American Rhapsody (52 page)

One day at the base, I got a call from Dad. The air force was sendin' a plane for me. President Nixon had a big idea. He thought Tricia and I'd be perfect for each other. I had seen pictures of Tricia Nixon, not bad, nice tits, but still . . . whoa!
Nixon's daughter
? Dad said Nixon did this kind of thing sometimes. He'd arranged Julie's marriage to David Eisenhower. A joinin' of the clans. A joinin' at the hip. The Nixons innerbleed with the Eisenhowers.

Well, we were a clan, too. The Nixons breed with the Bushes. Sort of like, I guess, intermarriage between Knights of the Round Table families. Nixon had been good to Dad, campaignin' for him, knightin' him our UN delegate. The plane was on its way to take me to dinner with Tricia Nixon in Washington.

“Be nice to her,” Dad said.

Nice
? How nice? What did that mean? How nice did I have to be? The guys at the Officers' Club shit a brick.
Tricia Nixon
? I was bein' flown to Tricia Nixon like some boy bimbo bein' served up on a silver platter at Barney Frank's house.

We had dinner. It was a nice dinner. That's all I'm gonna say. Tricia has her . . . qualities. Definitely not as stiff as her father. Nixon was even nicer to Dad afterward. Campaigned hard for him in Dad's Senate race. Knighted him the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Told Gerry Ford to crown Dad head of the CIA. I did what I had to do. I was nice to her. Tricia liked me.
I love my dad.

Yeah, but it was out of hand! That whole time was out of hand! My reckless and irresponsible youth! After flight school, I rented an apartment in Houston. A one-bedroom at the Chateaux Dijon. All singles. Four hundred units. Eight swimmin' pools. Secretaries. Ambitious secretaries. Secretaries on their own for the first time in their lives.

Away from mommy and daddy for the first time in their lives. All-day volleyball in the pool. All-night relays inside.

It was all so out of hand that when George Herbert Walker came to town, campaignin' for the Senate, and asked me to go with him, I did, but I took my shirt off, walkin' behind him, bare-chested. I was beautiful, trim, tanned. I don't know what the fuck I was thinkin'. Half-naked with my dad. Showin' myself off. (Jeb, my asshole little brother, lost it in those years. Hair homeless-long, smokin' weed like Winstons.)

I had to figure out what I was gonna do with my life. I got into the Harvard Business School, back up north in alien territory. Barry Goldwater was right. He said that entire part of the country except Kennebunkport should be chain-sawed and set out to sea. There were protests every other day. For Cesar Chavez, against the CIA. Dick Gregory spoke and said young white people were “America's new niggers.” The same heaviness that I'd felt at Yale, the same guilt-stewin' rhetoric, the same claustrophobia. I just couldn't give a shit.

I went down to Fenway and saw the Red Sox. I wore my old Texas Air National Guard jacket to class. Let 'em get a load of that while they were handin' out their antiwar leaflets.
Uh-huh, that's right, a genuwine bomber jacket, darlin', with genuwine stains on it!
I chewed tobacco and took a spitoon into class with me, spittin' loud so they could hear the plop-plop as they planned their civil disobedience against Gallo wine. What did I care about Gallo wine? I don't drink cheap wine.

I went down to a place called Hillbilly Ranch, outside Boston, with, you betcha, my jacket on. George Jones was in town. When it came time for my yearbook picture at Harvard, I wore a polo shirt and a pair of khakis torn at the knee. Everybody else wore a suit and tie. Yeah, uh-huh, I knew they would. That's why I made sure my polo shirt was rumpled.

I didn't know what the hell I was gonna do. Harvard Business School usually means an East Coast corporation, but I couldn't do that. Honest to God, I felt physically refrained in that part of the world. The hangin' heaviness. The spacious claustrophobia. The stewin' guilts. Everybody a victim of some kind or other.

I drove out to Arizona to try to breathe, and on the way there I stopped in Midland and saw some of the friends I'd grown up with. And the answer came to me while I was talkin' to 'em.
This
is where I was happiest. Under the big hot oily sky, havin' a beer and sippin' whiskey inside the air-conditioned country club with real people. Talkin' about Nolan Ryan and the Astros and the Rangers. People here knew how many career home runs Willie Mays had hit. People here weren't full of psychobabble horse manure. They weren't proud, unhappy, chest-beatin' victims.

