The Glories Of A Bi-Partisan Sexual Affair - Rutting Delight At The Follies Of Washington

Vicki Albright met Reed Ramlow on Dewey Beach, a more conservative, quieter resort than Rehoboth or Ocean City.  She was there with friends from Washington, all aides to one Congressman or another, all Democrat, all progressive in spirit and policy.  There was a heady enthusiasm among these young women. all of whom felt they were on God's side in the struggle against the evil in the White House, and all of whom shared a camaraderie that was based on political commitment but annealed by a youthful enthusiasm.  After all they were not just clerks in a five-and-dime but big deals, successful women who had come to Washington not to make their fortune but to make a difference. 

Reed was also a Congressional aide, but to a Senator and in a senior advisory position.  He had been in Washington since the first Trump administration, had served his master well during the penitential Biden years, and was now in the full flush of celebratory enthusiasm now that Trump was beginning his second, decisive term. 

Vicki and Reed met at Joe's Bar, a Dewey Beach hangout popular with the Washington crowd and absent day-trippers, casual tourists, and the curious from Baltimore.  Joe's could have been in downtown Washington but was perched on a pier over the Atlantic Ocean.  Dry martinis, crab cakes, insider talk and sidling up - the ironic term used by these up-and-comers for sexual interest. 

Joe's was the place to see and be seen and was distinctly bi-partisan. Somehow the beach, the ocean, and the summer did away with political allegiances and opened social commerce to both sides; and so it was that Vicki and Reed found each other side by side at the bar drinking oyster shooters, well on their way to the happy abandon for which they had driven three hours. 

They 'sidled' around workday affiliations - this being an eclectic, aisle-free, open season kind of place where it didn't pay to show one's colors or raise one's political flags - and found each other attractive, interesting, and available.  One thing led to another, and they went home together - or rather to The Rodney, a simple, rundown hotel on Airlie Avenue blocks from the beach but comfortable and anonymous. 

Their sex was surprisingly successful.  After all, Vicki, well-brought up in a strict Iowa farm family was not one to jump into bed with just anyone; but in these halcyon days of youthful adventure and independence, why not. AIDS was a thing of the past, contraceptives were state of the art, and abuse and discard were but feminist cant. 

It didn't take much pillow talk to out the obvious - not only were they partisans of opposing political parties, they were committed advocates for their policies.  Vicki was convinced that the black man represented America's best hope for sentient revival.  He, descendant of African tribes which resonated with the tribal energies of the forest, endowed with a primal intelligence which put white pretentious academicism to shame would soon rise to the top of the human pyramid. 

He, a frequent traveler to Africa, thanks to his Senator's place on the Foreign Relations Committee, found the continent a sinkhole of pestilence, corruption, misrule, and barely concealed jungle primitivism. 

How on earth would he and Vicki ever find each other?

They smoked a Bombay Black - the finest Moroccan hash mixed with Afghan opium - and found common ground.  In a marvelous riff Reed created a hilarious send-off of Africa, a cavalcade of intellectual dwarves dancing around cauldrons of white men, whipping up an appetite for human liver. 

He stood up, took off his shirt, blackened his face with burnt Moet Chandon cork and in a vaudevillian reprise of the strutting Stokely Carmichael, old Black Panther black revolutionary, channeled every black leader from Rap Brown to Black Lives Matter. 

Vicki howled with delight, charmed by the antics of her new lover with whom she had found a unique bi-partisan place.  One could be for the black man but not deny the outrageously hilarious caricatures of him.  

Her turn - a marvelous word salad, incomprehensible, ditzy rendition of Kamala Harris who had run for President on the I Am Black ticket and turned out to be a clown, the most insanely ridiculous cartoon character to ever show up on an American political stage. 

One could be for the progressive agenda incoherently proposed by this demented harridan and laugh behind her back. 

Sobriety, and particularly the hangover kind, can quash any budding relationship; but theirs - Vicki's and Reed's seemed to have staying power in the light of day.  Washed, showered, and dressed, they still found each other attractive and appealing. 

