by Bob Smith
THE NEXT MORNING I sniffed and noticed again the stale stink in my room that disgusted me when I’d first opened the door the night before. I’d been too tired to go back to the front desk and ask for a different room. It smelled as if a ghost with smoker’s breath haunted the motel. Ravi shook his head vigorously, rattling the tags on his collar, his signal that he needed to go out. Rose-colored dew on the car windshields glistened in the dawn light as we strolled around the edge of the parking lot. Ravi was male but looked straight ahead when he squatted to urinate. It made him appear pee-shy, and I always respectfully looked the other way as he piddled. Junior and Taylor’s room was next to mine—their curtains were still drawn—and thankfully whatever they’d done together in bed hadn’t been noisy, even though I could imagine exactly what they did.
I called their room to make sure they were up. Forty-five minutes later, they were at my door, damp-haired from their showers. I was relieved they were groggy and monosyllabic, tamping down any roosterish urges to crow that they got laid last night.
At 7:30 we checked out of our rooms with the new desk clerk, a middle-aged woman wearing pink cat’s-eye glasses and a large pink barrette in her gray hair. She was exceptionally friendly, making me grateful that someone so competent and pleasant had chosen such a dismal job, while I ignored the fleeting existential question as to why I would have been so unfriendly and unhelpful in the same position. Responding to our inquiry, she directed us to the nearest McDonald’s by drawing a little map on the back of a brochure for the Lewis and Clark attractions in St. Charles. “You have some long-distance charges,” she mentioned before adding our room bills together.
Junior and Taylor had a thirty-six-dollar phone bill. It had to be a mistake. I looked at them, expecting them to verify that none of us had made any exorbitantly overpriced long-distance phone calls at two a.m. I’d forgotten how cell phones had eliminated that standard hotel rip-off.
Junior shrugged as a prelude to an explanation. “We called Santa Fe. We need to stop somewhere at ten and call Michael.”
Michael had recently moved to Santa Fe after a burst of dissatisfaction with New York. The following summer I’d visit him for the Harmonic Convergence. It would be my first trip to the Rocky Mountain West. For two days in August, we camped out on a hillside in La Cienega, south of Santa Fe, chanting ohms and sweltering in Indian sweat lodges, believing that we were witnessing the dawning of a New Age. To our lasting disappointment, the New Age turned out to be our thirties.
“Why’d you call him?”
“He’s going to help us stop Bush.”
“You’ve told him about me?”
“Yes.”
“And he believed you?”
“Not at first. He asked a lot of questions. A lot. But when I told him I really believed you were from the future that was enough. I told him I—we—really needed his help.”
If Michael called me up and asked for anything, no matter how strange, I would help him. There wasn’t any question about that. I’d never forget how, when Carol killed herself, Michael flew to New York to stay with me that first weekend.
“He didn’t express any doubts?”
“A few. But not after I explained about Cheney.”
Michael always had his woo-woo side. He had read Shirley MacLaine’s autobiography Out on a Limb and had convinced me to read it. (I enjoyed it because we all want to believe that someone on Earth has been contacted by extraterrestrials.) Then, to our astonishment, he met and befriended her in Santa Fe. So I guess his best friend calling up to announce that “myself from twenty years in the future is visiting and he says we have to stop this asshole from becoming president” fell in the same category as UFOs at Roswell or moving to India to study with a guru for six months. Michael was exceptional: if he had told me this same story, I would have believed him. But I wouldn’t have believed it of anyone else.
I asked Junior and Taylor how Michael was going to help us and was told to wait and see. This irked me. I wasn’t going to be treated condescendingly by them. We continued to argue while loading up the car. Junior must still have been under the influence of last night’s testosterone, since he insisted on driving the first shift. I readily accepted his offer, as my right calf ached from gas pedaling the day before.
“You didn’t even know who Bush was until two days ago,” I said.
“We have it under control, Grandpa,” Junior retorted as he pulled into the McDonald’s.
