After a session of particularly grueling Monday morning meetings with unusually ignorant, extraordinarily obtuse and gratuitously argumentative federal bureaucrats of the United States Environmental Protection Agency down at 12th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest, I was ready to go home early and feel sorry for myself in the company of a nice, stiff mixture of Bombay Sapphire gin and Schweppes tonic over some Evian ice cubes. But on my way out of the building, I got buttonholed by Marcus, who has worked for the EPA his entire life. Well, since he got out of graduate school, anyway. His family name goes back to merry old England, where he can trace his ancestry all the way to the Praetor of Londinium. He’s High Church Episcopalian, of course, and one of the few liberals who not only escaped the mercenary ax men (and women) of both Bush administrations, but survived both terms of the Reagan Administration as well.
“Tom! Hold on there!” Marcus pleaded as I pressed toward the street and the surcease of my existential agony. Recognizing the voice, my better nature, nuisance that it is, restrained me.
“Marcus,” I greeted him both cordially and with caution – Marcus never has simple problems, “what a pleasant surprise,” I lied, “how’s it going?”
“Spitzer, Tom!” Marcus was beside himself with anxiety. “Have you heard about Eliot Spitzer?”
Of course I knew who Eliot Spitzer is – he’s the governor of New York. But, having been in meetings all morning, I didn’t know what Marcus was about to tell me.
“They’ve got him on prostitution. The Emperors Club VIP!”
“Oh, really?” I pondered for a moment. “Interesting. It seems to me that name rings a bell. Yes,” I said, stroking my chin in deep thought, “I remember now – my college girlfriend, Veronica, who decided to impose on our friendship by coming to Washington after her house in Malibu burned down and then by moving into my home in Great Falls. She mentioned that business back in December, and told me it’s an escort service that books dates out of a Web site.”
“It sure does,” Marcus affirmed, “and they work tricks here in Washington out of the Mayflower Hotel.”
“That certainly explains the Mayflower parking garage stubs littering the floor of Veronica’s BMW,” I observed. “But hey, she pays half the mortgage and utilities to live at my place, and Great Falls isn’t cheap.”
“Look, Tom,” Marcus beseeched, “I’m a liberal, okay? Far be it from me to judge your room mate for what she does to earn a living, as long as it doesn’t violate the United Nations Universal Declaration of Rights or anything like that. But this Spitzer thing, it’s got me between a rock and a hard place.”
“How so?”
“Spitzer made a lot of enemies while he was a New York government lawyer, particularly as Attorney General. It looks like they found out about his, ah, patronage of the Emperors Club VIP, and pulled some strings down here in DC to get the FBI to investigate. They wiretapped his cell phone and nailed him.”
“Gee whiz,” I exclaimed, “I guess His Excellency, Governor Eliot Spitzer, seems to have allegedly broken the laws of New York State and possibly those of the United States, as well. If such charges prove to be true, his continued tenure in that high office of public trust might become somewhat problematic. But why are you soliciting me to help him?”
“Forget about him!” Marcus emphatically declared, “I’m the one who you have to help! My cousin who works over at Justice called me to meet him at the Occidental for lunch. That’s where he told me about the FBI list.”
“A list?” I knew the FBI loves lists – actually, all the federal bozos in Washington love lists.
“An official FBI list of Emperors Club VIP customers. He said Spitzer is Client Number 9.”
“And your problem,” I prompted, “is…”
“That I’m Client Number 69!” Marcus blushed, hanging his head in shame.
“You are Client Number 69?” I was shocked. “I’m shocked, Marcus,” I told him. “Here you are, a man with a…” I pulled up short, realizing that I wasn’t sure. “Have you married Peggy yet?”
“Well… no,” Marcus confessed, “you remember how that all happened, when she and I were dating…”
“For like, five years,” I interjected, “if I recall correctly.’
“Uh-huh, about that long,” Marcus agreed, “and then she got pregnant. So it’s not like we decided to get married or anything.”
