American Rhapsody

by Joe Eszterhas

  And you, Al Gore, you Buddhist-kissin’ bag of wind, you never shoulda made Donna Brazile your campaign manager against me—the same schemin’ voodoo Ebonics witch who told the press in ’88 that George Herbert Walker was hosin’ his secretary. I’m gonna be your controllin’ legal authority!

  Hell yes, the pigeons are all gonna come home to roast, every one of ’em!

  You don’t get it, do you? Not even the big-britch media superstars, not even Mr. Rather, who tried to coldcock George Herbert Walker on prime time. None of you get it! I am my mama’s boy, and that means there’s gonna be blood and hair on the walls!

  Remember Mom sayin’ she wanted to hang Saddam Hussein? Remember Ferraro and bitch rhymes with rich? I’m a shit-kicker, partner, not the preppy from Andover. I grew up on George Jones and Johnny Rodriguez, not Fleetwood Mac hippie music. I wear cowboy boots with the state of Texas star on ’em, not tasseled loafers.

  Hey, I’m the guy who went up to Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal and his wife and his little kid and called him a “fuckin’ son of a bitch.” With his little kid there! I’m the one who says, “No comment, asshole!” to reporters I don’t like! I’m the guy who went into John Sununu’s office and told him his ass was grass and made him boo-hoo blubber! I’m the one who okayed the Dukakis in the Tank and the Willie Horton ads!

  And when all the big chips were on the table and it was time to show and tell, when the media was snotful and ready to sneeze about George Herbert Walker and Jennifer Fitzgerald, I’m the guy—my mama’s boy!—who went in to see my father and said, “You gotta tell me the truth, Dad, you been gettin’ some of Jennifer’s tail?”

  You know how tough my mom is? So tough that when my little four-year-old sister died of leukemia, Bar went out and played golf the next day. Well, son, I’m just as tough! I ain’t afraid of nobody or nothin’! I love my dad, but he got my dander up once, and I said to him, “Hey, you wanna go right here? One-on-one? Mano a mano?” Hell, I’ve always been like that. Mom had a miscarriage; I’m the one who drove her to the hospital, said to her afterward, “Mom, ain’t you gettin’ too old to still be havin’ babies?”

  The media put this preppy sweater on me, but that ain’t bad. Shit-kickin’ don’t buy a lotta votes in the North and the Midwest. Compaysionate conservative don’t mean callin’ a guy a “fuckin’ son of a bitch” with his little kid there or imitatin’ to a reporter that murderin’ chickenshit Tucker beggin’ for her life. So maybe the preppy sweater, worn to rags and riches by George Herbert Walker, is gonna come in handy in the general election.

  But it ain’t me, babe. This is me! Bob Bullock, Texas lieutenant governor, sticks it to me with a bill in the legislature. There’s a roomful of people there. I grab the son of a bitch by his lapel. I say, “If you’re gonna fuck me, you gotta kiss me first!” I pull his ugly face right up to mine. He’s got his mouth open, not knowin’ what the fuck. I stick my old tongue in there. Yeah! That’s me, hoss!

  They say I grew up rich, the silver wine opener up my butt and all that, but that don’t mean I noticed it stickin’ out of there. I was in Midland fuckin’ Texas, not in Palm Beach or Newport or Martha’s Vineyard. I crawled under the high school stadium and got forty feet up on the crossbars, climbed the light poles all around the stadium, got sent to the principal’s office for throwin’ a football out the window and puttin’ makeup on like Elvis. I didn’t give a shit about school; I wanted to be Willie Mays and play outfield for the Giants. I worked hard at hittin’ the curveball, not hittin’ the books. I collected baseball cards, not straight A’s. What I liked most about my dad, who mostly wasn’t there, was that he could catch a baseball—no shit—with the glove behind his back.

  I was out all day ridin’ my bike with the other kids—Texas kids, shit-kicker kids—learnin’ to cuss, suckin’ on young beers. I got a little older and we’d drive over to Odessa. They had whores there and dirty and oily honky-tonks. You raised hell in Odessa was what they said; you raised a family in Midland. I sure as shit didn’t have no silver wine opener stickin’ out of me when I was doin’ all that. Ain’t no little honey’s lips got split by no wine opener.

  I noticed somethin’ pretty young, though. I was a guy. I knew how to be a guy. Truth is, a lotta boys and men don’t know how to be guys. I sure did right away. And guys liked me. I knew how to grin and tell a dirty joke. I knew how to pat somebody on the back or on the ass. I knew how to look somebody in the eye and hold their eyes on mine or wink or squeeze a bicep while I was talkin’ to ’em. I knew how to cuss up a storm, turn the air blue with a stream of bad words, turn filth into locker room poetry. I knew how to rock on the heels of my boots and bob my head around. I loved Midland fuckin’ Texas.

