GEORGE BUSH
he day the barbarians came, George Bush was out in a boat on the Potomac River with Willie Horton, fishing, and Willie said, “Mister Butch, how come you always be jigglin and tappin yo foot? Man, those fish ain’t goin to come within a mile of us if you makin this racket. Let your foot be, man. Sit still.”
“Willie,” said the President, “you know the—we’re going to clean up here, get some fish, have a heck of a time. Not a vague hope. Talkin promise now. Serious fishing. Got you out of prison for the afternoon. Little favor. Don’t mention it. Didn’t bring you out here to get a tan, Willie. Came to do a little fishin.”
“Mister Butch, I’m grateful for the afternoon off, but you keep tappin away with that foot of yours, you drive away the fish, man. What is it with you? You always drummin yo fingers, you always gettin up and shiftin around and takin yo hat off and puttin yo hat back on yo haid, you always changin yo bait, changin yo sinker, you takes yo line up, you put it back down, up, down, up, down, you pop open yoself a cold Budweiser and then you let it set there in the hot sun, you open the cheese curls and you pick at ’em awhile but you don’t eat ’em—what’s eatin at you, Mister Butch?”
The President looked away off up the Potomac to the Jefferson Memorial, the perfect dome of glimmering white in the sunshine, a temple to intellect and art and democratic civility, and he crunched on a cheese curl and pulled the brim of his L. L. Bean fishing hat down and took a long pull on a Budweiser. The fact was, he had been tired of fishing two minutes after they started, and he was tired of Willie. Despite all he owed to the man, he didn’t much care for hanging around with the guy. Too pushy, too talkative by half, like so many cons—lots of time on their hands, years, so they read book after book, law books, all the classics, Great Book stuff—fine, great, but don’t tell me about it, okay, pal? No sense of humor, some of these guys.
And Willie was right, something was eating at him, and it was the barbarians. Vast hordes of barbaric Huns had invaded Chicago that morning, and a reporter had nabbed him as he headed for the car to come fishing—told Marlon, “No press, no press, no press,” and out the door he goes and there’s this beaky guy with a cassette recorder shoved in the President’s face and he yells, “The Huns are wreaking carnage in Chicago, Mr. President! Any comment?”
What could he say? He had only seen a brief clip of the invasion on the Today show, twenty seconds, bunch of ugly people waving burning sticks—what the hell? he thought, but he turned to the reporter and gave him the maximum presidente look, the George Bush in Crisis Mode look, and said, “Bob, we’re following that whole Hun situation up there very, very closely, and right now, I must say, despite the loss of life which, as you know, is always regrettable—a President sits up late nights thinking about things of that nature—and yet, I have to say, by willikers it looks encouraging, better than anybody ever hoped, so I’m just going to go way out on a limb here and describe myself as concerned, yes, but relaxed and definitely chins-up and in charge. The President is in charge, Bob. That’s part of the job. I think that people who think the President is not in charge are going to have a very big surprise coming. I don’t want to say what that is.”
The President reeled in his line and checked his hook—no worm, just as he suspected. “You think there’s no fish, think again,” he said to Willie. “Who ate that bait? Snapping turtles?”
The President put a fresh worm on his hook and lowered it into the water. How ironic, he thought. Beautiful day. Perfect day. And yet all the suffering in the world. The beauty-suffering irony.
At that moment, the good citizens of Chicago were fortifying the Loop, building barricades across Michigan Avenue and pulling up the drawbridges over the Chicago River, jamming taxicabs ten deep along Lakeshore Drive, and organizing scalding-oil brigades along the canyon of the Illinois Central tracks that ran between the city and the shore of Lake Michigan, but their cauldrons never got hot enough, and the hordes broke through. The barbarian boats landed in Lincoln Park near the bird sanctuary, and thousands of them poured through the North Side—wave after wave of squat, flat-nosed horsemen in leather skirts riding their ugly stump-legged steeds came galumphing down State and LaSalle, trotting past the bookstores and coffee stores and the Benettons and Gaps and Banana Republics, waving their hairy fists, rolling their little red eyes under the long black hairy eyebrow, grunting and blatting and howling, Haroooooo, Haroooooooooo, and bellowing at women in a coarse, unintelligible tongue like irate geese.
