I’ve learned that people expect me to have a logical reason for the things I do. I thought it might be a fun adventure, never seems to quite cut it. It sounds irresponsible, less than adult. When a ten year-old says he wants to be an astronaut and a spy, we smile and encourage his belief in life’s limitless possibilities. When a forty year-old says he still wants to be an astronaut and a spy, we worry about them. Settle down and be a miserable drudge like the rest of us, they say.

To some extent, it’s Helen Keller’s fault. At an impressionable age I read one of her quotes and made it part of my firmware. “Security is mostly a superstition,” she wrote. “It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” If a deaf and blind woman could be that gung-ho, I had no excuse. I would let it ride, take door number two, say “yes” first and consider the consequences later.

As a result, I’ve become a magnet for bizarre experiences; my life, a pastiche of incongruous juxtapositions. I’ve been a stripper and a minister. I earned three degrees in rocket science from M.I.T., but threw my education down the toilet to work in film and TV and become a humorist. I was hired—and fired—by the CIA in twenty-four hours. I know what it’s like to be in a gun battle with FBI agents and what it’s like to be threatened by the Russian mafia. I’ve held a Top Secret security clearance and I’ve been interrogated by the Secret Service. I worked on President Clinton’s Transition Team and even jogged with President, only to become a footnote in the Clinton sex scandals. I’ve shot Charlie Sheen in the movies, and I’ve saved Martin Sheen from being shot on television. I’ve been a stunt driver, a hand model, a sperm donor, and a screenwriter. And, oh yes, I’ve logged my time in a cube farm.

Even my friends and family have a hard time forming a coherent picture of me. As an editor once told me, “You may not be famous for any one thing, but at least you’re obscure in a lot of different fields.”

The year was 1985. O.J. Simpson was still a beloved ex-football hero. Ordering coffee did not involve speaking Italian. America was still duking it out with the Soviet Union. And I was a twenty-two year-old grad student, obsessed with becoming a spy. It felt romantic, epic, contrarian.

Priming my fire were the usual cinematic and literary accelerants—James Bond movies, spy thrillers by Frederick Forsyth and Robert Ludlum, the anti-collectivist novels of George Orwell and Ayn Rand. And I’m sure that reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago at age sixteen had a certain formative effect, much the way that reading Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States at a young age virtually ensures that one will grow up with more than a passing familiarity with the workings of a bong.

But the spark that set my dreams of covert operations ablaze was a PBS miniseries called Reilly: The Ace of Spies. Sidney Reilly, played by a dashing Sam Neill, was quite simply the greatest spy in history and Ian Fleming’s avowed inspiration for Bond himself. When he wasn’t busy securing Persian oil concessions for the British or huge battleship contracts for the Germans, Reilly devoted himself to overthrowing the Bolsheviks. One of Reilly’s most daring capers was his plan to capture Lenin and Trotsky, then parade them through Red Square minus their trousers. The disgrace, Reilly wagered, would be enough to cost them their authority without making martyrs of them the way shooting them might. As a former fraternity denizen, I can attest to the humbling effects of being trot through the street sans trou. Reilly’s was a baroque plan to be sure, but it might have worked had his operation not been blown by an assassination attempt on Lenin. It’s a historical “what-if” of enormous significance. If Reilly had succeeded in toppling Lenin, Communism might not have racked up a death toll estimated at one hundred million lives through its purges, pogroms, show trials, man-made famines, and death camps. Hitler gets worse press, but for sheer body count he was a piker compared to Stalin and Mao. Keep your gridiron gladiators; my hero will forever be a little-known Ukrainian Jew born in 1874 named Sigmund Rosenblum, a.k.a. Sidney Reilly.

One hundred and eleven years later, in the midst of the Cold War, my classmates were far more interested in attending pro-Sandinista rallies than considering careers in espionage. Of course, MIT wasn’t the biggest hotbed of liberalism in the People’s Republic of Cambridge. Up the Charles River I’d watch Harvard’s sons and daughters snap up Marxist-Leninist tracts at Revolution Books, and I’d feel as out of place as G. Gordon Liddy at Woodstock.

So be it. In a land of revolutionaries, the square is the rebel!

I decided to apply for a summer job with the CIA. The world was a dangerous place and I was going to make it safer. Or, at the very least, protect U.S. multinational business interests abroad. Or possibly yank the drawers off some odious head of state.

I sauntered down MIT’s recruiters’ alley, a corridor with interview rooms on one side and students queued up on the other. Go ahead, suckers. Toil away in your veal-fattening pens on tedious tasks for soul-crushing corporations. I’d rather parachute into Afghanistan, infiltrate Uzbekistan by camel, sabotage the guidance package on a Soviet ICBM, and deflower a Bedouin’s daughter. The fact that I was ill-suited for such derring-do was entirely beside the point, so intoxicated was I with the notion of reporting for work at the CIA each morning. In truth, given my physicality, my ideal CIA job would probably be the one Robert Redford had in Three Days of the Condor—sitting around reading spy novels all day looking for leaks and clever ideas.

I passed a few lost souls who were interviewing for jobs with small privately-held software companies—ragtag start-ups whose prospects were so dodgy they had to offer buckets of pre-IPO stock options to new hires. I wonder what ever happened to those poor dumb clucks and those companies with the funny names, like Oracle Corporation and Sun Microsystems and Microsoft? Yep, that’s a real Where are they now?

To enter the CIA’s designated interview room I had to sidestep a clump of protesters giving me the evil eye and holding signs that said “Culpable In Assassinations” and “Capitalism’s Invisible Army.” This rattled me, but the Agency recruiter quickly broke the ice with, “Forget about them. Hey, do you know how you become Communist? Go to Harvard and turn left.” I liked him already. Then he introduced himself as John Littlejohn and all I could think about was how the evil red lectroids in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension disguised themselves as humans and used questionable cover names like John Smallberries, John Yaya, and John Parrot. At the end of our meeting, the lectroid stressed absolute secrecy. No one could know I was applying—friends, family, no one.

Unfortunately the Agency used plain brown envelopes to correspond with me—envelopes my roommate immediately tore open believing I was hording a secret porno subscription. Hopefully this ruse was more effective in foiling any Soviet spies monitoring my mailbox.

In January I flew to Washington, D.C. to undergo a day-long screening gauntlet at the CIA’s nondescript personnel offices in Roslyn, Virginia. On the agenda were multiple interviews, aptitude tests, psych profiles, and medical exams. One CIA psychologist asked me to describe every possible way I could think of to get secret information from a foreign scientist. I let my imagination run wild: bribe him, blackmail him, seduce him, cajole him, torture him, bug his briefcase, tap his phones, slip truth serum in his coffee, hold his dog hostage, convince him to defect, appeal to his love of America (hey, it might work). I even dredged up gimmicks from Mission: Impossible, like drug him, bring him to a replica of his lab, and impersonate his boss. The shrink nodded approvingly and seemed impressed by my ethical elasticity. I felt so theoretically ruthless. I would stop at nothing to get hypothetical information from imaginary scientists!

Another test consisted of a single essay question: “Does the end justify the means?” I figured I had to answer “yes” if I was ever going to see that shoe-phone. Of course, the CIA wanted more than one-word answers and gave us thirty minutes to compose our responses. Luckily, I had an edge over the other applicants. I knew this question was coming; it was mentioned in an obscure book I’d read about the CIA. So I prepared a thousand-word answer in advance.

Oh yeah… I had another edge, too. I printed my essay in gnat-sized font on an index card, snuck it into the exam, and copied it verbatim while sitting in the back row, totally unbeknownst to the CIA proctors.

I realize that cheating on a CIA entrance exam—specifically, using a cheat sheet to score higher on that particular question—is a logical and ethical paradox of the highest order. Somewhere Arthur Schopenhauer’s head exploded. I mean what could they say if they caught me? How dare you? Using underhanded methods to achieve your goal of proving that the end justifies the means! I’m shocked! Shocked! The CIA is no place for unscrupulous rule-breakers.

Here then is my “off the cuff” essay:

Does the end justify the means?

If you lived in Rome in the 1st century, B.C. and were a writer of moral maxims named Publilius Syrus, you certainly thought so. In his Sententiae (Sentences) Syrus wrote, “Honesta turpitudo est pro causa bona,” literally “Crime is honest for a good cause,” or more commonly, “The end justifies the means.”

Syrus would get no argument from Plato. Several hundred years earlier the Greek philosopher wrote, “To the rulers of the state then, if to any, it belongs of right to use falsehood, to deceive either enemies or their own citizens, for the good of the state.”

But is the doctrine valid in modern times? Considering the context and who is doing the asking, perhaps it might be better to reframe the question as: “To what extent is the use of undemocratic methods justified in the protection of democratic values?” Among these methods, one might list electronic surveillance (Keyhole satellites), medical experimentation (MK-ULTRA), propaganda (Allende, Whitlam), sabotage (Laos, North Vietnam), even assassination support (ZR/RIFLE, Operation Mongoose, the Phoenix Program, Diem, Lumumba).

I have no doubt that occasional lapses in judgment and poor policy-making at high levels result in misguided CIA covert operations. I am, however, convinced that covert action must remain the third option, a middle course of action between lodging a diplomatic protest and sending in the Marines.

Certainly, we can’t go around toppling governments indiscriminately and assassinating leaders merely because their personalities or regimes are distasteful to us; we would create martyrs and drive the country to further extremism by our intervention. Better results might be obtained by skillful diplomacy and a combination of economic incentives and sanctions.

On the other hand, arguments against all forms of covert action are naïve. Maybe it is a reflection of the peculiarly American propensity for introspection that such notions are even considered. Or perhaps it is because America is a young nation without the centuries old tradition of espionage that countries like Russia and China have. The CIA is only 38 years old, while the KGB and its predecessors stretch back to sixteenth century czarist Russia. As far back as 500 B.C., the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu said, “The acme of excellence is not the winning of a hundred victories in a hundred battles, but rather to subdue the armies of the enemy without fighting.” Even the Bible talks of spies sent by Moses to the land of Canaan. Clandestine operations are deeply rooted in world history.

Yet just sixty years ago Henry Stimson, Hoover’s Secretary of State, shut down America’s nascent code-cracking bureau, declaring, “Gentlemen do not read other people’s mail.” This let’s-all-be-gentlemen philosophy may be appropriate for cricket matches between Oxford and Cambridge, but not when dealing with brutal military dictators and fanatical religious tyrants. The notion of “fair play” has cost America and the British dearly in actual war, and has had equally disastrous consequences in the secret war against our police-state adversaries. The Комитет государственной безопасности​ (KGB) has no qualms about being ruthless and neither should we when genuine national security interests are at stake. How long can any game last when only one side plays by the rules?

To those who would argue that covert action is wrong because it constitutes meddling in another country’s affairs, I would point out that many aspects of our foreign policy have impacts on other nations’ affairs. Embargoes, tariff policies, the Voice of America, and even foreign aid programs are all intended to have significant effects on the internal affairs of other nations.

Arguments against covert action based on their illegality are especially fatuous. All acts of espionage, be they intelligence gathering or covert action, are illegal in every nation of the world, yet they go on. The truth is that there are few generally recognized rules of international conduct, and even fewer enforceable ones.

And let’s not obstruct the CIA due to concerns about domestic skullduggery. These fears are vastly overblown, fed by conspiracy theorists and Hollywood. The undisputed findings of the 1975 Rockefeller Commission established only eleven instances of illegal CIA domestic activity. Concerns that the CIA will become the Church Committee’s proverbial “rogue elephant rampaging out of control” are especially unfounded today considering that covert activities must be approved by the National Security Council, the President, and seven committees of Congress. Compared to the intelligence agencies of other countries, the U.S. conducts its secret operations in Macy’s window.

Let the Birkenstock and granola crowd brood in their coffee houses, pondering philosophical generalizations like Syrus’s. Let them chide the CIA with Friedrich Nietzsche’s warning, “Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird.” Translation: “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.” It’s a fine thing to know philosophy, but the measure of a man isn’t what he knows; it’s what he does.

That’s why I want to work for the CIA. I’m inclined to act, not navel-gaze. For me, life in the real world has a way of cutting through the bullshit and clarifying issues. I believe in pragmatic realities, not utopian ideals. The secret operations of the CIA are more than just an expensive game of spy vs. spy with the Russians. The United States of America is a noble experiment in political history. Never before has there been a society so free, so democratic, so open, and so charitable. Perhaps someday international understanding and cooperation will reach a point where the CIA’s clandestine operations are no longer necessary, but until that day, no weapon vital in the defense of freedom should be discarded.

Yes, (Langley) Virginia, the end does justify the means.

And cue “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Clearly I drank the Kool-Aid. Ah, to be young again and know everything.

Casually including Cyrillic language and quotations in their original Latin and German in a supposedly spontaneous essay was probably excessive, but I figured your typical secret agent had to speak six different languages before breakfast. I think I showed some restraint by not quoting Sun Tzu in Chinese pictographs. And at least I didn’t attach appendices or audio-visual aids. That might have been a giveaway.

Amid the highfalutin pontificating I deliberately slipped in a profanity to hint to the Agency that I was a salty no-nonsense type, apt to pound a conference table and yell, “Damn you Ivy Leaguers and your namby-pamby philosophizin’! The President needs answers! Can the bullshit and give me some straight talk! Do we terminate the junta? Yes or no?”

#

In May the CIA summoned me again—this time to Headquarters to face the final hurdle: the polygraph. It was drizzling at National Airport so I donned my London Fog trench coat (very spy-like, I thought), hailed a cab and asked him to take me to “Langley, Virginia.” That’s how they always referred to the CIA in spy movies, so until I learned any authentic tradecraft, spy movies would be my teacher. I was really taking this secrecy thing to heart and didn’t want a cabdriver of swarthy—and potentially suspect—ethnic origin to know I had anything to do with the CIA until the last possible moment. He drove me to Langley High School and asked where I wanted to go from there. I don’t know what I was thinking. Like CIA Headquarters would be next to a 7-Eleven and I’d just say, “Oh, let me off at that 7-Eleven,” and I’d walk across the street once he was gone.

I confessed my true destination and the cabbie grumbled and asked why I didn’t say so in the first place. I sat quietly for the rest of the trip, trying to quell the voice in my head that said, If you can’t handle this cabbie, what makes you think you can match wits with a polygraph examiner, or the Kremlin for that matter?

I exited the cab at the visitor’s gate, walked past a CIA parking lot, and noticed a car with a vanity plate that said “BJB 007,” which—considering the location—I figured had to stand for “Bond, James Bond 007.” It made me wonder whether all Agency employees got the same stern warning about secrecy that I did.

Frank the polygraph examiner led me into a claustrophobic soundproof room furnished with a table, two chairs, a one-way mirror, and the dreaded polygraph, which looked like some mad scientist decided to mate a seismograph and a sphygmomanometer. He hooked me up to the machine: electrodes clamped on my index and middle fingers to measure sweating, two plastic tubes around my torso to measure breathing, and a way too-tight arm cuff to measure pulse and blood pressure.

To break the awkward silence, I started babbling. “Do you call them one-way mirrors or two-way mirrors? I’ve heard both terms used. I guess they’re one-way mirrors since they only reflect in one direction. But a regular mirror only reflects in one direction, too. Maybe they should be called one-way windows, since they’re only see-through in one direction.”

“I’ll ask the questions here.”

“Oh, right.”

After a lengthy sermon/psych job about his credentials and the box’s infallibility, he told me to sit still, face forward, take relaxed even breaths, and not to cough, sneeze, or move. As one of the world’s top five most fidgety people, this was akin to torture. All I could think about was coughing and itching.

Out of the blue, he said, “Transparent mirrors.”

“What?”

“I call them transparent mirrors.”

“Now that makes sense. You are one smart man. And did I mention handsome and impeccably dressed?”

“Do not try to befriend me. You will not succeed.”

Frank hastily wrote something on his clipboard and circled it emphatically. Probably, “HOMO???”

