Like most members of the United States Civil Service, Snodgrass is an early riser. It’s a Civil Service tradition to be at work by seven o’clock, if not earlier, all the better, due to lack of a proper prior interval of sleep, to screw up royally for eight hours before going home. Not that the typical member of the Civil Service isn’t capable of screwing up royally after eight hours of repose, appropriately divided among alpha, beta, gamma and delta wave, REM and deep sleep. Quite the contrary; the United States Civil Service prides itself on its members’ ability to screw up royally anytime, anyplace and under any conditions. Still, there’s nothing they like better than screwing up more stuff by noon than most people screw up in a lifetime.
So, around six-fifteen this morning, Snodgrass was at his desk when I arrived at the Department of Labor, where screwing up the tragic lives and tiny fortunes of ordinary taxpaying members of the American workforce is his continuing job assignment, for which, as a GS-15 in Washington, he receives an annual salary just slightly north of $148,000.
Normally, however, at this time of day Snodgrass would have had his feet up on his desk and be smugly reading the Washington Times, an activity which would continue until about five minutes before the next-earliest bird in the office arrives, predictably, at six-fifty-five. This is as it should be, since, as is well known, the US Civil Service Official Motto reads “There’s no point in working if nobody can see you doing it.” But today, Snodgrass had his head down on his desk, sobbing copiously, his rivulets of miserable tears wetting the headlines on an unopened, unread copy of the Times.
“Good Lord, man,” I exclaimed as I observed that sorry sight, “what on earth is the matter?”
“It’s my daughter,” Snodgrass wailed, not even bothering to look up at me.
“Your daughter, Penelope?”
“Yes,” Snodgrass affirmed, “my dear, sweet little Penny.”
“Has there been some kind of accident?”
“No.”
“Is she ill?”
“No… at least not what you’re thinking, Collins, I’m sure.”
“Did you two have a fight or something?”
“No.”
“Oh. She’s left home, then?”
“Yes,” Snodgrass whimpered, clearly half the man he’d been yesterday afternoon when he called me to arrange a consultation on labor market strategies. “She took off last night, while my wife and I were in bed. She left a note. That’s all – just a note.”
“What did it say?”
Snodgrass withdrew a piece of ruled, yellow legal sized notebook paper from under his sopping-wet newspaper. Penny’s note was damp, but not enough to make the ink run:
Dear Mom and Dad,
I’m eloping to California with Marty. We’re determined to get married, with or without your blessing. I know you don’t approve of Marty, but we’re very much in love, despite what you think of that. I’ll call you right after the ceremony.
Love,
Penny
“Aw, gee,” I commented as I handed the note back to Snodgrass, “don’t take it so hard. Two young people, each hopelessly and foolishly in love with one another – why, that’s a story as old as the pyramids. And besides, even if you and this Marty fellow didn’t get along before the wedding, it’s certainly not uncommon for guys like that to become very satisfactory sons-in-law…”
“Marty’s another girl!”
“Oh.”
“They eloped last night,” Snodgrass explained, “because California just legalized gay marriage and doesn’t have a residency requirement like Massachusetts!”
“Well,” I philosophized, “I’m sure nobody’s going to think the less of you because of what happened. I mean, it’s not like this is the first time a conservative Washingtonian with a powerful government job had to deal with a gay daughter. Take Dick Cheney…”
“Dick Cheney?” Snodgrass roared. “Dick Cheney can go [expletive] himself! When I found out about this Marty woman, any time I brought up Penny’s… relationship with her, all she could talk about was Dick Cheney’s daughter; or sometimes the Indigo Girls or Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. But mostly Dick Cheney’s daughter!”
“Golly,” I opined, “Penny’s such a… feminine young lady, too.”
“She said she’s something called a ‘lipstick lesbian,’” Snodgrass wailed disconsolately.
“So her… friend, Marty, she’s, ah… butch? The masculine element, that is?”
