American Rhapsody by Joe Eszterhas Page B

for was symbolized to us by the goofy uniforms he designed for the White House police. Double-breasted tunics trimmed with gold braid and gold buttons, worn with helmets that looked like they belonged in the Ukrainian army. Some of us even stopped watching “Laugh-In” when they allowed him on the show. “Sock it to me!” he said, and the sound of exploding TV sets was figuratively heard across the land. Considering the rage we felt toward him, Nixon was lucky some acid-burned, mind-blown one of us didn’t frag him— DICK NIXON BEFORE HE DICKS YOU our signs said. Dick Tuck, our merry political prankster, even hired two obviously pregnant women to march outside the Republican National Convention with a sign that said NIXON’S THE ONE !
    We chortled knowingly when novelist Robert Coover revealed the real Nixon to us in
The Public Burning
. Coover’s Richard Nixon said, “I’m a private man and always have been. Formal. When I have sex I like to do it between the sheets in a dark room. When I take a shit I lock the door. My chest is hairy but I don’t show it off. I don’t even like to
eat
in public . . . .” And we absolutely rejoiced when Coover revealed the scar that made Nixon tick: a brutal anal rape committed by Uncle Sam himself. Nixon: “ ‘No!’ I cried. ‘Stop!’ but too late, he was already lodged deep in my rectum and ramming it in deeper—oh Christ! It felt like he was trying to shove the whole goddamn Washington Monument up my ass! . . . I lay there on the spare-room floor, gurgling, sweating, half-senseless, bruised and swollen and stuffed like sausage, thinking: ‘Well, I’ve been through the fire . . . . I recalled Hoover’s glazed stare, Roosevelt’s anguished tics, Ike’s silly smile. I should have guessed.’ ”
    No dummy, Nixon knew how fervently we loathed him. He was our enemy and we were his. He described us as “bums” and “derelicts.”
    We defined ourselves to be everything that Richard Nixon wasn’t. We
were
sex, drugs, and rock and roll. We believed in the buttons that adorned our scrawny bodies: TUNE IN, TURN ON, DROP OUT; DON’T TRUST ANYONE OVER THIRTY; BURN POT, NOT PEOPLE; MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR; STAMP OUT PAY TOILETS; IF IT MOVES, FONDLE IT .
    We traded in our neckties for beads and ankhs. Peace symbols dangled around our necks. We got rid of our blue button-down shirts and wore embroidered denim or denim jackets with an upside-down American flag on our backs. We wore fringed Wild Bill Hickok coats and navy-surplus pea coats. (Bill Clinton had a long one when he came back from Oxford.) Those of us who worked in offices where beards and mustaches were banned bought fake ones for the weekend. We wore no underwear, and the funkier our bell-bottoms looked, the hipper they were, especially if there was a copy of Chairman Mao’s
Little Red Book
in the back pocket. We never read the book—it was in sync with yelling, “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win”—but we kept it in our pockets the way we kept a rubber in our wallets. We were too zonked to read much of anything, although the more scholarly were memorizing passages from Tolkien and
Siddhartha
and Kahlil Gibran.
    We swore by our genitals the way Nixon swore by his “old Quaker mother.” We were our own vast Bay of Pigs—roiled up and flooding the Berlin walls of Puritan resistance. The Stones’
Sticky Fingers
cover featured a real zipper with a bulge to the left of it. John and Yoko were naked on the cover of
Two Virgins
. Yoko made a movie called
Bottoms
, starring 365 naked ones. Andy Warhol painted with his willard, as did Tom of Finland, who said, “If my cock did not stand up when I was working on a drawing, I could not make the drawing work.” The Plaster Casters turned willards into art objects. One member of the troupe would get a