American Rhapsody

by Joe Eszterhas

  Kenneth W. Starr, Bill Clinton was convinced, was a Republican hatchet man, the demonic Helms’s creature, the former chief of staff from 1981 to 1983 to Reagan’s attorney general, William French Smith. He’d been appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals by Reagan in 1983. Who really needed more proof than that? Starr was obviously a Helms man, a Reagan man—but there was more proof. Even as Starr was investigating Bill Clinton as special prosecutor, Starr was still getting a million dollars a year representing . . . big tobacco! Helms, Reagan, and big tobacco! And the pious twit was claiming that he was being fair? Fair? With friends and allies like that?

  Bill Clinton wasn’t discouraged. He contemplated the advice his mama had given him: “Nothing good comes easy . . . . We just have to be strong to pull ourselves together . . . . We’ve climbed mountains before and we’ve got one more to climb . . . . You can’t saw sawdust.”

  It was back to the barricades for Bill Clinton, back to the sixties: The pigs were lined up in phalanx, holding billy clubs and tear-gas guns, and they were lofting the canisters in, and flashcubes were sparkling, and Bill Clinton was out there, the Stones and the Who blasting inside his head. Arkansas’s own Street Fightin’ Man with his Prince Valiant Beatles haircut wouldn’t ever get fooled again. Throwing those canisters right back at Judge Pig Starr, Bull Connor Starr, Rusty Calley Starr, Paul Harvey Starr, Judge Julius Hoffman Starr, screaming “Fuck you!” into the acrid, choking, dark night of his travail. Look, top of the world, Ma! Abbie Hoffman (now dead), Jerry Rubin (also dead, after turning into a real estate salesman), Bobby Seale (now selling barbecue sauce), and our lollipop-dispensing baby doctor, Benjamin Spock (dead now, too) would have been proud.

  It was all starting to swing the commander in chief’s way: The shows—A Time to Heal! and A Time to Forgive! and A Time for War!—had all been successful. This new show—A Time to Saddamize!—would play, too . . . but Bill Clinton was still uneasy.

  There was that moment in Vancouver, up on the balcony, when Boris Yeltsin, the doddering sot, had seen Bill Clinton waving to producer Bud Yorkin’s beautiful wife, the actress Cynthia Sikes, down below, holding Bud and Cynthia’s baby . . . and Yeltsin had turned to him with his vodka red cheeks and said, “Is dat your baby?” That was wrong! The president of a bust-out derelict country had no right to speak to the president of the United States that way!

  And then there was the uncomfortable moment in Hollywood, at that cocktail party, when he’d walked into the room, floating on his own charisma, and Sharon Stone was sitting there with her back to him. She didn’t even turn to look at him. She just sat there with her legs crossed, thighs showing, and didn’t even turn. Aware of him behind her, she arched her neck back and said, “Hi, Bill.” Hi, Bill? Bill? Like he was an ex-fiancé or something! He was the president of the United States! The commander in chief! She was an aging actress with one hit movie! Was that any way for a piece of fluff to greet her commander in chief?

  Within hours, people in Hollywood told the story of how Sharon Stone had greeted Bill Clinton. In a place where a good title means dollars, their meeting already had a million-dollar title: The Flasher and the Masher!

  [9]

  Kenneth W. Starr Confesses

  Forgive me, Lord, for I have sinned. Cast out the evil that has corrupted my flesh. Grace me with Your strength. Infuse me with Your spirit. Save me from the flames of perdition.

  I have been Your servant. I sing Your hymns on my morning jog. I read Your Scripture when Alice and I go on our Sunday-afternoon drives. I have never cheated on my Alice. I am a straight arrow, a learned, affable man, courtly, thoughtful, and deliberate. I try to carry myself in a judicial and Christian manner. I have been a good husband to my Alice, who has been a good wife to me. Once a Mendell, once a Jew, she is now a Starr; she is Church of Christ. I have never cheated on my wife!

  But I will never, to my dying day, forget the look on my poor Alice’s face when she found me down here in the basement, abasing myself with the Internet, my eyes red and lusting, ravishing Pookie’s body. Alice has gone back upstairs now. I hear her puttering in the kitchen, and I know she can hear the abject sobs of my ruin. For a man of my judiciousness, decorum, and equanimity to be discovered by his faithful wife sitting at his computer in striped pants and morning coat, looking at his strumpet’s naked body—His! His! Not mine!—is, I will be first to admit, an abomination. I have never cheated on my wife, Lord!

