(A half lit room with a television set and a desk with a telephone. The set is mostly darkness that gives a sense of solarity and emptiness..
Enter Donald Trump. He turns on the television set with a mechanical gesture. It is loud, offers some command to buy life insurance he makes a face at. He turns it down to near muteness.
He sits in a soft hair n looks at the screen blandly.
Trump's Serenade
Nothing last longer
Is richer or stronger
Then a whoppingly large obsession
It might be with war
It could be a whore
A taste for boring confession.
The passion they seek
May last for a week
Of simple meaningless magic.
There is nothing to lose
Nothing to win
Nothing that deep or tragic
I don’t care
Who, what or where
You may have somewhere within
I'm only concerned
As you may have discerned
With surface naked skin.
Some like to hallow
An old marshmallow
Larded with a bit of Pernod.
Call me callow
Say that I'm shallow-
What is it they want to know? .
They'll take on a bum
For a generous sum '
They'd sleep with the dead or a slob.
A Playboy bunny
Is there for the money;
So is a guy with a job..
Donald-
Hello, Melania. You just heard about my affairs with Stormy and Karen? That's not the half of it. You're a little miffed at me? Look, baby, for somebody who says as many crazy things as I do I'm pretty transparent; you have gotten what you expected from me. In fact, I've always got what I bought into from you. What could you be angry about? We're both predictable.
I know I slept with a whole lot of women while I was married to you. I can't even count them; I leave it to other people with pencils to come up with the right ballpark numbers. I want you to now that none of these tramps had any of the intimacy with me that I have with you. In fact, I treated them if politely enough with a deep underlying contempt. I throw them some money. I gave them free hotel residences when they needed to avoid a bit of bad weather.
All we hotel people look out for each other. We're working in the same field..
Of course it was contempt that I gave them, baby. I treated them like whores. I have a lot of contempt in me, honey. You're lucky none of it ever spills out and oozes like a venomous syrup your way, Melania.
I don't just feel it for women either. I have the same disdain for men, dogs and itinerant chickens. Maybe its barbecue I was born rich. Maybe I'm a louse. I don't know. What's the difference? Do I have to know the reason for everything? I don't. I'm lucky if I can see whichever is I front of me.
It's nice to communicate with a wife over the telephone. I know you prefer it. I'm not being sarcastic, honey; you are a solitary person and I respect that.. You're lucky you have somebody to pay for your existence. What do you do in your life? What did you ever do? You were a model. You posed.. You were beautiful. So is the Taj Mahal.
Honey, you were always a leech, not that a knock a beautiful tapeworm; even snake can be gaudy. ..Look, I know you're angry t me for shaming you with all those Playboy bunnies and porno stirs but I just have a need to be in the room while we were playing cards. Maybe it was checkers. If you hang with these people as show business guys like me do you've got to fall into bed with them when the poker game is over otherwise they think you don't like them very much. .
I don't want to insult any of them. These are sultry, beautiful women, Melania. They weren't used to being told by anybody that they couldn't have a quick one with them because one happen to be a happily married man.
Luckily I'm happily married, God knows. I wouldn't be married to anybody else but you. Those first two marriages I had were mistakes. I blame it on my youth. It's almost as if they didn't happen. Maybe they did happen, maybe I had kids by them, what if anything does that mean? Do you think I was emotionally intimate with them? You're the only one if my wives I ever felt close to. It took me decades of searching though Playboy Bunnies lounging around tepid swimming pools to find you too.
Melania, you may not believe anything I tell you, but you've got a helluva good life here in the White House. Nobody bothers you. Nobody asks you to do anything. There's not one person in this whole dump that wants anything from you. Besides that, you've got a kid. You can best me out of millions with that one kid whenever you want.
I'm glad you don't talk much or want to show up with me anywhere; you talk with an accent and if my voting base listens to you, I might have to deport you. Just kidding. Even if I deported you, you'd have a great life with my money in Slovenia. I hear life in Slovenia is always better with money. Are they telling me the truth? Maybe you could have had a better life with somebody else as you say, but to be frank, honey, I doubt it. I'm never around' much; that's a plus. You get tired of anybody after three weeks, even God..You've had enough of turtle soup after three days.
