Still Trying To Understand Whoring

More to the point, I knew that the previously authorized aid shipments to Somalia were being stolen by pirates and Islamic mobsters before they left the docks in Mogadishu. Somalia was a worthy nation mortally wounded by the dominance of bitter warlords and Islamic militias.

Within three hours of the extortion attempt, I had been accused of statutory rape and viciously attacked by my wife. Only the devoutly evil move with admirable efficiency in D.C.

Insanity of the cosmos strikes without warning and has no identity. In this instance my wife's blindsiding me, to the extent I could conduct an analysis, came out of the blue Medieval ether.

My wife's attack seemed unrelated to the initiative by the congresswoman and her stooge cop. In point of fact my wife's ambush came in the form of cyber attack, texts and voice mails.

It was during a luncheon to celebrate a friend's upcoming wedding that my wife began her assault. I began to receive vile accusations and threats from the love of my life who also had been my best friend for 30 years.

No! It was not a stellar start for the week.

Adding insult to injury, I found that my attempts to respond had hit a cyber wall. Morgan apparently had devised her strategies and tactics while hedge hopping in a Gulfstream 650 at 41,000 feet.

Morgan's host, Sheik XXX, enjoyed a moment of adulation on all party agendas. His effective control of billions accounted for his power; but he owed his success as a world class seduction artist in great measure to the media obsession with his phallic endowment."

Where would my 48 year-old mate twitch her twat tonight and for the duration of her most recent four-week tour of the investor universe? London? Mexico City? Kuala Lumpur? Abu Dhabi? Bern? Berlin? The Caymans? The Seychelles? Jamaica?

I often told her, as a witticism of course, that her perfumed slit was even more marketable today than when she was dubbed Doctor of Marketing and Psychology. No! I would never utter such nonsense in the presence of others.

To be sure, however, I have refused in retrospect to ask if my quip had served more as a harbinger than a lame attempt at humor. Essences are more important than assumable realities dependent upon sight objectification.

Confessedly, this is an involuntary attempt to say I only played piano downstairs and didn't know there were whores at work upstairs. True! I knew of the existence of the worms. But I never looked under the rocks. Mia culpa.

Sadly, all aspects of the sedate corporate world of high finance feeds popular erotic fantasies of systematic debauching. Even Morgan's job description confirmed assumptions that she was in constant party- time mode on behalf of her investment dependent banking monolith.

Candide would have asked Dr. Pangloss if my wife was a whore. But not I. And to this day I insist that I was clueless. I did not know!

There were signs of her culpability, though, that even a Senior Senator Moron should have recognized.

Morgan wore skirts and dresses that stopped just a millimeter short of justifiable criticism. Her soft, natural smile that diffused just this side of promiscuity made each Happy Hour her fertile field and the late night supper a fortune grabber.

WAS MORGAN A CORPORATE WHORE? AND DIF I KNOW THAT WITHOUT A DOUBT?

Sure she was! And "no" I did not know that without a doubt until long after the conclusion of this episode of life's sweet and sour pageant.

During the early years, she did feed the farce and dutifully devote some of her time to the home hearth. It was only during the span of the last year that she ended any pretense of having an interest in maintain a domestic image.

But she was truly in denial during the few hours at home.

Morgan was surprisingly sensitive to this implication, always on hair trigger when asked about her reputation for business partying. She shot from the hip when questions arose about her business agenda; and, unfortunately, her multitude of matronly feminist admirers were obsessed with raising the questions.

At all of our social functions, both obligatory and mundane, she was expected to talk of working dinners, networking Happy Hours and after theater suppers. Her most durable and intimate friends, moreover, had enjoyed teasing her but had learned when to cease and desist.

Without a doubt, Morgan enjoyed a firmament of dedicated friends. Morgan's friends populated the world as her many chroniclers had restated with authority.

Did these friends know that she was the vice president of whoredom? Of course they knew!

Morgan faithfully served the many adventurers spanning finance precincts from Wall Street to The City of London to Beijing and even Mexico City. As her fame grew so swelled her fortune.

Of her many friends, however, it was the ephemeral Caliphates that maintained their discretion. Undoubtedly, she would see many monuments in the great capitals of the world as the Mullahs seized possession during the 21st Century.

