Some papers kept it out. Some didn’t. But I’d bled to death anyway by then. Bob Dole was old. Bob Dole fell down. Bob Dole had only one thing going for him with the voters. Character! Character! Character! And now character had come back. And bitten Bob Dole on his johnhenry.
Bob Dole’s shoulder had been forgotten. Bob Dole was the joke now. “A candidate for the glue factory. At his best when the memorial service isn’t for him. He always sees the glass of Metamucil half-full. The woman involved was Wanda Flintstone. To appear more presidential, he’s been smoking pot and hailing hookers.”
I died in the mud. Impaled by my flag. Slick Willy beat Bobby D. My championship ring was out of my reach by the length of my johnhenry. My right hand couldn’t grasp it. Stuff like this can happen in any given war. On any given Sunday. Read S. L. Marshall. Listen to John Madden. See Private Ryan.
And then, when it was all over, when Bob Dole was dead and buried, I discovered that this Lipinski girl was our next-door neighbor. Bill Clinton and Bob Dole were veterans of the same campaign. He had Hillary. And Gennifer. And Lipinski. I had Phyllis. And Meredith. And the other Phyllis.
Then I took another bullet. Bob Dole was six feet under politically. But it still hurt. A doctor in Kansas said I’d taken a young woman to him. For an abortion. In 1972. One of my former campaign aides backed him up. But it wasn’t true! Bob Dole tells the truth! Bob Dole does not believe in abortion! Bob Dole believes abortion is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Bob Dole is not Bobby D. Bob Dole is not Bill Clinton.
Bob Dole loves America, not his johnhenry. He’s got one, though. Just like everybody else. Not everybody, I guess. Just men. I don’t mean that to sound sexist. Bob Dole is not sexist. Sexism is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. What? What’s that? It does what? Really? Jiminy! What’s it called? Niagara?
[9]
Billy Likes Doing It
“I did such a naughty thing yesterday,” Monica said to Linda Tripp, “but I couldn’t resist. Egon Schiele—he’s one of my favorite artists. It’s like a lot of naked women and stuff. It’s very erotic. So I picked this one postcard and it’s like of this—like naked—total fucking naked girl. She’s butt naked. I sent him the card.”
More than anything else, what seemed to distress some people—like the Reverend Donald Wildmon, head of the American Family Association, and James Dobson, head of Focus on the Family—was that the president of the United States played with himself.
“Should this man who is seen in Starr’s report masturbating in the West Wing,” wrote the conservative columnist George Will, whose wife, Mari, was the former speechwriter for the formerly impotent Bob Dole, “be seen for 28 more months in the Presidency?”
It was as though some people were waving that old yellow-stained book about hair and warts growing on boys’ palms: Onania, Or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution and All Its Frightening Consequences, with Spiritual and Physical Advice to Those Who Have Already Injured Themselves by This Abominable Practice, to Which Is Subjoined a Letter from a Lady to the Author, Concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed, with the Author’s Answer (4th ed., London, 1726).
Congressman Bob Barr was talking about “the flames of hedonism, the flames of narcissism, the flames of self-centered morality,” reminding observers of what Senator Orrin Hatch had said about now Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—“that anybody could be that perverted—I’m sure there are people like that, but they’re generally in insane asylums.”
Flames of hedonism . . . insane asylums . . . George Will, in another column, scoffed at a psychologist who said, “Masturbation cannot hurt you and it will make you feel more relaxed” . . . scoffing about playing with yourself . . . which the psychologist said 99 percent of Americans did but that only 1 percent admitted.
Did George Will never play with himself, when Mari was off with the impotent Dole, or when a good-looking young Chicago Cub hit one over the fence, or when he considered the tightly fitting white dress Cokie wore on the show last Sunday? Did Bob Barr, in between his three marriages, never play with himself? Or Orrin Hatch, remembering the ex–porn queen who’d once worked in his office? Or after a tour of that part of Mormon country where men had seven wives?
