Hot damn, I was havin’ fun. Back home. Back among people I loved. In the real America. The real red-blooded, red meat, real feelings, no psychomanure America. I knew I was drinkin’ too much, screwin’ around too much, but I wasn’t hurtin’ nobody except maybe myself. I didn’t have any responsibilities to nobody else.
Juicin’ up at the Nineteenth Hole, the country club bar, stuffin’ my face with Tex-Mex at La Bodega, playin’ George Jones on the honky-tonk juke boxes of Odessa. One night Willie Nelson came into Odessa and I was in town, tonkin’, with a couple buddies, and we decided to see Willie. Lord knows, we’d had too much whiskey, but that still don’t explain to me how we wound up onstage, right behind Willie, singin’ backup.
A good part of my time, I gotta admit, I spent playin’ poker, just like I’d spent a good part of my time at Yale and Harvard playin’ it, too. But it was different playin’ it in Midland now. It wasn’t a game here; it was like the final part of the equation in bein’ a good ole boy shit-kickin’ success story. You smoke, you drink, you laugh, you cuss, you wear pointy-toe boots, you tell dirty jokes, you wink, you eat red meat, you talk pussy, you get pussy . . . and you win at poker.
I set up a little drillin’ company with the old guys’ help, and things were lookin’ good. I was gatherin’ momentum and impotence. But I was drinkin’ too much. A friend of mine was callin’ the bars and the liquor stores and tellin’ ’em to sell me nothin’ but wine or beer. And then my best buddy got leukemia and I was shitfaced for a whole week, wakin’ up parched, pukin’ in the shower, makin’ a Bloody Mary as soon as I got out.
I knew my biggest talent was lookin’ folks in the eye and smilin’ and touchin’ ’em on the arm and gettin’ what I wanted from ’em. Men gave me bucks for my company. Women liked bein’ in my company. There was a lesson in that, and you gotta be sharp enough in life to read the lipstick handwritin’ on the motel room mirror. If men and women fell in love with me, there was a life to be had inside that. I’m not bisexual, so that left politics.
Out of the stump house and up on the stump! My dad had done it and so had my grandpop, but I thought I was better than them at gettin’ people to give me their money or their selves. My grandpop had such a thick broomstick up his butt, he couldn’t be elected to the Kennebunkport PTA today. And my dad had to work real hard and never did succeed—the pork rinds again—at bein’ more down-home than earnest.
All I had to do sometimes was a little badass boot rockin’ and back porch butt pattin’ and sugary-eye gazin’ and explicit winkin’ and pointin’ a sassy finger . . . and the money and the pussy fell into my lap.
I announced that I was runnin’ for Congress, and a month later I met Laura, my wife and my love, and now the mother of my children. Aw, hell, we’d “met” before, when we were in the seventh grade, but I wasn’t really lookin’ at anybody back then except Willie Mays. This time, we met at a backyard barbecue.
She was shy and on the quiet side. She’d been a grade-school teacher in Houston and was a librarian now in Austin. She was a reader—she’d spent her whole life with her pretty nose in or around smelly old books. It surprised the hell out of me that she’d lived in the same bordello apartment house, the Chateaux Dijon, in Houston while I was there. But then Laura wasn’t the type to play all-day volleyball and all-night relays.
I made her laugh. She was a great listener, and I talked a lot. Plus, she was smart and beautiful, the perfect girl for me. As Mom said, I got hit by a white lightnin’ bolt. Laura wasn’t any gigglin’, mechanical-bull West Texas hosebag. She was a serious, reality-time woman. I was in love. Asshole Jeb, when Laura met everybody, right away Jeb said, “Brother, did you pop the question, or are we just wastin’ our time?” She called me “Bushie,” and I called her “Bushy,” different spellin’, for different reasons. We still call each other that.
There was a prime-time political consideration, too, that had never occurred to me. I had announced the run for Congress and I knew they were gonna try to define me as this drunken, wild, and crazy pussy hound. Well, they couldn’t define me like that anymore. I was married now. To a librarian. To a schoolteacher. Laura, though I’d never thought about it, defined me now. I had found myself not just a smart and beautiful wife. I had found myself a voter-friendly and mandate-potential definition.
No mandate, though. The voters weren’t that friendly. I got licked by a Democrat who defined me as a drunken and wild and crazy pussy hound, Bushy or no Bushy. Damn I was pissed off! I was happy, too, with my new wife and everything, but I was pissed off! I guess I started hittin’ the Jack Daniel’s pretty hard again.