To be sure, my wife had friends.

I certainly could have used a friend that dark, rainy afternoon.

*****

FROM THE MOUTHS OF BABES

"You filthy rat scum!" came a shriek out of my voice mail. It was the first of five vile denunciations stored within two hours by my cell phone. They were all from my wife.

Morgan had to be flying from Hamburg to Marrakesh by the time I heard her first astounding profane denunciation. My wife traveled extensively as a "new client" vice president for the world's most prestigious investment bank.

It was Morgan's voice. But never in almost 30 years of friendship and 28 years of marriage had she shrilled hate at me. I am not disingenuous when I insist that neither of us ever used abusive language when arguing.

Just call me Stew, as in Sen. Stewart Bancroft, until a few minutes ago the secure husband of the beautiful Morgan. As God has favored me immeasurably, I also am the father of a fiery daughter possessed of genius and a brilliant son who fortunately differs with his sister only in temperament and emotional control.

AN INCIDENTAL LUNCHEON,

THOUGH LINKING THE EVENTS

At the moment, I was attending a tame bachelor lunch for an old friend, a lawyer from Dallas. Formerly a respected senator from Texas, he possibly was my best friend. His dozens of associates and friends of the Washington environs would, for various reasons, miss his bachelor dinner in Dallas.

"And just when the bride on the wedding night says she has reached her max," the woman comic masterminding the luncheon was saying," she will hand him this credit card to Shari's in Pahrump, Nevada."

"Sheri's is a classy brothel just outside Vegas," someone at our table explained, aware of my nurtured ignorance of the brothel culture. "It's funny only if you are aware of how pathetic it is to need whore sex, even if it's at Sheri's where you can get a great after-sex steak."

All six of us around the table nodded and smiled dutifully. They all sipped their coffee and glanced at me. They all knew I did not have a clue.

I'm "Dullard Do Right," the "Party Pooper." Respectfully, even my friends call me "The Millennial Moralist." To those few who have read Cervantes, I am prone to "tilt at windmills" in the style of Don Quixote, the foppish fool who always misinterpreted the essences of everything.

Occasionally, I could blindside them as I did at that time.

"Pathetic whore sex, you said?" I responded in my practiced low-key professorial voice. "It seems to me we could eliminate the sexual harassment claims if we issued all members of congress one of those credit cards to Shari's."

Perhaps the Speaker could use his office's "discretionary" fund to create credit cards limited to Nevada brothels. Acceptable steak houses no longer exist in the swamp.

"Finding a friendly lobbyist to pay the collective congressional credit card bill would be no problem," a lawyer from new York promised.

While I never mistook windmills for giant black knights of the Apocalypse, I confess that I have seen 50 shades of evil in the 21st Century's purple clouds. To be sure, I was the idealist who hoped he could always beat the devil; had faith that his wife would never be played and foolishly led to sample some primo Slick's monster gland, and that Saint Michael and his sword did truly exist, if albeit as a metaphor.

My God will forgive me, however, for not shading my eyes when my gorgeous neighbor weeds her garden wearing a micro miniskirt. We live by moral compasses and Platonic eternal truths, one of which was the viewing of a choice bum if we foreswore evil intent.

Whoever had designs to compromise me very likely had an equivalent interest in destroying the president. Key support for his alien wall and my refusing to aid and abet foreign aid thievery had set me clearly in the line of fire.

Save the invective. I'm politically impotent in the Senate. Surely you don't believe my Senate cousins intend to fund the president's wall.

Employing clumsy antics in framing me with statutory rape, however, smacked of brain damage. Obviously, these people had underestimated me and the president.

It was clever until you think about it. With these unimaginative souls for enemies, I needed no powerful friends.

Of course, my mind progressively responded to the torture in that voice mail from Morgan. Glowing questions about the spontaneity of her outrage from 8,000 miles away gnawed like phenomenological maggots eating away at Harvard's legacy.

Another voice mail arrived. It exceeded the first in bile and vulgarity.

Moving quietly, I negotiated my way through the tables to the foyer of the restaurant and fast dialed Morgan's cell phone. Having heard that searing hatred in the first voice mail, I had expected her to spew all over me in a flash.

