Wednesday, I had a lunch date with Connor, an old college chum – we were both reporters on the campus newspaper. These days, Connor is a Senate staffer, and consequently we shared a table in the Senate Dining Room. The food there, if not up to my usual standards, is nevertheless wholesome and acceptable. Furthermore, since we had agreed on our engagement some two weeks earlier, I had taken care to set up two meetings on Capitol Hill after lunch, thus taking advantage of the location.
Right from the outset, Connor didn’t look well. We had barely gotten past the usual pleasantries when, in reaction to a rather lengthy answer from me, followed by a somewhat detailed question about his wife and kids, he feel asleep and pitched forward into his Senate Soup.
Senate Soup is a specialty of the Senate kitchen – and a very appropriate recipe – it’s made from beans. Given the enormous amount of carbon dioxide in the copious winds exiting the cake holes of United States senators, consumption of their trademark soup allows balancing greenhouse gas emissions to exit from their other ends.
Considering that beans are the main ingredient in their favorite soup, a visit to the Senate is usually better if one has a head cold, or, as in my case, one takes the precaution of eating smoked belly lox and Roquefort cheese with chopped Appalachian ramps on a garlic bagel garnished with a slice of Bermuda onion for breakfast. I was not, as I mentioned, overly concerned about tasting the food in the Senate Dining Room anyway. Taking appropriate precautions, I had seated myself well across the table from my luncheon companion, and had also come prepared with an entire tin of Altoids with which to cleanse my palate prior to my impending afternoon meetings.
Connor’s white navy bean facial did him no harm. As is the habit of the Senate in so many other things, their eponymous soup is served at the temperature of tepid, lukewarm pabulum. This is as it should be, since, when it was first introduced in 1903, senators regularly staggered into the Dining Room and managed to remain seated upright only long enough to pass out dead drunk and topple face down into the first course. To this day, Senate Soup is the only item that has always been on the Senate Dining Room menu for every lunch, supper and dinner of the year. Thanks to this venerable and pragmatic tradition, just one of many observed by an institution which is, in a very real sense, a product of its many unique traditions, Connor’s injuries were limited solely to his dignity and his wardrobe, as have likewise those of so many members of the Senate over the last one hundred and four years.
“God Lord, man,” I observed as I helped him expunge Senate Soup from his suit, shirt and tie, “you look completely exhausted!”
“I am completely exhausted, Tom,” he admitted sheepishly while using the tablecloth to wipe beans from his lapels, “They finally concluded the cloture vote on the Iraq funding bill just forty minutes ago.”
“When was the last time you got any sleep?” I asked.
“I got about four hours on Monday,” Connor slowly replied, “but I thought I could make it through lunch with you before driving home.”
Obviously, something had to be done, or Connor would fall asleep at the wheel. I got him some coffee, of course, but it was clear to me that one cup of Joe couldn’t possibly deal with a such a severe case of sleep depravation. Fortunately, I had the solution right there in my briefcase – some years ago, another colleague of mine, an ethnobotanist, had returned from Borneo with twenty kilograms of powdered tree bark. The pharmaceutical companies were really excited about the possibilities, but it will still be about a decade before their patentable, synthetic imitations get through clinical trials. Of course, none of them were interested in the actual tree, which is related to cinnamon – you can’t patent a natural product, after all, so where’s the money in that? Needless to say, those companies royally screwed the guy who did all the real work, discovering that tree growing in a stinking, parasite-infested, disease-ridden tropical jungle. So after it became clear that his fortune had indeed not been made by his Herculean efforts in the name of science and medicine, this ethnobotanist traded me five pounds of the powdered bark for a Rolex watch. Then he promptly sold the watch, thereby obtaining enough money to defray the huge medical bills he ran up getting cured from a panoply of tropical maladies he had contracted while traipsing around Borneo, plus pay his rent and buy food until he could get a real job somewhere. Which he did – now he’s a pharmaceutical salesman. So anyway, I always carry a little bottle from GNC labeled “Licorice Root” containing gelatin caps of the bark in my briefcase – they look exactly like capsules of licorice root, too. So, to make a long story short, I gave Connor two of them. Inside of five minutes, he was wide awake and perfectly capable of finishing his lunch, although I was still not certain about him driving home on his own.
“Those pills work great,” he proclaimed enthusiastically, “what are they?”
