American Rhapsody Read online

  He was a southern rock and roller, a hillbilly cat like Elvis and Jerry Lee, growing up in Hot Springs, Arkansas, a neon-lit haven of gamblers and whores, once patronized by Al Capone, Bugsy Siegel, and Lucky Luciano. Bill Clinton may have been born in Hope, but he grew up in Sin City, with a mama who painted her eyebrows, pasted on false eyelashes, loved the racetrack, and helled around in her convertible, drink in hand, from the Vapors to the Pines to the Southern Club, with or without her husband. A ripe peach of a woman, there to be tasted.

  He developed a lifelong yen for those ripe peaches, for rock and roll, and for convertibles. It all came together in August 1977, the perfectly realized, transcendent Bill Clinton rock and roll moment, when he was already a married man, the attorney general of Arkansas. Dolly Kyle, a ripe-peach girlfriend he hadn’t seen for a while, now also married, came to see him in his office. He introduced her around the office as an old and good friend and then walked her out to her car and he . . . just flipped out! It was a brand-spanking-new turquoise Cadillac El Dorado convertible, 500-horsepower, nineteen feet long, eight-track tape player, AM/FM radio. It was the ultimate hepcat thing, a chrome-plated, poke-your-eye-out, southern gothic Elvismobile, hotter even than the Caddy convertible Chance Wayne (and Paul Newman) drove in Sweet Bird of Youth.

  He asked if he could drive it, and Dolly said sure, so Bill Clinton got behind the wheel and took her out on the freeway and juiced her up over a hundred, veering, skidding a little, laughing like a kid. He took his foot off the pedal then and let her drift, just gliding along, grinning. Elvis was singing on the eight-track and he sang along . . . “Treat me right, treat me good, treat me like you really should.”

  Bill Clinton pulled off into a field, with no houses nearby, and got out and popped the hood open and looked at her motor. Then he looked into her trunk and found some blankets and got back in the front seat and started kissing Dolly. He put the blanket over the front seat and pulled the convertible’s top down and told Dolly to take her dress off. He took off every stitch of his clothing, including his cuff links, and put his clothes neatly into the backseat. The sun was shining . . . it was a radiant, warm day . . . the Cadillac was gleaming . . . and they got it on. He put his finger into the sweat inside her belly button and he licked his finger. He reached into the backseat, put his pants back on, and walked back to the trunk for some water. He drank, offered her some, and took his pants off again. He moved her hand to Willard and said, “Touch it.” They got it on again. They got dressed and started driving back to his office. He put the Elvis eight-track back on and he started humming along to the song.

  “Today’s my wedding anniversary,” she told him.

  “Are you happy?” he asked.

  “Are you?” she said.

  He said nothing until they got to his office.

  “Good-bye, pretty girl,” he said, and walked away. She got behind the wheel and popped the tape out to put in another one and she heard the disc jockey on the radio say that Elvis Presley was dead in Memphis. She started to cry and drove away, the tears streaming down her face.

  The transcendent rock and roll moment . . . and it ended with a crash and a burn. Roaring down the highway in a brand-new Cadillac, rock and roll blasting, the sun shining, a beautiful girl with her legs up on the dash, a little water to slake your thirst, getting it on again, and then . . . death.

  A slice of life at Altamont, only four months after Woodstock, love and peace and beads splattered by blood, the beauty of naked bodies at Woodstock obliterated forever by an obscenely naked fat man with a knife plunged into his mottled, greasy flesh. Oyez, oyez, darkness once again at the heart of rock and roll. Darkness and danger and sex. Knives and guns and Cadillacs careening into the pitch-black night. Forget the Beatles and their “good day sunshine.” Rock and roll was about sex, not about love. It was about excess, not about romance. Bill Clinton understood that. It was exactly why he loved it. Bill Clinton was a rock and roll hog.

  So was I. I knew it, too, having seen it, even tasted it, firsthand. As a writer for Rolling Stone, I had helicoptered into a crowd of 100,000 drunken, naked kids in Darlington, North Carolina, with Alice Cooper and Three Dog Night and watched as Alice guillotined chickens onstage, spraying blood over these sunburned and sweaty, naked kids, who’d rub the blood into one another’s privates. I’d sat, afterward, around the pool of a Holiday Inn with the bands and a hundred local groupies as everyone got naked and the night blazed into a chlorine-smelling human blur of contorted wet bodies.