Masturbation, it seemed, was still the sin that turned out the freaks with pitchforks spewing fire and brimstone. It was still the “original sin” that made us all sinners. When Joycelyn Elders, Bill Clinton’s Surgeon General said, “I think masturbation is a part of human sexuality and a part of something that perhaps should be taught,” the “high-tech lynching” Clarence Thomas had talked about really took place and Elders had to resign. (“If President Clinton had followed Joycelyn Elders’s advice,” Jay Leno wisecracked, before the Starr Report revealed the president’s onanistic inclinations, “he wouldn’t be in trouble now.”)
But Bill Clinton was in trouble now and he couldn’t deny this one. He had a pattern of playing with his willard; he’d done it with Gennifer and he’d done it twice with Monica. Michael Isikoff, the Newsweek reporter, even got an anonymous phone call, before the Starr Report came out, from a woman who was groped by Clinton in his private study and who’d then had to watch as the president took Willard out and “finished the job himself.”
White House spin doctors didn’t want to deal with whacking directly, although Clintonista theologians talked about Jesus’ admonition to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” The head of America’s solosexual movement, Harold Litten, asked, “Did Jesus masturbate or did He have nocturnal emissions, wet dreams? Now, if you believe the Bible that Jesus was a human being in every way—it must be one or the other.” Other religious scholars pointed to Saint Teresa and John of the Cross as examples of saintly onanists (although John also flagellated himself, which no one so far had accused Bill Clinton of doing). Saint Bernard was quoted as having written, “If anyone once receives the spiritual kiss of Christ’s mouth, he seeks eagerly to have it again.”
Secular scholars, meanwhile, pointed to famous pud pullers like Tolstoy, Nietzsche, de Maupassant, Wagner, Jack London, and Shakespeare, even quoting from one of the Bard’s sonnets: “Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye / And all my soul and all my every part / And for this sin there is no remedy / It is so grounded in word in my heart.”
Some thought in the White House was given (allegedly, it was a James Carville idea) to presenting the president’s onanism in a political context: The world was overpopulated; hunger was everywhere. What the president was doing was good for the whole world.
Howard Stern offered up, on the air, what could have been an onanistic race-card defense: “The closest I ever came to making love to a black woman was masturbating to a picture of Aunt Jemima on a pancake box.” A generation of white boys who’d grown up assiduously reading every issue of National Geographic knew what he meant.
The spin doctors ultimately presented no defense, because Bill Clinton, even upon cursory examination, was the classic whacker. Onanists love Jacuzzis for obvious reasons, and the first thing Bill Clinton had installed at the White House was a Jacuzzi. Onanists love to jog, love the feeling of their stiff willards flapping against themselves, and Bill Clinton was a lifelong jogger.
Some people pointed, too, to his red face. Why was he so often red-faced? What had he been doing? That he loved Willard, no one could deny, a modern-day example of Leonardo da Vinci’s dictum: “The penis has often a life and intelligence separate from the man, and it would appear that the man is in the wrong by being ashamed of giving it a name or to exhibit it, seeking rather to cover and conceal what he ought to adorn and display with ceremony as a ministrant.” Bill Clinton wasn’t ashamed of his; he named it and exhibited it—“Kiss it”—he adorned and displayed it to Flowers, Monica, et al. And he had his own ceremony on Nancy Hernreich’s couch or over the sink.
He also fit the classic profile of the onanist in his relationship with Monica, as defined by the respected Dr. Karl Menninger: “They are very proud of their sexual organs, and, indeed, it is
not inaccurate to say that such persons prefer masturbation to sexual intercourse. Such intercourse as they perform is frequently only a kind of intravaginal masturbation.” In Monica’s case, the masturbation wasn’t even that—it was intra-oral. The first time she took Willard in her mouth, he didn’t even know her name. (His eagerness to display Willard did seem to put the lie to conservative writer Ann Coulter’s theory that Willard suffered from Peyronie’s disease, curvature of the penis, known henceforth inside the Beltway as “Ann Coulter disease.”)
Militant onanists everywhere, seeking empowerment, like other forgotten Americans, an awesome and vast silent majority, claimed Bill Clinton as one of their own.
They were hoping, naturally, that Bill Clinton would do for them what Martin Luther King, Jr., had done for blacks, Harvey Milk for gays, Cesar Chavez for Hispanics, Gloria Steinem and Lorena Bobbitt for women. Only Pee-wee Herman had had this chance, and he’d gone skulking off like he was ashamed of what he’d been caught doing—what most of us had sometimes done—in that theater.
