Enough already. I want ten or twenty comments an hour. No more resting.
I know, I know. It's tough being a Packer fan.
They have sucked ever since John Brockington retired.
But nobody wants to see your scars.
Allrighty then!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
8 comments:
Hope you are feeling OK, Michael?
And Troop? It's the OLD scars no one cares to see. New, fresh ones, with a slight bit of blood still showing? Who could ever get enough of those!
Why else would they have all these vampire shows on TV?
I had hoped that it wouldn’t come to this.
The plan had been carefully created. There was a cover story that was credible, that couldn’t be blown by a mere comment or question. It was investigation-proof. Plausible deniability was established. No weak middle-men were involved, just a cutout, no two cut-outs to make the story go cold; cold like the Artic, if anyone came within one hundred miles of the truth.
People knowledgeable about these matters were retained. They were sent abroad, to investigate, to verify, to check every square inch of the facility. Their reports all came back the same: It’s a clean op.
Arrangements were made in the names of third parties. The names couldn’t be traced. The patient was known only as Mr. Long. His svelte, carefully veiled companion was known only as The Missus. Their passports and driving licenses were forgeries; excellent forgeries convincing to the border and customs authorities who waved them through without so much as a question.
Forged insurance cards had phone numbers that rang in a room above a tiffin shop in Bangalore. An articulate, well-scripted but anonymous voice told callers “Yes, full coverage is approved. There are no co-pays, no deductibles. You are authorized to proceed.” Another voice at the same number would tell the caller “Federated Healthcare is known for prompt re-imbursement payments. May we have your bank routing number so we can wire funds to your account immediately upon receipt of your invoice?”
The story told to others, the story used to cover the absence from public sight was a sympathetic play. It used the word cancer. Everyone stops when they hear that word; no one asks any more questions, except “How bad is it?” How little they knew.
On the day of the operation, after the bloody part, the surgeon walked to the private beach and whispered to The Missus “It has been done.”
“Good” she whispered back. “And Mr. Long, what is Mr. Long’s condition?”
“Mr. Long is no more.”
“Thank you, doctor.”
The jet aircraft, plain white, tail number HAZ001, brought us back to the US. The onboard transponder had been briefly switched off, for an instant off 65 miles south of Key West. When it was turned back on the aircraft had a new transponder ID number, one that let is slip unnoticed into the FAA air traffic control system without raising suspicion.
It landed on a private, unmarked airstrip. There were security guards at the lodge; our team, we were home and safe. A few minutes online and the alibi had proved successful. Well-wishers posted their notes, responses were duly sent back.
The plan had worked. It was flawless.
Then Trooper York had to post that photo of Lyndon Baines Johnson. And all the bad, angering, horrible, humiliating old memories came gushing back like Maureen Dowd the next morning, reeking of gin, spackled face, begging for my phone number.
I couldn’t hold it in any longer. All that work, the cover story, the years of doubt, the long conversations with the therapist who later willingly became the Missus. It has to come out.
It wasn’t cancer on my kidney, although I wish it had been. Life would be so much simpler if it had been. A rough surgery, a week in a hospital, a few weeks of convalescence at home, and the episode would have passed. It would have been just another pothole on life’s superhighway.
But now I have to say it.
I had penis-reduction surgery because of Lyndon Baines Johnson.
TO BE CONTINUED
It was 1965. August 23rd, 1965 to be exact. DC was its usual sweaty, swampy, suffocating self. It felt oddly normal for me, if even slightly comfortable.
I had just returned from two years in Viet Nam. I was used to the heat and the sweat. Thirty days leave in DC would do me good, I thought. Get my mind off of the war, meet some chicks, drink cheap beer, be a tourist, a normal person for a while before shipping back to Nam.
I was a babe in the woods, a country kid who had enlisted in the Army after college. Never saw much of the country before getting kicked out of a K-130, rip chord in one hand, dick in the other, over the lush jungle of that sorry hell hole.
