Sex for America: Politically Inspired Erotica (2 page)

“Eleven.”

The VP licked his lips and let out a trademark grunt. “Mmm . . .

Barrel?”

“Five-and-a-quarter.” “Pocket-size. Nice.”

“Looks can be deceiving.” Our eyes met through his bifocals and I felt a shiver. “Short-bolt travel makes the rate of fire astro- nomical. But there’s no control.”

My new friend gave a little laugh that sounded like
hug-hug- hug.
“Believe it or not, I lose control myself.”

“Really?”

Suddenly I had feelings I couldn’t name. We’d drifted to the back of the store—no more than a counter, really, flanked by locked rows of guns on the wall and a signed photo of George Bush, Jr., in his flight suit, helmet under his arm, eyes triumphant, basket padded. His “Mission Accomplished” moment.

At some point the owner, a scruffy fellow who looked like Wilfred Brimley, had slung a Back in Ten sign in the window and disappeared. Maybe my future lovemate had given him a signal.

“Gee,” I heard myself say, “you look a lot like—” “I am,” he said, “but you can call me . . . Dick.”

He held open a door to the backroom. Which turned out to be more than that. My eyes took it in—sturdy mahogany desk and chairs, the portrait of J. Edgar Hoover over the crackling fire, the shelves stacked with sheaves of documents, busts of Lincoln, Jef- ferson and Julius Caesar and finally, as my eyes adjusted to the dark, the single bed in the corner. Rough green blanket tucked sharply under the mattress in military corners.

“Spartan,” he growled. “A man in my position can’t afford to be soft. We are, after all, at war.”

“Wait? Is this the bunker?”

“Negative. The Veepeock is technically in the White House basement. Everybody knows it. That’s the problem.”

“Veepeock. I’m not sure I—”

“VPEOC.” He cut me off, clearly a fellow used to getting his way. “White House terminology. Short for Vice Presiden- tial Emergency Operations Center. You didn’t think the bunker was in Washington, did you? That place is a cesspool of acro- nyms.”

“But shouldn’t there be security? Surveillance? Cameras?” “Sometimes you don’t want anybody looking.”
Hug-hug-hug.

He tapped the cot. “Come on over here, soldier.”

“Okay.” Jesus. . .

In spite of myself, I drifted toward him. The man had tre- mendous animal magnetism. A musky aura of power seemed to emanate from his scalp. But, still . . . Shouldn’t there be pull-down wall maps? Advisors? Data banks? A red phone with a key in it: hotline to Moscow . . . or Baghdad? Or Crawford?

I had, I realized, conflated Cheney’s love nest with the presi- dent’s war room in
Dr. Strangelove
. But I wasn’t hobnobbing with Peter Sellers. Instead, here I was rubbing cheek to grizzled cheek with the real vice president, arguably the most powerful man in the free world. Freakish but true. While I stood there, frozen with fear, he sidled over and licked my face.

“Did you just lick me?”

My breath, as they say, came in short pants.

Cheney chuckled, ignoring my question, and swept his arm before him, indicating his little patch of heaven.

“I like a barracks feel. It’s more Spartan. More . . . manly.” “But you didn’t actually serve, did you? What was it, five defer-

ments? You dropped out of Yale, then went to community college ’cause of the draft. I heard your wife even had a baby nine months to the day after they ended the childless married deferments.”

His face reddened. A tiny wormlet of vein began to throb at his left temple. For one bad moment I thought he was either going to kill me or stroke out on the spot. Instead, he began to hug-chuckle all over again. “That Lynne. Bent her over the sink and slipped her the Dickens. Out came l’il Mary, right on time. My daughter’s good people. Even if she is gay as Tallulah Bankhead’s fanny.”

With that he gave me another smooch. I wanted to recoil. And yet . . . I couldn’t fight it. There was no other way. I had to ask.

“Are you gay, Mr. Vice President?”

“Me?” He leapt from the cot and ripped off his flannel with such ferocity I feared he might tear a ligament. “I had so many chicks in high school they used to call them Cheney-acs.” Before this, I admit, I never knew the meaning of the word
swoon
. I

couldn’t help but stare at his tufted belly roll, his hairless chest, and—be still my heart—his pacemaker. Yes and yes again!

Embedded under the skin over his left nipple was the outline of what looked like a pack of Luckies.

He saw me ogling and beckoned. “Wanna touch?” I nodded.

“Figured you might.”

Slowly, I raised my fingers to his subcutaneous square. “It’s

. . . It’s so
hard
.”

What can I say? He was overweight, and grunting, and no doubt capable of having me disappeared with a single phone call. But, God, he was sexy. Soon my tentative touches turned to strok- ing, my stroking to outright caresses. Our eyes locked.

With that, it was on. Lynne’s hubby yanked off his belt, let his pants drop around the tops of his waders, and popped his thumbs under the elastic of his white undies, which rode so high on his belly they covered the button. “Big-girl panties!”

Then he turned, waggling his ample bottom, and dropped to his hands and knees beside the army cot. I wasn’t sure how to react, but before I could, he grunted, stretched, and pulled out a monkey-head bong.

“Who does this remind you of?”

It’s all a little foggy after that. Yes, he reached in my pants and chuckled that he’d found the weapon of mass destruction. Yes, he wanted me to duct-tape the cheeks of his buttocks. Yes, he wanted me to spank and penetrate him and call his organ “Bun- ker Buster.” The problem is I’ve never really been that into grass. It always hits me harder than anybody else. And there are blank

spots. Which is just as well, since, even now, my gorge rises at the very notion of anal sex with an aging fat man who voted against Martin Luther King Day.

After our “encounter,” he rolled off and, to my surprise, be- gan to recite, in that trademark Oval Office–adjacent growl, albeit a tad slurry after the high-grade government Kkush:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

Dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix.