For three days, hordes of Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Hloths, Wendells, and Vandals came down from Wisconsin, swept through Evanston and Morton Grove and Skokie, swarmed into the Windy City with relentless, locustlike ferocity, and put the torch to hundreds of churches, performing-arts centers, and historic restorations, and dragged away monks, virgins, associate professors, and postal employees to be sold into slavery, and seized great stores of treasures, heirlooms, and sacred vessels, and tore down libraries, devastated excellent restaurants, and traded away the Cubs and Bears.
Mr. Bush, back from fishing, rested, capable, conferred with John Sununu, met with the Cabinet, weighed his options, was on the verge of taking some kind of dramatic action. To those close to him he appeared burdened but still strong, upbeat but not glib. Then he made his move.
The President ordered the armed forces to enforce a complete blackout on all news of the invasion. “We will deny the enemy what he most desperately wants, and that is our attention and that of the American people.” All journalists were to be kept at a holding area in Peoria, 128 miles southwest of the action.
Thirty minutes later, in came the President’s pollster, Robert Teeter, with a poll showing that seventy percent of the American people thought the President was doing an excellent job with the barbarians. Mr. Bush was seen as confident and in charge but not beleaguered or vulnerable or damp under the arms the way Jimmy Carter had been during the Iran-hostage situation. Most Americans admired the way George Bush played down the story and wasn’t weakened or distracted by it. They felt that he was doing exactly the right thing, that sticking the press in Peoria was just what they would’ve done, and they viewed Chicago as a place where pretty rough stuff goes on most of the time anyway.
So the President didn’t have to address the nation on television after all, a huge relief to him. He walked through the West Wing, calling out, “Strike the set. Speech is off. Kill the lights. No speech.” He hated giving speeches, especially those long drony serious ones from the Oval Office. Hey, it’s just not me, okay? Give me a break, pal. The White House issued a statement saying that barbarianism is a long-term problem, no quick solutions, the answer is education, everything that can be done is being done and will continue to be done. It called for bipartisanship. It said the President would decide soon whether to name a barbarian czar to coordinate the federal effort. That evening, a White House dinner went on as planned, honoring Arnold Schwarzenegger for his work on behalf of fitness. “Anyone who says George Bush is a girly man is dead meat,” said Arnold, grinning. The President appeared calm but interested.
The barbarians made their squalid camps in the parks and on the boulevards and took over the savings-and-loan offices. “Savings and loan” sounds similar to the Hun word chfnxnln, which means “hen-house.” They broke out all the plate-glass windows and covered them with sheepskins, they squatted in the offices around campfires of teak and mahogany desks and armoires, eating half-cooked collie haunches and platters of cat brains and drinking gallons of aftershave. Their leader, Mogul the Vile, son of Generic, squatted down beside a speakerphone on the thirty-eighth floor of American National, called the White House, and babbled and screeched for more than twenty minutes. His English was horrendous. He seemed to be demanding a ransom of three chests of gold and silver, six thousand silk garments, miscellaneous mirrors and skins and beads, three thousand pounds of oregano, and $166 billion in cash.
The President, who did not speak to him personally, pondered the outrageous de
mand as he did his low-impact exercises in the White House gym. He appeared quiet but wakeful, thoughtful but not grumpy. On the one hand, a major American city was in the hands of rapacious brutes, but, on the other hand, exit polling at shopping malls showed that people thought he was handling it okay. So he flew to Kennebunkport for a week of tennis and buzzing around in his boat. He appeared relaxed but hearty, animated but restrained.
A few days later, the Hun sacking of Chicago was old news. It had already happened. Mr. Bush, in striking a note of determination right at the beginning and then refusing to be stampeded into action, had outflanked the story and avoided any loss of public support. He spoke to Willie by phone and Willie said, “You sure cool, Mister Butch, you the coolest dude I ever hung with, man, you be like the brother who these mean mothuhs, they point the gun at him, they say, Man, give us that there car of yours—the brother looks at the mothuhs, he says, Man, I don’t want that car, he says, Man, I never wanted that car. You cool like that brother, Mister Butch.”
