by Selina Meyer
And then along came Rod Longpole.
I’m not sure how Andrew first found him, but the adult male film star Rob Longpole could have been Porter Marshall’s twin brother. Tall, handsome, muscular, African-American, and exceptionally well-endowed, he was the virtual spitting image of my opponent. But unlike my opponent, there were hundreds of hours of video footage of Rod Longpole engaging in every imaginable homosexual sex act—plus a few that I had never imagined—with dozens of male partners, many with very bizarre and unconvincing frosted dye jobs and tattoos that made them look like a seventh grader’s doodle pad. Andrew, assisted by other members of the team, scoured the entire internet—not simply PornHub and YouPorn but also RedZone, Brazzers, Men.com, Manbone, Jackbuddies, Digital Playground, Gay-but-Straight, Straight-but-Gay, Manpussylovers, and even the darkest and scariest corners of the Dark Web—and screened every single film that Rod Longpole (or Peter Rodman, as he sometimes called himself) had ever made. Andrew then put together a “best of” compilation tape, spending hours in a darkened editing room, watching facial cum shot after facial cum shot and rim job after rim job, that showed Rod having sex with dozens of men, some of them in military uniforms. It was, dare I say, a work of art as well as political paydirt. But, having watched the footage and made the tape, the next step was less clear. How could we get the tape into the hands of the people who might be disinclined to vote for a gay porn star without leaving our fingerprints all over it?
And here we made a rookie mistake.
Back in 1998 social media was still in its comparative infancy if it existed at all, and the exact mechanics of how it worked were poorly understood. In those days, the only thing that was “going viral” was the deadly AIDS virus. So when Andrew sent his porn tape to a local newspaper, he didn’t realize that some basic sleuthing would allow a reporter to trace it back to our campaign. In retrospect, it would have been better to try and get the tape circulating among local high school students who have always loved that kind of thing. As it turned out, we pretty much handed the local media a negative story about ourselves, and Marshall, with his Teflon armor fully intact, wound up not even having to acknowledge all the disgusting behavior his look-alike had engaged in.
There is a footnote to the story, which is that Rod Longpole himself (real name: Franz Feldschmitt) came forward and endorsed me, saying that, thanks to Andrew’s compilation tape, he had become the fifteenth most searched-for porn star on the web, up from the 27,222nd just the week before.
And so we limped into Election Day, bruised and battered, definitely older, hopefully wiser. Andrew and I voted in the basement in the Presbyterian Church with Catherine in my arms crying and screaming that she wanted “Mama” (presumably Ines/Carmen)—thanks, Catherine! Thanks for your support!—and then we voted again, just to be safe, in the Community Center (without Catherine this time), and, after we’d had a few drinks, we voted for a third time, under the name “Mr. and Mrs. Iwanna Eggplant” at the local Chrysler dealership. At least I think we did; that part of the day is a little fuzzy. So we were definitely doing our part, but, unfortunately, many other supporters and probable supporters and theoretical supporters chose to be selfish and lazy and didn’t bother to vote, which severely reduced my final numbers. Andrew and I had proven that voting need not be a chore and that, in fact, it was possible to have fun while voting if you adopted the right attitude by drinking and taking drugs and having sex in the car while devoting an entire day to doing it.
Although the endorsements had not exactly poured in, I had gotten a few. However, none of these, other than Rod Longpole’s, were able to boost turnout significantly, at least not in my favor. The crack-dealing crowd was behind me 100 percent, to be sure, but the ominous pools of bloody vomit that I noticed on the city’s sidewalks as I went to vote brought a grim foreboding that “Big Crack” was going to let me down on Election Day. Sure enough, a bad batch of crack laden with deadly rat poison had gone around town in the last week of October, turning many Meyer supporters into drooling morons. I pride myself on my lack of prejudice, so let me be completely clear here. Drooling morons’ votes are every bit as valuable as those of the usual “garden variety” kind of morons one finds at a standard American polling place. That is our system, and I respect it. But when you’re too brain-damaged or dead to actually vote, well then, I think you don’t have anything to complain about when crack remains illegal and the “crackhead lifestyle” remains on the margins of American society. Given half a chance, I would have taken up both the shield of justice and the sword of righteousness on behalf of Baltimore’s oppressed crackhead minority, but since they had shown themselves unwilling to make more than a token effort on my behalf, I resolved that I would not raise a finger to help them. It is very much beside the point that, having lost the election, I was fundamentally powerless to help or harm them. The salient issue is that, having now learned firsthand how sneaky and unreliable drug addicts can be, I became a lifelong opponent of drugs and drug abuse and have led the fight against the crackheads who f-cked me over back in 1998.
