But Enough About You: Essays

by Christopher Buckley

  But about my old friend Dennis Blair: This was a vice-presidential mission, but since it was unlike most vice-presidential missions, that is, actually important, the White House sent Commander Blair along with us to keep an eye on things. Being a typical White House staff, we of course naturally assumed that his real mission was to spy on us.

  We were all very collegial. There is no “I” in T-E-A-M-A-M-E-R-I-C-A. (Oops—there is. Never mind.) But we did feel a bit . . . supervised by our NSC minder. I was informed that I would have to clear my speech drafts with him.

  The vice president’s chief of staff was himself a naval person: Admiral Daniel J. Murphy, former four-star admiral. “Murf,” a nickname I never used to his face, was a genial type, Brooklyn Irish. He was also someone you didn’t want to mess with, and when it came to bureaucratic in-fighting, he held a seventh-degree black belt.

  Admiral Murphy was cordial with Commander Blair, but he, too, felt a little supervised. So there was a definite feeling of us-versus-them aboard Air Force Two as we winged from Brussels to Berlin to Rome to Paris to Geneva to London in order to make the world safe for . . . more nuclear weapons.

  Commander Blair handed me back the draft of the big speech. He sort of tossed it at me in a brisk, naval way. He shrugged. “It’s okay, but it needs to be peaced up a bit.” We writers are—as you may have heard—a sensitive lot. This response was not the “By God, Buckley, this is absolutely dazzling” I’d hoped for. And what on earth was he talking about?

  “Pieced up?” I said.

  “Peace. Put in more about peace.”

  “Ah.”

  I shuffled off sullenly and groused to Admiral Murphy that Commander Blair was clearly an unlettered philistine who wouldn’t know it if Shakespeare bit him on the rear end. Murf was a lion to his cubs, but there wasn’t much he could do. He told me to suck it up.

  Then, two days later, something very cool happened.

  Commander Blair had given me back my draft of the next speech. Leafing through it, I noticed that it had somehow acquired two additional pages. What’s this? I read the two additional pages. My eyes popped, my jaw dropped.

  Commander Blair had accidentally paper-clipped to my draft a two-page TOP SECRET/CODEWORD (which is to say, truly secret) memo. How my little hands trembled as I held it. It’s probably best not to reveal what exactly it said, even thirty years later. I have no great desire to join Private Manning of Wikileaks celebrity in his jail cell. Suffice to say that it concerned codes having to do with nuclear launch procedures, a topic about which our government is very protective, and very pissy when revealed.

  I thought: Hm. I reviewed my options: a) sell it to the KGB, b) give it back to Commander Blair, or c)—leverage! Working at the White House turns any Pollyanna into Machiavelli.

  I scurried off to share the gorgeous radioactive windfall with Admiral Murphy. “Thought you might be interested in this,” I said, handing it to him.

  Admiral Murphy had been a Navy aviator. He had commanded the Sixth Fleet during the Yom Kippur War. Been very high up at the CIA. He was not a man easily impressed. But his eyes widened. He exhaled in a naval sort of way. He said to me, “Where did you get this?” I explained. He folded it and tucked it away in his vest pocket.

  Things were ever so collegial aboard Air Force Two after that. Commander Blair’s editorial comments about my speech drafts were all variations on “My God, Buckley, this is brilliant, just brilliant.”

  For whatever it’s worth, I think Admiral Blair (Ret.) is a splendid choice for director of whatever we’re calling it now. After he left the White House, he went on to a brilliant Navy career. And who could resist a guy who once water-skied behind his own destroyer?

  —The Daily Beast, November 2008

  SUMMERS ON SUZY

  College summers I worked as first mate and cook on a sailboat named Suzy Wong. She was a 42-foot-long Sparkman & Stephens yawl (two masts), all teak and mahogany and scrollwork dragons and Buddhas, topsides painted fire engine red, built in Hong Kong for four young American officers mustering out of the Navy and wanting to sail home. My father bought her in Miami, where the Navy vets landed after numerous adventures including being stuck in a monthlong sandstorm in the Red Sea.

  To defray the costs, my dad chartered her to paying clients. Our home port was Stamford, Connecticut, on Long Island Sound. We would go anywhere the client wanted: Long Island, Newport, Block Island, Buzzard’s Bay, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, Cape Cod, Maine. My best friend, Danny, was skipper.

