leader looked like the better bet at crunch time. That’s as in Dorie Miller, as he’s more familiarly known, the Mess Attendant Second Class -- cough, cough – who heroically got behind a gun and started blazing away at Japanese Zeroes during Pearl Harbor. That’s despite having much less experience firing the weapon than he’d had all his life enduring white privilege.

He’d have been not only the first Black man to get a carrier named after him – tough luck, Colin Powell, maybe you shoulda kicked the bucket before peddling that Iraqi-yellowcake horse hockey to the UN because Dubya said so – but the first enlisted sailor so honored. After being impersonated by Cuba Gooding Jr. (remember him?) in Michael Bay’s dunderheaded 2001 bungle Pearl Harbor, I’d hoped that Miller, who was killed in action aboard – cough, cough – an aircraft carrier in 1943, was if nothing else finito with the lacerations of posthumous indignity. Guess again, Dorie!

Up to now, no doubt advised by the famed Norfolk law firm of Obsequious & Craven, unnamed Navy higher-ups have been given the – well, I can’t really say credit, can I? – for the monicker switcheroo. But come on: any disgusted Pippi Longstocking out there can whiff Testosterone Pete Hegseth’s smelly but bizarrely underpopulated jockstrap all over this one a mile off. Not only does he live to suck on the Trumpmobile’s exhaust pipe (outta my way, Natalie). He hates Black people, women, men with women’s Christian names, and anyone who’s ever won a medal for valor. That’s Miller’s other Navy Cross to bear.

And yes, Sherry my love: it can get worse than this. Has steadily since 2015 if not 1946, will until January 2029 if not doomsday. Trumps itself around the clock. Me, I take what consolation I can from Nelson Algren’s fantasy of Diaghilev challenging Nijinsky to “Etonne-moi.” Astonish me! “Upon which,” Algren writes, “Nijinsky hit him across the face with a nine-pound mackerel he’d been hiding behind his back.” Later, the premier danseur tells the press, “I knew he was going to say that – he used it on Cocteau last week. This time, I was ready.”

Capturing a German bunker single-handed. Normandy, 1966.

A Stone From Omaha Beach

“There it is, men. Omaha Beach, dead ahead.”

Dad

On family trips, my father drove like a juggler. His properties were cigarettes and jokes. When I catch myself remembering him in the spotlit way he’d have liked, I picture him as the Marlboro Man’s wry, brainy kid brother, with a dash thrown in of midcentury screen cutup Danny Kaye: Jim Carson’s fellow redhead, manic one-man show, and now puzzled victim of time’s forgetfulness.

“Smart, funny, fragile” was how my mom described her favorite of her two husbands in a sentimental email to us kids one recent Father’s Day. Three well-chosen words, although Dad’s son can think of some others. But 89-year-old Ginny, sitting a continent away from my Altadena bungalow in the Washington, D.C., house she’s owned for over 40 years and that my father never saw, was no doubt similarly surrounded by snippets of Jim Carson: The Movie she’d discarded as inappropriate to the occasion.

We’d all outlived him for decades by then, thanks to a botched surgery in, of all places, Gitmo. Then nothing more ominous than the location of the U.S. hospital nearest Port-au-Prince, Jim Carson’s final State Department post when he collapsed one morning with a ruptured gut, our base in Cuba wasn’t yet a byword for injustice, one stain on America’s reputation I’m glad I didn’t have to hear my diplomat dad querulously defend in his dotage. Instead, in 1972, a Navy surgeon’s clumsiness rescued him from his foolish idea of the ultimate indignity: not feeling young and promising anymore.

“Now he won’t have to get old,” was my teary-eyed mom’s improvised silver lining once peritonitis did him in. There’s no question that the idea he’d been spared something moved her. But she was already devising the Dad-as-our-own-private-JFK legend, and since I know Ginny, I couldn’t help wondering which 1930s actress – Norma Shearer, Miriam Hopkins? – had helped with the line reading. With parents like mine, it may be no wonder I ended up making my living for years as a movie critic.

Anyhow, Dad was probably best at fatherhood in a car. That’s because the question most likely to shape his behavior in any situation was “What is my audience?” He prized his reputation as the wittiest man in the U.S. Foreign Service, keeping tabs on his main rival via the Foggy Bottom grapevine as if they were a couple of opera divas.

But a lot of the time, my sister Wendy and I weren’t worth his best work, as no doubt would have been the case if he’d been a professional humorist for real. Only on vacation did we have Dad’s energy and inventiveness to ourselves, and while that wasn’t quite the same thing as having Jim Carson’s attention – good luck attracting that! – it was the substitute we doted on. None of us were skilled at mimicking a family, but we did get to behave like a star’s entourage. That was especially true during the years we were stationed in Berlin.

Call Me Charlie Checkpoint

West Berlin, I’d better say, since some place-names serve as calendars by other means. It’s as unfindable on 21^st-century maps as South Vietnam or Leningrad, in the same way a puzzler like “Omaha Beach,” for instance, would have been unfindable on a Jazz Age map of Normandy. All this was half a century ago.

We’d been transferred to ultra-topical Germany from tropical Africa – Dahomey, today Benin, back then newly granted independence from French colonial rule – in 1964, a month or two before Barry Goldwater got trounced by Lyndon Johnson in that year’s presidential election back home. Dahomey having offered him wretched material when it came to attracting Foggy Bottom’s interest in what a marvelous young fellow they had as their D.C.M. – Deputy Chief of Mission -- in Cotonou, Dad was chuffed at being sent to the Emerald City of the Cold War.

Only three years after the Wall went up, vivisected Berlin glittered in not only newspaper headlines but on bestseller lists. Thanks to John le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in From The Cold, Checkpoint Charlie – the U.S. Army’s control post for access to forbidding, largely forbidden East Berlin, with admonitory signs reading YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR in English, Russian, French, and German – was almost as famous as Charlie Chaplin.

I was eight, and nothing about Berlin struck me as unusual. When you’re a Foreign Service brat, you have no usual to measure anything by; it wasn’t as if my cranium was stuffed for comparison purposes with gladsome memories of Columbus, Ohio. (Ohio! Now there was exoticism.) Nor am I sure when obscure but lulling Dahomey, with its thunderous surf, graybeard coconut palms, and quasi-prelapsarian lack of telephones or even watches, first began to seem like a lost Eden compared to its sequel.

In our three years in West Berlin, the Carsons lived in two different houses. All right: mansions, expropriated by the U.S. Army for official housing when their German owners weren’t in a position to object. But I remember the second one best. It was on Kleiststrasse in Zehlendorf, a burgher-ish and leafy neighborhood left largely untouched by either Allied bombing raids or Russian cannonades when the Red Army finally came on. Everything in Zehlendorf was gray, or green, or beige, or dun, coddled by comma-shaped lakes the color of pewter. I can’t remember anything there ever being blue, unless the sky’s tentative version counted.

The Kleiststrasse house didn’t look humongous from the street. But inside, it had three massive stories of rooms of all sizes organized around a towering central staircase, along with a basement whose odder appurtenances could have been found in no country except Germany. The one my sister Wendy remembers is the cramped little beer cellar wedged in at the foot of the stairs, its one black-painted booth facing an equally small bar, whose invite to Wilhelmine or Weimar-era stag boozing seemed as convivial as a Volkswagen’s coffin. The one I remember is the private bomb shelter.

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Uncle Sam has left the building, but no worries. His understudy’s gonna be a star.

To paraphrase William Wordsworth saluting John Milton, George M. Cohan shouldst be living at this hour. Why? Because the Yanks are going, the Yanks are going; we’ve all gone nuts and it’s over over here.

Don’t worry, though. One day, we’re sure to recollect this in tranquility, like the Daffy Duck daffodils we are. Trump wanders lonely as a clod.

Just for starters, one needn’t have any love lost for Teheran’s mullahs – nobody does – to notice that they’re winning the war of words along with the kaboom one. It was superb to say they’ll bail on the negotiations charade until he’s out of office and can prolong the fighting until he is if need be. One official queried about Iran’s alleged assassination attempts on Trump supposedly said, in effect, “Why bother? He’s doing a great job of destroying the United States.”

Isn’t he just. You can’t help figuring the reason he wants Greenland (again) is to turn it into the Arctic’s first shithole protectorate by planting the Stars and Stripes there. But Greenland pales, so to speak, compared to our latest conquest. You may have missed Trump’s edict that the Strait of Hormuz is now U.S. TERRITORY, but it seems safe to say the Iranians won’t miss it a bit. Manifest Destry rides again!

Americans old enough to have been around for Vietnam will remember the farcical-or-was-it suggestion we should just declare victory and pull out. After bin Laden’s killing. Obama could have actually done this and bugged out of Afghanistan, and why he didn’t still mystifies me. Trump has invented a new variant: declare victory and go on banging his ICU-ready pompadour against a brick wall until his and our dizziness is dizzy. Iran has now been annihilated – and yet, bafflingly, retained enough cognizance of its former surroundings to allegedly “beg” for a deal – more times than the Jolly Green Giant ever got to say “Ho, ho, ho.”

Miraculously, the Head Headbanger still has enough lack of wits available to ask himself if there’s anything he’s forgotten. In the nick of time, he’s remembered he can nip into the john to confound and alienate one of the country’s most durable military and commercial partners. No, not Canada; Canada’s gone. That flushing noise you heard on Monday was Seoul rejoining its shithouse ancestors.

It’s well known that Trump would order Ivanka to turn herself into a maggot-infested calzone if it pleased Kim Jong-Un. He’s always refused to do so to reawaken Jared Kushner’s libido; haven’t they got enough changeling kids, for Christ’s sake? But Dear Leader is one of the very few people whose good opinion he actually values, which says everything about his values.

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Repurposed statue of Jesus H. Christ at the entrance to the Horton Media Enterprises Mall outside Crevecoeur, O-D.

11. JerUSAlem

Mutt Hasbro challenged me a while ago. “If O-D is so basketball-crazy, how come you’ve never been in the Final Four once? You’re like the Avignon Papacy, you corn-fed shnooks. Or Joan of Arc telling herself it’s okay because she’s gonna be a saint one day while she’s getting roasted at the Friars Club.”

In America, baseball is the great leveler, football the great divider. Nobody can deny the NFL prospers more under Republican administrations; it’s piggybacking on the Pentagon budget that makes saluting our troops lucrative for pigskin owners. The real augury of Reagan’s 1980 victory – and mine – was the Dallas Cowboys’ run as “America’s team.” Hasbro: “If you’re a real American, you have to hate the Cowboys. Because the Cowboys are America.”

B-ball fans, by comparison, are forever Stendhal’s happy few, no matter how many of us there are. On a Codel to Jerusalem when I was a juvenile bomb-thrower in the House, shrimpy Rep. Woodman Singer (D-NY) tried bonding with me in his superior way by chatting about the Knicks. I cut him off because only the nation’s most weird-ass cities – New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Vegas lately – think the NBA is where it’s at. In my part of the country, which is the country if you ask me, it’s all about our college teams.

Mutt was right, though. In all our years in the NCAA, neither Wodie U. nor our state archrivals Edie – fucking Bourjaily, man – have never made it to the toppermost of the hoopstermost. It’s as if, on the national level, we don’t even exist. That’s always amused Kirk Ghentile, whose relationship to college ball is as convoluted as Woodman Singer’s. That’s not only because they’re both Jewish urbanites; it’s because they’re both short.

Mutt Hasbro is neither, but he can impersonate both when the whim is on him. Like a lot of people in Nola, he organizes his personality through parody. His spoofs of a frantic ofay who wants to be Black are especially choice, because he’s gifted at turning air quotes into an inside job.

That was the Mutt he hauled out when I gave the standard Nice State answer to a question that vexes Hi-Dies more than we like to admit: “That’s simple. Not enough African Americans in Ohidiana, or Negroes, as we went back to calling them once everybody got fed up with ‘African American.’ If you wanted to preserve any sense of rhythm in a conversation, it just took too long to say.”

“Too many honkies, you mean.”

Cheerfully, I Houyhnhnmed at him. “You have said the thing which is not.”

“The thing which is snot, I know. I know. I get that a lot.”

We may still get to the Final Four in my lifetime, but I’m no spring chicken and will settle for Edie U. if need be. Predictably, one player from there is the only O-D b-baller whose name Mutt, Kirk, and Woodman Singer all recognize, and he wasn’t even a native Hi-Die: an Austin-Boston hybrid with a Texican mother and a father from the Baked Bean State. His name was Larry Bird Johnson.

How he ended up in the Nice State beats me, but the statue of him in front of E. O-D. U.’s Montgomery Hall of Justice always surprises out-of-staters with its diminutiveness. “That can’t be life-size,” they say. But it is. Unlike Kirk, Woodman Singer, and even Mutt when he’s in the mood, LB-Jay, as we call him for auditory differentiation from our 36^th President, wasn’t Jewish. He just stood five foot nine, explaining why he never made it to the Celtics after college.

∞

When I was an undergrad, my thesis adviser knew better than to ask me to ever drive him the whole way to Bourjaily for academic conferences at snooty Edie once his Beetle died as my Beatles had. But Kirk did pester me to take him up to Crevecoeur once or twice, and it was for a reason R. Mutt Hasbro would have appreciated. Kirk wanted to see whatever was left of JerUSAlem.

On Ohidiana’s teary trail of failed and abandoned theme parks, it was the most legendary snafu: the Titanic if not White Star Line Ark of our forlorn bids to attract tourism. It was the brainchild, if paternity deserves that insult to its intelligence, of a onetime O-D carny named Yancey Lord. He’d named his boy Jesus H. Christ, and the kid looked as miserable as you’d expect about that and pretty much everything else that had happened to him without his input. If you knew Yancey Lord, that was pretty much everything.

As debacles go, JerUSAlem was a humdinger. Yancey’s son almost got pneumonia from being crucified five times a day so parkgoers could chuck MLB baseballs to dunk him in the Sea of Galilee. He was supposed to astound them by walking on water but kept missing the plank, maybe on purpose since wood splinters risked giving him blood poisoning and he was a hemophiliac. The on-site draft brew, Beersheba, was glue diluted with bat urine compared to our Chief’s Head, and maybe Yancey shouldn’t have subcontracted his biggest in-state competitor to make the swill for him under the table.

People dumb enough to buy tickets to Lazarus’s Wild Ride kept getting stuck underground before reaching the papier-mache boulder that was supposed to shunt itself aside when Yancey’s still towel-raw kid saved them from asphyxiation. But the worst was Gill Again’s Wake of The Flood, which shuttled facsimile “survivors” along tracks mounting miniature Arks. Gill Again was the brand name of an impoverished conglomerate devised to sell used worms to the Hirsuit’s muskellunge fishermen.

Wake of the Flood was a placid-seeming journey until passengers were instructed to look upward and gape in horror at drowned department-store mannequins floating in a dank tank above them. Never-filtered pond scum and stray Coney Island whitefish didn’t quite shroud their crazily staring glass eyes.

Then the tank burst one muggy tornado-friendly day, my Ralphie Laughlin nemesis Anton Arquebus lost the best summer job he’d ever had – that was the ill wind’s lone blown good – and JerUSAlem was done for. People said it cost too much anyway. Jesus was a pimply disappointment who couldn’t have gotten laid by his own mother in a New Orleans whorehouse and Beersheba just sucked moose.

Kirk was eager to get a gander at whatever was left. “Everybody needs an Alamo,” he wagged it up for Helen’s benefit. But there wasn’t much, since Coke and Cole Horton had bought the acreage and built Crevecoeur’s biggest and ugliest shopping mall in its place.

The only empiric relic, so to speak, was the Messiah: not Yancey’s kid Jesus H., who’d moved to Washington with his putative dad when Lord got a job as an advance man for Ronald Reagan – Lee Atwater ousted him fast – but a misshapen statue of J.C. riding a donkey toward what had been the park’s entrance and was now Horton Media Enterprises’ flagship home-entertainment center.

Some of the Flood’s mannequins had been repurposed for the mall’s Horst’s outlet, but anonymously: PTSD was a concern. Whether the customers or the mannequins were more vulnerable to it was obscure. Kirk was delighted, though. “If only they’d kept the name. Can you imagine a better one for a temple to the Golden Calf?”

That was after the first Mrs. Harbinger – something he never called her, either – surprised the newly elected Boy Mayor by volunteering to drive my ex-thesis adviser up in my stead, saying she was curious too and could use some new clothes for City Hall events. Trusting her implicitly, which was our preferred brand of marital communication when we had any, I didn’t even husbandishly ask if anything unusual had happened when he and she ended up unexpectedly sharing a motel room outside Crevecoeur, an odd chime with my stag graduation-week trip to Biloxi. As much as Kirk enjoyed shegetz consumerism, Bunny Ashtray’s saga would have boggled his mind.

∞

I sometimes wonder what would happen if R. Mutt and Kirk Ghentile ever met. Helen caught me off guard once after our divorce by idly remarking she’d thought off and on of having an affair with my favorite Wodie prof.

“I guess I just wanted to know,” she said with one of her small smiles. Unhappy wives alternate between being the household’s airy legacy cat and a Doberman pinscher you’ve unwisely agreed to pet-sit until its true owner gets back from Tahiti, Monte Carlo, Miami Beach or Stalingrad.

Left unclear was whether she’d wanted to know more about me, more about him, or more about why he put up with traipsing to the lending library in scene-setting Tsar Alexander I snowstorms to borrow successive pirated editions of Helen’s and his Craig, all smudges, typos and cheap rice paper. Pushkin and me, how we suffered. But I’d still been the original’s facsimile in our days at 2007 Emma Peale Drive and that’s why I protested.