This was what was unusual in the sexual street games of Washington.  Political differences tend to divide at every level.  Bitter enemies on the House floor, antagonistic lovers in bed; but Vicki and Reed (she couldn't help thinking of a porn star stud whenever she heard his name) shared common ground  - idiocy. 

It was this - not only getting the vaudevillian hilarity of Washington, but loving it.  The  popular word is 'embrace' but it was really just a rolling, rollicking belly laugh. 

How could anyone take seriously uppity black Black Lives Matter welfare queens lecturing in ghetto-speak about George Floyd, a career criminal, doped up and stupid, as an icon of black American residency?  Or Joe Biden, shuffled to the podium like a rag doll, then left to his own demented meanderings. 

'When I was a boy', Biden said, I filled buckets of water for my sand castle.  Now, why did I do that?', and there he paused, befuddled by the lines in his prepared script about Indonesian democracy, seeing only images of tsunamis and rijsttafel. 'My mother' he said, looking up at the rafters, hoping to see her, an angel surely there to help him, 'was a saint'.  Hooked off the stage like a bad vaudevillian at Grossinger's, he managed a Nixon high wave 

Or The Haircut, Gavin Newsom, or dumb-as-a-sack-of-hammers AOC, 'the reason why instructions are put on shampoo bottles', or...God alone could have created such a menagerie. 

As she and Reed rolled around in bed, smoking dope and draining bottles of Cuervo and noshing on pizza crusts and old felafel, Vicki never wondered about rectitude - that sense of moral dignity which had always defined her. Was the progressive canon really that much of a B-movie sci-fi script?

Why was there nothing so ridiculous about her party?  No transgender, rainbow silked, gay float boys? No tough girl flannel and e-booted Bernal Heights dames? No callused lettuce pickers in serapes? No rainbow coalition of dwarves and cotton-pickers?

The parade down Pennsylvania Avenue was all white, tall, blonde, blue-eyed and normal.  The sounds of waltzes and Frank Sinatra came through the windows open to the Rose Garden.  There wasn't an oddity among them, not one creep or tart. 

They screwed till the lights went out, Vicki and Reed, and never let incidentals intrude. 'We are a dyad' said Reed, rolling over on his side to look at Vicki.  'Just look at us, ebony and ivory', proof that politics are not the barriers to sexual entry they once were. "

Easier said than done, of course, for once back in Washington, the rumors and innuendoes began.  The Vicki-Reed affair, far from the spotlight on a buggering, unfaithful Washington the tabloids were used to, made the rounds in lower-level, aspiring circles. 

'How could she?' was the question, for it was always the woman who was the victim; but by this time Vicki had become fully liberated and would fuck whomever she pleased, and when the affair with Reed Ramlow petered out as they all did, she was ready for the next, whichever wind brought it through the lace curtains to her. 

The Barking Scarecrow, The Man Who Polished His Balls, And A Political Freak Show - Diversity Goes Upscale

The gym brings out the the freakish among us, a side show of dwarves, bearded ladies, and two-headed babies.  Metaphorically speaking of course, but if you factor in where the gym is located – in this case in an upscale professional neighborhood of Washington – then it indeed had the tony equivalent of the side show of a travelling circus.

Take ‘Death’ for example, a grey, skeletal woman, who did not just run on the treadmill, but was outrunning something awful.  Her face became more drawn and ashen the more and the faster she ran.  She never sweated because her body had no sweat to give, no excess of anything, all husbanded for one last ride.  

She was as frightening as the Headless Horseman, frantic on the rubber carpet, desperation in the hollows of her face, in the strands of thin hair which trailed down her back.  No one had ever seen her get on the treadmill or get off.  She was always there, pounding away, eyes in some unknown distance, on some fearful thing waiting for her.

There was The Creep, a giant of a man and in his way as frightening as Death but in an intimidating, threatening way.  He was always dressed in black sweats and a black hoodie, said nothing, did nothing except pump the ellipticals, but implied nastiness, hurt, and chaos.  He had no friends, no easy camaraderie.  People got out of his way.  

