Yesterday around eleven forty-five in the morning, my doorbell chimed. But when I opened the front door, I saw only my dear brother Rob Roy, standing there with a couple of grocery bags.
“Where’s Jason?” I asked, peering past Rob, thinking perhaps he was approaching, taking up the rear with his own arm load of supplies for his weekly cooking lesson. “And how come you’re so late today?”
“He’s downtown, with Katje and Paisley,” Rob explained as he walked past me into the kitchen. “They’re demonstrating, outside the Democratic National Committee meeting,” he continued as he placed his grocery bags on the kitchen island.
“But your wife, Jason and Jason’s girl friend are all Obama supporters,” I pointed out, more than a bit irritated. “Didn’t they hear that the Obama campaign has asked all Obama supporters to stay away from the DNC meeting today?”
“Oh, they heard the instructions, all right,” Rob affirmed as he began unpacking groceries, “but Katje convinced Jason and Paisley that, while what Obama wants is important, what they want for him is more important than that. So this time,” he concluded as I watched two huge, grass-fed porterhouse buffalo steaks hit the counter, “it’s just you and me.”
“And,” I observed, “a couple of monstrous slabs of meat.”
“Well,” Rob offered, a bit sheepishly, “I figured you’d never bother with teaching Jason something as simple as grilling steaks on a barbecue.”
“Actually,” I riposted as I headed out to the deck, “I was getting around to that. But what the hell, let’s get started, it’s nearly time for lunch, and it will take a while until the charcoal fire burns down to the appropriate level for grilling.”
“What,” Rob inquired, somewhat puzzled, “we’re not going to use your hot-[expletive] gas grill?”
“Of course not,” I told him as I rolled a small briquette grill onto a flagstone slab set into the earth a few feet from the deck stairs leading to my back lawn, “I only use that when I’m entertaining large parties. There’s just the two of us, and as long as we’re going to do nothing but grill a couple of steaks and vegetables; and cook those Idaho potatoes and ears of sweet corn I notice you also brought, then why not go for the maximum cookout flavors? So choose,” I cheerfully requested, holding up two bags of wood chips, “between mesquite and apple wood.”
“Right now?”
“Naw,” I guffawed, “not necessarily. The chips have to be soaked in water, then spread over a bed of coals. It’ll take about thirty minutes to get the coals going properly, after which, I’ll put the potatoes in. Then it will be another forty minutes or so before the corn goes into the coals and we put the grill on to start cooking the vegetables and the steaks. So you have at least an hour to make up your mind.”
While the charcoal burned down out back, we watched the DNC meeting on my HD TV in the den, enjoying a couple of chilled “Berliner Weisse mit Schuss” – German wheat beers into which I had poured shots of Chambord.
“You ever notice,” Rob asked as we watched Harold Ickes on one side of the split screen and Wolf Blitzer on the other, “how much uglier people look in high definition?”
“Well,” I allowed, savoring rich raspberry flavor as it mingled with the smooth, full bodied, yeasty taste of a fine white brew, “I think it’s more a question of how previous definition standards obscured the truth, because I’ve actually seen Harold Ickes and Wolf Blitzer in person, and the fact is, both of them really are that butt-ugly.”
“What I don’t get,” Rob mused, “is why the DNC has to do all this stupid [expletive] in the first place.”
“Oh, that,” I replied mordantly. “Yeah, it took, as they say up in Buffalo, one hell of a lot of work to get everything into a sweaty, stinking pig [expletive] like this. Funny that you should mention HD, Rob, because, actually, the whole thing started with television.”
“TV?” Rob was clearly mystified.
“No,” I assured him, “you didn’t hear me wrong. I said ‘television.’ You see, Rob, back before television, presidential primaries were covered pretty much equally by newspapers, radio and news reels.”
“News reels?”
“They don’t have them anymore. But prior to the establishment of commercial broadcast television, when people went to the movies, which was about twice a week, right before the cartoon…”
“Cartoon?”
“Yeah, back in the day, they used to show a cartoon before the feature. That was, well, the reason the studios made cartoons in the first place, you know. It’s not like they had anywhere else to show them.”