They were Americans, shit-kickers, oil and grease cowboys just tryin' to live life on their own gumption, not tyin' themselves up like a rodeo calf with guilts everybody around 'em is beatin' into 'em. I wasn't claustrophobic in Midland; I didn't feel physically constrained. I could breathe. I was free. I could rock back and forth on the heels of my boots.

I rented a back-alley guest cottage that was an outhouse dump. After a week there, it felt like home. Dirty laundry everyplace. Empty pizza boxes under the bed. Beer cans with gray fuzz growin' out of 'em. The bed frame was broke. I lassoed it together with some chili-stained ties. My Olds Cutlass needed a paint job. I spray-painted it. One of my friends got me a sweater at a thrift shop. I wore it all the time.

I was makin' connections in the oil business, down at the Petroleum Club, down at the country club, hangin' around the big-money guys in their ostrich Lucchese boots, doin' what I'd always been able to do with guys . . . the eye contact, the butt slap, the dirty jokes, the shit-kickin' jive that I had in my bones but not in my blood.

Sometimes, when I saw Dad, I thought I saw him lookin' funny at me. Dad was a Texan, but he could never shit-kick—remember that whole pork-rind-eatin' publicity later on? Dad even threw his horseshoes funny, like he didn't want any mud or dirt sloppin' up on him. I thought I saw Dad eyeballin' me enviously, thinkin', How does he do it? How does he shit-kick so well? It was workin' fine for me in Midland. Yeah, I had been to Harvard, but the dump I lived in was on Harvard Street in Midland.

The drinkin' helped, too. The old moneybags in Midland loved to drink, and I did, too. I don't mean sippin' scotch like my little asshole brother Jeb does; I mean shooters of whiskey and tequila and lots of iced Bud. I drank a lot with 'em and I talked a lot about poontang with 'em and they loved me. I told 'em all the poontang stories I'd heard at Skull and Bones and some of my own stories, and these old boys thought they were in heaven.

Smokin', drinkin', talkin' pussy, eatin' ribs. All that wasn't there yet was money. But I knew we'd get there, too, when I jogged by one of the biggest money guys and pulled his runnin' shorts down to his ankles and the old boy almost shit himself, he laughed so hard.

Hot damn, I was havin' fun. Back home. Back among people I loved. In the real America. The real red-blooded, red meat, real feelings, no psychomanure America. I knew I was drinkin' too much, screwin' around too much, but I wasn't hurtin' nobody except maybe myself. I didn't have any responsibilities to nobody else.

Juicin' up at the Nineteenth Hole, the country club bar, stuffin' my face with Tex-Mex at La Bodega, playin' George Jones on the honky-tonk juke boxes of Odessa. One night Willie Nelson came into Odessa and I was in town, tonkin', with a couple buddies, and we decided to see Willie. Lord knows, we'd had too much whiskey, but that still don't explain to me how we wound up onstage, right behind Willie, singin' backup.

A good part of my time, I gotta admit, I spent playin' poker, just like I'd spent a good part of my time at Yale and Harvard playin' it, too. But it was different playin' it in Midland now. It wasn't a game here; it was like the final part of the equation in bein' a good ole boy shit-kickin' success story. You smoke, you drink, you laugh, you cuss, you wear pointy-toe boots, you tell dirty jokes, you wink, you eat red meat, you talk pussy, you get pussy . . . and you win at poker.

I set up a little drillin' company with the old guys' help, and things were lookin' good. I was gatherin' momentum and impotence. But I was drinkin' too much. A friend of mine was callin' the bars and the liquor stores and tellin' 'em to sell me nothin' but wine or beer. And then my best buddy got leukemia and I was shitfaced for a whole week, wakin' up parched, pukin' in the shower, makin' a Bloody Mary as soon as I got out.

I knew my biggest talent was lookin' folks in the eye and smilin' and touchin' 'em on the arm and gettin' what I wanted from 'em. Men gave me bucks for my company. Women liked bein' in my company. There was a lesson in that, and you gotta be sharp enough in life to read the lipstick handwritin' on the motel room mirror. If men and women fell in love with me, there was a life to be had inside that. I'm not bisexual, so that left politics.