Then he began the interrogation. The questions covered three areas: professional background, criminal background, and personal background—the latter being mostly an excuse to traipse through my sexual history. Sadly there wasn’t much traipsing to do. I could count my sexual conquests on a single hand. And that was counting my hand.

Still, he insisted on knowing every form of “deviant sexual activity” I had ever engaged in. Frank looked like the sort of guy who might consider anything other than the missionary position deviant, so I asked him to clarify.

“Anything besides the missionary position,” he said.

I asked if he was kidding. He wasn’t.

How many partners? Which positions? Had I paid for sex? Did I masturbate? What did I think about while masturbating? Had I practiced S&M, bondage, or bestiality? Had I experienced a threesome? Note: “I wish!” is not deemed an acceptable response. Basically he wanted a full itemization of everything that had touched my penis since the circumcision knife.

He covered several questions repeatedly. At one point he stopped, gazed at the charts, and intoned gravely, “You’re showing signs of deception in response to some of the questions.”

“Which ones,” I asked.

“Homosexuality.”

“The machine is lying.”

“The machine never lies.”

“Well I don’t know where it’s getting that from,” I said, my voice unhelpfully cracking and rising an octave.

“Are you sure? Because earlier you told me I was handsome. Let’s start all over.”

And so it went for hours. I indulged Frank in his sexual inquisition, but suddenly felt sorry for all the female applicants who had to give this creepy man the intimate details on how often they indulged in anal sex and with whom. Two seconds later my lizard brain wondered how I could get a job as a CIA polygraph examiner.

The whole sexual screening seemed weirdly puritanical and prurient at the same time, and possibly counterproductive. I mean, didn’t the CIA want its spies to be rakes and seducers? If an actual James Bond ever applied to the CIA, he’d never make it out of the polygraph. Now then, Mr. Bond, approximately how many times would you say you had coitus with Pussy Galore?

Just for kicks, I wish I’d had the guts to “confess” to a bunch of bizarre urges just to see the look on Frank’s face. I could have copped to agalmatophilia (sexual attraction to nude statues) or amelotasis (attraction to amputees) or klismaphilia (deriving sexual pleasure from enemas). I could have combined all three fetishes. Honest, dude, the only way I can get off is by thinking about giving an enema to the Venus de Milo.

After dissecting my lackluster sex life, Frank moved on to my unimpressive drug use. My history with drugs was very simple. I avoided them entirely until my sophomore year in college, then one week I decided to see what all the fuss was about. In five days I tried wuss-sized quantities of five drugs: amyl nitrite, nitrous oxide, marijuana, speed, and cocaine. I didn’t like any of them and never touched them again.

Of course, in Frank’s eyes this was a wild drug binge, a bender of Hunter S. Thompson proportions. What could make someone shift so radically from clean living to reefer madness?

“Curiosity,” I told him.

What was to stop me from doing this again he demanded to know.

“I’m not curious about them any more. All they did was make me sleepy.”

Frank wasn’t buying it. He was sure I was hiding something. Nobody tries five drugs in five days then never touches them again. We tilled the same soil for hours. Drugs, drugs, drugs. Had I bought them? Sold them? Manufactured them? Transported them? Stared at them? Gone camping with them? Made Christmas ornaments out of them? Fed them to small children? Periodically he would stop and say things like, “You’re not doing very well with this. It’s obvious you’re withholding information on your past use of illegal narcotics. Is there anything you’d like to add?”

Frank was so far off base on this line of questioning that at this point I began to suspect the polygraph was totally bogus, no more valid than tea-leaf reading, its primary purpose being intimidation.

I’d heard of a case where police officers in the Deep South asked a suspect if he’d be willing to take a polygraph. He reluctantly agreed. The cops made their “polygraph” out of a metal colander wired to a Xerox machine, which had a card on the glass reading “He’s lying.” Every time the suspect gave an answer the cops didn’t like, they pushed the copy button and the machine spit out a sheet saying, “He’s lying.” Faced with such incontrovertible evidence the man confessed.

Frank’s insistence that I was hiding something felt like bad theater, his polygraph no better than a colander wired to a copier. So I called him on it.

“I think you’re bluffing, Frank. I think I passed that round of questions with flying colors.”

“Really? Then what do you call this?” he said, waving a printout that showed, well, deception. Either that or a giant earthquake.

“How do I know that’s mine? How do I know you don’t have a stack of squiggly charts over there? Turn my chair around so I can see the printout actually come from the machine.”

Frank’s mouth twitched into a hint of a smile before he caught himself. “You’re just digging your own grave with that attitude, but let’s move on.”

Leaving drugs behind we proceeded to the catch-all round of the interrogation. Frank wanted to know if I had ever, in my entire life, committed a crime. Uh-oh. Klaxons blared in my head and mini-submariners manned their battle stations. This seemed more a test of my memory than my character.

I had doubts about the polygraph’s accuracy, but didn’t want to take any chances. I began by clearing my conscience of adolescent Bubble Yum pilferage, underage drinking, Halloween vandalism and other youthful indiscretions. Next I itemized the laws I’d broken as an adult—the copyright laws I’d violated by Xeroxing articles without permission, the mattress tags I’d recklessly torn off, illegal U-turns, open containers, hell—fireworks. Not being Catholic, I was new to the confessional experience and was on a roll. I even copped to jay-walking that very morning.

Then I remembered that according to archaic sodomy laws, heterosexual oral sex was still considered a crime in many states. After working through that issue, I conceded that given all the loony laws still on the books, I was surely guilty of a whole slew of offenses: juggling without a license, crossing the street while eating an ice-cream cone, cursing while playing mini-golf. Apparently, I’d been on a crime spree since birth.

I wasn’t trying to be cute, just precise. I didn’t want be my dreams dashed over semantics and vaguely-worded questions. Finally Frank boiled it down to one simple, catchall question: had I ever done anything that made me susceptible to blackmail by hostile intelligence services? No? End of exam. A good thing, too. By that point I would have confessed to the Kennedy assassination just to get out of there.

Amazingly, the one question the CIA never thought to ask was, “Did you, by any chance, cheat on your CIA entrance exam?”

Total time spent on the lie detector: seven hours, with no break for lunch. I was drained, emotionally and physically. I felt like the hollowed-out shell of a bug caught in a spider web, my insides dissolved and slowly slurped out by this arachnid interrogator.

#

A month later on a Thursday in early June, a woman from the CIA’s personnel department called to congratulate me. I passed the polygraph and was to start at CIA headquarters on Monday. I was ecstatic. My first wife had just been hired as a Russian linguist by the CIA’s sister agency, the National Security Agency, so we were in spy heaven. That evening I took her out to see the latest James Bond movie, A View to a Kill. Even though it’s easily the worst of the franchise, I reveled in it. Later I fixed us a couple vodka martinis (shaken, not stirred) and we enjoyed a frisky coupling befitting two eager young spies, our pillow talk conducted entirely in Russian.

The next day the CIA woman called again—to unhire me. My career as a spy lasted exactly 19 hours and 13 minutes.

“What happened?” I asked.

“It’s a secret,” she said.

“What do you mean it’s a secret? What changed since yesterday?”

Long pause. “Well, it could be that yesterday Congress canceled the program we wanted you for. It could be we decided not to proceed with that project. It could be that the world situation changed overnight. It could be that we changed our assessment of your polygraph exam. It could be that we discovered some new information relevant to your security clearance. It could be…”

A friend of mine once blew a job interview with a top-tier consulting company. His gaffe? When lunch arrived, he salted his dish before tasting it, demonstrating “rash decision-making,” according to the debriefing from the interviewer. Reckless salting must top the list of dumb reasons to be denied a job, but at least it’s a reason. I was totally in the dark.

After I hung up it dawned on me that I had no back-up plan. It was June and I was just starting to look for a summer job. Personnel managers at dozens of companies howled when I asked if they had any summer jobs still available. They treated me like a guy who waits until age 64 to open a 401(k). Desperate for a job, I applied to be a taxi driver. They didn’t want me either.

Eventually I found work with a consulting company helping design the Space Station’s computer system—an odd assignment considering I know nothing about computers. If the Space Station ever turns into a sentient HAL-9000 killing machine, you’ll know who to blame.

Looking back, it’s just as well I never made it into the CIA. Without any prodding from me, the Soviet Empire folded faster than an origami master holding a junk hand in a game of five-card stud. And with all the spy scandals, who knows—an Agency mole might have sold me out for cheap thrills and a down payment on a condo in Georgetown. Several years later I learned I had a cousin in the B.V.D. (the Dutch intelligence service, not the underwear). Did that derail my career as a spook? I never found out. I bet it was that damn polygraph. Sidney Reilly would never have confessed to swiping a pack of Bubble Yum.

#

Potentially foreseeable, but nonetheless freaky epilogue: Three years later I was taking a cab to the airport and found myself at the mercy of a chatty driver. Where did I work? Where had I gone to college?

“MIT,” I said.

He laughed and said he had a story for me. A few years earlier his company received a resume from an MIT student inquiring if there were any openings for taxi drivers. The resume was still posted in their break room, and now featured numerous comments in the margins. Mostly theories about the intellectual caliber of the individual who sent it.

How much of an underachiever do you have to be to slog through all those engineering courses and then pursue a job as a cabbie, he wanted to know. “What did this fool do, blow up the chem lab? Knock up the dean’s daughter?”

I then performed an amazing feat of mind-reading for the driver and told him the name that appeared at the top of that resume.

“Yeah, holy fuck, yeah, I think that’s it! How’d you know?”

“Allow me to introduce myself. I am that fool.”

#

A fiction writer wouldn’t dare make this up epilogue: In March of 2002, I worked as an extra in the Alexandria, Virginia location shoot of the aforesaid movie, The Recruit. In one scene Pacino and Farrell were talking on a park bench, while in deep background, I and others walked by some tony row houses. In the middle of filming, a dapper old man and his wife emerged from one of the houses and walked down their front steps landing right next to me. I recognized him immediately and told him what sort of movie we were filming. He was as flabbergasted as I was. The silver-haired gentleman was Stansfield Turner, former Director of the CIA.

_______________

This essay originally appeared in somewhat different form in the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Phoenix.

“I’m innocent!” I shout.

Wham! The door nearly flies off its hinges. I listen as the agents search room by room, moving cautiously, methodically, whispering, “slice the pie” and “clear.” A Maglite rolls across the doorway, casting a fan of light over the floorboards, but my dresser is still safe in the shadows. A few inches off the floor, a mirror on a pole pokes around the doorjamb as an agent scans the room low, looking for feet—I knew he’d miss me crouched on top of the dresser. Slowly he enters the room: his gun, his arm, finally his whole body. He seems focused on the walk-in closet across the room. “Eat plastic, G-man!” I shout, shooting him in the back, but before I can leap for cover, two husky agents burst into the room and empty their Glocks into me. Ouch! A couple have shots would have sufficed, guys.

After a quick inventory of my groin, I ponder my performance. Hiding atop the dresser worked, but shooting the agent in the back? Craven. Maybe I should have taken him hostage and negotiated my way out? No biggie. I’ll get another chance in fifteen minutes and one thing’s for sure: it never goes down the same way twice.

Welcome to Hogan’s Alley, Virginia. You won’t find it on any map. This is the home of the FBI Academy’s Practical Applications Unit. It’s a quasi-secret training facility where newly minted agents get one last chance to make fatal errors without incurring fatal consequences. It’s also where I spent my weekends one year, at one of the coolest gigs in the world: hoodlum for hire. When I heard about Hogan’s Alley, a mock city where rookie feds practice realistic arrests on a cadre of role-players, I figured why not? Play urban paintball against the country’s top cops? Sounds too fun to be a real job.

A little research led me to the outfit that recruits role-players for the Bureau and a phone call secured me an interview—an exercise scary in its simplicity. The woman in charge asked me why I wanted to join. “What could be more rewarding than helping teach the good guys something that might save their lives on the street,” I said. It’s fun to shoot things, I thought.

“You start Saturday,” she said, “and I hope you’re not a sissy ‘cause you’re gonna get bruised.” Thus ended the only job interview I’ve ever done buck-naked. Did I mention the interview took place over the phone?

Hogan's Alley

Just like that, I was in. I arrived for my first day, anticipating a charred urban battleground, but instead found… Mayberry. Hogan’s Alley, nestled in the woods on the U.S. Marine Base at Quantico, is a quaint sixteen-acre enclave, complete with a bank, post office, motel, apartments, restaurant and liquor store. Except for the lack of a Starbucks, it looks like a real town. I drove by the Biograph Theater, whose anachronistic marquee heralds Manhattan Melodrama (the movie John Dillinger was leaving when the FBI gave him a case of lead poisoning), and parked at the Dogwood Inn, role-player headquarters, for orientation.

The other role-players—mainly ex-cops, firemen and agents’ wives—were nice enough, but the way they were constantly comparing battle scars and sprains began to unnerve me. An instructor equipped me: a mask to protect my face, a bulletproof vest to protect my torso, and a towel stuffed down my crotch to protect the “long arm of the law.” The gun he gave me was real but fired hollow plastic bullets filled with red paint; when shot, we would dye instead of die.

Next the instructor briefed us on the rules of engagement. We were not supposed to go on a mad-dog killing-spree when the agents collared us. If they used cover and talked us out effectively, we were supposed to give up. But if they gave us a clean shot, we could take it. Before each scenario, we were given a rap sheet on our criminal persona so we could improvise the encounters realistically. (Was I a white-collar criminal with a family and no record? A PCP-crazed killer with two priors and nothing to lose?)  And, like S&M aficionados, we even had a code word in case things got too dicey (“Code Red”). It didn’t take long to discover why.

Indeed, being armed and dangerous and mouthing off to a team of highly trained federal agents is not an enviable position. You will get an attitude adjustment. Think about the show Cops and how the perps get manhandled. Now think about undergoing that treatment eight hours a day. By the end of my first shift, my wrists throbbed from the handcuffs; new agents mistake them for tourniquets. Despite our protective gear, I learned that a shot to the hand leaves a welt for a week. Worse still was the gauntlet agents put us through to get us close enough to cuff without abandoning cover. Their favorite stunt was having us walk backwards to them on our knees. Hands in the air. On gravelly roads. Try it.

Then there was the Drug Enforcement Administration. In addition to the one thousand FBI agents who tested their adrenal glands at Hogan’s Alley, we sometimes encountered teams from DEA. And like many a cocaine mule before me, I grew to fear them. FBI agents share a certain all-American wholesomeness lacking in the hard-boiled, edgy DEA recruits. FBI agents look like they’d kill you, then go to confession; DEA agents look like they’d kill you, then go for a meatball sub.

FBI agents hunting me

In time, though, as the physical abuse became commonplace, the job settled into a strange blur of crime. My “workdays” revolved around chases, arrests, and interrogations. My “projects” involved around kidnappings, bank robberies, extortion, drug deals and white-collar stings. Hanging out between scenarios, twirling my gun and practicing my quick-draw in the paint-splattered, crackhouse-minimalist building interiors merely added to the surreal environment. The furniture at Hogan’s takes a vicious beating; we use it for cover, barricades and battering rams. Best of all? For car chases they let us use spoils of the Drug War: confiscated dealer rides. There’s nothing like rollin’ down Main Street in a rap-blaring, gold El Dorado, sawed-off shotgun in your lap, eyes peeled for the Feds to make you say, “What the hell am I doing?”

Role-players are supposed to do anything to rattle the agents—a challenge I took to with villainous delight. I began barking campy tough-guy talk (“I’m gonna perforate you like a sheet of stamps!”). I would fake a sneeze when being cuffed to see if a jittery rookie might mistake my lurch for a gun grab and waste me. When surrendering, I neutralized poorly-positioned agents by walking out at angles that put them in a crossfire. I shot agents who used flimsy sheet metal car doors for cover, instead of the solid engine block. I tried every film noir trick I could remember. I stuck sneakers out from behind curtains and made decoys under blankets using pillows.

No question about it: as the weeks went by, I was getting the hang of the criminal life. I started to enjoy being handcuffed—by the female agents at least. Soon I had more practical experience than the recruits I faced. My heart no longer leapt into my throat at the sound of “Freeze! FBI!” I was becoming hardened.

