Usually, I make my own coffee in the morning, but on nights when I sleep over at Cerise’s place, we get our breakfast pick-me-up at an espresso bar near where she lives. She had just hurried off to work and I was almost finished with my quad neat espresso and a decent almond croissant, when who should walk – or perhaps I should say, stumble – into the place but Wilmont, a veteran Bush Administration insider.
As soon as he saw me, he came over and said hello. It’s nice to know that not everybody at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue these days is an idiot who’s mad a me for not being able to work miracles for them. Wilmont looked pretty bad, though.
“Hangover, by any chance?” I asked as he sat down with a huge Coffee of the Day. It was Kona, by the way, which I always find a bit insipid; but, as anybody who has had some knows, Kona provides plenty of coffee’s famous active ingredient, and judging from Wilmont’s condition, he’d made a prudent choice of beverage.
“Yeah, Tom,” he admitted, nodding, “big, big going-away party for Karl Rove last night.”
“At Dick’s favorite undisclosed location?”
“You bet,” Wilmont affirmed, “same as it ever was. I didn’t get home until late, and this morning – ow! What a head! Fortunately, my mother-in-law caught my teenage son stealing her prescription pain killers a few weeks ago. When I searched his room at home, I found a huge stash of pills. Confiscated them, of course. Kids these days – don’t we spend enough money warning them about the dangers of drugs? But I must say, a handful of them came in mighty handy this morning.”
“You mean, you didn’t return the pills to your mother-in-law?” I inquired, somewhat perplexed.
“Nah,” Wilmont yawned, taking another swig of coffee, “my kid had them all mixed up in a baggie. She would never have been able to figure out how to put them back in the right bottles.”
“So,” I continued, as curious as anyone, if not more, “how was Karl Rove’s going-away party?”
“Ah, well,” Wilmont began, “like most of the parties we have, it started out pretty dignified at the beginning. We invited Bernard Lewis to be the guest speaker. He brought six platters of his home made kreplach, enough for everybody to have a piece. Then he gave a nice farewell speech about Karl. He quoted Irving Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ben Wattenberg, Lionel Trilling, Norman Podhoretz and Ronald Reagan a few times and everybody got all misty and nostalgic. Then, ‘The Way Were’ starts playing and Don Rumsfeld wheels in the biggest pastry cart I’ve ever seen. It’s got an enormous cake on it, shaped like Iraq, with little sugar decorations of oil wells, tanks, missiles, weapons of mass destruction and stuff like that all over it. There was just incredible detail and workmanship on those decorations. He hands Karl a cake knife big enough to gut a bear with. Karl cuts the first piece – he carves out a big chunk next to an amazing one-to-a-hundred thousand scale replica of the Green Zone – it’s Saddam Hussein at the gallows in perfect sugar miniature. First thing Karl does is pick that up and bite Saddam’s head off. Of course, everybody applauded and cheered when he did that. A staff chef stepped up and began handing out the rest of the cake – George was first in line, as usual, and everybody queued up behind him.
“So, while we’re getting our pieces of the cake, the music ends, and Laura enters the event room with a boom box – that’s where the music was coming from. She’s her usual bossy, prissy self. The first thing she does is supervise a game of musical chairs, played using a Marine band recording of ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever,’ which Karl wins. I don’t know for sure, but it looked like they let him win.”
“That would,” I observed, “be very appropriate.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, taking another deep swig of coffee. “Then Laura has everybody play charades. She started out having Karl, the guest of honor, do ‘presidential pardon.’ Well, it took Scooter Libby all of about twenty seconds to guess that one. So, according to Laura’s version of the rules for charades, that meant Scooter was next. She gave him ‘uranium purchase from Niger.’ Nobody guessed it – Scooter kept pointing at the audience and then pointing at his rear end, trying to get the easy parts of ‘uranium,’ and pointing at Condoleezza Rice, trying to get somebody to say something that sounded like ‘Niger,’ but no dice. Then suddenly George shouts out ‘I got it! “Cornhole the Secretary of State!”’ Well – Laura turns bright red and changes the game to Bust a Balloon. That’s the one where everybody starts out with a balloon tied to their left leg – then everybody tries to bust other people’s balloons by kicking at them with their right leg until only one player has an intact balloon.”
“Sounds like that could have been fun,” I offered.