“Guarana concentrate with a bit of taurine,” I conjured, inventing a plausible story suitable for Connor’s consumption, “similar to Red Bull, but somewhat stronger. It’s like if you drank six of those little cans – the sugar free variety.”
“Damn,” Connor beamed, smiling broadly, “now I know why my son and his friends are so fond of Red Bull with vodka!”
“It’s the current version of rum and Coke,” I observed, sipping my iced tea, “every generation has to do things a bit differently in order to establish its identity.”
“True,” Connor agreed, digging into his steak and fries, “except, I think, Congress never changes. I tell you Tom,” he said between bites, “the last four days have been absolute hell for me and all the other staffers – especially last night.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Oh, come on, Tom!” Conner shot back, momentarily disregarding his steak and rising slightly from his seat, “Don’t pretend you’re some news reporter or bohunk from the provinces with me!”
At this point, I was wondering whether two capsules of that Borneo bark might have been an overdose for someone like Connor; but the moving hand, having writ, moves on, so I replied, “No way, Jose. This is Tom Collins, your old buddy from college. Cool it, dude, people are staring at us.”
That mere suggestion was enough to send Connor into a paranoid state only people who haven’t slept decently for several days can appreciate. Connor slumped down, leaned across the table and continued his conversation with me in a stage whisper.
“Those damn senators, Tom! They drove us stark raving… what the hell have you been eating?”
“Oh that,” I tossed off cavalierly, “just some smoked belly lox and Roquefort cheese with chopped Appalachian ramps on a garlic bagel garnished with a slice of Bermuda onion that I ate for breakfast.”
“Are you out of your God damned mind?”
“No, just visiting the Senate.”
Connor slumped back into his chair, considering what I said and then, after taking a long, hard look at his steak and fries, resting on a tablecloth spattered with the remains of his Senate Soup, spoke once more. “Oh, [expletive deleted],” he ejaculated, “Tom… I… I’m a whore. I’m a no good, blood sucking leech on the buttocks of the American people…”
“Don’t let it bother you,” I advised, “there’s a lot of that going around. No need to go into details.”
Connor leaned across the table at me again, whispering desperately. “But I want to! My wife won’t listen! My psychiatrist – yeah, he would sit there, nodding his head, but he wouldn’t listen either; that overpriced son of a bitch, he’d let me tell him everything and then he’d say something like ‘I see. Why is that important to you?’ You, Tom, you’re the only one I can tell this to who won’t ignore what I say!”
Thinking of this web log, I assured my old friend. “Absolutely, dude. Tell me. I guarantee I will hear every word.”
Famished, fatigued, confused and exhausted beyond human endurance, Conner slumped in his chair, threw an obscene amount of salt on his food, then mutely began to devour his steak and fries. At last, after chugging a double ice coffee with cream and triple sugar that I had provided, he composed himself to speak. “Reid and the Democrats were playing hardball, Tom. He pushed through a 41 to 37 vote ordering the Senate Sergeant at Arms to force every senator to attend an all night debate. Who knew Reid was just kidding? Not us, that’s for sure! So first, we had to set up the cots. Then we brought them coffee, tea, bottled water, soft drinks and huge stacks of large pizzas. They went out at their appointed times and read their speeches, sat around gabbing about politics for hours… the usual. But we knew what was coming.”
“What?” I inquired, taking the first bite of my dilled salmon, and finding, despite my pungent breakfast, that I could still tell it was farm raised.
“It started getting late,” Connor said as he looked across the table at me with an imploring expression, “After midnight, they began to act like… I don’t know… like a bunch of crazy old people, I guess. Around twelve fifteen, the first senators began to turn in to take naps until the next quorum call. Right away the Democrats were screaming that the Republicans had short-sheeted their cots. Then word came that the Democrats had put itching powder in the Republican’s blankets. Then pillow fights broke out – it seemed harmless enough until I heard that Ted Stevens loaded his pillowcase with paperweights and tried to clock John Kerry – ‘I’m gonna knock a hole in that Commie peacenik’s hair helmet,’ he said, but he missed Kerry’s head and knocked a hole in the wall instead. That’s when everybody knew what Stevens was up to and took his pillowcase away. Then Mitch McConnell removed his shoes and left them next to his cot, and while he was sleeping Evan Bayh slipped a couple of Capitol hill police dog turds in them. McConnell was furious, Tom, absolutely furious! He swore revenge on the Democrats and went around demanding to know who did it!”
