American Rhapsody

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American Rhapsody Page 42

by Joe Eszterhas


  She liked me. I couldn’t believe that I was with the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen and that she liked Al Gorf. She said she thought I was funny and fun. She was sixteen, a junior at St. Agnes, an Episcopal girls school in Arlington, Virginia.

  Tipper was crazy about the Stones, especially Mick. She played drums in a girl garage band called the Wildcats. She adored the naughtiness of “I can’t get no girly action” in “Satisfaction.” She drove an ice blue Mustang. She had dated one of my classmates, one of the fast and cool guys, and had given him a 45 of “Get Off of My Cloud,” writing “Rolling Stones Forever!” on the record in French. She had also dated another classmate, another fast and cool guy, and had inscribed his yearbook, “Have all the fun you want, but someday I’m going to marry you!”

  She lived in her grandparents’ house in Arlington, where she’d grown up. Her parents had divorced when she was an infant. Her father had beaten her mother, who’d twice been hospitalized for depression. She’d been teased by the other kids in school for “not having a father.”

  She had an off-color, sometimes bawdy sense of humor. Definitely not Paul McCartney. I took her out all the time, but they were definitely not Stones-type dates. I’d put my suit and tie on and we’d go to fancy restaurants and then to the theater. We had chateaubriand a lot, even downstairs, at the Jockey Club, where I introduced her to my friend Powell, the doorman.

  I was hopelessly, desperately, madly, gloriously in love with her. It wasn’t just love, either. I realized quickly that she was my friend, the best friend I’d ever had. I called Donna in Carthage and told her the truth. Donna burned all the love letters I’d sent her.

  I felt awful. All those years with Donna, and I’d never once asked her up to Washington. She was a part of my summer experience, along with cleaning the hog parlors. A farm girl down in the hills for a senator’s son to use until he met his debutante. Is that what Donna was? Is that what I had done? I hoped not. I truly, remorsefully hoped not.

  I kept Tipper’s picture on my desk my first year at Harvard. She was in her senior year at St. Agnes. I was tossin’ and turnin’, turnin’ and tossin’, tossin’ and turnin’ all night. I was in pain without her. I went back to see her whenever I could.

  I bought a motorcycle, and there was no better feeling in the world than Tipper snuggled into me, her arms wrapped around me, and that roaring between my legs. I drove it back and forth to Harvard.

  I got myself elected freshman council president. Our big issues were clean rooms, the Princeton mixer, and the quality of the turkey salad and the meat loaf. I won a couple of beer-chugging contests, able to down a sixteen-ouncer in three seconds. I went for lonely midnight rides on my motorcycle around Memorial Drive. I even sort of participated in the annual spring riot, hundreds of guys blocking Memorial Drive by pretending, on their hands and knees, that they were looking for their contact lenses. I made the freshman basketball team, but I sat on the bench most of the time.

  Gentle on my mind was Tipper. I took her down to meet my parents. Mother was cold, but Dad liked her. He told me she had “lovely, beautiful, sparkling eyes.” He said she was “pleasant” and “shapely,” about as far as my dad would go in that area. He was even more impressed with her when she came down to breakfast the next morning. “She had every eyelash in place! She was dressed for an evening ball!”

  I asked Tipper what she thought of my dad and she said, “Do you remember Oedipus?” God, that made me laugh!

  Tipper came up to Boston on Spring Weekend, with her grandmother tagging along as chaperone. We went to see the Temptations. Please come to Boston, I begged her, and she said yes, she’d come to Garland Junior College, a short ride from Harvard on the subway.

  The world changed the beginning of my sophomore year. Beer chugging was out. Smoking dope was in. And Tipper was there. I lived in Dunster House and passed out on a lot of couches. Or Tipper was in my room. It was as though I were living inside her, stoned or straight.

  We read Wallace Stevens to each other. We went to see Doc Watson together. We liked to touch. To hold hands, to have an arm around each other. She said to Al Gorf, “You’ve got the greatest legs!” She made us some very special cookies.