“Honey! I wasn’t even in Congress yet.”

If that was an admission, it was one that hardly qualified as news to her. “I knew you were going, though. Maybe I just wanted to take some of you with us.”

I had no idea if this was a circuitous allusion to our marriage’s nonexistent progeny. Helen could be guileless around strangers, but she was cagy with herself: more so than I’d noticed in my mayoral days, or perhaps she ever did.

If she knew by then she’d never have my baby, was bearing Kirk Ghentile’s – Kirk Ghentile’s! – child a smuggled substitute in her imagination that stayed unbeknownst to the rest of her mind? What makes having a subconscious mind intolerable for anybody with half a brain is that it never rejects anything.

Christ. Weren’t she and Kirk already coparenting me? I had a flash of a firstborn’s jealousy at an unwelcome sibling, but I could never tell if Helen was oblivious to those nuances or just unperturbed.

“But Helen!” I felt a need to object on some other grounds. “Kirk’s shorter than you.”

“He’s shorter than you too. Think of the novelty.”

Which was, incidentally, confirmation of something I’d never been concerned about anyway: unlike me, she’d abided by our wedding vows, most likely right up until our divorce.

“He’d’ve talked your ear off, you know. Before, after, probably during.”

“So it wouldn’t all be novel, then. ‘Something old, something new, something borrowed – ”

“Something Jew?”

“Oh, you’re bad.” But she giggled.

“Sorry you never got to find out.” I thought more jocularity was on the menu, but good-humored foolishness is always deadlier to the joker than the ill-tempered kind. Have I mentioned Helen has gotten lewder in our AARP years?

“Oh, don’t worry, Craigie. I’m sure we’d’ve let you watch.”

One of divorce’s unsung pleasures, and they are many, is getting to cop to intuitions that were off limits in happier, or were they really?, times. My ex-wife got doused with a placebo dose of my no longer A-plus grin: “I just did.”

Solange Hemmings’ Gay Paree Hawings

Once she was no longer mine, my newly spirited Helen’s humor doubled as Liz Fowler’s fleshy fantasy, making me occasionally imagine my two spouses swapping skins. I suspect mentally transposing them never worked worth a damn because, no matter what happened or didn’t with either or both, I stayed stubbornly – that is, helplessly – me.

Figuratively as well as literally, every marriage has multiple rooms, and no doubt the best ones make hay from freely flowing among them. The layout of Bucky Shore and Conor Ryder’s West Wyandot condo predicted how their marriage would work. For many of us more run-of-the-mill millers-about, though, sex is what happens in a separate chamber of our existence – again, both literally and figuratively. So it was with both of mine.

Each was a comedy of expectations. Because Helen had first seduced me on a byway of the Wodie campus’s spavined notion of the great (but too chilly) outdoors – seduced us, rather; seduced herself and then me before I realized I was even involved – I expected amorous tusslings would tizzy me from everywhere from alfresco to UNESCO. The Legomaniac prologemena of her bedlamp switching off on our first night on Peale Drive told me a bed, four enclosing walls, fresh sheets and a lockable door (why? Practicing for our Craig-liquidated bairns’ intrusions, I suppose) were her conventlike sine qua nun for marital congress from then on.

Liz, by contrast, would have happily bedded me anywhere from the Eiffel Tower’s hypodermical tip to the Paris sewers, and guess which desire she came closer to fulfilling. Any marriage that thinks a sojourn in France is the answer doesn’t know beans about Louis-Napolḗon and Eugḗnie, let alone Madame de Maintenon. So I became the demure one, affecting that Geenie had made a severe and chastened widower of me: you know, 15 years earlier.

Like a lot of people who brag up their licentiousness, Liz had no imagination, none. The boniest drawing of an outrḗ erotic scenario was enough to get her champing at the bit to actualize it, skipping all the fun elaborations only undisturbed fancy can rollick in without misgivings and messes. She thought it was my fault our Paris tryst with Solange Hemmings was a bust, and maybe it was. All I’ll say about that is that premature ejaculation was an oxymoron – the Thing Which Is Not – among Senators in my day.

Recovering Senators, too. One day at a time!

The transaction – and in France, yet! – was what stimulated Liz. We were still on the plane, for Pete’s sake, when she shared her hoarded inside soapdish about onetime Industry ingenues who kept body and soullessness together by making their considerable annual nut off a single night servicing an OPEC sheik or World Bank magnate from brutish Cologne. They’d pay a king’s rancid ransom to rape and sodomize their fond memories of That Darn Tween or Upside Down At Sea. Solange was only the exotic daughter of the onetime face of Sallie Mae’s Georgia Grits on supermarket canisters in the ‘60s, but at least that put her within Liz’s budget.

What my second wife didn’t know, and you’d best believe I chose not to enlighten her, was that her true dream was to be the woman being paid, not the one forking over the Euros. But Hollywood lives by seeing one such exchange of specie as a reasonably gratifying substitute for the other. That the whole thing had been a ridiculous fizzle wouldn’t cheat her of what she wanted most of all, which was a chance to brag about it at Don Cape’s next shindig.

That was why Liz had a good reputation as an agent. She seldom outright lied, trusting instead in Hollywood’s favorite form of needlework: embroidery. The best of all is when you can trust others to do the embroidering for you; this proves you’ve arrived.

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If we could turn back time. Life aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, summer 2026.

In November 1944, the world was at war, transportation was at a premium and other urgent priorities were more pressing. The U.S. government moved heaven and earth to get hot Thanksgiving dinners with all the trimmings to millions of overseas military personnel, including front-line combat troops serving in miserable conditions.

Times have changed. Before agreeing to lend ships, personnel and facilities for the 1954 movie version of Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny – in hindsight, it’s rather remarkable they did – the U.S. Navy required a prefatory title stating that no mutiny had in fact ever occurred aboard an American naval vessel. The disclaimer conceivably fudged reality by a shade or two, but what if those times are changing as well?

Just offhand, one doesn’t easily recall a precedent for U.S. sailors having to be restrained from hurling themselves overboard at sea because they couldn’t take the scarce and rotten food, the miserable communications with loved ones at home, and a protracted wartime deployment with no end in sight. The Persian Gulf ordeals of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln have gotten massive coverage, but the media has been wary of emphasizing a key factor that illuminates just what those sailors intended to do. The carrier was and indeed still is, as of this writing, in mid-ocean, making it unlikely that the would-be escapees anticipated getting to swim ashore. Alcatraz inmates would have had a better chance of surviving the plunge.

If outright mutiny isn’t a risk as yet, a rash of potential suicides is reasonable grounds for supposing our Iran war might not have been such a great idea. Hopeless isn’t a word often on people’s lips to describe a U.S. Navy crew’s collective state of mind. Neither is despair.

It would be absurd, I think, to conjecture this as a protest against Trump’s war except of the most inchoate sort. These young men – the reports so far have mentioned no women, which doesn’t mean none have been tempted to do likewise – aren’t being “political.” If you’ll forgive me for speculating about their plight – I’ve never served, so take this with as much salt as salt water can summon – they’re going nuts because they’re being fed garbage and nothing makes time pass except excruciation, they’re largely cut off from any world worth staying in touch with, and they don’t know when or if they’ll get home. So far as I can tell, they hate their lives because their lives just suck.

“If the San Pablo dies, she dies clean”: contemplating suicide, Richard Crenna quells a mutiny in The Sand Pebbles, 1966.

It’s also unknown how many or few sailors are in this overwrought state aboard the Lincoln or elsewhere in the Gulf. But even if it’s a smattering, that’s one smattering too many. We also have absolutely no idea how many or few of their shipmates witnessed or heard about these incidents and privately thought, “Man, I wish I had that guy’s guts.” O Captain, my captain?

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He had an underdog chip on his shoulder the size of a Thunderbird about snotty Ivy League refugees like me, which was -- in a paradox he might appreciate -- not totally deserved but completely justified. I thought his advocacy led him down some blind alleys (he never gave up on Billy Joel and Bob Seger and was belligerent about ignoring their faults as artists), but he had integrity and never-say-die passion like few writers in our uncomfortably shared wheelhouse could match. Godspeed.

10. Enter The Rescuer Munchkin

My new girlfriend perceived early on that mentioning she had a kid wasn’t a good topic when I was nearby. Monica Heide looked interested once, but performed her imitation of a kriegie looping piano wire around an unsuspecting Luftwaffe guard’s neck by barking “Senator sighting” with unusual briskness when I walked in on them in R-286.

Gigi, Geenie, was never in my office that early. I couldn’t help guessing she’d been pumping Heidi for her new Senator’s back story on the sly. How motherhood had bobbed up in that eluded me – I wasn’t fully operative that day, hung over – but I had a hunch. She’d gotten rid of her Preventions T-shirt and certainly would never have worn it to the office, but I’d just pictured the Man of The Century’s face looking more distended than its b &w norm as it grew convexed, fisheye-lens style, by her newly swollen belly.

I knew the child she hadn’t set eyes on since she left Alamogordo – or talked inane candied gobbledygook to on the phone, not while I was around – was permanently rueful news in her mute Geenieverse. So what cued her to unmute it to Monica or anyone baffled me, not least as she knew it was permanently unpleasant news to me.

She’d seen how automatically my face evaded nearby air – my nostrils, eyes, everything – when Pam Buchanan’s annoyingly Parisian (what nerve!) daughter-in-law turned and swung her pomegranate infant’s riding-high nugget-noggin to blink at mine in the Rochambeau’s close-quarters elevator. “Pardon! Ce n’ḗtait pas un attaque, ” said the spherical mama, graciously assuming the brat had committed its first social gaffe.

“You’re lucky you don’t have to kiss babies anymore,” said Geenie once we’d made the corridor. “You couldn’t get elected Boy Wonder of Gotham City.”

“It’s not that,” I fibbed. “I love old Pam, but those Cadwallers give me a pain. All that asshole smug French!”

“Uh-huh. I bet they have a saying about that in O-D.”

“Come on, they’re pretentious. We aren’t. I mean, what kind of name is ‘Panama’?”

“You don’t get to complain about that, ‘Senator.’ I’m Geenie, I’m Gigi. Heck, at least I call you Craig sometimes for variety’s sake. Besides, I’ve never met people as pretentious about being unpretentious as you Nice State assholes.”

∞

One silver lining of taking her to Yugo for her birthday was that, with only a couple of exceptions, she gave up on us going public as a couple. I knew that hurt her, but then lots of things had or did or always would and I wasn’t the perp in any of the others.

Being Geenie, she probably intuited the boulder looming in my Ohidiana Jones skedaddle from responsibility. Becoming that atrocious thing, a Washington couple, would set in motion a cat’s cradle only dissolvable by marriage.

I told myself I couldn’t do that to Helen Wabash, eliding 2007 Emma Peale Drive’s testimony that I already had once and what makes men tiresomely unpredictable is our predictability. Helen and Geenie , who never met in real life so far as I know, didn’t have much in common otherwise except their intrusive damned intelligence, but there was one ostensible surprise I could see coming a mile off thanks to the friend who no longer called herself Mrs. Harbinger. In fact, Helen never had, but never mind.

Having already done it once herself, Geenie might be fickle enough to want not only marriage – that was no secret, just another one sublimated in nudity, Scotch, and omerta – but children. Few things about me are less Hi-Die than the fussy habit of revising my latest epitaph in the expectation I’ll never get or need one anyway. Dole wouldn’t, I know that much. But I kept and still keep coming back to Braz Cubas’s final words as invented by Brazil’s Machado de Assis, his creator: “I had no progeny, I did not contribute to the legacy of our misery.”

What could make me more different than Halloween Jack, I ask you? I don’t mean his biological brats – or brat, if District gossip’s accurate – but the hundreds of young ninnies, plus two middle-aged ones, he cajoled to go forth in the goddam Peace Corps. The two dozen or so O-D kids, most of them witless but the Roanokers witting, who signed up as volunteers for HARBINGER IN 1980 were just a feeble Xerox of that mucker’s children.

Reader, Bucky Shore married one. But never mind, never mind.

I Wish I’d Been Your Mother

One homunculus from her yesteryears Geenie needed no prompting not to talk about was Huck Grimm, the puny-chinned pun on New Mexico manhood who’d married and impregnated her before she could graduate from Pat Garrett High. Even the WashPost’s flying monkeys, soaring forth to back up Gail Hardaway’s Dentyne gumshoeing, could find only a single pic of him, eyes blackened into cinder-sockets by arid Sputnik Inn sunlight next to his pickup.

He was modeling Alamogordo’s apparent requirements for work as a roustabout: an impoverished swastika of a shirtless physique and a lower face like a gnawed thumbnail that had split from the parental cuticle to play out its hand. Otherwise, even the local P.D. ended up deciding he’d vanished from the earth.

I didn’t need a pop-psych why-to – ubiquitous on spinning wire book carousels in drugstores in my college and Boy Mayor days, now replaced by get-rich-quick guides to the unexamined good life available online – to tell me why Geenie often reminisced about her childhood. It filled in the blank left in our relationship by verboten discussions of her maternity, whether actual (I shuddered) or projected (I ducked).

Lulu and Chester had lots of multitasking to do in her psyche. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have wondered if she was gilding the lily about shining in Once Upon A Mattress junior year. The one request I made didn’t seem all that unreasonable to me, but she took it badly.

“Please, Gigi. Anything about when you were little is okay, but don’t ever tell me about the messes you used to make when you were eating.” Picturing that lovely mouth goonishly festive with Chef Boyardee and a banged spoon and a giggly grin revolted me.

“That’s odd. I mean I remember you buying me dinner more than once, and – but that’s really odd. Frodo.” If you ask me, punctuation is every man’s enemy and every woman’s friend.

“Sorry. Not sure where that one came from.” (Freddy and Flossie, Flossie and Freddy! All nine-year-olds are Borgias.)

“That figures. You wouldn’t do anything you do if you wasted time wondering where any of it came from.”

“That’s not true.” But it wasn’t the right time to tell her about Montelḗon. It never would be, but I thought there would: Harbinger miscalculates again.

“I meant with me. I say why, and you say oh let’s go.”

“Not my favorite Beatles song.”

“Well, I know it’s no ‘Obla-Di Obla-Da’” – and we were merry again. She’d loved my story about being the boy who didn’t see the Beatles in 1964, finding my hysteria at sharing them endearing.

The Liverpool lads didn’t come up much otherwise, despite her birth on the day Sgt. Pepper came out. I didn’t want to alienate my 23-, then briefly 24-year-old mistress by espousing treasonable beliefs. At 40 you start thinking younger people’s attitudes toward everything are generic. Their urchin piety about the vanished Beatles they were cheated of tops the list.

R. Mutt Hasbro set me straight on that one, which was one of his twisted specialties. “That’s how Geenie and me connected when Shari introduced us,” he told me in our first wary conversation after he copped to having known her too – known her earlier, in fact. “We dug it that we both liked the Monkees better when we were little.”

“Huh. I only knew about Negro Barbie.”

“Then you don’t know her favorite Monkee.”

“Not the fake Cockney shrimp.”

“’Course not. He was nobody’s favorite and Kirshner had to pretend he hadn’t been wrong about what little girls want. But here’s the surprise: not Mickey either.”

“Well, it can’t have been Tork.” I snorted. “Christ, I’d have wanted her dead,” which was rash even at Molly’s. Lucky me Jack Kryker wasn’t around!

Or HillaryAvenger, either. “Nah, nah. It was Nesmith for us both. That stupid wool hat, remember? She said she wanted to know even in fourth grade what it smelled like, because it looked like he never washed it.”

Despite not being a parent (God forbid!), I sometimes think I understand children pretty well. But maybe not girl ones, though. “I never knew that.”

“Did you need to? She told me that to tell me she hadn’t changed a bit. And she wouldn’t have, if – “ Mutt made a gesture of thrusting something living into his mouth, chomping down, and throwing the rest away.

“Come again?”

“It’s a code Shari Orfevre and I used to have at the Oh-Three-Oh. It means ‘Oh my God! I think I just bit the head off a chicken. Help me.’”

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Orson Welles as Mercutio, 1933.

He doesn’t cop to being MoT, but I’ve often thought Mercutio is the most Jewish character in Shakespeare. He’s certainly a sunnier one than oh, yeah, Shylock, who’s hauling around a few agendas too many for individuality to squeeze past them. The puckish and idiosyncratically brainy pal to a not especially interesting goy, on the other hand – who among us WASPs doesn’t recognize that dude, especially if we’ve gone to college?

He’s been on my mind lately because, despite its potency as an imprecation, “a plague on both your houses” is lousy political advice. People on both the left and right who follow it by claiming choices don’t matter because the system’s rigged are doing something Richard Nixon made a ritual of telling us he always considered but shunned every time: taking the easy way out. By his own lights, resigning was – but what the heck, nobody’s perfect.

Enthusiasts for the idea that voting is a mug’s game never admit the notion’s true appeal is the luxury of never having to think for themselves and pick a damn team already. Everything’s settled, above all in their own minds. Trump may well be convinced he got gypped out of a landslide win in 2020, but convinced isn’t the same as actually believing it’s true. If you’re him, what’s true doesn’t matter, never has.

Back here in Sanityburg, though, anyone who thinks Trump’s 2016 and 2024 victories were a cabal’s doing doesn’t know much about cabals. They wouldn’t be sinister if they were that stupid.

Nonetheless, even I have times when “a plague on both your houses” really hits the spot as cocktails go. Thanks to the ideological and generational clash underway between DSA leftists and Establishment Democrats – media-hyped, but hardly phony – right now is one of those times.

As it happens, the key bone of contention is of special interest to Jews. And you probably thought I was funning about Mercutio’s ethnicity for the hell of it.

