I'm Back for More Cash

by Tony Kornheiser

  Forget about Wen Ho Lee. The apparent, um, root of the security lapse in the eyes of the national security establishment is … Mister Winky!

  Spurred by the fear of a Mata Hari scenario, a new Department of Energy policy requires our nuclear scientists to report their amorous contact with foreigners from any of the twenty-five nations we have designated as “sensitive” because they don’t meet our standards of democracy, human rights, and Starbucks concentration. (The list of “sensitive” nations includes China, Russia, Israel, India, and Pakistan. But not Canada, so if you can get Shania Twain in the sack, go for it!)

  Thank God, though, the American government has shown maturity, sobriety, and self-restraint by limiting this xenophobic overreaction to “repeated sexual contact.” In a landmark victory for every man in every bar in every American town at 2 A.M., the Department of Energy’s “Kiss and Tell” policy has specifically exempted the one-night stand. (Note to feminists: Yes, there MAY be some women scientists who are also cheering this decision, and if there are, would you please tell them to call 334-7350 and ask for Antonio, Lord of Last Call.)

  To review then what our government stands for:

  1. Repeated sex with foreigners may constitute a security breach, and it must be reported. (When asked if scientists would be required to report repeated sex with the rock band Foreigner, DOE officials admitted that was still a “gray area.”)

  2. One-night stands! Yeah, boyyy!

  So come over here, my little sparerib, and let’s get it on!

  Of course the policy presumes (a) that the “sensitive” countries aren’t smart enough to get foreigners from a country not on the “sensitive” list to entrap the scientists, and (b) that a really hot babe couldn’t get a man to spill his guts in one night (a virtual eternity, in guy time). Speaking as a patriot, I would sell my country out in an Islamabad minute for one hour with Benazir Bhutto.

  I think the greater issue here, though, is the revelation that U.S. nuclear scientists are actually having sex with foreigners—and not just with themselves!

  Nuclear scientist is hardly one of the traditional sex-magnet occupations, like athlete, U.S. president, millionaire, and ombudsman. Do you realize what this will do for enrollment at MIT and Cal Poly? Exponential!

  But despite the enlightened move regarding one-nighters, the agency draws the line if said sensitive foreigner shows up for a return engagement. The rule requiring scientists to report sex they’ve had with a foreigner “on more than one occasion” states: “Such contact must be reported regardless of whether the foreign national’s full name and other biographic data are known or unknown.”

  Unknown? These are rocket scientists! And if after multiple sexual encounters they’re not even on a full-name basis, when would “country of origin” come up? (Are we hoping for a tattoo of a world map with an arrow that says YOU ARE HERE?)

  And where do naturalized citizens fall in this rule? Let’s say I suddenly got nuclear security clearance; could I freely boink Charo?

  What keeps me up at night is imagining the meeting in which a room full of highly classified government employees is about to declare sex with sensitive foreigners off-limits when some, um, rump group pipes up with, “Come on, guys! Not one-night stands? I mean, can’t we even do it just once? You make this rule, nobody will become a nuclear scientist anymore. They’ll gravitate to professions where it’s okay to have sex with foreigners—like the Peace Corps! I beg you, don’t force us to choose between cold fusion and hot blood.”

  And what pol went for that argument, anyway?

  Senator Blutarsky?

  The crux of the problem the policy makers faced was defining “close and continuing contacts.” To appreciate the difficulty, remember how the president answered the question “What is a sexual relationship?” by saying, “It depends what you mean by ‘is.’ ” (Actually, it’s a good thing nobody asked Bill Clinton for his definition of “close and continuing contact,” because he probably would have said: “Having Paula Jones soldered to your leg.”)

  Of course these are highly technical issues, too complex for us to expect nuclear scientists—preoccupied with highly classified weapons systems—to remember in the heat of action. So I am making my own contribution to national security—an easy mnemonic device to help our brave scientists remember what situations are “go for liftoff!”

  In the form of the following limerick:

  I once bagged a spy from the Knesset.

