The Normandie Farm Restaurant in Montgomery County, Maryland has been serving its signature popovers – a confection that’s a cross between a French pastry and a soufflé, since the early nineteen-thirties. As such, it qualifies as a Washington area landmark. That’s because, before 1941, there really wasn’t all that much to the Washington DC area, not even downtown. There was so little, in fact, that a restaurant like Normandie Farm, which has never achieved anything higher than functioning as a venue for Rotary Club and Toastmaster meetings, nevertheless qualifies. The food? Well, it won’t kill you, anyway. The wine list? Oh, please! The service? Mis apologías, por favor, don’t get me started – the last time anybody from France worked in the kitchen, Jacques Derrida was still a virgin.
But when a grateful client invites me to dinner, I go, and, as a professional consultant, I know better than to tell them the truth about where he or she has proposed that we dine. Not wishing to subject my girlfriend Cerise to the place, despite the fact last night was a Saturday, I pleaded a business appointment, expecting to suffer Normandie Farm Restaurant’s well-intentioned and slightly surreal attempts at French cuisine on my own.
“Normandie Farms? Oh, that’s so nostalgic!” How could I have forgotten that Cerise is that most exotic of American species – a native born Washingtonian? As with all the native born Washingtonians worth knowing, her partuition occurred at one of three hospitals – in her case, Georgetown.
“I remember when I was, oh, it couldn’t have been more than five or six, and my parents took Uncle Fred there, when he came to visit Washington with Aunt Betty and my cousins. We all sat at this big, festive round table under quaint, dim chandeliers…”
“You bet,” I assured her, “they haven’t redecorated the place since the 29th Infantry landed on Omaha Beach.”
“And those popovers…. oh, they were soooo yummy.”
My Dear Readers should be advised at this point, that despite being quite the urban sophisticate and a rutting mink in the sack, Cerise is the sort of female human who would insist – as she did – that her mate (me, unfortunately) accompany her to see “Horton Hears a Who” later this week. (More about that only if something noteworthy happens.)
“So you actually want to go?” I know her quite well, since we’ve been dating for years, and even have copies of each other’s house keys. I supposed I was being a bit dense, not having anticipated that she’d eagerly wish to attend.
“You know, Tom, I’d completely forgotten about that place,” she confided, “but yes, now that you’ve mentioned it, I think it would be great – a perfect counterpoint to our usual weekend flings.”
Well, it’s a truly stupid guy who won’t give the nod to taking his Significant Other out for an evening that will cost him much less than half the average, so I enthusiastically agreed.
And so it was, that last night, I sat in the Normandie Farm Restaurant cocktail lounge, waiting for everybody to show up. Waiting, you see, Dear Reader, because I was on time. Well, okay, twenty minutes early. For the record, though, everybody – my grateful client, his mistress (he’s married and his wife thought he was incommunicado at Camp David with Dick Cheney), as well as Cerise, eventually arrived late for our clearly agreed upon hour of mutual rendezvous. Fine by me – that meant I had time for an extra drink or two.
Do I ever order a Tom Collins? Absolutely! Not that I would think of asking for a Tom Collins martini at Normandie Farm, of course. Let Hamlet be haunted by the ghost of his father, not me. As it turned out, the Normandie Farm Restaurant version of the traditional Tom Collins is both weak and inexpertly concocted. Perhaps if I had ordered in Spanish, I might have had a better chance of getting a decent cocktail. Call me stubborn, I guess, for insisting on English all the time, just because this is the United States of America. Oh, and by the way, for those of my Dear Readers who are purists about the issue – the Tom Collins is in fact a cocktail, not a mixed drink. This is because the initial phase of preparation, prior to addition of soda, involves combination of the ingredients in a cocktail vessel with ice, followed by shaking (as would be required for a cocktail containing sugar). Anyway, what I got at Normandie Farm Restaurant was pretty sucky, but it did have some decent gin in it, at least.
There are no stools in front of the bar in the cocktail lounge of the Normandie Farm Restaurant. There are no stools anywhere, actually, only tiny cocktail tables. From the bar, you can’t see seats by the window, because there’s a huge square fire place topped with a big blackened steel chimney vent. So it wasn’t until I rounded it that I spotted Blebs, staring out a window, sitting alone, his table covered with empty cocktail glasses. His eyes were red, his nose aflame – did he even know his name? “Blebs!”
Slowly his massive head turned, staring at me. “Collins? Tom Collins, is that you?”
