Saturday was going to be a big day for Marilyn and me. We had a very important dinner to attend, and we had needed to dig up a sitter for the kids. I didn’t know anybody in the neighborhood, so I simply asked around my office. Anybody have a kid interested in babysitting Saturday night, maybe late, good money? It worked out that Sherry Longbottom, my Legislative Director, had a niece going to school at Georgetown and doing some intern work on the side with us, and she could do with a few bucks. She came over Saturday afternoon with a pile of textbooks. That gave her the time to meet Charlie, Holly, Molly, and Dum-Dum, and time enough for us to feed them before we ran out. Our security detachment would stay out of sight in the basement office we had set up for them. Sherry’s niece took over feeding the kids, and Marilyn and I went upstairs to clean up and get dressed. It was an important dinner, black tie, so I was in my tuxedo and Marilyn had a new black evening gown.
We were dining at the White House.
President Bush was giving a dinner for all the new Congressmen and Senators, along with the various Congressional and Senate leadership. I had bought a tux back when I began donating to the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in the early Eighties. With the kind of money I was donating, you get invited to a fair number of black tie affairs. The nice thing is, though, that when you buy your own tux, you can buy what you want. It’s really nothing more than a fancy black suit. I went with a full vest instead of a cummerbund, bought several types of black bow ties and such, and formal shirts in several different colors, all with French cuffs. By the time I was finished, I could have worked as a busboy at any number of excellent Washington restaurants!
For the White House, I selected a crisp white shirt and some gold Rensselaer cufflinks Marilyn had gotten me for my 30th birthday. Marilyn wore a new black evening gown with a slit up her right leg to a few inches above the knee, and slender straps up top. It had some interesting, but tasteful, cleavage on display. Our children were predictable in their opinions when we came down the stairs.
Holly oohed and said, “Mommy, you’re pretty!” Molly agreed with her.
“Dad, what’s with the fancy suit? You look like a waiter in that TV show last night,” asked Charlie.
My wife rolled her eyes and bit her tongue to keep from laughing. I just gave him a deadpan, “I’m auditioning for a new job.”
“I thought you just started a new job,” he replied.
“That might not work out,” I told him. Marilyn started giggling at that, so I shuffled her out the door before the kids could say anything else. To her I said, “I sure hope they serve drinks at this thing!”
“Maybe you should stop off somewhere and buy a hip flask,” she laughingly said.
“Sounds like a good gift for Father’s Day.”
We had our driver take us in a limousine over to the White House. The plus side, if you could call it that, to the new security regime was that nobody was going to photograph me in my ‘foreign sports car’. I probably should have sold it, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.
We pulled up to the White House behind a black limousine, and out of the car stepped John Boehner and his wife. When he saw who we were, he stopped and waved. I waved back, and when Marilyn climbed out, I led her over to them. “John, good to see you again. Marilyn, this is John Boehner, another Republican Congressman like me. We met him and his wife Debbie during Orientation, remember?”
“Pleased to meet you,” came from the others. We shook hands all the way around.
The Boehners went in ahead of us and we followed. Once inside, we took off our coats and handed them to a liveried waiter. Like me John was wearing a trench coat, although I had a fedora on. Debbie was wearing a long camelhair coat with a hood attached. Marilyn, however, was wearing a very nice calf length sable coat and a matching sable cap. I had bought it for her for Christmas, as a thank you for putting up with the election nonsense. Marilyn wasn’t big on fur coats, but she had owned a rabbit fur coat in high school and this was much, much nicer! For all of her complaints about what I spent, I would occasionally see her running her hands through the fur and smiling. I would laugh at her and she would blush and tell me I was imagining things.
After we were relieved of our outerwear, we were directed through a set of magnetometers towards a hall. The Secret Service was being vigilant, and they took my cane (dark mahogany, with an oiled bronze head) and examined it. I knew security would get worse in the future.
We ended up in a line outside a reception hall. A young lady greeted us and told us the drill. The President and First Lady would greet us, we would shake hands and pose for a photo, and then we would continue on into a reception for a few drinks. After that we would move on to a dinner, after which the President would say a few words. Then she was further down the line for the newest arrivals.
After we were left in the line, John turned to me and said, “I’ve seen you with the cane a few other times as well. You need that all the time?”
“Mostly just in the evenings. My knee stiffens up in the evening and starts bothering me,” I answered.
“If you don’t mind my asking, what’s wrong with your knee?”
I smiled. It was a common enough question, and I gave my usual answer. “I used to be a paratrooper, and I made one jump too many. I had a hard landing and wrecked my knee.”
“Well no wonder!” exclaimed Debbie Boehner. “That’s so dangerous! Weren’t you worried your parachute wouldn’t open?!”
I couldn’t help it. I grinned at her and said, “I never worried about that. Our parachutes had a 100 % guarantee.”
“A guarantee? How do you guarantee a parachute?” she asked.
“Well, if your chute fails to open, all you have to do is take it back, and they’ll give you a brand new one, free of charge!” I answered.
Debbie’s eyes opened wide at that, but her husband chuckled. Marilyn said, “Please, don’t get him started! You wouldn’t believe how many jokes they have about this stuff.”
“Like what?” asked John, laughing.
“Like, ‘We’ve never left anybody up there’ and ‘It’s not the fall that gets you, it’s the sudden stop at the end!’ I used to hear these guys all the time back in the day.” She turned to face me and wagged a finger at me. “It used to get old even then!”
“I would have paid good money to watch you jump out of a plane, good money!” I replied.
“You guys were crazy,” commented John. “I enlisted in the Navy but screwed up my back and they cut me loose while I was still in basic training.”
“My dad was Navy, but I get seasick, so I went into the Army instead,” I admitted.
By this time we had worked our way up the line to where we would be going in soon, so we quieted down. Another young lady took our names and reported them. Then John and Debbie were ushered forward, where they shook hands and posed for pictures, and after that it was Marilyn and me. Forget about any impromptu discussions of foreign policy; it was “Thank you for coming,” followed by smiles and the flash of a camera. Then we were off and into the reception.
We circulated around the room, being polite and trying to make small talk, but it was actually a bit surreal to both of us. I mean, this was the White House, the home of the President of the United States! Congressman or not, what in the fuck was I doing being so presumptuous as to think I could be here?! At one point I whispered to Marilyn, “This is just so fucking weird!”
“What, being in the White House?”
“Yeah!”
“No shit!”