As the drive-through window clerk handed us our bag of breakfast, Taylor added, “We need to buy a video camera today. Either on the way or in Midland.” They both refused to explain exactly what their plan was until they talked to Michael. “I think we’ve got it worked out,” Taylor said. “Let’s not jinx it.” In contradiction of his championing of scientific reasoning, Taylor embraced a handful of superstitions: he knocked on wood, avoided walking under ladders, and after spilling salt, he always threw a pinch over his left shoulder. I found his irrationality endearing; it seemed cute that a man who could diagram the molecular structure of sodium chloride could believe spooks lurked between the electrons. But it annoyed me that the two of them were grandstanding to each other.
“I might be able to improve your plan.”
Junior shook his head. “You’ll tell us why it won’t work.”
“Okay. Have it your way.” I never realized what a dick I could be. I was naive and thought that observing myself from the other side of my face would give me some objectivity, but our squabbling made it harder to preserve any optimism about human nature; the whole idea of good will among men nose-dives when you can’t even get along with yourself. Then I relented. The whole idea of trying to stop George W. from becoming president was a long shot. Maybe they did have a plan to stop him. I hoped they did because I didn’t. We ate our breakfast in silence and then drove for the next two hours listening to Joni Mitchell songs. Her musical exactitude about her sad feelings made me feel better that I never really tried to deeply examine mine. (It made me wonder again if my interest in art wasn’t just another means of avoidance, where I can enjoy other people’s close encounters with profundity, leaving my own life unexamined.) We stopped at Lebanon, Missouri, to use a pay phone to call Michael and to give Ravi a bathroom break. Junior put the call on his credit card and wouldn’t let me reimburse him. It lessened my animosity toward him that he wasn’t a cheapskate, but it also increased my anxiety. I would run up some major credit card debt in the next few years and felt compelled to mention this to him. As I should have predicted, he said, “Death and now debt. You are the grimmest reaper of them all.”
I eavesdropped on his phone call, trying to pick up something of their plan. I overheard him saying, “We can pay for all your expenses. Yeah, the gas and hotel. Yeah, we can cover that too. It won’t be a problem. So we’ll meet you in Midland tomorrow. We’re going to stay at the Midland Yucca motel. There’s only one. I know. It’s cheap but that’s part of the plan. Thank you for doing this. I know. Who ever thought we’d be unmaking history?” When he hung up, I pretended to be reading the headline of the Lebanon Daily Record,“Silo Fire Extinguished Quickly,” in a newspaper vending box.
“Michael will meet us in Midland. And he’s bringing Elena.”
“Why is Elena coming?” I asked.
“She’s offered to fuck Bush,” he said.
“That’s a terrible idea,” I said. Elena Orloff was one of the parents of my daughter. She was a stand-up comic who lived in Santa Fe in 1986 and she wouldn’t meet her partner, Sonia Derby-Katz, the birth mother of our child, for another twelve years. When Michael moved to Santa Fe, I put him in touch with her. Elena and I had been close friends since college in Buffalo when we took a writing course together. I was trying to write science fiction stories, while she wrote first-person comic essays about her African American mother and Russian-born father. We were at odds with the other five writers in the class, who, at nineteen, were trying to emulate Raymond Carver, the most revered writer of
that era. Each week, the other students handed in minimalist tales about financial hardship, alcoholism, or other forms of working-class despair, tinged with odd moments of dark humor, even though they all came from upper-middle-class backgrounds where their knowledge of financial struggle was limited to working up the nerve to ask Dad for money to spend their junior year abroad. Elena and I bonded on the day she called their fiction “blue-blood collar” and then realized we were the only students in the class who paid for our tuition and books with money earned from part-time jobs.
On my first visit to Santa Fe, Elena would tell me she wanted to move to New York to pursue stand-up comedy, and six months later we became roommates. We lived together until I moved in with Taylor. Then when her career began to take off, and after she had met Sonia, Elena would move back to Santa Fe to start a family.
“Then how the fuck are we going to get Bush in bed with someone?” Junior asked. “Are we going to hire a Midland whore and let her in on your history? Elena knows the score, and she’ll do it if she’s still convinced after meeting you.”