“No,” Snodgrass shook his head as he gazed up at me with red-rimmed eyes, “they’re both lipstick lesbians.”
“In that case,” I speculated, “maybe they’re not really gay.”
“Huh?” Snodgrass squinted at me in utter confusion.
“What I meant to say,” I clarified, “is that perhaps they’re both merely bisexual.”
“Bisexual?” Snodgrass sat up, alarmed. “You mean, you think my daughter and this Marty woman, they have, oh, my God, they have both sets of… of… “
“No,” I interjected, “what you’re thinking of is called an hermaphrodite, and they’re extremely rare. Bisexuality, on the other hand, is quite common. Maybe it’s just a phase they’re going through. A lot of young women take up with each other these days because they find the males in their age cohort unsuitable.”
“Unsuitable?” Snodgrass blinked. “How?”
“Well,” I elaborated, “because of the way the American public education system has been run for the last two or three decades, a lot of young males these days are absurdly immature. Having been coddled in a cocoon of gratuitous personal validation, where the only thing that matters is ensuring that they not develop ‘low self-esteem;’ and having been conditioned to respond to that instead of achievement, quite a few of them can’t cope with the slightest failure or disappointment. Combine such a phenomenon with our society’s traditional focus on unrealistic images of females, and the ubiquitous, spiraling trend toward a culture of instant gratification, and, not to put too fine a point on it, what we’ve got here is a generation of pathetic little snots who would rather hang out in their parents’ basement, whacking off to the whores in Grand Theft Auto than venture outside for a date with a real girl like your daughter.”
“You mean,” Snodgrass inquired, obviously astounded at the prospect, “it’s society’s fault? You mean that’s where all these useless, sniveling thirteen year old boys in thirty year old men’s bodies come from?”
“Essentially,” I confirmed. “So, who can blame young women for shacking up with each other instead of trying to make a go of it with guys like that?”
“So what you’re saying,” Snodgrass continued, following my syllogism, “is that maybe my baby girl isn’t really queer?”
“Yes, it’s quite possible,” I proposed, “that she and her friend Marty are just… experimenting – exploring alteratives to marrying men in their peer group who, after all, still own skateboards and dirt bikes; and, furthermore, still play with them regularly.”
“I see your point,” Snodgrass conceded, withdrawing a tissue from a box in his desk drawer and blowing his nose. “But I don’t know, thinking about it, her being bisexual and all, I just don’t know. It’s not like I believe it’s genetic or anything, Collins. There aren’t any ‘gay genes’ and I doubt there are any ‘bisexual genes,’ either. It’s a moral choice, that’s what I believe. That’s what any good conservative believes! And what if God decides to punish Penny for going to bed with another woman instead of one of those useless males in her cohort? When somebody breaks God’s edicts, you can’t blame society for it. God’s a ‘personal responsibility’ type of Guy, you know, and He doesn’t send abstract concepts like ‘society’ to Hell, either.”
“While it’s true that certain passages of the Old Testament condemn male homosexuality,” I pointed out, “it says nothing about lesbians, and furthermore, there’s nothing in the New Testament about either subject.”
“Are you telling me that God, who remembered to tell us everything in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, forgot to damn lesbians?”
“Essentially.”
“You liberals,” Snodgrass snorted derisively, “no wonder this country is such a mess! Next you’ll tell me the Rapture isn’t in the Bible, either!”
“It’s not. The Rapture was invented and promulgated by American Protestant theologians in the nineteenth century. There isn’t a word about lesbians or the Rapture in either Testament.”
“Oh,” Snodgrass sneered, “and I suppose that ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’ isn’t in the Book of Proverbs?”
“It isn’t anywhere in the Bible.”
“Oh really,” Snodgrass snapped back defiantly, “and I suppose ‘God helps those who help themselves’ isn’t in there, either?”
“You suppose correctly,” I confirmed, “it most certainly is not.”
