I Am Max Lamm (14 page)

‘To know the specifics wouldn’t be in your best interest.’

‘Dad! I want the facts! Or do I have to read them in the
New York Times
? Who’s this week’s ZZ Top lookalike in a cave in Pakistan? It’s not fair! You don’t let me know
anything
!’

But the man who famously stonewalled Congress over Oliver North’s indictment wouldn’t capitulate to his bratty daughter at the dinner table. She wanted information that was classified. Off-limits. It never swayed the Minotaur that in his presence, Kelly cunningly took his side. She’d curse his usual enemies: Graydon Carter and the liberal lapdogs at
Vanity Fair
, the vengeful Clintonites plotting their revenge, the investigative reporters up in New York – those fucking Hershes and Finkleblooms at the
New Yorker –
endlessly digging dirt on the Minotaur’s share dealings for another five-thousand-word hatchet piece. Expertly she regurgitated her father’s tirades, mimicked his prejudices, kindled his longstanding vendettas, not because she gave a shit but to get what
she
wanted out of him – a bigger allowance; a labradoodle puppy; an exemption from summer camp, or, most recently, the truth about whether a terrorist threat against her life did, in fact, exist.

Feeling a rare tingle of pride in his daughter, the senator recognized his own deviousness in Kelly. But he wouldn’t budge, never divulging a thing she couldn’t learn from the
Washington Post
that she never read. Sometimes extra guards patrolled the mansion’s perimeter, or another surveillance camera was installed atop the ivy-encrusted fence, but Kelly wasn’t allowed to know why. Had a terrorist suspect confessed, during his waterboarding in an Egyptian torture chamber, that Senator Wesson’s family was a target? Had a suspicious package arrived in the mail, like the anthrax letters that stalked the capital three years earlier? Kelly knew that she didn’t know anything, and it drove her nuts.

Only at home, drinking with his few trusted pals, did Kelly glimpse her father at rest. When the tight pink knot of his brow unravelled, the hangman’s glare softened, and for an hour or two, he seemed at peace. Away from TV cameras, journalists and women, amidst the foul-mouthed camaraderie that, it seemed, he cherished more than his daughter. Kelly was struck by the liberated physicality of the senator and his buddies drinking out on the porch; catching up, reminiscing, talking politics, telling dirty jokes, laughing with tears in their hard blue eyes, hugging, patting, touching; these immaculately groomed brutes in unbuttoned Western shirts and cowboy boots, often loud and rancorous, yet intermittently surveying each other with long, quiet, gritty stares, each man’s eyes fixed at the other’s moist lips, that conveyed more in their silence than she imagined.

The first Saturday of every month, the Minotaur and the handful of Washington men that he liked – usually his campaign director Garett Dunlap, the powerful attorney Larry Gibson (a partner to the distinguished old lawyer that Dick Cheney mistook for a grouse and shot) and Paul Leniston the deputy Treasury secretary, all three of them divorced – sat together on the back porch eating cheesesteaks, drinking Belgian beers, smoking cigars and howling like a pack of marmosets. They talked foreign policy, outdoing each other at thinking up names for that week’s newsworthy villain.
Those Cairo camelfuckers . . . Baathist French frogs . . . arse-nosed AIPACsteins . . . Baghdad beard bombers . . . Missilemunching martyrs . . . Caracas commie crackpots . . . Pyongyang pyjama poobahs . . . Saddamite sodomites . . .
on they’d go until three in the morning. Georgetown mansion or not, what the Minotaur loved was a grimy Texas saloon and inside its drunken banter and sweaty oily chests unbuttoned at the bar after a long day’s hauling machinery. A place like Howie’s, the sports bar in South Dallas where he’d cut his first oil deals, where Captain Hazelwood, the guy who crashed the
Exxon Valdez
up in Alaska, drank away his legal troubles for a while. The timeless truckstop havens of simple pungent smells: fossilized peanuts, sticky carpet, vomit in the washbasin, dried semen on the toilet seat, stale sweat. Wesson first loved those dank bars in his youth as an amateur boxing promoter. In 1969, the
Kansas Midwestern Star
tipped him to become ‘the white Don King’, but owing to his father’s connections, he went to Yale instead.

Relaxing on the mansion’s porch with a bottle of good Scotch, they let it all out.