He must be on parole, some said, or just released.  The gym had to take him as part of their tax abatement with local authorities – his private half-way house for a few hours a day before he took the bus back to the ghetto.   There was something feral and frightening about the way he strutted back and forth in front of the exercycles, bound up in rubber tubing to add tension to his walk, barbells on his shoulders, grunting like a hog, eyes rabid and distant. 

Jabba The Hut, a mammoth 400 lb. fat man with elephantine legs and a huge bariatric scar from abdomen to gullet, a reminder of his failed operation to tie off his intestines.  He spent hours in the whirlpool, the only place that gave him some comfort, relieving as it did the gravitational pull on his immense body.  

Rolls of fat shook from his neck to his feet every time he took a step, water poured over the sides of the whirlpool as he slid in.  As he sank down to the very bottom, only his surprisingly very small head showed above the water line.  With all the foam, spume, and roiled waters of the pool, no one could tell who was in it; but when he got out, no one could look away.  He shook his body like a St. Bernard and water splashed into the locker room, back into the whirlpool, and onto the low ceiling.

And then there was The Barking Scarecrow, the main attraction, the center of attention, and as batty as any inmate of St. Elizabeth’s.  She was tall, gangly, and neurasthenic.    “Not an ounce of fat”, she barked, but she was stringy, dried out, and bony.  Angular where there should have been no angles, protrusions instead of rounded flesh, scaly, corrugated shins and ankles.  

She ran miles every day, then biked tens more, came to the gym to work out, and then rode and ran home.  Halfway through her workout, she sat on one of the machines to eat her lunch of carrots, radishes, raw lima beans, and water.  And between bites she banged on about her job at the elephant house at the zoo, her work with wounded raptors, and her engagement in liberal politics.

What were they doing here, this collection of fringe elements, especially in the friendly confines of the Laurel Health Club & Spa, an upscale gym in one of Washington's wealthiest suburbs where one would expect only lawyers or real estate investors? 

Yet short of the James Fennimore Cooper rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike, the truest, purest local for diversity anywhere in the United States - everyone travels I-95 and everyone needs a rest stop - it is at the gym where everyone also drops their pants.  What is different here is that the weird diversity becomes caricature. 

The Man Who Polishes His Balls who after showering took his towel, put it between his legs, grabbed one end from the front and the other from the back, raised a leg on a locker room bench, and started whipping it back and forth as fast as a shoeshine boy at Grand Central. 

He whipped and slapped, snapped and polished, one side then the other, stopping in between to talk about Donald Trump and how he thought he was a demented fool let out of St. Elizabeth's on a pass to to his St. Vitus' dance in the public arena.  A madman, a crazed, demented boor. 

The irony of all this, a man whipping and snapping his balls until they were as red as cherries and his claims about the unhinged, wild behavior of the President, was lost on most, so unified and solid was the political cast of the gym.  

As Jabba the Hut pulled himself out of the whirlpool, displacing gallons of water, he stopped to catch his breath, turned to the men in the Jacuzzi, and reminded them of Trump's bulldogging Gestapo tactics of his praetorian guard, and his vicious hatred of the black man. 

The Barking Scarecrow was like a demented Union Square prophet, railing and flailing her arms, hysterical with hate, seething with it, and literally unable to stop ranting.  She ranted and shouted on the ellipticals, on the treadmills, and on the recliner bikes.  Again, the ironic conflation of this neurasthenic stringy ganglionic pile of sticks whacking away at the machines howling about Donald Trump could not be missed. 

Death had little of the energy of the Barking Scarecrow who, as she adjusted the incline on her treadmill, talked about her curation of the elephants at the National Zoo, 'magnificent creatures, intelligent, so majestic that I wish I were a member of their herd'.  Death was too preoccupied, too frighteningly intent on looking at something in the middle distance to yell and shout, but there was irony in this poor woman as well.  'Before I die...' she was often heard to say, then citing the canon of good works, progressive works, Utopian-grade works. 