“And you couldn’t say,” I speculated, “because that would be a breach of the time-honored Senate tradition of not finking on pranksters.”
“Exactly!” Connor replied, carefully modulating his voice so as to confine his remarks to me alone, “Tom, you have no idea how hard it would be to explain my motivation under those circumstances to an insurance salesman in Peoria who’s getting his butt reamed by the IRS, but you, Tom, you knew instinctively why I couldn’t say anything.”
“Sure,” I responded, raising my eyebrows in expectation.
“And then it got really weird,” Conner continued, “stranger than usual, even for them. Much stranger. Somebody, and I can’t say I know who exactly, got some of those packets of honey, jam and preserves from the Senate kitchen and they smeared a coating of sticky, sugary gook all around Bayh’s cot. When he got up, he walked over to get his shoes and all hell broke loose. Call it revenge, call it payback, call it sectarian violence if you want, the whole thing just escalated from there!”
“Ah, sort of like what happened in Iraq,” I observed dryly, “except that it was pranks instead of deadly weapons.”
“More or less,” Connor responded morosely.
“Nobody in Congress has actually attempted to murder another member,” I noted, “since Preston Smith Brooks attacked Charles Sumner back in 1856.”
“Right,” Conner affirmed, “and that was in the other body, not the Senate.”
“True,” I agreed.
“After that, when Robert Byrd entered the Senate chamber, he sat in a pool of sepia brown oil paint somebody had smeared all over his chair!”
“Scandalous,” I opined.
“You’re telling me – since the paint was sepia brown, it matched the color of the chair leather and he couldn’t tell it was there before sitting in it. And when Byrd felt it, he put his hand back there, looked at what he got and yelled ‘Uh-oh, Bobby go poo-poo again!’ His people had to create a diversion for the cameras so they could get him off the floor of the Senate without the whole thing appearing on national television!”
“It’s totally inappropriate to do something like that to such a decrepit and obviously senile old geezer like Robert Byrd,” I commiserated.
“That’s just what the Democrats thought, Tom. And they were quick to strike back – half an hour later, the Capitol Police had to be called in to extract Jim DeMint from his chair.” Connor paused for dramatic effect. “Completely covered with super glue. They had to cut the seat of his pants out. Then there were the Republican senators who voted along with the Democrats…”
“Gordon Smith, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins and Chuck Hagel?”
“Yeah. Every one of them woke up covered in Post-it notes with nasty, insulting things written on them.”
“Like what?”
“The notes said ‘RINO’ and ‘Traitor,’ you know, stuff like that – Hagel fell asleep on his stomach, so somebody taped a piece of Senate letterhead to his back with ‘Kick Me’ written on it in black magic marker.”
“Sounds pretty partisan,” I replied.
“Yeah, but the faction in favor of cloture got their licks in, I can tell you that for sure. Lamar Alexander, George Voinovich, Jim Bunning, John Ensign, Arlen Spector, John Sununu and Orin Hatch all woke up from their naps wearing more makeup than Boy George and Marilyn Manson put together.”
“That must have been a real blow to macho types like them,” I conjectured.
“No kidding,” Conner agreed, first nodding affirmation, then shaking his head in disbelief, “who says only Republicans are good at dirty tricks?”
“Not me,” I assured him.
Connor smiled ruefully, drained his second iced coffee and soldiered on with his tale of staffer woe and senatorial hijinks. “Then Hillary Clinton started a game of Truth or Dare with the other Democrat women senators. In wanders Ted Kennedy, toting a quart of Jack Daniels, wearing nothing but his undershorts, claiming he’s lost. He saw what Hillary was up to and tried to change the game to spin the bottle – using his bottle of Jack. But Hillary starts shmoozing him and gets him to take a few more swigs of hooch. She talks him into continuing Truth or Dare – five minutes later, Ted’s totally snockered and she’s got him choosing between ‘Tell the Truth About Chappaquiddick’ or ‘Dare to French Kiss Barbara Mikulski.’”
“That’s one rough choice,” I assessed.
“No kidding,” Connor agreed, “and no surprise that he chose not to tell the truth about Chappaquiddick.”
