American Rhapsody (48 page)

I was tired a lot. I was exhausted a lot. I thought I'd die. I don't understand why I
didn't
die. I probably came closer to dying than on the plane crashes or on the
Forrestal
. I had to wade through fire to stay alive on the
Forrestal
's deck, but that deck wasn't as hot as those Mississippi girls I'd plowed through.

Murphistopheles said, “That's enough. I can't bear anymore.”

Tell me about Vietnam, Murphy said.

It's Christmas Eve, pal, I said to him. The slant-eyed cocksuckers are playing Christmas carols. Dinah Shore. Dinah Shore all the time. Jesus Christ, do you have any idea how much I hate Dinah Shore?

One of the gooks tells us there's going to be a Christmas service. I'd been in solitary for nine months. I was the scarecrow the crows were done with.

Okay, they hobble me into this room full of more flowers than a Mafia funeral home. We're seated on benches—about fifty of us POWs. We've got to sit apart so we can't talk. Some gook priest is up there at an altar. Then I see all these photographers. Flashbulbs. Movie cameras. The cocksuckers are setting us up, I think, for some propaganda film. They're just using Dinah Shore to suck us into their plot.

I get up and grin and start waving at the other guys. “Hey, howya doin', man? How's it hangin'?” One of the cocksuckers says, “No talking! No talking!” and tries to get me back on my bench.

I say, “Fuck that!” and turn to the guy nearest me and say, “Hey, pal, my name's John McCain. What's yours?” He's a scarecrow, too, but the crows aren't done with him yet.

A gook we called “the Soft Soap Fairy” says, “McCain, no talking!”

I go, “Fuck you!” real loud. I go, “This is fucking bullshit! This is terrible! This isn't Christmas! This is a propaganda show!”

I turn back to the guy I've just met. I go, “I refused to go home. I was tortured for it. They broke my rib and rebroke my arm.”

The Soft Soap Fairy yells, “No talking! No talking!”

Another guard, the one we called “the Prick” runs over and screams, “No talk! No talk! No talk!”

I go, “F-u-u-u-u-ck you, you slant-eyed cocksucking motherfucking son of a bitch!”

I go hobbling around the room to the cameras, giving them the finger, going, “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”—a scarecrow gone berserk.

Murphistopheles said, “You make it sound like fun.” He was smiling.

I smiled at him, too. I said, “It wasn't
all
fun.”

What are some of the stupid things you've said? Murphy asked.

I told him my Chelsea Clinton joke. “Why is Chelsea so ugly? Because Janet Reno is her father and Hillary is her mother.” I had called Leo DiCaprio an androgynous wimp and Ross Perot nuttier than a fruitcake. I had called an old-age home named Leisure World “Seizure World.” People with Alzheimer's, I said, “couldn't hide Easter eggs anymore.” I had referred to Congress as the “Fort Knox of hypocrisy” and the Senate as a place where “most of the members don't have a life.”

Murphistopheles said, “Well, at least it's all true.”

How do you think we should use the POW stuff? Murphy asked.

We should low-key it, I told him, like I've always done. When I was first running for Congress in Arizona and my opponent accused me of being a carpetbagger, I said, “As a matter of fact, the place I've lived longest in my life was Hanoi.” When I was criticized for leaving Carol, my pea-brained brother Joe McKmart told the press, “Here's a guy who wouldn't accept a Get Out of Jail pass from the North Vietnamese for five and a half years—so the guy is certainly not going to bail out of a marriage unless there just isn't anything there.” When I was accused of using my influence to help businessman Charles Keating, I said, “Even the Vietnamese didn't question my ethics.”

Low-key
! Besides, I said to Murphy, by the time we go into New Hampshire, my book, which is mostly about what the gooks did to me, will be out and A&E will be airing the documentary called
John McCain, Hero or God
?

Murphistopheles cackled.

It ain't easy to campaign against a crippled POW wrapped in Old Glory, I said to Murphy. That, at least, is what one of my first congressional opponents said.

