If it were not a sign of ill breeding to discuss private family matters in public as my parents taught me as a child I would have filled Cheese in on examples of times I was historically unhappy and state to him as well that in my book Gimlet is aces and frequently makes me happy by fellating me and letting me burn her, for these are the only two events which make me become happy in matters of the birds and the bees. Unfortunately, even though I am one handsome dude and desirable on the part of many girls throughout my school and life, my penis declines to become erect when they want to commit the sexual act, and will only be erect if they fellate me, and if they fellate me I wish to burn them with matches or my lighter very much and most women dislike this event and are unhappy when burned and thus are chicken to fellate me and only wish to commit the sexual act.
However Gimlet is not chicken and she will. Furthermore Gimlet knows that what would make me the happiest corporate liability trouble shooter in the history of the planet earth would be to kill my father and that I will kill my father and bathe in his blood as soon as I can do it without maybe getting caught or found guilty at it, maybe when he is retired and my mother is weak, and Gimlet promises to help me and to kill her stepfather as well and she fellates me and lets me burn her sometimes.
I conversed with Cheese and my voice sounded slowly thick to my ears because recalling historical events from the past frequently affects my state of normal consciousness in the manner controlled substances affect other persons, and influences me. I stated to Cheese that I could not regrettably answer his question, yet I would give him a cash gift of a thousand dollars in return for Cheese making his Negro fiancée bathe thoroughly and then fellate me and then allow me to burn her with matches on the backs of her legs.
Cheese glanced at yours truly in a semi hypnotized fashion for a long period, and I became confident that he was going to agree to accept the gift and that we would consummate a deal, however at this time Keith Jarrett’s jazz piano concert had its hour’s intermission and persons began to enter the lobby of the Irvine Concert Hall. The persons were moving slowly and my heart in my chest was beating slowly. The people were exiting the auditorium doors and conversing, utilitizing motions which were in slower motion even than the NFL Highlights Show, a show which frequently shows the commercial in which the beautiful and sexy woman playing billiards asserts that all her men wear English Leather Cologne or they wear nothing at all. My state of normal consciousness became historically affected even further as Cheese persisted in staring at me and people in the lobby proceeded to mill and purchase refreshments and drink from the public drinking fountain and enter the restroom facilities extremely slowly, and the air in the Irvine Concert Hall became similar to lit ice, and Cheese’s voice as he began to decline my initial offer of a deal came from distances, and his pink glasses began to have the appearance of two dull sunrises through ice.
From the attractive bench in the slow lobby I began to attempt to see if Gimlet and Big and Mr. Wonderful and Grope were coming out to help me persuade old Cheese to accept my offer of a gift, yet I instead found myself noting with extreme interest the slow running of the older and distinguished gray-haired and athletic man in the sportcoat. The sportcoat had appeared to be the real McCoy from above his back in the Irvine Concert Hall, however now in the lobby it appeared to have unattractive narrow lapels and also nonEuropean tailoring, which are fashion features I dislike. The man was running with amusing slowness, carrying the young girl with the curious hair, and was being pursued through the slow and crowded lobby by Mr. Wonderful and Gimlet, who had left Grope and Big in the dust in their pursuit of the man and the girl with the curious hair. The mouths of my friends Mr. Wonderful and Gimlet were open wide in a laughing and excited manner and Mr. Wonderful had something metal and bright in his hand and Gimlet’s hair’s penis sculpture was becoming disordered at the tip and her eyes continued to be all dark black pupil rather than white and color and pupil and she was running slowly in her leather and plastic and reaching out with her hand for the curious hair of the girl with the curious hair who was asleep in the protective arms of the distinguished older man running slowly past me in narrow lapels, and when I saw the beautiful and pale face of the sleeping girl over the bouncing shoulder of the running man the face slowly made me extremely joyful and excited, and as Gimlet and Mr. Wonderful slowly caught the man by the rear portion of his unattractive sportcoat near the front of the lobby of the Irvine Concert Hall and as Gimlet’s hands with vanilla nails and Mr. Wonderful’s bright object were almost in her curious hair the girl with the hair seemed to awaken in the older man’s arms and she gazed incessantly and directly at yours truly, sitting at attention on Cheese’s bench and removing Cheese’s hand and unsightly nails from the wrist of the sleeve of my sportcoat, and I slowly assumed a happy and comforting and reassuring expression at the young blond girl and rose to my feet from the bench as Gimlet’s hands became even slower yet and were moving in the girl’s radiant hair and Mr. Wonderful was doing something with the bright thing to the man who was the girl’s father. And here’s what I did.
LYNDON
“Hello down there. This is your candidate, Lyndon Johnson.”
—Campaigning by helicopter for U.S. Senate, 1954
‘My name is Lyndon Baines Johnson. I own the fucking floor you stand on, boy.’
There was also an aide in the office, in one corner, a skinny man with big ears, working at a long pinewood table, doing something flurried between a teletype and a stack of clipped newspapers, but Lyndon was talking to me. It was the Fifties and I was young, burned-out cool, empty. I slouched emptily where I stood, before his desk, my hands in the pockets of my topcoat, flapping the coat a little. I stood hip-shot and looked at the scarlet floor tile under my shoes. Each red square tile was decorated with a lone gold star.