I should probably say that Establishment Democrats have been a nemesis of mine since Alexandra Ocasio- Cortez was a toddler. Bill Clinton wasn’t their first choice in 1992; Mario Cuomo was, and my guess is he kicked the bucket 23 years later still mulling whether to throw his hat or a towel in the ring. But Bill and Hillary’s New Democrat shtick got old for me fast. Bill himself groused early on that he and his White House team had devolved into Eisenhower Republicans: pro-business budget skinflints wary of social-justice initiatives and projects, especially if they cost money.

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“The poor dope. He always wanted a pool.”

Here’s Trump 1.0 to reporters in the Rose Garden, October 2018, musing about then Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s unquenchable fondness for the gilded bat piss Americans call beer: “I never had a glass of alcohol. I never had alcohol, for whatever reason. Can you imagine if I had? What a mess I would be.”

We don’t have to imagine it anymore. Not that I think POTUS has started hitting the sauce at age 80, but the behavior is identical. The slurred speech and uncertain gait, the frequent confusion about his own location, the baffled hunt for common words – “video” was the most recent to elude his T-Rex thesaurus. “Tapes like moving cameras” was what his coiffed (not quaffed) cranial residue coughed up instead.

More to the point, in happier times, Trump’s off-the-cuff divagations were divagations from something – some agreed-on point of origin the planet was familiar with, however vaguely. Now he wanders from crabapples to blood oranges according to no recognizable treasure map of the orchard.

His ad hominem attacks on perceived enemies always ranged from bizarre – wind turbines, which he’s now gone full-on Donald J. Quixote and calls “windmills” all the time – to petulant (Rosie O’Donnell, the “fake news,” Colbert). But at least we could more or less suss out why they peeved him. No more.

It’s terrifying to think the Trump Americans knew before this January was a Trump lashed to the mast by icy self-control and rhetorical filters up the gumstump. Not only figuratively but, it appears, literally, the adage that you don’t crap where you eat – or do anything else, for that matter – is an adage for good reason seems to have escaped his notice.

Why January? I dunno, maybe because that’s when we smashed Venezuela into submission and opposition leader Maria Corina Machado retaliated at a time and place of her own choosing, as George W. Bush used to say, by gifting Trump with his very own (actually her) Nobel Peace Prize, a sort of monkey’s paw disguised as a handshake. That kind of heartfelt encomium can really go to a guy’s head if it finds its way past his Distant Early Warning hair, and talk about your gilded bat piss. Don’t ever tell Trump all glory is fleeting.

Some alcoholics – and some mental patients, too – exhibit completely altered personalities when the fit is on them. In many cases, though, we get an unhinged exaggeration of what they were like all along. That’s Trump’s crass cross to bear. Always prone to focus on inessentials, he now has a drunk’s fixation on them, seemingly for the same reason: an escape from reality.

He can barely muster interest in his war with Iran even when it comes to figuring out how to conceal that we’ve lost it. (The Pentagon recently invited any interested military personnel to chip in with inventive ideas.) But don’t get him started on Reflecting Pool “vandalism” or his idiot ballroom or how do you solve a problem like Melania or how he got cheated in 2020 or how he might run again in 2028. He’ll talk his own wounded-warrior ear off.

Has any President, even Jimmy Carter micromanaging the White House tennis court, ever driveled away so much time on vanity-goaded trivialities? If Trump were honest with us – I know, I know, it’ll happen when ICE agents fly – he’d admit that he doesn’t have anything better to do. Not anymore.

Proof AI can produce terrific porn. Trump himself posted this image on social media.

If The DJT seems on the verge of abbreviating his monogram to the plain old d.t.’s, the Republican party – hey, remember them? Trump doesn’t – is behaving like a pack of late-born lushes who can’t quite face it’s AA time. Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy verged on tears as he confessed he’d vote for 101 Dalmatians yegg Todd Blanche for Attorney General because Trump might pick someone even worse. That was about as close as a Senator can get to brokenly mumbling “My name is Bill C, and I’m a Trumpaholic.” It’s enough to make you miss the austere dignity Mitch McConnell brought to the job of acknowledging he’s got no principles or ethics whatsoever.

Even if he survives in office until January 2029 – an increasingly dubious position if you ask me – we’re witnessing the last days of Donald Trump and the GOP knows it. They just can’t disenthrall themselves, as Lincoln once advised Americans to do, because they don’t have a clue what comes next. That has to rattle them to the point of gibbering.

What does it tell them that the nearest thing to a rising Republican star these days is Thomas Massie, the vigilante caped crusader to Trump’s Penguin? As we all know, the Penguin wouldn’t be much without his monocle (decor!), his suave cigarette holder (how antiwoke!), and a gift of gab considerably more elegant than DJT’s. If you don’t think Massie is hoping to lead a de-Penguined GOP, let us note he’s joined the pack baying for Fauci’s head on a stick: a MAGA priority, not a White House one. Me, I’m betting Trump will end up getting blamed for being Fauci’s enabler, and Liz Cheney shoulda been so lucky.

Meanwhile, out in Zipper-Over country, an increasing minority (so far) of stout-hearted MAGANs (get ‘em by the heart and their brains will follow) are following Lincoln’s advice and disenthralling themselves like gangbusters. Not only are they fed up with Trump, they’re manning and womaning up to admit they got conned.

That’s exactly what snots like me thought they’d never do, and we-a culpa. Does a day go by without more social-media video of dismayed Trump voters voicing existential buyer’s remorse? As liberals learned in 2016 and Trump is discovering now, getting these people pissed off is no recipe for placidity.

Besides being, whatchacallit, against the Constitution – i.e., illegal, even if Samuel Alito is sure to go down on any ship he knows he won’t go down with – Trump’s fetish about getting a third term is growing more hallucinatory thanks to one helluva inconvenient truth. If he ran, he’d lose, and not like Gerald Ford and then Jimmy Carter did. More like Herbert Hoover did, or Andrew Johnson (who did madly try for the 1868 Democratic – not Republican – nomination) would’ve.

What’ll Trump leave behind? Not a ballroom, that’s for sure. Not his triumphal arch. I suspect the Kennedy Center will survive him too; if the Reichstag could be gotten back into respectable shape by the Germans, restoring the KC should be child’s play. The last completed renovation of the Trump era may well be the $ 5.1 million worth of gold he slapped onto the massive equine statues abutting the Arlington Memorial Bridge. Trump’s new Gilded Age has turned into a gelded one, even if so far only the frightened horses know the difference for sure. Just say neigh?

It’s happened before. Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were born under a year apart and around 120 miles from each other. That sort of factoid is meaningless, but it’s our luck to live in a country where meaningless things are fraught. If they wanted to lead two different countries, so what? Doesn’t every President?

Neither Davis nor Lincoln is thought of as a Kentuckian anywhere else than in Kentucky, which takes whatever it can get in the way of a spearcarrier role in goosing the nation’s destiny along. Abe’s people split for Illinois and Jeff’s for Mississippi, giving count-’em three states a leg up in provoking tourists’ morbid curiosity. With rare exceptions, all interest in history is morbid, starting with Gethsemane and working its way down.

So who are Lincoln and Davis’s sitcom-edition avatars? One is Dem Governor Andy Beshear, due to leave office in 2027 and highly unlikely to pack it in then. The guy already spends lots of time with his family and doesn’t care if the electorate knows it.

The other, more Gothically, is GOP Rep. Thomas Massie, recently ousted from Kentucky’s Fourth District but newly prominent as an anti-Trump smartypants in troglodyte clothing thanks to the DJT faithful’s most Pyrrhic victory yet. Call that being cast into the wilderness at your peril.

Of the two, Beshear is better-known, which must be an exciting novelty for him. One of the less thrilling proofs is that he’s recently come in for his first bout of unflattering national catcalls. Thank the Man in The Iron Husk: Mitch McConnell, the world’s youngest living cadaver.

As Sing Along Without Mitch entered its 119^th chorus of “99 Bottles of Beer on The Wall” this month, Beshear was in his second or third week of getting abuse for not forcing McConnell to sit up in his hospital bed, face a nation’s irritated smartphones, and confess he’s been dead since mid-June. The Nixonesque denial Mitch might have resorted to in spryer days – “I am not a corpse” – bombed in New Haven weeks ago. The hunt now required somebody new to blame for the whole Exterminating Angel shindig, and Governor Andy, as we call him, fit the bill.

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“Kill the Wabbit, KILL THE WABBIT!” Elmer Fudd as the O.G. Christopher Nolan fanboy

Scoffing that critics are just a bunch of wannabe rock musicians, movie directors or what have you has always struck me as a calumny. I think I can speak for the breed in spilling the true gen. Like so many of you, we’re frustrated assassins. We have nothing but cowardice to thank for our gutless Plan B.

Given that predilection, is it any surprise that “Lighten up” is our least favorite advice ever? It’s often followed by a helpful reminder that Such-and-Such is “only a movie” -- or, to quote one Facebook commenter on Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, “It is a movie, not a classics lesson.” Nice to have that clarified.

I have no idea why “I’m just not interested” strikes people as an inadequate gloss on my non-eagerness to goggle along with the rest of the world at Nolan’s plus-size Trojan. I don’t like his work much and get no thrill from Event Movies. Done; next.

While it’s possible I’ve led a sheltered life, I’ve also never detected any huge public keening for a screen adaptation of Homer’s helpful guide to what James Joyce was on about. It’s no Gone With The Wind, whose readers began casting the movie three years before David O. Selznick released his pathetic flop. They were right about Rhett from the get-go, but nobody had Vivien Leigh on their Bingo card.

More to the point, the days when I miss being a working critic can be counted on the fingers of Mickey Mouse’s gloved hand. However, the days when I go akimbo all over from gratitude at not having to earn my keep anymore by weighing in on movies I don’t give two hoots about are known here on the prayer rug as Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

On Sundays, I rest, because all that akimbo indifference is exhausting. As a born-again kibitzer, though – a repentant frustrated assassin, if you like – I hope I’ll be forgiven for enjoying the ongoing intellectual Whack-a-Mole over Nolan’s moom pitcher. (Again: haven’t seen, don’t wanna.) Anytime a debate over only-a-movie spills over from the usual print and social-media suspects to the nation’s high-whinnying punditocracy, it’s a giveaway that ineptitude has become no deterrent to weighing in.

Glutton for punishment that I am, I couldn’t resist checking how long it took the NYT’s Maureen Dowd, whose major claim to expertise on the topic must be her eyewitness view of the sack of Troy in early middle age, to add her two drachmas. Answer: eight days, and wow. She must be getting as lazy as Mitch McConnell about providing hot-off-the-presses proof she’s still au courant.

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Artwork: Sean A. Garrison, “The Port of Alexandria in 202 CE.”

\9. Booth Day

HillaryAvenger is ghosting me lately. That’s probably not the right 21^st-century slang, I’ve been given to understand by Cassie and Em Em. My smartphone nemesis isn’t ignoring my messages to her, as I haven’t sent any and wouldn’t know how. Our peculiar (I’ll say) intimacy doesn’t depend on ever having communicated in a two-way sense of the word. But my former mother died today, or maybe it was yesterday, a few but not enough years back if you ask me, and HillaryAvenger didn’t even deign to interrupt the anniversary with one of her viruses.

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My guess is that few if any Pompeiians found time to mutter Quod erat divertens, erat, let alone add it to the ‘hood’s immutably preservable graffiti, on that fateful autumn day in CE 79. But the rough ‘Murican translation – “It was fun while it lasted” – ought to be on all our lips.

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Homemade Barbie wedding dress, c. 1963. Courtesy Sherry Deatrick

8. Goldilocksmiths

Before we go on, my guess is that some of you non-Hi-Dies have been stymied in your plodding progress to the good stuff by getting hung up, like the cataracts in cataclysm’s clothing you undoubtedly are, on a perplexing question. What, if any, is the relation of O-D’s Obladie City to the 1968 Beatles song “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” included on the by then largely theoretical band’s disgracefully overhailed White Album? Believe me, we wonder too. These are the indisputable facts:

1)The original itinerary of the Beatles’ legendary August-September 1964 tour of the Lower 49 included a hastily arranged August 25 engagement at Obladie City’s Winnebago Memorial Auditorium, the only available Nice State venue of respectable size. Wyandotte’s Barber Hall was overrun with runamok optometrists from all over O-D – 75 or 80 of them, plus their families! – and Crevecoeur’s Murdaugh Palais was overbooked with a highly idiosyncratic one-off triple bill of the Ormonde Sacerdotal Choir, the first and last convention of the foredoomed National Pre-Owned Automobile Dealers of America Association, and Chubby Chess.

2) Beatles manager Brian Epstein’s hand-over-fist lust for Uncle Sam’s hot-fun-in-the-summertime shekels had clearly outpaced both his calendrical common sense and his shaky grasp of things American. August 25, 1964, was a Tuesday and by no means an exemption from the work week on our roster of national or even Nice State feast days.

3) Whoever told the band’s homosexual Svengali that the 20^th anniversary of the Liberation of Paris had been declared a national day of reflectiveness, remembrance and mourning by Lyndon Johnson at his most Lincolnesque, as one surprisingly urbane rural legend has it, was talking out of his prop beret. It’s true that the reconstituted 23^rd Ohidiana of Civil War renown had been incorporated as the Fourth Battalion (Attached) of the 22d Infantry Regiment of the U.S. Fourth Infantry Division, which did indeed play a role in wresting the City of Light from noticeably perfunctory Kraut hands in 1944. But our pride in Chickamauga, however understandable, stops short of the cuckoo.

4) As is implicitly documented by August 25’s, Obladie City’s, and Winnebago Memorial Auditorium’s Bartleby-like recusal from the many websites devoted to tracing the lads’ 1964 U.S. tour in brain-numbing detail, the Beatles never showed. The four blobby waxworks adorning the site of Winnebago Memorial Children’s Clinic, as the former auditorium’s location became, were semi-successfully distinguished from resembling just another culture-police lineup by a plaque: On This Spot The ‘Beatles’ Would Have Played On August 25, 1964, If They Hadn’t All Four Been Detained By Unforeseen Events. Only the maddest Beatles completists from out of state ever parked.

5) Regurgitated with some Hi-Die skepticism on the front page of the Wyandotte Ives-Courrier of August 22, 1964, the official explanation of the snub was that the menace of Ohidiana’s recurring tornadoes had led a sissy air-charter company to rescind its rental of the eight-seater Cessna the boys would have needed to get from Indianapolis to Wyandotte in time, with a two-hour bus ride to Obladie City (Greyhound, lightning) on top of that. Like the Beatles, the tornado never materialized, leaving us twice uncycloned that week.

6) It’s a matter of record that the James M. Cain novel traditionally most requested at O-D’s public libraries, civic and Carnegie alike, is The Postman Always Rings Twice. Unscathed by 1964’s false alarm, which predated its existence in any case, the Winnebago Memorial Children’s Clinic was demolished in the Great Cyclone of June 16, 2015. Fortunately no permanent harm came to the 27 sickly tykes inside beyond an abiding dubiety about the trustworthiness of self-advertised places of refuge.

7) None ever married.

8) The four waxworks were in pretty crappy shape by then and got bowled over like half melted ninepins. Any-hoo, a new generation of Ohidianians, unlike mine, sees precious little merit in commemorating things that never happened in the first place.

9) McCartney always claimed “Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on” was a saying he often heard from a Jamaican acquaintance of his. The Jamaican promptly demonstrated their deep bond of friendship by suing for co-writing credit. He never saw tuppence worth his cud because the Beatles were the Beatles and he weren’t. By four-way moptop consent, the at-daggers-drawn quartet only tolerated lawsuits from each other once they belatedly decided they hated each other’s guts.

10) Here’s the smoking gun Paulie’s obfuscations have kept from coming to light all this time. Obladie is in fact an old Hirsuit word meaning, of course, “Life goes on.” All we white Hi-Die folk added, around 1840, was “City,” as ever America’s favorite way of underlining such Indian sayings’ veracity. What does Manhattoes mean, I wonder?

11) Unlike Paul’s Caribbean acquaintance, Nice Staters don’t sue. But we don’t forget either, even when everyone but us has or, more often, never knew beans about anything much that happens or doesn’t happen here to begin with.

∞

The tornado that time was wholly imaginary. The bespoke-suited future suicide Epstein, whose long-suffering rabbi pejoratively termed him “a symptom of the malaise of our times” at his funeral, cancelled the Winnebago Memorial Auditorium show because of poor ticket sales, a potential black eye for Bri that would have marred the lads’ otherwise unmitigated American triumph. But nobody can say Pastor Kendall’s wife hadn’t done her foredoomed bit to make it a success.

Barbara Kendall bought four tickets by mail and asked her husband to pad her weekly Hausfrau budget for gas money to Obladie City in the family station wagon. And back, if you’re wondering. A Doll’s House wasn’t her thing, ironically enough once I fill you in on the pastime that gave her life purpose.

Two were for her interchangeable twin brats, whom my revanchist-minded memory has rebaptized Freddie and Flossie. One was for herself as chaperone. The fourth was for me, poor little Harbinger-rebaptized Oliver Twist And Shout. Please please me, can I have some more? But our pastor’s wife can’t have anticipated Oliver T&S’s reaction when she broke the news.

She should have given me the comfort of announcing her largesse in my own home. Not that the Harbinger split-level, a bit of a Lincoln-refuting novelty in Wyandotte then, ever conceded to treat me as if I belonged there, but the Kendalls’ ostentatiously welcoming kitchen seemed full of strange new devices dating back to Colonial times. Smugly routine Freddie and Flossie included.