I didn’t know how, but I had lasted the full tour of duty at a time when the average life expectancy of a 2nd lieutenant in Viet Nam was about sixteen minutes. I was rewarded with a month’s leave in DC, where there were more guns, more dangerous people, more drugs and more lawlessness than in parts of Viet Nam.
On August 23rd 1965 I woke up in BOQ at the Army base in DC. It was a Saturday. I showered, dressed and hit the chow hall for breakfast. My plan was to visit the White House; take the tour with hundreds of other Americans, blend in for a few hours.
There were protests in DC that summer. The base commander waived uniform rules, and encouraged off-duty personnel to travel around the city in civilian clothes. I dressed in civvies, plain khakis, a short-sleeved madras shirt, socks and penny loafers. Blend in, I thought.
After a short cab ride and I was queued up for the White House tour. We were told that the first family was in the WH that day, so our tour wouldn’t include any private, family areas of the WH. Jaded as I was, I hoped to catch a glimpse of the old man, or maybe one of his daughters. They had big hair, and big, ratted hair was sexy back then. I wanted and needed sexy.
The tour was okay, interesting even. The WH was smaller than I thought it would be. The history was fascinating, though. And the art was beautiful.
Part way through the tour we heard a ruckus of footsteps and saw a small crowd of Secret Service agents hustling the President from one area to another. He saw us. LBJ saw the tour group. Not one who could keep away from potential voters, President Johnson turned and bolted toward our group, his big paw of a hand extended in greeting.
“Haw’re y’all tudday? Ah’m Predident Johnson. Kin Ah shake all y’alls hands?” he barreled.
He went down the line, shaking hands, pounding backs, kissing children. He got to me and looked at my head. My haircut was Army short in a world where non-Army hair was hippie-long. “Boy, you inna Army, ain’t cha?” he asked me.
“Yessir”, I said, “Lieutenant Second Class Hasenstab, sir, just home from a tour of duty in Viet Nam” I replied.
“Son, Ah’m a militerry man myself” he barked. “Was a pilot in WW Two, flew for MacArthur. Got my ass shot out of a B-26. MacArthur hisself awarded me a Silver Star.”
“That’s very courageous, sir.”
LBJ turned to someone behind him and said “Luci, tell Mama we’re havin’ a guest for supper, an’ take this gennelman with you to the family room. Y’all can talk about college or Texas or dancin’ that damn frug or whutever y’all want ‘til supper. Lieutenant, welcome to the Johnson’s house. Yer gonna stay and have barbecue with us for supper.”
I was shocked when two Secret Service guys grabbed me, and pushed me toward a woman my age who had big ratted dark hair. She was wearing a sweater to cover her pointy breasts, even though it was August. August 23, 1965 to be exact.
TO BE CONTINUED
WOW! :O :|
Looks like Michael is another overachiever, Troop.
I can hardly wait to see how this side of him plays out at the White House.
Hurry on back, y'all. Can hardly wait to hear about that BBQ. ;)
Luci turned out to be Luci Baines Johnson, the youngest daughter of President Lyndon Johnson and Mrs. Lady Bird Johnson.
She was just eighteen, and was already engaged to be married the next year.
Luci was a bit chubby, fashionable for young women in 1965. She was also lonely, very lonely. The confines of the White House had kept her from living the life of a normal teen-ager. Her Episcopalian parents had raised her to be a “proper” Texas woman. They had also cloistered her in a stifling environment where contact with people her age was carefully controlled, even manipulated. Her chance for a normal date was exactly nil.
I had been in Viet Nam for twelve months. Before that, I was in Officer Candidate School, before that Advanced Individual Training, and before that Basic Training. I had seen women, alright, especially in Nam, but the opportunities for safe contact were exactly none. It was far too dangerous; there were too many spies, too much disease. It had taken a strong will, but I had remained master of my own domain.