Bushy was all right about it—I can’t complain. She cooked what I liked—meat loaf, tacos—and she didn’t say anythin’, but she’d leave books around the house about the dangers of boozin’. Alcoholism. I’d read ’em and keep boozin’.
Our little girls were born. I was doin’ fine with business, settin’ up a new company, workin’ the phone, hustlin’ old family friends—the FOBs—the friends of the Bushes, which includes a helluva lot more people than the other FOBs—the friends of that SOB.
But somethin’ was off. I didn’t know what. Maybe it was that after all these years as a nomad, now I was a husband and a father.
I liked bein’ a husband and a father—that’s not what I’m sayin’. But I liked drinkin’ and raisin’ hell and howlin’ at the moon with George Jones, too, though there wasn’t any “strange,” if you know what I mean, in the mix. It was all Bushy. Makin’ meat loaf. Her nose in a smelly old book. So I don’t know . . . you know . . . but somethin’ was off.
That’s when Jesus saved me. Not Jesus, really, but Jesus in spirit. Billy Graham. I’d known Billy for a long time, thanks to my dad, and one day we were walkin’ around together at the summer house in Kennebunkport and Billy told me about his own boy, Franklin, who’d come to Jesus finally after drinkin’ every hour and comin’ into everybody else.
And Billy asked me, “Son, are you right with God?”
I told him that Bushy and the girls and I went to Midland Methodist every Sunday and that I even taught Sunday school sometimes.
Billy put his hand on my shoulder and said, “You didn’t answer my question, son. Do you have the peace and understanding with God that can come only through our Lord Jesus Christ?”
There was somethin’ about the way Billy looked at me that was like takin’ one of the hot hangers we used on the pledges in the Deke house at Yale and puttin’ it into my heart. I told him I felt somethin’ off in my life and about the Jack Daniel’s and the iced Budweisers.
Billy said, “To be without God in this life is to be terribly lonely. If there is one thing I want you to take back to Texas, it’s this. God loves you, George, and God is interested in you. To recommit your life to Jesus Christ, you have to give up that one last demon before you can become a new man. Give it to Him; George, He’ll take the burden and set you free.”
I thought about it when we got back to Texas. To recommit my life to Jesus Christ? God loved me? The last demon? A new man? It sounded good, but I wanted more Jack Daniel’s. I wanted my iced Bud. I wanted another Winston or a big fat cigar. I chose Jack Daniel’s over Jesus Christ. An iced Bud over God.
On my fortieth birthday, Bushy and I went to the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs with some friends. We had a six-course dinner, sixty-dollar bottles of wine, brandy, some Jack Daniel’s back in the room, a few cold Buds. I don’t remember a whole lot after Bushy and I got back to the room, except that she left and slept in one of the other rooms.
I didn’t treat her that night like you should treat the mother of your children. May God forgive me—it was a George Jones moment. I got up the next mornin’ with vomit over me. I looked in the mirror and I started to cry. I begged Bushy to forgive me. Drinkin’ was over. Smokin’ was over. George Jones was over. Sex was over, like it had been for a while (except for Bushy).
I’d come to Jesus.
I was a man now, finally, like Billy�
��s son, Franklin, except Franklin was twenty-two when it happened, and I was forty. I would make love no longer to the demons Jesus Christ had freed me of. I would make love to America. I would put all that wasted energy now into lovin’ up America, into makin’ this an America worthy of God’s name.
I’d made love to Budweiser and then to bimbos and then to Bushy, and now I would make love to America. Come to Jesus, literally! I felt like I had discovered a callin’ that I had seen vague glimmers of at Yale and Harvard.
I would make love to America and by my hard and deeply felt exertions and insertions, I would transform her. I’d turn her out. Inside out. No more heaviness. No more victims. No more guilt. No more self-indulgence. I would make her forget, through my soft words and hard-thrustin’ actions, the pervert tricks she had been trained to perform in the sixties. Abortion. Gays in the military. Gay marriage. Women at work and not, like Bushy, at home with their kids.
I would teach my beautiful America the virtues of self-reliance, responsibility, consequence for your actions. And abstinence. No more street-corner trickin’ for the America I loved! No more special-interest whips and chains! No more empowerment-group blow jobs! No more advocate-group daisy chains! Missionary position all the way!
