Wry Martinis

by Christopher Buckley

  None of this struck me as especially novel or insightful. I did not have to look under rocks or call up Soldier of Fortune magazine for sources. Among those I quoted were Philip Caputo, James Webb, Robert E. Lee and George Washington. James Fallows had broken the ground in The Washington Monthly eight years ago.

  My piece was a kind of footnote, something I had been mulling over, and which had coalesced as I watched the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in November ’82. It was neither an endorsement of the Vietnam War nor an endorsement of war. It appeared before the Beirut bombings and the invasion of Grenada and the article in the Style section about the Airborne Rangers who got their jollies by “stomping to death” a homosexual.

  I should have known something was wrong when the Phil Donahue Show called. (I declined.) Then the Today show called, followed by PBS, a number of radio stations. People writing books on the aftermath of Vietnam called.

  Bob Greene wrote a syndicated column, slightly missing the point, which said he felt the same way, too, i.e., that those who didn’t go were cowards. I still cannot find where I said that, but never mind. Mike Royko, who doesn’t like Bob Greene, read Greene’s column and weighed in with a puzzlingly titled column, DRAFT DODGERS BORINGLY BLUBBER THEIR GUILT—puzzling because neither Greene nor I had in fact dodged the draft. Royko was royally peeved and ended his column with a suggestion: “Oh, shove it.”

  Vermont Royster of The Wall Street Journal found it a reasonable thesis, and wrote a thoughtful piece placing it in historical perspective. Jules Feiffer did a very funny strip in which a “shallow $50,000 a year journalist” and a “glib $65,000 a year attorney” effetely fret at the tennis net over not going to Vietnam. “Of course, I wouldn’t want to get hurt,” says one in the last frame. “No,” concludes his partner, “I’d prefer to see others shot and learn from it.” My laughter over that last line has a nervous quality.

  Then Richard Cohen of the Post wrote an ideologically guided epistle, describing my article as “something out of Kipling, or maybe Tennyson.” That is not such bad company, but it wasn’t meant as a compliment, for he viewed my article and the invasion of Grenada and the bombing of Beirut as all of a piece. “Once again, we are in love with war,” he wrote. “This is a dangerous infatuation.” I felt a bit misunderstood at first, but calmed down on reflecting that Cohen reminds us conservative warmongers at least once a week that war is bad. I am sorry to disappoint him, but I agree with him.

  All this, however, has not been half as interesting as the letters that four months later are still coming in. For the most part they are extraordinarily well-expressed, moving, provocative—and not necessarily sympathetic.

  A twenty-seven-year-old counselor of Vietnam vets writes with the world-weary maturity of one who might have served in that war: “Don’t envy the soldier’s experience.… I admire them all for trying to hold up considering what they went through. But it is dangerous business to start looking even remotely fondly, for whatever reasons, at Vietnam. This is the first step towards forgetting all the many lessons we can learn from the war, and this is the first step towards getting ourselves in such a travesty again.”

  A vet who returned in 1967 and who has had a hard time of it writes that he found in the article “a rare empathy, brimming with the recognition of sacrifice made by those like me, from those like you. This was all I ever really wanted. A recognition I never got from the junior personnel executives, the multitudes of them I have had appointments with. The ones who went straight from high school to the college campus to the business world, uninterrupted.”

  Then two letters from the same person. The first is dated September 10 and explains that after years of malaise over having been in the Special Forces in the late ’60s but not having gone to Vietnam, he is volunteering, at age thirty-six, for the Airborne Rangers.

  The second letter is dated November 15. It begins, “Whatever guilt I might have felt by my not participating in the Vietnam War has all been erased by recent adventures in Grenada.… Unfortunately, we lost three killed and six seriously wounded in three helicopter crashes on our last raid before pulling out.” It ends, “Please continue doing whatever you can to further the cause of Vietnam vets.”