Now generally, pitted against a squad of the Bureau’s finest, the outnumbered role-player has as much chance of winning a scenario as Wile E. Coyote has of catching the Road Runner. But when you play “cops and robbers,” it’s not just the cops who get more proficient. By mid-summer, I began to perfect my craft and occasionally found myself besting the agents. Once I beat a team of ten in a supposedly unwinnable exercise where I had to drive to a location at night and pick up a bag of extortion money under heavy surveillance. Although I can’t reveal my techniques, let’s just say there are times in life when it pays to wear all black, douse the headlights, kill the engine, roll to a stop, exit a car silently from the passenger window and crawl in the shadows to a drop location.

My finest hour, my crème de la crime, came one Saturday afternoon. Three agents picked me up with a gun in my backpack and a can of mace stashed in my boot. After one agent frisked my clean leg I started badgering her: “Let’s see some ID; what’s the charge?” Flustered, she checked the same leg twice, overlooking my mace. Another agent searched my bag and, incredibly, missed the gun. They cuffed me and led me to an interrogation room. Once there, I feigned that the cuffs were too tight. What’s the harm, they figured. They had guns and I had been frisked, so they unshackled me. When two agents stepped outside for a quick powwow I made my move. Staring at the wall behind the third agent I said, “That’s an ironic painting for an interrogation room.” As he glanced back at the empty wall, I grabbed my mace, sprayed him, lunged for my bag, yanked out the gun and shot him. As the other agents ran in, I blew them away too. The oldest trick in the book? Sure. But it was new to them.

That night, driving home after my triumph, I was euphoric, in the grips of the against-all-odds buzz to which lifelong felons become addicted. I began to fantasize about following the career path of the legendary role-player who decided to parlay his experience robbing banks at Hogan’s Alley into a lucrative career as… a bank robber. The line between fantasy and reality was blurring. So, just like that, I quit.

Still, as I walk down the streets of my hometown, I sometimes gaze a bit too long at the underprotected storefronts. Perhaps I stare at the unguarded entrance to the local bank. And maybe, once in a while, I think, hmm…

_______________

This essay originally appeared in somewhat different form in P.O.V. magazine.

So I was a little surprised one Saturday morning when she knocked at my door and asked me to jump-start her car. “Mike wasn’t home,” she explained. Mike was the neighborhood fix-it man and all-around good Samaritan.

The Jetta stubbornly refused to turn over. No crank, no click. Not wanting to seem ill-informed about car repair in front of a woman, I stuck my head under the hood and glanced around. Despite MIT’s efforts to educate me about things technical I still didn’t know a carburetor from a crankshaft, so I furrowed my brow like Kasparov eyeing Deep Blue’s endgame and parroted something I’d heard once, “Must be your starter. Probably a dead solenoid.” To cap my diagnosis I cast a suspicious eye at the nearest component, a plastic jug of blue liquid, and wagged my finger at it.

“That’s the wiper fluid,” said Tracy.

“Uh, yeah, of course. It just looks a little low. Might want to check that.”

“Damn, now I’m going to miss my go-see,” she said.

“Go-see?”

“Oh, it’s just what modeling agents call an audition. You know, ‘go see’ this casting director. ‘Go see’ that advertising agency.”

Although using “go see” as a noun seemed a linguistic abomination, I was intrigued. “I’m not doing anything right now. I can give you a ride if you want,” I said.

“Oh no, I couldn’t,” she said, kicking off the Accismus Game. After a rally of feigned refusals and friendly insistences, she agreed and we sped off.

“I didn’t know there was much work for models in Washington, D.C.,” I said. “I thought models were generally found in New York and Paris and Leonardo DiCaprio’s bedroom.”

“You’re confusing fashion models with commercial models,” began her practiced reply. “Fashion models are the six foot tall, anorexic freaks you see in Vogue. Commercial print models are the people in magazine and newspaper ads, selling free checking and cell phones. We’re in your junk mail. We’re the people in your catalogs, the billboard urging you to car pool, and the smile on your box of toothpaste. We’re the politically correct mix of faces in corporate brochures and annual reports. We’re everywhere.”

“That stuff is shot around here?” I asked.

“It’s shot wherever you find companies. And do you know how many companies are headquartered here? They all need marketing materials and ads. And by ‘here,’ I mean Washington, D.C., northern Virginia, south to Richmond, and north to Baltimore. Sometimes Philly, occasionally Pittsburgh. That’s what we consider local.”

“And it pays decently?”

“A hundred and fifty an hour with a two hour minimum. Plus buyouts, bonuses, and usage fees,” she said.

“Wow! That’s enough to make me wish I’d had a stage mother dragging my ass to auditions when I was a kid,” I said.

“You don’t have to start young. I got into it three years ago, when I was twenty-five.”

“I guess you’re right,” I said. “Somewhere, at this very moment, there’s probably a brand manager flipping through photos of seventy year-olds looking for the next Depends adult diaper model.” Temporarily dependent on my chauffeur services, Tracy humored me with a polite chuckle. “Hey, you know what would be great?” I said. “To be the guy who poses for the photo that’s used in a picture frame. Shopping would be so easy. I’d just breeze into Wal-Mart on Christmas Eve, scoop up a bunch of picture frames, conveniently pre-stocked with a photo of me. Boom, done. That’s what you’re getting, everybody. Picture frames.”

I’ll admit, modeling long held a secret fascination for me. I’d get catalogs in the mail and see guys not unlike myself smiling and wearing shirts, and, presumably, getting paid for it. “I can smile and wear a shirt too,” I’d think. On one occasion I even flipped through the Yellow Pages under “Modeling Agencies” and made a few phone calls. Every place I called reeked of scam. They wanted to sell modeling classes, make-up, apparel blazoned with their agency’s logo, and sleek black leather portfolios, like the one in Tracy’s lap, to store those elusive tear sheets. But most of all, they wanted to sell photography sessions. Big, fat, hideously expensive photography sessions. Without even looking at a snapshot of me first to gauge my photogenicity. The whole situation was clearly designed to Hoover people’s wallets while playing to their basic desire to be told they’re attractive. If there was a legitimate modeling industry in Washington, D.C., it had to be underground. “So how do you find an agent?” I asked.

“There are about two dozen reputable modeling agencies in the mid-Atlantic region,” Tracy said. “But you won’t find them in the phone book. You need to know someone and get The List.”

And with that she whipped out a thirty page document listing all the modeling agencies in the region. More than just names and addresses, this had open call hours, preferred method of contact, likes, dislikes, and all sorts of insider information.

“I knew it!” I said. “A secret list! How do you get it?”

“I got it from an ex-boyfriend. He was a model, too.”

“Is that how it generally works? Boy gives it to girl, girl gives it to boy?”

“Yeah. A guy won’t give it to another guy. He’d just be adding to his competition. But he will give it to a woman.”

“In exchange for…”

“Whatever he can get,” said Tracy.

“So it’s an STD—a sexually-transmitted document.”

“Pretty much.”

“Would I have to jump your bones to get a copy?” I asked.

“Tempting,” she said, “but like my car, I’m going to have to refuse your jump. I’ll give you a copy though.”

“Who am I kidding,” I said, ignoring Opportunity as it banged at my door. “That list wouldn’t do me any good. I’m no model. I hate getting my picture taken. My high school yearbook photo is in the Dork Hall of Fame. My driver’s license photo makes me look like a Klingon.”

“I’ve got an idea,” said Opportunity. “I need to update my comp card with a new guy-girl shot. You know, happy couple walking in the park. Why don’t you pose with me and see if you like it?”

“But why would you want me?” I said. “You must have scads of male model friends you could call on.”

“I do but they all have dark hair like me. I think your blond hair would be a nice contrast.”

“What the hell!” I said. “I’ll do it. Thanks, Terry!”

“It’s Tracy.”

“Oh, right. Sorry.”

The next weekend Tracy and I did our shoot on the grounds of an abandoned gristmill in rural Maryland. The photographer was patient although it was clear there was much I did not know about smiling. A true smile comes from the eyes, not the mouth, he explained. It’s the difference between the forced smile of a flight attendant and the natural smile of a child. And, it turns out, an open-mouth smile is good for catching flies, not good for modeling. The tongue just ends up being too prominent. Although most shots were ruined by my uncanny ability to blink the instant the shutter opened, one was salvageable and wound up on Tracy’s comp card.

#

Two months later, my phone rang. Tracy’s agent had noticed me on her card and wanted to know if I was interested in working as an extra on the movie Die Hard: With a Vengeance. He needed twenty blond guys who could pass for German terrorists, and couldn’t find enough local actors who fit the bill, so he opened the casting to the modeling ranks, which apparently now included me. Her agent leveled with me: he was desperate.

It sounded fun, plus I was a huge fan of the original Die Hard and its hero, Lt. John McClane. Before Die Hard, action stars were Nietzschian superheroes, uberconfident highly-trained vigilantes with an unflinching readiness for combat. Stallone often wanted us to consider his character’s tortured past, while Arnold just had fun pummeling his adversaries. But the point remained: their heroes were invincible. When they tangled with entire platoons of bad guys, you expected them to tie one arm behind their back to even the odds. Bruce Willis’s McClane, on the other hand, is reluctant and fallible and feels pain. He’s just a regular, blue-collar guy who doesn’t go looking for trouble, but always seems to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’ll tangle with those Teutonic terrorists because he has no choice, but you know he’d rather be home watching the game, downing a sixer.

Die Hard was also on my mind because I’d recently seen it on network TV with the profanities dubbed over. In the climactic scene where Bruce Willis drops villain Alan Rickman out the skyscraper window, his line “Yippie-ki-yay, motherfucker!” became the deliciously daffy “Yippie-ki-yay, Mister Falcon!” which might have worked if Rickman’s character wasn’t named Hans Gruber.

Shooting took place over three nights in a warehouse in Jessup, Maryland. I was in charge of sales for a high-tech company at the time and we had a major proposal due, so this meant working all day in Northern Virginia, driving halfway to Baltimore, working from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. on set, then driving back to work and doing my best to stay conscious for 72 hours straight.

It was a foolish thing to do, but I asked myself, “How many times will I get to work on a movie set?” At work all the creativity I was supposed to put in the proposal went towards devising sneaky ways to catch a little sleep. The first day I shut the door to my office, threw paper clips all over the carpet, and laid down for a snooze with my feet a few inches from the door and my hands over the paper clips. When my boss opened the door, it banged against my feet, rousting me, and I pretended to be picking up the spilled clips.

He looked at me suspiciously and asked what was going on. I had to say something because there were several clues that things weren’t right with me. My hair was cropped ultra-short and slathered with perma-hold movie stylist hair goo. My bodily aroma was past its shelf-life; there simply wasn’t time to go home between the office and the set. And most suspicious of all, I was uncharacteristically wearing an olive green commando sweater with reinforced shoulder patches, matching rip-stop nylon assault pants, and combat boots—my Die Hard wardrobe.

“Uh, I read that book on guerrilla marketing you gave me. Very inspirational,” I said.

“I think you may be taking it too literally,” he said. “How’s the proposal coming?”

“Zehr gut,” I lied. It was hard to break character.

The second day I curled up for a little catnap in my car at noon. I was dreaming of stealing billions in gold ingots from the Federal Reserve Bank in Manhattan and finally vanquishing that pesky troublemaker, John McClane. Boom, boom went our explosive charges. Boom, boom! I awoke to discover the only thing explosive in the vicinity was my boss’s temper as he pounded at my car window. I rubbed the crust out of my eyes and checked my watch: three p.m. This was the kind of company where people bragged about the overtime they put in and I was zonked out in the parking lot. I had to confess. I explained what was going on and he asked if this was a one-time thing. I assured him it was and for the first time that week, I was only lying to my boss unintentionally. I never expected to do it again. I was 32 years old and I’d been asked to work on exactly one movie, therefore, I figured this is the sort of thing that happens to a person once every 32 years or so.

Though I didn’t expect to do it again I wouldn’t have minded. Because back at the warehouse in Jessup I was having a rip-roarious time living out adolescent fantasies. I was dressed in a military uniform, toting an M16 carbine, pretending to be a badass. Plus our gang had trucks and helicopters and a secret hideout and all the beef jerky we could eat.

The first night director John McTiernan gathered the extras and said he needed “a great pitcher and a great catcher.” While my homophobic compatriots wasted precious seconds lewdly interpreting this request, I waved my arms like an idiot outside the Today Show window. Even though my hand-eye coordination is pitiful, I sensed an upgrade might be involved or at least a moment in the spotlight.

“Oh, pick me! Pick me!” I shrieked in a tone normally reserved for use by people signaling Coast Guard helicopters when they are stranded on roofs during floods. John made me the catcher and explained my enhanced role in the proceedings. We criminals were celebrating the completion of our caper. I would be seated atop a tractor-trailer and a comrade below would toss a wet, slippery bottle of champagne fourteen feet in the air at me. I was to reach out and catch the bottle without falling off the trailer, shake and open it as fast as I could, and spray the bubbly all over the head of Oscar-winner and thinking woman’s pin-up, Jeremy Irons. Jeremy would be standing directly below, so it would be disastrous to miss the bottle and treat his brooding face to high-velocity carbonation-propelled fragments of shattered glass.

As ill-suited as I was to be the Catcher, my partner the Tosser was even less so. He winged bottles in my general direction like I had a giant butterfly net to catch them and he was getting $100 for each end-over-end the bottle made in flight. Still, how hard could it be to catch a bottle a couple of times, I figured. Somewhere around the thirty-fifth take from the sixth camera angle I began to appreciate how painstakingly repetitive movie shoots could be. After each take a wardrobe assistant would blast Jeremy’s champagne-soaked hair and shirt with a blow dryer. Do not expect Givency to unveil “Burnt Champagne: The Fragrance” anytime soon.

Part of me wishes this incident had a more sanguinary climax. If only I could say that I dropped a bottle, blood was let, the production was halted, and I was banned for life from the movie industry. But something dramatic did take place that night. I experienced a kairotic moment of transformation that inaugurated in me a strange obsession with volunteering for things I was entirely unqualified for. I decided to say “yes” first and consider consequences later.

So the next night, when the stunt coordinator asked for a few volunteers for “something a little dangerous,” I jumped up and down and flailed my arms like Gilligan signaling a rescue ship off the lagoon. I think he chose me just to calm me down. In this scene Bruce Willis was flushing us from our lair. Trucks were pulling out of the warehouse with a few of us still on the roof of one of the tractor-trailers. Our job was to jump from the moving truck to a stationary truck. The speed wasn’t much—the truck was only going about ten miles per hour. The leap wasn’t far—the gap was only about five feet. But if we misjudged anything, the pavement was a long way down.

Apparently the bit was too tame to bother the stuntmen, but for me it was the pinnacle of daredevilry. I stretched and limbered up and double-knotted my shoelaces so I wouldn’t trip. As a kid raised on cop shows like Mannix and The Rockford Files, it had seemed to me then that adults spent much of their day jumping on and off the roofs of moving vehicles. At last my turn had come.

The director yelled “action,” the truck started moving, and I leapt the five foot chasm, knowing in my heart that this was surely how Evel Knievel felt jumping the double-decker buses at Wembley.

The final night I got to watch a truly hairy stunt—a pilot started up a helicopter in the warehouse and flew it right out the front door. The margin of error was only a few feet in any direction. What a world these movie people inhabited. Unlike the rest of us, they never lived the same day twice.

That morning I bid auf wiedersehen to my gang of gold thieves and left the Maryland warehouse for my Virginia office. On the drive, I took inventory of what I’d been given. I had been given a line to say: “Kameraden!” A toast to fallen comrades. The experienced extras gushed about what a rarity this was. I’d been given a more than fair paycheck when you tallied up the union wages, overtime, and sundries like night premiums, smoke pay, and meal penalties, fines the production company incurs if they don’t feed you on time. And the escapade made me eligible to join the Screen Actors’ Guild, whose Catch-22 rules say you can’t join the union until you book a union job, and by the way, you can’t get a union job without being in the union.