You walk though the world's supermarket and buy everything until you can't take it home in fleets of big trucks and a month later you wonder why there isn't anymore to shop for. I know. I've been in that damn supermarket. I've had the best life money could buy; I'm still amazed that's all there is to take away with you into a Seven Santinis moving van and speed away into the distance.
You can have it too; you''ll see you will hope they find something to eat or sleep with on maybe r you haven't even imagined because you are weary with what they are offered to you here. You will be pushing me to get behind a space programs. Ii will do it too.
I need those Martian pleasures much more than you do..Give my regards to the kid. Don't let him eat too much; he looks a little chubby to me in the photographs you send me, baby. .Look, I've got another call; I can't banter like this with you forever, baby. I'm President; I've got to handle some things more important than whether or not you and I can get along. . He presses a button on the phone. )
I wonder which of us got tired of the other first.
(He clicks the phone again.).
"Now children we're going to spend the next hour making decorations for our class-party".Mrs. Sadofsky was also collecting pennies for the party, which she kept in a jar on her desk. Pointing to the jar she said, “And don’t forget to bring more pennies for yummy candies and cakes.”
(He clicks the phone again.).
Hello Paul? You sound good. I wouldn't say you're chipper. Who is, who could be? Yeah, they don't make federal prisons they way they used to anymore. The food is lousy; they don't even make any pretense at trying to rehabilitate anyone, even cockroaches and rats. It's just simple steady punishment...
I'm sorry you're in the clink, Paul. I talked to a lot of people that keep you at home these days with an ankle bracelet, then a fancy prison that w more like one of my minor hotels, and You kept on breaking rules they set for you .I couldn't ague about with the police anymore.
You don't like it in jail? Paul, nobody does. Even to religious saints jail has always been the pits. Sometimes they're literally pits. Look, I know I told you you' would never do a minute in the big house; sometimes even a straight arrow like myself can't keep all his promises to everybody. I said it before you wore that vest of ostrich feathers when they ostriches followed you into the bathroom Did you get those supplements I sent you? The warden took them? He thought they were amphetamines? Well, if he takes them he's found out it keeps you in top health all day long.
Yeah, you can take those supplements out of jail to,anywhere at all; I know that. Look, Paul, do you know the reason you're in jail? It's not because you committed treason, cheated on your income tax or did a lot of other crazy things most people wouldn't approve of. You did all of that under Reagan and working for Bob Dole; nobody complained.
You could kill everybody in a monastery and set up a satanic temple in back of Washington Monument and nobody would get too excited about it either. That's not what gets anybody locked up. You did one thing that put you in the slammer; you disrespected a judge. You acted as if you weren't contemptible or humble or whatever when you lived as you did with champagne and lots of pretty girls while being under fancy house arrest. You talked to all the witnesses at your trial. They got you for that; they wouldn't touch you for murder, arson or rat pedophilia..
You can learn a lot from rats, Paul; I have. I've got rats running all over Trump Towers, the Mar El Lago estate, everywhere. Every hotel I set up in Patagonia or Tajikistan. Rats have a bad reputation, I know, but they have wisdom they have taught me when I didn't learn it from anybody else.
Rats are always one step from death, Paul. people can poison them, crush them, chase them into the street, banging their brains out with a broom. Even if you're a rich and powerful rat you can be done in by an eagle or a hawk. Owls can't get enough of the taste of raw rat meat.
I'm trying to tell you, Paul, that you need to think like even the the smartest of these damned rodents. You are never far from destruction. You act as if nobody can touch you, Paul. You've got good reason to have that opinion too; nobody has put the kibosh on anything you've done your whole life. One day somebody will kick you into the landfill. You were lucky for thirty years. Now you've said the wrong thing to a judge. They are imperious types, these damned judges. They are the closest thing in America to oriental despots,
You act as if you're contemptuous of their power and any judge even in traffic court is going to lock you up. To them we're vermin. That's why we can learn a whole lot about surviving in any American court from a local rat.
I'll look into that thieving warden Paul. It's a disgrace he would be allowed to steal vitamins from you.. When are you going to get out of the hoosegow? I don't know. I can pardon anybody I suppose but if they haven't been tried I have nothing to pardon them about. If you would have been more careful about what you did under house arrest you'd still be in your living room sipping Brandy Alexanders.