  Then they sent me up to Andover. Up in New England. It was colder than Tricia Nixon’s you know what. East Coast spoiled brats, phonies who hardly knew who Willie Mays was, let alone his lifetime battin’ average against left-handed pitchin’. I tried out for everything, but all I got was cheerleader. Yeah, I know, you don’t have to tell me. But don’t try to define me with that. That don’t mean shit about shit. It don’t make me Richard Nixon, either, just because he was a water boy or a cheerleader or whatever the diddly shit he was.

  By the time I got to Yale, it was hittin’ the fan. The antiwar stuff. Hippies. A heaviness hangin’ over everything. That whole downer scene. Everybody gettin’ drunk on their own guilt—we were here havin’ toga parties—they were havin’ recon parties in the rice paddies. Big deal! You know what? Listen, this is the God’s honest truth. It’s not that I was for the damn war or against the damn war. I just didn’t give a damn!

  I still went to see as many ball games as I could and I discovered the pure-joy bliss of drinkin’ Jack Daniel’s with iced Budweiser behind it. Sometimes I mixed up a garbage canful of screwdrivers. Sure, I tried a little loco weed, who didn’t? Even Tricia Nixon did. Bill Clinton may have been off protestin’ against the war in England or Prague or Moscow or Hanoi (my dad’s CIA friends say he was in Hanoi), but I was in New Haven, gettin’ busted for stealin’ a wreath off a store’s door with my fraternity brothers or gettin’ almost busted at Princeton for tryin’ to pull the goalposts down.

  I wasn’t wallowin’ in how awful everything in America was, because I didn’t see anything that was awful. I loved my fraternity brothers and I loved hearin’ the pledges squeal when we put ΔΚΕ on their asses with a red-hot coat hanger. And I loved hearin’ some bead-wearin’, peace-lovin’, social-conscience little nitwit squeal when I made her feel good.

  Mom and Dad were livin’ in River Oaks, outside Houston, by then, and on vacations or in the summer, I was hangin’ out with Lacey Neuhaus (who’d almost marry Teddy Kennedy one day)—I guess Teddy and me got at least one thing in common. And with Tina, who was a sizzlin’-hot handful and the actress Gene Tierney’s daughter. (Gene Tierney was one of JFK’s millions, so I guess I sorta indirectly got somethin in common with JFK, too.) Then I met Cathy, who was smart, sexy, and blond and who belonged to the country club. We got engaged, but then we broke up and not—hell no!—because her stepfather was Jewish, either.

  You would’ve thought back then, readin’ the papers and lookin’ at the TV that this country was comin’ apart, but I didn’t get it. I didn’t see that. What I saw was the media sensationalizin’ everything.

  There were a whole lotta young people like me who didn’t grow their hair long and clack around with beads and smell like the inside of a fortune teller’s. Truth is, there were more of us than there were of them. The fact that it was easier to get laid than ever before wasn’t our fault. And to turn it down? At that age? (Bill Bennett, back then, used to date Janis Joplin! I’m not shittin’ you, cowboy. Bill “Book of Virtues” Bennett and drunk-as-a-skunk, fuck-the-doorknobs Janis! True story!)

  Hell, I wasn’t changed by any of it. Alterin’ my conscience like a lot of ’em. I still listened mostly to George Jones and Johnny Rodriguez. I still liked beer better than loco weed or . . . anything e
lse. I still cussed up a storm. (Mom wouldn’t play golf with me, I cussed so much.) I still went to as many ball games as I could. I swam. I jogged. I played ball. I still couldn’t hit the damn curveball. I was still smokin’ and chewin’ tobacco.

  The only part of Yale I really liked, besides the Dekes, was Skull and Bones, which was a different kind of fraternity. To get initiated, I had to lie down bare-assed in a coffin half full of mud. Then they locked the lid. (Fuck John McCain and his war hero stories! That never happened to him!) But what was fun was this braggin’ we did. We had to brag the details of our sexual scores to the other braggers of Skull and Bones and they had to brag theirs. We knew everything about what everybody had done to whoever. So one day, you’d hear about this little old girl and the tricks she knew, and the next day, you’d call her and maybe experience ’em for yourself. It was like we were givin’ tips on outboard power motors or sides of beef.