“None at all,” I concurred. “So he French kissed Mikulski?”
“Yeah, and she bit him on the tongue while he was doing it – real hard. Ted must have jumped a foot off the floor. He grabbed his bottle of Jack and ran out, cussing a blue streak.
“Gee,” I pondered, “maybe Ted ought to retire.”
“Nah,” Conner shook his head definitively, “he’d just drink himself to death in no time. Hanging around the Senate shooting his mouth off is good for him, really. So, Ted’s wandering down the corridors of the Senate singing ‘Baby, I Need Your Loving,’ and here come John Boehner and Saxby Chambliss up from behind – bang – Ted gets the Atomic Weggie! And Ted’s all doubled over, clutching the Kennedy clan treasures, right? So Boehner grabs Ted’s bottle – there must have been at least half a quart left – and takes off with it.”
“Outside on North Capitol Street,” I pointed out, “they call that rolling a drunk.”
“Yeah, but here, it’s called Senatorial comity. So then Saxby and Chambliss get together with a bunch of other Republican senators in a meeting room and polish off Ted’s Jack Daniels while they play around in the dark with a flashlight one of them lifted from a Capitol cop. First, they scared themselves silly – John Warner holds the flashlight up under his chin, see – and starts telling the ‘Headless Union Organizer’ story. That’s the one where Pinkerton’s shoots a UMWA shop steward, then throws his head in the Ohio river and his body down a mine shaft for the other miners to see. But the headless body gets up and works an entire shift alongside the other miners, then rides the elevator back up to the mine head, picks up an axe, and as the clock tower tolls midnight, he walks into town…”
“Stop,” I protested, “you’re scaring me.”
“Sorry. Anyway, Joe Lieberman is passing by the room and he hears them screaming like Campfire Girls hopped up on s’mores, and he can’t resist. He goes in there and talks them into playing ‘Bloody Mary,’ but instead of chanting that, they chant ‘Osama, Osama, Osama…’ over and over again in this dark room, right? Then the doors fly open and they see someone standing there, lit up from behind, and they totally freak out, running through the other door yelping in panic like the Devil Himself was after them.”
“What was up with that?”
“It was Barack Obama. He was passing by, heard the chanting, and thought it was some kind of Senate caucus declaring their support for his presidential candidacy.”
“I guess the moral to that story is ‘Never give a flashlight to a group of unsupervised children or United States senators,’” I sagely intoned.
Connor paused to look at his dessert – apple pie ala mode. “I don’t know if I can eat this,” he commented. “Suddenly, for some reason, I’m just not very hungry.”
“Eat some of the ice cream anyway,” I encouraged. “It coats the stomach.”
Connor took a spoon full of vanilla ice cream, swallowed it slowly, then looked back across the table at me. “The senators knew it was going to be a long night, of course, so they brought cologne, perfume and such to freshen up with. So, right around three in the morning, here’s Sherrod Brown, Patty Murray, Claire McCaskill, Barbara Boxer, Dan Akaka, Jeff Bingham, Ron Wyden, Christopher Dodd, Joe Biden, Jim Webb, Jack Reed, Chuck Schumer and Carl Levin running around swearing like sailors, complaining that the Republicans peed in their toiletries! And no sooner did we get that straightened out, than we had to deal with getting Trent Lott a new suit – and pronto – at four in the morning!”
“What happened to him?”
“Well,” Connor continued after taking another bite of ice cream, “while he was sleeping on his cot, somebody put his left hand in a bowl of warm water.”
“Holy Hanna,” I blurted, “that’s what I call government in action!”
“Tom, it was nothing compared to the cold pizza food fight at the end.”
“Well,” I proclaimed as I rose from my seat and helped Connor to his feet, “it’s good to know that all those brave young men and women fighting and dying in Iraq are represented by a Senate that hasn’t forgotten how to pull an all-nighter with some genuine style.”
“Yeah, there’s that, at least,” Connor replied as I held on to him, discretely gauging his equilibrium.
“Here you go, dude,” I offered, pressing a hundred dollar bill into his hand, “do us both favor – let’s leave your car in the parking garage and get you into a cab home – on me.”
Oh, Connor protested a bit as I walked him out to the curb and hailed a taxi, but I knew I was doing the right thing. And today, after sleeping all the way through Thursday, he called to thank me for it.