Otherwise we spent the rest of the week goofing off and screwing around. We had a small locked safe built into the master bedroom closet, and inside it we kept a few things we didn’t want anybody else who might be staying there to find. Specifically, Marilyn kept her vibrators and dirty movies in there! She wasn’t too worried about somebody seeing her lingerie drawer, but the ‘Lifelike 8" SuperMax with G Spot Action’ and a copy of The Horny Housewife would have embarrassed her to death! New Years Day we unlocked the safe and put in some new batteries into the toys and watched the movies. Marilyn stayed naked the entire day.
Thursday we flew to Utica, retrieved the fruit of our loins, and went back to Hereford. Friday morning I flew back to Washington and went back to my sacred duty representing the Maryland Ninth, holding high my sworn commitment to our nation’s highest principles. Well, something like that, anyway. In some ways it was back to the same old grind. The eight of us who were now a real thorn in the side of the Democrats were now being referred to as ‘The Gang of Eight’ in the media. We didn’t really talk like that, but the house on 30th Street was now known as ‘The Clubhouse.’ This was because we had taken to calling ourselves, just like in the old Our Gang movies, the He-Man Democrat Haters Club! My friend John Boehner was now being referred to in the press as the leader of our little group, but I was surprised to find my name being used as his ‘second in command.’ I asked Rick Santorum how many commands I had given him, and he just laughed and told me that the press needed something to fill the white space.
We went back to weekly speeches, this time slamming them for borrowing money from their House bank accounts to fund their re-election campaigns. President Bush was actively calling on Congress to investigate this further, offering to help through the Justice Department. We also whipsawed the Democrats with the Post Office problem, which looked to be just as big an issue as the banking scandal. Something had to give.
The dam burst in March of 1992. By the middle of the month, both the House Sergeant at Arms, Jack Russ, and the House Postmaster, Robert Rota, had resigned in disgrace. Both were under criminal investigation. The banking scandal had been referred to the House Ethics Committee, where the leadership caved in, accepting a vote by the House to divulge all the details of who had overdrawn their accounts, by how much, and how often. The House Administration Committee would be doing the same thing with the post office mess.
As I told Marilyn, I didn’t have to face a Republican primary challenge. Two Democrats, Bud Hawley of the Baltimore County 3rd District and Tommy Hoffman of the Carroll County 3rd District, decided to square off for the privilege of kicking my ass to the curb, where a good and proper Republican should stay. Speaking as an outsider, all I could say was that it was a messy primary, and the eventual winner, Bud Hawley, did not come out of it looking or smelling any too sweet.
We’d just have to wait until November to see.
Chapter 112: 1992
1992 proved interesting on a number of fronts.
Grace Hopper died in January. I had met her back when I was a lowly Second Lieutenant. Hell of a mathematician, hell of an officer, and a hell of a lady! Marilyn and I went to her memorial service and funeral at Arlington. The world lost somebody special that day.
Charlie was now in his first year of the Boy Scouts and he went camping overnight in January again, this time for two nights. During the summer he did an entire week and had a grand and glorious time. I was much too busy these days to be much of a volunteer leader, but I managed to spend time on each of these trips. He thought this was just great! I would end up coming home with kinks in my back from sleeping on a rock somewhere and thinking to myself that this was the reason we invented houses.
The only real issue with camping occurred that summer, when I helped out one night as a volunteer leader. Scout leaders are almost always volunteers. The only professionals are the guys who man the district offices or actually man the camps. Probably 90+% of us are just parents of the boys. It’s too much to ask any father to take an entire week off to stay up at camp, so we usually worked up a rotation. Most of the dads could manage to take a day off at some point, and then spend a night in a tent. While there you were the boss. It was always a couple of men, though, for safety sake.
The issue came about at the end of the day I was there, a Wednesday. We were having a “retreat parade” after dinner, where you line up the boys and lower the flag in the campsite. It’s supposed to be a somber and sober ceremony, quiet and polite, and the boys are supposed to be standing silent and at attention in their uniforms, saluting. That was the theory, anyway. That night was different, though.
Instead, the boys were joking around, laughing and talking through the ceremony, Charlie among them. It’s a quick ceremony, not even five minutes long, but they were just fucking around. It pissed me off, and I just stepped up into the middle of the ceremony. “KNOCK IT OFF!”
Everybody’s eyes were on me. The two boys who were lowering the flag stopped what they were doing. I turned to them and ordered, “Raise that thing back up to the top! Do it now!” They hustled it back up, and I turned back to the assembled boys and gave them a piece of my mind. Pointing back to the flagpole, I said, “THAT IS THE AMERICAN FLAG! THAT IS THE SYMBOL OF THIS COUNTRY! YOU WILL DAMN WELL SHOW IT THE RESPECT IT DESERVES!”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the other adult leader, Bo Parsons. Bo was a teacher over at Hereford High. He was eyeing me curiously, but otherwise was smiling and nodding. I decided to keep going. “MY FATHER WENT TO WAR UNDER THAT FLAG! MY GRANDFATHER WENT TO WAR UNDER THAT FLAG! A COUSIN OF MINE WAS BURIED UNDER THAT FLAG! YOU WILL DAMN WELL SHOW SOME RESPECT WHEN YOU ARE AT A FLAG CEREMONY AND YOU WILL BEHAVE LIKE SCOUTS AND KEEP YOUR FAT FUCKING MOUTHS SHUT! IS THAT UNDERSTOOD?!”
The boys were staring at me, half terrified, and a few mumbled out a, “Yes, sir.”
“IS THAT UNDERSTOOD!” I roared. “I WANT TO HEAR IT LOUD AND PROUD!”
At that the boys looked at each other and gave me a ragged but loud “YES, SIR!”
I turned back to the two boys at the flagpole. “Now, let’s do this over again, and do it right!”
After the ceremony, the boys took off, Charlie included, getting away from crazy Mister Buckman as fast as they could. I was left near the chuck wagon with Bo Parsons, who was smiling. He was an official Assistant Scoutmaster, much higher up in the hierarchy than just a parent. I gave him an embarrassed smile, and said, “Sorry if I got out of line there.”
“Don’t sweat it. I’d have stepped in if I thought you were out of line. They’re a bunch of kids. They need their asses kicked every once in awhile. We probably won’t have to chew them out on this for another few years.”
I gave him a curious glance. “Really?”
He nodded and chuckled. “Every few years the older guys have either dropped out or grown old, and you get a bunch of new guys who need a lesson in… practical civics, let’s say. It will be a few years before they forget it, too.”
I grunted and shrugged. None of the boys said anything to me, and nobody said anything to Charlie, as far as I could see, but they all were a lot better behaved during ceremonies from then on.
The twins started out the year in the second half of the second grade. I was wondering whether they were identical twins or not. I suppose there’s a genetic test. They looked almost identical, maybe 99.9 % the same, but there was always something about them that let you tell them apart. Maybe it was just the way they carried themselves and their mannerisms. They could confuse new people, but after you had spent some time with them, even the clothes switching routine wouldn’t work. Holly seemed just a touch louder and more extroverted than her younger-by-five-minutes sister Molly.