By saying, Yes, I masturbate, like most of you, and, like most of you, I love it! Bill Clinton could have freed men and women everywhere from the disdain and prejudice they were victims of. Homosexuality had already been transformed into a mainstream all-American trait on the sitcoms; couldn’t Bill Clinton do the same for solosexuality? Lincoln had freed a couple of hundred thousand blacks—what was that compared to freeing hundreds of millions of blacks, whites, browns, yellows, reds, albinos, and so on? Bill Clinton could have been Mandela, Walesa, Gandhi, and Yeltsin combined.
They had their hearts broken, though, those militant onanists who stuck it into eggplants and melons and avocados and the tail pipes of cars. Bill Clinton was Bill Clinton, who said he hadn’t inhaled, who hadn’t dodged the draft, who hadn’t had sex with Gennifer and Monica, who even denied smoking his cigars—“I admit that I did do it when Captain Scott O’Grady was found in Bosnia, because I was so happy. It was a form of celebration.”
Even the onanists got angry at him, as angry as George Will and Bob Barr. Here was this titaholic solosexual in the perfect position—the Oval Office—to help them, and he was letting them down. He was jacking off all over the White House (certainly in the new Jacuzzi, and on the new jogging track, too), probably using feather dusters and Vicks VapoRub and flower vases and scrotal straps and napkin rings and vibrators . . . and he was acting just like Pee-wee Herman, skulking off and hoping Americans would forget about it . . . instead of putting them up on the cross for their hypocrisy. There was no doubt he used a Sears pistol-whip vibrator; Gennifer had told us about that.
What an opportunity Bill Clinton had for the kind of breakthrough Nixon had achieved with China, Reagan had achieved with Gorbachev’s Evil Empire, Jimmah had achieved with Hugh Hefner’s Playboy. Like the rest of us of his generation, Bill Clinton had whacked in joyful teenage circle jerks, whacked while watching strippers in burlesque houses, whacked while playing pocket pool in school, whacked while reading the Sears catalog, whacked while watching Cecil B. DeMille’s biblical epics, whacked while listening to Claudine Longet’s voice. Whacking, whacking, whacking (DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, whacked eight times a day), and now he blew it. He didn’t have the balls to tell America how he loved playing with his balls.
He was an aficionado of onanism. He even liked different kinds of phone sex. He liked the kind where Monica was kneeling in front of him and he was on the phone conducting the nation’s business with that sugarcane magnate or the congressman about Bosnia or with Dick Morris.
The Morris phone-sex conversation was a kind of telephonic orgy, a four-way disembodiment of intimacy. Here Bill Clinton was with a phone to his ear and Monica on Willard at the White House, talking to Morris, who had a phone to his ear and a hooker on his willard at the Jefferson Hotel.
But that wasn’t even the real thing. The real thing was with Monica, whom he turned into his “phone whore,” as the 900 operators called themselves. Monica could do that silky Marilyn imitation and she had a natural Valley Girl voice, which is what the 900 operators all try to fake. Monica was so out there, he could get her to do anything.
After he’d put the cigar inside her, after he’d given her the leather-bound Whitman book, she’d sent him a note that said, “Whitman is so rich that one must read him like one tastes . . . a good cigar—take it in, roll it in your mouth, and savor it.” Monica, who’d described phone sex to Vernon Jordan by saying, “He’s taking care of business on one end and I’m taking care of business on the other.” Monica was a sensational phone whore, as opposed to Gennifer, who’d never liked it and had re-created one of their sessions in her book.
Bill would never come out and say, “Let’s have phone sex.” Instead, it usually went something like this. We’d be having a nice conversation. Suddenly, Bill would lower his voice, and I knew he was about to start getting into it.
“What are you wearing?” he would ask.
“Nothing, except for the black teddy you bought me,” I’d answer. “I’ve got my hand on the girls [her breasts] and I’m about to rub them very softly.”
“Do you know what I wish?” Bill would ask breathlessly.
“No, what?”
“God, I wish you were here, and could do the same to the boys [his testicles].”
We would go on like that for a while until, finally, Bill would come.