She didn't answer. But I received another blistering text almost immediately.

Text message: Get out of my house before I get back Friday. How could you destroy us like this?

Fifth Voice Mail: I hope you are in jail by the time I get home. Statutory rape should get you 20 years. My god. Those pictures and videos on the internet are so horrible I can't believe I ever let you touch me. Resign from the senate before I get home. Damn you! Damn your sorry ass!

Of course, I knew that my wife was playing a high stakes game with me as the discard. But I could do nothing to redirect. I could only play out the hand she dealt me.

Of course, no one enquired about my hole card until it was too late.

My chief of staff also had left half a dozen strained text messages and several voice mails. She was obviously upset but would not elaborate on her urgent request that I get back to the office immediately.

Anxiety had built to a crescendo. Though almost painfully stressful, it wasn't guilt or fear. I had done nothing to justify my wife's bizarre messages.

Consequently, my only concern at that moment was a need to tackle whatever the bilious proposition might entail. Though a fop and fool I might be, I knew all about Photoshop and how to create a video that assassinates character by inference and carefully conceived camera angles.

When watching a video of a magnificently massive phallus making mush of a noble vagina, the viewer almost never sees the faces of the performers. There! I live in the real world.

Never one to leap irrationally, I had no problem returning to the dining room to conclude the celebration with dignity.

Ironically, the clownish entertainer's contrarian anti white male diatribes had previewed the horrors that I would find in my office later, scenes found only in opioid hallucinations.

Of particular poignance was the comic's story about Eve's accusing Saint Michael of groping her when he discharged her from Heaven. We all laughed at the good natured story about Saint Michael's being invited to speak at Cal Berkeley.

Though an element of truth in the ribald humor made me uncomfortable, the theme of the joke made me laugh.

It seems that Saint Michael arrived at Sather Gate only to be met by Mother Eve, now serving as the provost.

"Now, you good for nothing SOB, I've got you where I want you," Mother Eve hooted. "You touched my ass when you kicked me out of the Garden of Eden, and I'm demanding that God fire your butt."

"Don't think for a moment that I'm apologizing," Saint Michael responded. "But after more than a few millennia, you're making a fool of yourself."

Inappropriate touching? Indeed, according to Genesis, Saint Mike touched her butt! Arguably, the could not avoid the blatant touching.

"You mean like when God told me to put my foot in your cheating butt and slam the Garden gate behind you?" Saint Michael asked, never one to duck a fight.

"See!" Eve said. "Even God's a groper, but he didn't have the guts to play with my butt himself."

Welcome to the 21st Century, Saint Michael!

Well, to be sure, Saint Michael was no where to be seen when I entered my office in the Hart Building. I am a second-term Senator from a confirmed red state.

Missing the inference that I was a defender of the constitutional republic would create a problem in identity. As a strict constitutionalist in the vein of Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch, I frequently astounded my liberal enemies by being a true 18th Century liberal and my conservative friends by actually believing in the constitution.

Another of those damnable texts arrived as I ascended to my floor in the elevator. It was a continuation of my wife's onslaught.

"You dirty slime ball," screamed Royce, my daughter. "If mother doesn't kill you, I will."

Always swaggering and abrupt, though inexplicably replicating her mother's saleable beauty, my daughter had smelled the male animal's blood. Royce had always wondrously came on point to seize an opportunity to spear me.

Of course, I knew that any effort to talk to Royce would yield only more wounds. As fathers must, however, I called her. Perhaps it was to my advantage that she refused to talk to me.

Obviously, that leaves only my son, Harold, and his grand parents along with my brother and two sisters to complete the family response to my lynching. As I anticipated, no one responded to my voice mails or e-mails.

If they had answered, I could have told them only that I knew nothing. They were learning more from the hostile media than I could have told them.

I almost laughed as I realized that I was missing all the dirty drama, and I was the diva.

Once inside my building, I strode purposefully as an innocent man must. It was such an honor and a privilege to be here in this building with such accomplished people.

If truth were told, however, I detested the glass, plastic, stainless steel and laminated office with its incessantly diffused lighting and clean lines with all those menacing right angles.