Sometimes people like us at the top of the bailiwick can't believe that anything or anybody at all can stop us from doing whatever we want. We don't really believe we can ever go to jail even if we murder somebody. Look at Edward Kennedy and that slut Mary Joe Kopechne. Did he ever spend five-seconds in stir? He walked into the bright sunlight. Just be patient; it will happen to you.
You know, Paul, you haven't got it so bad as a whole lot of situations in life go; . You're in solitary so nobody is going to rape you or do any damage to you unless they poison your food or have rats come through tole to nibble at your toes while you're sleeping. When you watch television you're the same as everybody else with their eyes fixed on that program.
The only difference between you and me and that when we finish watching whatever it is that interests us on the tube I'm President of the United States and you're in the clink. Maybe some people say you might be better off. You don't have any Secret Service bucks trying to protect you because you have assorted enemies with guns and knives who would like to take you out and feed you to the buzzards and worms. You shouldn't upon jail as a place that protects you, not a dump that confines you to a few feet of space even when you want to do laps on a fancy treadmill.
Paul, if there' no sex or bad sex in a lock up you might enjoy, that could be good. How good I the lovemaking outside of Jail? It's mostly dismal stuff. It humiliates everybody in the bedroom including the roaches in the shadows of the stale boudoir. , We escape some of it with a fistful of greenery but what do we get in the end from all those casual hotel romps? At lest the tramp gets a few scant bucks. We have a spasm, we go to sleep, and dream about money, not love. and most of our bed mates if we have a buck or two are very aware of how some foxy women have scented those dollars deep in our pockets and trade off a little very forgettable hotel service to get some of it from us. You might be horny but you have one fewer enemy than you had when you were out of the hoosegow.
You might be horny but you have one fewer enemy than you had when you were out of the hoosegow.
Yeah, I talked to Marco about Vladimir's very singular ambitions. He sounded iffy. He will go for our deal because it's global politics with a lot more at stake than some retired dictators touring as a Fats Domino rock star but he wasn't all that enthusiastic either doing a movie as an action hero. You know Marco.
Yeah, among other things he's the central; Mafia button man in the music business but he does have taste and opinions like all of us, even me. He knows Vladimir's Blueberry Hill was a big hit but he doesn’t know whether Vladimir can sustain a career out of doing Fats Domino covers.
Yeah, among other things he's the central; Mafia button man in the music business but he does have taste and opinions like all of us, even me. He knows Vladimir's Blueberry Hill was a big hit but he doesn't know whether Vladimir can sustain a career out of doing Fats Domino covers.
I don't think I could either. After all, the real Fats was a one of a kind guy. I don't even look like Fats Domino, a wonderful gumbo cook by the way ,Neither does Vladimir but that's what makes his act interesting. Nobody expects him to sing Blueberry Hill like Big Fats. They think they can learn something about him from not sounding like Fats. Why they want to know about him bets me. I don't understand any of it. I think once they got rid of kings mostly the folks out they have a hunger for some kind of low level royalty.
You know, Vladimir was never really Communist even when he worked for the KGB. He's apolitical, He has contempt for ideas. He thinks Socialism is a racket for bums. His idea of government is who is sitting in a palace and who is eating stale kasha left by peasants in a garbage pail.
Vladimir is simple. That's what makes him as powerful as he is. People look for complexity in the guy and they get a sock in the nose.
Maybe jail for you is sort of like Socialism,, American style, Paul. Somebody values you for some reason enough to keep you alive and fed enough to wake up the next day doing the same thing. It doesn't matter why they trash you; the miracle is that they honor you at all. You'd think anybody in a slammer would be more respectable, wouldn't you?
A lot of people prefer a jail to being on on some boulevard somewhere given the kind of people you meet on the street these days. People hide in their homes from them. still they come down the chimney like Santa Claus or up from the crocodile cesspools. Go to any poor neighborhood,; you'll see people are cowering in their cellars and never walking around outdoors much. They're all under consensual house arrest as you were . Jail doesn't means much of a change for them. Most of the men are happy to get rid of their wives when they do some appreciable time in the federal slammer. The local felons don't have wives; they have nothing. Yeah, whatever they find in a a nearby river.
Nobody ever sued an American slob for alimony and child support while he was locked up in the big house either. It's hard to be a man out on the street, If they don't draft you for a stupid war when you're young, they hit you with legal slavery when you've got a buck to steal. It's punishment for wanting a quick one in a broken down car.