  Can’t recall any night that would best it.

  Though she probed about nukes,

  Sought a list of our spooks,

  I’m not even obliged to confess it.

  A Truly Gifted Man

  Like most men I want no part of buying holiday gifts. At the last possible moment I trudge to a department store and I scan the floor for a saleswoman around my age, who will take pity on me. I approach her with a soft smile and a shrug. “I have to buy gifts,” I say, pleadingly, “and I have no clue what to get. Left to my own devices I’ll end up with Oil of Olay and stool softeners. Could you please help me?” Two hours later I’ve got all the gifts I need.

  My late friend Pete, a sportswriter, also had a foolproof plan for buying Christmas gifts. Pete had a friend who you might say carried the floral-arrangement gene. Every year at Christmas, Pete would summon the guy to Runyon’s, the New York bar where Pete hung out, hand him a thousand dollars, and say, “I need nice gifts for ten women. Keep the change.”

  How I admired that. Pete did his shopping and never left the bar.

  Here is what women need to know about men: We’re only buying gifts because you expect them. If it were up to us, we’d just as soon hand you some cash and go back to watching the Pamela and Tommy Lee honeymoon tape.

  The best thing you can do is tell us exactly what you want. I mean, exactly.

  Men like a woman who’ll say, “I’m out of this body lotion. Lancôme Trésor. The eight-ounce size. You can find it at Lord & Taylor in Chevy Chase. Second floor. They’re open until nine.”

  We can handle this. And we’ll gladly get a decorative gift bag to put the lotion in.

  (Those fancy bags are a godsend. For years I have tried to wrap presents by myself. I tear off a piece of wrapping paper that should easily be sufficient to wrap the Great Wall of China. I fold the paper, snip it with scissors, and tape it to the box—yet invariably part of the package is showing. I try to disguise this with another sheet of wrap that clearly does not match the pattern of the first sheet. And by now I’m usually totally out of paper, so I have to use a piece of a grocery bag. My gifts look like they’ve been wrapped by Ted Kaczynski.)

  My friend Nancy says, “I prefer a man who admits that he knows nothing about gift-giving and will try to buy his way into your heart, rather than a man who is arrogant enough to think he knows what a woman wants. To those men, it’s never about what she wants, it’s about what he wants.”

  She related the story of the first gifts the man who would later become her husband gave her: “A book on whitewater canoeing and a can of bug spray.”

  (By the way, when she opened the package, she wept.)

  I understand that gift. Last year I gave my wife an electric can opener.

  I’ve never been good at buying gifts for women. As a young man my imagination was limited—as was my objective—and I always bought women the same thing. Nightgowns.

  I probably bought my wife fifteen nightgowns—usually the kind you’d see in a Larry Flynt magazine, next to pictures of women who had sex with various Republican congressmen (upcoming pictorial: “Women of the Junior League”).

  She wore them once, to please me, then ran them through the disposal.

  “Of course she hated them,” my friend Liz said. “You were buying what you wanted her to wear—things with snaps and leather trim. Don’t you know those sheer fabrics create all kinds of static electricity? You can be asleep and suddenly there’s spontaneous combustion and you’re on fire!”

  A ch
ick so hot she’s on fire! Man, that turns me on!

  Liz sighed. What women really want, she said, is sweatpants. “When flannel can be made sexy, then the world will be a better place.”

  Men have no problems buying presents for other men. (Except for the awkwardness in giving a present to another man, which has to be accompanied with manly clasps on the shoulders and the promise of skinning a moose in the morning.) All you have to do is find something you’d want for yourself. And buy two of them.

  The other day my young friend Michael told me he was visiting his girlfriend’s parents for the holidays, and he had to bring them a gift.

  He intended to buy gifts that any twenty-three-year-old man would buy: CDs and video games.

  “I don’t think in terms of what people need,” he explained. “I think in terms of what I like. Hopefully they’ll like CDs and video games, too. And if not, the hell with them.”

  Spoken like a man.

