About four o’clock yesterday afternoon, a fully loaded bus dived off an overpass onto the intersection of US Routes 270 and 495. Say what you want about Los Angeles, at least if the freeway you’re on suddenly turns into a parking lot, you can creep along to an exit, get off and find another freeway. But the Washington DC metro area only has one freeway, which locals call the Beltway, and if it gets shut down during rush hour by a major traffic accident like that, well, forget about going anywhere in your motor vehicle for a few hours, even if, like me, you don’t happen to live in Maryland where the accident happened. No, I knew better than to try to drive home to Great Falls, Virginia from downtown. I had dinner at the Willard Hotel and afterward, I stopped by its famous Round Robin Bar, figuring that if I hung around until eleven or so, the authorities would, by then at least, have had time to clean up all the highway hamburger and do their usual due diligence major accident investigation minuet.
When I got to the Round Robin, I spied Rinderhouse, a senior FBI agent, whom I know is not at all a heavy drinker, working on what appeared to be his third Round Robin bourbon and branch water mint julep. Those are really good, by the way, but I highly recommend stopping at one. I could see Rinderhouse was working Julep Number Three because the bartender had pointedly left the empties from the previous two sitting right in front of him and was regarding that obviously inebriated sworn federal agent with a marked degree of apprehension. Rinderhouse, for his part, was staring back at the bartender as if he had two heads, which, come to think of it, considering Rinderhouse’s condition, the bartender may very well have appeared to possess.
“Collins!” Rinderhouse shouted as soon as his bleary gaze wandered in my direction, gesturing for me to occupy the empty bar stool next to him, “Sit down! Make yourself comfortable!”
Well, I’ve charged my share of consultation fees to the Department of Justice in general, the FBI in particular, and, truth be told, to Rinderhouse in specific, so it would not have been very good business for me to refuse. Taking a seat next to him, I ordered my namesake, a Tom Collins martini. Not that they make them at the Round Robin in anywhere nearly as a sophisticated manner as my dear old Dad did, but then, nobody does. But, like pizza and copulation, a Tom Collins martini is still pretty damn good, no matter what, even if it’s not the best you’ve ever had.
“How are those?” Rinderhouse demanded, pointing at my drink.
“Not bad,” I vouched, taking a sip.
“Mind if I try it?” Rinderhouse inquired with the voluble air of the truly snockered.
“No, of course not,” I told him as I handed him my glass, “they’re one of the best things that’s ever happened to gin.”
Rinderhouse killed about half of my drink, then, displaying a satisfied grin, handed it back. “Yeah,” he nodded, “pretty [expletive] good! Maybe,” he continued, gesturing at his oversized mint julep, “I’ll have one of those after I finish this!”
“Sure,” I humored, glancing briefly at the bartender, who stood scowling back at me, shaking his head subtly in frank negation, “after – but perhaps not tonight. So what,” I pressed, “is the… occasion… anyway?”
“[Expletive] DIOG Test,” he spat, “that’s [expletive] what!”
“Oh,” I replied, “you mean the FBI Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide Examination. You passed it?”
“Yeah,” Rinderhouse muttered into his mint julep. “I passed it all right – in less than twenty [expletive] minutes!”
“Oh, gee whiz,” I commended, “that’s really impressive! I understand that test was designed to take anywhere from ninety to over one hundred and ten minutes to complete!”
“Exactly,” Rinderhouse murmured ruefully, “what they told us.”
“Huh?” I carefully considered Rinderhouse’s comment as I took a sip of what was left of my drink. “What’s the problem with finishing a test early? I remember when I was in college, sometimes I’d know the material stone cold, too…”
“It’s a [expletive] open-book test!” Rinderhouse yelled in irritated interruption.
“Oh,” I hesitated, mulling over his comment in my mind for a moment, after which I saw no reason not to proceed. “Yeah. So, anyway, I’d be done and out the door in a hell of a short time. I still remember the expressions on some of the other student’s faces when I…”
“No!” Rinderhouse vehemently interjected. “That’s not it! Everybody took less than twenty minutes!”
“Wow,” I replied, “I guess that must have been a pretty easy test!”
“No, no, no!” Rinderhouse protested in frustration. “That test was a total [expletive] [expletive]! The [expletive] DIOG Manual is two hundred fifty eight [expletive] pages long!”
“I… I’m not sure I under… oh, wait a minute,” I continued, “you’re getting drunk because you got caught cheating on the FBI DIOG Manual Examination!”
“Me and about three hundred other FBI agents!” Rinderhouse wailed as he chugged about half of his drink. “And now, the IG is gonna tack our [expletives] to the [expletive] wall!”