“Yeah, well it was, until it became obvious that Cheney was kicking people really hard in the shins instead of aiming at the balloons. When Laura saw Richard Armitage hopping around on one foot, holding his leg and swearing at Cheney, she put the kibosh on Bust a Balloon and made everybody play Telephone. I got selected to be the first player in the chain, so Laura comes up and whispers ‘Karl Rove is a mighty credit to our great nation’ in my ear.”
“Gee,” I commented, “that was awfully sweet of her.”
“Maybe it was, but in my opinion, I think she should have chosen a more neutral subject than the guest of honor. By the time it got to the end of the line, where Kyle Sampson was sitting, he stood up and said ‘Karl’s stove is a dirty secret disposal station.’ To which Karl jumps out of his seat and yells at Sampson ‘You can’t prove that – nobody can!’ and Laura has to go over and calm Karl down. Next, Laura makes us all play ‘What Am I?’ That’s this game where the master of ceremonies – Laura, of course – hands out folded pieces of paper with the names of things on them in sealed envelopes. Then everybody stands in a circle facing the back of the person in front of them. Laura comes along with a letter opener and a roll of Scotch tape. She opens your envelope, takes out the piece of paper and attaches a piece of tape to it. Then you tape the paper to the back of the person in front of you. Then when Laura says ‘Go!’ everybody breaks out of the circle formation and starts talking to other guests, asking questions about what they are. Like if you wanted to find out if you were some kind of animal, you’d ask ‘Am I an animal?’ and after somebody told you ‘Yes,’ then you’d ask things like ‘Do I have fur?’ ‘Would you find me in a barn yard?’ ‘Do I lay eggs?’ – you know, that kind of stuff – until you guess what you are, at which point you are done. Laura said she likes this game because lots of people can play, but there’s always only one loser, that being the player who’s still guessing after everybody else is done.”
“Sounds like fun,” I ventured. “What were you?”
“I was ‘A lawyer from the ACLU.’”
“Interesting. What kind of questions did you ask?”
“Well, I started out with ‘Am I alive?’ Then I progressed through ‘Am I person?’ ‘Am I a professional?’ ‘Am I an American?’ you know, the usual line you’d pursue once you found out that you’re not a flower pot or something. Then I started to ask ‘Do people make jokes about what I do for a living’ ‘Do I work in a hospital?’ ‘Do I work in a court house?’ ‘Do I sue the government’ ‘Do neoconservative Republicans hate me?’ and so forth.”
“Sounds like you nailed it pretty effectively,” I said, “How did the game end?”
“George lost. We… well, we all sort of figured he would.”
“What was he?”
“George was ‘A Katrina survivor.’”
“Oh, well,” I exclaimed, “that would have been a really tough one for him.”
“Yeah,” Wilmont affirmed, “and he got kind of ticked off about being the loser, too. ‘Laura, how could you do that to me?’ he says, whining stuff like that at her; and she comes back at him with ‘George, the envelopes were all assigned by random lot!’ So George gets up on his high horse, and he yells at her ‘Well then, you can tell Random Lott the President of the United States says he’s fired!’ At that point, anyone could tell that, while the guests were amused, they couldn’t wait for Laura to leave. Rumsfeld has his usual bunch of flunkies standing around next to the doors, of course. He gives one of them the high sign and a new guest enters the room. It’s this lieutenant colonel that was always tagging along with Don when he was Secretary of Defense – Special Forces, decorated like a Christmas tree. He won three medals during the invasion of Baghdad alone, and he’s really handsome, too. Looks sort of like Harrison Ford, but much younger and a hell of a lot more buff – Laura was always mooning after him. So when he walks in wearing his dress uniform and medals, she goes utterly ga-ga, and in five minutes, the two of them have left the room. Rumsfeld winks at Karl and says ‘Diversionary tactics.’ Then a couple of major generals wheel in drink carts loaded with these wicked strong Jello shots. It was about ten minutes later that things started getting intense.
“Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Richard Perle, with Harriet Miers doing the first tenor part, start singing ‘Bomb, bomb, bomb… bomb, bomb Iran…’ you know, the one that goes to the tune of the Beach Boys’ ‘Barbara Ann.’ George puts a lamp shade on his head and starts dancing around, shouting ‘Help, help! My brain is leaving me!’”
“I didn’t know he’d started drinking again,” I interjected, momentarily concerned for the stewardship of our nation’s extensive arsenal of heinous thermonuclear weapons.