  We talked about living beyond the sea. She was going to paint and I was going to write. We talked about going to Tennessee and living in the hills, in a commune, growing vegetables. Sometimes we’d hang out on the lawn, both of us wearing bib overalls, laughing at my new Texas friend, Tommy Lee Jones, as he paced along a path by the Charles. He wore blue velvet—jacket and pants—held a rose, and recited lines from Shakespeare in a stoned, down-home twang.

  Laughing as Tommy suddenly said, out of the blue, deep into his black turtleneck existentialist phase, “I just realized I’m gonna die.” I grew my hair long (my dad was angry) and flipped out over Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

  Tipper and I hated the war in Vietnam. We got into the protests, but I had to be careful. I didn’t want to do anything to hurt my dad, whose increasing liberalism was getting a lot of Tennessee voters more and more angry.

  He asked me to go to the Democratic National Convention in 1968 with him and, even though I hated to be away from Tipper, I went. I was on the convention floor, helping him write a speech, while the whole world was watching what was happening outside. On election night, Tipper and I prayed for Hubert Humphrey. Instead, the man my dad called “the Vilest Man” became president.

  Yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away. Now I had to deal with the draft. I thought the war was immoral. I was head over heels in love. And I was the son of a senator from a rural state who’d be up for reelection in two years.

  My dad told me to make my own decision and that whatever it was, he’d support it. If nothing else worked, Tipper wanted to go to Canada. But Mother laid it down: If I didn’t go into the service, I’d destroy my dad’s political career.

  I enlisted. Tipper and I cried and held each other. It wasn’t fair, but I felt I didn’t have any choice. I could not destroy my father’s life. I even volunteered for Vietnam. I knew how good that would look for my dad—to have a son in combat during a campaign.

  I was assigned to Fort Rucker. “Mother Rucker,” we called it. I looked at myself in the mirror and didn’t recognize the grunt in the buzz cut I was looking at. I called Tipper, in her senior year now, every day. I hung out with soldiers who hated the war as much as I did.

  On weekends, some of the guys and I would rent a motel room and get stoned, listening to Cream and Hendrix and Zeppelin. I saw and loved Easy Rider, M*A*S*H, and The Strawberry Statement. I read and loved Dune, The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Meanwhile, I’d won “Supernumerary of the Guard” three times for having the sharpest-looking uniform and the shiniest boots.

  I almost got into trouble once—picked up by state troopers in a field near a freeway, looking for the perfect four-leaf clover to give to a buddy headed for Nam. I explained to the state troopers what I was doing and why, and, thank God, they let me go.

  Our wedding was at the National Cathedral, right next door to St. Albans. The love of my life wore a train of white lace and carried a bouquet of orchids and white carnations. I wore army dress blues. The organist played the Beatles. She loved me! Yeah yeah yeah!

  We moved to Rucker, lived in a trailer full of cockroaches, and drove a VW camper. We stayed in bed much of the time. I felt alive again. She was there, holding my hand, touching me, making me laugh. I thanked God each night and day for His blessing.

  Dad was in trouble. The Vilest Man had targeted him. Because of his friendship with the Kennedys, he was being attacked as “the third senator from Massachusetts.” Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, wrote a memo telling an aide that “Gore’s cocktail-party liberalism offers a chance to rebut his folksy image” and told the aide to dig up a list of dinner parties Mother and Dad had attended, including the menus—“the Frenchier the better.”

  Dad’s Nixon-picked
Republican opponent said, “Our college campuses are infested with drug peddlers, our courts are disrupted, buildings bombed, schools threatened. Our law officers are threatened, beaten, and murdered. Pornography pollutes our mailboxes. Criminal syndicates infiltrate legitimate businesses. Rapists, robbers, and burglars make our streets and homes unsafe.” Dad and liberals like him, of course, in this vilest view of the world, were to blame.

  I tried to help Dad as much as I could. We did a TV ad together, with me in uniform, where Dad said, “Son, always love your country.” Dad even got his fiddle out again after all these years and played “Turkey in the Straw,” but it didn’t do much good. His ads showed him riding a horse or playing checkers with the old-timers on the courthouse lawn. The Nixon people portrayed him as a man out of touch with his constituents, a wealthy social snob in a Tyrolean hat and a red vest, a man who fought for the little guy but couldn’t stand his presence, the southern regional chairman of the eastern liberal establishment.