  Suzy was over a decade old now and, like any lady of a certain age, was starting to show the wear and tear. It took weeks of long days to get her ready for sea. By mid-June, neither Danny nor I had fingerprints left from all the sandpapering. She leaked from the top and from the bottom; the bottom leaks being more problematic. I was forever lifting the floorboards to see how much water had accumulated in the bilges. When you hit the bilge pump toggle switch, you never knew if you were going to hear the reassuring rrrrrrr sound indicating that it was working.

  On one memorable occasion, one of our charterers stuck his head through the companionway and asked, “Is the water supposed to be above the floorboards?” We were twenty miles offshore and, as usual, the marine radio—one’s link to the U.S. Coast Guard—had decided to stop working.

  Danny sprang into action. One of my enduring images is of Danny’s legs protruding from the engine compartment, accompanied by a vigorous stream of profanity. The culprit was usually the stuffing box, where the propeller shaft penetrates the hull of the boat, providing ample opportunities for the admission of seawater.

  There was always something. One time we had to dismantle a very unpleasantly clogged head (toilet) and carry it out onto the deck over the heads of the guests eating dinner, one of them a distinguished monsignor of the Catholic Church.

  For refrigeration we had an icebox, which after five days would begin to smell, on occasion urgently. Another lasting image I have of Danny: his face a prune of revulsion as he extracts spoiled chicken parts. For cooking we had an alcohol stove and outdoor barbecue. The alcohol stove you approached as you would a live hand grenade. You had to prime the burner with a propane torch, then pump air into the stove’s fuel reservoir in order to force the alcohol up onto the burner. Then you opened the valve and applied the match, at which point it could go either way. Often it went the bad way. For most of four summers, I had no eyebrows.

  Steaks and burgers we cooked on the outdoor charcoal briquette barbecue. It hung over the stern (rear). One night, anchored in a swift current in the cold water of Maine, I was cooking some lovely juicy steaks for our guests. I cut into one of the steaks to see if it was ready, whereupon the entire barbecue swiveled 180 degrees and dumped four Omaha steaks and dozens of sizzling charcoal bricquettes into the swift-running current of dark water.

  Danny and I leapt into the inflatable dinghy, fired up the outboard motor, which for some strange reason actually started, and buzzed off into the blackness in pursuit of the runaway steaks. We drove two over with the propeller, turning them from filet mignon into chopped steak. The other two were more or less intact. Fortunately our guests were too well gone into their martinis to notice that their steaks had been mutilated and finished off with outboard motor oil.

  Most of our charterers were nice people, and we worked hard to make their time aboard Suzy Wong a good one. Sometimes this came about in a roundabout way. When we went aground, for instance, or got lost in a dense fog, or the floorboards started floating twenty miles offshore. Nothing, we found, made our guests happier than when these disasters ended well. Our incompetence in having gotten us into the difficulty in the first place was immediately forgotten, so grateful were they on learning that they were not going to die, after all. One time we got seriously lost off Block Island, with bad weather coming in. Our guests were a nice Belgian couple who spent the night hyperventilating and wondering if they would ever see Belgium again. When by some miracle we found the harbor entran
ce, they were so overjoyed that they broke out a bottle of brandy and toasted us on our navigational skills.

  What we lacked in seamanship, we tried to make up for in other ways. We had no electric blender, but this did not deter us from making banana daiquiris for our guests. Many a cocktail hour found me squeezing bananas into mush with bare hands.

  Other occasions called for different libations. One time we had aboard a middle-aged couple whose marriage didn’t seem likely to make it to the Diamond Anniversary. Their dialogue could have been written by Edward Albee. Sometimes they got so angry at each other that they could converse only indirectly, through us.

  Her: Chris, why don’t you get Bob another drink. He’s only had seven since lunch.

  Him: Anything to numb the fact that I’m married to her.

  It got so bad that Danny and I decided the only solution was tea. I mixed some pot—hey, it was the seventies—with actual tea in the coffee percolator and let it boil for an hour. I poured Mr. and Mrs. Virginia Woolf each a steaming mug and before long they were curled up together in the cockpit, cooing at each other and going, “Isn’t that an amazing sunset, sweetheart?” “Yes, sweetie, it is.” Danny and I smiled. When they got off, I was a bit tempted to give them some of my tea. I wonder if their marriage made it.

