I was back with the vial of Lincoln’s morning breath in less than an hour. Security at the National Museum of Health and Medicine was a joke. The vial wasn’t under guard; it wasn’t monitored by surveillance cameras; it wasn’t even kept in a locked vitrine. It was propped up on a table in the middle of an empty room.
“What do you think of this?” I asked Arleen, handing her the vial.
Arleen shrugged.
“Arleen, what you’ve got in your hand happens to be a vial of fucking Abraham Lincoln’s morning breath. And it’s my pleasure and honor as your husband to invite you to join me in partaking of a snort or two.”
Arleen looked at the vial.
She looked at me.
She looked back at the vial.
And then back at me.
“Let’s get stoned,” she said.
It’s impossible to do justice to the smell in words. One may try to quicken the olfactory imagination with poetic evocations like “suppurating abscess … colonic effluvia … smegma.” But nothing comes close to capturing the overwhelming stench that wafted from the vial when I removed its rubber stopper. It’s suspected that Lincoln was afflicted with an inherited disease called Marfan syndrome. Perhaps this accounts for the unbelievable foulness of his morning breath. Unfortunately, the vial was not dated. We only know that it was prepared during the Lincoln presidency. Halitologists contend that anxiety and tension can affect the odor of one’s breath. Perhaps the sample was taken in 1863, the morning after the Battle of Chancellorsville, when Union forces commanded by Joseph Hooker were decimated by the Confederate troops of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. Or perhaps Lincoln had simply split a sopressata and smoked mozzarella sub with hot peppers and extra onions with Mary Todd the night before the sample was collected.
But did we get high? you ask.
Chapter Four
The psychoactive effect of Lincoln’s morning breath was quite as astonishing as its aroma.
I could easily devote the balance of this memoir in its entirety to detailing the 12-hour psychedelic joyride/Götterdämmerung that Arleen and I experienced under the influence of the rancid vapor. But highlights shall suffice.
Sex was intense. Creamy lime cum. Then creamy apricot cum. Then a mint gel. And finally a cyan-yellow-magenta swirl that actually burst into flame. Now, I’m no stranger to chemically enhanced lovemaking. For instance, I’ve explored the romantic possibilities of the anabolic steroid Oral-Turinabol (OT), used in conjunction with Piracetam, a drug which increases endurance and enhances concentration. I’ve been known to revive a humdrum evening with a discreet injection of recombinant erythropoietin (rEPO), which raises the red blood-cell count so that more oxygen is carried through the circulatory system, for big performance gains. And every so often, I like to turn the lights down low, put something lush and dreamy on the stereo, and inject myself with blood plasma from hibernating woodchucks, which imparts to the lovemaking an extraordinarily serene and sylvan quality. But these paled in comparison to Lincoln’s morning breath.
Using a piece of charcoal and a sheet of hotel stationery, Arleen did a rubbing of the welter of protuberant veins on my biceps. Had the neuronal networks linking the left and right sides of our brains not undergone an amazing spurt of spontaneous hyperplasia as a result of our inhaling the gaseous relic of the Great Emancipator, surely the rubbing would not have achieved the mystical profundity that it held for us that afternoon. With Arleen’s permission (of course), I quote verbatim from her journal entry dated April 12, 1991: “We gazed at the rubbing for over an hour in awed silence. Like the intricate tesselations that decorate the walls and floors of the Alhambra, the veins on Mark’s biceps bespeak a cosmic meta-mind, a universal and primordial mentality of form, the interplay of energy and entropy that preceded life and will follow it. I will never be able to look at his biceps again without a sense of epiphany.”
Do you know the commercial where the heavily mustached old woman in a black shroud drinks strawberry Nestlé’s Quik and turns into this buxom bombshell in pasties and G-string, and she squats down for a second in a mud puddle, and when she gets up, her buttocks are covered with leeches, and Jesus appears holding a Barbie, and two beams of sparkling particles shoot from the eyes of the Barbie and vaporize the leeches, and the bombshell gets on her motorcycle, and pink florets of exhaust spurt from its tailpipe spelling out the words Be All That You Can Be? Try watching that on Lincoln’s morning breath. It’s un-fucking-believable.
How about the scene from On Golden Pond where Jane Fonda arrives from Omega Centauri to “visit” her father in the nursing home? You remember what it was like to watch her tenderly remove his toupee and then his hearing aid and his bifocals and his dentures and his truss, and then suddenly drain his cerebrospinal fluid through that horrible sucking proboscis? Well, imagine what it’s like watching that scene on Lincoln’s morning breath. It’s almost unbearable. But would you believe that the two of us were actually jumping up and down on the bed, cheering?
It was midnight. Arleen danced on the balcony clad only in white stretch-vinyl jeans and Walkman, bathed in moonlight. I’d been cooling out in the tub — the small fondue forks from my Swiss Army knife vibrating slightly in various acupuncture points on my physique. I focused my video camera beyond Arleen, and scanned the revamped cityscape. Every federal building — White House, Capitol, Executive and Congressional offices, Departments of State, Justice, Commerce, etc. — had been razed and rebuilt in an astonishing new style, each designed and constructed to simulate building blocks toppled in a toddler’s tantrum. And looming over the city, dramatically illuminated by floodlights, was a huge 1,000-foot white marble baby in diapers, arms akimbo, smugly admiring his own vandalism. The Überkind.
I twanged each impaled fondue fork and zoomed in on the monolithic tot’s chubby smirk.
“Überkind, Überkind, a thousand feet tall, what’s the best diet cola of them all?”
“Diet Pepsi. Diet Pepsi #1.”
(I was reading the Überkind’s marble lips through the zoom lens of my camcorder.)
“Thanks, babe,” I said, passing out.
In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Ed Gibbon’s gossipy tell-all chronicle of the West’s first millennium, Attila returns to his wooden palace beyond the Danube after sacking Aquileia, an Italian maritime city on the Adriatic coast, and declaims: “Sure we enriched ourselves with the spoils of a wealthy and effeminate people. Sure we stole their gold and jewels. Sure we stripped their palaces of splendid and costly furniture. We wantonly destroyed exquisite works of art. We defiled consecrated objects. We tortured and slaughtered their clergy. And let no man say that we did not imbibe tremendous quantities of Falernian wine and slake our sensual appetites on helpless, trembling captives — male and female. And yet, notwithstanding the amazing amount of fun I had in Aquileia, it’s so great to be home. My home … Here I don’t worry every minute about having to be the epitome of rapacious avarice and unrelenting cruelty. I can relax and be myself. How sweet to be in my large wooden palace again. How sweet to lie again in the warm beds of my innumerable wives.”
Could it be pure coincidence that the sentiments of one of history’s luminary strongmen and belletrists so perfectly mirror those of another who lives almost sixteen centuries later? I felt exactly the same way about returning home. Sure D.C. had been a blast. Sure the Lincoln’s morning breath had been primo shit. But it just felt so damn good to be back at headquarters.