  I can’t even bring myself to refer to him by his name. Nor can I force myself to violate myself further and call him the president of the United States. I will call him, then, POTUS, the inhuman acronym used by the Secret Service on their location maps. Please do not think, my God, that I am apportioning any of my blame to him by referring to him. I am on my knees as I hear Alice, sniffling upstairs now, begging to be forgiven for my sins, not POTUS’s. I will use the worn-out and now meaningless phrase I have heard so often sitting high on my judge’s bench: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.

  You know I have done my best to serve You and America my entire life. I say that not to excuse myself in any way for my sins, but to provide a moral context, to build a case for a pattern of my behavior that, until my exposure to POTUS, was as near-exemplary as humanly possible. I say that in all humility, my Lord, but You know it in Your all-encompassing wisdom to be legally accurate. Mother told me that I prayed to You already when I was two weeks old. I knelt as Father preached at home in between haircuts. I didn’t drink. I didn’t smoke. I went to see You at the Church of Christ. I sold Your Word door to door. I didn’t dance. I didn’t fornicate. When I married Alice, she taught me to dance. Alice and I didn’t fornicate, either—we still don’t. We celebrate Your presence in our hearts and loins. I’ve been true-blue, Lord. I campaigned for Richard Nixon in high school. I’ve served under Ronald Reagan and George Bush. I’ve spoken at Pat Robertson College.

  I have suffered the slings and arrows of a blasphemous and profane world because of my beliefs and my loyalty to America and You. I have been called Chauncy Gardner and Mister Rodgers. I have suffered calumnies and bogus allegations. I have seen signs that say WHAT’S THE FREQUENCY, KENNETH? as I pass by. I have been called a doofus and a nerd. In my service to You and America on the federal bench and as solicitor general, I have taken courageous and maligned positions against abortion, burning the flag, and homosexuals. I have opined on behalf of school prayer. I have raised in tribute to You, with Alice’s help, a beautiful family. I have never cheated on my wife, Lord! I have put one cigar into my mouth for a group photograph with my colleagues. I didn’t light it.

  I have been Your Christian soldier fighting the forces of the Church of Cool. In a world increasingly cool, I have spoken up for family values, for the unborn fetus, for Paula Jones, for the Constitution. I have represented the tobacco companies You need to bring sinners swiftly back to You, the automakers You need to bring broken bodies to repentance. I have gloried in not being cool, proudly using my smarminess, my thick glasses, my baseball cap, my Starbucks mug, my baldness, and my psoriasis as prayer flags for You—a reminder to all Americans of a bygone world when people didn’t worship at the altar of cool and weren’t focused on the slimness of their bodies, the inarticulation of their speech, the barbarism of their music. Hear me, my Lord! When the tie-dyed hordes befouled the earth in the sixties, I wore a suit and tie to school. My children speak English, not Ebonics; my dear wife is a mate, not a suffragette.

  You know, too, surely, that intimately I have violated neither myself nor You. Father taught me the godly nature of an ice-cold shower. Mother never found anything when she examined my sheets. For my entire life, as I’ve stood at the urinal, I’ve held myself only with the tips of two fingers. The instant I have felt myself not even attracted, not even tempted, but in the tiniest platonic way curious about a member of the opposite sex, I have fled to Your Scripture. And You have rewarded me with an infinite capacity for work, with an energy impossible to deplete. Y
ou have made my psoriasis-scarred flesh as unto the fine, musty-smelling pages of a leather-bound law book. Thanks to You, the briefs I discuss are legal ones; the wildest climaxes I enjoy are in a courtroom at top hourly rates. Thanks to You, my seed is green-backed and collecting interest. I have never abused myself, my Lord!

  I beg You, then, now that I’ve defined the moral context, now that I’ve established my pattern of behavior, to forgive me for what I, a sinner, am about to confess.

  In my servitude to America and You, I was asked to read a book in 1993. I regret to say that it wasn’t the Good Book. It wasn’t Your spirit and Your soul. It was a leprous book—a diary written by a sinner. His name was Robert Packwood. I was asked by a congressional committee. I couldn’t refuse. The sinner was a United States senator. I was selected to read it thanks to the probity and decorum that You have granted unto me, oh my God. It was a diary of filth and sexual debauchery. It was a document written in a sewer. I was asked to read every word and form an opinion as to its relevance in a Senate trial. I read every word over and over and over and over and over and over again. It was torture. It was horrifying. Flesh, my Lord! Intimate female flesh that Packwood sniffed like a depraved beast.