“Oh, right – no TV,” Rob concurred, nodding his head.
“Uh-huh. So anyway, a news reel was a short subject, like a cartoon, somewhat akin to a modern television news broadcast, shown before the feature. It was a major medium for people to get news.”
“Right,” Rob assured me, “I understand now. People would get their news from papers like the Washington Post, and from news reels.”
“And the radio,” I added. “But then TV came along and changed all that, and when it did, the TV network executives decided it would be good for ratings if they had live coverage of presidential primaries, with their news anchors staying up until midnight, reporting on exit polls and forecasting a winner. It was real excitement, they figured, excitement that differentiated TV from radio, newspapers and news reels. It was immediate – it was like you were right there with the TV reporters. The viewing public could see and hear everything as soon as it happened. Well, with that kind of emphasis on immediacy and so forth, it’s hardly a surprise what happened with New Hampshire.”
“Which,” Rob queried, “was what?”
“Television’s new emphasis on immediacy gave particular importance to the first presidential primary – the New Hampshire primary. Then, over the decades, as television became the most important, and, for some people, the only source of news, the perceived importance of the New Hampshire primary grew all out of proportion to the importance of New Hampshire with respect to anything else. I mean, really, New Hampshire? Gimme a break! It’s this tiny little New England backwater that’s so insignificant, it makes states like Vermont and Connecticut look urbane and sophisticated. But every four years, Katie bar the door, because here come all the presidential hopefuls, shaking New Hampshire hands, hugging New Hampshire babies and kissing New Hampshire butts, every one of them followed by a TV crew. It was only a matter of time before another useless, jerkwater state tried to get in on the action.”
“Which useless jerkwater state was that?” Rob yelled from the kitchen as he pour rather more Chambord than is generally considered necessary into another frosty wheat beer.
“Iowa,” I yelled back. “Yeah, here came Iowa, with its party caucuses and TV photo opportunities where the candidates could display their prowess with bull [expletive] by shoveling some of the real article while listening to some hick Iowa farmer complain about how Washington doesn’t pay him enough taxpayer’s money not to grow corn. The whole thing got to be so bad, it eventually dawned on everybody that it was totally ridiculous. I mean, really, think about it – here were these two dinky little states deciding who the President was going to be, essentially. The concept was so idiotic, even a bunch of benighted, nose-picking morons like the American electorate could figure out it was totally messed up. So, after about half a century of that nonsense, the two major political parties finally decided to do something about it.”
Rob plunked down on the couch next to me, took a swig and gave me a curious look. “What did they do?”
“A move that bespoke the brilliance of the typical party hack – they added two more states to the early primaries and caucuses, two states that, they reasoned, would balance the influence of a New England state and a Midwestern state – a vast, practically unpopulated Western state and a backward, inconsequential Southern state. And thus were determined the primary dates for two new places where presidential candidates could make fools of themselves while the whole world watched – Nevada and South Carolina. But, despite the fact that most of the other states went with the program and didn’t squawk, the Democrats in Michigan and the Republicans in Florida didn’t like it.”
“How come?” Rob asked as he stared in disbelief at the Democratic National Committee. “Damn! Did you ever see a more pug-ugly collection of idiotic wonks in your entire life?”
“Rob, I hate to tell you this,” I sadly informed him, “but compared to an average room full of federal civil servants, those bozos you’re looking at right now are not only as handsome as Screen Actors’ Guild Award winners, they’re also as smart as the last three physicists who walked off with the Nobel Prize. And the reason the Florida Republicans and the Michigan Democrats were displeased with the new presidential primary deal was that they knew big states like theirs had been given the short end of the stick for decades, and even with compromises like Super Tuesday, voters in Des Moines and Manchester still had about ten times the influence voters in states like theirs did. Then the two states that had already been given the advantage of earlier decision dates decided to get cute. South Carolina moved its primary to an earlier date and Nevada moved its caucuses to an earlier date. That prompted New Hampshire and Iowa to get into a spitting contest with them about who was really going to be first, and when Florida Republicans and Michigan Democrats saw that, they decided they were going to do something like that, too; and they did. Then along came Barack Obama.”