  Sometimes we’d say, “Would you like lobster for dinner tonight?”

  They’d point out that we were at sea. “Where are we going to get lobsters?”

  Whereupon we steered to the nearest lobster pot, which was usually never far. We’d pull up a pot, remove a few lobsters, and by way of payment, put a bottle or two of whisky or vodka in the pot. I always wanted to be there when the lobsterman pulled up his trap and found bottles of Johnny Walker Red and Smirnoff.

  The summers passed quickly. We read Zen koans by candlelight. Drank wine from goatskins. Fished for squid in phosphorescent water. Shot off flares. Slept on deck under millions of stars. Made bonfires on beaches. Swam naked at night. Blew out sails. Took apart the engine. Scaled a sand cliff and rescued a kid who had gotten trapped. Drank rum to keep warm during a storm. Did foolish, dangerous things and howled because we were so scared, the only thing to do was laugh. Then came ashore and went about our lives and grew up and got old. I think of him whenever I come across the passage in Conrad:

  A gone shipmate, like any other man, is gone forever; and I never met one of them again. But at times the spring-flood of memory sets with force up the dark River of the Nine Bends. Then on the water of the forlorn stream drifts a ship—a shadowy ship manned by a crew of Shades. They pass and make a sign, in a shadowy hail. Haven’t we, together and upon the immortal sea, wrung out a meaning from our sinful lives? Good-bye, brothers! You were a good crowd. As good a crowd as ever fisted with wild cries the beating canvas of a heavy foresail; or tossing aloft, invisible in the night, gave back yell for yell to a westerly gale.

  —Forbes FYI, June 2005

  THE DIRT ON DIRT

  I seem to have taken up gardening.

  I realize that this is not a declaration to cause goose bumps. I stipulate that, rhetorically speaking, it is not up there with “Once more unto the breach” or “Sic semper tyrannis.” It’s more on a par with “Checkout time is eleven a.m.” or “Where did I put the car keys?”

  How did this happen, I wonder? As a child, my summer chores included weeding my mother’s marigold bed. She called it a “bed,” but at the time it seemed as vast as the entire state of Connecticut. It did not instill in me a love of gardening. To this day, I cannot hear the word marigold without breaking out in hives.

  If you yourself have not yet been ensorcelled by Horta, Goddess of the Garden, and turned into a haunter of the local nursery, let me report that as hobbies go, it’s less expensive than collecting antique biplanes or Andy Warhol soup cans, but dirt, though dirt, does not necessarily come cheap.

  When the landscape architect Le Nôtre presented the bill for the gardens of Versailles to Louis XIV, a shadow is said to have eclipsed the features of the Sun King. My own little patch of earth is as Dogpatch, comparatively speaking, but like le Roi Soleil, I went ashen when presented with a bill for sixty bags of cedar nuggets.

  “Nuggets,” I quipped to the fellow behind the counter. “I must say, that’s apt.” As you can see, I’m something of a wag.

  He did not riposte, but then he was busy on the phone with the Fraud Alert Department of American Express, which was no doubt demanding zip codes, blood types, social numbers, and maternal birth dates. Once home, I placed each “nugget” individually about the garden with care befitting Murano glass mosaic tiles.

  We of Hibernian persuasion have internalized the adage that to be Irish is to know that sooner or later the world will break your heart. But I have made a corollary discovery: The gardener, too, knows that Nature—and all the gods—is in conspiracy against him.

  Squirrels, I am now aware, devote every waking hour between October and May to rooting out the bulbs that you laboriously interred in October. The bulbs, that is, that you ordered from exotic mail-order houses; that you soaked overnight in a homemade atomic elixir containing the most potent capsaicin-laden peppers known to science. While I prepare this fiendish brew, I wear latex gloves, face mask, and eye goggles. Saddam Hussein would have paid good money for my formula.

  That sound you hear in my garden? That would be the squirrels, expressing gastronomic satisfaction as they dine, chittering, “Cayenne and habañeros! Sublime! Magnifique!”