But the thing I valued most was being given responsibility for the structural integrity of Jeremy Irons’s skull based on nothing more than my assurances of my fitness for duty. I had been trusted by strangers on a movie set more than my corporate overlords who required three signatures just to buy a new stapler. And it got me thinking, maybe there are parts in the movies for people who can’t act, emote, craft characters, or cry on cue, but can reliably follow directions, like “catch the bottle” or “jump over there.” So, like all mortals who get a brush with show business, I fantasized about quitting my day job.

I got back to the office hoping to catch up on my work, then my sleep. But my boss called me into his office and forced my hand. He said my disappearing act during the proposal was very unprofessional and I needed to make a choice right there. He said, “What’s it going to be: government contracting or Hollywood?” which in my bleary, but giddy frame of mind sounded more like, “What’s it going to be: beets or chocolate?”

I might have mulled it over longer if he’d said something realistic like, “What’s it going to be: a regular paycheck, raises, bonuses, company-paid medical and dental insurance, and a 401(k) plan, or a world of perpetual unemployment and crushing disappointments, an excruciatingly difficult trail, littered with the carcasses of people far more talented than you?”

But deep down, I just didn’t want to be the kind of person who sells out his dream for a good dental plan. Even if that dream was only a few hours old. And utterly unrealistic. And conceived in a state of total sleep deprivation. So, in a move that my descendants will surely lament while they ponder their meager inheritances, I told him, “If you put it like that, I gotta go with Hollywood,” and walked out the door.

“Now that, my friends, is how you fuck up a guy’s life,” I said, plucking the letter from the IBM Selectric I’d acquired from MIT’s Gas Turbine Lab by midnight requisition.

The four frat brothers gathered in my room concurred. I was the clear winner of the impromptu 3 a.m. contest entitled, “Hypothetically, think of the worst possible thing you could do to Mike Rubin.” Schemes for food tainting, public humiliation, and adulteration of personal hygiene products (e.g. putting Nair in his shampoo) were no match for my plan to get Mike investigated, and possibly arrested by, the Secret Service.

The idea was malicious, but elegant: Mike, my pledge brother, was an electrical engineering major at MIT; almost every job he would be interested in after graduation would require a security clearance; threatening the life of the president would make a security clearance an impossibility. Mike’s career would be ruined; hence, Mike’s life would be ruined. Q.E.D.

What made Mike such a lightning rod for our animus? I doubt anyone stooped to anti-Semitism when there were so many valid reasons not to like him. He was soft and whiny, spoiled from a wealthy Marin County upbringing, not a team-player, a disaster on the athletic fields, socially inept, and prone to drawing attention to his strangeness by doing things like standing up in the middle of dinner and asking the entire brotherhood, “Why don’t you guys like me?” He just didn’t fit.

So how did he get in? At the time, MIT’s entire rush was compressed into three short days. People slip through. Mike’s nickname was “The Mistake.”

And we had our laughs. Ho, ho, ho, Steve. Yep, that would sure do the trick. Good one. I crumbled the letter and threw it in the trash. Someone fished it out, smoothed it, and taped it to my door. It stayed there for a couple days, then mysteriously disappeared.

The astute reader may see where this story is going.

Fast forward one month. I was seated in an MIT lecture hall about forty-five minutes into my electronics final exam when I felt a hand on my shoulder. The hand belonged to a suited man wearing a curly earpiece. His partner, similarly attired and accessorized, was talking with the proctor.

“Stephen Altes?”

“Yes.”

“We’re with the Secret Service. Can you come with us?”

“Uh, I’m in the middle of a final exam. Can this wait till I’m done?”

“No, it can’t.”

And just like that, two special agents of the Boston field office of the United States Secret Service escorted me out of my final exam two hours and fifteen minutes early. At any other college, the other two hundred students would have stopped scribbling and stared at this unfolding drama. Not MIT. The hyper-competitive dweebs plowed ahead without rubber-necking. Excellent… another rival culled from the herd.

The agents took me to an empty classroom and sat me down. “I don’t suppose this is about counterfeiting,” I said, hoping to lighten the mood, but instead prompting a ten minute warm-up interrogation on counterfeiting, and proving beyond all doubt, that only an imbecile jokes with the Secret Service.

These guys didn’t waste time with good cop, bad cop. They went straight to bad cop, furious cop. I couldn’t blame them. This was a scant year after Hinckley placed a bullet three inches from Reagan’s heart.

They filled me in on what I already suspected. The Secret Service intercepted a letter threatening the president, signed “Mike Rubin.” Mike Rubin vehemently denied sending it, but knew I had written such a letter. Interviews with a dozen fraternity brothers had confirmed as much. Basically the only thing left to decide was when I arrived at the federal penitentiary, would I prefer a large white man or a large black man to greet me with, “Boy, I’m callin’ you Maytag, ‘cause I’m givin’ you all my loads.”

I tried to explain that although I wrote the letter, I didn’t send it. I tried to get them to see that I, more than anyone else, surely was cognizant of the consequences of mailing said letter, since I proposed it as the worst thing you could do to someone. Of course I knew the Secret Service investigates all threats against the president. In essence, my argument boiled down to, “I couldn’t have sent the letter because only an idiot would send it and I am not an idiot. Go find yourself an idiot and you’ve got your man.” This was a tough sell considering ten minutes earlier I joked about counterfeiting. Their expressions said, Oh we think we’ve located the idiot.

As they were acquainting me with Title 18, Chapter 41, Section 871 of the United States Code, which stipulates up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine for threatening the president, I had a flash of inspiration. What if the real sender was Mike Rubin himself in a diabolical reverse double whammy? He knew no one would suspect him and everyone would suspect me. He had the most to gain. By sending it he would garner sympathy in the frat and strike back at me for writing the letter. How fiendishly clever of him! I shared my theory with the agents, but they weren’t swayed. Evidently, in his interview with the agents, Mike shed a fair number of tears—the blubbering tears of the truly innocent, not the crocodilian tears of the diabolical reverse double whammyist.

Why, you may wonder, didn’t I propose that the Secret Service trace the culprit by DNA fingerprinting the saliva on the back of the postage stamp used to mail the letter? For the same reason I didn’t hop on my Segway Human Transporter and skedaddle—it hadn’t been invented yet.

I was given the choice between cooperating (my putative best choice) and playing games (the end of life as I knew it). The agents said the fraternity had forty-eight hours to produce the guilty party and a confession or the consequences would be severe, beginning with the immediate closure of our fraternity. The word “lawyer” was mentioned. And with that, I was dismissed. I stopped by my electronics final, but the professor had already ripped up my exam, adhering, I suppose, to a strict “no leniency to would-be presidential assassins policy.”

Forty-seven hours and fifty minutes later I was no closer to solving the mystery. Secret Service agents were en route, everyone was panicking, and I had a new nickname: BFM, short for Big Fucking Mistake.

Enter Joe Petrovich, my roommate, virulent Mike Rubin hater, and deus ex machina. Joe told me he still held a massive grudge against Mike from the infamous Pumpkin Throwing Incident. This tale of treachery begins Halloween night with Joe and I hurling spent jack-o-lanterns off the frat roof onto the parking lot five stories below. One errant pumpkin pulverized the windshield of a parked BMW belonging to a killjoy neighbor who always asked us to turn down the music. Joe and I figured that broken windshields—along with loud music, the yeasty smell of week-old kegs, and the occasional mooning—was just the price one paid for living next to a frat house and, at most, a comprehensive claim on the neighbor’s auto insurance policy. Certainly nothing we needed to confess to. Our fussy neighbor, however, considered it vandalism. After calculating possible trajectories and doing a little deductive reasoning, the beemer’s owner concluded that the missile’s only possible origin was our frat. He stormed over and, by chance, ran into the sole witness, Mike Rubin. We had crawled through his window to get to the roof. Mike cracked under the neighbor’s grilling and ratted us out. History does not record whether he wept in this interrogation like he did with the Secret Service. In any case, Joe and I had to pony up $300 for car repairs.

Okay, back to scene. In a startling forty-seventh hour confession, Joe prattled on about how he could never forgive Mike for squealing and that maybe, just maybe, he had gotten drunk and mailed the letter. My reaction? “Joe, you crazy nutbag. Quick, somebody call the Secret Service while I keep my eye on Joe.” I guess some people get drunk and have sex with strangers, others mail death threats to the president. And that was it. Joe was expelled, the fraternity was spared, and I was out of the Secret Service’s maw. But not MIT’s.

MIT convened their Committee on Discipline to decide my fate. Expulsion was debated, but they were torn. They felt I had major culpability in l’affaire Rubin, but questioned whether they could really punish me for writing a letter and throwing it out. By one vote the freedom of speech faction prevailed and I got off with probation.

Within the brotherhood, however, I didn’t fare so well. Allegiances shifted. I was the new pariah and, although Mike Rubin never exactly became popular, he did become less ostracized. Even the threatening letter boomeranged in a sense. I had pressed a button (on a typewriter) and it did electronically destroy me (on my electronics final).

As for the rarefied intellectual heights to which I would one day ascend, let’s just say my only chance of getting into college then was via a Petri dish. At that point in my life no one would invite me to a cocktail party. I was such a lightweight a single drop of alcohol would have killed me instantly. And cell division, not witty banter, was my forte. In less than a year, however, my obsession with mitosis paid off. I grew, gained strength, and burst forth onto the world. To my dismay, I found myself to be the youngest son of a middle-class family in central New York state, and not the scion of a rich and powerful family of globe-trotting adventurers.

We’ll return to my struggle to rise from obscurity in a moment, but first, a caveat. Most memoirs rehash familial relations. This is not one of them. If tragic family matters is what you seek, I refer you to the splendid reminiscences of Augusten Burroughs and Dave Eggers. Lesser works often strike me as peevish, blame-shifting tracts. “I’m all screwed up because my parents didn’t buy me a rubber ducky when I was two.”

I’m going to gloss over family business for two reasons: (1) my childhood was spectacularly untraumatic (severely handicapping my prospects for a career in the arts), and (2) if my parents, brother or sister want you to know their life story, they can write their own damn memoirs. But there are a few incidents worth recalling because I think they reveal certain leitmotifs to come.

My father was an electrical engineer for General Electric in Syracuse, New York. In his forty-year career he had several important discoveries (in radar and monolithic microwave circuits) and a few blunders (“proving” to GE management in the fifties that color television would never work). But hey, in 1932 Einstein said we’d never split the atom either. It takes a great mind to make a great mistake. In any case, he is the most highly educated, innately intelligent person I have ever known. British history, quantum physics, classical music, plate tectonics, you name it, he knows it. He is a true “renaissance man,” before the term came to mean basketball players who rap. His brain belongs in a bubbling beaker at Harvard with electrodes coming out of it, solving all the world’s problems.

Here’s an example. My sister is a radiologist. Recently the MRI machine at her hospital broke and no one, including the manufacturer’s technicians, could fix it. Time for a new MRI, right? As a last-ditch effort, she called our father, who has never seen an MRI in his life. In five minutes he walked them through the repair over the phone.

From the time I was five, my father and I spent Saturday mornings together. While other kids were out playing Little League, my father briefed me on the latest developments in astrophysics, biochemistry, and paleontology—topics my Weekly Reader’s relentless coverage of Monarch butterflies and Pilgrims left little space for. Grasping the intricacies of a discovery relating to say, supernovae, would typically require mathematical concepts beyond “Johnny has six apples,” so my father held sidebar discussions on the finer points of calculus and analytic geometry.

I enjoyed these lectures even if I only understood one percent of what he was saying. They made me feel important, like I was his little colleague, like we might be huddling together over a book of early hominid skulls and I’d turn a page and he’d suddenly yell, “Eureka, the missing link! Well done, lad!”

Subject to my father’s relentless tutelage, even a cocker spaniel couldn’t help but learn a few things and it wasn’t long before I brought my supplemental education into school. I suppose I could have kept silent when Miss Long taught our fifth grade class that negative numbers did not have square roots. But I was pretty sure they did and that these so-called imaginary numbers inhabited the vertical axis of the complex number plane. Surely, Miss Long, you’re familiar with the Euler Equation, e^iπ + 1 = 0.

Besides correcting authorities, I had two other hobbies: comic books and coin collecting. Sometimes my hobbies cross-pollinated. When I was eleven I noticed a mistake in the Guinness Book of World Records. Guinness claimed the world’s largest bubble chamber at the Argonne National Laboratory contained 5,330 gallons of liquid hydrogen at -476° F. I didn’t know then—and I don’t know now—what a “bubble chamber” is, but I knew it can’t be at -476° F because it’s impossible to reach temperatures below absolute zero (-459.67° F), the temperature at which all molecular motion ceases. This factoid I gleaned from Metal Men comics.

A year earlier I had put my coin collecting knowledge to good use. The Price Chopper food chain had a logo with a Peace type silver dollar, an axe chopping through it, and the date 1932. Fine except, as any rabid ten year-old coin collector knows, Peace dollars were only minted from 1921 through 1928, and again in 1934 and 1935. So I wrote the president of Price Chopper. He wrote back, explaining that 1932 was chosen because it was the year the company was founded, but in forty years no one had ever brought its numismatic impossibility to their attention. For my troubles, he sent me a genuine silver dollar. It would seem a career in fact-checking beckoned. Little did I know it was a harbinger of my madness for trivia later in life.

#

If my father taught me value of pi, my mother taught me the value of publicity. After each fault-finding stunt she would take me to the local newspaper and trot me out for their obliging reporters. Articles followed and my reputation grew. Teachers became accustomed to me correcting mistakes in their textbooks. It’s good for your grade point average when teachers trust your response over their own answer keys.

My mother had a surprisingly liberal attitude toward actual school attendance. On beautiful days, she would encourage me to skip. “Give those knuckle draggers a chance to catch up,” she’d say.

My mother also abetted my entrepreneurial instincts. A child of the Depression she was always open to any idea I had for making a dollar out of fifteen cents. I think she fancied herself a grifter and me her little Addie Pray.

One of our best capers happened when I was thirteen. Canada Dry stuck two-for-one movie passes in their ginger ale six packs. I visited all the grocery stores in town and plucked the shelves clean of these coupons. I was too young to drive so my mom was the wheelman. Movies cost $4 then, so I figured I could accost moviegoers in theater parking lots and sell two-for-one passes for at least $2. Could I ever! “Wow, you could choke a horse with that wad,” my mother said, inspecting the $300 I garnered the first night. This went on for a week, until there were no more coupons left in Onondaga County.

I didn’t need calculus to see it beat the hell out of a paper route.

Prof. Kosta Tsipis

Professor Kosta Tsipis, my MIT thesis advisor, had no qualms about biting the hand that fed me. Kosta is a brilliant nuclear physicist, a world-renowned arms control expert, and a major pain in the rectum to anyone who thinks the world needs more weaponry. He and I were suffering through a presentation by a recruiter from Rockwell International, a defense contractor the size of Neptune. As a Rockwell Fellow, my attendance at this meeting was the one obligation I had to the company that funded my graduate education. Kosta was there to throw spitballs.

“Rockwell also manufactures the inertial navigation system for the Peacekeeper ICBM,” the recruiter said.

“The Peacekeeper?” said Kosta, “I suppose it carries peaceheads, not warheads.” I kicked him under the table. I loved Kosta’s sardonic wit, but wanted to at least appear gracious to the company that had forked over $20,000 on my behalf.

The recruiter cleared his throat and continued, “Let’s move on to our crown jewel. As you know, Rockwell is the prime contractor for the fleet of space shuttle orbiters, the only launch vehicle with a perfect reliability record.”

Just then the recruiter’s assistant entered the room, his face as pale as Marilyn Manson. They conferred briefly, then the recruiter grasped the table to steady himself and ended his pitch with, “There’s been an accident at the Cape. The Challenger just exploded.”

I’ll never forget where I was at 11:45 a.m. on January 28, 1986—indelibly learning that timing is everything.