  I now understand that any rumination on any redemptive aspect of Vietnam, especially with American soldiers’ dying in another what-are-we-doing-here conflict, is bound to strike some as utter folly. If I glorified war, then I was the fool. It is such a delicate matter that praise for those who went should be prefixed and suffixed with ritual denunciations of war in general. I do not say that cynically; that is what the emotionalism of the public dialogue appears to require.

  Among my article’s faults was that it wholly neglected the effect of the war on women. Some of the most compelling letters I am getting are from women. One writes to say she feels something like guilt over her inability to have a child. It has left her with a sense of unfulfilled womanhood. Another correspondent reports the very good news that Joe McDonald, late of Country Joe and the Fish, minstrels of the antiwar movement, now holds benefit concerts for San Francisco-area Vietnam vets. What troubles her still is that she never asked her boyfriend about his war experiences. “You were correct,” she ends, “when you said that most people are comfortable with the course of action they took during the war years. I, however, am not one of them.”

  That this article should have provoked so many disparate interpretations may mean that there are still a lot of people out there like her.

  —The Washington Post, 1983

  A Few More

  for the Road

  A.C.

  in D.C.

  I read somewhere that air-conditioning was invented in order to provide a measure of relief for poor President Garfield as he lay dying during a Washington summer from Guiteau’s bullet. I feel bad for the man. Bad enough to be shot by a maniac with a French surname, but to linger on to spend your last July and August in Washington.… It was so hot on the top floor of the President’s House, as it was then called, that a crew of navy technicians was tasked with devising some means of cooling him down. They came up with a system of forcing air through pipes chilled by ice and salt. Valiant as this effort was, I can’t imagine it helped much. I’m convinced of this because I used to spend summers in the top floor of a house in Washington. I wasn’t able to call in the navy, but I called in just about everyone else, and it’s still hot enough up there to finish off a healthy president.

  Air-conditioning did not become the most important thing in my life until I moved to Washington in July 1981, almost a hundred years to the day after President Garfield was shot. I soon developed the habit of opening the freezer of any refrigerator I passed and inserting my head in it.

  To make matters worse, I lived for the first five years in Foggy Bottom, a part of the city named for the swampland it once inhabited. (The State Department is nicknamed Foggy Bottom, an often appropriate bit of metonymy.) In President Garfield’s day the army kept its stables there. There was also a slaughterhouse nearby, as well as a canal running along what is now Constitution Avenue, from the Lincoln Memorial to the Ellipse, just south of the White House. Apparently a lot of carcasses from the slaughterhouse ended up in this canal. The miasma would then waft on up to the President’s House. A few years later President Cleveland decided, Enough already, and moved his summer residence to higher ground three miles to the northwest, where the air did not smell like cholera soup. A hundred years later, my wife and I followed him to what is now called Cleveland Park.

  The first thing I asked the realtor was, Does it have central air-conditioning? Yes, she said. Sold, I said.

  I set up my office in the small, third-floor attic room that gives out onto a rooftop deck from which you can see the towers of the National Cathedral and pluck apples from the branches of the old apple tree in our backyard, assuming you enjoy severe stomachache. I thought I had found Writer’s Heaven, an aerie it might please a passing muse to light upon.

 
It was early June, already well into the Washington summer. On my second day in my new office I noticed that by 9:00 A.M. it was already a bit stuffy up there. By ten I was downright clammy, and by eleven I was starting the old summer striptease. Then I thought, Hold on, you have central air-conditioning, schmuck. Turn it on!

  I approached the control panel with some trepidation. I’d never had central air-conditioning, only the window “units” that shake, rattle and drip and cause the lights to dim. I turned the switch to On. The whole house shook for about five seconds. I took this for a good sign. I imagined a great polar bear stirring after a long winter’s hibernation. I went back up to my office and put my hand under the register and there, by gum, was a cool stream of air. Soon the house would be a veritable igloo. I sat down contentedly and went back to work.

  I spent the next few days trying to convince myself that I was keeping cool, but Lucy kept coming up to the third floor and saying, “Boy it’s hot up here.” And the reason she was coming up was to ask if she could please turn the air-conditioning off, because the floors below were now so cold that icicles had formed on the bathroom faucets. There followed a period of acute marital stress. If you put one spouse in a refrigerator and the other in an oven, this results.