  After Yale—Yale went completely to shit right after I left, thanks to Bill Clinton and his skank and the Black Panthers and the kind of college president who let protesters piss into the wastebasket in his office—I had a problem. I didn’t wanna go to Vietnam, not because I had Clinton’s fancy-ass, high-falutin theological differences with the war—but because I didn’t wanna get my young ass shot off.

  Then I heard about this Texas Air National Guard outfit and I went to see the guy and I told him who I was and he said fine. I wanted to be a fighter pilot anyway, after hearin’ all my life about Dad gettin’ to be a hero as one. And it’s not like there wasn’t a need for fighter pilots to defend our borders.

  What if Castro’s air force tried to take Galveston out? This was back in the good old Cold War days, don’t forget. The guy with the shoe, remember? The bald Russian? The fat one? He beat on the table with his shoe and said he’d bury us!

  I liked the Texas Air National Guard. Lt. Lloyd Bentsen III was the senator’s kid and Capt. John Connally III was the secretary of the treasury’s kid, and I met half the Dallas Cowboys team, who’d all signed up. I spent fifty-three weeks of flight trainin’ school in Georgia, at Moody Air Force Base, in the shit-flake town of Valdosta. I learned how to fly a jet and got high on the sound of the burners. I drank a lotta beer and a whole lot more whiskey, and the women in Valdosta . . . aw, man! They just about trucked ’em in there from all over the piney woods, little halter tops, hot sweat, and iced beer, and I scratched my itch . . . from all the mosquitoes, oh yeah!

  It was out of hand—no shit—I’m the first to admit, part of my feckless and irresponsive youth. Georgia peaches, yessir, Georgia peaches, Georgia peaches! The Officers’ Club—wasn’t nothin’ but a shack, a stump house, a tin roof, a hot tin roof, up there on the roof on a summer night, a girl in a halter top on a tin roof on a summer night, pussycat on a hot tin roof . . . aw, shit, aw, man . . . jukebox blarin’ George Jones, “White Lightnin’,” real hot, so fuckin’ hot, tubsful of iced Bud, sweat drippin’ off me, took my shirt off, still sweatin’, sweatin’ like a pig, took my pants off, singin’ ”White Lightnin’! White Lightnin’! White Lightnin’!” got up on the bar, bare-assed . . . No! Hell no! Forget it! Didn’t happen! Never happened! Wouldn’ta done that! No fuckin’ way! Naked? On the bartop? Hell no! Hell no! Naked? With all those guys in there? . . . Why? . . . I’m not . . . Hell no!

  One day at the base, I got a call from Dad. The air force was sendin’ a plane for me. President Nixon had a big idea. He thought Tricia and I’d be perfect for each other. I had seen pictures of Tricia Nixon, not bad, nice tits, but still . . . whoa! Nixon’s daughter? Dad said Nixon did this kind of thing sometimes. He’d arranged Julie’s marriage to David Eisenhower. A joinin’ of the clans. A joinin’ at the hip. The Nixons innerbleed with the Eisenhowers.

  Well, we were a clan, too. The Nixons breed with the Bushes. Sort of like, I guess, intermarriage between Knights of the Round Table families. Nixon had been good to Dad, campaignin’ for him, knightin’ him our UN delegate. The plane was on its way to take me to dinner with Tricia Nixon in Washington.

  “Be nice to her,” Dad said.

  Nice? How nice? What did that mean? How nice did I have to be? The guys at the Officers’ Club shit a brick. Tricia Nixon? I was bein’ flown to Tricia Nixon like some boy bimbo bein’ served up on a silver platter at Barney Frank’s house.

  We had dinner. It was a nice dinner. That’s all I’m gonna say. Tricia has her . . . qualities. Definitely not as stiff as her father. Nixon was even nicer to Dad afterward. Campaigned hard for him in Dad’s Senate race. Knighted him the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Told Gerry Ford to crown Dad head of the CIA. I did what I had to do. I was nice to her. Tricia liked me. I love my dad.

  Yeah, but it was out of hand! That whole time was out of hand! My reckless and irresponsible youth! After flight school, I rented an apartment in Houston. A one-bedroom at the Chateaux Dijon. All singles. Four hundred units. Eight swimmin’ pools. Secretaries. Ambitious secretaries. Secretaries on their own for the first time in their lives.

  Away from mommy and daddy for the first time in their lives. All-day volleyball in the pool. All-night relays inside.

  It was all so out of hand that when George Herbert Walker came to town, campaignin’ for the Senate, and asked me to go with him, I did, but I took my shirt off, walkin’ behind him, bare-chested. I was beautiful, trim, tanned. I don’t know what the fuck I was thinkin’. Half-naked with my dad. Showin’ myself off. (Jeb, my asshole little brother, lost it in those years. Hair homeless-long, smokin’ weed like Winstons.)

