Friday, my office was closed. It was the day after Thanksgiving, after all. But five-thirty p.m. found me downtown anyway, at the Willard Hotel’s Round Robin Bar, quaffing one of their signature branch water mint juleps, just as Mark Twain might have done there, more than a century ago. Hell, I could have been sitting on one of the same bar stools he used. I mean, I must have sat on all of them at one time or another by now, anyhow, and it’s a safe bet that Mr. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, as fond of bourbon as he was of cigars, sat on all of them at one time or another, too.
Bourbon certainly seemed an appropriate drink before a dinner at the Willard’s exquisite dining room; with both serving as a proper prelude to a night at the theater, where Cerise and I took in August: Osage County over at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater. It got the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play, and, what’s more, it stars Estelle Parsons. The story of her life gives me hope. She was, you see, a lawyer who quit the profession to become an artist. Ms. Parsons received an Oscar for her work as Best Supporting Actress in Bonnie and Clyde, and was elected a member of the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2004 – but I suppose most people remember her as the actress who played Roseanne’s mother in the eponymous situation comedy. Sure, the tickets were eighty bucks a piece, but, as any of my many clients will confirm, you get what you pay for – and the play, by the way, was nothing less than absolutely splendid. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Cerise for suggesting it. I’ve always loved her taste in theater.
About half way through my mint julep, Unsinger plopped down next to me and ordered a double zombie.
“A bit early for something with that kind of octane rating,” I observed.
“Tom Collins!” Unsinger nearly jumped out of his skin. “You, won’t,” he beseeched, glancing around nervously, “tell anyone I ordered a double zombie at the Willard, will you?”
“My lips,” I assured him, “are sealed.”
“It’s… it’s just not… you know, the kind of thing…” he muttered, “that… well, that…”
“Someone in the Secret Service would normally do,” I broke in.
“Exactly,” he affirmed, nodding vigorously. “And, for the record, I’m off duty now; and I’ve had one totally rotten [expletive] day, Tom, no doubt about it, and I, well, I really, really need to relax…”
“Washington DC,” I informed him, “has always had one of the highest rates – if not the highest rate – of per capita alcohol consumption in the United States. It’s all these people with all these highly stressful jobs.”
“Seem to me,” Unsinger commented, cracking a broad smile as his drink arrived, “that they ought to factor out Congress and the diplomatic community before they promulgate a statistic like that.”
“Alas,” I commiserated, sipping my mint julep, “there’s no practical way to do so.”
“Damn shame,” Unsinger griped as he soothed himself with a long, cool draught of that devilish concoction of rums, brandies, liqueurs, juices and exotic fruit syrups which comprises the fabled Willard Round Robin Zombie. “Because we folks in the Secret Service don’t actually drink all that much, if you average it out.”
“I’m sure you don’t,” I agreed. “And so, when you say you had one totally rotten [expletive] day, I believe you. A United States senator, on the other hand, if they don’t get a hummer from that cute new summer intern the first morning she starts work, why, that’s plenty excuse enough for them to have a Willard Double Zombie – for lunch.”
“[Expletive] right,” Unsinger groused, diving into Lake Zombie for another touch on the bottom. “[Expletive] politicians,” he exhaled when he finally came up for air. “Makes me wonder sometimes why I have this [expletive] job.”
“Because you’re a jock from a poor inner-city neighborhood or a farm boy with mud between his toes,” I suggested, “who, frankly, isn’t capable of anything better than taking a bullet for the President?”
“Yeah,” Unsinger replied, “I mean, no,” he corrected, now obviously a bit muzzy from the initial effects of one of the world’s most potent alcohol drinks. “I mean, yeah… we’re suppose to jump into the line of fire, but hell, we do wear these [expletive] [expletive] hard [expletive] bullet-proof vests, you know. And we do all kinds of other stuff…”
“Like White House security?” I needled.
“Oh, [expletive],” Unsinger grinned, now quite obviously dancing the limbo to Shango’s All-Zombie Orchestra, “how’d you [expletive] guess?”
“It was all over the news,” I reminded him. “Everywhere you looked the last couple of days – ‘Wannabe Reality Star Socialites Crash White House India Reception’ – there it was. Might as well have said ‘US Secret Service Screws Pooch in Front of God, Miss Liberty and the Holy Ghost of Abraham Lincoln;’ or something similar. I understand you guys at the US Secret Service have formally, deeply and abjectly apologized to President Obama, Michelle Obama, Rahmn Emanuel, Mr. and Mrs. Joe Biden, Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum of India, the Indian Ambassador to the United States, her Excellency, Meera Shankar, and, last, but not least, to the American people, for making such pathetic, outrageous, egregious fools of yourselves by relinquishing even the least semblance of professionalism, competency, self-control, common sense or intelligence at the mere sight of what, to your ignorant eyes at least, appeared to be a knockout blonde bombshell in a designer evening gown.”
“Yep,” Unsinger chirped, now obviously, by virtue of Dr. Zombie’s prescription, feeling no pain whatsoever, “we got down on our knees and groveled. Like you said, Tom, we behaved like a bunch of dumb [expletive] [expletive] hayseed rubes, letting Michaele and Tareq Salahi waltz into the White House while the President, Vice President, Prime Minister of India and the Indian Ambassador were there. Who knows? Instead of it being a couple of disgustingly ambitious social climbers who wanted to be on Bravo’s new The Real Housewives of Washington series – which is what they turned out to be – that woman could have been wearing a fake designer evening gown made of plastic explosives.”