Suddenly a sliver of realization chilled my nervous system, holding for the briefest of a moment. It wasn't the synthetic Soviet stamp or lack of spirit of The Hart Building that nettled me at times.

It was the D.C. experience in all its variations that raised my doubts about the future of the constitutional republic.

Just inside the thick glass double doors that led into my reception area, Midge paced like a sentry at the Tomb of The Unknown Soldier. I was no different from other senators in the degree to which I relied on my chief-of-staff.

My chief-of-staff had never smiled in my presence. At times she had failed to mask her impassivity; but I had observed that minimal contempt without comment. Most of my colleagues praised her as the best at deciphering the D.C. intrigues; so, it was on that thread that I had reluctantly abided her hauteur.

"As you probably expected," she spat, "all of the alphabet news channels have been carving you into a pedophile monster on the air and calling me every three minutes demanding a statement."

"Whoa! Did you say pedophile monster?" I asked. Defying nature, I kept myself controlled and able to concentrate.

"Both the majority leader and the whip have called," she said, consulting notes on a clipboard. "They want you to withdraw temporarily from your committee chairmanship."

"Forget the phone calls," I said. "I have no understanding of anything you've said."

"I will remain one week to keep your office functioning," she said as her eyes flared with anger. "But you must stay in your office and keep our communication to an absolute minimum."

"Before you join the firing squad," I responded, "you owe me the courtesy of explaining why you are calling me a pedophile."

"You'll find a metal case on your desk containing DVD's and pictures of your sexually abusing Debra," Midge said. "Debra has your ass nailed but good, Senator.

Incongruity always has significance. My consciousness redirected to my grandfather's clock.

"Is my grandfather's clock in my office?" I asked abruptly.

Midge was disconcerted as she considered my seemingly irrelevant question. I repeated the question. She shrugged and said that no one had disturbed my prized time piece.

"No one has moved your grandfather's clock since they day you moved into your office," she said.

"Midge, you have accused me of a most atrocious crime," I said carefully. "Is that your belief?"

Midge narrowed her eyes and thinned her lips as she affirmed that she believed I had raped an intern in my office.

"I will leave the office in operating order, however," she said.

"Midge, you have five minutes to get your purse and coat and get out of my office," I heard myself saying. My anger boiled over for an instant before I consciously retrenched.

Without comment, she turned on her heel and strode toward her office. Behind the reception desk, Karen, nominally my receptionist but more like my utility infielder, smiled as she continued to conduct business with a caller constituent. I could sense and hear the norm of disparate office noises. Apparently only Midge was rebelling and jumping ship.

"Forward the telephones to the answering service," I said. "And if you are willing to risk being alone in my office with a monstrous pedophile, I need to know what you know."

WHAT WOULD LIFE BE

WITHOUT THE UBIQUITOYS DVD?

Within minutes Karen had related how she signed for the aluminum case that now sat in the middle of my desk. She had watched Midge examine the contents and insert a DVD into my player.

"It's bad," Karen said, sipping her diet coke. But her eyes were twinkling, a strange combination of expressions.

"Who is Debra?" I asked, exhaling slowly as I once again managed to control my anger.

"Blue thongy Debra!" Karen answered, those eyes sparkling again. "She showed up as a new intern the first Monday of last month."

"I don't recall authorizing another intern," I said, surprised and beginning to experience the initial discomfort of the betrayed trusting fool. "And what's with this blue panties sobriquet?"

"Your man mountain chief-of-staff seems to have known her for awhile," Karen said seriously. Then she giggled and said, "As for the blue satin thong, you have to see it to believe it."

Debra, according to Karen's graphic description, wore a silk skirt that fit more like a wide belt. Describing the effect of the spectacle drove Karen into paroxysms of derisive laughter.

"We quickly discovered that dear Debbie can't walk three feet without bending from the waist and touching the floor," Karen said. "And with her miniscule thong cutaway at the ass, we all got an opportunity catalog each little crevice in her most identifying cavity."

"And now our chief-of-staff tells everyone that poor Debby has not seen her 18th birthday," I concluded. "I am also absolutely certain Debra's employment application conveniently has disappeared."

"You want to see the DVD's?" Karen asked.

"I'm sure you saw more than I could or would want to see," I said. "Tell me what you saw and what you think."