  I had to figure out what I was gonna do with my life. I got into the Harvard Business School, back up north in alien territory. Barry Goldwater was right. He said that entire part of the country except Kennebunkport should be chain-sawed and set out to sea. There were protests every other day. For Cesar Chavez, against the CIA. Dick Gregory spoke and said young white people were “America’s new niggers.” The same heaviness that I’d felt at Yale, the same guilt-stewin’ rhetoric, the same claustrophobia. I just couldn’t give a shit.

  I went down to Fenway and saw the Red Sox. I wore my old Texas Air National Guard jacket to class. Let ’em get a load of that while they were handin’ out their antiwar leaflets. Uh-huh, that’s right, a genuwine bomber jacket, darlin’, with genuwine stains on it! I chewed tobacco and took a spitoon into class with me, spittin’ loud so they could hear the plop-plop as they planned their civil disobedience against Gallo wine. What did I care about Gallo wine? I don’t drink cheap wine.

  I went down to a place called Hillbilly Ranch, outside Boston, with, you betcha, my jacket on. George Jones was in town. When it came time for my yearbook picture at Harvard, I wore a polo shirt and a pair of khakis torn at the knee. Everybody else wore a suit and tie. Yeah, uh-huh, I knew they would. That’s why I made sure my polo shirt was rumpled.

  I didn’t know what the hell I was gonna do. Harvard Business School usually means an East Coast corporation, but I couldn’t do that. Honest to God, I felt physically refrained in that part of the world. The hangin’ heaviness. The spacious claustrophobia. The stewin’ guilts. Everybody a victim of some kind or other.

  I drove out to Arizona to try to breathe, and on the way there I stopped in Midland and saw some of the friends I’d grown up with. And the answer came to me while I was talkin’ to ’em. This is where I was happiest. Under the big hot oily sky, havin’ a beer and sippin’ whiskey inside the air-conditioned country club with real people. Talkin’ about Nolan Ryan and the Astros and the Rangers. People here knew how many career home runs Willie Mays had hit. People here weren’t full of psychobabble horse manure. They weren’t proud, unhappy, chest-beatin’ victims.

  They were Americans, shit-kickers, oil and grease cowboys just tryin’ to live life on their own gumption, not tyin’ themselves up like a rodeo calf with guilts everybody around ’em is beatin’ into ’em. I wasn’t claustrophobic in Midland; I didn’t feel physically constrained. I could breathe. I was free. I could rock back
and forth on the heels of my boots.

  I rented a back-alley guest cottage that was an outhouse dump. After a week there, it felt like home. Dirty laundry everyplace. Empty pizza boxes under the bed. Beer cans with gray fuzz growin’ out of ’em. The bed frame was broke. I lassoed it together with some chili-stained ties. My Olds Cutlass needed a paint job. I spray-painted it. One of my friends got me a sweater at a thrift shop. I wore it all the time.

  I was makin’ connections in the oil business, down at the Petroleum Club, down at the country club, hangin’ around the big-money guys in their ostrich Lucchese boots, doin’ what I’d always been able to do with guys . . . the eye contact, the butt slap, the dirty jokes, the shit-kickin’ jive that I had in my bones but not in my blood.

  Sometimes, when I saw Dad, I thought I saw him lookin’ funny at me. Dad was a Texan, but he could never shit-kick—remember that whole pork-rind-eatin’ publicity later on? Dad even threw his horseshoes funny, like he didn’t want any mud or dirt sloppin’ up on him. I thought I saw Dad eyeballin’ me enviously, thinkin’, How does he do it? How does he shit-kick so well? It was workin’ fine for me in Midland. Yeah, I had been to Harvard, but the dump I lived in was on Harvard Street in Midland.

  The drinkin’ helped, too. The old moneybags in Midland loved to drink, and I did, too. I don’t mean sippin’ scotch like my little asshole brother Jeb does; I mean shooters of whiskey and tequila and lots of iced Bud. I drank a lot with ’em and I talked a lot about poontang with ’em and they loved me. I told ’em all the poontang stories I’d heard at Skull and Bones and some of my own stories, and these old boys thought they were in heaven.

  Smokin’, drinkin’, talkin’ pussy, eatin’ ribs. All that wasn’t there yet was money. But I knew we’d get there, too, when I jogged by one of the biggest money guys and pulled his runnin’ shorts down to his ankles and the old boy almost shit himself, he laughed so hard.