“Drinking?” Wilmont stared at me in frank surprise. “Who said anything about him drinking? He behaves like that every time a party starts cooking and Laura isn’t there to drag him off and tuck him in. So, after the first chorus, Condi Rice jumps up on a table and does the Mashed Potatoes. Rumsfeld gets down on his knees next to the table and starts clapping his hands, pretending to be into it, but it’s obvious he’s trying to look up her dress. Not that she was bothered by that – on the contrary, she starts dancing right over him so he can see better.
“Then Rove puts a linen table napkin over his head and wraps his tie around it, so he looks like an Arab. He picks up the sugar missile and WMD figurines from the Iraq cake and starts throwing them at the lamp shade on Bush’s head, yelling ‘Iraq attack! Attack Iraq!’ George tries to dodge the stuff Rove’s throwing, but since he can’t see, all he does is bump into the guests and furniture. Then I see George is struggling – he can’t get the lamp shade off his head – and all the while bip, bip, bip, Rove’s nailing the lamp shade with those little sugar cake figurines. So Alberto Gonzales is watching what’s happening, and I guess he figures that the right moment has arrived – he breaks out a paper mache donkey suspended from a microphone boom, hands Bush a baseball bat, and starts yelling ‘Andele, andele, arriba, arriba, piñata, Jorge, piñata! Ole, ole, ai-yi-yi-yi-yi!’ and a bunch of other beaner talk like that, you know. George runs around after the piñata with the lamp shade stuck on his head, swinging the bat like Mark McGwire chasing an outside spitball. He knocks a hole in the wall, hits a coffee urn and sends scalding java flying all over the buffet, breaks the lamp he took the shade off of, cracks a Secret Service agent in the back of the head – everyone was laughing and screaming while Dick Cheney ran around with his new digital video camera, taking pictures. When Perle told him to cut it out, Cheney said ‘Go [expletive] yourself!’ Finally, George lands a solid hit on the piñata. It breaks open and spills a huge pile of Hanukkah geld, all decorated with the Presidential Seal on one side and a portrait of George on the other. I don’t know how Gonzales did it, but not only were the pieces pure Fritz Knipschildt chocolate, the covering wasn’t that toy foil kids get – no, this stuff was pure twenty-four carat gold! So suddenly the singing stops, and there’s this huge flesh pile, everybody on the floor grabbing at the piñata prizes like a bunch of brats in kindergarten. George finally manages to get the lamp shade off his head, sees what’s going on, yells ‘Yeee-hah! [Expletive] New Orleans!’ and takes a flying jump right on top. Meanwhile, Cheney’s shooting every second of it, cackling like a maniac and drooling.”
“Well, maybe his new pacemaker was hiccuping,” I suggested.
“Or maybe he’s exactly what he appears to be,” Wilmont snorted, gulping away at his remaining coffee, “I guess the truth will never be known. So, after all the stuff from the piñata was picked up, well, Bernanke must have been really hammered from too many of those monster Jello shots or something, I don’t know what, but he went around yelling at everybody that he’s the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and they have to give all their gold to him. So he and Wolfowitz get in a fist fight over it, and Mike Brown tries to break it up. But Bernanke clocks Brown so hard it rings his bell and he goes bananas. Brown hauls off to deliver Bernanke the mother of all haymakers, misses, and hits Dan Bartlett instead. He knocks Bartlett halfway across the room. After that, it was like one of those brawls you see at a hockey game, you know, where everyone gets up off the benches and joins in. Right about then, I crawled under a table. Maybe ten seconds later, I feel something rubbing up against my left butt cheek, so I turn around on my hands and knees and I see that it’s Michael Chertoff. So we just hid there for a while, peeking out from behind the table cloth. Then Chertoff stares at me with this really bizarre look on his face and says ‘My psychics predicted that Rove’s going-away party would be like this.’ So I figured it was a good time to leave.”
“No doubt,” I agreed, “when the guests start talking like that, it’s way past the witching hour.”
Wilmont upended his coffee cup, set it down on the table and gave me big, goofy smile – from mixing all those narcotics, muscle relaxants and mood enhancers with a master dose of caffeine, no doubt. “Yeah, a good guest knows when it’s time to leave the party.”
Wilmont rose and shook my hand.
“Still, I wouldn’t have missed it for all the hot snatch in Washington. Sorry you weren’t invited.”
“After listening to you,” I assured him, “I feel like I was.”