Out of the stump house and up on the stump! My dad had done it and so had my grandpop, but I thought I was better than them at gettin' people to give me their money or their selves. My grandpop had such a thick broomstick up his butt, he couldn't be elected to the Kennebunkport PTA today. And my dad had to work real hard and never did succeed—the pork rinds again—at bein' more down-home than earnest.

All I had to do sometimes was a little badass boot rockin' and back porch butt pattin' and sugary-eye gazin' and explicit winkin' and pointin' a sassy finger . . . and the money and the pussy fell into my lap.

I announced that I was runnin' for Congress, and a month later I met Laura, my wife and my love, and now the mother of my children. Aw, hell, we'd “met” before, when we were in the seventh grade, but I wasn't really lookin' at anybody back then except Willie Mays. This time, we met at a backyard barbecue.

She was shy and on the quiet side. She'd been a grade-school teacher in Houston and was a librarian now in Austin. She was a reader—she'd spent her whole life with her pretty nose in or around smelly old books. It surprised the hell out of me that she'd lived in the same bordello apartment house, the Chateaux Dijon, in Houston while I was there. But then Laura wasn't the type to play all-day volleyball and all-night relays.

I made her laugh. She was a great listener, and I talked a lot. Plus, she was smart and beautiful, the perfect girl for me. As Mom said, I got hit by a white lightnin' bolt. Laura wasn't any gigglin', mechanical-bull West Texas hosebag. She was a serious, reality-time woman. I was in love. Asshole Jeb, when Laura met everybody, right away Jeb said, “Brother, did you pop the question, or are we just wastin' our time?” She called me “Bushie,” and I called her “Bushy,” different spellin', for different reasons. We still call each other that.

There was a prime-time political consideration, too, that had never occurred to me. I had announced the run for Congress and I knew they were gonna try to define me as this drunken, wild, and crazy pussy hound. Well, they couldn't define me like that anymore. I was married now. To a librarian. To a schoolteacher. Laura, though I'd never thought about it, defined me now. I had found myself not just a smart and beautiful wife. I had found myself a voter-friendly and mandate-potential
definition
.

No mandate, though. The voters weren't that friendly. I got licked by a Democrat who defined me as a drunken and wild and crazy pussy hound, Bushy or no Bushy. Damn I was pissed off! I was happy, too, with my new wife and everything, but I was pissed off! I guess I started hittin' the Jack Daniel's pretty hard again.

Bushy was all right about it—I can't complain. She cooked what I liked—meat loaf, tacos—and she didn't say anythin', but she'd leave books around the house about the dangers of boozin'. Alcoholism. I'd read 'em and keep boozin'.

Our little girls were born. I was doin' fine with business, settin' up a new company, workin' the phone, hustlin' old family friends—the FOBs—the friends of the Bushes, which includes a helluva lot more people than the other FOBs—the friends of that SOB.

But somethin' was off. I didn't know what. Maybe it was that after all these years as a nomad, now I was a husband and a father.

I liked bein' a husband and a father—that's not what I'm sayin'. But I liked drinkin' and raisin' hell and howlin' at the moon with George Jones, too, though there wasn't any “strange,” if you know what I mean, in the mix. It was all Bushy. Makin' meat loaf. Her nose in a smelly old book. So I don't know . . . you know . . . but somethin' was off.

That's when Jesus saved me. Not Jesus, really, but Jesus in spirit. Billy Graham. I'd known Billy for a long time, thanks to my dad, and one day we were walkin' around together at the summer house in Kennebunkport and Billy told me about his own boy, Franklin, who'd come to Jesus finally after drinkin' every hour and comin' into everybody else.

And Billy asked me, “Son, are you right with God?”

I told him that Bushy and the girls and I went to Midland Methodist every Sunday and that I even taught Sunday school sometimes.

Billy put his hand on my shoulder and said, “You didn't answer my question, son. Do you have the peace and understanding with God that can come only through our Lord Jesus Christ?”

There was somethin' about the way Billy looked at me that was like takin' one of the hot hangers we used on the pledges in the Deke house at Yale and puttin' it into my heart. I told him I felt somethin' off in my life and about the Jack Daniel's and the iced Budweisers.

Billy said, “To be without God in this life is to be terribly lonely. If there is one thing I want you to take back to Texas, it's this. God loves you, George, and God is interested in you. To recommit your life to Jesus Christ, you have to give up that one last demon before you can become a new man. Give it to Him; George, He'll take the burden and set you free.”