  Ironically, even my attempt to help him by volunteering for Vietnam proved useless. I’d go to Vietnam, I was told, on the first transport after the election.

  “A damnation!” my dad called it, when he lost on election night. “The causes for which we fought are not dead,” he said. “The truth shall rise again.”

  I cried, for Dad and for myself. I had enlisted in a war I hated in order to help him. And now he had lost anyway. And after he had lost, I was going to Vietnam, risking my life for nothing, leaving behind and alone the woman who was my life.

  Rat fuck. I had rat-fucked myself.

  How’s that for a Naomi Wolf word?

  I was in-country for six months. I was a military journalist. I talked about Tipper so much that a buddy, Mike O’Hara, felt like he knew her.

  I smoked a lot of dope. I bummed a lot of cigarettes. I listened to a lot of music. I bodysurfed, pulled O’Hara out of a riptide, and saved his life. The guys called me “Brother Buck,” not Al Gorf, and told me I “had my shit in the bag.”

  I heard that Tipper was depressed and crying all the time. I was depressed and crying when no one could hear me.

  I took my turn regularly on the perimeter in those little firebases out in the boonies. Someone would move; we’d fire first and ask questions later.

  I saw men and women cut in half by Huey gunships.

  I never had to come face-to-face with someone whom I had either to kill or be killed by.

  I promised God that if I survived, I would atone for my sins, and purify myself.

  I blasted Dylan and dreamed about Tipper.

  Our company had a pet snake, a mammoth python we called “Moonbeam.” It ate the pack rats, which were everywhere around us, but it liked chickens the best.

  We’d go into the villages and buy fat chickens and then we’d offer the chickens to Moonbeam, who’d swallow them in one gulp.

  I watched that python devouring, its eyes lidded, cruel, and impassive. Stoned one night, watching it feed, I thought, The snake is Vietnam, swallowing America.

  Tipper Gore! Tipper Galore! I’m here! I’m back! I made it! I survived! God did I miss you! God do I love you! Oh my God, I love you so much, so much, so much, so much.

  Tipi Tipi Tin, Tipi Tipi Tan, Tipi Tan Tipi Tan—all day, all night, Tipi Tan Tipi Tan, all day all night in the sand . . .

  I was angry and bitter. She soothed me. I had dreams of carnage and bloodshed. She healed me. I went to divinity school and atoned. She helped me. I purified myself. She held me. I became a newspaper reporter at a place that had already hired Bobby Kennedy’s son, Arthur Schlesinger’s son, and Hank Aaron’s daughter. Tipper took pictures.

  We made a baby. Then we made another baby.

  I wasn’t a very good newspaper reporter. We had to do something with our lives. What should we do? Live on a commune and grow vegetables? Live by the sea and paint and write?

  We had babies now. We were parents now.

  What should I do, Tipper Gore, Tipper Galore, Tipi Tipi Tin, Tipi Tipi Tan?

  Should I run for Congress?

  Yes.

  Yes?

  Yes!

  She kissed me.

  I made my announcement, and just before I did, I threw up.

  . . .

  We moved back to Washington when I was elected and lived in the same house in Arlington where she grew up. The girls went to the same public elementary school she had gone to. The school crossing guard was the same one who had helped her cross the street.

  Mother tried to buy “proper Washington clothes” for Tipper, until I stopped it. My wife was more beautiful, curvier, than I’d ever seen her. She built a darkroom in the house and freelanced some of her photographs. She worked in volunteer shelters for the homeless. She wore jeans and was mostly barefoot at home.

  I was a congressman. I wore a blue suit, a red tie, and scuffed shoes every day. I kept a computer to one side in my office and a case of Tab on the other. I came up with my first nationally quoted good line: “The tax system is a national joke that hurts when you laugh.” I studied every issue myself that I was interested in. I didn’t want staffers making decisions for me. I investigated unsafe infant formula. I found a conspiracy to overprice contact lenses. I held hearings to toughen warnings on cigarette packs. I held hearings on organ donations. I learned that if you want to get your colleagues’ attention in Congress, the best way is to let them see you on TV or in the paper.