The gym was a side show.  Not only was this assemblage of God's menagerie endlessly interesting per se, but to watch them labor away in the most ungainly, desperate way on the machines, and then to hear the cackling, hectoring, bellowing anti-Trump tirades was worth the price of admission.  

Conflation at its best - when it folds political dementia in with physical oddity and psycho-social hilarity - is a philosophical wonder.  Who could have predicted that the doors to Laurel Sport & Health Spa would open onto a side show worthy of Barnum & Bailey?  Or that the diversity that is the central core of the progressive ethos of the place could be so inverted - or rather so brutally honest?

If there was any reason to finally dismiss the cant of 'diversity, equity, inclusivity' it was the here at the health club.  Human diversity at its most defining and outrageous was on display within the unbending, absolute strictures of received political wisdom.  This diversity, backlit by the communal political group-think of the place, stood out even more.  This was real diversity - the unhinged, aberrant, unfathomably weird deviations that one saw on the floor every day. 

The Tale Of A Spiritual Harlot Who Sold Herself To God

Margot James had been born and raised in an observant Catholic family, the kind that said the rosary, went to high mass, prayed the stations of the cross, went to confession and communion, and to the best of their ability led a moral, Christian life. 

 

Margot made her First Communion, was confirmed, went to Catholic schools and was on her way to being the good spiritual child her parents had always intended. She was so devout in fact, that the nuns of St. Maurice had singled her out for a vocation, and even Father Murphy, the senior priest of the church had spoken to her about it. 

As devout and sincere as she was, Margot felt there was something missing in her spiritual life.  She felt talked to, instructed, warned, and counseled by prescription and canon rather than with the intimacy indispensable to epiphany and spiritual satisfaction. 

'Come with me', said Althea Robbins, her classmate who belonged to the New Light Of Canaan Baptist church on the other side of town, the sketchy part far from her leafy West End neighborhood.  Arch Street was sincere, said her parents, just not adequate; but a trip or two down there wouldn't hurt, especially if it was in God's plan. 

The New Light was not a mainstream church, but a storefront charismatic evangelical one, so Margot was surprised when she got off the bus and saw what had been a Jewish tailor's shop - the faded letters of 'Rabinowitz' Clothing Emporium' could still be seen over the doorway.  

She was greeted warmly by a group of congregants, hugged, and shown to her seat, not in a proper pew but on a folding chair.  In a few minutes the pastor took to the podium, asked the congregation to rise and sing A Mighty Fortress Is My God.  Before the hymn was over, the old tailor's shop rang with voices loud and in unison. She had experienced nothing like this at St. Maurice's. 

 

It was quite a show - women rising from their seats, shouting 'Hallelujah', and walking down the aisle towards the pastor, arms raised high, tears streaming down their cheeks, trembling with emotion.  

Pastor Brown hugged them in turn, positioned them on the small platform behind him, extended his arm towards them and shouted, 'Praise the Lord'.  He turned to the congregation and in a sobbing, virtuous voice, told them that Jesus had come to this very place, had resided here, and had taken to his sacred heart the spirits of the women standing here before them. 

 

It was a lot of fol-de-rol, more energetic and satisfying that the up, down, kneel, 'Let us pray' ritual of the Catholic mass but still more circus than divine.  She thanked Althea for her invitation, promised to go with her again, but returned to the West End wondering where her next spiritual step might be. 

She had been in the temple Beth Israel a number of times for the bar mitzvahs and bas mitzvahs of her friends but never had attended a full ceremony.  She was impressed by the temple, its complete lack of statues, paintings, or religious icons.  

The service at the temple was sedate and somber compared to the New Light church on Arch Street.  A lot of rocking and recitation, long readings from the Torah by the rabbi, and little the Sturm und Drang she needed to rouse her soul. 

She prayed before the Wailing Wall beseeching Hashem's forgiveness, asking him to take her in his all-powerful embrace; but all that cant, obedience, and virtue was a thing of the past. 

love. 