Obviously if you're a convict breaking up stones with a sledgehammer you can't be making any money unless you have a glue and barbiturate concession in the damned place.
There are two ways to get medical help in this country cheap or free; live sanity five years and get on line in a dumpy clinic or go to jail. I'll bet the doctors in prison are better too. They don't take any foreign doctor in the clink. Nobody talks to you in rustic Filipino or offers you a pill while stinking of mangoes and fish curry. Nobody misses the loss one more bum in this world but if they're in the slammer and you die, everybody in the institution losers a resin for a steady paycheck.
Having money from doing nothing is what is is all about these days, Paul, that's why gambling has always been more popular than stealing and bad sex. Don't you think every Chinese Communist coolie would like to hit it big on the Hong Kong stock market and take off into the country or a fancy whorehouse for a rest?
Gamblers don't work. I learned that at from Marco Gambino in Atlantic City. That' not his real name. He's not even Italian. Marco say the less people know about him the better. F course life is better with money, even infancy. .
Marco is smart about people, kid. Whatever they know about him they will try to turn into a favor , tats why they know nothing, sometimes even less than nothing. Marco's a philosopher.. He says that people who work for a living look up to a gambler.
You never heard of Marco? That's good; that's the way he likes it. You've heard of the unknown god? That's the only real deity if there is one Paul. The gods you now about are just punks. Every god has to have a couple.
You don't trust gods or dice players? I understand. That very wise. Still, a gambler may be a cold fish but he isn't pissing his life away for a bit of cash with a picture of some corpse with a wig on it. Work in an office or a construction site humiliates people. White collar work with fancy pay, lousy pay or no pay enrages anybody who is foo enough to do it.
Even dying is better with money. There is nothing like dropping dead in an expensive hospital with round the clock service by good looking Norwegian nurses and being pawed over by earnest and gloomy Jewish doctors. God in the Torah gave Jews a special gene for working with pencils. I'll l bet even life after death is better with money.
I don't feel superior to you out of jail at all, Paul. Being President can be fun if can organizes a military parade or throw some people into the hellhole they came from but for a long time you had it all over me as a success. The guy who is powerful in America isn't the one who's sitting in the White House but the guy you don't know about who makes the telephone call to the honcho and tells him what to do next. I get a lot of telephone calls, believe me.
I think you're more successful than I am. For decades nobody ever heard of you. Nobody asked how you got billions of dollars from interested foreigners, what you gave-them back for the money, what advice you have some of the worst people in the world, why any loan shark plunked down wads of cash you now owed them big time, or what was going on in your private life. Ow they all take a intense interest in you, You were swift enough for thirty years; they didn't even know who you were much less where to look for you. How you said the wrong thing to the wrong guy and you're snagged. It happens. It might happen to me.
Well, maybe it wasn't that you said it to somebody but I did and that somebody took some umbrage at what I had to say and is taking it all out on you.
I'm still one of your allies, Paul. When the sentence comes down I will wave it way like magic. I'm good at magic.
Paul, at the bottom of this country is some poor creep, usually Black, who can't smoke a reefer in a park without getting arrested; at the top there's guys like me and you. It's not so bad either. Would any of us including the idiot locked up for a smoke like to live in half the places on this planet we all know about?
It's no fun being in a cage. I never met one happy lion or tiger in a zoo. I know there not much passion in the lovemaking in jail; how much is there is most marriages or whorehouses? Do you think you're missing something being momentarily incarcerated? Maybe God is doing you a favor. At least in jail you have no expectations anybody is going to love or honor you in or out of the sack.
All right, I've never been locked up in a cage myself; I don't know what I'm talking about. I agree with you, I can't say I would like ay time in stir either. Do you like being out of ail all that much, Paul?
You want to hear about my meeting with Putin? Well, that’s a complicated story. You might even find it fumy. I'll tell you about my little tete a tete coming up with Putin tomorrow. Don't call me up so much,Paul. I'm not your therapist. I'm busy here watching vintage rerruns of I Love Lucy.
Have you thought of getting a jail pet?Lizards and sloths don't mind being in jail. I don't mean a dog; they’re too intrusive and needy. How about a smart parrot? I've had a few hymns like parrots here myself. They're trained by Melania to say: Obama is born ins Kenya; he's never even seen Hawaii. I get tired of hearing it from a parrot. I like parrots who tell me they love me. It's just parrot talk.