“Yes,” I vouchsafed, hurrying to sit at the other tiny cocktail chair at his table. “God Lord, man,” I declared, “you’re three sheets to the wind!”
“You would be too, Tom,” he shot back, “if you had my problem.”
“Well, now, Blebs,” I began, “you and I are men of the world, to be sure, and we both know that there’s no problem great enough to get a man arrested by the Maryland State Police for Driving Under the Influence, now is there?”
“Not to worry,” Blebs responded, his eyes bleary and his breath beery, “a baby blue Barwood taxi cab brought me here, and a baby blue Barwood taxi cab is going to take me home.”
“But why,” I enquired, “get snockered here instead of at your house? It’s what, five, maybe ten minutes away, isn’t it?”
“The wife’s having an early spring garden club meeting,” Blebs explained. “The speaker is Principal Curator of Iridaceae at Behnke’s Nurseries.”
“Ah, yes,” I echoed, “the Behnke’s Nurseries?”
“None other,” Blebs replied morosely, draining his drink and raising his hand to signal for more from his apprehensive Hispanic waiter.
“Sir,” the waiter nervously asked, “don’t you think maybe you’ve had enough cocktails for now?”
Blebs expended some effort to focus his bloodshot gaze, but only succeeded in looking right through the cowering waiter. “You think you’ve got problems? All right, let’s say you do – everyone does. Oh, sure, you walked sixteen hundred kilometers from Guatemala so someone could cram you into the dashboard of a pickup truck and get you across the border to fill a job serving me drinks in this mouldy old eatery in Montgomery County. And your job doesn’t pay enough for you to own a motor vehicle or even have a girl friend while you slave away eighteen hours a day and send nearly everything you earn back to your fat, horny, cheating wife and seven kids in Huehuetanango. And the Jew who runs the liquor store in Northwest DC just over the border from where you live with twenty six other illegal immigrants in a condemned Silver Spring squat – you know he takes advantage of you because you’re an illegal alien and can’t open a real bank account. You know that between the criminal fees he cheats you for cashing your pay checks and the bogus charges he reams out of you for sending money home over the telephone, he keeps over twenty percent of what you sweat your butt off to earn, even if it is off the books. And on top of that, since you started puking up what looks like worms, for the first time in your entire life you visited a doctor and when you did that, you found out your body is crawling with contagious communicable Central American parasites, and now you’re deathly afraid that somebody will tell the Montgomery County Health Department and you’ll get arrested, locked up in quarantine and deported. Yeah, okay, okay, those are pretty bad problems, nobody’s saying they aren’t. But I challenge you, nay, I defy you, to match mine – I am a Democratic Super Delegate.”
The waiter blushed bright red. “My sincerest apologies, sir,” he groveled, “I had no idea you were dealing with something like that. Please – tell me what you would like to drink, and I will see to it that not only is it a very generous double, but also that it is made exclusively with top-shelf ingredients and completely on the house, free, and without charge, and God strike me dead if it is not here on your table within five minutes!”
Blebs, obviously satisfied with having gained the upper hand, turned to me for advice. “What should I ask him for, Tom?”
“Bring this gentleman a Margarita,” I told the waiter, “a real one, served up, mind you, in a cocktail glass with its rim coated in kosher rock salt, and made with fresh lime juice and simple syrup, not that low-life rail sour mix that smells like Pine Sol, okay?”
The waiter nodded, scurrying off.
“Good thing for him I didn’t have to explain my problem to the manager,” Blebs commented.
“No doubt about that,” I concurred. “My most heartfelt condolences.”
“Thanks,” Blebs said, taking a deep and significant sip from my drink, “I appreciate your sympathy. Damn lot of talking a Democratic Super Delegate has to do in order to get decent free drink around here, though, isn’t it?”
“Well,” I observed, “everything is a bit dearer these days, what with oil over a hundred dollars a barrel, our balance of trade going south, the national debt exploding, the stock market collapsing, the bond market imploding, unemployment running rampant and the dollar floating, waiting for somebody to flush it.”
“Right!” Blebs sat up, invigorated by the mention of the challenges to the American Way of Life that face us today. “Collins, you hit that damn nail right on the [expletive] head! But instead of doing that, like they should be, what are those two jerkoffs up to?”
“Pardon me,” I asked, “but which two jerkoffs? After all, Washington is chock full of jerkoffs.”
“Damn me to Hell if it isn’t,” Blebs agreed. “Jerkoffs in Congress, jerkoffs in the Pentagon, jerkoffs on the Supreme Court – but most of all, jerkoffs in the Executive Branch.”