St. Maurice's was a virtual flea market of religious do-dads and grottoes, and while she understood their metaphorical meaning, she always thought them more the palm buzzers, flies-in-ice-cubes, and whoopee cushions sold at Jimmy's Smoke Shop than symbols of divinity.

The rest of her religious scouring in New Brighton was predictable and unsatisfying.  She went mainstream Protestant and heard windy sermons about the black man, the environment, the rights of gay men and the depredations of the current President, but nothing with staying spiritual power. 

She poked into the Church of Scientology, allowed herself to be hooked up to the G-meter and learned of the sorry state of her soul, dabbled here and there at other fringe orders of spiritual respite, and finally gave up.  Epiphany would have to wait. 

The 18th century metaphysician David Hume observed that belief is emotional in nature. Belief contains an element of feeling of compulsion or constraint.

“The difference between fiction and belief lies in some feeling which is annexed to the latter and not to the former, and must arise from the particular situation in which the mind is placed at any particular juncture. Belief is something felt by the mind”

It is not surprising that true believers group together.  While association for social, political, and economic reasons is fundamentally human, such association becomes spiritual when true belief in progress, Utopia, a better world replaces a belief in God. 

Michael Shermer in The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies — How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths, details the psychological mechanisms by which individuals use beliefs to create separate realities:

As a 'belief engine', the brain is always seeking to find meaning in the information that pours into it. Once it has constructed a belief, it rationalizes it with explanations, almost always after the event. The brain thus becomes invested in the beliefs, and reinforces them by looking for supporting evidence while blinding itself to anything contrary. Shermer describes this process as “belief-dependent realism” — what we believe determines our reality, not the other way around.

If, Shermer suggests, such beliefs are internal rather than externally- based; that is if they have been created by us and become part of our personality and being, the individual has every reason to defend them at all costs.  It is not much of jump to ironic defenses, the hope for Armageddon as a justification of personalized beliefs.

Social reformers as a group are no different than a religious sect with canon, hymn book, liturgy, commandments, salvation, redemption, and epiphany. Those who insist that the incineration of the planet due to global warming is at hand say that they are protesting to stop it; to prevent the destruction of the world caused by ignorance, indifference, and greed.  

Yet the more temperatures climb, polar ice caps melt, and deserts expand, the happier these true believers are.  Such fulfilled prophecy is a far better reward than an unfulfilled one.  Each degree Celsius is a Station of the Cross – a secular Via Dolorosa leading to crucifixion.

 

So it was no surprise that Margot was tempted by social activism, particularly environmentalism which had a very spiritual, existential cast to it. The intensity, the fervor, the commitment, and the absolute righteousness struck a chord and resonated deeply within her. Environmentalism was where religion and secular belief joined.  

There was no difference between the evangelical ecstasy she witnessed at the New Life church and the climate jamboree on the National Mall.  Protestors for climate action were like Old Testament prophets, voices crying out in the wilderness, willing martyrs to the cause of environmental justice. 

Yet the constant drumroll of doom and gloom, the ecstatic hysteria of her colleagues, and the savoring misery of everyone was nothing like the spiritual solace she sought.  If this was true belief and one which was no different than a spiritual one, then she wanted no part of either. 

She dabbled in the black man, the gay, the transgender, and the impoverished, but came away dreary with the whole pedestrian nature of it all.  There was no mystery, no glory, no host of angels and no trumpets of Gabriel.  

All of which signaled the end to her search. Gone were the talismans, the chasubles, the prayerbooks, and the cant of doing good.  She chucked it all.  She became an apostate, said her former colleagues, worse than Judas, turning her back on and betraying the movement; but Margot was her own woman, tough as nails.  She ripped off her burqa, veil, abaya, and headscarf and walked away.

For years she had been God's harlot, there whenever he wanted her, calling her to the communion rail, filling her with his body and blood until she couldn't help but turn tricks for him.  And then she joined her charismatic sisters and begged him to come down and visit them, take them, ravish them with his

She was her own harlot now, a streetwalker, a tart for her own purposes.  A woman finally of consequence, in no one's harem, gussied and painted, but her own woman.