I can hear you asking whether my opponent Porter Marshall had poisoned my supporters’ crack with rat poison. Certainly many people said that he had. But, to be fair, we will never know, since he died when a helicopter he had chartered to bring food and medicine to Honduras after a disastrous series of mudslides crashed into the Gulf of Mexico. This time, his predecessor’s twenty-year-old wife could not be deterred from running to fill Marshall’s seat and lost after it turned out that the fall campaigning season coincided with a trip to Greece that she had won at a charity auction.
The winner?
Me.
The “People’s House.” That’s what we call the House of Representatives, maybe, and it truly is full of people. Probably around four hundred members, to be exact. Maybe even more. Can you imagine all those people in one place? I’ve never been a sports fan (and I don’t like people who are), but once, when I was little, my dad took me to an Orioles game because a client had given him some tickets. There were a lot of people in that baseball stadium, and I didn’t care for it much. In fact, I made my father leave and take me to a toy store after a few baskets had been scored. Maybe it was football. The point is I’ve never been terribly fond of large groups of people and, if it is one thing, Congress is full of people. Each of them terrified of getting kicked out of Washington and having to go back to Emphoria, Kansas, or whatever for the rest of their lives. So it is intense. John Quincy Adams died in the Capitol, and you can see why. It’s just a lot.
So what kind of people are elected to the House of Representatives? I began to realize, after just a few weeks in Congress, that almost all of them were complete and total losers. I know, I know. They must have been “winners” in some sense in order to “win” the election in whatever godforsaken place they came from. But in pretty much every other respect they were exactly the sort of people you would have bullied in high school. The bullies go to the Senate, the saying goes; their victims go to the House.
I won’t deny that it was a severe blow to learn how uncool the House of Representatives is. I had fought my way past the velvet ropes, imagining a glamorous club crowded with leggy supermodels and rich, fat Middle Eastern businessmen with fingers like sausages straining against pinky rings encrusted with sapphires and rubies (rubies, which are Mike McLintock’s birthstone, have always been one of my favorite gems) who paw at them while stone-faced bodyguards keep interlopers at a respectful distance, and shirtless muscle-bound waiters serve magnums of Dom Perignon as throbbing techno music plays. That was what I had imagined. The reality was far, far different. The point is, don’t believe everything you learn in school about how cool the House of Representatives is. It may be a lot of things, but “cool” isn’t one of them.
What can I say? I was young and naive. I had hoped for glamor, style, intrigue, and even a whiff of sex. Instead I got the nerd (not that there is anything wrong with nerds! See Chapter One or Two) table. Right away
, I noticed that in addition to being ugly, everyone was terribly dressed. I mean outlet center bad. The cheap suits on the men looked like they might burst into flames at any point, as the volatile Vietnamese chemicals they were made from decomposed, but compared to the women, they looked like late-’80s era Don Johnson. Oh, my God, you’ve never seen such women. Fat and either flat as a board or with giant opera singer bosoms—none of them were much to look at to begin with. But they did themselves no favors when they chose their garments, their lavender patent-leather kitten heels, or their shiny heavy-duty industrial-strength pantyhose. Their makeup invariably appeared to have been applied with a mason’s trowel, and their lipstick was worn in a manner made popular by Bozo the Clown (see illustration).*
But it was their hairstyles that I found the most soul-destroying. I’ve heard that, in many small towns, the local beautician will make a little extra money on the side by preparing corpses at the town’s funeral home. This is something you would certainly believe to be true after glancing around the House of Representatives for no more than just a few moments. They say that bad taste is contagious. After barely a week in the House, I began to have a recurring nightmare that dogs me to this day. In it, I am being attacked by the other female members of Congress, who hold me down and administer a ridiculous permanent wave. I wake in tears, clawing at my scalp, screaming, “Get it off! Get it off!”