#

Six months earlier Kosta had persuaded me to do my master’s thesis on a new joint NASA-Pentagon project called the National Aerospace Plane (NASP). Depending on whom you talked to and what day of the week it was, the NASP was going to be either a space launch vehicle capable of taking off like an airplane and flying directly into orbit, or a civilian hypersonic transport capable of flying from New York to Tokyo in two hours, or a scramjet-powered military bomber. It probably sliced and diced too.

I was eager to take it on because by examining both the technical feasibility and the policy implications of the NASP I could fulfill the requirements for two master’s degrees—one in aerospace engineering, the other in public policy—with a single thesis. I’m not one to pass up a two-for-one deal on toilet paper, so I sure wasn’t going to pass it up on master’s degrees.

Plus, I smelled blood in the water. The entire aerospace industry was licking its sharky chops and gearing up for a good old-time defense contractor feeding frenzy at the taxpayer’s, uh, wounded swimmer. Okay, that metaphor spun out of control. What I’m saying is the NASP’s nebulous justifications made it clear this was a project in search of a mission. I’m all for research and innovation, but the more I dug, the more I realized this wasn’t science; it was science fiction. To withstand the searing heat of flight through the atmosphere at Mach 25, this beast needed a hull made from that rarest of elements, unobtainium. Hundreds of millions of dollars were being spent with little more than viewgraphs to show for it. Congress was being asked for billions of dollars to build a vehicle that was utterly dependent on nonexistent technologies. The whole thing looked like a giant boondoggle, but I knew that if I criticized the project I was going to anger a lot of people who were suckling at the NASP teat and virtually every potential employer of an aerospace engineering graduate. The smart thing to do would be write something safe, insipid, and wishy-washy. On the one hand, NASP might work. On the other hand, it might not.

But I’ve never been one to do the smart thing. So, in my thesis, I ripped the National Aerospace Plane a new one. I shot down its technologies, skewered its cost estimates, and savaged its utility. I wrote that NASP advocates were guilty of “hypersonic hyperbole,” an obvious choice of words perhaps, but soon it was getting quoted all over, from technical journals to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Science, and Fortune. One day a batch of European press clippings arrived from Amsterdam and lo and behold, a whole contingent of Dutch relatives whom I never knew existed were smoked out of hiding. It wasn’t that “hyper-hyper” was so clever, it’s just that journalists have to balance proponents with opponents, and I wasn’t ammunition for the opposition. I was the opposition.

The House Committee on Appropriations used my thesis to lambaste Department of Defense officials in hearings. Maybe Kosta’s gadfly sensibilities were rubbing off on me, but it was fun to be the guy who says, “The emperor has no clothes.”

Technology Review magazine asked me to adapt my thesis as a cover story. I did, then that article won a science journalism award. I didn’t know it had been nominated. It was never my dream to become famous for Pentagon-bashing, but I became the media’s go-to guy for an anti-NASP sound bite.

And then, something really bizarre happened. James Fallows reviewed my thesis in The New York Review of Books. Never before and never since have they reviewed a college thesis. But in December 1986, they did.

What’s the point of all this self-congratulation? A simple question: was all this attention due to my scintillating writing? Or was I in the right place (with a report on the future of the U.S. space program) at the right time (one year after the Challenger disaster)? I gotta go with timing.

#

As expected, by graduation I’d pretty much pissed off the entire aerospace industry. Criticizing their most grandiose plans is not a skill they tend to value highly. So I decided to apply to the one place that valued dumping on technological white elephants, the now-defunct Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). OTA’s mission was to give Members of Congress nonpartisan analyses of scientific topics, and occasionally inform them that gene splicing has nothing to do with mending a pair of ripped Levis, or that it’s nuclear, not “nucular,” energy that they are violently opposed to.

I called OTA to verify the spelling of the name of the person in charge of their aerospace branch, Richard DalBello. Rather than spell it for me the receptionist just patched me through to him. Our conversation went like this:

“Hi, my name is Steve Altes. Could I get the spelling of…”

“Did you say Steve Altes?”

“Yes.”

“That’s amazing because this very moment I’m reading your Technology Review article about the National Aerospace Plane. I agree with everything you wrote and I’d like you to come work for me. How soon can you start?”

Did I mention it’s all about timing?

Now, you think, surely he’s making this story up. He doesn’t expect me to believe that spacewalks are among his oddball adventures. Ah, but the tale is true. Again, the alert reader may have noticed a telling clue in the first paragraph. Wrenches may strike helmets in the vacuum of space, but, lacking a transmission medium for sound waves, they won’t ping. Water, on the other hand, is an excellent sound conductor, four and a half times faster than air.1  The incident didn’t occur in orbit. It happened underwater. If you caught this, call NASA and request an application.

Until those lazy scientists get off their duffs and invent the anti-gravity ray gun heralded by comic books for decades, NASA has only two ways of simulating weightlessness on earth. The first is a white-knuckle ride in a modified Boeing KC-135A turbojet. By roaring up from 24,000 feet to 31,000 feet at a forty-five degree angle, then pulling back on thrust and coasting up and over the top of a parabolic arc, the aircraft can produce about twenty-five seconds of zero-gravity for experiments and astronaut training in its padded cargo bay. If you’ve seen Kevin Bacon squirt weightless blobs of juice in his mouth in Apollo 13, you’ve seen the KC-135’s handiwork. The cast and crew flew about five hundred arcs in the plane to achieve the real weightlessness depicted in the movie.

But the KC-135 has limitations: short zero-g durations, cramped test space, and a gut-churning trajectory that produces a one-third barfing rate among first-time fliers of the “Vomit Comet.” It’s not the sort of place astronauts can practice putting a pair of bifocals on the Hubble Space Telescope. For large-scale rehearsals of space operations NASA has only one option: neutral buoyancy. Making things like satellite mock-ups, tools, and space-suited Ron Tanners neutrally buoyant in water—that is, neither rising nor sinking—is a matter of attaching lead weights or foam.

Neutral Buoyancy Simulator in Huntsville, AL

The Neutral Buoyancy Simulator (NBS) at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama is a cylindrical tank seventy-five feet in diameter and four stories tall, containing 1.3 million gallons of water. That’s enough water to, uh… give 1.3 million people a gallon of water. It’s also enough water to submerge a full-size mock-up of the space shuttle cargo bay.

Of course, NASA wouldn’t be NASA without 1.3 million safety checks, one of which is a crew of safety divers at the NBS. And that’s how I found myself irritating astronauts like Ron. MIT’s Space Systems Laboratory sent me and a dozen other students to Marshall for the winter semester break to fiddle with some widgets that might prove useful in building the space station, or in more fundable terms, to conduct “Time and Motion Studies of Large Space Structure Assembly Using Underwater Simulation of Weightlessness.”

When I heard about the program I had to sign up, in keeping with my rule to never turn down anyone willing to pay for my certification in an expensive hobby like SCUBA-diving. Plus the gig seemed positively spa-like compared to the alternative: enduring a scrotum-retractingly cold January in Boston, my teeth chattering like a teletype. The continuously filtered water in the NBS has a gin-like clarity and is as warm as a pile of laundry fresh from the dryer. As added incentive, the three best-looking MIT women (not an oxymoron, but close)2 were part of this program and the thought of spending eight hours a day in close proximity to their wet-T-shirt-wearing, SAT-acing bodies was a sacrifice I was willing to make for science.

I never understood much of the actual research. The “large space structures” we built were giant tetrahedra composed of PVC pipe. I think it was the connectors between the pipes we were prototyping. Basically, my comprehension of events in the tank was limited to thoughts like, “I wonder if he’s going to connect the astrowhozit to that whizdiggy over there? He is, he is! Oh crap, is that astronaut motioning to me? Does he want this dealiebob I’ve been holding? Okay, hold your Tang! Let me finish scratching my back with it.”

We were supposed to take breaks from diving throughout the day so we wouldn’t develop the bends, but being young and therefore indestructible, I ignored the dive tables. Happily, when we did take breaks, the tank provided ample opportunities for monkeyshines.

One of our pastimes was a variation on that convenience store game where you drop a coin in a water jug and hope it flutters into the shot glass. If it does, you win a prize. If it doesn’t, Jerry’s kids thank you. We stood on the upper deck of the NBS, used the tank as our jug, played it with lug nuts, and instead of a shot glass, aimed for each other’s heads. This activity was banned the day I beaned an astronaut, though I thought a periodic lug nut shower made the simulation more realistic with all the space debris in low earth orbit.

Another diversion of mine was laying on the bottom of the tank, taking a big lungful of air, removing my regulator, and blowing air rings, like a smoker blows smoke rings. The compressed air doubles in volume as it rises and the rings eventually become necklaces of tiny bubbles twenty feet in diameter when they reach the surface. These air-wasting antics kept the SCUBA tank refiller guy at the top of his game.

The NBS features a number of observation portholes into the tank and these provided my greatest source of merriment. The NBS was on NASA’s public tour itinerary and visitors would gawk at us several times a day. As an aquatic attraction, I felt a Shamu-sized desire to perform. Sometimes I would wave at tourists wearing my “Creature from the Black Lagoon” Halloween mask, but generally I would remove my SCUBA gear and float by the porthole—inverted, eyes rolled back in my head, limbs limp, ostensibly drowned. When I heard screams through the inch-thick steel tank wall, I knew I’d given the folks their money’s worth.

If we happened to be exiting the tank when tourists were present, they assumed we were astronauts and invariably asked for our autographs. The NBS director had warned us not to impersonate astronauts, so I was very careful to sign my name Yuri Gagarin.3

At night the bevy of technobabes found a use for me, but not the one I had hoped for. I became their make-up assistant and hair stylist for wild nights on the town with local men. We had worked closely for so long that I achieved dreaded “like a brother” status. My duties also included being a guinea pig for various products the girls bought to save their skin and hair from damage due to daily immersion in the chlorinated water. One girl’s remedy for chemically-fried hair was to slather a thick layer of mayonnaise on my head and bake it in with a hair dryer. Submitting to this was a huge deal for me—I abhor all condiments and consider mayo to be the devil’s jissom. But I was desperate to please and went along. The next day I wondered whether the prankster had become the prankee. My scalp smelled like potato salad for a week.

Between hijinks I managed to absorb a few morsels of wisdom from MIT’s waggish Space Systems Lab director, Dr. Dave Akin. A true space zealot, Dr. Akin has probably logged more hours underwater in his research than the USS Seawolf. His “Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft Design,” a compendium of engineering humor, has become very popular on the Internet. Some observations include:

In nature, the optimum is almost always in the middle somewhere. Distrust assertions that the optimum is at an extreme point.

Mar’s Law: Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.4

The odds are greatly against you being immensely smarter than everyone else in the field. If your analysis says your terminal velocity is twice the speed of light, you may have invented warp drive, but the chances are a lot better that you’ve screwed up.

von Tiesenhausen’s Law of Program Management: To get an accurate estimate of final program requirements, multiply the initial time estimates by pi, and slide the decimal point on the cost estimates one place to the right.

Mo’s Law of Evolutionary Development: You can’t get to the moon by climbing successively taller trees.

Atkin’s Law of Demonstrations: When the hardware is working perfectly, the really important visitors don’t show up.

January drew to an end and it was time to pack up the gear and return to Ice Station Boston. I couldn’t afford to fly so I volunteered to drive the equipment from Alabama to Massachusetts. It was a smooth drive and I even had time to stop in Lynchburg, Virginia to attend a birthday party a friend was having in her family’s Tara-esque antebellum mansion. I didn’t realize it was a costume party until I got there. Luckily, I knew where to find an outfit, proving

Altes’s Law of Improvisation: When you entrust an Apollo spacesuit worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to a college student, you can be certain he will find an occasion to wear it. And do the moonwalk.

_______________

1. The speed of sound in water was first measured in 1826 by Swiss physicist Daniel Colladon and mathematician Charles-Francois Sturm. Colladon rang a bell underwater in Lake Geneva and simultaneously ignited gunpowder. Ten miles away, Sturm saw the flash and measured the time it took for the ring to arrive using a trumpet-like device in the water. They determined the speed of sound in water was 1,435 meters/second, doggone close to today’s accepted value of 1,439 meters/second. I mention this because doesn’t it seem that all the really clever experiments have been done? What passes for ingenuity today are advances like the Slurpee cup with the divider that allows two flavors to coexist in the same cup!
2. The standard MIT joke was, “Women at MIT are the guys who worked their balls off in high school.”
3. I’ve never understood the fascination with autographs. Once I was working as an extra on the movie Arlington Road and my job was to cross in front of the star. Between takes an onlooker asked for my autograph, so I wrote, A Person Who Walked By Jeff Bridges Repeatedly.
4. You may have to be an engineer to appreciate that one. If you’re not, trust me, it’s quite funny.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Bill Clinton’s got an eye for the ladies. I know because he hit on my (then-, now ex-) wife, Barb.

Barb was a press advance person on the 1992 Clinton/Gore campaign. For those of you who don’t watch C-SPAN all day for fun, advance people are the behind-the-scenes people, the small team that travels days ahead of a presidential candidate to stage events for the media. Each camp sends about 300 of these presidential carnies crisscrossing the country, renting stages, chairs, tables, stanchions, rope, generators, lights, U.S. flags, state flags, sound systems, mult boxes, CD players, balloons, drapes, bunting, and nowadays, high-speed Internet access. Their job is to get footage on the evening news and worry about the smallest of details, like bending clothes hangers into diamond shapes and duct-taping them to the backs of flags to make them drape elegantly behind the candidate.

They are professional worrywarts who leave nothing to chance because they know the press corps will make an issue out of anything. Heaven help the presidential contender who walks into the Merrimack restaurant in Manchester, New Hampshire during primary season and orders a ham and swiss sandwich. For the next two weeks all he’s going to hear is, “Swiss cheese, huh? What’s the matter, Lord Fauntleroy? American cheese ain’t good enough for you?”

Barb had done the same thing in 1988 on the doomed Dukakis/Bentsen campaign and had many fond memories of those days, like the time Dukakis told a group of workers at a St. Louis auto parts plant, “Maybe the Republican ticket wants our children to work for foreign owners, but that’s not the kind of a future Lloyd Bentsen and I and Dick Gephardt and you want for America.” Dukakis’s advance staff failed to tell him that the workers he was addressing had been employed by an Italian corporation for eleven years.

Then there was the infamous tank photo op, when Dukakis’s handlers let him take a spin in an Abrams tank, wearing a goofy helmet three sizes too big, looking really uncomfortable and not unlike Rocky the Flying Squirrel.

Good times, good times.

Luckily, Barb’s fingerprints were on neither of those two debacles. And so, in the summer of 1992, in perhaps the only situation when the words “Dukakis campaign” looks good on your resume, she landed a job doing national press advance for the Clinton campaign.

Being of German descent, Barb had exacting standards for everything in life, from T-shirt folding to permissible carpet vacuuming patterns. Her perfectionism extended to advance work and she often called me from the road after the news aired a clip of her event. “What did you think? Should I have used more bunting at that rally in Amarillo?” she would ask, forcing me to actually have an opinion about bunting. At an event in Carbondale, Illinois, she learned a painful lesson: Make sure you know who owns every building in camera range and their political leanings. The owner of one building unfurled a huge Bush banner behind Clinton in the middle of his speech, making that the picture of the day. Hers was a glamorous high-stakes job, with stratospheric highs and benthic lows.

Meanwhile I slogged away in my cubicle. I was the Director of Business Development for a company that made remotely-piloted aircraft, fittingly called drones because that’s what I felt like. While Barb was having cocktails with Wolf Blitzer in the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, discussing policy options for health care reform, I was drinking burnt coffee with electrical engineers in an aircraft hangar in Manassas, Virginia, arguing over who would win in a fight between Batman and Spiderman.

As if her life wasn’t cool enough, Barb even managed to land a cameo in the Clint Eastwood Secret Service thriller In the Line of Fire. Director Wolfgang Peterson incorporated digitally-altered footage of a Clinton campaign rally she staged in Denver, and when the film was released, there was Barb.