On August 23, 1965, Luci grabbed my and pulled me along, down the stairs, into the private basement beneath the White House. We ran to the old area where years later Richard Nixon had a bowling alley installed.
She hugged me, tight at first, then even tighter until it felt like her nipples were thumbtacks pressed against the corkboard of my chest. We were breathing hard, clawing, clothes coming off, faster, faster, both wanting to get……….dogs were barking.
Not dogs, a dog. And not barking but baying as the lights went to full bright. I wasn’t a Fullbright Scholar, but I knew that full bright was bad because the hands I could account for were in places where there weren’t light switches.
“Luci! Loooci!? Y’all down here with that Army boy? Where y’all at now? Mama tol’ me to fetch y’all for supper and that’s………DAMN, SON, whatcha doin’ with muh dotter? Get back Lieutenant or this here beagle’ll tear that third leg right off’n ya before y’all can say fuck Gerry Ford…”
TO BE CONTINUED
And then the world stopped for a minute. Luci looked down and screamed. Her sister Lynda Bird who had run in the room behind her Daddy raised a hand to her mouth and giggled, then her eyes got real big all of a sudden.
The damn beagle jumped up and clawed the President right at the hips.
“Son of a bitch!” The President screamed. “Git the damn dog off’n me!”
He grabbed the dog by its ears and tossed it part way across the room.
“Now lookit this here!” he yelled, pulling his shirt out of his pants. He pointed to a fresh, red scar along the right side of his belly. We all stared in disbelief.
“Ah get half my damn intestines cut out by some damn quack doctor who couldn’t find my appendix if I woke up and pointed it out to him myself. An’ now I got to put up with this here Army loootenent trying to club my very own daughter to death in the basement of my very own White House with that damn big oversize dick.”
“I don’t know anymore what’s wrong with America. Ah’m gonna damn well not run for another term. Ah’m gonna go back to Texas and just get drunk and smoke cigarettes for whateve few years Ah’ve got left on earth!”
An’ you, young lady, you better prepare yerself to marry that Patrick Nugent boy next summer.”
“Now all y’all, get outta here afore I call the Secret Service to throw your ass out.”
Wow. It was like a bomb had gone off in the basement of the White House. The First Lady, wearing an apron, took LBJ by the arm and led him back upstairs for a nap. Lynda Bird rounded up the beagle. I reeled in my penis and prepared to leave before there was anymore trouble.
Luci grabbed my arm and told me she’d like to have my address before I left. I said that I didn’t have a pen, she didn’t either, but said “We’ll improvise.”
I don’t know much about Luci, but I do know that she must have a poor memory. We had to improvise several times before she could remember my address. Can’t say as I blame her, though, Military addresses are hard to remember because they have a lot of letters and numbers, not street name like regular addresses. She was s good improviser; that she was. I learned where the expression “writing on the wall” comes from.
She showed me out the back door of the White House on August 23, 1965. And she started a problem that took decades to repair.
TO BE CONTINUED
I returned to Viet Nam 28 days later. I must have been lucky because I got re-assigned to a supply platoon in-country, then I spent the next six years as an officer in the Quartermaster Corps. Quartermaster officers do a lot of hard work – we’re the ones who get the beans and bullets to where they need to be – but we seldom face hostile fire, unless it’s over a bad poker game at the Officers Club.
Luci was married that next summer to a guy named Patrick Nugent. She was only nineteen, but girls got married at an earlier age back then. Plus, she needed to get out of her Daddy’s house.
LBJ withdrew from the 1968 presidential race. It didn’t look like he could win, the Viet Nam war was going bad and his popular support was all but non-existent. He and Lady Bird moved back to Texas where he resumed smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey. He died in ’73 after his third heart attack.
I never did hear much from Luci again, although she sent me an invitation to her wedding. I was back in Nam that summer, so I sent my regrets. I was probably not the kind of guest that she’d actually want to show up at the wedding anyhow.