  As a screenwriter, I’d waited in the living room of a Denver hotel suite at eight one morning for Bob Dylan to emerge from his bedroom. A half-full quart of Jim Beam stood on the living room cocktail table, along with three or four broken lines of coke. A pair of black silver-toed cowboy boots was under the table. One girl came out of Bob’s bedroom, then another, then another. They looked tired and sleepy and were scantily and hastily dressed. They said hi in a shy and embarrassed way and then they left. Five minutes later, Bob came out, bare-chested and barefoot, wearing jeans, his hair an airborne jungle, his complexion graveyard gray. He sat down at the cocktail table, took a long slug of the Jim Beam, did a line of coke, smiled, and said, “Howya doin?”

  That’s what rock and roll was about! Brakes screeching, knives flashing in the moonlight, bodies aswirl in a lighted pool, blood spraying naked flesh, Mick with a whip in his hand, Keith’s skull ring gleaming, a bottle of Jim Beam, silver-toed cowboy boots, a girl in a Cadillac with her legs up, a finger being sucked clean of the juice in her navel.

  Rock and roll was Elvis doing “One Night” and “Mystery Train” before Colonel Parker and Hollywood tried to turn him into the Singing Eunuch . . . Jerry Lee Lewis spraying more lighter fluid on his already-burning piano . . . Otis Redding running down a fire escape as an irate husband shot at him from a window above . . . Chuck Berry videotaping himself as he urinated on a hooker . . . Little Richard getting a backstage blow job as the curtain went up from the groupie whom Buddy Holly was doing doggy-style at the same time . . . the Stones passing that catatonic naked blonde over their heads in Cocksucker Blues.

  Rock and roll was a young Jerry Lee sneaking over to Haney’s in Natchez and watching an old black man play boogie-woogie piano. It was a young mascaraed Elvis sneaking down to Beale Street in Memphis, watching an old black man with a tin cup singing a Robert Johnson song. It was a young Billy Clinton watching the curvy, ripe-peach painted women taking their tricks into the Plaza or the Parkway or the Ina Hotel in Hot Springs.

  All three learned to play their instruments in proximity to that corrupt, exhilarating, and life-giving red neon glow. Jerry Lee had his piano, Elvis had his voice, and Billy Clinton had a silver tongue.

  It was easy to forget now, in the nineties, when we were parents or grandparents so busily reshaping our pasts to become role models for our children or our junior executives, that behind the idealism and the social commitment and the herbal experiments related to self-awareness, the sixties were about sex.

  Even the drugs were tied to it: grass made us ecstatically sensitive to the slightest flick of a dry-mouthed tongue. A little bit of coke on our willard or her labia was a marathon stuntlike sex act. Quaaludes tranced us into an endless stretch toward orgasm. The sixties were, in a world without the lethal dangers of AIDS, a sexual smorgasbord. No small talk, no courting, no foreplay, just “Do you wanna fuck?” Or, if you wanted to be a little Jane Austenish about it, “I’d really love to ball you.”

  I spent the years from 1971 to 1975 as a senior editor at Rolling Stone in San Francisco, recently arrived from the Midwest, and found myself dining at this pink smorgasbord quickly and heartily. Some of the women at Rolling Stone were going to Braless Day rallies, where they hurled girdles, bras, and panties into a “Freedom Trash Can.” All the Rolling Stone editors, all of us male, expressed fervent solidarity with the gesture.

  The women at Rolling Stone were young, nubile, attractive and liked the phrase “I really want to ba
ll you.” And they did. Goodness knows, I did, too . . . with Deborah and Kathy and Shauna and Sunny and Robin and Leyla and Janet and Deborah again, realizing quickly that they were balling the other editors on alternate nights, that this was about nothing, really, but a little bit of exercise and lots of pleasure. It was about having fun. It was a combination of athletics and theatrics, intimate communal performance art, best exemplified by the staffer who took his girlfriend into the parking lot each noon while other staffers lazily watched from the windows upstairs as she fellated him. (We named the show “Clarabel and the Zit Queen.”) When Jann went out of town, some of us borrowed his office for our couplings, but he came back from one trip, enraged to find “coke and come” all over his desk, and started locking his door.