It's true. Obama couldn’t tell a pineapple from an apricot. He doesn’t know a breadfruit from a papaya. He's a Muslim of course. You can always tell them even in the boulevards these days. They're' always carrying a plastic rug. they make them in Pakistan. It raps up into a little ball but when you open it out anywhere, you kneel on it sometimes with knee pads and give your private thoughts to Allah.
Yeah, I['d try a Norwegian, not an African Grey parrot. Melania has a whole bunch of them here in the West Wing. Norwegian parrots eat a lot of fish. How you're going to get fish in jail I don’t know. They sample my cheeseburgers before I munch on them; then they sip on my strawberry milkshakes. If they die nobody cares. It's no great loss.
Here comes one of them now. They also all talk that crazy stuff about stupid basketball players Melania taught them, (He imitates the squawk of a parrot's voice.) They don't know what a pineapple or breadfruit is either. Obama's never seen a volcano. (in his own voice) they repeat that over and over again; it's all these poor birds know. Yeah,I had to back off that caper I I had private detectives find out that Obama had really been born in Hawaii and grew up guzzling pineapple juice. I need a new part line for my parrots.
Yeah, I could get Melania to spare a few Norwegian parrots for you. Maybe they'll fly into your cage. What do you want them to say?...they can't say that. They';; be taken off to parrot jail.
African Grey parrots can talk, think; they do everything we can do that parrot can handle too. we're not so good; they'd be better off imitating something else, maybe leopards. Norwegian parrots aren't so good at abstract thinking. Some of them try to imitate me. thy do a lousy job in my opinion. Of course when they are finished doing their bum Trump imitation, I am Donald Trump and they are not. They’re just one more African gray parrot. That must be a come down.
I’ve also got a few lizards here to test the plumbing. You throw one in the toilet every time you want to use it. Some Iranian scientist developed a nerve serum that pops up from the cant and attacks you whenever you even urinate in it with a small sprinkle I put an iguana in the john and they find their way into they water. Then they either live or die. It expanded whether my enemies are particularly active that day.
Yeah they come at me with everything. Not even the john is safe. The Cubans have exploding golf balls,strychnine flavored french fries. The North Koreans have Abyssinian cobra venoms. One time a lizard died here from an arsenic laden pancake. It was manufactured in northwest Tajikistan. ?
( He hangs up the phone.)
I shouldn’t talk to anybody like that too much; I might believe what I say and go to jail myself. If I'm going to be there it's sure as hell I won't be with a smile either. Paul is spoiled though. he has five houses with gold johns and wears ostrich ether vests. How many places can take a dump in at the same time? What has Paul got against a respectable ostrich? Hell, I thought Paul was a stand up guy; he's buckling. He doesn’t like the plumbing in his cell maybe. I'll send him a few spare lizards. I'll get him a better brand of toilet paper too and a can that has more of an aromatic flush.
Probably the prison food doesn’t suit him either. It's never inventive. He was always a guy who had a yen for anything that had a lot of curry and spicy noodles. Even it the meat was carved out of a dog's buttocks he’d go for it if it had that reliable hot sauce flavor. I could get some fish curry sauce smuggled into his cell if I talk to the right guy. It's a disgrace that jails aren't more habitable for people than they are these days, I think. People told me they used to be like hotels. I understand hotels. I can't make anything about running a jail instead of a hotel or a whorehouse and gambling casino. First of all the customers don't want to be there. Secondly the Mexicans don’t want to work in our jails the way they do our our better hotels. It's too confining for them. They say most of the prisoners hadn't done anything wrong either. They don't like our notion of what a crime is. what's the matter with locking up somebody for smoking the wrong weed? You're protecting them from themselves. The should be smoking tobacco. Tobacco may kill you but it doesn’t make you crazy. I don’t smoke anything myself; maybe I don’t know what I'm talking about. if you talk enough and you don't know much, that's what happens.
Once when America was great or anyway great for some people we served a better diet to our convicts; they were people too. what's the difference between a jailbird and any of us? We don’t have the wrong enemies. We are mostly careful. Now we start on putting the felons and maniacs in a cage and work our way toward the middle where we feed the common people tacos fish and rat meat filled with preservatives. It's disgusting.