Having them as dopey witnesses enraged me. I heard my own voice quixotically windmill: “Don’t make me! You can’t make me.”

Always goaded to reassure others when she was baffled about what was going on, Mrs. Kendall made to reach out a comforting hand. I indignantly knew I hadn’t asked her for one. People acting on charitable impulses have struck me as frustrated job seekers ever since.

I tossed my forearm up as if she meant to bundle me into the Kendalls’ claustrophobically capacious Ford Falconetti on the spot. Finding odd new spaces I needed to stuff with a random anything, my brain lit on a word I’d come across in I forget which tale of Royal Navy floggings and cutlasses: shanghaied.

“No! No! No! No!”

Did Barbara Kendall secretly welcome an unlooked-for chance to dodge a dreary day of root beer smells, Baby Ruth wrappers, parched O-D sunlight turning gray highways black between pale fields of just-hacked adolescent stubble? Of unconsciously pining for women’s lib, of a rivulet of inadmissible maternal perineum sweat sneakily seeking its own level on station-wagon upholstery whose disorderly crescents of foam-rubber stuffing resembled split Idaho potatoes conducting a doomed uprising? Maybe. I know I didn’t dare look at her.

“All right! Then it’s settled. We just won’t go.”

Despite the tears as scalding as Yahweh’s urine freshly cooling on my cheeks, I had to suppress a cockeyed grin at fat Flossie and fire-hydrant Freddie as the import sank in. Their mother had just abandoned them to hunt for playground status elsewhere. She’d denied them the Beatles for my cracked, usurping, so stupidly orphaned sake.

“Mom!” “Mommy!”

“Hush. You two don’t have anything to complain about. You think you do because they’re on the radio, but if the Beatles had never been born, would you notice the difference?”

“But they did. So we do.”

“Enough of this – prattling!” It made Mrs. Kendall happy that she’d thought of that crossword-puzzle word. “For Lord’s sake, remember you’re Hi-Dies. Did your dad put that hoop over the carport for you to stick flowers in it?”

“Aw, Mom.” That ’60s sitcom chorus was my generation’s version of “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.” But my euphoria sagged then. I’d never called my adoptive mother anything but Mother Harbinger and now knew I never would.

As for my birth one, I no longer called her anything at all. Between the Beatles’ first and second appearances on Sullivan – Feb. 9 and Feb. 16, respectively – she’d upped stakes and bussed her way to San Francisco, like a homing pigeon undaunted by never having seen California’s wild shores in her life. She’d blearily watched the Beatles at the Cow Palace under a week before they bailed on Winnebago Memorial, attracting notice as the oldest woman there and the only one without a child in tow.

But I only learned that decades later. “I know what ‘prattling’ means,” I proudly told our pastor’s wife, seizing the chance to one-up the two marzipan Kendalls. But she’d already become a pure Mom again. Her stooping, scooping, sloping breasts and Winnebago memorial hips excluded me.

The Birth And Death of Oliver Twist And Shout

The twin twerps never forgave the de-McBrided interloper. But I hated them anyway, so no skin off my Charles M. Schultz nose. The kitchen’s formica grew merry, Disneyfying its barely post-Dallas appliances.

I wasn’t even sure what blenders were for, imagined some sort of mammarial woman-warrior sacrifice. My earliest victory was no ode to democracy; it was a schizophrenic one-boy junta’s martial law backed, Franco-style, by the Church. My eyes were M & Ms in the wild before the hunters came and rustlingly body-bagged us all as we waited for the main feature at the Wyandotte Rialto to begin. The only cyclone in sight was the one animating my Popsicle-stick arms and legs.

No surprise the Beatles and their homosexual manager were to give the Nice State a clean miss on their 1965 and ’66 tours. Once unbidden, twice shy, I suppose. In any case, Ohidiana, lacking a full-size sports stadium – it would have been futile to build one, as we were the only state in the Midwest that lacked a single professional team within road-trip distance – had no venue surrounded by Lilliputting green with the capacity to temporarily pinion their by now Gulliverish scale for herds of tiny toy shoulders and thimble-sized bouffants.

True to formless form-follows-dysfunction form, my former mother was blowzily on hand for their final U.S. concert – and final concert, period, not counting the ’69 rooftop thing – at Candlestick Park on August 29, 1966. She’d been bulkily augmented by an epigonic two dozen superannuated foster earth moms whose presence no longer excited comment. It seemed the word was out that this show was the last one, and a few seconds of news footage exist of my mother’s slovenly lard-pouched eyes shining like Lucite diamonds. But the venue was far from sold out; San Franciscans’ first loyalty was still to Jesus for the nonce.

I realize my hysterical 1964 rebellion in the Kendalls’ all-mod-cons Great Society kitchen has undoubtedly baffled you cataracted ‘60s cynosures. I’d better explain. Was I frightened by the Beatles? Not hardly at all.

Winnebago Memorial Auditorium, maybe. I’d never been to Obladie City, not even in tow behind my McBride or Harbinger parents, and to me the name sounded a little Gunsmoke or, more ominously, Have Gun, Will Travel. But I’d loved the as yet recondite Fab Four since I’d heard the then Brit import “Love Me Do” on a New York station while twiddling my Godzilla-tweaked revenge- for- the- atom -bomb birthday Sony in culturally protectionist O-D in late November ’63.

Partly because no amount of knob-twirling (not up to our American standards, the cheap chrome flaked soon) ever found me that station again and Manhattan was life on Mars anyway, a feeling of being privy to something furtive and illicit was precious to me. Can you please, please comprehend my uniqueness? I’d gone nuts for the Beatles before Sullivan.

That gave me something in common with Black Republicans like Rep. Kunta Kintner, whom I invented by total accident one day in 1986 (long story). Congressman Kintner (R-Ø) included, they all used to pointedly say they’d changed their party affiliation before Reagan.

That should have been grounds for Ralphie Laughlin cafeteria crowing in the phosphorescent daze after mid-February ’64. But I desisted, clinging to my even more reifying surreptitiousness. By the time I came clean (see: A Hard Day’s Night, released in the U.S. August12, 1964), nobody believed me and school was out anyway.

My problem? So help me, I loved the Beatles so much I didn’t want to share them with anyone. Not with puling Flossie or flatulent Freddie, not with their bounteous bra-Gullivered mom. Not Obladie City’s seventh-grade desperadoes, not a kazillion brainlessly squealing teenage American girls. Not even with you.

∞

Remember, I was under two years out of Montelḗon. An agate-hard conviction that I wasn’t like anybody else was all my newly Harbingered self had available in the way of empiricized individuality. It helped that my Plan B parents never discussed what had led them to call their split level my home and only a small and quickly dwindling covey of neighbors, Barbie Kendall included, were in on what rapidly became a secret even before I went into politics.

It’s easy to imagine you’re the only one who knows the Beatles exist when you’re hunched over listening to your scratched-up Sony in a guest bunk bed whose upper tier is unoccupied after lights out. My Harbinger foster parents surely knew, but felt the same way about it as they did about masturbation. They could tolerate both vices as a growing boy’s covert urge to experiment in solitude. They just didn’t want me to be sociable about either of them.

You may have begun to discern why Oliver Twist And Shout never relaxed enough to call them Mom and Dad. Not even when they weren’t around and I distinguished myself in the worst way by not hewing to Ralphie Laughlin conversational form. But the Ed Sullivan show definitely forced my insistence that I alone knew about the Beatles to get a lot cagier.

The explanation I came up with was that there were hundreds of them, prefiguring Chuck Weinachten’s joke about the multitudes of fake parents at Craig Harbinger’s campaign rallies. Everyone else had been fooled into worshiping spurious duplicate avatars, not the four originals only I had heard one November night in 1963.

Some night or other at Molly B’s, Mutt Hasbro’s reaction to my fantasy took me aback. “Hah! I should have known you were a failed rock critic.”

As so often with him, I was guarded. Mutt always makes sense to himself, but you’re never sure if he wants company. “So long as I’m a failed something, I guess I can get the hang of it.”

“No, no, no. Don’t sell yourself short. You were too visionary and that’s why you ran for Senator instead. Like all the other flops at making a genuine contribution, because you’re right.”

“How’s that?”

“Every slob band, every dumb fan, everywhere. Forget the Beatles. The Adastra Slobs could be all over the radio and I’d still be sure the band I listen to in my room is the one true one. Everyone else is nuts about a bogus group that looks like them and plays the exact same songs. Weird coincidence, but what are you gonna do?”

I decided to be amused, always a good default move with Mutt until his next idea springs fully mangled from his forehead. “And ‘mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.’”

“Huh. I am an anarchist, but everyone knows that about me. Or thinks they do, but my Adastra Slobs are the Addams Family and yours are the Munsters. We have to pretend they’re the same to keep the shitass social fabric from pulling the ripcord on us, but why we care about that shit beats me.”

I laughed. “So I ran for Senate to compensate.” He was right about that.

“It’s all the same. Life is a continuation of rock criticism by other means. Didn’t every idiot who voted for you think their ‘Senator Harbinger’” – he always pronounced that name as if I’d made it up, which I suppose amounts to the same thing as having it imposed on me – “their Frodo, was the real one? And the fifty other yous they had no use for were just weird costuming? Even her.”

That seeming afterthought’s potential meaning eluded me at the time, I admit. I was pretty drunk.

“That was different. We were all fakes.”

“No shit. So you were Heisinger High’s pet Senator. Hall monitor, big deal. Big badge! You think that makes you different from the rest of us? I used to pretend I was a musician, so I know.”

“I didn’t.”

“There’s a lot of shit about you you don’t know. It’s all about begging forgiveness. For existing, no wonder we have to fake it. All good Americans do. It’s what we have in common with the bad ones. Good luck with that, you fucking fortune cookie that walks like a man.”

I turned prim. “I only meant I didn’t know you were ever a musician. Or pretended to be.”

“Six of one, ‘Frodeaux.’ Six of one.”

∞

That was why R. Mutt always said he liked the Monkees better and the Archies best of all. According to him, they were the only two authentic bands in rock and roll, white subdivision, because everyone knew they were fakes. I never went that far, not having Mutt’s conceptual genius. But in the god-love-‘em ‘60s, only a matter of time until I could salvage my precious uniqueness only by turning against the Beatles.

Help!, well, helped. Anyone could see it was a costume-junk turd compared to A Hard Day’s Night, but I was the only kid at Ralphie Laughlin High to make a Federal case out of saying so. Everyone else wanted to fib to themselves it was the bees’ knees and not the Beatles with measles. Why, because it was in color?

Of course I couldn’t avoid them. Otherwise, I might not have had one conversation with any ostensible peer between sophomore year and Wodie freshman orientation. Hostility kept me on the Beatle checkerboard, like a bright red rook barging into a b & w chess game.

Sgt. Pepper at least gave me a camp to belong to. A tiny camp, but Fidel only had a dozen starveling followers when he set up his in the Sierra Mastre. I thrilled when a marooned New York Fifer critic called that sellout to the wispy ‘60s “busy, hip and cluttered” in the New York Times, but how did I know he did? Because it was news, not only in the Ives-Courrier but on WYOD-TV. That’s how coverage of the Beatles was then.

By ’68, Lennon had become the focus of my loathing. If he thought being more popular than Jesus was something to brag about, the guy was in denial about being the beneficiary of much more faddish hype. Jesus owned no novelty for us and the press didn’t go agog at His every move. George Stevens’s The Greatest Story Ever Told wasn’t a patch on A Hard Day’s Night and even wretched Help! easily outdid Max von Sydow’s good-humored Christ at the box office. For a valid comparison, you’d really have to see which of Them handled a press conference better.

In all Ohidiana, I alone knew “Hey Jude” was drivel. The cover of Paulie’s first solo album to the contrary, sanctimonious drivel is no bowl of cherries. Yet tiresome nah-nuh-na-na-nananah aside, in my own private Nanook of north Wyandotte, only McCartney was exempt from my reaction: McCartney, who represented everything for which the latter-day idiot ‘60s had an ultra-affected scorn.

Harrison lost me when he mistook a sitar for his noodle-headed version of Hal in 2001. I held out longer on Ringo, but lost respect for him when he didn’t man up and stick to his guns about telling his former-in-all-but-name bandmates to pretty please-me can the horsecrap during the White Album sessions. If nothing else, Ringo had a nose for horsecrap. So I thought.

But Lennon! You can probably imagine how Yoko, bed-ins, “Give Peace A Chance” (lousy song, incidentally), the Bewhiskered Dork look and giving back his OBE went over in O-D. I was gaining adherents; future voters, too, not that I knew it. October 7, 1975 – the day Lennon successfully dodged the by then extinct Nixon Administration’s well founded if not well-meaning attempt to deport him – wasn’t the saddest of my life, but it was certainly the angriest. I risked my popularity at both ends as Boy Mayor of Wyandotte with a Business of The City proclamation thanking the Justice Department for fighting the good fight and obliquely condemning Ford’s White House for giving up on it, just as he and that Volksdeutsch bastard Kissinger had on Indochina the same spring.

As for December 8, 1980, I was busy hiring for my new Senate office – the O-D Roanoke Society’s first big payday – and the news from New York didn’t make much of a dent in that. I only remember mumbling this before I got back to work: “There but for the grace of God, I guess.”

Bucky Shore thought that was funny. “Hold your horses, boss. You’re still a leedle too new on the national scene to qualify for assassination. Attempted, attempted! But someday, if I’ve got anything to do with it. That’s why we’re here and doing this, remember?”

As perceptive as he usually was, even Bucky didn’t realize I hadn’t meant John Lennon.

∞

I’ve never asked R. Mutt Hasbro what he thought of Mark David Chapman. But talk about life being a continuation of criticism by other means! The greatest rock critic ever born certainly thought his John Lennon was the only genuine one and the rest of us – save only me, save only MeMeMe – had fallen for a con job.

It occurs to my inner red rook that Lennon was my musical Halloween Jack. Just not the way most people would interpret the comparison.

The last conversation I remembered having about him before I told Bucky “There but for the grace of God” had been with Mark Poicaris in our junior year. Just as predictably, it had an unnerving undertow. I hadn’t guessed there could be anything unforgivable about siding against him, since nobody was running for office yet. But Poicaris never stopped doing that in his own mind.

This was in February ’70: months before Nixon invaded Cambodia. The two of us and a couple of forgotten supernumerary Wodies were bull-sessioning about college draft deferments one night in Ezra Sununubis’s room. That didn’t qualify as being in public, really, but Mark always evaluated any situation involving himself as if he were. Close quarters only got him more heated.

Here’s what I said that turned his glare hunted: “Okay, Poicaris. You’re too valuable to society to get your ass shot off, we accept that.”

“You do?” Helplessly ceding to the illusion he’d won, Mark’s brown eyes turned almost tender.

“Sure. But suppose that undereducated spook who’s going to be cannonfodder instead is really way smarter than you?”

“Why – “

He didn’t know it, but it was to protect my roommate from what he was about to say – “That’s impossible!” – that I quickly went on, “And a better human being. That’s pretty low-hanging fruit and you don’t care anyway.”

Ezra tore it by giggling. To be laughed at by Ezra Sununubis was as mortifying in our dorm as Dan Quayle correcting one’s spelling would be in the Senate when he was Bush 41’s VP. No wonder Poicaris rounded on me when we were stumbling down a hall lit by brown paint to our room. Stale Chief’s Head reek blew from his nostrils and lips.

“You just remember, pal. I’m John. You’re Epstein.”

“Wait. I’m the faggot?” Ninth-grade Ralphie Laughlin joke, newly vivid: Q. What do you call a queer who’s put a noose around his neck and jumped off a toadstool? A. Low-hanging fruit.

“Your preference, man. The pub, pubic-school meaning or the American one. I don’t see much difference, to be honest.”

I knew I shouldn’t have gone to see Lindsay Anderson’s If. . . with him when the Wodie SOL Film Society screened that piece of arrogantly opportunistic Limey crap before Christmas break. No theater in Wyandotte would book it, fearing an unruly outbreak of interest among undergrads. We’d had a fight about that too, because I thought the movie was clamorously stupid except for Malcolm McDowell and Mark had been riveted. Unlike mine, his interest in cinema was confined to movies he could interpret as his autobiography botched by strangers. Besides, I kept forgetting he’d gone to Olivier de La Hardie Academy in Crevecoeur on a frigging tennis scholarship.

Trying to blot out the stubborn squeaks and occasional “Ow” of Poicaris’s dalliance with Bunny Ashtray that night, I put myself to sleep by recollecting the time McCartney had come this close to saving my ass from John Kennedy Lennon’s adherents at Ralphie Laughlin High almost exactly three years earlier. You’ll soon understand why that episode inaugurated my vow to never concede in public that I spoke or understood French.

No, it wasn’t “Michelle.” Talk about low-hanging fruit! It was “Penny Lane,” and just my luck that I’d lately won second prize in the High-School French Teachers of Ohidiana’s annual competition for the best poem written by one of their pupils in Mademoiselle From Armentières patois. There were four entries in all, one written in game but ineffectual Low German (“Switzerland – Land of Alpine Contrasts”), and the HSFTO retired the contest in ’68 before disbanding itself in protest after Kent State. The only woman among the nine wounded had won first prize over me at – one guess – Obladie City High.

Because all glory is fleeting and youth’s laurels wither fast, the jury didn’t know that “L’État des Grands Épaules, C’est Moi” was a pretty fair Frog translation of my Ives-Courrier poem about Wyandotte and Magnavox, written in long-gone 1963. I was half wittingly resigned by then to “Oh Ohidiana, My Ohidiana” being my poetic peak. Monica Heide might have guessed, but she was no longer my English teacher and didn’t read French. This was Mlle. Bornes’ one famous victory.