“Amen to that, Parson,” I answered, “you be preachin’ to de choir now.”
“But the biggest jerkoffs – you know who they are?”
“Let me guess,” I ventured, “would they be the United States Civil Service?”
“Yeah,” Blebs ejaculated, slamming his hand on the tiny cocktail table with such force that it not only shook, but created such a rickety racket that nearby patrons turned in our direction, attempting to discern the nature of such an egregious commotion. “And who’s the Grand Jerkoff? Who’s the People’s Preeminent Pudding Puller?”
“The President?”
“Correct – POTUS, Leader of the United States Civil Service, Galactic Legion of Total Jerkoffs. POTUS – First in War, First in Peace and First Among the Hanky Holding Hierarchy of Federal Jerkoffs – the GSA, the NSA, the EPA, HUD, NASA, FDIC, the CPSC, OSHA, NIH, DHS, Social Security, Health and Human Services, FDA, the Justice Department, the State Department; Interior, Commerce, Agriculture, Treasury…
“Your Margarita, sir,” the waiter panted breathlessly.
“Oh, yeah… thanks,” Blebs continued, “… the lot of them! Jerkoffs, that’s what they are, half-witted, incompetent, lazy, featherbedding, nepotistic, corrupt, self-serving, dishonest, money burning jerkoffs!”
“So,” I concluded, “you’re talking about Hillary and Barack, then?”
“Yeah,” Blebs moaned between sips, “them. They want to be POTUS, Emperor of All Federal Jerkoffs. My problem is, they think that to get there, have to start acting like jerkoffs right now. And to make matters worse, they both figure the best way to achieve complete, asinine, world-class jerkoff-ness is to be complete, asinine world-class jerkoffs to each other!”
“I’ve noticed,” I agreed. “But I don’t understand. Why don’t they target their world-class, asinine jerkoff talents at John McCain? They’re both Democrats, after all, and last time I checked, McCain was some kind of Republican, I think.”
“Because of the Rule,” Blebs confided, taking a deep drag from his Margarita.
“What rule,” I queried, “might that be?”
“The Democratic Party Circle Jerk Firing Squad Rule,” Blebs confided. “It’s been around for nearly two hundred years. The Rule says, that whenever Democrats form a firing squad, they have stand in a circle like a bunch of retarded jerkoffs.”
“But why the hell,” I protested, “would they behave like that?”
“Tradition!” Blebs took a particularly deep swallow before going on. “Hubert Humphrey did it; George McGovern did it; Walter Mondale did it; Michael Dukakis did it; Al Gore did it; Jim Kerry did it; and Jesus Christ, Tom, Adlai Stevenson did it twice! By the time they and their opponents for the Democratic presidential nomination got done denigrating, insulting and smearing one another, explaining to anyone who would listen, in excruciating and gory detail, why their fellow Democrats weren’t qualified to be Grand Jerkoff, they had done such a splendid job that the voters sincerely believed every word all of them had said, and so consequently, they elected a Republican!”
“And that,” I gently pressed him to divulge, “is what you see shaping up?”
“That,” he confessed, “is why I’m getting [expletive]-faced at Normandie Farm while my wife listens to a lecture on crocuses, daffodils, snowdrops and early tulip varieties.” Blebs slurped another prodigious swig. “And, I’m sure, buying another seventy five hundred dollar annual lawn care and landscaping contract, complete with a new set of young studs for her to watch getting sweaty in the summer sun.”
“So both the Clinton and Obama campaigns are after your support, then?”
“My support?” Blebs snorted derisively. “They’re after my athletic supporter – or perhaps I should say, what’s in it!”
“But you’re a Super Delegate,” I pointed out. “By definition, as a loyal and long-serving Democratic party functionary, you enjoy a rare privilege, that of attending the party convention, weighing the issues against the exigences, and making up your own mind, in the light of your valuable personal political experience, judiciously informed by the inspiration of our Founding Fathers, as to which Democratic candidate you, as a Super Delegate, shall ultimately cast your vote. So why be so despondent?”
“Because,” Blebs admitted, “my wife demands that I sell my vote out to the one who will a guarantee me an appointment as United States ambassador to France.” Blebs sobbed, draining his drink as he motioned to summon his hapless Guatemalan waiter.
“And?”
“I can’t figure out how to tell her that even Democratic Super Delegates don’t have that kind of clout.”