Free Sex for America: Politically Inspired Erotica by Stephen Elliott

beaten down by the rain and snow. Everything else was rusted. But still we slid in the backseat immediately.
She started to cry, but I think maybe she was laughing, too. “It’s just a useless piece of junk,” I said. “It’s not that special.” “No, it’s really nice,” she said.
I put my arm around her and we slouched down in the seats. “There should be a radio playing,” she said. “Classic rock.” So I sang, my voice echoing in the trees. I sang her every song I remem-
bered, songs that smelled of revolution, songs of the days when my father was alive, when she and I were still young and knew nothing, nothing of war or fear or what it was like to have to walk forever, and then when I was done with those, I made up a few new ones just for her.
     
DESERT SHIELD ‌
LYDIA MILLET
     
The mission of our troops is wholly defensive . . . they will not initiate hostilities.
—President George Bush, press conference, August 9, 1990, scripted speech
     
I think it is beyond the defense of Saudi Arabia. So I think it’s beyond that.
—President George Bush, press conference, August 9, 1990, Q&A
     
My Boy Scout in the White House knew where he was going from the start. He had consulted his pocket compass, and the nee- dle was quivering between “War Powers Resolution” and “First Strike.”
It was an auspicious and exciting time, what with the large- scale mobilization of our troops, by mid-September costing taxpay- ers about twenty-nine million dollars a day. A bargain. You can’t put a price tag on glory. Everyone and his brother felt downright historic; it had the momentous panache of an impending WWIII. We were an empire again, and it was scoring 75 percent approval ratings for G.B. He had been Born Again in the opinion polls, and I was watching his ascent there somewhat fearfully. Because we
     
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were still living in hungry Reaganite country; my fellow Ameri- cans would line up behind G.B. only as long as he stalked like a predator, slavered at the chops and pretended to wipe his drooling fangs on a sleeve.
Russell had a new synthetic hipbone and had been prescribed a couple of months’ worth of Percocet, so he felt he was sitting pretty. He lay on the sofa all the time in front of the TV, which forced me to use the second, smaller TV upstairs for my sessions with G.B. That was working out fine, until one night there was a realignment in our domestic geometry.
I’d stopped on my way home to buy a goodwill present for Russki in the form of twelve Original Glazed Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Russell had virtually no appetite, so I looked forward to the pleasure of consuming the lion’s share myself. Imagine my shocked chagrin when, green-and-white box in hand, I entered my base of operations and saw that he had company.
Russell’s complete lack of friends, or even casual acquain- tances, had long been a selling point for me. His isolation from a larger community was both liberating and complimentary. To find him lying in the living room with his legs up on the sofa arm and his teeth on an end table, sharing visibly stiff whiskeys with what appeared to be an Appalachian mountain man, was unnerving to say the least.
The mountain man had a matted gray beard that hung almost to his waist. I would not have been surprised to find small animals nesting in it. He was wearing a safari jacket of Lawrence of Arabia vintage, which apparently had not been doused with water since the turn of the century. He committed his first faux pas right off the bat, in what was to prove a defining moment for me. When I
came into the room, and was standing staring at them at a loss for words, he jerked a thumb in my direction and asked of Russell, “Who’s the roly-poly?”
And then he proceeded to eat eight of the doughnuts himself. Little did he know, at that instant, that he had made his worst enemy.
The mountain man turned out to be an old comrade-in-arms from Russell’s service days. Or post-service, to be precise. After