‘Dick, you’re wrong about the pussies making a fuss in the
Post
,’ Larry Gibson slurred on a warm evening in September 2003. ‘It doesn’t matter what brand of bullshit the spooks cooked up. We could nuke Saddam back to the Stone Age and the kids today, they
will
accept it. This ain’t Chicago in 1968, this ain’t Berkeley back when we were terrified of the draft. Nowadays, the college students don’t wanna get arrested barricading Penn Avenue. They want good grades. They want a PlayStation. They want a Honda. They wanna get laid. My nephew Paul’s no dummy, he’s at med school at Tufts, and he wouldn’t know his Sunni from his Shi’ite from his sunny shit.’ Gibson guffawed into his glass; the tipsy habit of laughing at your own wisecracks.

‘How about your kid?’ Leniston asked Wesson. ‘The blonde bombshell. Marilyn. She ever turn your dinner table into
Meet the Press
?’

The Minotaur laughed, the rumble of a grizzly feasting on a hiker. ‘My daughter doesn’t disapprove of what I stand for. Not that I’m aware of.’

Wesson sat up, facing the patio door.

‘Be honest, my dear. What do you
really
think of us? Are we a quartet of wrinkled, warmongering old beasts?’

The other men cracked up like schoolboys. ‘Dick, give the girl a break! How about another drink?’

Kelly crept away from the door.
How did he know you were listening?
Drunk or not, the Minotaur rarely missed a thing.

Later that night on the mansion porch, Wesson told stories of the decrepit Midwestern boxing halls – in Kansas City, Topeka, Des Moines, Jackson – where, by manipulating his saps in the ring and the drunken suckers in the betting circle, he first learnt the how-to of politics. How to control desperate people via their deficiencies. Eighteen-year-old Dick Wesson, a ginger-haired rake just graduated from Fort Worth Methodist High in 1967, taking bets while his bone-headed cowpokes got ready on the ropes. He never forgot those farmyard fighters; the way they trusted him unreservedly, their blunt resilience, their bleeding gums, their ripped pummelled abdomens trailing silvery lines of perspiration down into their tight full undershorts. He’d pick them up at rough bars after the harvest, so broke they’d use a cut of orange peel for a mouthguard. His right hand deep in his pocket, gleefully fondling $500 and something else too, Dick Wesson watched his pairs of bare-chested Tom Joads duke it out for peanuts while the rural crowds went berserk. Everything that, thirty-five years later, had taken him into the loftiest federal offices and boardrooms in America, Senator Richard Wesson first learnt in a dusty Oklahoma City boxing hall where both fighters turned out to be the loser.

Kelly agreed to join the National Guard. So the Minotaur made the phone call. On his mobile phone, during lunchbreak the afternoon that the 9/11 Commission heard Richard Clarke’s told-you-so testimony that uncannily reminded Wesson of his ex-wife’s gin-soaked tirades. Down the line at the Maryland barracks, the lieutenant was perfectly cooperative. After six weeks’ training, the senator’s daughter would get an officer’s post.

At Union station, Kelly got a farewell hug from Ray, her octogenarian chauffer and the only black man since emancipation to visit her family’s cotton ranch near Charleston. She rode the train, not an airplane, because hidden in her toiletries bag were five ounces of pot, a miniature hash pipe and $2,000 worth of cocaine, shrink-wrapped inside tampons and a jumbo bottle of moisturiser.

Yet astonishingly, her father was right. During Kelly’s nine months in the National Guard, she startled herself by unintentionally lasting a day without snorting anything, then two days, four days, a week. Her habit – crucially, her boredom – was interrupted by the 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. schedule of cleaning duties, march drills, rifle instruction, tactical theory classes, artillery workshops, uniform inspections and six-hour hikes lugging a forty-kilogram pack though the Catoctin Mountains, a natural wonder of mud, sandflies and little else.

Finally doing something all day apart from weeping into a pillow and daydreaming about blasting her face off with the Civil War rifle that her father kept in a silver case engraved with the Second Amendment, Kelly couldn’t help but recover her health. Much more than she ever achieved with her psychiatrist, Dr Schmidt, who had apparently learnt nothing at Johns Hopkins except how to scribble a Luvox prescription and his weekly invoice. Kelly hated that tanned bald shrink, his soapy voice softened by vacations in the Bahamas and a Lexus coupé financed through his patients’ misery. Sometimes she didn’t speak a word their entire hour together. Silently they sat in the consultation room, Kelly on the overstuffed Chesterfield doing her nails, Dr Schmidt reading
Newsweek
and texting his son about basketball practice.