I had to pump myself up first, before I could seduce, make love to, and transform America . . . like Rocky before he fought Muhammad Ali in the movie. The trainin’ sequence, remember? Before you step into the ring with all the bright media minicams on you. Baseball! It was ideal. As American as apple pie, the catsup inside what would be the hamburger bun of my candidacy . . . to serve America . . . to be a public servant . . . to get her off the street corner.
Baseball! I bought into the Texas Rangers. I became the general partner of the Texas Rangers. I didn’t sit in the owner’s box; I sat in a regular seat behind first base, with Roger Staubach, the Captain of America’s Team, right next to me sometimes. I pissed in the same urinal the fans did. I signed baseball cards with my picture on ’em. I jogged in the afternoon in the outfield. I hung out with Nolan Ryan on the pitcher’s mound before games. I met Willie Mays and told him all his stats. I built a brand-spankin’-new stadium and sold the team for a $16 million personal profit.
How’s that for a Rocky trainin’ sequence, huh? I’d come to Jesus and I had become a high priest at the same time of America’s own religion, baseball, where battin’ averages and ERAs—the important ones, not the women’s kind—were mumbled like prayers among the faithful.
I joined my dad’s campaign as an adviser in 1988. That’s when I met Pat Robertson. He knew all about me from Billy. Word spreads fast among sinners saved. Oh, we weren’t friends right away. He was runnin’ against Dad, so we had to bring him down a notch or two, leakin’ that stuff to the press about what his close friend Jimmy Swaggart had asked that hooker to do to him.
But we respected each other. Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell can get the vote out. Their friends and neighbors and admirers will show up in flatbeds and pickups and buses, wearin’ little crosses and wavin’ little American flags. They vote for Jesus. The votin’ booth is their church on election day. By the time 1992 came around, Pat and Jerry Falwell and Jim Robison and I were friends.
They knew how true-blue I’d been born again. They knew that my dad talked the talk but that I walked the walk. No more drinkin’. No more smokin’. No more George Jones. No more sex (except for Bushy). They were in the same boat. Nothin’ left except meat loaf, tacos, America, and Jesus. They were in the room with me when I testified to my Lord Jesus Christ, my Savior.
Dad made a big mistake. He thought the way to win was to appeal to the center and fake it to the Religious Right. Bullshit. Pat and Jerry and the others recognize bullshit when they see it. They’re experts. A lot of little white churches are out there in smelly farm fields. The way to win is to lock up the Religious Right—make them know how much you believe in what they believe in—and then fake it to the center.
Tell everybody you’re a compaysionate conservative, a uniter, not a divider—talk about goo-goo soccer-mom issues like education, health care, and breast cancer—and make sure Pat Robertson tells the faithful that what you believe in . . . to his own personal witness . . . is the death penalty, outlawin’ abortion, lettin’ the gays die off from AIDS, and Jesus Christ our Savior.
I’m gonna be the president of the United States. I’m better at lookin’ in your eyes and suckin’ up your votes and pain than Bill Clinton. I got a sexier wink cuz my eyes been inside more dark places than he’s dreamed of. And I’m not pussy-whipped, either. Bushy does what I tell her to do. She don’t wanna experience no more George Jones moments, now does she? Hey, you don’t ever see scratches on my face.
Remember when Bill Clinton was gonna be impeached and Pat Robertson suddenly said just censor the bozo (my dad’s word), don’t remove him? Why do you think he did that? I’ll tell you why. He knew I was gonna be the next president of the United States and it would help me if Bill Clinton stayed around and everybody could swallow in our humiliation and his misery.
I hope asshole Jeb, that dumb shit—not only did he marry the first Mexican girl he ever slept with, she was the first girl he ever slept with—doesn’t give the game away. Bannin’ affirmative action in his state, gettin’ the endorsement of groups that hate gays. Callin’ for the abolition of the education department, flat out opposin’ gay rights and abortion gives a little sneak preview in Florida of what George W. Bush’s America is gonna look like. In Florida, the highways are full up with prisoners on chain gangs. Asshole Jeb, my little brother, spendin’ his nights watchin’ reruns of American Gladiators . . . lettin’ the cat out of the bag, sayin, “The age of relativity is over! There is absolute truth! You are responsible for your actions!”
