My Life in Heavy Metal

by Steve Almond

  But Darcy had her own dewy allegiances. Reagan, for instance. They’d named an airport after him. Now he had Alzheimer’s and the news told stories of his decay, over which Darcy clucked. “He made it acceptable to love this country again,” she told me. “Don’t give me that snotty look, Billy. He was an American hero.”

  This was astounding to me: Ronald Reagan! The man who had allowed Big Business to run the country, slashed social programs, gorged the national debt on wacko military systems, funneled arms to Nicaraguan murderers, and just generally sodomized Mother Nature.

  So, in other words, we learned to avoid policy aims.

  By March Darcy was traveling nearly every week. She was unofficially on loan to the McCain campaign, which was full of reformist spunk but foundering in the polls. I expected Darcy to be devastated by the results of Super Tuesday, which all but assured Bush the nomination. But she emerged from her flight (a red-eye out of Atlanta) beaming.

  “Kenny O’Brien talked to Roger about me. He wants me to do advance work for Dubya! Isn’t that amazing!”

  My reaction to this news was complicated. I was thrilled and impressed. Darcy was making a name for herself. But this would mean more travel for her, more prestige, more action. While I remained in D.C., plinking out obscure proposals on how to reduce recidivism, stewing over whether to vote for the Android or the Spoiler. And missing her.

  Beyond envy, I felt genuinely unsettled. Darcy had been a rabid McCain supporter—one of his true believers. She had derided Bush as a semipro, a lollygagger. It was hard for me to fathom how she could now throw her support behind him.

  “We fought the good fight,” Darcy assured me. “The key is that we managed to push finance reform onto the agenda.”

  “You really think Shrub is going to do anything on that?” I said. “The guy raised fifty million before he even announced.”

  Darcy frowned. “Don’t be so cynical,” she said. “Have a little faith for a change. Oh, I’m hungry, Billy. Where can we get a burger at this hour?”

  Winter limped into April and we barely noticed. The dirty slush glittered and the gutters lay ripe with magic. In early May the cherry blossoms reemerged along Pennsylvania and I turned twenty-seven. Darcy organized a celebration at a tapas bar in Foxhall Road, one of those places where the waiters are obliged to enforce a spirit of merriment by squirting rioja from boda bags into the mouths of particularly valued diners. Darcy, in her little cocktail dress, offered a toast, while my friends glanced in horror at the table beside us, where a pack of trashed dot-commers were plying the waitress to flash her tits.

  Darcy considered the evening a triumph, and I hoped she was right. My friends were a glum and brainy lot, nonprofit warriors and outreach workers. They could see how smitten I was and spoke to Darcy with elaborate courtesy. But to them she must have appeared no different from the hundreds of other GOP tootsies cruising the capital in their jaunty hair ribbons.

  I met Darcy’s friends the following week, at a luncheon held in the executive dining room, on the second floor of the Fund’s stately colonial. The maître d’ grimaced politely at my sweater. He whisked into the cloakroom and reappeared with an elegant camel’s hair sports coat.

  Darcy waved to me and smiled, which instantly snuffed my doubt, made me hum a silent pledge of allegiance to our love. The men at her table wore matching dark green blazers, with an FFT in gold script over the breast pocket. Darcy stood out like a rose in a stand of rhododendron.

  The servers were brisk Europeans, officious in their table-side preparation of chateaubriand. George F. Will delivered the keynote, wearily lamenting the “deracination of moral authority” to general mirth and light applause, though his platitudes were obscured by the sandblasting from next door, where workers were empaneling a new marble patio at the Saudi embassy.

  I cannot remember the names of Darcy’s colleagues, only that they seemed to have been cut from the same hearty block of wood. The older fellows evinced the serenity characteristic of a life spent in private clubs. The young guys imitated these manners. They were clean-shaven, deeply committed carnivores who seemed, in conversational lulls, to be searching the rich wainscoting for signs of a crew oar they might take up.

  They all adored Darcy, that much was obvious, and chaffed her with careful paternalism.