“Okay,” I conceded, “that’s up to you two, I guess, but nevertheless, here you are a guy with a woman and a baby at home, and, my God, you’re… making whoopie with a call girl?”
“Yeah,” Marcus admitted, his voice choking with shame.
“Magilla Gorilla humping vanilla in Manila, Marcus,” I admonished, “I don’t have to be Warren Buffet to figure out that any nookie-nacky ring the Governor of New York gets his magic twanger plucked by has got to cost, big time. What in blue blazes were you paying?”
“Over two…” Marcus gagged in embarrassment, trying to get the words out, “thousand an hour.”
“What?” Marcus had me completely flabbergasted. “Marcus, I’m completely flabbergasted,” I told him. “You, of all people, who are so notoriously cheap, someone who makes Scrooge McDuck look like a spendthrift…”
“I am not cheap,” Marcus protested.
“Oh yeah? You should hear what Peggy tells Cerise,” I responded, quite well informed due to my own girlfriend’s love of gossip. “Who eats homemade spaghetti with Food Lion ground beef and Hunt’s tomato sauce five times a week? Who served that very dish to Peggy’s family after they drove all the way here from Wisconsin, and, what’s more, used water from the basement sump to make it so he didn’t have to pay for a plumber to come fix his backed-up septic system on an Easter Sunday? Whose idea of a romantic day at the seashore is windsurfing for six hours, followed by four more scanning the beach with a metal detector? Who expects the woman to go Dutch, even at nickle-and-dime clip joints like T.G.I Friday’s, Ruby Tuesday, Beningan’s, Applebee’s, Bugaboo Creek and Outback Steakhouse? Who has to rotate restaurants on a six month cycle because he tips worse than a bull dyke? Who buys one advance ticket for a movie, a sports event or a play and thinks that standing in line with his date while she waits to buy hers at the box office is normal? Who looks for women to date at swing dances because he knows swing dancers don’t drink and he wants to save money by having a girlfriend who doesn’t order expensive wine or cocktails when he goes out with them? Who makes a GS-15 salary, but still pulls out a tape measure and argues with impoverished West Virginia rednecks delivering his firewood about the customary and accepted dimensions of a cord? Who sets his thermostat at 55 degrees in December and at 85 degrees in July? Who re-gifts Christmas fruitcakes and cheap Chinese ceramics to people who give him serious designer loot and bling?”
“I do,” Marcus admitted.
“And that’s not cheap?”
“Yeah, okay,” Marcus relented, “I’m a tightwad.”
“A legendary, renowned tightwad,” I emphasized. “A tightwad, I dare say, of mythic status, even. And you paid a prostitute two grand an hour?”
“Yeah.”
“Good Lord, man,” I demanded, “in the name of all that’s holy – why?”
Marcus averted his gaze from mine, licked his lips nervously, then set his jaw with a steely resolve and looked me straight in the eye. “She made me feel like a conservative Republican stud-hunk.”
“What?”
“She made me feel powerful. Like a major hottie, like I was in charge, like… like… like I was Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
“You paid thirty three dollars a minute to feel like the Governater?”
“Yeah, ‘Hasta la vista, baby’ – like that. Tough. Worldly. Pumped up. Commanding. ‘If it bleeds, we can kill it,’ that kind of thing.”
“And you don’t get that at home?”
Marcus sighed loudly in frustration. “Are you kidding? My house smells like dirty diapers and sour breast milk. Peggy starts the same argument with me, every day, every night – she just disguises it, that’s all.”
“She wants you to marry her,” I surmised without much effort, “that’s it, right?”