It was fitting that she appear in a film about the Secret Service considering how much interaction she had with them. Advance people and the Service have conflicting desires. The Service would prefer that candidates campaign by waving at people from inside a bullet-proof Lexan bubble. Advance people want the candidate pressing the flesh on the rope line, shaking hands and kissing babies. Or is it shaking babies and kissing hands? I always forget. Anyway, Barb was an asset to the advance team because she had phenomenal pull with the Service and usually got her way. Later I learned that her clout with these presidential guardians may have been enhanced by her willingness to let Secret Service agents hide their Oswalds in her school book depository.

When the truth came out, I asked Barb, “Why?” Was it the dark suits and sunglasses? The microphones in their sleeves? The concealed Uzis? Their laconic air of unflappability? Their heroic self-abnegation? Did her Secret Service fetish stem from overexposure to The Wild Wild West featuring Robert Conrad in skin-tight pants and his saucy little bolero jacket? Her answer: she just got bored after seven years of marriage to a drone. I suppose I should have expected as much considering Barb allegedly had sex with my best friend during our engagement. Yes, I realize that the fact that I married her anyway makes me as dumb as a bag of Tony Danza pilots.

Aside from her liberal interpretation of our marriage vows, Barb and I had other differences. While Barb is a political junkie, I’m more of a recreational user. I can take it or leave it. Sure I’d had some fun pitching in with the campaign here and there. I ripped “Bush/Quayle” posters off telephone poles, but that was just because I consider illegally-posted signs to be ugly street spam. I helped assemble the briefing book to prep Gore for the Vice-Presidential debate, but that was just for the free pizza. I agreed to drive a Lincoln Town Car in candidate Clinton’s motorcade, but that was just for the thrill of speeding through red lights with a police escort.

So you can imagine my tepid response when Barb asked me to fly from Washington, DC to Little Rock, Arkansas, on election day to join her and, with luck, celebrate victory: “I’ll only come if you get me some face time with the member of the Clinton family I admire most.”

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll make sure you meet Socks.”

While some believe spoiler Perot cost Bush the election, I humbly suggest to future historians that Clinton rode to victory on the strength of my wife’s flag-draping skills. That evening when Clinton made his acceptance speech on the front steps of the Old State House, Barb maneuvered us a position right next to campaign strategist James Carville. I studied him and decided it was grossly unfair of Republicans to suggest that Carville looked like an alien, or a serpent, or a shaved cat. These are terrible exaggerations of his actual appearance, which is more like a Sleestak from Land of the Lost.

At the victory party, a Clinton aide pulled us aside at midnight and told us that the phones in the Governor’s Mansion were ringing nonstop as congratulatory calls poured in from around the world. Would we mind manning the phones? Right now.

Answer phones for the president-elect? Visions of telephonic mayhem danced in my head. Leader of the Free World’s residence. Speak, supplicant! Boris who? Yeltsin? Never heard of ya! Click.

Little Rock, Arkansas, capitol of the New Confederacy. Guess what? We secede!

So off we trotted to the Governor’s Mansion: Barb to play her role in history, me to start World War III. A guard escorted us to the mansion’s basement communications nerve center which also doubled as the Clinton’s rumpus room.

Soon Bubba himself stopped by. I even made him laugh by saying, “So, now that you’re President, do you think you’ll get President’s Day off?”

“Heh, heh. Why don’t you look into that and get back to me,” he said.

“I will, Mr. President.”

Although technically the proper form of address was still “Governor” or “Mr. President-Elect,” I didn’t want to miss an opportunity to punctuate a sentence with the words, “Mr. President.” As presidential joke-writer, Mark Katz, has noted, they add a certain gravitas to any sentence you might say. Consider the sentences:

“Hooters buffalo wings are delicious.”

“Hooters buffalo wings are delicious, Mr. President.”

See? No contest.

Though Clinton and I spoke for several minutes, I have absolutely no recollection of anything either of us said after the joke. That’s because our entire conversation was drowned out by my own blaring inner monologue.

Oh god, I am talking to the President. Don’t say anything stupid.

Too late.

Jesus Christ! The President just said something to me.

Wow. He’s pretty funny. Laugh. Wait! Not too much. Don’t look like a suck-up.

He’s still talking to me. I am the one person in the world talking to the President of the United States right now. Not the National Security Advisor. Not the Secretary General of the United Nations. Little old me. I wish Tracy Nolan was here to see this. She’d be sorry she turned me down for junior prom!

Damn, he’s the President. He could order me to stand on my head or punch Al Gore and I’d have to do it.

Where the hell is somebody with a camera right now? A dozen shots of me and the Chuck E. Cheese rodent and not one of this? Oh fate, you are indeed cruel.

If I make him laugh maybe he will like me.

If he likes me maybe he will appoint me to some cushy special assistant position on the Federal Maritime Commission.

I don’t even know what the Federal Maritime Commission does.

I wonder if my lack of knowledge about maritime issues is hindering my career.

Holy shit, this guy is charming. He’s making me feel so special. I can see why women get weak in the knees around him. Whew, is it hot in here?

Ask me to punch Al Gore, Mr. President. Or at least give him a wedgie.

Oh my god, there’s a letter opener on the desk! For all they know I could be some wacko and decide to stab the President with that letter opener. That is so irresponsible of them to let some random guy like me in here.

If I lunged at the President with that letter opener, I wonder how quickly the Secret Service agent in the corner would react.

I bet I could draw blood.

Not that I want to! God, what a bizarre thing to think.

That agent would sure be surprised though. He’d probably be aghast and thrilled at the same time. I bet he dreams about stopping assassinations.

Why is that Secret Service agent inching closer to me? Did he notice my eyes darting nervously between the letter opener and the President’s jugular vein?

I wonder if the Secret Service still has a file on me from that little incident at M.I.T.

It’s so selfish of me to tie up the President. He must have important things to do.

Wait, Mr. President! Don’t go! Not yet.

Oh well. At least I’ll always be able to tell my friends, “As the President of the United States once said to me…”

Oh god. I have no idea what he just said to me!

After my mind-erasing encounter with Clinton, he greeted Barb like they were old pals and even knew her name. I was impressed. Next, Clinton gave what might have been the first executive order of his presidency. Barb and I were supposed to forward calls from heads of state and governors directly to him, patch threatening calls to the resident Secret Service agent, and take a message from everyone else. We took our places at a couple of desks and discovered the aide wasn’t kidding. It was pandemonium. Press calls, V.I.P. calls, family calls, even drunken Villanova frat boys and San Francisco wine-and-cheesers phoned to invite Clinton to their parties, already in progress.

Barb was far more competent at this telephonic triage than I. At one point late in the night, I fielded two calls simultaneously: one from German leader Helmut Kohl and the other from a deranged Kentucky man describing how he was, at that very moment, carving the initials B.C. into a rifle cartridge.

That’s when I committed the first of three major errors.

I accidentally got the lines crossed and patched Billy Joe directly to Clinton and forwarded Helmut Kohl to the Secret Service for a shakedown. I would have loved to have heard that conversation. “Sure pal, you’re the Chancellor of Germany and I’m the Queen of Sheba. Now why don’t you tell me where you live?” On line two, I noticed that Clinton kept the psycho on the phone for a good twenty minutes. He was probably sweet-talking the guy out of hating him. He’s just that good.

Around four a.m. the calls tapered off, so I took some time to scope out the artifacts in Clinton’s basement like some nosy date rifling a medicine cabinet for incriminating prescriptions, searching for insights into Bill’s character. My earth-shattering conclusion: This guy is a reader. Or someone in the family is. Bookcases overflowed with biographies, history books, political treatises, and not just for show. These tomes had cracked spines, dog-eared pages, and big highlighted passages throughout. I wished I had a book to plant. Can you imagine Hillary stumbling across The Joy of Sex with Bimbos on his shelf?

Just when I got tired of snooping, to my rescue came a certain quadrupedal member of the First Family. Socks looked a lot like my own tuxedo cat, and turned out to be very friendly, no cattitude at all. I noticed he still had his claws and imagined him using Mary Todd Lincoln’s celebrated rosewood bed as a scratching post. I stroked him, gave him little paw massages, and told him all about the fancy living quarters he’d soon be occupying. I told Socks not to worry since it had been twelve years since Amy Carter’s cat, Misty Malarky Ying Yang, had traipsed around the White House and they had probably swept up all traces of her by now. I suggested that, issues of territoriality aside, Misty Malarky Ying Yang was a damn good name for a cat. My beastly charge purred his assent. At sunrise he got restless and started mewling at the door, so I let him outside.

Around this time, the racket returned as morning drive time DJs called and tried to trick us into putting them through to Clinton. They feigned ridiculous yokel accents and pretended to be Roger Clinton. They impersonated gubernatorial mistress Gennifer Flowers. One caller claimed to be Virginia Kelley, the President’s mother. I didn’t want to foul up again, so I interrogated her. “If you’re the real Mrs. Kelley, can you please tell me where Bill Clinton was born.”

“Hope,” she said.

“Nice try, lady. The answer is Hot Springs,” I said and hung up. I knew my Bill Clinton trivia. That’s when an ashen aide sidled up to me and explained that although Bill Clinton was raised in Hot Springs, he was born in Hope. That was my second mistake of the night. When Mrs. Kelley called back a minute later I apologized profusely and put her through to her son.

Then the aide asked me where Socks was. Turns out ol’ Socks had a photo shoot that morning—Cat Fancy magazine or something. I told her I let him outside. That turned out to be my third mistake. Apparently, Socks was an indoor cat.

It was, even for me, an unparalleled flurry of bungling. In just eight hours I had managed to aggravate the German head of state, put a potential assassin in direct contact with the President of the United States, hung up on the President’s mother, and lost the First Cat. After a tense 48 hours, Socks returned to the Governor’s Mansion. Amazingly, so did I, although I was relieved of all phone duties. Basically, I hung out in Bill Clinton’s basement for the week, pretending to look busy.

Barb, as usual, was performing splendidly and was assigned additional responsibilities. One of her new assignments was managing the deluge of incoming mail. Now I don’t know if all president-elects get such a motley collection of missives, or just this one, but from day one, people sent him the weirdest stuff: allergy remedies, black velvet Elvis paintings, used books, cat toys, baseball caps. It was as if Clinton won the election and all over America people got the same idea: Let’s send the President the crap in our basement!

Some mail required special attention: requests for Clinton’s signature on a football to be auctioned off for charity, autograph requests from terminally-ill children, and other tear-wellers. Now I don’t think I’m divulging a state secret when I say that not everything bearing a presidential signature was touched by a president. The word “autopen” has been in the public consciousness for years. But I didn’t know there were human autopens. My wife was one of them.

Clinton himself coached her in the fine art of presidential signature forgery. Before long her “Bill Clinton” looked better than his. Hers was neat, confident, and stylish. His appeared rushed and sloppy. Like some harbinger of disillusionments to come with his Administration, the signature subterfuge really bothered me. At least with the autopen you’re still getting the President’s own personal holographic idiosyncrasies, albeit mechanically reproduced. With this setup, you’re just getting conned. Clinton wasn’t the first president to disappoint me (I’m still waiting for my “Whip Inflation Now” button, Mr. Ford). And I did envy Barb. Being able to mimic the President’s autograph does present some intriguing possibilities. If only eBay had existed back then.

At the end of the first week Barb introduced me to the three new basement aides who would replace the floaters. They were all cute, young, blonde things and all named Michelle. Barb and the Michelles were not oblivious to their eye-pleasing qualities and immediately dubbed themselves the “Basement Babes.” Barb asked me to do a better job at looking busy while in the basement, because it was becoming apparent that, aside from pilfering official stationery, I had no real purpose being there. A few minutes later Barb looked over my shoulder and noticed I was hurriedly scribbling equations.

“What are you doing?” Barb said.

“Looking busy.”

“No. I mean what the hell is that?”

“Combinatorics. It’s a branch of probability theory.”

“Why?” she said, her patience gone.

“I just thought it was interesting that you and the three other permanent staffers in Clinton’s basement would be attractive young blondes, so I decided to calculate the odds of it happening purely by chance. See?” I said and offered her my sheet:

Consider the Bernoulli trial of n chance experiments in staffing Bill Clinton’s basement:

Define “babe” to be a cute, young, blonde woman.

p = babe distribution among Clinton campaign staff as a whole = 1 out of 20 = 0.05 (Source: this researcher’s empirical observation)

n = number of Bernoulli trials = 4

j = number of successes = 4 (i.e. 4 out of 4 basement staffers are babes)

Thus, b(4, 0.05, 4) = 4! (0.05)⁴ (0.95)^4-4 /4! (4-4)! = 0.00000625

Odds = 1/0.00000625 or 160,000 to 1 that it occurred by chance.

For comparison: The odds that a person will be killed by lightning at some point in his life is about 50,000 to 1. Thus, it is three times more likely that I will be killed by lightning than the four staffers picked to work in Bill Clinton’s basement just so happened to be “babes.”

Note: Calculating the odds that three of the four babes would be named Michelle is beyond the scope of this investigation. Further research is warranted.

“Are you nuts?” Barb said, tearing up my work. “What if CNN got ahold of that? Jesus! After that stunt you’re now three times more likely to be killed by me!”

I guess I was getting bored and missed my fellow engineers. They were simpler people who didn’t worry about politics. Or fashion. Or hygiene. Or social graces. I felt more at home with them. But I had to admit, life was interesting in central Arkansas in November, 1992. Anything could happen. The next morning Barb and I decided to get away from all the hubbub. The press was swarming around the Governor’s Mansion like wedding guests around an open bar, so we drove an hour to Hot Springs to check out the famous geothermal springs and Gilded Age bathhouses. We were walking by Bill Clinton’s boyhood home when a camera crew pounced on us.

“Can I ask you why you came here today?” an ABC news reporter asked.

Barb, who never saw a TV camera she wasn’t eager to speak into, immediately starting spinning. “I came to Hot Springs because I admire Bill Clinton so much that I just had to see his boyhood home. It’s a tribute to our country that someone from such humble origins can still grow up to be the President. He’s a man of the people who hasn’t forgotten where he came from. And I think the family values of this town will always be the bedrock of Bill Clinton’s moral fiber.”

The reporter gave Barb a thumbs up, then turned to me. “How about you, sir?”

Barb’s revisionist Norman Rockwell whitewash rankled me. Family values? Whose family? Which values? We’d just finished a tour of the town and the locals made no secret of Hot Springs’s colorful past. It wasn’t called the “Las Vegas of the South” for nothing. So I chimed in. “I agree. Family values like bathhouses, speakeasies, gambling, and brothels put Hot Springs on the map and made it a destination of choice for gangsters like Al Capone and Bonnie and Clyde. I’m sure Hot Springs made Bill Clinton the man he is today.” Barb elbowed me, a little harder than necessary, so I continued. “Say, are you familiar with probability theory?”

“Okay, that’s enough,” said Barb. “We’ve got to get going.” Our interview aired the next day on Good Morning America.

My final night at the mansion it became clear to me who wears the jackboots in the Clinton family. It was around one in the morning and I was busy cramming Presidential Transition Team letterhead into my briefcase so I could send some fake letters to my friends appointing them Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs and whatnot, while Bill was in the basement clowning around with Barb and one of the Michelles. They were modeling a cowboy hat someone had sent Bill. Suddenly, in walked Hillary wearing a bath robe and no make-up, her hair up in rollers. Her face was contorted into a scowl that made my balls retract into my stomach. It was truly an Elsa Lanchester moment. If she didn’t actually have a rolling pin in her hand, I think my mind just connected the dots and drew one in.

“Bill,” she hissed.

“Okay, okay, just a minute,” he said.

“Now! I mean it!” The subtext of the situation was pretty clear. Theirs was a frosty marital bed. A forlorn Bill silently skulked out of the room while the rest of us pretended to be too preoccupied with the nearest piece of paper to notice the whip cracking on our nation’s next Commander-in-Chief. I felt perversely sorry for the most powerful man in the world. We all did. And in that moment I got the sense that everything that had been written about Bill Clinton’s skirt-chasing ways was probably true—he needed the outlet. Because never in my life have I seen a woman more corrosive to libidinous urges than Hillary Rodham Clinton. The sight of her that night haunts me still.