  Sadly, Michael’s girlfriend said that video games wouldn’t do, and he should think more in terms of what her family needs. Lamps, for example.

  “Don’t they already have lamps?” Michael stammered.

  “Yes, but they’re old,” his girlfriend said.

  Michael had no idea where to buy lamps. Men don’t know from lamps.

  Do you know how far down the gift list I would have to go before I got to lamps? It would be under “live eels” and “autographed photo of Tarik Aziz.”

  Men like overhead lights. A man wants to flip a switch and get light all over the room, not in some small corner. Table lamps are too prissy. And stand-up lamps get in the way when you want to play Wiffle ball in the living room.

  Men are happy with bare lightbulbs. I have one of those bathroom light fixtures with six frosted decorative globes arranged horizontally above the mirror. One by one the globes went out, and I didn’t notice. One day the last bulb went out, and I looked up and realized I was shaving in the dark. I went outside, unscrewed a sixty-watt bulb from the porch light, put it in my bathroom, and I’ve been happy ever since. Now my bathroom looks like a man’s bathroom should—like it belongs in a bus station.

  So if anybody wants to buy me a lamp or frosted decorative globe for the holidays, I’m not interested.

  But a new bulb for the front porch I could use.

  Out, Damp Spot

  My friend Gino was looking forlorn, like a basset hound at a funeral. I asked what was wrong.

  “The roof fell in,” he said.

  “You mean, like, you’re swamped with work?”

  “No,” he said.

  “You mean, like, all sorts of things went wrong at once?”

  “No,” he said. “I mean, like, the roof fell in.”

  What follows is a story with many important lessons for the American homeowner, such as the need for maintaining sound structural integrity, and the value of having adequate insurance, and the wisdom of not letting male humans own homes, on account of they are idiots.

  The story began a week before, when Gino was in his den and noticed a steady drip, drip, drip from the window beside him. The water was falling from the top of the window onto the sill, inside the house.

  This struck him as odd. It wasn’t raining. It hadn’t rained for days.

  Now, Gino was not born yesterday. He knew something had to be done. So he did what any man would do. He got up and made himself a sandwich.

  When he got back, the dripping had stopped. Another homeowner problem solved!

  (This is typical guy behavior. My friend Nancy recently smelled something burning in her house, but she couldn’t find anything wrong. She was afraid that it was an electrical fire, so she asked her husband to do something. He did what any man would do: He opened the windows to get the smell out, and went back to watching the ball game.)

  Anyway, a couple of days after the dripping incident, Gino was back in that same room, typing, when suddenly the computer started fizzing.

  Gino does not know much about computers, but he knows they seldom fizz.

  He looked up. Water was dripping into it from a pinhole leak in the ceiling. Again, it was not raining outside.

  Gino did exactly what I would have done in that circumstance: He moved the computer.

  Then he resumed happily banging away on the keyboard, until he noted the sound of his daughter screaming. He looked up. The pinhole was widening. It was the size of a marble. Then, a second later, it was the size of a football.

  Something was clearly wrong—finally, this hit him, like a dash of cold water in the face. In fact, it hit him exactly like a dash of cold water in the face.

  “It was like someone was in the attic, tipping over a bathtub,” he says.

  You can tell a lot about a person by how he reacts in a crisis. Here is the canny homeowner strategy Gino came up with: He put a pot on the floor and waited until morning.

  By morning, he had it all figured out. In a slap-to-the-forehead revelation, he remembered there was an air conditioning unit up there in the crawl space above the room. So he phoned the air conditioning guy.

  The air conditioning guy climbed up to the crawl space and said, yes indeedy, the unit had malfunctioned and spewed water all over. He fixed the leak. As he was leaving he said, “By the way, it’s crawling with termites up there.”

  “Termites?”

  “Yeah,” said the air conditioning man, disapprovingly. “It’s really creepy. It made me wanna puke.”

  So Gino called the exterminator.

  The exterminator went up into the crawl space. Then he came down.

  “You don’t have termites,” he said.

  “Whew,” Gino said.