So much so, in fact, that she ruined my high-school life by barging into the principal’s office to insist on including it in that morning’s P.A. announcements. Everyone was excited about the P.A., since it was the first in any Nice State high school. Teachers were always hogging it on damn near any pretext – all except Heidi, who stayed demurely aloof from anything redolent of showbiz.

I was only saved from universal ridicule because Bornes Loseur’s English wasn’t all that comprehensible either. Speculation about her first language – Inuit, Hursuit, Houyhnhnm ? – ran rife. But enough of my classmates got the gist that a clutch of Laughlin jocks corralled me in the cafeteria at lunch hour, prefiguring sullen Mark Poicaris misnaming me Brian Epstein to his Lennon three years later.

Ralphie’s jocks had the special arrogance that comes of fielding a truly suck basketball team in a basketball-crazed state. They were a bit of an Avignon Papacy or Kerensky provisional government or Jean Hagen being forced to do her own dialogue in Singin’ In The Rain, but all the more bullying for that. Like dud jocks everywhere, they were embittered by any sort of academic accomplishment, the more esoteric the worse.

Naturally, they had a front man: Anton Arquebus ’67, who was an even worse QB than he was a basketball guard. Dyslexia wasn’t a familiar affliction in those days, and it didn’t help that both teams were named the Murdaughballs; he often wandered into the wrong practice squad. All this made him vicious everywhere but the court or football field, where it might have helped.

He and I had a history too, but he didn’t even remember my name had been McBride when it started. No matter how corn-fed, all high-school thugs are Sicilians. They only forget the inessentials, like whether the capital of Minnesota is Minneapolis or St. Paul.

“Hey, Harbinger. I hear you polly-voo Frog.”

“That’s what they say.” I’d watched my share of Westerns too.

“Yeah? Then do us a favor.”

“What?”

“Sing ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ in French.”

They chortled. So did future Nice State historian Harry S. Sherman, who was devoting himself that year to sucking up to them. To think he was the same kid who’d taught me back in seventh to answer “How many eggs did you have for breakfast, Caesar?” with “Et two, Brute.”

I opted for the high-school white flag known as negotiable bluster, the lingua franca of confrontations. “At least give me a chance. Come on.”

“Okay, moan ami Pierrot. ‘Penny Lane.’ That’s the A side.”

“They’re always the easy one!” You know, like Harry S. Sherman had spent his Ralphie Laughlin years proctoring Canuck citizenship tests for voluble would-be Quebecois apple scruffs.

“Can I at least have a blindfold?”

They didn’t get that, so I squeezed my eyes shut: the thousand-deaths substitute. One reason I’ve always thought high school is just like the Army must be is that you never know where the real tests will come, especially in barracks. There was nothing for it now.

“Penny Lane, dans mes oreilles et dans mes yeux.

Ooh, the ciel est bleu dans la banlieue –“

As I’ve mentioned and Geenie was to learn firsthand, I have a piss-poor singing voice along with a terrible O-D French accent. I truly hoped those factors wouldn’t be decisive now, and they weren’t. Out of the bleu, a stiff-armed jolt to my left shoulder stopped me, which was just as well. I’d forgotten the rest of the goddam words in English, let alone as Maurice Chevalier might croon them.

If only Arquebus’s right hand had been that good at lobbing passes or fending off an attacking Obladie City High dribbler, the Laughlin Murdaughballs might have been a force to reckon with in Ohidiana high-school sports. A dumb force, but a force nonetheless. Stunned, I staggered back.

“How do I know that’s even French? Prove it.” Snickers. I sink, therefore I am.

That was my cue to do the brainy and provably French thing, which was to turn tail and abjectly bolt. They came on after me. Flash cut from dim cafeteria exit marked EXIT to locker-arrayed dun corridor, scuffed sneakers replacing chatterbox tin cutlery, hurtling jeers taking over from inane snorts and snuffles.

I didn’t stop until I burst through Ralphie Laughlin High’s double-barreled main door and into the front parking lot. I knew I’d be safe there, less because of the Stars and Stripes whose concrete stand I took refuge atop anyway than school’s equivalent of shark-infested waters: potential teachers, potential janitors and grounds-maintenance men, potential glumly summoned parents, potential Wendell Wilkie supporters who hadn’t gotten the word 27 years later their candidate had given up on O-D.

Arquebus’s faithful customers – every high-school clique is an unwitting clientele – apparently knew I’d successfully made it to Adultland, judging from the paused frowsy frieze of facsimile humans I could make out clotting Ralphie Laughlin’s front steps. Even at the height of my Kittney Wayne fetish as Boy Mayor-elect a half dozen years later – only a half dozen, really? – I never could stand the gauche gouaches of sports events that made that eternal dauphin of a dauber Royal Neinpin richer than Van Gogh’s most literally lunatic dreams.

Hugh Hefner didn’t know much about art, but he was a genius at guessing what the kind of man who read Playboy could be fooled into mistaking for it in an indulgent and distractable mood. But why had I turned glaucomedian? I don’t like mentioning it because what’s too painful to remember we simply choose to elide and so on, but I wore glasses in those days: thick ones. In one of our handful of genial head-to-head cloakroom conversations in the Senate, Bob Packwood and I agreed we both owed our political careers to the invention of contact lenses.

Who’d gleefully snatched them off my face with a yip of quisling solidarity during that madly pelting corridor pursuit? Future George H. Thomas biographer Harry S. Sherman, that’s who’d. Returning them to me with a sheepish quasi-apology the next day, the next day!, Harry S. guiltily adjusted his own.

I should have asked him how many eggheads he’d had for breakfast that A.M., the fucking four-eyed cannibal. But I didn’t.

∞

Laisse-moi vous accrocher,

Puisque je m’en vais

Aux champs des fraises frais,

Ou nul est reḗl

Aucune raison d’en t’inquieter.

So there. So fucking there, all of you. You too, Mr. Je suis le Walrus, you dumb phoque. Paulie’s French was better. So was mine. I only cheated by adding “fresh” to “Strawberry fields” for the sake of the rhyme and I believe I’ll be forgiven that lèse-majesté.

More Popular Than James Jesus Angleton

Neither Barbara Kendall nor I knew it, but our pastor’s wife was my first failed Goldilocksmith. They all were – even Geenie, who spurred me to invent that spritelike category one Saturday afternoon in late May or early June of ‘91. But life didn’t give her much time to jimmy me.

I called Gigi my Goldilocksmith because she got curious about my Harbinger parents, still living then but as mysterious to her as decapitated Frank McBride or cuckoo Ella, that crackbrained best-laid panopticon of thighs and wens in San Francisco. I didn’t want to talk about them – a habit I’ve hardly shed, in case you haven’t noticed – and so I fended her off by telling her Mother Harbinger used to call me the fourth bear. Chester, mon plush semblable, my Teddy frère, your eyelessly ursine name was legion. “She told people – she told company – it was because I’d eat anything. They’d laugh.”

“Of course you would. You were a freaking orphan and she knew it.” Mulling, Geenie turned Christina Robin. “But she had the wrong bear, you Frodo of very little brain.”

Saying “Oh, honey” won me a giggle.

∞

Gigi liked what she called the Bluebeard Room tucked behind the kitchenette at my Rochambeau Towers digs. No meathooked abattoir of ex-wives even in effigy, since I only had one of those then and Helen and I were on good, not murderous, terms, that walk-in pantry closet was the miniature “office” where I kept a sorrowful desk, my oddball pornography – the cache’s secret prize was a mildewed Edwardian album of French And Greek Masters from Editions Platon Roses, ed. Nostradamus Desfleurs, 1912 – and the more licit books I nonetheless didn’t care to explain to purely Washington friends, aka near strangers, on the rare occasions I hosted in the living room in my Senator Harbinger guise.

The proof the pantry closet was for my eyes only was the framed page of the Ives-Courrier with my third-place Versifiers of Tomorrow poem about Magnavox and blonde widows. I’d had Monica obtain “Ohidiana, My Ohidiana” eight years earlier by pretending O-D’s junior Senator needed a full copy of the paper’s November 24, 1963, edition – normally its Sunday pre-Thanksgiving special, which the contest was traditionally timed to – for a floor speech recalling the Nice State’s grief over John F. Kennedy’s assassination two decades previous.

They didn’t need to know I called him Halloween Jack and just wanted to get my mitts on the only verse of mine ever printed anywhere. Despite being its only begetter, my old ninth-grade English teacher was horrified when I tossed the rest of the paper into her trash bin at R-286’s reception desk and muttered, “The hell with that guy. He killed my parents.”

“But Senator!” She chose to ignore the obvious reproach that JFK hadn’t actually offed my birth mother even indirectly. He’d only turned her into a gibbering Left Coast loon that Ken Kesey himself would have thrown under the bus with no compunction whatsoever, and that kind of collateral damage has been happening to Americans since 1789. “What about the speech?”

“What speech? Heidi, screw the Senate too. Only I am escaped alone to tell the United States Senate to go fuck itself.”

Of course, they ended up doing the exact same to me. But in public, and I had fucked myself by having sex with Geenie, Geenie, Geenie, Geenie. Repeat to the end of the Congressional Record for October 31, 1991, Government Printing Office.

The rules allowed and may still for florid addenda to one’s actual remarks. I could have had an intern whip up a king-hell maudlin speech about Halloween Jack’s O-D fans and mourners and inserted it as my remarks on the soggy subject if I hadn’t thrown the paper away.

Speaking of detritus, Geenie was especially tickled by my now moribund undergrad collection of books about the Cambridge spies, which had spawned a bibliographic essay Kirk Gentile flatteringly called the least berserk part of my junior thesis. Until my own habits began to bore me – why bother with anything, really, just because it had mattered once? – I’d augmented it with newer gossip studies as the Cambridge Three became the Cambridge Four and then Five. But not until I was packing up the Rochambeau era after my resignation did I espy the small volume her then still living hands had mischievously tucked in to stand as the series’s conclusion: Now We Are Six.

∞

My last Goldilocksmith had already gotten to work with her metaphorical bobby pin – not an item she had any use for in reality, since her cascading nude-naped coif was on armed-truce terms with gravity anyhow – to uncover and gaily go Frisbee on the most ridiculous Yorick-skull in my pantry closet’s ossuary. My contemptuous rejection by the Ohidiana Famous Writers’ School hadn’t been the only thumbs down that drove me into Wodie SOL – the choice my fake parents approved of – and then my Boy Mayoralty. Having just named the Bluebeard Room, she said, “Tell me. Which one was your favorite Beatle back in the U.S.S.R.? Philby, Maclean, Burgess or Whozit?”

It surprised me I’d never thought of the comparison. What were Oliver Twist And Shout and the college fan of Moscow’s own Fab Four but secret sharers? “It was just like the real ones,” I heard myself hazard. “It depends on your personality and outlook. I never liked Philby because I never liked Lennon.”

“And – ?”

“Oh, geez. Maclean has to be the cute one. Burgess can’t help being Ringo. Blunt’s the easiest, because he’s just cultivating his chops on the old axe anytime he talks about Poussin. Then he discovers he’s living in the material world and he’d better do something about it. The attraction is he thinks of himself a man of parts, but he’s never experienced what it’s like being a stone bore.”

“And?”

“It’s invigorating, by gum! I thought you’d read my speeches – well, enough of them.” That had become one of our jokes.

“So why didn’t you try being a spy? With that earnest boyish face of yours.” Then hers melted in gawping delight. “Oh, crap. You did!”

“Yup. I was lucky enough to get an abusive letter from James Angleton yelling at me for wasting the Agency’s time. It’s somewhere in that file cabinet if Monica didn’t get rid of it.”

“How did he figure out you were wasting his time?”

“He thought I was kidding. And I was, but I thought it would get Langley interested in how an oddball like me would do in that kind of career.”

“You know something? You haven’t changed a bit.”

“Never said I had.” Seeing soft alarm dawn in her eyes and eager to dodge that conversation, I quickly added, “Except for you.”

∞

The vintage wooden filing cabinet Helen positioned next to the Christmas tree the year I became Wyandotte’s Boy Mayor – she’d mischievously bedecked it in red tape, not ribbon – has traveled far and wide enough since then to rate its own article in OdysseUS: The Peace Corps Alumni Magazine, if not a segment on Antiques Roadshow. From 2007 Emma Peale Lane in Wyandotte, whose rusted tin “2” fell off one day and got replaced by Helen with leftover red tape, to the Rochambeau Towers to Hoboken to Los Feliz to my Marigny shotgun, ‘tis never too late for my prattle-scarred filing cabinet to seek a newer world. It could talk but, Bartleby-style, prefers not to.

If you’re wondering, Emma Peale (1862-1913) was a pioneer woman photographer descended by marriage from painter Charles Willson Peale, who’s best known for Washington at Princeton (1779), depicting the battle and not some bungled orange-and-black Halloween attempt by the future Father of His Country to matriculate at Old Nassau. Her career made her anomalous among the later generations of blood Peales, who were obsessed with ornithology to a point that passes all understanding.

All this is true. O-D claims Emma as its own because she visited us more than once to take experimental Midsummer Day’s Dream snapshots of Hi-Dies learning their way around mechanical threshers and vainly trying to turn bloody (“I’ll say,” she’s said to have said) Coffin Creek into a transportation artery. A photograph of her, not by her, used to hang in R-286’s main corridor, donated by Helen as a goodbye fillip around when our marriage went bust. An English rose bearing up under a Nice State sunburn, Ms. Peale is shown in a field of half dredged muck outside Obladie City, clad in the one-gallus overalls, waders and hokey-pokey straw hat she always called her Ohidiana rig.

I’ve checked the old filing cabinet just now, and the May 29, 1970, letter ridiculing my undergrad application to join the CIA from James Jesus Angleton, the “embattled” (Kim Philby’s word) head of its counter-intelligence section from 1954 up through, incredibly, 1975, is indeed MIA. If Monica did filch it, as I imagine she did, she wouldn’t have burned it: too self-dramatizing. Her usual m.o. in destroying incriminating documents was to run them under her kitchen tap for up to an hour unless The Sound of Music was on, wad them into turgid spitballs, and feed them into the Dispos-All with a grrrr – from the whirligig blades, not her decorum-throttled throat.

She needn’t have bothered. Already wily then – famous last words! – about protecting the political career I didn’t yet know I’d have, I’d made sure my application couldn’t be traced back to anybody named Craig Harbinger. I thought of my dissimulation as proactive proof I’d be no slouch at fieldcraft. Let them find me if they wanted to hire me!

I didn’t keep a carbon of my application letter, knocked out in a couple of hours while my estranged roommate was off courting yet another coed – yes, we still called them that then – who wouldn’t let him get his tennis-tested finger past her twin-shuttlecock knees. It’s up to you whether that shows I was unserious or just cautious. The CIA didn’t recruit publicly in those Vietnam-dark days – even Wodie’s ROTC facility was behind a chain-link fence for the duration, which struck everybody but Mark Poicaris as vanity masquerading as fear – or even cop to its identity on George Washington Parkway signage. So I addressed my letter to Richard Helms, Director, “Bureau of Public Roads,” Langley VA 22201. I figured the quotation marks would signal I was in on the joke.

In hindsight, it’s no mystery why my Agency application ended up in Angleton’s crammed red felt-tipped inbox. His unsuspecting friendship with Philby had driven him batty once Kim’s perfidy was exposed. That impelled him to spend the rest of his career on a mad hunt for the Muscovite moles he imagined sharing his belfry.

He kept his job and even grew more intimidating because a less insulting word for Yale men who’d gone gaga in the intelligence community back then was dedicated. My letter had been calculated to fuse his brain into porcupine goo by explaining that the Cambridge Three, as they were then, had inspired my sense of vocation.

“I don’t think of Kim, Guy, and Maclean as betraying their country so much as being anxious to serve a country of their choice,” I’d written. “Many Americans are in the same boat, only it’s always the U.S.A. of their choice.”

Porcupine goo! For good measure – note the dates here – I added that I’d recently grown troubled about my sexual orientation and felt that a career as a spy would help me resolve this.

As so often when I’m most masked, I was dead serious. You’d expect an obsessive mole hunter to recognize as much, and perhaps Angleton did. Although it wasn’t assembled from newspaper cut-outs like an insulting ransom note, his reply was the mandarin equivalent of the O-D Famous Writers School’s Are you kidding??

“You seem to have mistaken us for MI6, my young Ohidiana friend. Suggest applying for British or Soviet citizenship as the bright undergrad’s opening move here. PS, I am no devotee of the Oxford comma. But the Cambridge comma is worse.”

Despite or perhaps because of the rather pointed omission of a return address or handwritten signature, I have to admit I felt recognized. Born in my hometown’s quasi-official twin city, Boise, Idaho – “the Wyandotte of the West,” we called it – Jim, like me, was a poet Iron Maidened in a government career, although his admiration for Ezra Pound was not shared by his Nice State Koppelganger. Anyway, I got published – in the Ives-Courrier, at least, at 14 – and Angleton did not. He only cofounded Furioso at Yale, while I cofounded the Wodie Fjord of the Roanoke Society at SOL. I leave it to you which of us was more attuned to modernism’s spiky scramble.

Boise, you should know, never responded to Wyandotte’s offer of civic fraternity, which dated to 1939. (Right, like they were too good for us, too haughty for Nice State hoi polloi? Get real, potato head.) Suspecting Angleton’s hand at work, I canceled the invite in one of my first acts as Boy Mayor. Never hung in City Hall, the mediocre painting by half-Injun O-D primitive Grandma Hammurabi of our own Byawatha shaking hands with Boise-born cowboy turned silent-screen actor Jack Hoxie now sits above my Marigny shotgun’s mantelpiece.