Bad breath has always been a personal bugaboo of mine. Something about the decaying death smell of really bad breath makes me physically ill. And the sense memory of it will linger for hours, so that I seem to still smell it long after the offending party has departed. I guess I was prepared for a certain amount of bad breath in Congress. I had seen the House, of course, on television and may have even visited it during a Model UN trip to Washington, where I was either drunk or hungover to such an extent that I can’t even remember if I visited the House of Representatives. Suspecting that, mainly because there were so many old Members, there would inevitably be some bad breath, I had steeled myself and avoided to the greatest extent possible having conversations in noisy places, which sometimes require the other person to speak at a close distance in order to be heard. As we halitosisphobes can attest, it is in these close conversations when bad breath is most likely to make itself known, sneaking up on you in circumstances that make it hard to recoil without seeming rude, even though every fiber of your being is telling you to run.
Like I say, I knew there would be some bad breath. What shocked me was the scope of the problem. While I don’t personally use Scope mouthwash (I prefer the more upscale Cepacol, and if that makes me a snob, well, sue me!), I came to understand how apt the name is when I began to grasp the dimensions of the bad breath problem in the House. The scope of it was, quite literally, breathtaking.
But what could one do? One couldn’t simply remain holed up in one’s office, communicating with the outside world only through trusted associates with consistently fresh breath from a safe distance that made it unlikely one would even have to smell their breath in the first place. Or could one? And if one hired mostly younger staff members, regardless of experience, one might be able to avoid the unpleasant aromas that often attend dentures and other types of dental work. And younger people are often more breath-conscious generally, lacking the arrogance of older people who often seem completely indifferent to the way they smell. In terms of whether or not to hire married people, one faced a dilemma. Single people might be on the prowl for a mate and more likely to brush and floss frequently in order to be as sexually attractive as possible but, on the other hand, married people would have someone with whom they were theoretically intimate enough to warn them of offending odors. Sure, this comparatively antisocial approach to governing might limit the impact one could have, but when it came to a choice between getting your name on a lot of bills that probably were going to pass or fail regardless of your support and dealing with a lot of mouth-f-rting, well, that was a no-brainer.
Look, here’s another reason why Congressmen are such losers: There’s no real money in it. A member of the House of Representatives makes $174,000 a year, which may be a lot to some of these people, but to you and me it’s nothing more than chump change. Of course, the real reward is having the honor to serve. But if America wanted to attract a higher class of person, who dresses more fashionably, to public service, it might consider making it pay a little better.
Let’s take a look at some of the other perks. Is there free parking? I can’t remember. There may well have been. But keep in mind that whatever you’re getting, at least four hundred other members are also getting, so it’s not like it’s particularly exclusive. Can you get tables at new trendy restaurants? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Can you get on a plane before everyone else? You can, but ordinary people who are waiting in line will sometimes get mad at you and then turn out to be reporters for The Hill. Is there a gym? Yes, but after visiting it once and having nowhere to look but at sweaty, gross Congressmen, I never went back. Sure, you get an office, which is something I had never really had before, since associates at my law firm were forced to work in an open area outside the partners’ private offices. And you got a staff. It was during my first term that I made the acquaintance of such lifelong associates as Amy Brookheimer and Dan Egan, both comparatively youthful at the time and relatively odorless if not entirely sweet-smelling.