  I played basketball at the House gym. Al Gorf was the master of trick shots. Al Gorf could carom the ball off the rear gym wall and get it into the basket. Al Gorf could lie on his back at half court and throw it over his head for a score.

  The beautiful Mrs. Tipper Gore and I attended formal state dinners, where she nibbled my ear.

  We had three girls. We wanted a boy. We read a book. We put it into practice.

  Tipi Tipi Tin, Tipi Tipi Tan . . . but she wasn’t . . . tan. She was snow-white back there. No tight underwear for me, lots of coffee, deep, deep penetration, and no missionary position.

  Deep, deep penetration, over and over again, at her thermometer’s beck and call, in those dazzling mounds of miraculous snow.

  We got our boy.

  She was angry. The baby-sitter had brought home a Prince CD and the last song on it, “Darling Nikki,” said, “I met her in a hotel lobby masturbating with a magazine.”

  There were videos on MTV that the girls were talking about. Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher”—in which a teacher stripped—and “Mötley Crüe’s “Looks Can Kill”—with women kept in cages by men wearing leather.

  Tipper set up the group called Parents’ Music Resource Center with other congressional wives. She went public. There was my beautiful wife on the CBS evening news talking about “Bondage and oral sex at gunpoint.” There she was at home, telling me that Prince sprayed his audience with water to simulate a woman’s body fluid, that Wendy Williams pretended to masturbate onstage with a jackhammer.

  The music industry lashed back at her. Frank Zappa, who’d been one of our favorites at Harvard, called her a Nazi. Wendy Williams told her that she was just afraid our own daughters would masturbate.

  I was proud of the strength of her conviction, but I wondered, Are we getting old? What about the Stones’ ”Starfucker” and the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie” and all those other daring rock songs we’d laughed about in school? Tipper was the one who’d loved rock and roll raunchiness, while I was the McCartney fan. She seemed to almost obsess about Prince and how he’d appear onstage naked in a purple bathtub. But wasn’t that just rock and roll showbiz, not all that far removed from James Brown’s cape?

  She laughed when she heard Ice-T’s response to her . . . but I couldn’t.

  “Think I give a fuck about some silly bitch named Gore? Yo, PMRC, here we go, raw. Yo, Tip, what’s the matter? You ain’t gettin no dick? Your bitchin’ about rock and roll, that’s censorship, dumb bitch.”

  I couldn’t even bear to tell her about the tape that had bee
n sent to every member of Congress, the tape that all the staffers were listening to and cackling about:

  She got pouty lips

  She got juicy tits

  She got hungry hips

  She got funky pits

  Ride, Tipper, Ride

  Your lips so wide

  Ride, Tipper, Ride

  You’re burnin up inside

  She got big blue eyes

  She got a hefty size

  She got milky thighs

  She got cherry pies

  Ride, Tipper, Ride

  Don’t pay Al no mind

  Ride, Tipper, Ride

  Baby go hog-wild

  Ride, Tipper, Ride

  Wiggle that behind

  Ride, Tipper, Ride

  Move it side to side

  We both laughed when she finally got support from a rock superstar who said she was right. Paul McCartney!

  She hung in, though, and never backed off. A few years later, when I was running for president, she said, “We’re just trying to get his name recognition up to mine.”

  I ran for president and got my butt kicked—Mother sent me a note that said, “Smile. Relax. Attack”—and our boy got hit by a car and we nursed him back to health.

  I wrote a best-selling book and got tagged as “the Ozone Man,” and Tipper and I and the kids went out on a houseboat, where I grew a beard, and we decided I wasn’t going to run for president again.

  Tipper got up on a stage and played drums with the Grateful Dead. And at a National Correspondents Association dinner, with photographers all around, she stuck her tongue deep into my mouth.

  When Bill Clinton asked me to be his vice-presidential running mate, she didn’t want me to do it. We had decided on that houseboat to focus on us and the kids. But I remembered what my dad had said at the moment he lost: “The truth shall rise again!” So Tipper said, “Okay, here we go. Let’s save the world.”

  I liked Bill Clinton. I thought he wanted to do good things for America and I knew I could help him. He was an instinctive politician and I was a cerebral one. He went with his gut and I went with my head. He was John Lennon and I . . . would always be Paul McCartney.

 

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