“And, of course,” Snodgrass concluded, “the Bible says nothing about bisexuals because it took until the twentieth century for liberal psychological pseudo-science to make it up, didn’t it?”
“No one can say why God never mentioned lesbians or bisexuals,” I responded, “but I’m sure He had His reasons, and I’m also sure that if He were concerned about those issues, He would have let us know.”
“God hates fags!” Snodgrass shouted as he leapt up from his chair, leaning across his desk at me, his expression blazing with self-righteous anger. “Everybody knows that!”
“Maybe,” I expanded, like Socrates, “depending on the interpretation of a few verses in the Old Testament, He hates male homosexuals; maybe not. But you certainly can’t say that ‘everybody knows’ God hates lesbians or bisexuals.”
“A fag is a fag is a fag,” Snodgrass muttered.
“With a tip of the Hatlo Hat to Gertrude Stein, perhaps?” I stepped back a bit, in case that one went over his head and he decided to take a swing at me. Instead he just froze.
“Gertrude Stein said ‘a fag is a fag is a fag?’”
“No,” I admonished, “she said ‘a rose is a rose is a rose.’”
“Roses! Fags! What in [expletive] damnation…”
“Fags and roses are all God’s creations,” I reminded him, “are they not?”
At that, Snodgrass collapsed back into his chair and resumed his sobbing. “My grandchildren, Collins! What about my grandchildren?”
“Even if Penny and Marty stay together for the rest of their lives…”
“Don’t even talk about that!” Snodgrass groaned like a man being broken on the rack. “Don’t even mention the possibility!”
“… it could still be okay,” I murmured.
Snodgrass looked up from his weeping, beseeching me. “How?”
“Oh, it’s very simple, really,” I kindly let him know. “The lesbians contact a few HIV-negative and otherwise healthy gay men, who come over and throw a party in the living room. Meanwhile, the lesbian who wants to be the mommy waits in the bedroom while her partner waits in the kitchen, coating the outside of a turkey baster with personal lubricant, then…”
The telephone on Snodgrass’ desk rang. He answered it.
“Hello? Now, now, stop crying. What happened? You did? She did? He did? They are? Okay, okay, princess, don’t worry. Sure. Right away. Okay.”
Snodgrass copied down a telephone number with a 415 Area Code.
“Good. All right. I’ll call back as soon as I’ve taken care of things. Bye-bye, princess! That was Penny,” Snodgrass said, his voice filled with equal parts of happiness and relief. “She said they arrived at San Francisco International Airport last night, but they couldn’t get to City Hall before it closed, even though it stayed open extra late to accomodate all the gay couples who wanted to get marriage certificates after the new law took effect yesterday afternoon. So they went to Marty’s cousin’s house in Oakland, where they were going to stay for their honeymoon. Penny says Marty’s cousin’s brother-in-law, who’s a lumberjack from Oregon, was visiting there, too, and around two-thirty in the morning, – That would be Pacific time, which is what, about forty-five minutes ago? – she walked in on them making love in one of the guest bedrooms. Then she and Marty had a big fight and broke up, and now Penny wants to come home; but she says her credit card is maxed out and can I call the credit card company and get her credit line increased by two thousand dollars so she can fly home right away.”
“Well,” I offered, “looks like you have a few things to do that require your immediate attention. Want to reschedule our appointment?”
“Sure. How about Thursday, same time – here?”
“Very good,” I nodded and began to leave. “See you then.”
“Hey, Collins!” Snodgrass called after me. I stopped. “Since it’s likely Penny’s in a… uh… receptive state of mind now, do you know of any boys about her age who she might, you know, get… interested in? Just to prevent any, ah, you know, similar… uh, problems in the future?”
“Sorry,” I declared, “but all the young men I can think of either already have girlfriends or are totally immature social retards who wouldn’t know what to do with one.”
“Oh well,” Snodgrass sighed, “at least they aren’t queers.”