He leaned over his desk at me. He looked like a big predatory bird.
‘My name is Lyndon Baines Johnson, son. I am the Senator to the United States Senate from the state of Texas, U.S.A. I am the twenty-seventh richest personal man in the nation. I got the biggest wazoo in Washington and the wife with the prettiest name. So I don’t care who your wife’s Daddy knows—don’t you slouch at this Senator, boy.’
The way he looked, when I looked at him, was always the same. He looked like eyes, the eyes of a small person, looking trapped from behind the lined hooked jutting face of a big bland bird of prey. His eyes are the same in pictures.
I apologized nervously. ‘I’m sorry, sir. I think maybe I’m nervous. I was just sitting out there, filling out application forms, and all of a sudden here I am speaking to you, directly, sir.’
He produced a nasal inhaler and an index card. He put the inhaler to a nostril and squeezed, inhaling. He squinted at the card.
‘ “Every prospective part of the personnel in the office of the United States Senator from Texas shall be interviewed”—I’m reading this, boy, off this card here—“interviewed with the potential of being interviewed by any part of the personnel of the office he shall potentially work under.” I wrote that. I don’t care who your wife’s Daddy’s wife’s internist knows—you’re potentially under me, boy, and I’m interviewing you. What do you think of that?’
The big-eared aide sighted down his shears at a news clipping, making sure the cut lines were clean and square.
‘A senator who interviews low-level office help?’ I said. I listened to oak-muffled, far-away sounds of telephones and typewriters and teletypes. I was beginning to think I had filled out forms for an inappropriate job. I had no experience. I was young, burned out. My transcript was an amputee.
‘This must be a very conscientious office,’ I said.
‘Goddamn right it’s conscientious, boy. The president of this particular stretch of the Dirksen Building is me, Lyndon Johnson. And a president views, interviews, and reviews everything he presides over, if he’s doing his job in the correct manner.’ He paused. ‘Say, write that down for me, boy.’
I looked to the jughead of an aide, but he was laying down long ribbons of Scotch tape along a straightedge. ‘Plus “previews,” ’ Lyndon said. ‘Stick in “previews” there at the start, son.’
Pores open, I patted at my jacket and topcoat tentatively, trying to look as if this might have been the one just-my-luck day I wasn’t carrying anything connected to writing down aphorisms for inspired Senators.
But Lyndon didn’t notice; he had turned his leather chair and was continuing, facing the office window, facing the regiments of autographed photos, civic awards, and the headless cattle horns, curved like pincers, those weird disconnected horns that projected from the wall behind his big desk. Lyndon probed at his teeth with a corner of the card he’d read from, his chair’s square back to me. He said:
‘If there’s even a pissing chicken’s chance that the ass of some sorry slouching boy who can’t even button up his topcoat is going to cross my path in the office of this particular United States Senator, I’m interviewing that boy’s ass.’
His scalp shone, even in the Fifties. The back of his head was rimmed with a sort of terrace of hair. His head was pill-shaped, tall, with the suggestion of a huge brain cavity. His hands, treed with veins, were giant. He pointed a limb-sized finger slowly at the thin aide:
‘Piesker, you keep me waiting for a news summary again and I’ll kick your ass all down the hall.’
The thin aide was clipping out a complicatedly shaped newspaper article with unbelievable speed.
I cleared my throat. ‘May I ask what whatever job I seem to have applied for consists of, sir.’
Lyndon remained facing the decorated wall and big window. The window had limp United States and Texas flags flanking it. Out the window was a sidewalk, a policeman, a street, some trees, a black iron fence with sharp decorative points like inverted Valentines. Beyond that was the bright green and scrubbed white of Capitol Hill.
Lyndon inhaled again from his nasal inhaler. The bottle wheezed a bit. I waited, standing, on the starred tile, while he looked through the onion-skin forms I’d completed.
‘This boy’s name is David Boyd. Says here you’re from Connecticut. Connecticut?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘But your wife’s Daddy is Jack Childs?’
I nodded.
‘Speak up Boyd goddamnit. Black Jack Childs, of the Houston Childses? And Mrs. Childs and my own lovely wife share a internist, at the doctor’s, back home, in Texas?’
‘So I’m told, sir.’
He rotated his chair toward me, noiseless, still fondling the policy card he’d written, tracing his lip’s outline with it as he scanned forms.
‘Says here you went and dropped out of Yale Business School, does it.’
‘I did that, sir, yes. I left Yale.’
‘Yale is in Connecticut, also,’ he said thoughtfully.
I fluttered my coat pockets. ‘It is.’ I paused. ‘In all honesty sir I was asked to leave,’ I said.
‘Met Jack Childs’s little girl at Yale, then? Kicked in the butt by love? Dropped them books and picked up a loved one? Admirable. Similar.’ He had his boots, two big boots with sharp shining toes, up on his desk. The eyes behind that big face were looking at something far away.