  As I watched Bill Clinton with Hillary and heard Gennifer’s account of how Bill wanted to have sex with her in a rest room while Hillary stood outside, a few feet away, I remembered that during those years at Rolling Stone, I was married . . . and so were many of the other editors. And after those office or parking lot or backseat or Van Ness Avenue motel couplings, I’d go home to my wife, still smelling of sex, with Acapulco Gold coursing through my blood, and she and I would talk about Watergate or the price of not-yet-taboo abalone at Petrini’s.

  My wife wasn’t one of the hot and willing young sweetmeats at Rolling Stone. She was, in fact, sort of like Hillary: smart, poised, responsible, a partner in most ways, except the sexual ones. I didn’t marry my wife for sexual reasons, and it became obvious to me that Bill Clinton didn’t marry Hillary for sexual reasons, either. You could call Hillary many things, but not sexy. Drawn to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Bill Clinton had married Judy in Disguise with Glasses.

  Was it possible to imagine Bill wanting to take Hillary into that rest room while wife Gennifer was standing out there? But there was another deadly flip to that question: Would Bill Clinton have felt the need to take anyone into that rest room had he been married to Gennifer instead of Hillary? No one was saying that Bill and Hillary didn’t have a sex life, but the whole world knew by now that it didn’t amount to much.

  So our rock and roll president started having what the press called “affairs,” although, except for Gennifer, the euphemism didn’t bear scrutiny. These weren’t affairs—they were backstage exercises, Mick cutting a swath through groupies, the political rock star run amok at the sexual smorgasbord. All women were Connie Hamzy to him. Connie was a rock and roll groupie whom he’d met in Little Rock. Not just any groupie, royalty groupie, made famous as “Sweet Sweet Connie” in Grand Funk Railroad’s smash hit “We’re an American Band”: “Sweet sweet Connie was doin’ her act . . .” Connie had done singers and drummers and managers and roadies and bus drivers by the time Bill Clinton spotted her by a hotel pool, and the first thing he said to her was, “I want to get with you.”

  He was using women’s bodies still, the way he and we had callously and selfishly used one another’s bodies in the sixties. The point was a pair of lips, a pair of tits, a nice ass. The point was skin, flesh, meat. The point was a hole. And was it any wonder that he hadn’t matured? That, simply due to age and wisdom, he hadn’t learned to treat his fellow human beings with more humanity? Well, look at Mick Jagger, who was pushing sixty. He was just a rock star, not even the most powerful man on earth, the president of the United States. Mick still wasn’t interested in women. He was still interested in holes.

  The trouble with holes, if you were a politician, was that you couldn’t run on them. The public smirked when Mick knocked up a new honey, and they said, “Look at that Mick! And he’s almost sixty!” But you couldn’t run for president and say, “Listen, people, I’m married and I love my wife, but I’ve got this thing about vaginas and fellatio and if I don’t get enough, I’ll sit around the White House masturbating.”

  If you couldn’t say that, and if you were a career politician whose only talent was to collect votes, you had to lie. You had to become a practiced and constant world-champion liar. And if you saw yourself getting away with this lie for many years, and continued collecting votes in the statehouse and in the White House, then why not lie about everything? If your whole inner dynamic was structured on a fundamental lie that you were getting away with, then why not adopt the same successful strategy—lying—about everything? You dodged the draft? Lie and say you didn’t. You smoked dope? Lie and say you didn’t inhale. You were humping Gennifer whenever you could? Lie and say it never happened. A White House intern? “I want to say one thing to the American people. I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”

  A semen stain on a blue dress? DNA? What? Hoo-boy! Jesus God! We didn’t need the National Center for Atmospheric Testing to tell us there was a skunky odor in the air. America felt like it needed a psychic disinfectant. We were Grossed Out, Pissed Off, and Ready to Throw Up—a nineties twist on “Tune in, turn on, drop out.”