I was horrified that someone I loved was going to sleep with Bush. What made it more disgusting was that I thought she would actually appeal to him. She had a rack that all straight men and even the gays always commented on. Elena was very attractive in a short-haired pixie tomboy way. She was also a nerdy bookworm who read everything. I hadn’t thought of her as a possible lure for Bush, as the thought of asking someone you love to fuck him is repulsively unnatural. But I also had no doubt that if Elena’s future self were given the chance to get rid of him by putting out, she’d do it in an instant. In 2006 she loathed him more than I did, and my disdain was immeasurable.
“You told them everything?”
“Yes. They know you’re from the future and that we have to stop this guy from becoming president.”
“Does Elena really know what we’re asking her to do?”
“Yes. Michael told her. She hasn’t promised anything yet. She wants to meet you first, before she commits. But she said she can’t stand Reagan, and if she can stop a president who’s worse than him, then it’s her patriotic duty to fuck him.”
I was moved that my friends were doing these things on Junior’s endorsement. At times, I felt like a failure, but I overlooked that one of my greatest accomplishments was that I had many close friends. I knew I was a good friend in return but didn’t feel this feat needed to be mentioned to Junior, as I’d always known that. While we drove, I wondered aloud whether simple adultery was enough to prevent Bush from becoming president. “It always surprises all the pundits, but Americans can forgive almost any personal failing if a politician does his job well. If Clinton could have run for a third term, I have no doubt he would have been reelected. Even though he used the cootch of a twenty-two-year-old White House intern as a humidor. That’s a pretty high bar of kinkiness to reach to make Bush unelectable.”
“So do we try to find some hidden kink he has?” Taylor asked.
“His wife’s a librarian, so maybe he has a librarian fetish,” I suggested.
Junior began to impersonate a librarian dominatrix. “Oh, you’ve been a naughty, naughty boy. Your book’s overdue and now you’ll have to pay a big fine.”
“I think anyone would find that either laughable or dull.”
“Or we have him do some sexual act that’s so disgusting . . .” I didn’t allow Taylor to finish the thought.
“No! This involves Elena. She’s going to be the mother of our . . . child.” (I had almost said daughter.) I’m not going to ruin her reputation. Even if it means allowing him to become president.”
“But you’ll allow her to fuck him?” Taylor asked. “And us to videotape it?”
It sounded sleazy, and I was uncomfortable thinking about how we’d explain this to our daughter when she was older. What would I say when this videotape became public knowledge or, even worse, achieved immortality when it received five million hits on some Internet site? Could I really say, “Well, your mother slept with him to prevent him from becoming president, which prevented the war in Iraq. She saved the lives of twenty-five hundred Americans and a hundred thousand Iraqis by having intercourse with him and allowing us to videotape it. Your mother’s not a slut; she’s actually a national hero.” I was idealistic and imagined Isabella as a sophisticated adult. She would be raised not to think that every act of consensual sex was immoral. She would understand that her mother had served a higher purpose by getting down and dirty with the failed older son of then Vice President Bush. If we did our jobs right, George Junior would remain as obscure as his brothers Neil and Marvin or his sister Dorothy. It occurred to me that I would have to tell Elena about our daughter. I couldn’t let her fuck Bush without telling her the full story of whom it might affect. Judging from my own example, it was impossible for anyone to time travel without repeatedly changing history.
Taylor opened a bag of nacho cheese–flavored tortilla chips, which filled the car with their aroma. Junior made a pee-eew gesture, flapping his hand in front of his face. “Those are like a white-trash room freshener.”
Taylor ignored his comment as he popped a chip in his mouth. “With our luck, he’ll be kink-free.”
“The one sure thing that would disqualify him for the presidency now is if we could make it look like he’s gay,” Junior said.
“But he’s not,” I said, “and he’s never going to do something with a guy.”
“Maybe we only need to make it look like he’s gay.”
“He doesn’t actually have to be doing anything gay,” Taylor suggested. “If a guy’s videotaped in a room with another guy’s hard cock, it’s like Chekhov’s comment about putting a loaded gun on stage; the audience expects it to go off sometime.”