Yes, I confess: I stole it before decamping from Wyandotte for D.C. But nobody else wanted it anyway. Unlike Bunny Ashtray, it was never reported missing, and what does that tell you?

If I’m right about Jim’s vanished letter, even Monica Heide was a thief. Unlike my Boy Mayor topper, it wasn’t among the effects of hers returned to me as the original owner, making a Dispos-All final solution likely. But if Heidi fretted about the harm to my political career should it become public – or worse, my initial application, which may well still repose in Langley’s Ex-Lax-allergic bowels – she hadn’t caught on that slapstick can double as a form of tradecraft, something else Angleton and I apparently had in common.

First off, I’d used Ezra Sununibis’s Nordofen Hall room number, not Mark’s and my tainted one, as my return address. As usefully gullible as ever – “Ezra, I don’t even think you’re a person,” I heckled him once after our falling-out. “You’re a plot device in an asshole’s body” – he bought my story about needing a dead drop for my clandestine Poicaris-bypassing communications with the secretary of the national Roanoke Society, or pretended to. For good measure, I surreptitiously mailed it from Biloxi, where I, of course, could prove he’d been just before our graduation. Bunny was my mute witness to that.

Besides, I’d used an alias, an easy habit for an ex-McBride turned Harbinger to slip into. It was guaranteed to fuse porcupine goo into a chilly neon heart, since Kim was still very much alive and Jim no doubt pined for a secret word from him as much as Mark Poicaris probably did for one from me. I’d signed my letter Phil B. Maclean (Esq., etc.), Burgesshire.

∞

On May 26, 1951, by his own account, right after learning from an unsuspecting British Embassy “colleague” that Maclean had flown the coop cross-Channel the day before and Burgess had gone , Kim Philby drove out along the Potomac toward Great Falls from his house at 4100 Nebraska Avenue. His compromising photographic equipment was in the trunk of his car in waterproof containers along with a trowel. On the pretense of stopping to urinate – he probably did need urgently to piss, but not all cover stories are outright charades – Kim buried the contraband at an undisclosed location in the roadside woods, where it no doubt sits underground to this day.

No thanks to me, if only in intention. Almost exactly 30 years later – May 29, 1991, to be finicky about it – I drove Geenie out toward Great Falls on the same route to treat her to lunch at the Finagler Inn, a favorite getaway spot for boldfaced and two-faced Washingtonians before Kim’s day and beyond mine. Unbeknownst to her, and just as well, I had a metal detector in the trunk of my rented cherry-red 1989 Farandole Coup.

I’d failed to ask if it worked against waterproof containers, but it turned out that didn’t matter. As a member of the Senate’s National Parks Committee and, as I don’t believe I’ve mentioned, Ranking Member of its Battlefields Subcommittee, I’d thought obtaining a metal detector for purportedly official business would be a breeze. It wasn’t. The National Park Service informed me pretty darn frostily that U.S. Senators weren’t exempt from the law against bringing them to historic sites this side of a committee subpoena, and so did the GSA.

I decided against getting myself deeper in dutch by explaining that the battlefield I had in mind was a Cold War one. But the staffer at O-D’s Bureau of Nice State Mines, Riverways and Historical Artifacts in Crevecoeur was dazzled by an honest-to-gosh request from an honest-to-gosh member of Congress. “In Washington? That’s Washington, D.C.?”, young Miles Frost Jr. gasped, proving he couldn’t be caught napping once he’d begged coffee from someone offstage. Before he slept, he sent it to my Wyandotte office without question – “Please return it, it’s our only one” – and they sent it on to me at Rochambeau Towers, not R-286.

I did return it; I’m a privateer, not a kleptomaniac. But the post office on Connecticut Avenue had initially refused to deliver it to me because the container resembled packaging for a rifle and their metal detector was inconclusive. No doubt it wasn’t wise to grunt “I wish” and then “Just my luck” when I came by to demonstrate different by hacking at the Karloff tape binding it and then prising up the lid with no silver stake handy, but I wasn’t recognized that I know of. District postal workers take pride in being heedless of all but a few Senators and high Executive Branch officials, much as the waiters at Barney’s Beanery might have blinked at Janet Leigh or Alfred Hitchcock but stayed oblivious to Anthony Perkins in Hollywood’s last golden days.

That’s also the only time I set eyes on that landlocked piece of wannabe scuba gear. It was back in its box when I loaded it into the Coup, and Gigi for damn sure never saw it. She guessed but didn’t know for sure she had when I fake-idly chatted about Philby’s undiscovered cache somewhere along the dappled but steamy road we’d taken: “I know you,” she said, brushing back her damp Cyclone in a lackluster way. “I bet you’ve got a mine detector in the trunk of your Midlife Crisis rental.”

“Metal.” I was sweating like Peter Lorre in M on the Inn’s outside patio and our table’s too tilted Mai Tai-sized umbrella had all but literally fallen down on the job. I left it to her whether I was confessing, making a generic correction, or correctly identifying my cutlery’s origins. I swear to God it was sweating too.

∞

More likely, I’d just knocked a few stray beadings of H2O loose when I blindly dove for my water glass in the poleaxing heat. My fault for being so set on giving my Gigi a truly Washingtonian experience. She was getting one right between the eyes, or so the defeated strand of blond hair seeking messy refuge from her itching scalp’s Bull Run told me.

To think all this was my unvoiced effort to make up for her birthday dinner at Yugo’s, which was one of those memories that stubbornly declare it wasn’t what it might have been without ever elucidating what it might have been. “The outside’s where you – we have the best chance of spotting someone famous. Famous for Washington, any-hoo. Alfresco insiders, I guess you could say.”

“You do know there’s nobody else out here,” Geenie observed. “Except that poor old guy who looks like Tom Eagleton – okay, it is Tom Eagleton – having lunch with Arlen Specter.”

“Haunting, isn’t he? I thought he was in Europe.”

“And the waiter who’s bringing our drinks and hates your guts. Mine too, probably. But I’m innocent!”

This last was cheerfully exclaimed – I can’t really say “sunnily,” can I? – at the patio’s perspiring Garçon himself as he deposited my gin and tonic, which looked to my trained eye as if it had theoretically had ice in it once, and Geenie’s sensible-glass-slipper Pinot Grigio spritzer. I knew when to beat a retreat.

“All right. You win, pal. Any chance you can move us indoors?”

Satisfaction turned him north bipolar. “Are you kidding? It’s so full of happy people in no hurry to leave you might as well wait until Halloween, Jack. Excuse me, Senator.”

That prompted me to lift my warmed G & T to Geenie in a toast once he left: “To JFK.”

“Okay, but why?”

“Today’s his birthday, sugar. You wouldn’t believe how the three kids at Ralphie Laughlin High who shared it used to put on airs in ’63. Of course they felt screwed when Oswald blew out the candles.”

“Jealous much? ‘Senator.’”

“Sure. You know who I had? Nixon. Try getting dates with that hot plum in your pocket.”

“I know, I know. ‘You got a rock.’”

“I’m not so sure, hon. Nixon’s alive. As much as he ever was, anyway.”

“I bet he’d have brought a mine detector.”

“Metal,” I said again. I was starting to feel sheepish about everything from my birth onward. January 9, 1949, a date that will live in indignity.

∞

The whole outing had been a day on the Somme from the start. The Senate wasn’t in session that Wednesday and I’d done my best to make my suggestion we play hooky sound spontaneous and moderately madcap. Geenie knew better as soon as she saw the Farandole Coup parked on Delaware Avenue across from the Russell Building; I obviously hadn’t rented it this a.m.

I hadn’t wanted to risk my spare Senate sticker for legitimacy’s sake. Why make life easier for dozens of undeserving tourists, most not even from O-D, once I returned it with the windshield scraped-at but legible? But it was already such a drowsing, heat-zonked, pointless sort of morning that half a dozen spaces were available. I’ve since learned that those days are the dangerous ones, largely because New Orleans has no other kind: could be a hurricane, could be Drew Brees retiring. Six of one!

Coup or no Coup, Geenie probably thought we were going to either Rochambeau Towers or, more puzzlingly, her Columbia Road digs when I steered us north by northwest on Mass Ave. Then I didn’t take Connecticut at Dupont Circle and I could tell she was wondering if she should get irritated, always a decision with her and not the improv she typically had a predilection for.

We went on past the British Embassy, where Kim had once slyly served two masters, and the anaconda girdling the Naval Observatory, site of the cloistered Vice-Presidential residence that might have been mine. For once I circled past it without wondering if Helen would have reconsidered and joined me there, since she’d been the first and only person I’d ever confided my Veephood ambitions to. From that you can gauge Geenie’s effect on me.

She’d given up on talking when I surprised her at Ward Circle by leaving Mass and turning north by north. Then I stopped across the street from 4100 Nebraska Avenue, my preliminary destination today. Well, ours, but she wasn’t in on the plan.

“We don’t have to go in. I doubt the owners would let us look around anyway. But that’s where Kim Philby lived when he was posted here.”

“I have to admit I’m not bowled over.” Geenie had made up her mind to treat me as foolish, which always improved her mood. Mine too, come to think of it. “Call me nutso, but it looks to me like just a house.”

It was, too. Large and reasonably expensive-looking, but that hardly made it exceptional in this leafy neighborhood. The columned portico was modestly proportioned, proving this was an older D.C.’s discreet idea of swank.

“I know. But think of what went on there. Kim getting drunk with Jim Angleton. Burgess showing up as a houseguest. The famous dinner party where the only thing on the menu was liquor and Guy makes a lifelong enemy out of Bill Harvey by drawing a dirty picture of his wife. She was sitting right there, and giving an Irish ex-FBI man turned spifflicated Agency white hunter a reason for a vendetta definitely isn’t well thought-out tradecraft.”

“I don’t see why it matters he was Irish.”

“They’re like Sicilians without the classy side and good manners. It might have been what queered the whole deal.”

“What a curiouser and curiouser choice of words.”

“It’s just an expression.”

“Well, aren’t they all? So is ‘I love you.’ What are we doing here?”

“I’m not sure. ‘So long, farewell, auf wiedersehn, goodbye,’ I guess.”

Catching me off guard – I thought she’d be truculent, but that came later – Geenie beamed. She still had the stamina to do that then. I’d kept the car running, the windows were rolled up to the acme of their Farandole lives and the A/C was cranked high.

Her all too temporary hand was on my temporarily freeze-dried thigh. “It’s all one Heffalump after another to you, isn’t it? You say goodbye, and we say hello. So it goes.”

∞

No surprise the only line I remember from Tender Is The Night, read when I was trying to impress doughty Miss Heide in high school, is the gratuitous bit Fitgerald jammed in about Dick Diver’s valedictory to his papa, just because he’d recently lost his own: “Goodbye, my father – goodbye, all my fathers.” Newly Harbingered, convinced the Beatles were mine alone, unaware of B-movie actor Ronald Reagan, full of prince-of-Denmark hate of JFK and not yet Philby-ized, I thought the SOB didn’t know the half of it.

No wonder my two favorite Disney movies in my Montelḗon-bifurcated O-D youth were 101 Dalmatians and In Search of The Castaways. You know, bullshit happy endings and all. My idea of a movie with a good, true-blue, all-American happy ending was The Alamo. An embarrassment now – what, already? – the mine, sorry metal, detector in the Coup’s cherry-red trunk was as dead to me as Poe’s black cat.

By the time slick-faced Garçon plopped down my cornmeal-dungeoned Dungeness crab cakes and Geenie’s shrimp Caesar salad, the thought of food was odious to us both. Her face was actually blotchy, something I’d never seen before. “I think this one used to be his wife,” she muttered as a sad, pale, crooked and recently beringed Roman finger drooped disconsolately from her fork.

“Count your blessings. I’m exhuming the unknown Canadian who fell at Passchendaele. ”

“I guess that’s why they call it trenchfoot.” But the last wisp of her good humor drifted away with that joke.”

“You should try it. This is Heffalump crab we’re talking here.” Word to the wise from the wizened: resurrecting a tender exchange to please someone sulky amounts to offering a spoonful of crème brulḗe on a rusty trowel just vacated by maggots.

“I didn’t think we were talking.”

Stuff’s gotten real the first time you .ask a woman “What is it?” without smiling. I hadn’t said it minus a politician’s defusing grin to anyone since Helen, my MIA Second Lady. Or first Dark Lady of the Senate, I suppose.

“I just know what this is. I’m not sure you do.”

“So tell me and there’ll be two of us. I hate being in the dark about myself .”

Have I mentioned this was the fourth day of a D.C. heat wave and I should have known better? Senators have a bad habit of thinking weather only applies to them during election cycles. The invention of air conditioning was to Washington what contact lenses were to Packwood and me.

“Huh. Don’t be ridiculous. I mean be ridiculous, that’s what makes you telegenic. You love being in the dark about yourself. You couldn’t survive if – “

“Gigi, for Christ’s sake. What’s this about?”

That was the cops-at-the-door version of “What is this?”, as I’d soon discover thanks to her. Just over two months later, incredibly.

“I know you. I’m, I’m the camera you want to bury.”

I managed a dazed chuckle. “Give me a cavity search, officer. No trowel here.”

“I mean all of it. His house. Insane things probably went on all over that neighborhood, but that’s the one you care about. Because you know about it – so what? And now driving me out here for lunch, because I’m the secret you’d do anything to keep. I don’t know why.”

“That’s not true.”

“I don’t know why, I don’t know why. Can you please take me home now? I mean back to my shitty room.”

“You don’t have A/C there either.”

“I know, believe me. But at least you won’t be there, smirking at me like I’m a silly kid who’s crying. I’m not, I’m not.”

“Really?” With a smile – all, right, smirk, probably smirk, I can’t help that – I made to pass her my damp napkin.

She knocked aside the offering and the hand it rode in on. “I never was, I never will be, and you know it. Please stop being an asshole, Frodo. Oh, what am I saying?”

∞

She never knew she’d guessed wrong for once. I’d rented a Coup and taken her out to Finagler’s Inn because I’d decided to placate her by proposing we get married.

I hadn’t saved our Econolodge room key because I’m not that foresighted and a butterfingers anyhow, but the ring I’d bought a week earlier at the jewelry outlet the former Georgetown Theater on lower Wisconsin had become (they’d kept the marquee) was discreetly engraved 202, nothing else. I have no idea what became of it.

I can be slow but I hope I’m not stupid. After our disastrous outing on what would have been JFK’s 74^th birthday, and fat chance the Addison’s wouldn’t have got him long before then unless Jackie said the hell with it one fine morning at Hyannis and poisoned him like the Dresden-doll Borgia she must’ve pined to be, it crossed my mind that Geenie was unusually sensitive about being treated like a whore. Her Alamogordo misadventures were clearly some sort of lesion in her resumḗ, or so she couldn’t help imagining somebody like me would think no matter how often Senator Rouḗ-OD tried to disabuse her, not that I ever confided much about my own unselective ruttings. So much for quality control, and so forth. A troth plighted with a motel-room memento might not strike her as all that romantic.

It did me, but what do I know? Anyhoo, when I did ask her to marry me five weeks later, I didn’t have a ring on me. It was absolutely spontaneous – midway up the Exorcist steps between M Street and Prospect in Georgetown on the fucking Fourth of July, if you must know – and I knew Geenie would cherish it more that way.

So did I, impulsiveness not being my outstanding trait. If we’d been vacationing in Vegas, I’d be a widower today, most likely one with mixed feelings. Well, aren’t unmixed ones a stone bore?

We made it up after Finagler’s Inn, I don’t remember how. But it must have been not long after that that she slipped Now We Are Six into the Bluebeard Room’s bookcase for me to discover at a time of neither of our choosings, perhaps the point of it all. I’m guessing she didn’t know she’d be dead when I did, but neither did I except every minute in my heart.

That wasn’t the only book Gigi gave me. I just took the other out of my Civil War bookcase: Tom O’ Bedlam: The Life of George H. Thomas, U.S.A, by Harry S. Sherman. Wodie Press, 1991: my onetime Ralphie Laughlin sidekick turned cafeteria corridor tormentor’s first book.

He’s dead now, like so many people, killed in a two-way car crash on the way to Chickamauga for a Midwestern historians’ reunion. The other guy was coming from Franklin, TN, and had written a book about CSA general John Hood’s debacle there.

My copy of Tom O’Bedlam is inscribed – though not by its author, whose history with me Geenie didn’t know. Good luck in Butchertown on Barber Day, Frodo. Sorry I won’t be with you, but we both know I will be “any-hoo.” PS: Tell them why Lincoln’s still a Republican and so are you. There won’t be a dry seat in the house and I ought to know. Love, your Genya.

∞

Yes: I’d reconsidered. The invite to speak on Friday, September 20, in Colonel Barber’s old hometown that I’d wormed out of in early April, B.G. – Before Geenie – had gotten a lot more attractive once I decided I wanted my fiancée to see mine. Crevecoeur too, and the view of boundless but intramurally bounded blonde, butterscotch, tan, chartreuse, brick-towned and docilely siloed, blue-skied friezes from a life-arraying United Airlines flight’s window seat.

A weekend in O-D with me was bound to convince her the Nice State was real – real every day of the year, as we Hi-Dies like to say. She’d been eager, too: “From the Bluebeard Room to the Beanstalk. How lucky can an Alamogordo girl get?”

Then, on August 6 – yes, the last day anyone but her uncaught killer saw Geenie Grimm alive – she woefully told me she’d have to fly to meet me on September 21. She had a yeast infection scheduled for that Thursday, or something feminine like that. Harry S. Sherman’s just published book was her apology for the delay, which became an eternal one.