“What,” Rob demanded, “you saying he screwed everything up?”
“Not really, at least from an objective point of view. But from the perspective of Hillary Clinton’s supporters, yes, Barack Obama totally screwed up everything they care about.”
“Why?” Rob sat up indignantly. “Just because he happened to get more votes than her?’
“Well, actually,” I pointed out, “as of today, anyway, more Americans have voted for Hillary Clinton than have voted for Barack Obama. Not that it matters – what does matter is the number of Democratic convention delegates each candidate has now, as opposed to how many they’ll have…”
“Holy [expletive]!” Rob shouted, gesticulating wildly at the screen. “Look! They’re talking about Florida! They say the proposal is that, in return for being seated at the convention, each member of the Florida delegation only gets half a vote!”
“Interesting compromise,” I mused. “It reminds me of another compromise the Founding Fathers made when they wrote the Constitution.”
Intrigued by the surreal absurdities before him, Rob took a long pull off his beer while staring intently at the screen. “Which compromise was that?”
“Well, for purposes of enumerating the population to determine apportionment of the House of Representatives, the original Constitution of the United States specified that certain males were to be counted as three-fifths of a person.”
“Damn,” Rob philosophized, “you learn something new every day, don’t you? Which males were those, the gay guys?”
“Ah, no, not really. People didn’t really talk about gay stuff very much back then. There was no gay movement, no gay agenda, no gay voting bloc.”
“You’d sure as hell never know it from the way they dressed,” Rob quipped.
“Good point,” I conceded, determining that it might not be terribly productive to tell Rob exactly whom it was the Founding Fathers’ original intention indicated the Constitution of the United States consider 60 percent human; and hence deciding to change the subject, “I’m going to go slice up the veggies and put them in a nice marinade.”
Which I did, accompanied by a nice glass of Bordeaux. Then, since my own original intention had been to form a more perfect union of Mascarpone cheese, espresso nectar and high liquor dark chocolate for today’s luncheon dessert, I embarked on making tiramisu.
Midway through that, I heard Rob exclaim “It’s them! It’s them! Tom! Come quick! I see Katje, Jason and Paisley! They’re outside, screaming at the Clinton demonstrators!” I did nothing, of course, since, I was certain that not only would such a glimpse be extremely short lived, but I also already know what my sister-in-law, nephew, and nephew’s girlfriend look like.
So in went the potatoes, each coated with white truffle Tuscan olive oil, tied with a sprig of fresh rosemary, and wrapped in aluminum foil, followed by the sweet corn, which I like to roast untouched, in the husk. After that, I found a few other things to do in the kitchen, including making some biscotti of various flavors for the coming weeks. All the while, of course, Rob got more and more stoked on my extensive collection of fermented and distilled potables, reaching a state, round about the time it was proper to start grilling the steaks, where he was yelling at the television with considerable gusto. In the end, I had to decided on which smoke wood to use, as Rob became too, shall we say, politically engaged to be bothered with such questions. “I don’t care,” I recall him saying, “as long as that [expletive] [expletive] Hillary Clinton doesn’t [expletive] the election and hand our government over to the [expletive] [expletive] [expletive] Republicans for another [expletive] eight years!”
One whiff of mesquite-grilled, grass-fed buffalo steak, however, proved quite sufficient to pull him away from watching the Obama and Clinton campaign organizations, with a supporting cast from the Democratic National Committee, make total fools of themselves, the electorate and everyone else within reach of a television signal. Not that it could keep Rob from babbling like a lunatic about the legitimacy of the Michigan primary and other such subjects between bites.
Dessert, nevertheless, doth indeed have charms to sooth the savage political breast, and by the time he had finished his second helping of tiramisu, I dare say he was rational again. It had put Rob in the perfect state of mind, it turned out, to go back in the den and get worked up again. Fortunately, just as I finished loading the dishwasher and realized that I was fresh out of excuses not to join him, the doorbell rang once more.