“I must say, there’s a whole air of I don’t know what you’d call it frankly, a kind of unreality that’s operating here, it’s like a guy is lucky to—I mean, if you can come to the end of the day with both nuts intact, you’re ahead of the game,” said the President. “So I guess I must be doing okay. I got both of ’em. Right here.”
There were stories in the press, of course, about the pillaging up north, but most of the press was in Washington, not Chicago, and what could you say about Huns that everybody didn’t already know? Huns perspire heavily; they make terrible farmers and lousy husbands, they don’t eat vegetables, only meat and gravy and desserts, and they drink bad sweet wine; their clothes are ill-fitting and covered with lint; they smell rancid and their hair is limp and dull, and they’re ugly as a mud fence—short, flat-faced, thick-lipped, illiterate, grunty people with heavy brows, hairy backs, and no necks, that’s your basic Hun horde. And their relationship with the press is very, very poor. Huns do not take well to criticism. They are not easy to talk to. They’ve never seen movies, never read books, never done anything interesting except rape and pillage. And how long can you talk about rape and pillage?
On the other hand, the country was tired of hearing Huns bad-mouthed by the same old liberal doom-and-gloom writers. Give me a break. The country was curious about Huns and Hun lifestyle. Vanity Fair did a Hun cover, showing Bruce Willis eating half-cooked collie haunches with a naked virgin tied to a chair next to him, her head back, fainting—it was a big topic of conversation: Did you see the Hun on the cover of Vanity Fair?
Some ministers protested that it was tasteless, but that was the whole point, of course, and the owners of collies protested, but the fact was, collie haunches can be drop-dead delicious if you braise them with plenty of garlic over a trash fire, and the Vanity Fair writer who cooked collie concluded that the barbarians were barbaric, hell yes, but unmistakably thrilling and possessed of a true visceral authenticity—“Call it vicious, ruthless, brutal, degenerate, call it what you will, but barbarism is here to stay, and we may as well learn to enjoy what it has to offer, a directness and a frankness, a you-have-it-I-want-it-I-take-it sensibility that is frankly refreshing after all these years of boring boring boring humanism.”
The President, a devoted dog man, wasn’t interested in trying collie haunches or wearing Hun outfits, but he decided not to interfere with the takeover attempts in the savings-and-loan industry—sure, there were these pesky yammering voices in the press about how he ought to step in, etc., etc., as if it were that simple. Easy for the press to point the finger, much harder to be the pointee who, darn it, is just trying to do a day’s work and get home in time for a hot shower and a highball before you got to go to the damn banquet, sit up there, and pick at your damn chicken surrounded by a bunch of Bible fanatics and right-wing creeps with their tiny narrow ties and their squinty eyes, and you grinning and backslapping like mad, but you know they never liked you and they know you know that and it sure does not make for a nice evening out for the Bushman. Boy oh boy.
He told the Secretary of the Treasury to pay the $166 billion, not as a ransom of any type—no, absolutely not, there was no element of ransom involved nor was it ever discussed for a moment by anyone in this Administration—but as ordinary government support, plain and simple, absolutely nothing irregular about it, and the next day, the Huns and the Vandals rode away, carrying their treasure with them, and the Goths sailed away up Lake Michigan. Gothic boats are hard to handle, though, being built of stone, with great high arches that make them tippy, and they all sank in Lake Michigan in a light breeze, carrying half the loot to the bottom, but not before the President’s chopper landed in Grant Park. He had flown to O’Hare aboard Air Force One, then boarded a Marine Corps helicopter for the five-minute hop to the Loop.
Willie watched it on CNN from his prison cell. How cool the man was, he thought. The twitchiest, jumpiest foot-tapping, finger-drumming, facial-ticking nervous mothuh you ever saw, but capable of such cool moves the man coulda held up liquor stores with nothing but a potato in his hand, he was that cool.
It was a serious-faced George Bush who stood at the water’s edge, hair blowing from the rotor backwash, and announced that the barbarians had been removed. He said that the savings-and-loan industry was sounder than at any time in the nation’s history. He announced that he was deeply moved by the heroism of the people of Chicago and reiterated his lifelong opposition to human suffering of any kind whatsoever.