I wonder whether Paul is going to feel he might do better to be be a snitch after a few more days of being locked up somewhere like alien monster. Maybe he hasn't dreadnought to rad. I might send him a copy of that huge bunch of books by Maurice Proust. That would keep him busy for along while. Maybe I'd throw in War And Peace for an encore. Nah, Paul isn't a reading man; he's more of a dedicated television addict. He likes marathons of old tube shows he saw thirty years ago; It makes him feel like a kid. Of course all those actors have taken their residuals and locked themselves up themselves in their own private dump in Florida. I ought to know; I sell them the crocodiles for their individual deep water moats.
Maybe Paul watches the same television programs I do. Then we're having the same experience who's to tell who's locked up and who isn't? Both of us think for the moment we're some kind of hero.
l never had any illusions about his job either we were out to take over America. That was simple enough. We were going to take it from the people who had wanted to run America themselves, did it for a while, and maybe weren't so unhappy somebody else wanted to do it. You get tired of everything, power, lovemaking, eating hamburgers with three kinds of relish and apricot milkshakes. If we lived only a few years maybe it'd be better for us. We'd never get tried to anything. There'd be no time to get fatigued even of your own wife.
I never get tired of Melania because I never send all that much time with her in the first place. Sometimes I even forget I'm married to her. Luckily that’s the way she likes it too. I have no dietary what she’s doing or where she is most of the time. At least I know pretty much where Paul is. That's one of the advantages of knowing people who are in safe in jail.
Usually when they get locked up people I talk to over the phone get very dependent on you. They want to know what You can do to get them out onto the street and broad daylight. I don't blame them for wondering whether I can do that for themselves when it's obvious I can't help them. Frankly, if I were sitting in a federal coop somewhere I’d be wondering myself how to take a long walk somewhere again.
I've been sued, vilified, threatened, slandered and excoriated by some of the best people at that line of behavior; so far non of them has had me put way in stir. I guess I should be grateful. It might be the genius of America. We may fry a few people now and then but it's usually for murder, not for betrayal.
Murder to me is a respectable business. People who kill other people usually have a strong reason to knock them off. If you put a bullet into somebody or slash their throat with a razor it's one very decisive move. You know what you are going too. You are willing to live by the consequence of a quick slug in the groin of some enemy, or pumping artillery into the guts of some people you don't like very much.
Fraud is different. It's usually impersonal. Any victim will do. It's more impersonal than private betrayal when you’re treacherous to other people you have to get lose enough to them to make your move for their throat. You have to foll them with civility, charm, cordiality. You might even get them into orbit if you have some bucks and a little power and offer them a prodigally generous piece of it sometimes people will kill and steal for you for nothing.
Sometimes they need a good reason to do some injury to somebody you want hurt real badly. You can't depend on some objective way to get people to do things for you. Some of them can't be threatened or bribed; some of them are waiting for somebody, anybody, to muscle or bribe them.
Paul did a lot of work for me for nothing but he was looking for the elusive light too that shine from billionaires and celebrities like myself. He wouldn’t have committed treason or sold out a whole lot of his confederates if they were bums or nobodies. He maybe mistook me for somebody who was a king or minor god and thought he was doing it for some vague patriotic reason.
Money can do that. A lot of people will kill and steal because they want to do some trivial little favors with a wad of money in their pockets. It's mostly money that does it, in fact. You can't tell people anymore you're a prince and god wants You to command them to knock off a person or two for whom God has taken a fierce dislike. You can say it, of course; nobody will listen to you. You've got to tell them right way they will have some bucks in their pocket if they do a thing or two for You in the shows somewhere.
What are they going to do with the bucks anyway? Take a trip on a boat and dance wildly in a ballroom or sit in a hotel in South Africa and watch those sitcoms and action hero mock massacres with the rest of the half dead pensioners? Of course it's better to have some money in your pocket than to have nothing. Maybe not. Watching the same junk means all men are finally created equal. It changes everything you do. I know. I'm not like some of my employees who order breakfast and look at the prices on the menu for a fancy omelet. I can buy out the whole goddamn waffle joint and I am paying the bill while he is looking to save a few nickels by not ordering thirds on the sausage and wheat cakes. It's all in their minds.