It was my girlfriend, Cerise, who had arrived early in anticipation of an afternoon visit from Ellen, my masseuse. Ellen and I have known each other for years and years, going back to our college days, when she was putting herself through school performing as a stripper in local night clubs. Even before graduating with her degree in kinethesiology, she had drafted me as her guinea pig for massage technique practice, and now that she possesses not only several degrees, but one of the most sought-after pairs of hands (and feet) in the country, because of my years of service as her lab rat, I can still get her to make house calls; although they are by no means inexpensive.
It was only a few minutes later that Cerise was back downstairs, fresh from the shower in her favorite fuzzy bathrobe, ready to feel the sweet liquid touch of Ellen’s hands.
Now, Dear Reader, I don’t know whether you have gotten the word yet, but, after about a century, genuine absinthe is once again available in the United States, so I prepared some for Cerise. This involves pouring a shot of absinthe in a cocktail glass, placing an implement known as an absinthe spoon over it, and placing a sugar cube on the spoon. The absinthe spoon has slats cut in it, so when you execute the next step in the process, which is to pour cool water over the sugar cube, the water runs through the spoon into the absinthe. While you are doing that, just as Hemingway described, the absinthe turns from clear to milky white. ”The wormwood makes it do that,” as Ernie so succinctly put it.
Then I prepared some absinthe for myself, and we sipped for a while until Ellen arrived. Then I went upstairs, took a quick shower while Ellen set up her massage table, came downstairs in my favorite silk bathrobe and stretched out for ninety minutes of bliss, Ellen’s relaxation recordings obscuring, for the most part, all the hell Rob was raising out in the den while he watched the DNC make history. Cerise, meanwhile, lounged on the couch, sipping another absinthe, until her turn came. Then I dismounted Ellen’s massage couch, prepared another absinthe, and lounged while watching her massage Cerise.
If there is a better way to spend three hours on a Saturday afternoon, I am certain of one thing – it sure as hell ain’t baseball. Alas, the better something is, the quicker its enjoyment passes, and, after finishing Cerise and sharing another absinthe with us, Ellen reluctantly said goodbye.
The afterglow, no doubt considerably amped up by the absinthe, nevertheless persisted for another half hour at least, until Rob finally burst into the living room, finding Cerise and me snuggling on the couch, just about as unconcerned with the Democratic primary as two people could possibly be.
“Tom!” Rob yelled, clearly a nervous wreck. “Florida and Michigan are getting seated, but only with half a vote for every delegate! Clinton’s Michigan people are [expletive] bull [expletive]! They say Obama took his name off the ballot because he wanted to hedge his bets, not because he was following the rules! They claim that the DNC high-jacked at least four delegates from Hillary to Obama! They’re saying that the DNC is substituting the prejudices of 30 people for the will of 600,000 voters – in a state where Obama wasn’t even on the ballot, Tom! He wasn’t even on the ballot! You know what this shows, Tom? It shows that Hillary’s just going to keep on pushing, that’s what! And you know what that means, Tom? It means she cares more about her own ego than she does about electing a Democrat president of this country, that’s what it means! The Clinton supporters all swear that if Obama wins the nomination, they’ll never vote for him, and the Obama supporters say they’ll never vote for Clinton! We’re doomed, I tell you! Doomed! And on top of that, after the crowds broke up outside the hotel, Katje got attacked by a Clinton supporter in a bar! Some [expletive] stupid cow who loves Hillary pointed out Katje’s tatoos and called her a dyke, so Katje said ‘Me, a dyke? I thought all the dykes were voting for Clinton!’ and then this Clinton [expletive] punched Katje in the face, or so she says, anyhow, and now I have to go down to DC and bail her out!”
“Okay, Rob,” I spoke up, pointing at a glass of absinthe “but before you go, drink that. I made one for you; figured you might need it.”
“What is it?” Rob eyed the cool, milky liquid curiously.
“Absinthe,” I replied.
“Absinthe!” Rob repeated, shocked. “Isn’t that supposed to drive you crazy?”
“Rob,” I assured him, “compared to what watching the presidential primaries on television this year has done to people’s sanity, I’d say a glass of absinthe might as well be a vanilla milk shake.”