  “A remarkable young woman,” said the gentleman on my left, the moment she had excused herself to the bathroom. “You are watching a future congressman from Pennsylvania.”

  “Congresswoman,” I said, half to myself.

  “Yes,” he answered, poking at a rind of fat on his plate. “Darcy mentioned that about you.”

  At the brief reception after lunch, while the higher-ups clustered about Will, Darcy introduced me to her mentor. Trent was a thick blond fellow with the most marvelous teeth I had ever seen. “This your special friend, Hicks?” Trent said. “Good to meet you.”

  “Bill,” I said.

  “Bill. Good to meet you, Bill.”

  He gripped my hand and held it for a few beats. It occurred to me that Trent had served in the Armed Forces, possibly all four of them.

  “Darcy tells me you’ve done some work for Bradley.”

  “Not really. A little volunteering.”

  “A good man,” Trent said. “Principled. Shame he got ambushed by Gore. Not surprising, especially, but a shame. What’re your plans for the election, Bill?”

  “I’ll probably be sitting this one out,” I said.

  Trent barked. “How long you been in the District, Bill? No such thing.” He winked and drew Darcy against him. “You watch this one, Bill. She’s going places.”

  Darcy blushed.

  “You take care of her,” Trent said.

  “Darcy does a pretty good job of taking care of herself.”

  Trent dragged his knuckles across his chin and shot me a look of such naked disdain that I took a step backward. Then he wrapped Darcy in a bear hug, kissed her on the brow, and wished me well.

  “He just seemed a little aggressive,” I said to Darcy later, in her office.

  “Nonsense. He’s just protective.”

  “You know him better than me.”

  “Wait a second.” Darcy’s eyes—they were steel blue—flickered with her triumph. “You’re jealous!”

  “The guy was all over you, honey. And the way he behaved toward me—”

  “He wasn’t all over me. He was being affectionate.”

  “Is that what they’re calling it these days?”

  Darcy began to laugh. She’d had three cups of punch and was still flying. I listened to her gleeful hiccups and watched the chandelier in the foyer glint. “Trent’s LC,” she said finally. “Log Cabin, Billy. He’s gay.”

  She began laughing again.

  Trent the Gay Republican? “He must be thrilled with Shrub’s support of the sodomy laws in Texas.”

  “There you go again,” Darcy said. She was imitating Reagan now. “Judging people. I thought you enlightened liberals didn’t judge people.”

  Darcy traveled throughout spring and into summer, and this lent our relations an infatuated rhythm. My heart beat wildly as I waited for her plane to land. This was not her beauty acting upon me, the glamour of her ambitions, even the promise of sex, but the sense of good intention she radiated, a kindheartedness measured in the drowsy hours before she could assemble her public self. This was my favorite time: Darcy in the shades of dawn, warm with sleep, her hair scattered across the pillow.

  There was an ease to her domestic rituals, the way she snipped coupons (which she would never use) and scrubbed her lonely appliances and listened sympathetically to the latest reports from Ashton. She fretted endlessly over what to pack for her trips. “I’m too fat for these slacks,” she complained. “I’m one big, fat ass, Billy.”

  This was not true. If anything, Darcy was growing slimmer. But these sudden bouts of self-doubt were necessary to her maintenance. They were vestiges of her girlhood, of the awkward striver who lived
behind the awesome machinery of her charm. They were the part of her that needed me.

  I was a fool to watch the Republican Convention. But there was an element of morbid curiosity at work. I wanted to see Jesse Helms reborn as an emissary of tolerance. (What would he wear? A dashiki?) And besides, I had promised Darcy. She was attending as a Bush delegate from Pennsylvania.

  What has always astounded me about the Republican psyche is its capacity for shamelessness. Here was the anti-immigration party parading its little brown ones across the rostrum, the party of Family Values showcasing its finest buttoned-down catamites. Here was Big Dick Cheney—who had voted against funding Head Start as a congressman—excoriating Clinton for not doing enough to educate oppressed children. On and on it went, and nobody exploded of hypocrisy!