I would not want you to believe that I was a complete hermit during this first brush with elected office. There were a few other members whose company I was able to tolerate, even sometimes enjoy. These were mostly other scions of wealthy families, whose clothing budgets were not dictated by their Congressional salaries and whose taste had not been determined by what was on sale in size XXL at Target. And there were some older members who, like Abe Blumfeld had done, took me under their wing and sought to give me guidance. I recall one such mentor, then-Speaker Mario Nicastro, who had represented Boston’s North End for decades, saying to me as I sat on his lap and his hands moved rapidly under my shirt attempting to undo my bra (which, ironically, had a clasp in front), “Martha [he always called me Martha], in Congress you’re either a workhorse or a show horse.” As someone who had been showing horses pretty much since the time she could walk, I resolved that I would be the latter.
And so I set out to make my mark, with a few showy maneuvers that would get me just enough attention to be able to claim credit for anything that was popular when it came time to run for reelection. This, it turned out, was a bit harder than it looked. When I think of the bills I introduced, H.Res.1063: “Designating room H-226 of the United States Capitol as the ‘Lincoln Room,’” and H.Res.1068: “Recognizing Hispanic Heritage Month and celebrating the heritage and culture of Latinos in the United States and the immense contributions of Latinos to the United States,” which I introduced with my good friend Representative Taguilas, who now looks like a fat cook in a food truck but back in those days was muy caliente, or H.R.6790: “To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to clarify that gain or loss on the sale or exchange of certain coins or bullion for strictly numismatic purposes be exempt from recognition,” which I introduced after an informative conversation at the home of one of my constituents, I can’t help but regret that none of those bills left committee.
On the other hand, we did rename a post office after one of Maryland’s own daughters, Anna Ella Carroll, who had the wisdom and good grace (not to mention the foresight) to free her slaves before Emancipation, and deserves recognition for that.
Memories of the House . . . What else? I remember Representative Langon Kruger of Nebraska cornering me in the cloakroom and going on and on about why I had to vote for some place or another to become a National Grassland and thinking, “My God, this is actually important to this guy.” That was eye-opening. And of course Representative Dan Chase of the West Palm Beach area, remember him? We went to Italy on a fact-finding trip together, and he introduced me to a lot of women I later learned were prostitutes. So in this way
I put in my pocket the gold coin of experience—the only coin that may never be spent.
When one looks past the shabby, smelly members of Congress shuffling about in their sad, forlorn way and opens one’s eyes to the splendors of the Capitol building and the District of Columbia generally, it is sometimes possible to forget the moral squalor that attends governing at the junior varsity benchwarmer level in the House. The Capitol itself is a magnificent building despite its stupid spelling. I won’t deny that parts of it can be a bit tacky (but never tackier than the people inside it), and there are cynical crowd-pleasing “politically correct” recent additions of statues and paintings and plaques honoring Native Americans and women and what-have-you. That kind of thing can’t be helped, and you just have to smile and grin and walk quickly whenever you see the signs that workmen are about to unveil yet another statue of a Hawaiian princess or some g-ddamn thing.
What else can I tell you about the Capitol? Well, if the brochure they give your former press secretary when he runs over to get it is to be believed, the Capitol dome is 288 feet high and 96 feet in circumference. Or maybe diameter. Which one is the “across” one? While far from the biggest dome in the world or even the country, it is plenty big enough to serve its purpose, which is somewhat unclear. Anyone who has ever lived in a house with a round room or even a semicircular portion of a room that is otherwise square knows how hard they are to put furniture in. Believe it or not, the Capitol was built during the height of the Civil War, when brother fought against brother and battles raged from the Atlantic seaboard all the way to the Western frontier, which would have been probably near or even past the Mississippi River. I defy even the most confirmed cynic to stand in the center of the Capitol and not find it inspiring when they look up and imagine the relief the workmen building it must have felt not to have been drafted as soldiers. Sure, the work was dangerous and the end result is kind of all over the place aesthetically, but at least they weren’t getting their wounded limbs amputated by a drunk with a dull saw or sh-tting their dysentery-infected innards out in some prison camp.