‘Had to get married did you? Had to leave?’
‘Sir, in all honesty, I was asked to leave.’
‘Yale up there in Connecticut asked you to leave?’
‘Yes sir.’
He had rolled the card into a tight cylinder and had it deep inside his ear, probing at something, looking past me.
“Tomorrow will be drastically different from today.”
—Speech to National Press Club, Washington, D.C.,
April 17, 1959
“The President is a restless man.”
—Staff member, 1965
“The President is a wary man.”
—Staff member, 1964
“I doubt if Lyndon Johnson ever did anything impulsive in his life, he was such a cautious, canny man.”
—The Honorable Sam Rayburn, 1968
‘I committed indiscretions,’ I told Lyndon. ‘Indiscretions were committed, and I was asked to leave.’
Lyndon was looking pointedly from Piesker to his wristwatch. Piesker, the aide, whimpered a little as he collated sheets at that very long knotty-pine table beneath a painting of scrub and dead-brown hills and a dry riverbed under a blue sky.
‘I was asked by Yale to leave,’ I said. ‘That’s why my postgraduate transcript appears as it does.’
He was always right there, but you had the sense that his side of a conversation meandered along its own course, now toward yours, now away.
‘Me personally,’ he said, ‘I worked my ass all through college. I shined some shoes in a barber’s. I sold pore-tightening cream door-to-door. I was a printer’s devil at a newspaper. I even herded goats, for a fellow, one summer.’ I saw him make that face for the first time. ‘Jesus I hate the smell of a goat,’ he said. ‘Fucking Christ. Ever once smelled a goat, boy?’
I tried my best to shake my head regretfully. I so wish I could summon the face he made. I was laughing despite myself. The face had seemed to settle into itself like a kicked tent, his eyes rolling back. My laughter felt jagged and hysterical: I had no clue how it would be taken. But Lyndon grinned. I had not yet even been asked to sit. I stood on this great red echoing floor, separated from Lyndon and his boots by yards of spur-scuffed mahogany desktop.
‘Probably heard rumors about what it smells like, though,’ he mused.
‘Some grapevine or other, having to do with animal smells, I’m sure I…’
But he sat up suddenly straight, as if he’d remembered something key and undone. The suddenness of it made Piesker drop his shears. They clattered. Lyndon looked me up and down closely.
‘Shit, son, you look about twenty.’
“Remember that one of the keys to Lyndon Johnson is that he is a perfectionist—a perfectionist in the most imperfect art in the world: politics. Just remember that.”
—An old associate, 1960
I finally got to sit. My back had been starting to get that sort of museum stiffness. I sat in a corner of Lyndon’s broad office for four hours that cool spring day. I watched him devour Piesker’s collected, clipped, and collated packet of important articles from the nation’s most influential newspapers. I watched aides and advisors, together and separate, come and go. Lyndon seemed to forget I was here, in an outsized chair, in the corner, my coat puddled around my lap as I sat, watching. I watched him read, dictate, sign and initial all at once. I watched him ignore a ringing phone. I noticed how rarely such a busy man’s phone seemed to ring. I watched him speak to Roy Cohn for twenty solid minutes without once answering Cohn’s question about whether Everett Dirksen could be shown to be soft on those who were soft on Communism. Lyndon looked over at my corner only once, when I lit a smoke, baring his teeth until I put the long cigarette out in a low ceramic receptacle I prayed was an ashtray. I watched the Senator receive an elegantly accented Italian dignitary who wanted to talk about sales of Texas cotton to the Common Market, the two men sitting opposite on slim chairs in the waxed red floor’s center, drinking dark coffee out of delicate saucer-and-spoon complexes brought in by Lyndon’s personal secretary, Dora Teane, a heavily rouged, eyebrowless woman with a kind face and a girdle-roll. I watched Lyndon leave the slender spoon in his cup and reach casually down into his groin to ease his pants as he and the dignitary talked textiles, democracy, and the status of the lira.
The light in the office reddened.
I think I was drowsing. I heard a sudden: ‘Yo there in my corner.’
‘Don’t just sit there with your mind in neutral, boy,’ Lyndon was saying, rolling down his shirtsleeves. We were alone. ‘Go and talk to Mrs. Teane out front. Go get orientated. I once see a disorientated boy on Lyndon Baines Johnson’s staff, that boy’s ass gets introduced to a certain sidewalk.’
‘I’m hired, then? The interview’s o
ver?’ I asked, standing, stiff.
Lyndon seemed not to hear. ‘The man that invented specially convened sessions of the United States Senate, that’s the man ought to be made to herd goats,’ drawing his jacket on carefully, easing into it with a real grace. He fastened his cuff studs as he crossed the floor, his walk vaguely balletic, his boots clicking and jingling. I followed.
He stopped before his door and looked at his topcoat, on its coat hook. He looked to me.
The coat hook was the same ornately carved wood as the office door. I held Lyndon’s coat up as he slipped back into it, snapping the lapels straight with a pop.
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