I wondered through all of this what effect my actions would have. Would Bob Dole win the nomination again? Would Ross Perot still be a spoiler and third party candidate? Would somebody else do better? I had a lot of respect for Senator Dole, both then and now, and said I was going to support him. It would be interesting to see how this worked out from a front row seat. I remember it being a wild and wooly primary season, and I suspected it was still going to be.
We kept talking through the rest of the preparation time, opening a third bottle of the Riesling in the process, and then I called quits to shop talk while we ate. That didn’t work out all that well, since we were all a bunch of political junkies. What I found disturbing, though, was when Newt was telling us how much he wanted to hurt Clinton, to grind him into dust. It was almost personal with the man. I simply shook my head in disagreement.
“You disagree with me, Carl?”
“Yes and no, Newt. It’s not so much your intention as it is your degree. It’s one thing to beat the man, but leave him some wiggle room. There is nothing more dangerous than a wild animal that has been wounded and then trapped. You learn the same thing in the Army. It’s better to let an enemy on the run keep running. It demoralizes the other troops facing you. If you corner them, well, desperate men do desperate things, and they have no reason not to take you down with them.”
“I think you overestimate him, Carl. Bill Clinton is spent. He’s a has been. We can wipe him out and replace him in two years,” Newt bragged.
“Newt, I am going to keep backing you, you know that, but this may not turn out as neat and easy as you think it will. There’s a reason they named him ‘Slick Willie’ back in Arkansas. You may not like him, but you sure better respect him,” I replied.
“You think he’s going to be that tough in ’96?” asked John, in between bites of chicken. “Oh, this is so good!”
I laughed at that. “The secret isn’t in the chicken, it’s in the spices and the stew they make with the flour you dredge the chicken in.” Then I gave it some thought. “Yeah, I think it would be very easy to underestimate Slick Willie. We have the tiger by the tail right now, but it would be very easy to end up inside the tiger!”
I went home the next night and told Marilyn I had cooked dinner for the boys, after which she pointed me towards the kitchen and made me cook for the kids. I made shrimp scampi for them, although I insisted that Marilyn had to help me with peeling the shrimp. We were able to eat by about seven or so. Now that the kids were older, we didn’t have to worry about them going to bed early. The girls were still only ten. They still listen to you at that age. That would change too damn soon for my taste. Charlie was now thirteen, and had recently discovered that he was smarter than I was, or at least so he thought.
He was a pushy little bastard, too! On his birthday back in October he had asked about getting a tattoo or an earring, and he brought it up again. He didn’t have anything particular in mind, just asking, but I decided to shut that idea down real fucking quick! “You get no tattoos that don’t say U.S. Army, and no extra holes in your body that the Good Lord didn’t issue as original equipment! YOU GOT THAT STRAIGHT?!” I thundered at him. He just laughed at me and scooted out of the room.
“You think that was clear enough?” I asked his mother.
“Probably not,” she said with a smile.
“I think I’ll show him a rerun of Heartbreak Ridge, where Clint Eastwood rips an earring out of a recruit’s ear. Maybe that will get through.” My wife rolled her eyes at that. “Wait until your daughters get in on the act, and want their belly buttons pierced?”
“My daughters are good girls and would never do that,” she replied, rather primly.
I snorted. “Yeah, well my daughters would do it and then lie to us!” On my first go, Maggie had not only gotten her belly button pierced, she also got a ‘tramp stamp’ at the base of her back. I don’t have a problem with the piercings so much as the tattoos. They don’t enhance the scenery, as far as I am concerned, and just wait until you’re a grandmother and weigh fifty pounds more, and your grandkids want to know why you have a tattoo on your ass.
On the plus side, Charlie was fundamentally a good kid. He was still in the Boy Scouts, although I had my doubts whether he would make Eagle. I could see him doing the Explorer routine like I had done, or just staying in the Scouts and goofing off and going camping with them. Then again, Marilyn had caught him looking through my latest issue of Playboy, so I figured he might also develop a totally different interest to take up his time. Well, you can’t get into trouble just chasing girls; you only get into trouble when you catch one!
I remember when he asked me what ‘overly developed’ meant. He had been looking at a copy of The National Enquirer, which struck me as rather odd. Certainly neither Marilyn nor I ever read it, so I asked him, and he said he got it from the Parkers. I could imagine Lurlene reading it, and rolled my eyes. “So, what’s it mean?”
“What does what mean?”
“It says that Mom is overly developed. What’s that mean?”
“WHAT?” I went over to him and grabbed the ‘newspaper’ from him and looked at the page he was reading. It was reportedly an article on Congressmen with good-looking wives or girlfriends. There was a picture of Marilyn and me at the Kennedy Center, me in my tux and Marilyn in a black evening gown. That had been a few weeks ago, and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, which I supported generously, was having a Tchaikovsky night. The photo made me pay attention, since Marilyn’s dress had been somewhat low cut, though not untasteful. This shot, maybe because of the angle, or maybe because they doctored it, showed an awful lot of very healthy cleavage.
Charlie was pointing at the words. “See, it says that Mom is pretty but overly developed.”
Marilyn came out at that moment to find us looking at the picture. I was trying to keep from laughing, working my jaw to keep steady. Marilyn took a look at the Enquirer as Charlie asked again. I glanced at her and stifled a grin, and replied, “Let’s just say that it means your mother still looks good in a swimsuit.” Marilyn looked daggers at me. I guess that’s not something a father is supposed to tell his son.
Suddenly a light went off in Charlie’s head. His eyes opened wide and he gave a loud, “Ohhhh!” Then he looked at Marilyn, and his eyes glanced at her chest for just a split second, and then darted away, and he repeated, “Ohhhh!”
“CHARLIE!” she protested.
“Get out of here,” I said, swatting him with the paper. He grabbed it and laughed, and ran out of the kitchen.
I was silently laughing at my wife, while she stewed at me. “What do you have to say?” she demanded.
“Who? Me? Nothing, nothing at all! Would you rather I explained to him that it meant his Mom has big tits!?”
“Behave!” I was sent packing from the kitchen, but she had a smile on her face, too. I figured I’d talk to her about this later that evening, much later, in our bedroom.
Back in Washington we had all sorts of fun on the Armed Service Committee. For one thing, the latest round of the BRAC system was happening in 1995. BRAC stood for Base Realignment And Closure. During World War II and the Cold War the various armed services had built bases all over the place, and as a result we had huge numbers of very expensive bases. Since nobody would allow a base in their district to be closed (“It’s strategically important to defend [fill in the blank]”) but everybody thought that somebody else’s base should be closed (“It’s an outrageous duplication and wasteful spending to defend [fill in the blank]”), they came up with a system. An independent commission would come up with a list of bases to be shrunk or closed. The list could be voted yes or no, but could not be modified. It gave everybody political cover when things started closing.