  Alice woke me one night, screaming, and said that in my sleep I had put my face, sniffing, against her flesh. I had to run to the bathroom because I was wet between my legs, the way I was wet sometimes as a boy.

  I tried everything. Ice-cold showers. Ice cubes. Dry ice. Ice cream. Alice and I tried reading the Scripture to each other. I heard her, but my eyes were trapped on her breasts. I read to her, but I was drooling. Packwood, this beast, had immersed his wanton, dripping-wet hands in my brainpan. Images of pink flesh—on a single occasion, even dark-hued, but not black, flesh—were polluting my snow-white, decorous, judicial thoughts. After what seemed a very long time, I felt relieved.

  Perhaps it was because I had converted to decaf and abjured eating red meat. Perhaps it was because my daughter’s girlfriends stopped visiting our house. I had purged myself of Packwood’s poison, but I still felt my recovery tenuous. I was still unexpectedly, joltingly reminded of passages in Packwood’s diary by the most nonsensical things: a piece of white chicken meat, the inside of a cantaloupe, the bulb of an angel on our Christmas tree. But I prayed to You, every hour of every day. I bought a desk calendar with Your Word on every hour. And I was better.

  I didn’t know then that Packwood’s diary was only the first step in my ruin, that his frenzied images were nothing but a means to weaken me for POTUS. I knew very well who POTUS was. I had watched him on television and at banquets, displaying his masterful, easy charm. POTUS was everything I wasn’t and never wanted to be. He wasn’t just cool. He was the Pope of the Church of Cool. POTUS discussed his underwear on television, tooted a horn for the wide-eyed naïfs. POTUS swept through a room like a powerful jolt of electricity. POTUS was good-looking and charming. POTUS wasn’t a nerd, didn’t wear glasses, wasn’t bald, didn’t have psoriasis. Nobody called POTUS Chauncy Gardner and Mister Rodgers. I had heard all the talk, too, about how POTUS had always betrayed his wife. I have never cheated on my wife, Lord!

  POTUS represented everything I was committed to fight against … for America and for You, my Lord: Abortion, promiscuity, pornography, suffragettes, homosexuals, AIDS, affirmative action, miscegenation, evolution, the Woodstock Nation, bilingual education, heathenism, communism, globalism, onanism, busing, rutting, flag burning, marijuana, clove cigarettes, herpes, tattoos, graffiti, pierced navels, Boogie boards, skateboards, sushi, Jolt, Brompton’s Cocktail, bungee jumping, incense, the spotted owl, the Denim Bible, The Ultimate Fighting Challenge, bikinis, yoga, Altoids, protesters, demonstrators, longtime companions, anarchists, surfers, streakers, the Rosenbergs, Teletubbies, Studio 54, professional wrestlers, peace signs, the SDS, the IWW, the SLA, the ADL, the Rainbow Coalition, Nine Inch Nails, STDs, Marilyn Manson, Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Manson, Warhol, Alger Hiss, Henry Reske, Mike Tyson, McGovern, Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, Ralph Ginzburg, Al Goldstein, Howard Stern, Jane Fonda, Gus Hall, Che Guevera, Ralph Nader, Mapplethorpe, the Rolling Stones, rap, hip-hop, the Internet, Hollywood, massage parlors, massages, body paint, body parts, birth control, gay marriage, the polls.

  I hated POTUS and what he stood for, and when I was asked to replace Fiske as Whitewater independent counsel, I was as happy as on days when Father would cut my hair and preach to me at the same time. I had the cross and the sword in hand now! Thanks to Your help, with Packwood’s diary pushed to the back of my mind now, I had my old energy back. I would reveal POTUS as the low and base Borgia Pope that he was. I would force his followers to turn their faces from him in disgust. I would slay POTUS, and abortion and promiscuity and pornography and suffragettes and homosexuals and all the rest of it would die with him. Those who maligned me with their calumnies missed the point: I was not Inspector Javert. I was not Ahab obsessed with his white whale. I was Your St. George, facing Lucifer’s dragon. I knew POTUS was guilty; all I had to do was to determine of what.

  I began in Little Rock, a place built of excrement. I knew the full power of the stench now. It wasn’t just POTUS; it was also his suffragette wife, FLOTUS. They were chest-deep in their own slime and corruption. But every time I was about to reach the link that would strip the clothes off both of them and expose their scrofulous nakedness, the link evaded me. Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate—the link would slip away. I sent Hubbell to jail and the harlot McDougal, but it did no good.