“That might just work,” I said, trying to decide which one of us could get a hard-on in the presence of George W. Bush. Naturally, I thought Taylor should have to bear that burden, due to his future Republican affiliation.
We were formally welcomed to the Bible Belt by a billboard for a sporting goods shop. The caption beneath the illustration of a fisherman casting a line read: “You bring the loaves and we’ll take care of the fishes!” Taylor had changed places with Junior in Joplin and drove west for the next five hours. Somewhere near Tulsa, it became apparent that there’s a strong impetus to be saved if you live in the Bible Belt. Who wouldn’t clamor to die and go to heaven if it guaranteed you’d never have to live in Oklahoma again?
When we crossed into Texas, I took over the driving. We still had five and a half hours to go if we were going to make it to Midland that night. Texas claims to be a western state, but it’s the West of the South, which is not the same as the Southwest. I was hopelessly biased against Texas since it had inflicted two Bush presidents on us. I thought of the state as wide-open spaces filled with narrow-minded people. As the landscape became almost entirely grassland, it was hard to shake the feeling all the trees were gone because they’d all been cut down for crossburnings on front lawns. I’d visited Texas’s big cities and knew the state wasn’t all boondocks. It’s possible to get a dose of sophisticated culture at the Menil Collection and Rothko Chapel in Houston, or the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. Without a doubt, the gays in Texas are some of the nicest, wittiest, most enjoyable people I’ve ever met. But they’re a few drops of smart in an ocean of stupid. And people always claim Austin is exceptional. It’s not like the rest of Texas, and that’s true and depressing. When Texans boast that one city in their state is progressive, it always sounds like hillbillies bragging that someone in their family still has teeth. To your average New Yorker, no one in the state was smart enough to figure out how to avoid living in Texas.
The three of us had resumed conversing again in Oklahoma, where we noticed the further south and west we traveled, service slowed to a mosey even at fast-food restaurants. The employees lackadaisically drawled your order back to you at the drive-through window—in some parts of Texas your dubba-cheeseburge
r could be ordered with everything but an “L.” To their credit, the employees were always friendly and at the drive-through window asked, “Will that be y’all?” as if chatting through a plastic clown’s head was a downright neighborly way to get to know someone.
By the time we got to Midland, it was after midnight. We found the motel Junior had booked for two nights. The Midland Yucca was a cheap, one-story motel built in the ’50s on what had then been the outskirts of town. It consisted of two “wings,” and Junior had specifically asked for rooms in the back. You could park your car in front of your door and come and go without being observed. I had to give Junior and Taylor credit. If we could convince Bush to commit adultery, he’d probably want a little privacy; it was clever of them to think of that. And they’d even found a place that took pets.
All we had to go on was my memory, which had already been revealed to be forgetful or completely wrong. We had two leads: Bush attended a men’s Bible study group in Midland, and the name of his oil company was Spectrum 7. I hoped that would be enough.
We were all exhausted from two days of driving and slept in late. We woke up around 9:30 and had breakfast at a diner. At breakfast Junior revealed he’d discovered George and Laura Bush were members of First United Methodist. He’d woken up at 8:30 and made phone calls to the major Protestant churches in town. He’d pretended that he was looking for the men’s Bible study group recommended by his friend George W.Bush. On his third call, he spoke to a woman who confirmed the Bushes were members and that the men’s Bible study group met that evening at six. Junior added, “She said, ‘We had to move it to Tuesday nights. Trying to get men to show up for Bible study on the same night as Monday Night Football would take a miracle of the Lord. And that might even be beyond his power.’”
I wondered about Junior eagerly getting up early to call churches. Then it hit me. He liked Taylor and didn’t want me to break up with him. In some ways I found his solicitude sweet, and in other ways I found it meddlesome. Junior was deliberately trying to change my future. At first I resented that he didn’t know anything about my inthe-future-present circumstances, and yet he was making decisions for me. But then I realized I’d been doing that my entire life. It was part of the human condition; we make decisions about our futures, completely ignorant about what our futures might be. To blame yourself for your bad decisions, which we all do, is like telling a blind man to watch where he’s going when he bumps into you.