  It was the stain that got him, of course. Technology. Who would have thunk it? Exposed as a liar forever, impeached, red-faced, jabbing his finger, lying. In the same boat as Nixon. “I am not a crook.” The same boat as Nixon! Nixon the Night Creature! Devil incarnate to us in the sixties! Not Nixon at the end, sneaking into Burger Kings in New Jersey for a forbidden cheeseburger, but Nixon at full bore: lying about Pat’s cloth coat and Checkers and Ellsberg and the break-in at the Watergate. Exposed, too, as gutless as Nixon, which was why Nixon lied too. Nixon could have admitted it, could have said the break-in was wrong and a mistake, but he didn’t have the guts to do that or to burn the tapes. (“If he had destroyed the tapes,” former House Speaker Tip O’Neill said, “he could have remained in office until the end of his second term. Not to destroy them was irrational.”)

  Clinton could have admitted it, could have said, Yes, I’ve always had a problem with sex. My marriage has never fulfilled me. I’m a horndog, dadgummit! But no, it was impossible for him. He had lied from the beginning about everything because he had lied about . . . the holes . . . and gotten away with it. (“It’s not a lie,” former Reagan secretary of state Al Haig said, “it’s a terminological inexactitude.”)

  Oh boy, a sad, sad story. A sixties kid, waging the good fight against the forces of racism and intolerance, against Nixon and the Marlboro Man and the right-wing pentecostal nutbags possessed and held in thrall by the unborn fetus and the Confederate flag and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion . . . and then this happened! In the same leaky boat as the Night Creature, way up shit creek . . . revealed, disgraced, and all this after a landslide victory over Bob Dole, an old man who had ED—erectile dysfunction. (Everyone sensed something, but no one knew.) Bob Dole couldn’t even get it up, at the same time Bill Clinton was frolicking with Willard on aide Nancy Hernreich’s couch. Oh boy. Sad.

  Only Hunter Thompson, our mad prophet, had had any reservations about Bill Clinton, claiming that Clinton made him uncomfortable, that he didn’t have a sense of humor, that he hogged the french fries. When Bill Clinton said he hadn’t inhaled, Hunter wrote, “Only a fool would say a thing like that. He’s just a disgrace to an entire generation . . . . Bill Clinton doesn’t inhale marijuana, right? You bet. Like I chew on LSD but don’t swallow it.” Hunter didn’t like Bill Clinton from the first time he met him. “He treated me like a roach from the get-go. Like maybe he had such a pure, clear goddamn nose from never inhaling that he could actually smell what he thought was some kind of drugs in my pocket. Or maybe it was me that was actually responsible for what happened to his brother. Sure! Like it was me that told the cops to go ahead and put the poor despised little bastard in a federal prison. For his own good, of course. Nobody would have Roger locked up for their own political reasons, would they?” But Hunter endorsed Bill Clinton anyway, despite his reservations, just like he’d endorsed Jimmah, because he thought Bill Clinton would be the first rock and roll president in American history: one of us.

  So he was one of us and now many of us couldn’t wait to get him out of sight—what the hell, a lot of us had
seen too much of Mick’s tired circus act, too. Eighteen months before his final term ended, America had already turned to the next election. The news shows were covering it as if it were next week. Why so early? Why were we so caught up with an election eighteen months away? Because so many of us wanted it to be over already, because so many of us wanted Bill Clinton gone. He was the first rock and roll president of the United States and he had become the first elected president to ever be impeached. Impeached for lying about his ripe peaches. He should have been infibulated instead of impeached.

  It sure wasn’t supposed to end this way. Our first rock and roll president was supposed to rock the world . . . but not like this. He was supposed to put our kick-ass primal inner beat into the Oval Office. He was supposed to tell the truth—finally—after all the White House liars we’d grown up and grown older and grown more cynical with.

  He made us feel queasy now. We saw a freeze-frame of a fifty-three-year-old man, tired, red-faced, overweight, a father, sitting alone in a plush office, his fly open, Willard in hand, staring, coming. Bill Clinton was the literal nineties realization of that mythical moment in the sixties: Jim Morrison onstage in Miami, unzipping his fly, showing off his dick, and simulating masturbation and oral sex in front of thousands of people. Bill Clinton was the wet spot on America’s bed.

  It had gotten so tawdry in Washington that even the reporters, as they were asking their questions, seemed shocked by their own actions—as shown in an exchange between White House correspondents and Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry.

  A reporter: “Does Clinton have a sexually transmitted disease?”

  Another reporter: “Jesus!”

  McCurry: “Good God, do you really want to ask that question?”

  Another reporter: “Mike, are you saying the President does not now have and has not since he entered the White House been treated for a sexually transmitted disease?”