  Darcy called me each night, giddy with the sense of how well it was coming off. “Did you see me on CNBC?” she said. “Deb Borders interviewed me. Did you see Christie Whitman, Billy? Wasn’t she amazing? Okay. Don’t answer that. I miss you, Billy. Do you miss me? Do you?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Do you love me?” she said suddenly.

  “You know I do.”

  “Say it.”

  “I love you, Darcy.”

  And I did. It was nothing I could help.

  “I love you, Billy. I love you so much.”

  “Where are you?” I asked. “Are you in your room?”

  “I’m on my bed.”

  And so we progressed, deeper into our thrilling disjunction.

  By October the Bush people had taken Darcy on full-time. She was living out of a suitcase, returning to D.C. with purple stains under her eyes, sleeping twelve hours straight. I took it as my duty to offer her refuge in the cause of intimacy.

  And Darcy returned this devotion. Even as the campaign drew to an end, she came at me in a dizzy operatic spin, ravished for affection, for a private domain in which she could shed the careful burnishings of her ascent. One evening, as we lay flushed on gin, she announced that she had a surprise for me and rose up on her haunches and slipped off her panties and knelt back. All that remained of her pubic hair was a single delicate stripe.

  I felt touched to the point of tears. Here was this miraculous creature, tuckered beyond words, right here in my apartment on the eve of the election, flashing me her vaginal mohawk. She vamped gamely even as her eyelids drooped, and licked her lovely incisor and urged me forward. How could it possibly matter that she opposed gun control?

  I called Darcy at 2:42 A.M. on election night. The networks had just issued their flop on Florida and Dan Rather—in an apparent caffeine psychosis—was urging America to give Dubya a big ole Texas-sized welcome to the White House.

  Darcy was across town, at the Radisson. There were whoops in the background and the echoes of a bad jazz band.

  “Congratulations,” I said.

  “Billy! Oh, you are so sweet!”

  “Well, no one likes a sore loser.”

  “It was so close,” Darcy said. “It’s a shame anyone had to lose!”

  There was a rush of sound and Darcy let out a happy scream. “Stop it! Stop!” She came back on the phone. “That was Trent.”

  “Can you come over?” I said. “I’d like to congratulate you in person.”

  Darcy drew in a breath. “I’d love to. That would be so nice. But I promised some people I’d stay here. At least until Dubya gives his speech.”

  I was quiet for a moment.

  “Honey,” she said. “Are you okay? Are you mad?”

  I was maybe a little mad. But I knew how hard Darcy had worked for this, how much hope she’d pinned to the outcome. She had leapt toward the thick of the race, bravely, with her arms wide and her pretty little chest exposed, while I’d thrown up my hands in disgust and voted for Nader.

  “No,” I said. “I’m proud of you, Darce. You deserve this.”

  “I love you, Billy.”

  “I love you too,” I said quietly. “You crazy Republican bitch.”

  She laughed. A chorus of deep voices swelled in the background and Darcy, carried away by some shenanigans, shrieked merrily.

  I wondered sometimes why she didn’t just settle for some GOP bohunk with a carapace of muscles and the proper worldview. She could have had her pick. We both knew that. But that’s not how the heart works. It runs to deeper needs. “I’ll try to come over after the speech,” Darcy whispered. “I want to see you.”

  Two weeks later we were in Darcy’s apartment, still trying to figure out what had happened. Al Gore was on CNN, imitating someone made of flesh.

  “Why doesn’t he give it up?” Darcy murmured.

  “Why should he give up?” I said.

  “Because he lost.”

  We had both assumed the election would bring an end to the tension. One or the other side would win, fair and square, and we would move on.

  “You can’t say he lost until they count all the votes,” I said. “It’s just too close. Can’t you see that, honey?”

  Darcy sighed. She’d cut her hair into a kind of bob, which made her look a little severe. “Why did Gore ask for recounts in only four counties? He’s not interested in a full and accurate count. Admit it. He wants to count until he has the votes to win.”

