Free The Damned Highway by Nick Mamatas Page B

that will be the only type of job left for us, once our manufacturing and service centers have shipped overseas. Durable goods will be made in Taiwan, and B-movie actresses like Mamie Van Doren will go from movies and television to politics, and then maybe back to movies and television once they’re done in Washington. How long, oh Lord, how long? We live in a country where Mamie Van Doren, star of such classic fare as High School Confidential and Sex Kittens Go to College , is getting personally guided tours of our seat of power by good old Henry the K. And why not, eh? Everyone knows Van Doren models herself after Marilyn Monroe. This third-rate blond bombshell was even engaged to a baseball player. Monroe snagged the great Joe DiMaggio, so Van Doren hitched herself to that sore-armed, left-handed pitcher Bo “Bad Boy” Belinsky.
    But never mind that. I have no patience for America’s greatest pastime, unless I’m betting on the game. I’ve always been more of a football fan myself. But so is Nixon. In fact, as far as I know, that’s the only time Nixon ever told the truth about anything. I interviewed him in the back of his limo and all we talked about was football. He knew the name of a second-string Oakland flanker who only played seven plays in one Superbowl and was never used again. Indeed, here’s the rub. Nixon not only knew the player’s name; he knew where the son of a bitch had gone to college. Nixon takes his football very seriously. He openly talks about politics and international diplomacy as if they were a series of plays. He doesn’t want to be president. He wants to be coach. He thinks in terms of end sweeps and touchdowns and mousetrap blocks. Football is Nixon’s game, and it’s my game too. It’s a sport for ugly brutes and vicious bastards, and there is nothing uglier or more vicious or more brutish than Richard M. Nixon. Oh, I get along fine with some of the folks around him. Ray Price and Nick Ruwe seem like good people, and Pat Buchanan can hold his own with me and a bottle of whiskey. Indeed, I’ve always seen Pat as sort of a wild-eyed Davy Crockett for the Nixon team, and if that’s so, then I wonder what Nixon’s Alamo will be? I only hope I am there to see it. But it doesn’t matter how many good people he surrounds himself with. Nixon himself is evil, a congenital liar who would let the Devil himself fuck his own mother if it meant a rise in the polls. For my entire adult life, Nixon has been a national bogeyman of sorts. There have been other evil men. Lyndon Johnson, King Herod, and Adolf Hitler come to mind. But they are mere punters compared to old Tricky Dick. Sooner or later, he will fail and fall, and I hope I am there to give the final push.
    Ye gods, now I’m rambling. Where am I and, more importantly, where was I? Oh, yes. Van Doren and Kissinger and Nixon. We will reach a point in this country, perhaps only a decade from now, when our politicians and our celebrities will be indistinguishable. Trust me on this, for I am wise. I have medicine. And Mamie Van Doren is a great example of this malady. Not only did she date a baseball player just like Marilyn Monroe, but when Monroe fucked Kennedy, Van Doren apparently decided to do the same. Why else would she volunteer to serve on the Committee to Re-elect the President (and sweet Jesus, how is it just now occurring to me that the acronym for that is CREEP)? I feel a stirring in my loins when I imagine Monroe spread-eagled on Kennedy’s desk in the Oval Office, but I feel no such lust that night in the motel room, as mushroom-induced visions of Nixon and Kissinger and Van Doren and the rest of the Happy-Fun Club frolicking naked and rolling around with each other in some subterranean bunker beneath the White House invade my brain. The things I bear witness to . . . I must testify, for confession is good for the soul, and what I experience leaves my soul feeling