  I kept hearing, again and again, about how POTUS had debased himself in pursuit of his fleshly pleasure. There were more stories about his debasement in Arkansas than there were watermelons. The more stories I heard, the more Packwood’s diary haunted me all over again. I felt like my brain was a cavern of degradation, my Lord! Flesh danced in my sentence structures and dreams. I found myself confusing what Packwood had done and what POTUS had done. Alice was back in Washington; she couldn’t help me. I looked in the mirror and saw an overwrought, overweight nerd with the pouches of sleeplessness beneath his sinner’s eyes. I was afraid to fall asleep for fear of wetting the Little Rock Holiday Inn bed. But I did not betray You! I was not an accomplice in the evacuation of my seed.

  Two events took place at roughly the same time. They are joined together in my mind. I read the Gennifer Flowers file that Bulldog Bittman and Jackie Bennett and some of my other disciples put together after interviewing her. She has a filthy mouth, my Lord! She has a beautiful filthy mouth, usually painted in hammer and sickle scarlet. I shouldn’t have read the file.

  I was not prepared—not even after Packwood’s diary and the lascivious chitchat in Little Rock and my fevered dreams. How can Your creations do such things? Blindfolds and ropes and food from the refrigerator which they—ice cubes? For these purposes! When all of my life I have used ice cubes for the opposite effect! POTUS called her “Pookie.”

  And I saw the photographs in the file, too. A young Pookie in her full shame! Pookie from every different angle! Pookie in close-ups! Pookie in color! I couldn’t stop myself from staring at them, at her. I sat for hours in my office, the door locked and Pookie on the desk in front of me. I was rigid, literally petrified. I couldn’t stop looking at her shame. She was disgusting! Pookie was so disgustingly perfect and so perfectly disgusting.

  Shortly afterward, I met POTUS and FLOTUS at the White House. We took their depositions. I couldn’t keep my eyes off him. He was his smiling, insidious self. I watched him and envisioned the photographs of Pookie in my files. He had done all of those abominable things to her, this smiling sinner sitting here with his betrayed wife. He had debased Pookie, impregnated her, and paid two hundred dollars for her abortion. Two hundred dollars! As I watched him and thought of her body and her shame, I resolved that if I didn’t slay him, my life would be proved worthless.

  But I was in worse pain than I’d ever been, my dreams filled with Packwood’s hands and Pookie’s shame and POTUS holding buckets of ice. And sometimes Ali
ce and I would be in there, too. … My God, forgive me! I couldn’t get it out of my mind! Even Alice wasn’t much help to me anymore. She was unexplainably smiling much of the time, talking about our second honeymoon, waking me up at night. Were her lips painted, or was it my imagination? Had my sweet, loving, non-Jewish, baptized, Church of Christ wife now also become part of my infernal dreams? Or was Alice Pookie? Was I POTUS? Were Packwood, POTUS, and I taking turns with—was that Alice touching me or Packwood? Oh, abomination! Lamentation! Shame! Blasphemous ice cubes! I did not abuse myself, my Lord! I have never cheated on my wife, my Lord!

  Then that woeful pig-nosed woman came to us with her tapes. It was the final straw personally. First Packwood’s diary, then Pookie’s file, then Pookie’s photographs, and now all this splendid new dreck! The ice-cold showers didn’t work anymore. Alice didn’t want to read Scripture anymore; she wanted to … I was now forced to contemplate the horror that took place in the Oval Office hallway and bathroom. Now I had to hear about fellatio and masturbation and that other heinous sin I can’t even bring myself to discuss. On top of blindfolds, ropes, food, and ice. And that hideous netherworld cigar. I will never touch a cigar, let alone put it into my mouth, as long as I live.

  I was overjoyed and in torment. I knew I had stumbled, thanks to this obscene pig-nosed woman, upon the means to slay POTUS. But at what price to myself? Could I download all this new imagery into my brain and survive—without, minimally, exhausting Alice unto death? I resolved to sacrifice myself and Alice. I would stay within my usual innocent demeanor—my smarminess, my baseball cap, my glasses, my Starbucks mug—while I destroyed him! Even if it meant my dreams and thoughts would be filled with French postcard orgies of sin. No one would know what I had sentenced myself to. No one would know the sacrifice I had made. No one would know that this once-decorous figure of judiciousness and responsibility had become as flesh-obsessed as POTUS.