Those bits of food aren't worth anything at all really. They all make it up. A car could cost three cents, a house a dime. Why not? the price for anything , Mike, is what you can get for it. The price for anything , Mike, is what you can get for it. The money isn't worth anything either. It's modern epitaphs. Sometimes they walk off with the extra rolls on the table. Paul is always walking off with the sweet and low packets . He pockets them after a meal. Maybe he sells them on the street; I don't know. the place might be missing a few knives and spoons too. They might even walk off with a mini-envelope of grape jelly. Then they complain when the packets break and stain their clothes.
I never had that experience. Maybe I lost something. Most kids when they're little learn they have to bring something to the table to survive in a world of large and nasty adults or lots of mean kids. I could have them all fired. The enemy I've had in life isn't rivals but a taste for simple pleasure. My brother Fred died of too much booze. Before he croaked I asked him why he did it. Because it feels goo, he said. I know a lot of things feel good but can knock you off the way the fancy bottles of Scotch did in Fred.
I don’t have any illusions about being happily rich either. I've always been rich; I can't say I’ve been happy too much or that money ever brought me any deep satisfaction. Of course I’ve had good times. I've certainly had satiety. I haven’t got a major interest in lovemaking either. I know how many men have made fools of themselves because they like one slab of flesh more than another one. I don't mind paying top dollar for good bodies but it's just a habit; it's as if I have to prove to myself maybe that I'm indifferent to them.
You wouldn’t call me an avid or generous lover. I really don't feel that sort of passion about anything or anybody at all. I'm always civil. I never get made t women I might grow tired of them.
What seems like a good haunch of flesh on a Tuesday can look like cheap chuck sirloin on a Thursday.. The cut of meat doesn't change; yo get weary of it. That's okay. We've got a right to be fatigued after awhile by whatever we were once enthusiastic about.
It's not a if we've made a mistake in the first place. We've grown and changed. We know more. Sometimes I think the world is made for adolescents and very young people. They haven't had time to be indifferent or disappointed.
When you get a few years in you and show up at the same place you did when you were a young man you know more or less what's coming. If you're an average guy you shrug and go on; if you're rich like me you get your lawyer to throw them a few bucks if they’ll agree to be very quiet about the whole affair. Not that you have to do it either. Who the hell cares about whom or what I do in the hay or for that matter what I are she thinks about it afterward?
They have their own little quick ones to explain to themselves. If we all were hones about who we slept with we’d all be arrested and thrown into the hoosegow like Paul. We'd have to look for Martians to be the wardens and the guards. Somebody would have to cook the rice and beans and crochet the socks. Maybe even the Martians would have even more terrible stories to tell us if they were in a garrulous mood and felt like talking about their astral adventures.
I've run a whorehouse in a famous brothel city and spent a lot of time with some very wild elements in our society that a prig would call criminals and much worse. I think I became a Republican from managing a whorehouse.
Mike, even a bordello gets inept and shabby when it has no competition. When you've got a string of sporting hoses as far as you can see down a street it means the tarts have got to be good or the customers will show up at the next one. There is nothing sadder in life than a whorehouse with no customers. It looks empty in a way a shopping mall never does. After a while the whores quit and go on Welfare. If there's no Welfare you get better brothels.
Take your choice. either a woman who's a looker and nice to a guy can get a few bucks doing something or she can get old and ugly doing nothing at all.
I know what the principles of lovemaking are. First of all, you should have no expectations You're a goner if you have any hope.
There are two types of people; everybody else and me. Sometimes I get tired of me; I think of everybody else. I doesn’t make me happy to think of them. Are they different? that might be lunch if they're a Playboy bunny or a slow moving cow. I wonder sometimes why these bums listen to me at all. I told them I would teach them no matter whether they were morons or imbeciles how to be rich.
Can you imagine, they believed me? If I know how other people could get rich I would never tell them how to do it in a million years. that might be my neighbors or rivals.. I don't need either one. I like life lived on a big lawn. Make it huge; make it borderless. I want to have a lot of time as I sit sipping a lemonade to see who's coming.
It doesn't hurt me much to realize I might being a sporting house rather than a airport. I like an airport though. It's a place of invisibility. My voting base understands that . They want the same thing though they can only afford a dump with a back yard. You don’t know anybody. Nobody knows you either. You can disappear in a jet and never come back.