It wasn’t until Gail Hardaway’s WashPost obit in January ’92 that I learned the true reason she’d had to postpone. She’d kept secrets from me, had Gigi. The RNC’s automatic-pilot try at smearing my love as an easy New Mexico lay to save my seat – not on the airplane, in the Senate – had come and quietly collapsed months earlier, but Gail’s pro-Geenie militance had come in second, as ever, to her newshound nose’s instinct to dig and keep digging until every last grave was a newly spaded garden in waiting.

When she gave me Tom O’Bedlam in R-286 the afternoon of her death, she told me she wanted to read it too when I got back from O-D, an odd slip if she planned to join me there and an odder one with the trip six weeks away. “It’s that Colonel of yours,” she smiled. “Anybody who founds a barber school for the blind is someone I’d like to get to know in my spare time.”

‘Which one?”

“I didn’t know there was more than one.”

I assured her there was: “Oh, yeah. There’s the hero of Chickamauga who founded the school. Then there’s the guy who shot the Bride of Hollow Sky, my putative great-grandmother, right between the eyes a dozen years after forswearing violence forever.”

“Were they related?”

“Close as milk. We put a lot of work in O-D into treating them like they’re two different people. They weren’t.”

“Even on Barber Day?”

“Especially on Barber Day. You won’t hear my great-grandma mentioned on Barber Day, for sure not by me.”

“I guess that makes sense. We do that E.A. Poe ‘William Wilson’ thing a lot in this country, don’t we?”

“We do most of his horror stories a lot, but it depends on what kind of mood we’re in that day. Him too, It wasn’t really Bonzo that strangled that broad in the Rue Morgue, of course not. Edgar Allan Poe, how do you plead?”

“Put down that banana! You’re not fooling anyone. That’s what Philby took advantage of, right? We’re okay with being tricked so long as we don’t know.” She stuck her fingers in her ears, mimed credulous incredulity: “Blah, blah, blah.”

It was the first time she’d mentioned the name since May 29^th, and you’d better believe I damn well hadn’t. She was telling me I’d been forgiven.

“JFK too. He’s the great guy who invented the Peace Corps,” I tried to keep the scorn out of my tone, “or the one who said he got headaches if he couldn’t get a new piece of ass every day. We’ll never let him be both.”

“Or you, Senator McBride. He’s the Senator from Ohidiana I really like, you know. Only you don’t. You think you’re not allowed to.”

For once – okay, twice – she’d said “Senator” without putting mischievous quotes around the word. She was dead a dozen hours later.

∞

Comme vous avez vu, by no means were my Goldilocksmiths all female. Lennon, the Cambridge Three-Four-Five, the McBride family patricide John F. Kennedy: what a consulate, what a junta, what a sextet of weird brothers upon the heath. Plus Poicaris, I suppose, and – far more important – my W. O-D U. adviser Kirk Gentile, who appointed himself my consigliere for his own Hebraic amusement. He’s still amused despite having only a relic to toy with. To him I’m still a piece of the goyim’s True Crossword Puzzle.

Bob Dole was somewhere in there too in his taciturn way. And predating them all, the man, the fellow facsimile of someone who didn’t properly exist, who called himself el verdadero Che. Since he’s the one I like to think about the least, he’s naturally the one lurking hereabouts the most.

I’d never have bet on anyone to join that company in what I’m fondly hoping is my dotage, R. Mutt Hasbro least of all. He has a wayward habit of being significant in ways he didn’t ask for that irritate him mightily, but that’s what he gets for not having hobbies. Unless, as I suspect, they all are.

Cassie Furbelow, who knows Mutt better than anyone – “Not a high bar to clear,” she says, “would you want to?” – tried to explain it to me once. “He’s fine with people thinking he must be some kind of genius. He just doesn’t want anyone to know how come they do.”

“I guess he moved to the right place, then.”

“Here? Oh, yeah. He says Nola’s the ideal city if you want it perfectly understood that you have no interest in being understood. People get along without that here and it works pretty well.”

“That’s good. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want him to understand me either. That’s always been kind of a deal-breaker with me, well, except in one case.”

“He knew her too,” Cassie told me with aplomb, idly confirming something I hadn’t been sure I’d heard Mutt mumble. I’d learned by now I’d better pay attention when he mumbled.

“Really? I’m not sure I did. Or she wasn’t sure, whatever.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t say it works both ways!” Cassie thought that was hilarious. “Mutt understands you pretty well, Frodo. He just doesn’t see much point in it.”

“In understanding me or thinking it makes any difference if he does?”

“Both. Six of one, like always with Mutt. He is a jerk, you know.”

“And that’s why you love him.”

Her wry mouth and sloped shoulders and mountainous breasts all shrugged simultaneously, always a sight to behold or perhaps several of them. “I guess I did once. Six of one covers an awful lot of territory in my life.”

∞

So did something else she said about him, that night or another. “The whole reason we started Spokes Persons was that Mutt hates working. He’s really lazy. Now he’s obsessed 15 hours a day, but he says it’s still better than having a job.”

I know the feeling. Dig up the camera, Frodeaux. R. Mutt Hasbro had known Geenie. What else was there to grasp, understand, reduce him to?

Let’s see. He’d grown up at least partly in Montclair, N.J., no doubt pretty privileged but aware, unlike most, that rejecting all of that was a continuation of privilege by other means. He’d been or, as he said, pretended to be a musician for a while. He was brainy but devoted to remaking himself as an asshole, less for protection than license – in New Orleans, at least. He was indifferent to politics in a way that emphasized his obsession with them. It was maddening to keep feeling Mutt reminded me of someone I’d never met.

It really didn’t take too long. The Lurker – remember him? – was telling Cassie in a tobacco-wreathed mutter about a band from Louisville he used to follow: the Bunion Dance Blondes, something punkish like that. Listening to everything except his own voice as usual, Mutt perked up: “Hey, I know them. Used to. They opened for us once at Zero Dark Thirty.”

Because listening to everything but his own voice makes him blind, he’d forgotten I was on the stool next to his. This time there was no doubt in my mind, or rather my ears. Geenie had told me only latecomers like herself called the club the Oh-Three-Oh back in the early ‘90s.

“In D.C.?” I asked it sharply just to alert him he’d been caught out. Mutt looked mulish but acceded by alleging I’d only stated the obvious.

“Yeah. I don’t like it to get around, but I was George Bush’s White House Assistant in Charge of Anomie for a while. Gave Quayle a wedgie once, he was used to it.”

I could pull rank there, as Mutt no doubt meant me to. “He was. His Secret Service detail had one absolute rule. No high-school visits, ever.”

Mutt looked fond of nothing in particular, which was pretty much his outlook on life in any case. “They were great days.”

“So your band was just a sideline.”

The wannabe lout born Monroe Hofbrauer, Jr., knew a good chess move when he heard one. “The Preventions? Yeah.”

”And you were – ?”

“The Man of The Century. But that was then. Who cares what I’m the man of now?”

∞

Craig Harbinger’s younger fans — thassuh joke, son — likely won’t recall a simpering brand of 1980s TV Macguffaws known as Will They or Won’t They. But after that night at Molly B’s, whenever precisely it was – with the exceptions of January 8, 1815, and August 29, 2005, New Orleans is notoriously predisposed against sticklers for chronology –Mutt Hasbro and I occupied a mutually recognized but wordless force field. Call it Had They or Hadn’t They.

He knew I’d never ask if he’d bedded Geenie and I knew he’d never tell. The subsequent tension in our relationship was generated by whether or when he’d slip up and let the cat or the rat in the hat out of the bag in a haphazard moment of heat.

I have a hunch we both enjoyed it, didn’t want our tacit new connection to be severed the second it became a fact we’d shared a prior one. As it would be, since we were bound to decide on the spot we’d never actually liked each other much – another favorite Nola gavotte, played out in a kajillion everyday encounters unavailable to mapping or census by my or anyone’s brain.

Note my phrasing; Geenie would’ve. It was too damned alienating for me to imagine a Sadie Hawkins roundelay provoked by her bedding him and still is. The enigma in my Gigi’s juryrigged giggle is the degree to which she had agency even fleetingly once anytime between May 6, 1967, and the night of August 6-7, 1991. It would be too brutal to say her murder settled that #grimm hashtag for good, notwithstanding that I just did.

Rain in early November ushers the District from the realm of neon-blue empyreans and architecture’s chalk and toothpaste to the neverland of granite ghosts. That gray and chilling brand of misty drizzle was Today’s Special weather-wise when newly ex-Senatored Me, fresh or rather prematurely stale from resigning my seat the evening before, bid his all too typically scattershot and fumbling farewell to Geenie. I hadn’t intended anything of the kind, or any-hoo known I did, until I told the taxi driver taking me and my suddenly anonymous luggage to DCA from the now emptied scrotum of my Rochambeau Towers pad to drop me off at the corner of Columbia Road and 18^th Street NW.

“Sell you an umbrella for five bucks if you want.” He summoned a stash of forlorn cerise, sunflower, and Wave Blue tubular belles with skirts tight-wrapped and bound peekaboo-immured in a zippered clear plastic casing from the well of the cab’s shotgun seat.

“I’m leaving town today.”

Travis Bickle wisdom: “Rains everyplace, pal.”

“Not inside airplanes.”

“I’ve heard different. You tell me how that works out.” I couldn’t be sure if he’d recognized me or that was his standard line for anybody who tried anything outside his cab.

Once my roller suitcase gave up on tugging me either hither or yon – sit, Shiva, sit – I hesitated at the intersection, not sure why I’d come here in the first place. But I did know better than to stroll down the three-story high street where she’d lived. I’d learned from local TV news that her mourners left flowers there, although she was still officially just missing, not dead. Brother, if I’d worried about the cabbie recognizing me – !

At least he’d been seated, Shiva, professionally trapped. Out of the cab, my suitcase and I both felt vulnerable, and as things turned out, we weren’t wrong. But I walked down 18^th to Zero Dark Thirty, aka the Oh-Three-Oh club.

I’d only been inside the place once and that was the night she was killed, so I had no desire to venture in. Couldn’t have anyway, since 0-3-0 only opened at sunset year ‘round. No matter the season, adding a little touch of Heisinger in the night. Geenie and I hadn’t shown up until 9:30 back in August and the crowd was still sparse.

Like so many buildings on that chunk of 18^th, relics of a time when what was still called Washington City, forbidden to expand, burrowed within itself as if Kafka was Pierre L’Enfant’s executor, Zero Dark Thirty’s street frontage was unprepossessing. But its carapace stretched back and back to a pitted and still cobblestoned alley John Wilkes Booth might have dodged into between acting jobs and assignations before he combined his hobbies by assassinating old Abe. The District’s avant la lettre answer to Jack the Ripper always did mistake himself for the Scarlet Pimpernel instead.

That hadn’t stopped him from becoming Lincoln’s Goldilocksmith in a way. I couldn’t help recalling my sozzled “remarks” at the Gettysburg Kiwanis only seven unimaginable months ago. Geenie had claimed she’d fallen in love with me as I was bumbling my way through Craigsplaining that Booth had to shoot our 16^th President to give America proof of how important Abe was, would be, to us.

She’d guessed I was miscast as a Senator and wanted to be a little boy when I grew up, impish but fundamentally docile. Had she been right? Most likely; she usually was, also avant la lettre.

To those of us not as adept at reading punk runes as she’d been, both the exterior and interior signage of its venues, the Oh-Three-Oh included, was as cryptic as Klingon haikus. A fair comparison, since there are now people who could teach classes in the latter’s made-up vocabulary. I was to learn this all over again on my valedictory return visit to Wyandotte many years afterward for the squat landlocked tugboat that had housed Frank McBride’s combined machine and industrial junk shop in my Ohidiana childhood had become a record store mysteriously named Shredded Spine Intact Banana.

I was greeted there by a poster of an undiplomatic-looking fellow whose teeth were indistinguishable from spittle. Brit dentistry at its Wile E. Coyote acme! He was jerking a guitar as if it was a stevedore’s hook out to topple his mic stand, and the lettering under his yobbo snagglepuss read The Clash at Coffin Creek.

My eyes needed some Bletchley work to deduce that the site of what white Hi-Dies used to call a battle and Byawatha’s surviving tribespeople called a massacre was now a forum for summer concerts. On the first Saturday of November, 1991, I didn’t even get that far.

A relatively fresh-looking poster outside 0-3-0 told me tonight’s headliners were The Sapiosexual Polymaths, Featuring Shari Choler – themselves featured on one of Geenie’s T-shirts that spring. But I knew nothing more about them except that Shari herself, apparently pictured, resembled the star of Dreyer’s 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc. That was unless the photograph was of the original, which I couldn’t be sure of and probably wasn’t meant to. So far as I could tell, origination and appropriation seemed to be pretty interchangeable concepts in Punkland.

“You should come see us!” a female voice across the street called out merrily. I turned, and it was plainly Shari Choler herself hallooing me: cropped prison hair, martyrdom-tilted chin and all, made incongruous by a genial for-tourists-only smile. But she’d vanished toward Columbia Road before I caught more than a glimpse of her. I had no idea whether she’d recognized me, although I knew she’d been a crony of Geenie’s and Gigi had confided in her about her new beau the Senator in long-lost April. I weirdly hoped she’d find her Antonin Artaud someday.

I didn’t have any better luck with a much more weathered and Dopplered giant poster of a fellow with Edward Scissorhands hair and a microdotically stippled blue shirt advertising an album (?) called Disintegration: that seemed apt. But while I was years away from knowing R.Mutt Hasbro – and even more of them from meeting Shari, not that it matters – I could recognize the Man of The Century’s literal handwriting, especially since it was faded. Scrawled across the poster was 1 oz Preventions = 1 £ Cure.

“Senator.” Gail Hardaway made the greeting sound as if it was her gracious reply to having been introduced to me by an unseen third party, which I suppose she had. She knew better than to put out her hand, miming curling it back instead like a kitten’s parody paw.

My predator’s face was a foot away from mine in the soft rain that had just been turned keen by a chilling breeze. Not enough of one to agitate her coarse black mop of wiglike hair, which probably required jet engines to be stirred. Her eyes’ pupils nosedived cheekward and then refloated themselves like a mechanical fortune teller’s in a Depression-era O-D arcade. It was as if she was privately inspecting her smirk’s effect from the inside of her mouth.

“It’s sort of like a high-school reunion, isn’t it?” she merrily theorized. “We ought to be wearing HELLO MY NAME IS stickers. I just saw Shari Orfevre go into the florist’s.”

“Who?” I still couldn’t believe Gail Hardaway was a) disconcertingly present and b) speaking to me with such mischievous intimacy. It was almost as if Geenie herself had reappeared.

“That punky chantoozy she was buds with. Did you think her real name was Choler? When somebody like her buys roses, you know there’s only one reason. Someone’s died or someone’s married.”

“What the fuck, were you following me?” It occurred to me that now I was no longer a Senator, I could drop f-bombs from here to Hanoi if I pleased. Silver linings!

“No such luck. I heard about the memorials and wanted to see.”

“You would.” I now had license to be bitter too. Ah, the new sea’s salt tang.

“And you, ‘Senator.’ Were you following yourself? You would.”

“Oh, fuck you in the butthole, bitch.” Salt tang!

∞

Unless you count shouted but Cheshire-purring questions in hectic Senate corridors, which I’d soon learned to ignore, Gail and I had never spoken face to face. A few curt phoners right after Gigi disappeared had swiftly disabused me of any notion her mind had risked being an open one in any situation since her birth. But even in person, her lips twitched from the inside as if she were observing herself on TV, as schizos are said to. I wouldn’t know myself.

If I hadn’t known she was a reporter, I’d have assumed she was mentally disturbed. My hunch was that Gail Hardaway had had the same effect on people in college, impelling her to a journalistic career. It wasn’t all Woodward and Bernstein in her smirking generation, y’know.

“You’ll have to talk to me now,” she filled me in. “I’m shopping for a book deal.”

“You’d be better off shopping for a plastic surgeon, lady.” This turned out to be true. Nobody wanted Gigi And Frodo: Backwards In High Heels or whatever she hoped to call it, not with her byline. Using rumors of unacknowledged borrowing from other reporters’ spadework as its pretext, the Post fired her before Christmas for just irritating the bejesus out of people.

“Oh, come off it, Craig. It’s water under the bridge. Let’s have a drink. I’ll ride with you to National if – “

“You’re joking.” Pointedly glancing Columbia Roadward, I hitched up my carry-on bag – odd memory of doing the same with Geenie’s Jaclyn Smith designer satchel around the corner just six months ago, six months – and gripped my roller suitcase’s handle. Kill, Rover, kill. Woof!

“Burdens of office,” she saucily captioned my bricolage. “I thought you and they were on the outs. Too bad this place is closed, huh? But she liked Thyme of The Ancient Marinade too.”

Gail nodded to the former Yugo’s, which was across the street half a block down. I didn’t know Gigi had ever gone back there after her 24^th birthday – with Shari Orfevre Choler, the sapiosexual polymath? With the Man of The Century, not yet known to me as Mutt Hasbro? Restaurants and people both reincarnate themselves too damn fast these days, and I should know. Been there, done that, but it was a process in my day: an evolution, not a whim.

“You can’t be serious. And stop calling me ‘Senator.’”

“I already did,” she pointed out. “And why not? I always wondered what you had, Frodo. It’s one reason I got pissed when you stopped retur –“

“Oh, Jesus H. fucking Christ.”

“I guess now I’ll never know, but guess what? Neither will you,” she Cheshired. Then she sauntered away – to quiz Shari’s florist, most likely. You never know.