  I wonder: What countermeasures did the burghers of Amsterdam deploy against their squirrels during the seventeenth-century Dutch Tulip Bulb Mania? Did grown men weep on discovering that a squirrel had noshed on a tulip bulb worth more than the value of their house? It is not impossible that the arquebus- and sword-wielding soldiers in Rembrandt’s celebrated painting The Night Watch were protecting tulip bulbs from seventeenth-century tree rodents. How gardening widens one’s intellectual horizons.

  Gardening is said to be a calming pursuit, yet there you find yourself, reaching for a pencil with which to scribble down the 800 number in the infomercial with the guy injecting compressed gas into gopher holes and then igniting it, causing thousands of divots to shoot violently into the sky, along with the remains of the very unpleasantly surprised gophers. How does the poem go? “One is closer to God in a garden than anywhere else on earth.” Right.

  In my next dispatch from my backyard Eden, I will discuss strategies and options after Hurricane Sandy has deposited fourteen cubic tons of sea salt on your perennials and fifty-year-old ornamental cedars. Hint: You’re going to need a lot of gypsum.

  —ForbesLife, April 2013

  AUTUMN, INTIMATIONS

  Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, as Keats put it, before heading off to Rome to cough his life out in a pensione overlooking the Spanish Steps. According to my anthology, “To Autumn” is the most popular poem in the English language. And here I thought “Casey at the Bat” had that distinction. Well, I’m not a bit surprised: Everyone’s a sucker for fall. If you grew up in New England, as I did, this was when you knew you were in the Right Place.

  That apple smell, those burning leaves. Those younger than me—an ever-growing cohort—have no memory of setting a match to the piles of leaves our parents made us rake up. The Environment Police put an end to that, on the grounds that that rich, musky smoke would bring about another millennial winter. Such a distinctive smell, those smoldering leaves made. I’m reminded of it on bright sunny days when my ten-year-old sets fire to a leaf with his magnifying glass. It takes me back forty years. Rakes have been supplanted by blowers. The delicate scritch-scratch sound of tines combing the grass has been replaced with eardrum-straining turbines. Lawns now sound like the flight deck of aircraft carriers.

  Ripeness is all, as Lear would say, and fall is when ripeness happens. While I was growing up, Dr. Bell lived next door. He had a magnificent vegetable garden, and by September his tomatoes were red and heavy on the vines. We would sneak in a
fter dark, armed with a purloined salt shaker, and sit and gorge. We ate his corn raw, each kernel exploding with sugar juice. My mother used to serve us acorn squash with puddles of butter and brown sugar. As a child, I found this a credible delivery system for a foodstuff named “squash.” Pumpkins made a hollow thunk when you tapped them. Gutting them was never my favorite part; the stringy innards clung tenaciously to the sides, so you had to shave them off. Back then most Halloween jack-o’-lanterns had quaintly similar eyes, noses, and mouths. Now I buy carving templates that transform your pumpkin to look like it was designed by the special effects crew of Halloween 5. What hasn’t changed is the toasty smell of the candle-scorched insides, the thrilling pagan feel of the night.

  People from other parts of the country who came to New England in the fall said, “Aren’t the trees beautiful this time of year!” I shrugged. The trees were exactly what they were supposed to be this time of year. Nothing unusual in that. (Yankee snobisme.)

  We would drive up to New Haven for the Yale-Harvard game. This was my introduction to tribalism. Those blazing autumn sunny days and the blue and crimson banners snapping in the wind seem vivid now. During the final down of one close game, I remember my father telling me that it was sad, because this was the last time these players would be on a football field. Looking back, it seems to me apt that my first intimation of mortality was imparted to me by my father at the time of year when things start to die.

  Thanksgivings we drove up to Sharon, in northwestern Connecticut, my grandparents’ house. When we arrived, I would tumble out of the rattly diesel Mercedes and race into the house to make mischief with cousins. As there were fifty first cousins, the opportunities abounded. In later years when I was older, the ritual was to hunt pheasant on Thanksgiving morning. Not much fun for the pheasant, but walking through those fields, listening to the tinkle of the dogs’ collar bells, is one of my happiest memories. Of those Thanksgiving meals, I remember the pearled onions in cream, mince pies, and bottles from my grandfather’s celebrated wine cellar being brought up and decanted. Some of these had been maturing since the First World War. Sometimes after it was poured into glasses a half-inch of purple mud would settle at the bottom. My aunts and uncles would ooh and aah over these pourings, but we of the younger gen caught them wincing and puckering when they drank.