  I called in the experts. They ranged from people like the guy in those “Hey, Vern” commercials to refugee German rocket scientists. The former said, “Whutcha do is, block off yer intaykes on the second floor, but not so’s ya brayke the whole system ’cause then you’re gonna hafta replayce the whole thang.” The latter said, “You haf an imbalance in ze zyztem. You require a new zyztem, ezzentially,” which they said they would be able to install for five thousand dollars.

  Five thousand dollars being five thousand dollars, I called in more experts. They advised putting in a separate “unit.” That meant gouging a large hole in the roof. (The attic office had no windows and forty-five-degree-angle sloping walls.) It also meant rewiring the whole house for reasons I still don’t understand and the certain prospect of rain getting in.

  I had a brainstorm: rearrange the entire floor plan of my office so that my chair was directly underneath the register. It worked! As long as I sat bolt upright in my chair, I was enveloped in the slender shaft of cool air, leaving only my forearms, extended toward the keyboard, to glisten and bead with sweat. There were drawbacks. If I wanted to turn on my printer, which writers tend to do from time to time, it meant getting down on my hands and knees and crawling under my desk to reach it. But it seemed a small inconvenience.

  More serious were the muscle cramps. Within a week I couldn’t get out of the bed in the morning owing to the spasms that ran from my neck to my waist. Lucy was not as sympathetic as usual because of her now-chronic rheumatism from living in the refrigerated downstairs. I went to a doctor, who prescribed ibuprofen and Flexeril, which helped with the muscle spasms but had a tendency to put me to sleep. This did not do much for my prose style. Assignment editors stopped calling. I began drinking heavily. Water, I mean. I thought I could air-condition myself internally by drinking continually from a pitcher of ice water, but all this really did was make trips downstairs necessary at the rate of approximately one every ten minutes.

  Faced with being divorced by a pre-pneumonic wife, addiction to muscle relaxers and the demise of my writing career, I wondered if the time hadn’t come to spend that five thousand dollars on ze new zyztem. However, a chance encounter with my next-door neighbor architect promised a brilliant solution to the problem: convert the low-lying, shaded garage into an office. Of course! Why hadn’t I seen it?

  I’ll call my architect friend Hobart, because he is a fine man and I don’t want to do anything to impede his career. Hobart said it could be done for $25,000. A lot of money, sure—five times more than a new zyztem—but I’d end up cool and with three times the space. “Let’s do it,” I said. (The same words, now that I think of it, Gary Gilmore said on his way to the firing squad.) Hobart drew up five thousand dollars’ worth of blueprints and put it out for bids. The bid came in at $57,000.

  I swallowed a few extra muscle relaxers and asked myself how such a thing could be. Then I remembered the Law of Rusher’s Gap. Named for its formulator, author and columnist William A. Rusher, it goes like this: Say you want to convert your garage into an office and they tell you it’s going to cost $25,000. Now you know, in your heart of hearts, it’s going to cost $40,000, right? Well, Rusher’s Gap is the difference between $40,000 and what it actually ends up costing.

  Hobart and I and the contractors entered into negotiations. We drew up new plans for enlarging the existing office, etc., etc. Looking back, I wonder if we couldn’t have brought about peace in Central America if we’d spent as much time and effort on that problem instead. The negotiations broke down when the contractor came in with a bid so astronomical only Copernicus could have made sense of it. But it wasn’t the money that did it. It was the asterisk at the bottom of the contract that said, “Does not include new A/C if required.” (Italics mine.)

  I wrote out a good-bye check to Hobart, whose total bill had come to just under $10,000, and said to Lucy, “We’ve tried the liberal solution and hurled large sums of money at the problem. It still won’t go away, so why don’t we?” I said, “Let’s go someplace really cold for the summer, like Maine.” Lucy agreed, and we rented a bungalow in the woods in Maine. There was moss on the roof and it was so dark we had to turn on the lights at 10:00 A.M. Perfect, I said. Perfect.