“You’re being investigated?” I asked.
“Forty fingers,” he gestured, “right up my [expletive]!”
“Because?”
Rinderhouse took another hit off his mint julep, and, realizing that most of it was gone, attempted to summon the bartender, (who pointedly ignored him) with an ostentatious display of the usual signals that drunks in bars know all too well. Once the futility became evident, even to Rinderhouse, he turned to me. “Because we were supposed to take the test alone – and I didn’t. But I wasn’t alone in not taking the test alone, okay? Everybody was doing it! And we weren’t supposed to be looking up the answers using that F9 thing on the keyboard, either – it was like, push Control and F9, and the correct answer came up on the screen, okay? How the [expletive] are you not supposed to use that after they tell you about it, huh? And the instructors! They’d do these PowerPoint presentations where the stuff that was going to be on the test was highlighted, okay? What were we supposed to do about that? And they stamped their feet, too! Yeah, that’s right, the instructors did that every time they told us about something that was going to be on the exam! And then, you know how there’s these things, up in Internet Explorer, that are like, www.fbi.gov right? Okay, so they had one like that, but it was longer and weirder and I had to write it down, and yeah, I did; but if you typed that up there, and then typed in ‘/exam-answers,’ at the end of it, then you could see the entire test and all the answers – and you could print them out! I mean, whiskey-tango-foxtrot, okay? What the [expletive] were we supposed to do, anyway?”
“But what about Question 51?” I gently inquired – since, in fact, I knew all about Rinderhouse’s predicament, having been consulted by the DOJ, the FBI IG and several other interested parties, starting last Friday afternoon, actually. But never, ever let someone as drunk as Rinderhouse was last night know you understand why they’re getting that drunk! No, don’t ever do that, because there is an overwhelming probability that, upon figuring that you knew, right from the start, why they are being so idiotically foolish, they will punch you in the face, really, really hard. Don’t ask me how I know that, either – just remember, if you know what’s good for you, don’t do it. There – I’ve made reading this Web log worthwhile for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people all over the world. Isn’t technology wonderful?
“You mean,” Rinderhouse growled, “the last question on the exam? The one where we FBI agents swore that nobody else had helped us, that we weren’t using any crib notes, and that we were not, by any other means, cheating on the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide Examination?”
“Yeah,” I cautiously affirmed.
“Jesus [expletive] Christ on a [expletive] crutch!” Rinderhouse exclaimed, quite loudly as he stood up and waved his arms around. “What were we supposed to say? ‘No,’ maybe? ‘Hey – Super-Spade! Yeah, you, Eric Holder, Chief Pickaninny-in-Charge of the Department of Justice! Yo! We guys over here at the FBI cheated on your Socialist-oriented, Commie-coddling, hippie-kissing, homo-hugging, [expletive]-loving, Jew-[expletive], ACLU-[expletive], [expletive] terrorist-[expletive]-sucking, illegal-immigrant-favoring, Obama-[expletive]-agenda-influenced piece-of-[expletive] Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide Exam because we don’t give a flying [expletive] about you, your boss or the [expletive] liberal scum-bags who put you in the [expletive] White House because four [expletive] months from now, our main men, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are gonna be running the [expletive] Congress and then, the [expletive] FBI is gonna be free to go back to kicking some [expletive] socialist, peacenik, hippie, homosexual, environmentalist, Jew-[expletive]-Arab-beaner-chink [expletive], just like God, George W. Bush and J. Edgar Hoover intended!”
At that, a hushed silence fell over the Round Robin Bar for about one minute. Not that Rinderhouse noticed. He simply sat back down and finished my drink.
“So, [expletive],” Rinderhouse sighed as he plopped my empty martini glass back on the bar. “The problem is, between now and then, there’s going to be [expletive] hell to pay!
Without a word from me, the bartender provided a replacement for the Tom Collins martini which Rinderhouse had so boorishly consumed. “Compliments of management, sir,” he informed me with sly smile. As I accepted it, I turned to Rinderhouse, sulking sullenly as the bartender continued to pointedly ignore him.
“I mean, really,” I remarked as I took a sip of my replacement martini, “tell me the truth. Weren’t any of you guys in the FBI smart enough to figure out that if you were going to cheat, then you at least needed to sit there for ninety minutes so nobody would get suspicious and catch you?”
“Huh?” Rinderhouse gazed at me, thunderstruck. “Is that what you’re supposed to do?”
“God help the United States of America,” I said, “we obviously need it.”