After meeting the vice president, touching his pacemaker, and pounding him with a savagery that still makes me cringe, I did not think anything could surprise me. But hearing him recite “Howl” did just that. His passion was palpable. Or so it seemed.

. . . Maybe he was just trying to impress me. When I glanced over, he snarled from the side of his mouth, “ ‘Ginsberg was a bottom, too.’
Hug-hug-hug.”

After that I passed out. I may have been behind the gun store

for twenty minutes, or an entire day. When I came to, he was fully dressed and clutching a shotgun.

“You know I have to kill you,” he said.

It was hard to tell if he was serious. You think Cheney, you don’t think joke. But the shotgun in his hand was not smiling. “Remember Harry?”

“Harry Whittington? The guy you accidentally shot in the face? When you were quail hunting?”

By way of response, he thrust the muzzle toward my face and yelped, “BLAMMO!” It was the first time I saw him smile. And I quickly wished he’d stop. That rictus grin was scarier than his persistent scowl.

“Quail’s a front,” he said, looming over me. “Only
quail
I ever wanted to shoot was spelled with a
y
. Lightweight by the name of Dan.”

Here, finally, was the proverbial Dark Force of legend. He raised his shotgun and racked it. “There was no hunting accident,” he went on, talking out of the side of his mouth. “I heard Harry was two-timing me. That bastard.”

“You mean it was a lovers’ spat?”

“I shot him in the face.” He sneered his trademark sneer. “But I was aiming for his huevos.”

That double barrel was still pointed my way. But my lover seemed to have withdrawn into himself. Indeed, to my amaze- ment, he wiped away a tear. This was my chance.

I began to back away. One step. Two . . . Three. I felt be- hind me for the door. My fingers grazed the knob. Got it! But just as I prepared to make my escape, Dick Cheney lowered the gun, turned away, and, as if pulled by invisible heartstrings, moved to a closed door. Sighing audibly, he opened it. A closet. Over his shoulder, I could see within, where a single flannel shirt hung on a hanger. “Harry . . . Harry . . . Harry,” he said, burying his face in the buckshot-riddled flannel.

I knew I should leave, but I was touched. We’d shared some- thing, after all. Tenderly, Li’l Dickens rubbed the holey material on his face. Tenderly, he inhaled the must of lost desire. Here it was.

Brokeback Neo-Con. I felt myself tearing up, though at the same time I was concerned about the nagging chafe on my scrotum.

For another beat, I lingered. And then, I left him. The vice president the rest of the nation would never see. The burly, pink- thighed, sneering buffalo of love. I’ll never forget you, Dick. Though, God knows, I’ve been trying.

MUSIC FROM EARTH
‌

MICHELLE TEA

The night before Aidan shipped out to some other even worse
part of Florida, we all went to the karaoke place on Route 12. I was wearing a bizarre outfit I’d scavenged from my mother’s storm-smashed bedroom—a half-shirt with a flamingo on it and a pair of shorts so short a bit of my ass rolled out from behind a curtain of stringy, cut-off fringe. It was a scandalous look and not my style, but fuck it. My own clothing was floating in the flooded guest room, and it was so hot even at night, no power anywhere for air-conditioning, only weak fans with blades that buzzed like flies. Being half-naked felt oddly good, normal even. The wet air sat on my skin heavy as a flannel shirt. Which was what the boys stubbornly wore—Aidan and his friend Hank and his other friend

13

Marcus. No matter how mean the sun or how strangling the hu- midity, they kept themselves in their damp plaids. Aidan’s little sister Angela was with us, too. She couldn’t stay home because their mom wouldn’t stop lobbying for Angela to have an abortion and it was oppressing her. What was worse—Angela sitting home with their Ma or coming to karaoke with Hank and Marcus, one of whom was to blame for the whole thing? Their drama was like a TV left on in the background, a soap opera you’re watching with half an eye while doing something else. I felt exhausted from clean- ing felled debris, a steady diet of canned tuna, and not enough water. The karaoke outing would have been awesome, a relief, if it weren’t so shadowed by the occasion it was marking—Aidan’s last night free before he shipped out and into the army.

The karaoke parlor had been on the news show me and Ma watched once the generator was running. The parlor was the only business left standing on a stretch of road that had held a tackle shop and a sandwich shop and a hairdresser. Everything was gone but the karaoke place, and the man who owned it, crazed with gratitude, was offering free karaoke to everyone. Aidan took his truck, me and Angela squished beside him in the tight cab. Ange- la’s belly wasn’t terribly pregnant yet; it just looked like the belly of a teenaged alcoholic, a swell above the waist of her jeans. Hank and Marcus were spread out in the truck bed next to their dogs with their ropey leashes. Hank and Marcus leaned up on their elbows, clutching beers, pointing and hollering at the catastrophe we blew by.
Ohw! Ohw!
Their cries sounded wet and far away behind the glass, clipped by the speed of the truck. They hollered at the trees at the edge of the road, whole trees knocked from the ground, their roots splayed, stiff tendrils grasping at the air.

Giant palm leaves and strips of bark lay soggy on the pavement. I thought about a wind so harsh it flayed trees, a razor gust. The tall metal signs advertising hamburgers and gas for miles looked like they’d been mauled by monster trucks. Slabs of metal hung peeled from posts. The front of a jewelry store was just gone. That store had been on the news, too, footage of the squat bald owner picking through the rubble for jewels while a cluster of cops stood near, making sure he wasn’t set upon by looters. Aidan’s head- lights lit up shattered glass as we passed, then left it in darkness. He drove slow because all the streetlights were out and many were downed, wet logs bumping up against the felled trees, the whole mess tangled with loops of rubbery wire and wet leaves.