Jeb smoked too much bad loco weed, I think. Talkin’ heavy stuff like “Politics is a contact sport.” Callin’ himself in college “a cynical little turd.” What kinda upbeat, vote-catchin’, middle-of-the-road compaysionate message is that? Where’s the funny face or the rainbow at the end of “cynical little turd”?
I’m willin’ to do anything to be the president of the United States. Not for me. I could give a shit. For America. For Jesus Christ. For your kids. For my kids.
Anything! We gotta get rid of John McCain? Yeah, well, they turned him into a robot Commie while he was makin’ himself into a big hero, didn’t they? Or, hey, doesn’t he have some illicit kids? Black kids, maybe? I don’t say that, Pat doesn’t say that, Jerry doesn’t say that. Some voice on the phone whispers it at midnight. Mudslingin’? Hell no! Just a little enlightenment in the shadows of the underpass on the information highway. Steve Forbes? Hey, wasn’t his dad a homosexual who had little Arab boys goin’ down on him? Al Gore? Don’t make me laugh. I’ve got Al Gore. He’s dead meat. It’s all over. We’re gonna show the world his bald spot. Dad wasn’t head of the CIA for nothin’. They don’t call Mom the Silver Fox for nothin’, either.
We’re takin’ this country back. Thanks to Bill Clinton’s pecker. Thanks to people thinkin’ about Bill Clinton’s pecker. Thinkin’ pecker thoughts right down to the minute they go into the votin’ booth. And I’m gonna take the high, bold road all the way . . . compaysion, inclusion, empowerment, entitlement . . . . I’m gonna postpone execution dates and kiss babies and hug mongol-faced kids . . . . I’m gonna charm the skinny waitresses and flabby soccer moms into giving me what I want . . . . I’m gonna stash the cowboy boots and wear tasseled loafers . . . . I’m a leader, not a misleader! I’m an insider, not an imbiber! I’m an imbiber, not a divider! I’m a reformer, not an informer! I’m a deformer with results! Hell, I’ll even sit down with the log-sized Log Cabin Republicans, and with whatever other fairies who wanna meet. How’s that for compaysion?
Sometime in my second term, with an all-Republican Senate and House, I’ll do two things. I’m gonna hang Saddam Hussein by his nuts for Mom and I’m gonna reward Ken Starr to the Supreme Court for Dad. He shoulda done it when he had the chan
ce—both with Saddam and with Ken—but he wimped out. Well, hell, ain’t nobody perfect. I love my dad.
Read my lips! We’ve won! And that rhymes with fun!
Read my lips? No, sir, that’s not the way I’d say it. I’d say:
Move your hips! I’m comin’!
[12]
Billy Comes Out to Play
“You’ll die,” Monica said. “You will die. You’re gonna smack me. What do you think I said to him? What’s the worst I could say?”
“God only knows,” Linda Tripp said.
“I said, ‘I love you, Butt-head.’ ”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing,” Monica said. “He just kind of hung up.”
As time passed, the distractions piled up (and so did the bodies) . . . endless Kosovo and then Columbine and then JFK, Jr., and then the guy in Atlanta who went to war with two brokerage houses.
During that period of time, with eighteen endless months left in his term, Bill Clinton came out to L.A. often to hang out and play a little golf. On one trip, he came, officially, to attend the Women’s Soccer Championship between the United States and China at the Rose Bowl. He came alone; Hillary was doing summer stock in rural New York in the new show called A Time to Listen! Bill Clinton had a few days to kick it and chill with his Hollywood buddies.
A week or so before the game, Mark Canton, the former head of production at Sony, now a producer at Warner Bros., where his career began, contacted his friend Rudy Durand. Mark was still in the middle of a messy divorce from his wife, Wendy Finerman, who had won the Academy Award for producing Forrest Gump. He was a man with a remarkable string of hit movies, whom Newsweek magazine had once called “moronic.” Mark Canton asked his friend Rudy Durand if he’d like to join him in his box at the Rose Bowl for the Women’s Soccer Championship.
Rudy Durand was offended by the invitation. First, because Mark didn’t call himself, but assigned the call to his assistant. Second, because if Rudy wanted to join Mark and his new girlfriend, Amy—Mark’s marriage blew when wife Wendy walked into Mark’s studio office and found him on top of his desk with Amy—in Mark’s box at the Rose Bowl, it would cost Rudy a thousand dollars a ticket.
American Rhapsody Page 51