  The temperature hit ninety and stayed there. The radio said it was the hottest summer in Maine’s history, at least in living history, and people in Maine live forever. Most of them remember the Spanish-American War and none of the ones I spoke to could remember a hotter summer. When we got back to D.C. in mid-September it was still in the high eighties.

  One day while I was inspecting the joists in the basement to see if they were strong enough to hang myself from, it struck me how very … cool the basement was. I thought, Aha … I wouldn’t even need to have to put in air-conditioning. It’s cold enough down here to keep hamburger fresh, why not me? It is a little dark and damp and it does tend to flood when it rains, but so does Venice, and what’s a little arthritis?

  So now I’ve solved my problem of keeping cool during the D.C. summers. My new basement office is nearing completion. We found a wonderful contractor who said it could be done for $40,000 and it looks like it’s only going to end up costing $105,000 by the time the paint dries. A lot of money, you say? Well, yes. Yes it is a lot of money. It’s twenty-one times what a new zyztem would have cost. But this is how it works in Washington. How do you think the deficit got so big? It’s not so bad as long as you take enough of these muscle relaxers. Here, have one. See? Nothing to it. You just take out your checkbook and write zeros. It’s got so I hardly notice. And when I go down to the basement and stand there and look out the new windows and see the heat waves vibrating off the pavement outside and I feel how nice and cool it is, I think how comfortable President Garfield would have been down here. Yes. I think he might even have pulled through. I’m going to go drink some more water now. The doctors say it’s important for me not to have stress and to drink a lot of water.

  —Architectural Digest, 1989

  Hot Hot Hot

  As I sat down to write this, on a train, a young woman walked past wearing an above-the-knee pleated skirt, ivory stockings, bone-colored pumps, a blue double-breasted jacket, a strand of pearls, gold earrings, and blond hair pulled back with a barrette. I think she got on in Philadelphia.

  She looked like she got on in Philadelphia. Grace Kelly, who must figure prominently in any discussion of what twentieth-century man finds sexy in twentieth-century woman, was from Philadelphia. There’s that scene in Rear Window where she sweeps into Jimmy Stewart’s Greenwich Village apartment wearing that long Edith Head skirt—I don’t even remember seeing her legs in that scene, only the dress, and that face. Fast-forward to Sharon Stone uncrossing and crossing her gams in Basic I
nstinct. Two hot blonds in the latest fashions. What’s to compare? In sex, as in architecture, less is more. I remember something else about that scene: Jimmy Stewart being annoyed at her. What acting that must have taken.

  Before that lovely woman walked by on the train, I’d planned to write a heavy-breathing encomium to the miniskirt, which I’ve always thought of as the twentieth century’s most brilliant achievement, grateful as I am for antibiotics, automatic teller machines, and passenger-side air bags.

  But things have changed since Mary Quant first raised hemlines and male heart rates back in the mid-sixties. In those happy Beatle days, the miniskirt had an innocence and a larkiness to it that seem lost in our Age of Less Innocence, with its crotch-grabbing singers and in-your-face jeans and well-oiled glutei maximi. I have a theory—I am nothing if not a deep thinker—that once all those gorgeous, mile-long legs were revealed, the next logical step was to adorn them with sexy black stockings and garters! Panty hose (for my money, one of the century’s worst inventions) made the mini possible, but in doing that paved the way for seventies kink, which in turn led to some rather harder-core stuff. Remember Liza Minnelli in Cabaret in 1972, all got up in black stockings and garters and the Berlin S & M bit? Charlotte Rampling two years later in the positively wicked Night Porter?

  Once that hemline went north, Pandora started opening boutiques with names like the Pleasure Chest, serving all your latex needs. It’s been a while now since Cole Porter sang, “In olden days a glimpse of stocking/Was looked on as something shocking.” What lyric would be left to him in an era of butt floss bathing suits?