  “You’ve got carpenter ants.”

  “That’s better, right?”

  “Not really,” said the exterminator. “Why do you think they call ’em carpenter ants?”

  “Because they are skilled at basic home repair?” Gino said, hopefully.

  “Good thing you called me, though,” said the exterminator. He had a manly hitch in his voice, like Marshal Dillon after running the bad guys out of town. “I put some powder down. It’ll kill them.” And he left.

  What happened a few seconds later can only be described as mystical.

  Gino’s two dogs began acting strangely. They were obeying some timeless imperative, some instinct born in the wild that gives dogs an ability to sense danger and react in a manner that features random moronic drooling and yowling and aimless galloping in circles.

  “What’s wrong, boy?” Gino asked his Labrador retriever, Harry S Truman.

  Before Mr. Truman could explain, the house shook with a terrific crash. Gino ran to his den and opened the door. For a moment he just stared, slack-jawed. Then he slammed the door, turned around, and said in a very, very loud voice a very, very bad word, which caused the dogs to madly suck up and apologize for whatever they had done.

  Then Gino opened the door again. This is what he saw:

  Under the weight of standing water, the ceiling had collapsed. Water was cascading into the room, along with ten thousand ants.

  Ants. Gigantic black ants were raining down from the roof, writhing in agony. They were dying from the poison. The dogs were wolfing down poisoned ants as fast as they could. Gino was stomping ants and yelling at the dogs to stop.

  The phone was ringing. Help was at hand!

  It was someone selling commodities options.

  This all happened last Monday. I am pleased to report that everything is back to normal. The dogs are okay. The air conditioner is working fine. Gino’s house is no longer infested with ants. Now it’s infested with contractors.

  Pranks for the Memories

  There are college pranks, and there are college pranks. But you can stop calling now. I think we’ve got a winner.

  This guy put a cow on the dome of the historic Rotunda at the University of Virginia!

  It happened thirty-two years ago, and for all that time the identity of the perpetrator remained a secret. F
or thirty-two years the poor county sheriff had this unsolved “Bovine B&E” on the books. It turns out the man responsible is now president of Nasdaq. His confession was front-page news last week.

  (Apparently, one of his friends cowed him into it. Now I’m milking the story. I’d butter stop with the puns before I look like an udder fool.)

  The perp’s name is Alfred R. Berkeley III.

  Make that “Bossy” Berkeley.

  He put the cow fifty feet above the ground, on the dome Thomas Jefferson designed. The president of a multibillion-dollar stock market. Oh, man, I wanna party with you, Alf.

  Got any hot stock tips? Anything about to moooooove up?

  (And get this: The reason Alf put the cow on the roof was to outdo his dad, who once hung stuffed animals on the tree outside the U-Va. president’s office. I shudder to think what Alf would have done if his dad had hung U.N. inspectors from trees, like Saddam Hussein.)

  All right, class, let’s compare and contrast: The president of Nasdaq puts a cow on a roof. The president of the country says that, in college, “Yeah, I took a toke on a joint—but I didn’t inhale.”

  What does that tell you about hands-on, take-charge leadership?

  The Nasdaq guy ought to be president of the United States. Here’s his slogan: “Make Cud, Not War.”

  The only disappointing thing in an otherwise totally uplifting story is that Mr. Berkeley has expressed regret at dragging the cow up about a hundred steps and coaxing it onto the dome. “I have a lot more of an adult view at age fifty-three than I did at twenty,” he said.

  Nobody’s buying that, Alf. You put a cow on a roof. You’re a legend. You can run that maturity jive in public, but here’s what you’re saying in private: “High five, baby!”

  (Livestock are part of a hallowed prank tradition. Remember the horse in Animal House? Dorfman was supposed to shoot the horse, and he didn’t know the gun was loaded with blanks. So he shot into the air—and the stallion dropped dead of a heart attack. After being sedated and hauled from the dome, Mr. Nasdaq’s cow died of Valium-related causes. Sadly, it’s always the hoofed animals who suffer.)