The next day I flew back to D.C. leaving my wife behind. To work long hours in Bill Clinton’s house. In his basement. On the night shift. Dear God! What was I thinking?

A couple weeks later, on Thanksgiving, I was polishing off my Swanson’s Turkey Dinner when the phone rang. It was Barb. She said that Hillary put the kibosh on the Michelles and had them replaced with less alluring aides. Then she said she had a special guest who wanted to say something. Bill Clinton got on the line and said, “Steve, ah jus’ wanna tell you that I sure enjoy havin’ your wife in ma’ basement. I don’t think I can let her go.”

Thinking quickly for once, I replied, “Well sir, to paraphrase Nathan Hale, I regret that I have but one wife to give for my country.” Did my pun go too far? Did I tempt the president and invite the mischief to come?

I don’t want to name names, so let’s just say that one night in mid-December Barb found herself alone with a certain priapic president-elect of a certain North American superpower in a narrow corridor of his basement. In the midst of talking about correspondence, he pinned her against the wall between his two forearms, looked at her with puppy-dog eyes and said, “Ya know, even presidents need hugs, too.” Then he proceeded to hug my wife for a period of time which was, as she put it, “uncomfortably long, much longer than a normal hug, like thirty seconds.” Barb pushed him away, feeling shocked, flustered, flattered, and vaguely insubordinate at the same time. She got back to work and they never spoke about it.

A harmless hug? Doubtful, given what we now know about Bill Clinton. As Vincent Vega observed in Pulp Fiction, a foot massage is never just a foot massage. Well, sometimes a hug isn’t just a hug. I wouldn’t last very long in cubeland if I tried a little hallway frottage with the buxom hottie from payroll. I liken Bill Clinton’s technique with women to that of a hotel burglar. He goes down the hallway checking doorknobs, looking for easy targets. If it’s locked he doesn’t beat the door down; he just moves on and tries the next one. Eventually he finds an unlocked door.

Given Barb’s past you may wonder whether more transpired and I only got part of the story. I know Barb. She freely confessed all her other affairs to me, so I’d have been the first person she bragged to if she’d actually banged a U.S. President. In fact, back in 1992 when my wife first told me about the incident, I must admit, I was kind of proud. I mean, he was the ultimate alpha dog and he wanted my woman. It’s not like it was the pizza guy putting the moves on her. Subsequent revelations about Clinton’s choosiness have devalued the compliment considerably.

In a way, Hillary and I made the same deal with the devil, though hers was on a massive scale. It’s incontestable that Hillary ignored her husband’s infidelities because he brought her closer to power. Likewise, I overlooked Barb’s affairs because she brought adventure into my life. Once I discovered I could create my own adventures, I was able to end my hollow marriage. It’s a shame Hillary can’t do the same.

Part Two: Becoming a Footnote to Scandal

The preceding essay was sparked by a Georgetown book release party I attended in the spring of 1998. The Lewinsky story had just broken, the press was beginning a two-year run of sustained batting practice with Bill Clinton’s balls, and people at the party were arguing about whether any of it was true. “Of course it’s true,” I said. “Clinton’s a total horndog. Hell, he even hit on my wife.” Bill Thomas, editor of Washington, D.C.’s Capital Style magazine, perked up his ears.

“If you can prove it, I’ll publish it,” he said. I was reluctant, feeling it might be a tad disloyal, but I told him I’d think about it.

At home that night I tried to work out the moral arithmetic, aided by my mental lubricant of choice, cranberry juice and vodka.

Cape Codder #1: Barb will go right up the flue if this story becomes public! But does anybody want to read a “hug and tell” story? Plus, how am I going to prove any of this? And for all his faults Clinton is still a pretty likeable guy. Do I really want to pile on? I’ll call Bill Thomas tomorrow and tell him I don’t feel right doing this.

Cape Codder #2: Besides, the Clinton machine has lots of foaming political attack dogs eager to bite inconvenient mailmen like me. They’ll call me a liar on national television. Remember what they did to Kathleen Willey?1

Cape Codder #3: No, I definitely can’t do this to Clinton. For Christ’s sake, I’ve gone jogging with the man.2

Cape Codder #4: Okay, wait a minute. No omerta binds me. What obligation do I have to either my ex-wife or Bill Clinton? Why should I be worried about loyalty to a serial adulteress? As for Clinton, he made his bed. Maybe it’s not such a bad idea.

Cape Codder #5: Come to think about it, I’m pissed at Clinton. Those jerks on his Transition Team stiffed me! It’s only fair that I get paid for the story, considering how they owe me.3

Cape Codder #6: Screw ‘em! I’ll do it. This is a true story. Clinton’s behavior with women is deplorable.4 Let the chips fall where they may. Maybe the story won’t get much attention anyway.

At that point I committed the grievous sin of E.W.I., emailing while intoxicated. I wrote Thomas and told him I’d do the piece.5 The next morning I woke up a little worried about what I’d gotten myself into. But soon the fun of writing the piece overtook my misgivings and I got lost in the process.

I realize that many people, especially female people, might think I’m a prick for writing the piece. They’re probably right. Keeping silent would have been the chivalrous thing to do. I could offer the William Faulkner Defense and insist that a true writer will use any material or circumstance available to him to tell his story. Said he, “Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate. The ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.” I could argue that, though I’m no Keats, ex-wives surely cannot expect more compassionate treatment than mothers.

Or I could point to my lingering resentment stemming from Barb’s vindictive heel-dragging our divorce proceedings, making a six-month process take two years and needlessly costing me thousands of dollars. The lesson for Barb being: before you jerk someone around, ask if they plan on ever becoming a memoirist, because paybacks are a bitch.

But my primary impetus was the righteous state of mind I reached around the sixth Cape Codder, a feeling of solidarity with the Clinton accusers, whose ranks now included Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, Kathleen Willey, Dolly Kyle Browning, former Miss Arkansas Sally Perdue, former Miss America Elizabeth Ward Gracen, flight attendant Christy Zercher, and others.6 Their claims rang true to me based on Barb’s experience. Seeing the White House involved in efforts to discredit, bribe, audit, threaten and intimidate these women incensed me as a feminist. That’s right, I said it. Revoke my fishing license and donate my plaid shirts to Goodwill. Call me gay as a clutch purse at the Tony Awards, but the writings of Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi and Camille Paglia speak to me. I am a feminist—hear me roar. “Go ahead,” I said, baiting unseen political attack dogs, as I wrote the piece. “I dare you to call me a liar. You’ll rue the day!” Yes, I actually said, “rue the day,” the histrionic threat of the hopelessly outmatched. And, I’ll admit, a certain amount of shadow-boxing was involved.

A month later I sent Capital Style a version of “Bill Clinton Hit on My Wife” similar to the one here, minus the references to my wife’s marital lapses (how discreet of me!). Thomas called me the next day, sounding concerned. While he liked the piece he didn’t think he could run it. It seemed impossible to fact-check. I agreed. Verifying a six year-old clandestine embrace between two people, both of whom are highly motivated to deny it, does pose some problems. Especially since there were no witnesses. Thomas told me to come to his Capital Hill office and bring every shred of evidence I had.

I dumped on Thomas’s conference table the contents of my Clinton campaign shoe box, to wit, my Presidential Transition Team ID badge and some photos I took at the Governor’s Mansion. It was a strange assortment of photos: Socks sitting regally next to a flower pot, the back of James Carville’s head, George Stephanopoulos asleep on a couch with his hand shoved down the front of his pants, a photo of Clinton’s new Washington, D.C. driver’s license, aide Loretta Avent putting a pair of cowboy boots embossed with the Presidential Seal on Clinton, and… what have we here?… Clinton with my wife. On her knees.

A candid moment with George

Thomas stared in amazement at the photo, which showed my wife wearing a leopard-print blouse on her knees with an arm around Clinton’s shoulders. Clinton was slouched in a basement chair, legs wide apart, talking on the phone, wearing a cowboy hat, blue jeans, and a sweatshirt that said “City Year,” except the fabric puckered in a way that made it look like, “Oh Yea.”

“Wow,” said Thomas.

“Yeah. I know.”

“Do you realize your wife looks a lot like Gennifer Flowers?” he said.

“Mm-hm. They’re both big-haired, bottle-blondes who resemble Hillary, but without the hard edge.”

My credibility had moved up a notch. But Thomas still needed proof that something happened between them. “She didn’t write you any letters about it?”

“No, she told me over the phone and in person.”

“Did she tell anyone else?”

“Her best friend, Natasha. But Natasha would deny it. And I know she told a journalist, but I can’t remember his name.”

“I’m surprised the journalist didn’t run with it,” Thomas said.

“I think they were talking off the record.”

“Sorry, Steve, but if that’s all you’ve got, I’m afraid this story is dead in the water. But I’ll give you a couple hundred for that shot of Stephanopoulos groping himself. It’s fucking hilarious.”

Perfect, I thought. Another month’s work down the drain to go with my three months unpaid tour of duty on the Transition Team. My finances were shaky enough. I didn’t have the luxury of volunteering months of my time.

Then I remembered The Email.

The day after Clinton’s affair with Monica became public Barb sent me a nastygram telling me to keep my big yap shut. I couldn’t remember exactly what she had written, so I told Thomas there might be something else. I drove home and searched my email archives. There it was:

Subj: Loose lips
Date: 98-01-22 11:36:59 EST
From: Barb@xxxxxxx.com
To: SteveAltes@aol.com

I need complete confidence that you are not going to say a word to anyone. I’m staying out of this. Matt Cooper is a friend and he would never reveal what happened. Clinton is going down without my help, so it doesn’t make any difference. Anyway, I still like him, so I’m not interested in adding to the fire. Thanks. Go make your own news!

Classic Barb. Ask a favor then sign off with a jab. I appreciated her jogging my memory about Matt Cooper, the reporter she told about the incident.7 Her email convinced Thomas that I was telling the truth. He called Barb and told her he was going to publish the article. Thomas told me later, “Her reaction gave me all the confirmation I needed.”

Wednesday, September 23, 1998. The October issue of Capital Style hit the stands, featuring “Bill Clinton Hit on My Wife” in a highly edited form—about one-sixth the size it appears here. I guess I should have asked Thomas how long a piece he wanted. Stripped of humor due to space constraints, it was mostly accusation. Alongside the article ran the suggestive photo of Barb on her knees with Clinton, although Thomas had pixilated Barb’s face at my request. I didn’t want to turn her life upside-down. I just wanted to make people laugh.

Thomas called around noon and said that he was getting calls from journalists around the world. He wanted to know if I wanted to talk to them.

“No, I think the article speaks for itself.”

“Good plan. It’ll add to the mystery,” said Thomas.

I wasn’t trying to be crafty. But what was I going to say at that point? That I was an aggrieved husband who wanted to go all Aaron Burr on Clinton’s ass and challenge him to a duel?

“Have the journalists figured out Barb’s real name?” I asked.

“No. They’re referring to her as Barb Altes,” Thomas said. Luckily for Barb, she kept her maiden name during our ten-year marriage, so the press was busy hunting for a “Barb Altes,” who didn’t exist.

“Good,” I said. “I don’t want her dragged into this if possible. She still has to work in this town.”

A few hours later Thomas called back, sounding excited. “How does it feel to have the White House press secretary discuss your article in a press conference?”

“Oh god. What happened?” I asked, freaking out.

“A reporter asked Mike McMurry if he had any comment on the article.”

“What’d he say?”

“He ducked and weaved. Said he hadn’t seen the piece yet. But the reporter was persistent. Asked about it three times. Also, Extra and Inside Edition want to interview you. What should I tell them?”

“Tell them the author is in seclusion. No, tell them the author is in South America hiding from Clinton’s hit squads.”

I was kidding, but my paranoia was real. I’d just finished reading an article about the untimely deaths of a statistically large number of people who were witnesses in the numerous Clinton scandals. The article said that the average life expectancy for Clinton scandal witnesses had hit an all-time low. The median age of death was now just 45 years old. If this keeps up life insurance agents are going to have to ask prospective customers, “Do you smoke, motorcycle, skydive, or have any connections to Bill Clinton?”

I got up and made sure my apartment door was deadbolted. For the third time that hour.

Thomas said, “It looks like Page Six might cover the story tomorrow.”

“What’s Page Six?” I asked, revealing myself to be hopelessly unsophisticated.

“You don’t know what Page Six is?” Thomas asked incredulously.

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s Richard Johnson’s gossip column in the New York Post.” He paused, perhaps expecting me to say, “Oh that Page Six!” Nothing. He might as well have been talking to a cow. “It’s the first thing celebrities read in the morning. A lot of people would give their left arm to be written about in Page Six.”

“Cool. I’ve never been written about in a gossip column,” I said. “Do you think it’ll help me get into Studio 54?”

Thursday, September 24, 1998. The next morning I drove to my local Centreville, Virginia, drugstore and bought a New York Post. I flipped to page six but it wasn’t there. Rube that I am, I did not know that Page Six appears anywhere but page six. But on page eight, there it was: seven column inches on the story and the photo of Barb on her knees with Clinton. I stared at the caption in disbelief. Jaw agape, I read it several times just to be sure.

The caption said, “Clinton poses with the Little Rock ‘Basement Babe’ he is said to have propositioned after he was elected in 1992. Her face is pixilated because she is the alleged victim of a sex crime.”

Sex crime? Who said anything about a sex crime? This story was mutating faster than a Chernobyl fruit fly. In one day, it had gone from “hit on my wife” to “sex crime.” What would the headline be tomorrow? Clinton Gave my Wife a Dirty Sanchez? Suddenly I felt sorry for Clinton. Sorry I’d told the story. And afraid for my life.

I went home, turned on the tube, and just happened to land on the opening drumbeats of Inside Edition. Maybe it won’t be a big deal, I thought. Deborah Norville’s first words: “Another day, another indiscretion is being alleged against Bill Clinton.” Uh-oh.

Craig Rivera, Geraldo’s kid brother (double uh-oh), covered the story. He deepened his voice and added ominous color to key phrases like, “But there’s more.” When he got to the part about Clinton pinning my wife against the wall, the segment’s background music suddenly switched to a porno-sounding track and the stock footage of Clinton was slowed down, making him look blameworthy somehow. It’s a neat trick. For some reason our brains say, That guy moves slow! He must be guilty! I hear porno music. That guy’s gotta be a sex fiend! TV news producers know this and exploit it.

About this time the media figured out how to reach me without going through Capital Style and my phone started ringing. Journalists from all over the world—the United Kingdom, Russia, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela—were doing stories and wanted to talk to me. Producers from CNN, ABC News, Fox News, and The Oprah Winfrey Show called. Tabloid reporters begged for exclusives.

Once again, I freaked out.

It’s a surreal experience to suddenly go from private citizen to tabloid fodder. You just don’t know when it’s going to end. Am I going to be the butt of jokes in tonight’s Leno monologue? Am I going to be the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question twenty years from now? I called Thomas for advice. He was an old hand in Washington, a seasoned journalist and author of several books on Washington scandals. Surely he would know what to do. He told me, “These media frenzies burn out quickly. My advice to you is don’t answer the phone and drink heavily.”

“Good plan,” I said. “Alcohol got me into this mess. Maybe alcohol can get me out.”

Friday, September 25, 1998. The calls continued and my answering machine captured a message of support from an unlikely source—Sydney Biddle Barrows, the Mayflower Madam.8 I’d met her at a party a couple years earlier and was surprised she remembered me. No stranger to intense worldwide media coverage, she said she enjoyed my article and told me to hang in there. She then she offered some insights about notoriety being a blessing and a curse and, if you play it right, profitable. I wanted to write down her exact words, but in my alcoholic fog when I went to hit “repeat,” I accidentally hit “delete.” Tabloids and Mayflower Madams? I thought. This is not my life. Where do I go to get my life back? I wondered if Barb was thinking the same thing. Then I had another drink and contemplated the question, “exactly how big a bastard am I?”