He loved having sex with Monica by phone. They had phone sex fifteen times and only had “real” in-person sex ten times. He initiated all the phone calls. He’d be in the middle of a conversation, lower his voice, and say, “I want to talk about something else.”
Monica knew what she was doing, like the Tiffanys, the Vanessas, the Porsches, and the Mercedes at the 900 numbers who moaned and screamed and pushed their callers’ “dick buttons.” Like the best of phone actors, Monica the phone whore knew how to make slurping noises. She sucked her fingers and smacked her lips. She jiggled her fingers up and down in front of her teeth and between her lips, getting into the saliva, making a slushing sound, which, overdone, could sound like a waterfall or a washing machine. She knew how to use the four basic dirty words creatively. Phone sex with Monica really was “the next best thing to being there.”
And what was the big deal in calling her for a little phone sex? Two hundred fifty thousand Americans called the phone-sex 900 numbers every night. Bill Clinton wasn’t calling the 900 numbers, was he? He knew it would be unseemly for the president of the United States to do that. He had his own private, devoted, and starstruck phone whore. He wasn’t part of that shady army of faceless men who called the 900 whores each night and said things like “Beg for it . . . . Let me hear you scream . . . . Be my pig fuck . . . . Crawl . . . . Scratch me harder.”
No phone whore would ever be able to say about Bill Clinton what one 900 actress said about her clients: “They hate the women they lust after and need to degrade women during sex. They view women as physical bodies without names. They adore their cocks and love to talk about them.” Thanks to having Monica, no phone whore could ever say about him: “They need to call me a degrading name as soon as possible. It not only helps them to get off, but it releases a knot of pent-up desire to verbally debase and abuse the woman.”
. . .
While masturbation and phone sex became a part of the national debate over the blow jobs and the cigar (a debate that had begun years before, during the Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill hearings, with Long Dong Silver and the pubic hair on that Coke can), no one had the stomach, it seemed, not even Kenneth W. Starr, to explore the most sexually incendiary revelation of the Starr Report. It was a simple short sentence, footnote 209. “Lewinsky. 8/26/98 depo. at 20. They engaged in oral-anal contact as well.” Blow jobs, a cigar, whacking, and . . . anilingus?
Rimming? What the textbooks describe as “kissing or licking in the anal area,” in the Oval Office? “Some people have a strong, perhaps even exclusive preference for either rimming or being rimmed,” one
textbook states. “Others enjoy both, either taking turns or else experimenting with positions that allow simultaneous rimming . . . of all forms of anal stimulation, rimming is most likely to trigger strong revulsion and disgust. Most of us learned early in life that when something is dirty we should definitely avoid putting it in or near our mouths . . . . Those who decide to explore rimming usually want to try it during or immediately after showering or bathing. This can lower discomfort with the odors commonly found in the anal area and also reduce the possibility of encountering feces.” Most doctors strongly advised using a latex dental dam during rimming.
The rimming that took place in the Oval Office survived as the greatest unsolved mystery of the Starr Report. No newspaper account mentioned it; the talk shows didn’t present anal experts to pontificate about it; Jay Leno made no jokes about it. The children of America, who’d already learned about penis size, pubic hair on Coke cans, blow jobs, masturbation, and an interuterine cigar, were spared.
Even Starr and his prosecutors didn’t ask Monica more detailed questions, such as: Who was doing the rimming? Those Washington insiders who knew everything said it had to be the president who was being rimmed, but they were guessing. Was it possible that Bill Clinton, who wanted to perform cunnilingus on Monica but couldn’t because she had her period, turned to anilingus instead?
It was obvious from the Starr Report that no dental dam had been used and that neither Clinton nor Monica had showered beforehand. Had either of them been infected? Had the president of the United States risked the nation’s interest by engaging—if he engaged—as the rimmer?
The debate over presidential whacking did have one healthy effect upon the body politic. It pushed the Oval Office blow jobs into the background. As more facts came out, it appeared that a lot of people, besides Monica, agreed with Bill Clinton that a blow job wasn’t sex. One of the state troopers guarding Governor Clinton in Arkansas said the governor told him way back then that the Bible said a blow job wasn’t sex. A governor who attended a conference with Governor Clinton heard him make the same claim. Other public figures, it developed, had drawn the same distinction.
American Rhapsody Page 24