Murphy started noodling lines he thought the media would pick up. McCain survived prison camp; Bush survived summer camp. McCain survived getting his arms, ribs, shoulders, and knees broken; Bush survived trading Sammy Sosa. McCain got a silver star; Bush got daddy's car. McCain got over dysentery; Bush got over the tooth fairy. McCain's a hero; Bush is a zero. McCain's a man; Bush ran.

“We need a low-key visual reminder,” Murphy said, “like Dole clutching his pen in his right hand all the time.”

Murphistopheles thought about it and smiled a sociopathic smile.

“We let the press see Cindy spraying your hair,” he said. “It reminds everybody you can't lift your arms above your shoulders.”

That, I thought, was hellishly Murphistophelian.

With a pocketful of good luck charms, including an old penny and an American Indian medicine bag, I started campaigning in New Hampshire. I didn't feel like Luke Skywalker, I felt like the Elephant Man. We didn't have any crowds; we didn't have any money; we hardly had any volunteers. In the beginning, it was mostly Long Tall Sally and Murphy and me.

“My friends,” I said at one town hall meeting after another, “I will say things you agree with and some things you don't agree with. But I promise you this. I will always tell you the truth, no matter what. You have my solemn promise. You may disagree with me often, but I will never embarrass you. We need to reform government. We need to reform politics. We need to reform the military, the education system. We need to reform the tax code, which would lead to greater freedom for all Americans. Anyone who is satisfied with the status quo should vote for somebody else. But anyone who believes that America is greater than the sum of its special interests should stand with me.”

The folks gawking at me like a circus freak didn't like the truth sometimes, but I told it anyway.

“Who won the war in Vietnam?” somebody asked at a town hall meeting.

“We lost,” I said.

“So you think a gay person could be a good president of the United States?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

A caller on a radio talk show said to me, “You are misinformed.”

“No!” I barked. “
You
are misinformed!”

Anyone anywhere could ask me anything. No rope lines. No security. No team of advisers. No entourage. No airs. No pomp and circumstance. They didn't know how to handle it. They couldn't fathom I'd stay at the town hall meeting until every question was answered. They didn't know how to react to the way I handled the meetings, either.

When a question was long and garbled, I said, “Come on, get to the point. Spit it out!”

When it was time to introduce local politicos, I said, “We have several Spanish-American War veterans here today.”

When I saw someone in the crowd who looked wacko or was dressed oddly, I invited them up on the stage and gave them the microphone.

Murphy, I noticed, was doing his rock and roll best on TV interviews, which often included Bush aides, to back me up.

“May I finish?” a Bush aide asked.

“No, you may not!” Murphy said.

“Don't spin me,” Murphy told a Bush aide. “I'm in the racket.”

“You
are
the racket, man,” the Bush aide said.

My favorite was Murphy with Tim Russert and a Bush aide on Meet the Press.

“How do you beat Al Gore in the November election?” Russert asked.

“Well, it'll be tough,” the Bush aide said.

“Nominate John McCain,” Murphy said.

He introduced me to a crowd by saying, “John McCain is the skunk at the garden party in Washington.”

And I responded by pointing to him and saying, “That's what happens when you hire people from the prison release program.”

We had begun. I was running for the highest office in the land. I was telling people the truth as I saw it. This is what my life had been spared for: gawking strangers. I hadn't had so much fun since I was firing rockets, dropping bombs, and shooting off guns.

I was nuts. That, at least, was what some of my colleagues in the Senate were whispering to the press off the record, while the word they chose for attribution was
temper
.

What got me wasn't what they were saying. I
am
probably a little nuts, but not as nuts as Slew and Good Goddamn McCain were; or as nuts as my screw-loose brother Joe McKmart, a former newspaper reporter, who once wrote a fake story about Mickey Mouse divorcing Minnie Mouse; or as nuts as my mom, who's eighty-seven years old and just bought a new car to drive to places like Outer Mongolia and Uzbekistan.