The old man sent me a brief letter in 1970, much to my surprise. It was introspective and he rambled some. It was personal, but given the present circumstances I can share parts of it with you. I can still hear is voice as it read it now.
Dear Hoss,
How the hell are you? I did my damndest to get that bastard McNamara to keep your sorry ass out of harms way as the war got uglier while I was figuring out how to get you boys home. He told me he had you in charge of cots and bandages. That prick better not be lying to me or I’ll kill him when I see him in the hereafter. McNamara’s a Mormon, you know and I don’t trust those people one damn bit.
I been meaning to mention this to you for some time but didn’t know how to start. Since I don’t have much time life on earth I figure I better do it now.
When you and my Luci were in the WH basement that one time, I couldn’t help notice the size of your dick. A thing like that gets a man jealous. Now before you go thinking the wrong things, I want to tell you that Lady Bird and I have been happily married for 43 years now, and there ain’t been one time when I so much as thought about anyone else.
But truth is, I wished that I had a dick that big. It won’t do me any good now, hell, it’s like trying to push a rope up a tunnel the way things are, and it ain’t going to get any better. Cain’t do nothing about it.
There is one thing that I would like, though. I’d like to take a dick like yours to the eternal hereafter with me, just in case, you know. Just in case.
I expect that you’ll outlive me by a fair amount of years. I truly hope that you do. If there ever comes a time in your life, however, when you think you might need….um….a bit less in the front pocket and a bit more in the wallet, I’ve set up a trust. That trust will pay you a Texas-sized lump of good American money if you’ll send part of what was yours down to the Johnson Library where I’ll be buried. I’ll leave instructions as to opening my casket, etc., if your donation ever shows up.
Now you take care, jeep, and I’ll be looking for you the other side,
[Other personal comments redacted]
Sincerely,
Lyndon
TO BE CONTINUED
Quite a few years have passed since the old man sent that letter. I’ve kept it in my safe and still read it every few years.
I met that svelte blond woman in the late 70s and we married in the early 80s. No one calls her The Missus; that’s just a name we made up one night when I was laughing so hard from the nitrous that she couldn’t get the key into the handcuffs. It’s surprising the things a man’ll do when he’s wearing a mask.
Life has been good. The timber business in Thailand turned was a long shot that paid off better than we ever dreamt it could. We did get stuck with that ranch in the Australian outback after the owner disappeared, but when we hit on the idea of making cheesy sheepskin boots to sell to female mall rats and model wannabes, that deal also turned golden. As did everything else.
We’re starting to age a bit. And we’re getting more introspective about our role on earth and our legacy.
A few months back, after she turned off the camera and sent the crew from National Geographic out of the hot tub room, she asked “Honey, do you ever think about donating part of big Richard there to ol’ LBJ?’
Well, I had been giving it some thought, to tell the truth. I told her so, and we talked about how we could do it for the old man, not to mention that awaiting pile of Texas sized American money that had grown into something that might make a billionaire wishful.
The thing was, we needed to keep it private. A donation like that just can’t be talked about, ever. It’s too personal.
So we planned and planned and planned. The easiest story would be one that is nearly true. Say, for example, that it was about a kidney. Yeah, that’s it, a kidney. That’s believable, and in the same general neighborhood.
So we called it kidney cancer. Heh heh. And we made all the secret arrangements to have surgery for a “Mr. Long.” Heh heh. It all went well, perfectly, in fact, until that chump posted the damn photo of old LBJ showing off his scar. So of course he’s expecting that I’ll post a picture showing my scar.
I can’t do it. The feds would be at the door before I can click the “off” bu.tton.
So as a last resort, I have to tell my sorry story. The sad truth about LBJ making me have penis reduction surgery.
Ah well, it was the least I could do for our country. Call it the mega-briss. Call it the 20% commission off the top. Call it Shirley.
The plumbing’s fine. There’s some pain and there will be for quite a while to come. There seem to be no long term negatives. I can still write my name in the snow, but the font size is now smaller.
That’s my story.
Post a Comment