“Yeah,” Marcus shrugged, “but I don’t know if I can spend the rest of my life with a feminist. They’re kind of mean, you know. I don’t think they actually like men, either. It’s more as if men exist for them to blame stuff on, and to pay them back, all the time, for something or another men supposedly did a long time ago. Face it – feminists are domineering ball-cutters, Tom. Feminism has nothing whatsoever to do with women’s rights, equal pay for equal work, reproductive freedom or any of that stuff – it’s about demonizing men, and hell, yeah, even a world-class skinflint tightwad like me will pay ridiculous amounts of money to escape them, even for just little while.”
“I can’t say I would get far arguing with you about that,” I averred, “but your problem, I take it, is the repercussions that could ensue when the FBI makes that list public and it’s finally revealed that you are Client Number 69. And to that I would say, ‘What in the name of Beelzebub’s bile stained beozar are you worried about?’ You’re a member of the United States Civil Service, Marcus! Therefore, by definition, you have no responsibility for anything you do. You are obligated to nothing and accountable to no one, and you can never be fired. Besides, as a federal bureaucrat, you are a complete nobody – Spitzer’s an elected official – that’s a totally different kettle of fish, right there. The public cares if their elected officials are hypocrites who commit criminal acts. They voted for those idiots, you know – so the people identify with them. But federal government employees? Come on, gimme a break! The public expects federal government employees to be hypocrites and crooks, just like they expect them to be incompetent, bumbling morons who couldn’t do their jobs properly if their pathetic, meaningless, horrid little lives depended on it!”
“I understand all that,” Marcus assured me. “And pretty much everybody who works for the EPA is a prostitute for polluters and big corporations. I only managed to avoid that by working in an ivory tower policy studies office and becoming the world’s foremost expert on sea level rise due to global warming caused by anthropogenic green house gas emissions. Back at the start of my career, the mathematical models all said none of the effects we were studying would happen until well after we had all retired. Then reality caught up with us. The sea level is rising, real fast, right now.” Marcus shook his head, sadly resigned to his fate. “So we all had to become prostitutes, too.”
“So the entire EPA is nothing more than a huge whore house?”
“Well,” Marcus asked, “how else would you expect a federal agency founded by Richard Nixon to end up?”
“Good point,” I complimented, figuring I might as well, so as to make the poor devil feel a bit better. “So, ah, if you’re not worried about your job security, what’s bothering you about being Client Number 69?”
Marcus’ voice took on a slightly husky quality, as if he were about to do something unmanly, such as cry, for example. “I’m afraid that Peggy will leave me.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute – right there, Bucky,” I shouted, although not too loudly, since we were, after all, standing in the EPA Headquarters lobby. “Year after year,” I continued, lowering my voice carefully, “you two practiced coitus interruptus…”
“You knew that?” Marcus whispered at me in utter disbelief.
“So Peggy told Cerise,” I replied.
“Women!” Marcus exclaimed, slapping himself in the head.
“And you called that a relationship?” Frankly, I just had to ask.
“Uh, yeah, I guess so.”
“Incredible. Then, one night, she talks you into leaving it in, and bingo! She’s pregnant.”
“Ah, right. So?”
“And you two are adults with professional jobs, at least in the broadest definition, what with both of you working for the Civil Service. But the way you behaved was no different from a couple of pimply teenagers, who, you must admit, would at least have the fact that they were a couple of pimply teenagers to use as an excuse.”
Marcus fumed a bit, but after a minute, he nodded affirmation. “I agree. Peggy and me, the whole thing, it’s ridiculous, it’s absurd.”
“So why do you contribute an aerial fornication?”
Marcus blushed deep red, right up to his ears, realizing that throwing a smokescreen of lies in my face was totally futile. “All right, Tom,” he muttered in defeat, “it’s not Peggy either.”
“Then what is it?” A long silence passed between us as I waited for his reply.
“I’m sure that my mother is going to kill me, Tom. She’s absolutely going to kill me. What should I do?”
“On the contrary, my dear Marcus,” I advised him, glancing meaningfully at my watch, “I’m absolutely sure she’s going to be completely and rather pleasantly surprised that you had the guts to do it.”