What got me was that they were saying I had
been driven crazy
by my five and a half years in captivity. So. I had been in prison for five and a half years for the love of my country, and now they were saying that the love of my country disqualified me for the presidency. Poor John had
suffered too much
. So he couldn't be president. The reason poor John did all those town meetings, they said, was because, after all that time in caged solitary, poor John had a compulsive need to talk.

“Where do they get all this shit?” I said to Murphy one day, and he laughed and said, “Careful—temper!” That hippopotamus who's the governor up in Michigan and wants to be the Crown Prince's footstool so badly, Engler, farted that I was a “hot-tempered psycho.”
Saturday Night Live
did a skit saying I couldn't eat without a blindfold. I wasn't allowed to be angry, a reporter explained to me, but being tense or irritated was okay.

Irritated? Tense? Hell, I was so pissed off, I felt like going down to the Senate chamber and body-slamming and head-butting those chickenshit assholes.

Murphy and I started making fun of the whole thing.

“Well, you gotta be a little nuts to want to be president,” I said.

We allowed CBS to film our prep for the first debate, and Murphy stood there in a nauseatingly hideous Hawaiian shirt and said, “Senator, you killed a guy on the way here to the debate. You're a screaming, hotheaded maniac. You're exploding every minute. Do you have the temperament to be president of the United States?”

“Well,” I said. “You know, that really makes me mad.”

The other reason they thought I was crazy was the bus. We thought about calling it the Bullshit Express but settled on the Straight Talk Express instead.

We rode the bus up and down New Hampshire every day and we let the reporters (Murphy called them “the scrums”) ride with me
all the time
.

It had never been done in American politics before—full access all the time and nothing off the record. Since the media, to most Republicans, is the enemy, I was eating with the enemy, pissing with the enemy, snoring with the enemy almost twenty-four hours a day. So I
had
to be nuts!

Full access all the time . . . at a time when Clinton had never even answered one question about Juanita Broaddrick, when Lockhart tried to call only on his pals in the White House press room, when everybody still remembered Ronald Reagan cupping his ear and pretending not to hear questions about Iran-Contra. Most scrums were so cynical about politicians that, in the beginning of my campaign, they seemed almost insulted by “full access all the time.” I was being manipulative, they told me, by not manipulating them. Since most scrums were used to politicians lying, a politician who told the truth had to be lying by telling it.

They didn't know whether to shit or go blind when they boarded the Straight Talk Express and realized they could ask me anything about anything and it was all on the record. I remember one day when a scrum got on for the first time. “Senator,” he said, “can I ask you a couple of questions?”

“We answer all questions on this bus,” I told him. “And sometimes we lie. Mike Murphy is one of the greatest liars anywhere.”

The scrum blinked his eyes. I looked at Murphy and said, “Aren't you, Mike?”

Murphy grinned and nodded and I turned back to the scrum and said, “Murphy has spent his life trying to destroy political careers.”

Murphy said, “I'll have yours destroyed by election day.”

The scrum was gaping at us, his jaw hanging.

Murphy said to him, “The problem with the media is, you're obsessed with process, with how many left-handed, independent soccer moms are going to vote.”

“In other words,” I told the scrum, “you're assholes.”

Like the gawking voters, the scrums were astounded by the truths I told them.

“Why are you running for president, Senator?”

“Because it's mandatory for any senator not under indictment or in detox to lust for the presidency.”

“How do you feel about the media, Senator?”

“It's the first opportunity that I've had to meet with card-carrying members of the Communist party.”

“What has your favorite day of the campaign been?”

“My favorite day of the campaign was that day we went over to New York and I saw all you guys pushing one another out of the way and slipping on the ice.”

“What was your life like as a naval aviator?”

“I drove a Corvette, dated a lot, spent all my free hours at bars and beach parties, and generally misused my good health and youth.”

I liked John F. Kennedy, Jr., a lot, and the final editorial he wrote for
George
magazine compared my candidacy to Luke Skywalker fighting the Death Star. So we started screwing around on the bus with light sabers and playing John Williams's
Star Wars
theme on the loudspeaker.

One day, I clutched my chest melodramatically and told the scrums, “It's the Death Star! They're firing from all directions! Luke may not make it.”