CHRISTMAS IN VERMONT
t was Christmas Eve in Vermont, and through the howling blizzard struggled the runaway nearsighted boy Jim, his red-plaid shirt frozen to his back, his skinny arms limp from hauling his big golden retriever Tony, who was wet and therefore much heavier than if the weather had been warm and sunny. Jim had left home that morning, because his folks were talking about going contra-dancing on New Year’s Eve and leaving him with the servants, and now big wet flakes were falling so thickly he couldn’t see the nose on his own face—and Jim did have a good-sized beezer. “I’m done for, Tony,” whimpered the myopic child wearily. Death was near. If only he had worn a sheepskin coat or asked Basil to drive him in the limo! And suddenly, with a loud whump and an oof, he walked into a small statue or something and fell down with Tony on top of him. It was an antique carved wooden figure of a fisherman! He was back at his mom and dad’s house! He had wandered through the blizzard in a full circle back to Hickey Avenue in Redford and the palatial colonial home of his wealthy and irrepressible parents. He pounded weakly on the door with his small plump hands.
Before the door opens, let me say that this story is made possible in part with the financial help of the folks at Bert&Willy’s Ice Cream and their forty-four thousand business associates in the Bert&Willy work experience. Bert and Willy were two dope-crazed hippies who drove to Vermont in 1968 in a stolen car loaded with dynamite, intending to blow up draft-board offices, but instead bought a couple of used ice-cream freezers and made a hundred quarts of vanilla crunch and sold it for three dollars a quart to tourists, which is the effect Vermont can have on people. Bert&Willy became multimillionaires, but guilty ones, and they both made it a point to live in small ugly homes like ordinary people and to use their money in good ways, such as subsidizing stories. A story can be very expensive to develop. This one, for example, was conceptualized in 1983 by a couple in Plainfield, then sold to a fiction company in Montpelier, then bought by Vermont Power&Light, which spun it off into a fiction/ski-resort/leather-goods/ homemade-preserves subsidiary in 1987. At that point, the story was a bare outline—Rich Boy Finds True Meaning of Christmas and Dies in Blizzard with Dog—but it had an assessed value of six hundred thousand dollars. Bert&Willy’s bought the option for seventy-five thousand and turned it over to me for development. Thanks, guys!
The big redwood door with a carved face of John Muir on it opened, and there was Sarah, Jim’s size-8 mom, in a homespun calico dress from Italy or somewhere. “Jim! What?” she said.
“You’re outdoors! Sharon said you were in the solarium, working out on the ski machine.”
(Sharon! Why would she believe his sister Sharon, who was a singer/songwriter and was abusing mulled wine?)
“I ran away from home eleven hours ago, Mom!”
“Oh. Who’s this?”
“It’s my old dog, Tony. I’ve had him since he was a pup.”
“Oh—I thought you had a pony.”
Jim’s mom was a busy woman, involved in quilt-making, shape-note singing, storytelling, Shaker dancing, the restoration of an old Shaker movie theater, and Shaker baking, so she did not always stay current with her two children. She was not a hands-on mom, preferring to help them set their own priorities and then leave plenty of room for personal growth.
“I never had a pony in my life, Mom,” said Jim in disgust.
The immense traditional-style home twinkled with handmade Christmas lights she had purchased from native Vermont craftspeople, and the quarter-acre log-paneled family room was gaily festooned with pine boughs that she had gathered with a traditional bough-gathering group, singing solstice songs in Gaelic and drinking maple punch. How rich with traditions Vermont is!—the red Navajo Christmas streamers, the little angels with heads made of dried apples and cornsilk hair, the French-Canadian wreath hung over the vast Shaker fireplace, where the imported English Yule log blazed away and the free-range chicken stock bubbled in the antique pot. In the dining room, the table was decked with green Irish linen, Swedish candlesticks, beautiful earthenware made by a blind lesbians’ collective, and crystal goblets from Mexico. So much ethnicity! So many values! Such diversity! And through the great arch he could see, standing thirty feet high in the Amish rotunda, the Christmas tree, the most beautiful one anywhere in the world! It was a Shaker Christmas tree, lean and angular and tasteful, strung with lights, each string blinking at a different tempo, a contrapuntal tree, and it cost four thousand dollars.
The Book of Guys Page 21