But two months at the National Guard barracks and – though she was loath to acknowledge it – Kelly’s face glowed a robust pink
without
$175 spent at the organic beauty salon. Exhausted by the dawn wake-ups, her limbs sore from marching drills, Kelly regained an orthodox sleep rhythm; at 11 p.m. she collapsed on her bunk, and, just as she started hankering for her presidential suite of a bedroom back in Georgetown, she drifted off like a drowsy toddler. Her appetite returned too; at dinner she gulped the lukewarm moguls of cheese macaroni swiftly as anyone in the mess hall. Kelly’s zigzagging mood hit a temperate plateau, and as her coke-ravaged nostrils recovered their olfactory receptors, she could smell again.

But to whom would she tell the good news? Who cared about her regression from suicide’s precipice? Not the other Washington heiresses with whom Kelly once shared beer bongs and quarterbacks at Georgetown frat parties. They weren’t
really
her friends. And not the girls she knew up in New York, the catwalk models who coasted their legginess from Midwestern farming towns where they were the tall awkward freaks in school until they blossomed into statuesque yuppies while their classmates got pregnant, got married, got divorced and grilled burgers at Denny’s. And not the college track stars Kelly had fucked, before her narcotics eclipsed even the catharsis of sex. If those people knew her story, they’d sell it to the
National Enquirer
.

And nobody in her family, especially her father, would understand Kelly’s recovery, nor fathom the magnitude of her near-fatal affliction; not enough to offset their anger that by using drugs, by plotting suicide, she had imperilled the honourable Wesson name. Her older brother Tommy, a carbon copy of his father down to their bullish pink skin, was a semester off graduating law down at Yale. Kelly’s real mother, the Miss Texas of 1975, had two toddlers with a trucking tycoon in France. Eight years ago the senator had married Janet LaRoye, a K Street mining lobbyist who was to Kelly a world-class bitch and to everybody else a strawberry blonde bombshell who first earned her conservative stripes as an intern to defence secretary Caspar Weinberger during the invasion of Grenada. In February 2004, during entree at a White House banquet in honour of the Chinese premier, Janet instructed her husband that his promiscuous beauty of a daughter needed strict discipline or else she would inevitably get busted with drugs or fall pregnant, thereby revealing his parental neglect to the Capitol gossip mill.

‘Just imagine it, Richard! She’ll get snapped on a camera phone snorting something at a frat party. The pictures will reach that prehistoric bitch Barbara Walters. Kelly will fuck up; my gut feeling’s
never
wrong. Take my advice. Send the princess into the army. She’ll be an officer and play dressups.’

The senator – a suspicious man who had fixed policy at the CIA – recognized that his wife wanted Kelly away because her teenage son Dennis would soon return from a detox clinic in Palm Springs. But Richard Wesson had known public life for thirty years and couldn’t deny that his party animal of a daughter – with a rumoured coke habit to boot – was a dangerous liability with mid-term elections approaching. So to the barracks she went.

Kelly hated the National Guard. She hated everything at the barracks; the shapeless monotone uniforms, the infantilizing nicknames, the drab restrictions on her hairstyle, the she-whale snoring in the bunk beneath her. Most of all, Kelly hated the horny sniggers from virginal crooked-toothed Kentucky farm boys whenever she bent over to pack her bivouac. She couldn’t believe that young men so dull and boorish, so irreversibly, unapologetically unstylish, really existed outside of that MTV reality show featuring two socialites slumming it on a Mississippi hog farm. What merciless, sarcastic force had made her fellow recruits so unattractive?
Why?
It was incomprehensible.

Just as unendurable were the weekly ‘listen and learn’ sessions with other freshmen officers, all of whom had studied hard, voluntarily enlisted, graduated from West Point or Fort Queenscliff and, unlike Kelly, actually gave a shit about the US military. On and on the young officers sucked up to their superiors, on they crapped about respect, honour, discipline, morale, devotion, values, those apple pie words that, Kelly presumed, gave the commanding corporal a throbbing hard-on. Did these young sycophants know another thing she didn’t? That by yelling ‘
yes
,
sir!
’ or ‘
immediately sir!
’ by puffing out their chests like a randy tomcat, they magically massaged the corporal’s prick until he blew in his khakis? No wonder the GI Joes got the best dorms. From what inhuman, emotionless mould, Kelly often wondered during those nine months, had these military men emerged? If, while on the shooting range, she were to blow the sergeant’s head off with an M16, would he swiftly be replaced by a flesh and blood doppelganger? Kelly imagined a secret production line, buried deep in a Nevada salt mine controlled by the Pentagon, where pleasureless, obedient men are manufactured from camouflage cotton, sheeps’ brains and discarded foreskins. Then into the National Guard they go.