  “They both want to win. It’s called a race.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Billy.”

  “I wouldn’t patronize you if you didn’t keep oversimplifying the situation.”

  Darcy clicked off the TV. “Why do you talk like that, Billy? Why do you make everything so personal?”

  “Trying to impeach the president for getting a blowjob? That’s not personal? Or DeLay sending his thugs down to Miami to storm the canvassing board? What is that? Politics as usual? Are you kidding me?

  Darcy shook her head; the edges of her new haircut sawed back and forth. “I can’t talk with you about this stuff. You get too angry.”

  “You’re as pissed as I am.”

  “No,” she said. “I just want this to be over.”

  We didn’t say anything else, but the mists of rage hung about us. And later on, after we had retired to the bedroom, this rage hid within our desire and charged out of our bodies in a way we hoped would bring us closure. We slammed against one another and gasped and clutched, did everything we could think to enthrall the other while at the same time hoping somewhat to murder, to die together, and woke instead, in the morning, bruised and contrite.

  I agreed with Darcy, after all. I wanted the election to be over. I didn’t want to be angry at her, because I loved her and that love was more important than any election. I honestly tried to ignore the dispute. What did I care? Gore had run an awful campaign. He deserved to lose.

  Gradually, though, the radical truth was coming clear: more voters had gone to the polls in Florida intending to vote for him. The statisticians understood this, and the voting-machine wonks, and even the brighter reporters, the ones who bothered to think the matter through.

  The Republican strategy was to obscure this truth, to prevent at all costs a closer inspection of the ballots. In doing so, they became opponents of democracy. (There is no other way to say this.) What amazed me was the gusto with which Bush executed this treason. His fixers lied incessantly and extravagantly. His allies stormed the cameras and frothed.

  Us Democrats never quite grasped that we were in a street fight. We lacked the required viciousness, the mindless loyalty. This has always been the Achilles heel of the Left: we are too fond of our own decency, too fearful of our anger. When the blackjacks come out we quit the field and call it dignity.

  The cold fog of December descended on the capital and I sat in my apartment glaring at CNN, and fantasized about putting a bullet in James Baker’s skull. Darcy called out to me from the answering machine, her voice loosened by red wine. My name sounded vague and hopeful in her mouth.

  And then, one night, just after the final certification of votes in Florida, a knock came at the door. There was Da
rcy, in her blue skirt and her lovely snaggled smile. She was breathing hard. I imagined for a moment that she had run from somewhere far away, from Georgetown perhaps, through the dark banished lowlands of Prince George County, or from the tawny plains of central Pennsylvania.

  “We need to talk,” she said.

  She fell against me, smelling of gin and lilacs and cigarettes. Here she was, this soft person, soft all the way through. I felt terribly responsible.

  “Where’d you come from?”

  “That bar down the street.”

  “The Versailles?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  She looked up into my face. “My friends say I should dump you.”

  “What do you say?”

  “I don’t know. You’re a good lay.” She tugged at my jeans. But this was only an imitation of lust, something borrowed from the booze. Her hands soon fell away. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “I haven’t been anywhere. I’ve been here. Look, I’m sorry. I haven’t quite known what to do.”

  “You could start by returning my calls, okay? Okay, Mr. Fucking Sensitivity?” Darcy glanced into the living room, at the pizza boxes and heaps of clothing. She shook her head. Bush was on now, staring into the camera like a frightened monkey. “Please, Billy, don’t tell me you’re still moping about this election.”

  “It’s more like constructive brooding.”

  Darcy plopped onto the couch. Her knees pressed together and her calves flared out like jousts. This lent her an antic quality, as if she might at any moment leap to her feet and burst into a tap-dance routine. “Why are you doing this to yourself?”

  “I’m not doing anything to myself.”

  “I just don’t understand why you have to hold this against me. I don’t hold your views against you.”

  “That’s because you’re winning,” I muttered.