I stood there too stunned to remember I still needed a taxi to National to fulfill my new dream of getting the hell out of Washington. Gail’s receding widow’s-walk coif and orange slicker glittered with homeless raindrops that had never done the world any harm. She’d been the last person to call me “Senator” and the first to call me Frodo to my face, anticipating New Orleans boldface lingo by almost two decades.

She was wrong about everything else, though, as I was happy to remind her when we bedded each other on the 20^th anniversary – well, more or less – of Geenie’s death. Not only didn’t she sell her squalid book proposal once her career went on the skids, comeuppance time!, but Shari Orfevre told me she and Geenie had only gone to Yugo’s once and that was before its rechristening. I was still dazed that watching CSI’s “Morgan’s Adam” for the umpteenth time had put Gail in an erotic mood., but there’s a new one born every minute.

Unlike Shari, Gail Hardaway wasn’t one of my Goldilocksmiths. The whole trouble, I saw too late, was that I’d been hers. She’d persisted beyond fathoming in thinking I was the only one.

Santa’s Helpmeet

I can’t really say it did Gail much good. But speaking as a beneficiary, I want to give my Goldilocksmiths credit where cold cash is more appropriately due. Since it all started when I was small, I’d like to thank the big people.

Among them, Pastor Kendall’s wife is the original if not quite the greatest. To her, Oliver Twist And Shout was just one more among the needy, no different from the hello-gruel-world tykes she sewed Mattel-unendorsed doll fashions for every Christmas except in my flesh-and-blood proximity. My hormones and I were both fascinated by her nimble, gentle, downright perversely long-fingernailed hands’ quick way with the Sears sewing machine, glue gun, staples and varicolored bits of plastic sheeting setting off her varicolored nail polish in the Kendalls’ golden basement.

Wyandotte having few indigent families and those few being much too proudly Hi-Die to put up with generosity’s impertinence in noblesse-oblige guise, Barbara Kendall’s miniature clothes and painstakingly handmade accessories were all mailed elsewhere by a nonprofit outfit called Green Pastors she’d founded while pregnant with Freddie and Flossie. Take it from an alert teen observer, charity begins with unconfessed dissatisfaction at home.

By way of an anonymous thank-you to her, I still send Green Pastors a small Christmas donation every year. Her sewing and accessorizing endeavors were no joke; she reproached the mirror if she hadn’t gotten started by Labor Day. Since her self-devised task in life didn’t fall much short of obsession – Nice Staters simply don’t have those, so hers wasn’t discussed – its most noteworthy verbal peculiarity sort of got lost in the shuffle.

The name by which her Ur-doll was universally known never passed Barbara’s lips. She might have felt differently in her girlhood, but her married name made it taboo. Midge, Skipper and the brand’s other subsidiary personages were mentionable in extreme circumstances, but Mrs. K never spoke of Midge’s sibling and her gelded consort other than as “She” and “He.”

Her lips would wrinkle faintly but visibly respectfully under her beige lip gloss when she had to do even that. As with so many other facsimile doppelgangers women have a penchant for, the British royal family’s pecking order seemed to be her model.

Presumably, at Windsor Castle, one doesn’t speak of the beheaded. Unless she wasn’t like other little girls or just had no brothers (Freddie and Flossie were my grubby education on that score), our pastor’s wife must have done her share of twist-off lopping to the Ur-doll and Ur’s beau in the gladder glades where their proprietor romped as plain and frisky Barbara Lillibild. The exclusive proprietor, she’d no doubt thought, as I once did of my duvet-tented ownership of the Beatles.

But I was unconscious then of any connection to that disconnection, blatant though it seems now. What ought to be obvious to even the slowest of you is that transitioning to Harbinger to McBride was the source of my fixation on names: bestowed ones, mute ones, unwelcome ones, changed ones. She and He had company, me included in the days when I was Barbie’s shrimp.

I know transitioning means something altogether different thse days to my younger admirers (ha ha again). But mine under Camelot wasn’t so dissimilar. Above all, I remember the tollgate limbo before my formal adoption by Dr. Harbinger and Mrs. Doctor. I was no longer Frank and Ella’s child but not yet anyone else’s.

The worst part was when other friends of my McBride parents hemmed and pawed as if that was adulthood’s yin and yang – what did I care, my tender chain was being yanked any which way – and then invented bank-shot ways of detecting if I’d watched my father being decapitated. Knowing their portal of discovery was narrow, they stopped as soon as I was legally someone else.

∞

That’s Hi-Die manners squared. If you don’t realize those nice people, and they were nice, meant well, you’ll never understand Ohidiana. Every middle-class white person in America was an unlicensed but concerned and troubled psychiatrist in the early 1960s. Their anxiety about my mental state was sincere.

But I haven’t forgotten how relieved they looked – duty safely discharged, and so on –when I politely answered “No, sir” or “No, ma’am. Can I please have a Coke?” G-rated animal desires are ever youth’s friend socially. Adults never guessed I didn’t even want a soda pop half the time, at least until the fluted excremental bottle showed up.

“Oh. Well. Then that’s all right, then.” Say what?

It never crossed their minds they could have just asked someone safely uninvolved while I was out of hearing distance or elsewhere entirely. But they wanted reassurance from the mouse’s mouth. Mrs, Kendall ventured a hope I might have only heard the news on radio, not TV!, once the blowsy bag of swamped bones I was soon to quit calling Mom and I were safely back in the U.S.A. No doubt during the news break on WNOD-AM’s “Frolic At Five, ” between “He’s A Rebel” and “Big Girls Don’t Cry.”

“We didn’t have WNOD down there.”

“I only meant I hope you didn’t have to hear it from your mother.”

I was puzzled. “Why? I didn’t care who told me.” Barbara Kendall looked puzzled. :Not a bit,” I boasted, hoping that made it sound more like a decision.

“I was thinking of her, not you. Well, both of you! You’ll learn, honey.” I’m not sure she was right about that, but never mind, never mind.

Emboldened by her pained Teresa of Avila face, I challenged her: “What if I saw it?”

“You didn’t.” She wasn’t positive, she just didn’t want me to have seen it. “Don’t ever imagine you did.”

I should have gone to town then. “Oh, sure! I wouldn’t have missed it for anything, Mrs. K. Gosh, could those retard kids of yours have beaten me at Show And Tell? I mean Dad’s glasses. His head rolled just far enough to lose them like he always does, and I grabbed them faster than a hegseth craps. A Dad’s a Dad but a buck’s a buck and I remembered which comes in handier in the States. The big green.”

“You poor boy. Then what happened?”

“Oh, yeah! Get a grip and hold your horses, Kay. Your eyes are kind of starting to glow with weird excitement. Dad started to sort of grope around, like usual, but his glasses were like five feet away and his ears just didn’t have the dexterity. So he just kind of blinked and then his head said, ‘Someday, son, all this will be yours.’”

“Oh, dear.”

“And guess what. It is!”

“Oh, dear. Oh, dear, dear, dear.”

[You really were a nice woman in what we’re pleased to call real life, Mrs. Kendall. The only time I saw you in adulthood, meaning mine and not yours, you told me you’d just voted for me for mayor. I sometimes picture you as you might be today, sitting in a rocking chair facing the wall where your sewing machine used to bar passage to twin siblings and rodents, your hair gone gray and chignonned and the capacious bosom once as mighty as the Warsaw Pact now crumpled and concave. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.]

Here’s where my voice turns tearful. “Those were the last words my Dad ever spoke, Mrs. Kendall. I don’t think ‘Oh shit! Is that a machete?’ should count, do you?” More sobs. “That’s the only time I ever heard him use a v-v-v-vulgarity.”

“You poor dear child. Well, I guess I shouldn’t call you that anymore, Craig! My, how you’ve grown. If it would help with your grief, would you like me to manipulate your penis? I know I don’t have your father’s gift, but – ”

“Aw, shucks, Mrs. K. He only did that to me once. He was just feeling really depressed until Sargent Shriver’s form letter came telling him and Mom they were in the Peace Corps now and he had it framed. Well, he already had a bunch of frames in the shop, just in case somebody got a government job. They had an eagle glued to the top.”

“How patriotic and hopeful and sad.” Her varicolor-nailed hand groped toward the table of spare sewing-machine needles and accessories as if wondering whether she’d been outdone. Impossible.

“The eagles all fell off pretty soon. I never said Dad was a good handyman, y’know. It’s just people can’t tell the difference and he never overcharged. Everything about us was pretty pathetic, really.”

“Uh-huh. I’m sorry, I forgot to put on rubber gloves before doing the dishes. That’s the disaster of motherhood – the things you forget, that you stop caring about, that you forget how to do. Like this.”

“You’re lots better at it than my mom, Mrs. K.”

“So they say. But the whole town knows she gave the best blowjobs in O-D. The late Pastor Kendall couldn’t stop raving about them, even from the pulpit or in Sunday school.”

“I remember. That was the last time I felt really proud of her.”

“Did you know what his last words were? We were talking about how she turned into a Communist slut after – you know, Montelḗon, and he pretended he agreed with me, being the Lord’s shepherd and all. But then he just said, ‘Oh, Mama.’ He and Frank should have swapped – I’d’ve liked that. Can you hurry up and ejaculate, please? Freddie and Flossie will be home soon and I want to smear it on their sandwiches. Won’t that be fun? You can watch them gag.”

∞

In what I’m less than pleased to have to keep calling real life, Barbara Kendall was as placidly virtuous as an unheated tea kettle on a never-fired gas burner. I’m reasonably sure she was never unfaithful to her husband, nor he to her. I wondered what it had been like for them both when she lay down for the first time beside her green pastor.

Because wishes never come out in the wash, at least if they’re mine, only her wild taste in nail polish so much as hinted at unraped gardens of carnal delights. Kindness wasn’t only in her bloodstream but its pump, and just my luck her mind’s array of tourniquets precluded bedding a sexually homeless 13-year-old with a Schroeder nose but no 88s. She may chosen to deny herself even a suspicion her boy neighbor was battered witless by nightly train wrecks of horror and hormones in my gossamer-thin (predictably, it was as oversized but fragile as a Schultz cranium) skull.

Before my birth mom the future hippie Earth Stepmother collected herself sufficiently to vamoose to the West Coast, where she’d heard smithereens made of former people were popular, Barbara Kendall’s treatment of Ella had shunted between automatic pity and stick-shift contempt. You could practically hear the gears gnash, the latter was so unnatural to her. But all too soon after we came back to Ohidiana, Ella’s mourning caul as Frank McBride’s widow had ripped in two to leave a town joke exposed.

No wonder she hied herself off to San Fran to hunt down the punchline. But Wyandotte post-Montelḗon was less the TV Repair Capital of The World to me than a Turner painting of a surfboard bobbing into multiple storms. Nothing bleeds into everything and I’m a blue blob of unfinished Gainsborough in it somewhere.

So picture me as a series of train wrecks at sea. I came to call that movie Attack of the Horrormones. It starred a thoughtful but peculiarly po’-faced Arthur Hill as Poe-facing Dad McBride, some Amtrak socialite turned piggishly bloated Warhol superstar as the Earth Stepmother, and one-man UN, as he was known, J. Carrol Naish – familiar to me then from Sahara and Rio Grande in his prime, not yet I Dream of Jeannie or The Man From U.N.C.L.E. once his rich harvest of credits dwindled to TV guest shots – in brownface makeup as El Verdadero Che.

Plus me, a tadpole muskellunge bewildered by conflicting currents and two-way billboards on the obscure span way high above. Have I mentioned I wore glasses by then, like Dad McBride? Barbara Kendall took multiple forms as a series of maddeningly remote sitcom facsimile moms, from Barbara Billingsley as June Cleaver to, unnervingly, Agnes Moorehead as Bewitched’s Endora, Samantha Stevens’ magic mom. The real Oedipal fantasy for lads of my generation was that incest is no big deal so long as you’re secretly someone else’s kid.

Before Mother Harbinger (Nancy Kulp, Beverly Hillbillies) took on the role in not-quite RL, I wasn’t anyone’s that I could see. I was the ultimate Huck Finn, a motherfucker without a mother. Until Geenie volunteered, I suppose.

∞

When the Attack of The Horrormones’ bedtime stirrings threatened to get out of hand, meaning it would soon be in one of mine if I didn’t watch out, I had a surefire facismile of what a later era would call aversion therapy to keep me boyishly celibate. All I had to do was remember that Mrs. Kendall had given birth.

Had been pregnant, had had her tummy reflattened by God’s ultimate, invariably fatal wonder diet. Had dealt with umbilical cords chopped in two and uncoiling like gelatinous cobras on an OR’s slimy floor, dealt daily with the stickiness that is to infancy what crop blight is to Hi-Die farmers.

Worse: she’d had twins yet. Freddie and Flossie were boy and girl but interchangeable in everything but diapers, not that I have or ever intend to have any firsthand knowledge about that. I suppose I do have firsthand knowledge from a victim’s point of view.

Why do I refuse to remember the Kendall twins’ names? To keep them fantastically preposterous, that’s why, as if they’d wandered over to the doll-clothing artisan workshop in Barbara Kendall’s basement from a nearby bookshelf chockablock with juvenile insipidity. I balked at internalizing that she was their so-help-me mother.

The not particularly imminent prospect of making the yeast with two packets with such a walking embodiment, embodiment, of humanity at its worst – that is, most indefensibly human – revolted me at age 13 and then 14. So I was usually able to get to sleep unviolated by straying Huck-hands – mine, just to set your minds at rest -- and wake up hours before school, looking forward most of all to Miss Heide’s English class.

Albeit much less jagged and bloodstained than my teenage horrormones’ self-hypnotized version, it revolts me to my toes even now, Helen and I never spoke of it, but my hunch is that she guessed and it made her sad. If so, it was the only one of her sorrows I never heard a peep from her about. But she had enough others on tap to turn our kitchen table into an ongoing ping-pong match surreptitiously played for keeps by our fourth or fifth anniversary,

To my toes’ even more ingrown if not outright fungal dismay, Ohidiana naturally was and is a “pro-life” state. I certainly wasn’t going to tell Nice Staters I believed abortion should be not only legal but universal. No exceptions, ever again! The first test of any competent politician is keeping everything under control, himself first and most.

Luckily, anti-abortion fanatics aren’t uncompromising about fetishizing autobiographical testimony when you’re male. We leave confessionals to the Amtraks unless you’re a woman with a sad or happy tale to tell about the fetus in the dumpster or the healthy elementary-school Little Leaguer you saved by doing nothing whatsoever in spite of Mephistopheles’ frequent murmurs that you had better do something, Shirley. To win myself cheers, applause and, fingers crossed, votes, all I had to do was vent about our enemies, life’s enemies.

∞

As for Tom O’ Bedlam, Harry S. Sherman’s life of Chickamauga stalwart George H. Thomas is one of the few unread and likely never-to-be-read books upon my shelf. Trying to absorb its text would be too painful for the same reason I keep taking it down to look at the inscription, which I’ve long since memorized. Unlike the National Archives, I only have a single sample of Geenie’s handwriting in my possession.

Should I have been more anticipatory? Maybe, but I defy anyone to recognize the permanent value of a Post-It note reading F: no more vodka for you tonight! It did stay on my refrigerator’s freezer door at the Rochambeau until it mimicked an autumn leaf one day without even needing to change color.

Frazzled with packing in haste, I crumpled it and pulled a Heidi by washing it down the Dispos-all, too blinded to recognize I was mimicking her. Besides, I’d only been reaching for more vodka when my handle-yanking hand jarred it loose. In my defense, I don’t think that note would have any resale value on eBay or even to the Archives. Unlike the book inscription, it wasn’t signed – not even a G.

Muddled as I was, I may have thought the note was from the woman who came to clean twice a week. Her English wasn’t good enough for her to be sure Craig and Fred were two different names or just me slurring, and of course the second was much more common. Or perhaps I thought the F was my grade in the sack on some misfired night, since Geenie liked to tease me about my occasional fiascos.

Because the inscription was the only page I ever looked at, I only learned where Harry S. had gotten his title from Emily Emory years later. After we’d laughed together near Jackson Square, I was about to tip my hat and bid adieu to Mrs. Tambourine Man, the only name I had for her then. But she interrupted me: “Wait, Frodeaux. I think maybe you’ll like this one. It reminds me of you.”

Remember, I was still new in town. “Come on. How can it remind you of me when we only just met?”

Amused, she glanced around from the Cabildo to the invisible river. “You’ll learn, honey.” Now that was spooky. Em Em was strapping and hooking a capo between her guitar’s first and second fret.

“I learned this off a Stampfel and Weber record.” She said it as if she was playing to 150 people in a club – that is, conversationally, but without a mic’s amplification. Here’s what she sang:

From the hag and hungry goblin
That into rags would rend ye,
The spirit that stands by the naked man
In the Book of Moons defend ye,
That of your five sound senses
You never be forsaken,
Nor wander from yourselves with Tom
Abroad to beg your bacon,
Of thirty bare years have I
Twice twenty been enragèd,
And of forty been three times fifteen
In durance soundly cagèd

On the lordly lofts of Bedlam,
With stubble soft and dainty,
Brave bracelets strong, sweet whip’s ding-dong,
With wholesome hunger plenty,
With a thought I took for Maudlin
And a cruse of cockle pottage,
With a thing thus tall, sky bless you all,
I befell into this dotage.
I slept not since the Conquest,
Till then I never wakèd,
Till the roguish boy of love where I lay
Me found and stript me nakèd.

With a host of furious fancies
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning –

With another laugh, Em Em broke off and detached the capo, slipping it inside an unseen pocket in Mrs. Tambourine Man’s Les Misḗrables skirt. “There’s a lot more to it, but don’t you think that’s enough for now?”