“True,” I agreed, “and since the guests didn’t have to go through one of those chemical sniffer detection stations…”
“Yeah,” Unsinger concurred, taking another gulp from Zombie River, “nothing but plain old metal detectors…”
“It’s also going around town,” I dryly related, “that the Secret Service detail didn’t even check the guest list to see if the Salahis were on it or not…”
“I… I mean, the security detail…” Unsinger whined, “it’s kind of hard to explain. You have to realize how ugly most of the people who attend White House state dinners are, and that woman…”
“Wasn’t,” I interjected. “I know. But if Michaele and Tareq Salahi had been terrorists instead of a couple of scheming, nefarious mountebanks with dreams of being on a reality TV series, well, then – the President, the Vice President, the Prime Minister of India and about three hundred other members of the United States and Indian governments; assorted foreign diplomatic officials, along with various sundry miscellaneous dignitaries, might be…”
“You don’t understand,” Unsinger protested. “You didn’t see the way they behaved! It really seemed like they belonged there! Let me explain…”
“Don’t bother,” I consoled. “I know what you mean. From what I’ve heard through the grapevine today, they both met and shook hands with President Obama. On the basis of that alone, you must concede the whole affair had the potential for an incident as bad, if not worse, than September 11, 2001. The list of terrorist organizations who would do just about anything to get into that particular state dinner would probably be the longest list of terrorist organizations ever to all possess concurrent interest in penetrating any government state function, at any time, anywhere! It would include not just Al-Qaeda and the Taliban; oh, no, there’s the Abu Nidal Group, the Egyptian Vanguard of Conquest for the Caliphate, the Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi, the yjr Takfir wal-Hijra, the Pakistani Sipah-e-Sahaba, the British al-Firqat un-Naajiyah, the Al-Ghurabaa’, the Jamaat Ansar al-Sunnah, the Asbat an-Ansar, Hezbollah, the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, the al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, and the al-Harakat al-Islamiyya, all of whom would want access to the Americans; plus God knows how many bat-spit crazy underground terrorist groups right here in the United States who want Obama out of office by any means possible. Say what you will about the feasibility of some rag-heads over in the Middle East recruiting a woman who looks like Michaele Salahi, her maiden name was Holt, and she’s from Virginia. You don’t have to be Robert S. Mueller, III to figure out there are plenty of women, many of them, in fact, much better looking than her, out in the Godforsaken wastelands of Fly-over, reading The Turner Diaries right now. And what about the terrorists who would want to pay their respects to all the Indians in attendance – groups like the Manipur United National Liberation Front, the United Liberation Front of Asom, the Tamil Nadu Liberation Army, the Deendar Anjuman, the All Tripura Tiger Force, and the Al-Badr Babbar Khalsa? Not to mention groups like the Indian Mujahideen or the Naxalite-Maoist Insurgency Movement, who would want to reach out and touch everybody! And now, every one of those groups – plus plenty of others I can’t remember the names of at the moment – have had unequivocally demonstrated to them that all they need to penetrate the highest levels of American security is a blue-eyed, blonde bimbo with acceptable skin, reasonably good teeth and a slim figure, dressed in a few thousand dollars worth of passable haute couture!”
“Yeah,” Unsinger sighed, clearly having his passport stamped at the border of Zombie Land, “and [expletive] me in the [expletive] with a [expletive] AK-47 if that [expletive] didn’t look mighty [expletive] fine, too!”
“Oh, boy,” I remarked with a touch of despair, “the problem is, anybody macho enough to want to be some kind of US Federal Agent is also suffering from such a bad case of chronic testosterone poisoning that one look at a woman like Michaele Salahi and their second brain immediately takes control.”
“I think you got a point there, Tom,” Unsinger ostentatiously proclaimed, now clearly all the way up Zombie Creek without a paddle. “Whaddya think we should do about it?”
“Well,” I opined, “you could put brunette Secret Service women in charge of security at White House functions.”
“Huh?” Unsinger gave me a bleary stare. “What the [expletive] good would that do?”
“A brunette woman Secret Service agent,” I proposed, “would take one look at Michaele Salahi and think ‘there goes a conniving, sneaky, amoral, lying, thieving, slutty tart who slept her way to success and is most probably up to no good.’”
“How the hell,” Unsinger demanded, “would she know that?”
“She wouldn’t,” I explained. “But any time a normal woman sees somebody like Michaele Salahi, I guarantee you, that’s what they think – especially if they’re a brunette. Michaele Salahi could be a saint – and for all I know, she is. But it’s dollars to donuts, Jackson, when a regular, ordinary woman sees someone like Michaele Salahi, that regular, ordinary woman will instantly distrust her. And, of course, if you guys had had a bunch of regular, ordinary women Secret Service agents screening the guests at the White House Indian state dinner, I further guarantee you, Michaele Salahi and her polo-playing husband would have gotten the instant bum’s rush that they in particular, and people like them in general, so richly deserve.”
“Why…” Unsinger quietly wailed as he killed his Double Zombie and gestured to the bartender for another, “why, oh why… if those two idiots wanted to be on a reality television show, how come they couldn’t just send up a helium balloon, then call the cops and tell them their kid is trapped in it?”
“First of all,” I noted, “people like that generally don’t have time for children. And secondly, even if they do have one running around somewhere, that business with the helium balloon has already been done by a couple of other overly ambitious dolts who wanted to break into reality television.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Unsinger grumbled, “I know, I know. What I meant was, why couldn’t the Salahis have done something like that?”
Just then, Cerise tapped me on the shoulder. Draining my julep, I rose, took her hand, and turned to leave. “Unsinger,” I reminded him, as Cerise and I walked away, “we’re inside the Beltway. And here, what the Salahis did is precisely something like that.”