Saturday, September 26, 1998. I awoke to the sound of—what’s this?—peace and quiet. The media had moved on. They were probably having a hard time figuring out whether the story was real. They couldn’t track down Barb. I refused to take their calls and had a history of writing humor essays. Maybe they decided the whole thing was a gag. Or maybe, it being Saturday, the media just decided to take a day off from covering The Hug of the Century.

Whatever the reason, I was simultaneously grateful and perturbed. Happy to have my privacy back, but annoyed that my rollercoaster ride was so short. In two days I had grown accustomed to the media hounding me. It made me feel important. Ducking reporters was just another vexation of celebrity, like finding a decent supply of melted glacier water for one’s Chihuahua or slapping injunctions on ex-lovers to prevent them from releasing your private sex videos. It was the price you paid and definitely something I could get used to.

It dawned on me that perhaps I’d played too hard to get. So I decided to do one, and only one, interview before the story got stale. The choice was easy—it had to be Matt Drudge’s eponymous talk show on Fox. My reasons were many. Drudge’s producer, Kristine Kotta, was the most persistent, charming and cajoling of all the producers who had contacted me. The Internet muckraker was the point man for Clintonian dirt. He broke the Lewinsky story, after all. The show was taping that evening and I could do it by satellite from the Fox News offices in downtown D.C. And, best of all, Drudge offered to interview me in silhouette, Mafia-informant style. What’s not to love?

Drudge interviewed Thomas and me for a solid six minutes. Thomas waxed philosophical about The Sociopolitical Implications of The Hug, sounding very intelligent and suggesting that it was part of Clinton’s “modus operandi” and “behavioral mosaic” and that “psycho-historians will look to this later to try to piece together what makes this president tick.” Meanwhile I hid in the dark and did a bad impression of Clinton’s cheesy pick-up line, “Even presidents need hugs, too.” Drudge closed the segment with, “Steve Altes, a brave man.” I had to replay this line several times at home on videotape and run it through my irony-detector, since “brave” is not the first word that comes to mind when discussing a man cowering in the shadows.

Sunday, September 27, 1998. By Sunday my life was back to normal though the story lived for months in the tabloids. It’s an odd feeling to be buying a bag of Double Stuf Oreos at the supermarket, look up and see the headline “Angry Hubby: Bill Tried to Force Himself on my Wife,” and know they’re talking about you.

Before long I got wistful for my fleeting moment in the spotlight. If I hadn’t been so worried about White House death squads I could have had more fun with it. Why don’t schmoes like me who thrust themselves into the limelight ever take the opportunity to say something entertaining? Why can’t the nightly news be more like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart? Why didn’t I stage a press conference and give absurd answers? It would have been a fun experiment. Would the media get it? Would they brand me a kook?

Here, then, is the transcript from the press conference I wish I’d held:

Q: Don’t you think the public is growing tired of these salacious accusations against President Clinton?
A: Well, I’m of the mind that, and I think public opinion polls will back me up on this, that as the economy goes to hell in a handbasket, there is no more pressing national issue than Investigating the President’s Genitals. And will said genitals withstand intense media scrutiny.

Q: Are you concerned about libel?
A: For that I refer you to the legal doctrine of “Is So vs. ‘Fraid Not.”

Q: Was your story fact-checked?
A: This story has more checks than a Prague phonebook.

Q: Isn’t this a tacky thing to do to your ex‑wife?
A: Well sure, in a perfect world I wouldn’t do this. But in a perfect world Superman wouldn’t be vulnerable to kryptonite, Krispy Kreme donuts would have zero calories, and I’d be wearing underwear right now.

Q: Isn’t telling this story being disloyal to the President?
A: Bill Clinton already turned the presidency into a three‑ring circus. I’m just selling cotton candy in the bleachers.

Q: What is your political affiliation now? Are you still a Clinton supporter?
A: I have switched allegiances to the Whig party.

Q: What caused the break‑up of your marriage? Was it this incident with President Clinton?
A: No, we got divorced for reasons totally unrelated to this. But, gosh, go into the reasons for my divorce on national TV? Such a tempting offer. But I think I’ll pass. Because that’s my private life and if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it is to see a person’s private life invaded by the media.

Q: Your reputation as a humorist has some observers questioning the veracity of your account. Can you confirm for us that this is a factual story rather than satire?
A: I swear by the rumpled fedora of Matt Drudge that every word I wrote in that article is the truth. As far as you know. Let me reiterate: I am not a liar. I’m writer. I’m a blabbermouth. I’m a liar. But I am not a porn star.

Q: Is the timing of your story politically motivated?
A: [with rising indignation] Are you telling me that an average citizen like myself can’t grow up to make lurid accusations about his own President’s sex life without getting hounded by you jackals? Are you telling me that fifty million men gave their lives in the Korean War fighting for my freedom of speech just so some cub reporter from a two‑bit fish wrap like The New York Times can tell me what I can and cannot say? You make me stink! Dan Rather is probably turning in his grave. This press conference is over! [storm out]

_______________

1. A year earlier a widowed campaign worker named Kathleen Willey accused Clinton of groping her in the Oval Office in a manner very similar to what my wife experienced. The White House and its unblushing apologists smeared Ms. Willey brazenly.
2. Though lacking in the fidelity department, Barb did come with a few fringe benefits. In 1993 she wrangled me an opportunity to jog with the President. Surprising fact: despite all the jokes about Clinton stopping at McDonald’s to scarf down Big Macs during his jogs, he’s actually quite a fast runner.
3. After my week in Little Rock I went home to Virginia, quit my job in the drone factory, and weaseled my way into a staff position on the Presidential Transition Team in Washington, D.C., working with astronaut Sally Ride scoping out new directions for NASA. The Clintonites promised me a salary, but were slow to pay. I continued to work while their excuses piled up. In the end they reneged, so I ended up volunteering my time for three months. This stuck in my craw.
4. Full disclosure: I’m a registered Independent who has gone Donkey more than Elephant. I voted for Clinton in 1992, figuring he was our best hope for health care reform, and in 1996, as a favor to comedians everywhere.
5. To avoid having to write “Bill Thomas” and “Bill Clinton” every time, from now on I am going to refer to Bill Thomas as Thomas, and Bill Clinton as Clinton
6. At this point nursing home executive Juanita Broaddrick hadn’t yet publicly accused Clinton of raping her back in 1978 when he was attorney general of Arkansas, although I’d heard rumors about the incident when I worked on the 1992 campaign.
7. Barb was dead right about Matt Cooper. That man can keep a secret. He’s the same Time magazine reporter who was held in contempt of court and was willing to do eighteen months in the hooscow rather than reveal his confidential sources in the Valerie Plame / Joseph Wilson / Robert Novak / Karl Rove / C.I.A. / Uranium from Africa / Man from U.N.C.L.E. Affair.
8. For the benefit of readers born after 1966, the blue-blooded Ms. Barrows was busted for running a high-class New York escort service in 1984, causing quite a sensation. And she actually is the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question.

Isn't it divine?

My first order of business is to ensure that joining the clergy did not incite in me a desire to sodomize young boys. I scan myself for pedophilic urges. All clear.

My second task is to decide whether to order the ULC’s “Ministry in a Box” for $139. This puppy is crammed with all sorts of religious doodads: holy land incense, a Doctor of Divinity degree, a sainthood canonization document, a minister’s ID card, a ULC badge, a laminated clergy parking placard, and church bylaws and regulations. Although it is tempting to be canonized Saint Stephen, I remember Billy Joel’s wise counsel about laughing sinners and crying saints and decide to screw the paperwork. My ministry will be light on documentation.

Before you ask what good deeds I have done to merit this spiritual elevation, consider some of the things I have not done: unlike Pope Gregory IX, I never started a Spanish Inquisition; unlike Pope Urban VIII, I never imprisoned Galileo for saying the earth revolves around the Sun. I never burned anyone at the stake or started a Crusade. Seems to me these Popes set the bar for holiness pretty low.

Eager to put my theological credentials to use, I read my ordination message. It says, “Every rite is granted to you by the ULC to officiate and perform except circumcision.” I love that they feel it necessary to advise people that clicking a mouse does not qualify them to perform genital surgery on newborns. I can only assume this warning stems from a past incident. Foreskin, off-limits. I can live with that. But surely somebody around here must need a marriage officiated, a sermon, a baptism, or, if I’m lucky, an exorcism.

But before I start a-preachin’ I need the proper vestments. So I shoo Chaplain Tigger off my lap, water the Reverend Ficus, hop in the Minister Skylark and head off shopping.

I need an outfit that says, “this is a person you can trust with your innermost secrets and look to for sage guidance,” while at the same time saying, “this person believes there is an invisible, omnipotent, supernatural being in the sky, who, with the proper supplications, can be persuaded to affect the outcome of high school football games, while simultaneously maintaining a strictly hands-off policy with regard to epidemics, terrorism, and genocide.”

Basically, my look must strike a balance between caring and crazy.

At a vintage clothing store I hit pay dirt. I snag a hooded purple crushed velour robe, dress it up with some gold roping around the waist and a nifty multi-colored embroidered vest. One crucifix later and I’m done. I’m dressed, blessed, and ready to impress.

The Reverend Me

Time to tend to my flock. But first, I must actually gather a flock. I place an ad on Craigslist.org offering marriage officiating for $99. Two days later I get an email from David. He and his fiancée, Denise, “aren’t too religious, but want someone spiritual.” Ain’t that always the way? He asks for details about my services.

I tell him “my philosophy is that wedding services are too damn serious. My vows will draw inspiration from the ones Homer Simpson wrote, which began, ‘Do you Marge, take Homer, in richness and in poorness? Poorness is underlined. In impotence and potence? In quiet solitude, or blasting across the alkali flats in a jet-powered, monkey-navigated hovercraft.’ That’s my kind of ceremony!”

As a bonus, I throw in my “everlasting love guarantee: If I wed you and your marriage doesn’t last five years, I’ll refund your money!” What other minister can make that claim?

Amazingly, David emails me back and says, “that sounds like fun.” Luckily he doesn’t ask to see my credentials. He even pays up front.

Their ceremony is only three months away, those procrastinators. The night before the wedding I start writing their eternal vows, drawing inspiration from many sources: The Bible, TheOnion.com, a book of love poetry, the Farmer’s Almanac, fortune cookie slips I have amassed over the years, Tony Robbins’ Awaken the Giant Within, and some Hallmark greeting cards. Mine is an eclectic religion. I scrupulously avoid any quotations from The Prophet by Kahlil Gilbran. Is that guy overdone at weddings or what?

When I finally write the line, “By the power vested in me, I now pronounce you husband and wife,” I get goose bumps. It has been my lifelong dream to stand before a group and say those words. I want people to look at me in awe and think, “Wow, there goes a man with power vested in him.”

At the ceremony I decide I need some catchphrases, to toss at people as they pass by. I settle on “Shazam,” “God digs ya,” “Bless your guts out,” and the whispered “You’re God’s favorite.”

The ceremony goes surprisingly well. The guests laugh at the right places. I deliver the line, “If anyone objects to the union of these two people, let him speak now or forever hold his peace” and pause a good long time for dramatic effect while I scan the room, hoping a wild-eyed fellow will burst in screaming, “I object to this unholy union! The bride is still engaged to my brother, who is in a coma.” No such luck.

After the service I dole out handfuls of dried frijole beans to the kids and tell them to pelt the happy couple while shouting, “Holy Frijole!” My pious little disciples can’t wait to perform this religious rite and immediately bombard the mother of the bride. I brandish my crucifix in defense against her evil eye.

Later, one woman says my vows were the most interesting she’s ever heard, though she says “interesting” in the same euphemistic way we use to describe someone’s ghastly new haircut.

David and Denise make a cute couple and I wish them well as they depart for Antigua. I hope they stay married forever. Or at least five years.

#

Next on my agenda is to deliver a sermon. I enter a cinder-block strip mall church and introduce myself to the minister as an Archcardinal Deacon Missionary of the Universal Life Church. I ask him if I could be a special guest preacher one Sunday. He says he has never heard of the Universal Life Church. Where has this guy been? The ULC’s website claims over 20 million ordained ministers worldwide, meaning one out of every 325 people on the planet is a ULC minister. That suggests that there are at least 307 ULC ministers in my hometown of Burbank, California. I doubt his congregation has that many members. I bring him up to speed on how the Internet (you know, the thing that brings you kiddie porn, Reverend) lets anyone be a minister. He scoffs at this notion but invites me to join his church. I bless his guts out and leave. Speaking in tongues.

I go home and rethink my strategy. I need an audience less critical, more captive.

An hour later I arrive at a local nursing home. I pop in the TV room and find seven drooling geezers watching a test pattern. I kill the tube and work the room, making crosses, touching people’s foreheads, softly saying, “The power of Christ compels you. The power of Christ compels you.” Who says I can’t sneak in a little exorcism?

Next I feed them Ritz crackers faux-communion style. “Body of Christ?” I say. “Would you like some delicious body of Christ today? He tastes best with peanut butter.”

Then I begin my sermon. Unfortunately, my knowledge of scripture is right up there with my knowledge of Etruscan history. But I figure I’ve inadvertently heard a whole bunch of preaching on the radio. I’ve seen Elmer Gantry and The Apostle three times. Maybe I learned something by osmosis. Besides, preachers don’t make a whole lot of sense anyway. I think the key is to speak in a soothing, monotone voice with random bursts of emphasis.

What tumbles out of my mouth for the next five minutes sounds something like:

“And Moses said unto Noah, ‘go ye verily unto the seas and take the filthy beasts with ye.’ And God said that it was good. And Eve said that it was good. Hail the mighty Noah! Hear ye, hear ye, I sayeth unto you, thou art smaller than a pygmy shrew’s belly button lint compared to God’s humongous excellence. For God is neither a slob like one of us, nor a stranger on the bus. Hallelujah, Jesus Christ, ye art truly a superstar!”

If I got some of the details wrong, no one seems to notice. Some smile; a few clap. I take a bow, feed them more Christ and leave with a flourish, my robe billowing in my wake like a cape. Shazam!

#

Having come this far, I think if only I could perform a baptism, my ecclesiastical life would be complete. The ULC’s ordination message says that how I choose to practice my newfound religion is up to me. I convene my Council of Elders (friends Ralph and Mark) for advice. Soon a schism develops. One faction wants to baptize people using holy water balloons flung from the roof of my apartment building. Another faction wants to baptize people by flinging holy water balloons from a different apartment building. While both these rituals have their appeal, I think the Elders are excessively fixated on the kinetic possibilities of holy water. No, I need more face-to-face interaction with my parishioners. I decide to anoint an entire public swimming pool, perform a mass baptism of unsuspecting swimmers, then hand out certificates.

The next day I put my plan in motion. Wearing my robe and a ceremonial crown (graciously provided by Burger King), I stand at the lip of a city pool. I blow a whistle and issue the terse command, “Abracadabra, water be holy.”

When swimmers climb out I congratulate them on being baptized into the Universal Life Church and hand them their commemorative certificates. One convert is so dazed by the purifying effects of my baptismal that he cannot even muster the strength to hold the paper in his hand. It flutters to the cement after a few steps. Besides littering, other popular responses to baptism are “Is this a hidden camera show,” and “Fuck you.”

One non-believer tells me pool water can’t be used for a baptism. I silence her with: “Well, the earth is mostly a closed system, like a terrarium. The same water that existed eons ago is still here. So the water I baptized you with today may have been stegosaurus piss millions of years ago. If the water tasted funny that might be why.”

I must say, since my ordination, Sundays have become a lot busier and heaps of fun. There’s no telling what might happen. And my matrimonial services are in such high demand I had to double my price.

Undoubtedly some people will find my venture sacrilegious. To them I say, “Have you seen the churches that call themselves the ‘Church of Jesus Christ, Scientist?’ Now Jesus may have been many things, but to call him a scientist is to seriously pad his resume. In a world where Christ can be a scientist, why can’t an atheist be a minister?”

And while they ponder that, I run away before they burn me at the stake.

_______________

This essay originally appeared in somewhat different form in Urban Male, The American Rationalist, Freethinker, American Atheist, and Raven magazines.