My brother Fred used to say that terror isn't a good way to control people. Everybody avoids all the pain they can. You get them dependent on you with pleasure and maybe hope. You feed them a little and they start thinking you might throw them a few bucks or give the an unlimited credit card at a posh department store. that think they can spend a week in a fancy hotel room with room service in Las Vegas on me.
Maybe they can. If I never give people that kind of generosity nobody will ever think I might do it for them. I've get the buck to do it with after all; why shouldn’t I do it? What do I lose by doing it. I might get a new lover or a punk. We always for some reason I've never quite understood want a new bed partner or a fresh punk to deliver the coffee.
My father once said that when you get past the people who can bribe and the other bunch you can mildly terrorize, you meet the only enemies you can't do anything about. Maybe that's shallow or deep; I don't know. My enemies say I'm a vulgar, lowlife who lies and brags his way through life, a guy who belong on a television reality show because he can't handle anything like street life.
There might be some truth to that. I wasn't out on the boulevards as a kid in Queens; nobody was. It's too rural. Queens isn't dirty like New York City. It's also very boring. Still I was the only kid who on the block who was given a million bucks by his father and told: Donald, do what you want with it. It isn't always a good thing either. Fred got his million and tried to drink everything that came out of Scotland with it, even the piss water.
I've got the world by the nether parts There's a lot more coming.
What if it's true? There are worse people walking the Earth than that? Do they say I murdered anyone? did I send anybody to Iraq to get their legs blown off? Maybe I have hustles a few out of some bucks but I'm never accused of killing. Am I? Have I set fire to national forests? Of course not. II may have hustled a few people out of money, but what is money? Money is nothing. I am what I am because a lot of people who are boring beyond boredom find me interesting. I am a kind of star. I find planets orbiting around me.
Am I interesting? I am fascinating? Why? Low standards? Maybe because seem more evil than I really am. I would guess it's because I have the opportunity to express enormous anger. Nothing happens to me when I do it. When other people do it they don't like the consequences. I don’t back away from any of them. Let people sue me. I can afford more lawyers than anybody who does.
Karen? ...Yeah I think of you all the time , baby, especially when you're not here or joining me for a weekend in a posh hotel room. I can't get enough of your body and I might like you also, who knows? You're an obsession with me; is that good or bad? I don't know. You spent all that money? It was quite a wad of it; you must have bought out most of the stores on Fifth Avenue. How can a pair of panties cost fifty thousand dollars? I don't begrudge you a dime of it, believe me. I can always make more money. Now that I[m President i can print it with you picture on it. Maybe that's what this world needs: your naked body on a ten dollar bill. who's there now, Alexander Hamilton? Move over, Al, baby; you're smart but you're not good looking.
If all this world wants from me is more money I will give it to them easily enough. It's when they want something else I might get a little nervous.
You want a little rendezvous in Los Angeles? Yeah, let's do it. I’ve got a suite in the same old place, the one you liked because they put only a little chlorine in the swimming pool; don't have any clothes on when I get there. I might have to rip them off and tear my fingernails ripping at your undies. Se you then. I've got another call. (He presses a button on the phone. )
Hell, it looks like Mike! How does anybody become a general without ever leading anybody into war.?he,, these days in America it happens all the time. The generals are all t their desk and leave the little wars we have to be run by the colonels. They have better thing to do than to lead a bunch of stupid punks into battle.
I'm all for those little wars; it gives us a chance to knock off our own morons who re dumb enough to fight in them. Then we make a treaty with the bad guys and we all make a few busks on some profitable business.
What do those generals do in those huge office buildings they set up for themselves in Washington? Do they watch porno on their computers or maybe sell a little life insurance? Maybe they d a little of both. You can't watch porno all day;you loose your taste for it. You can’t sell life insurance seven hours a day either. There aren’t enough costumers.
I really hate talking to Mike. I know I’m a phony but I never posed to anybody in a uniform claiming I was a general. I think the reason Mike got netted by the Russians was sheer boredom with his desk job. He get tired of porno reruns. yeah, he likes strangers, not familiar faces.
The Russian understand that kind of weariness. They have a whole bureaucracy of guys sitting I their own monumental buildings looking above all never to go to work. Maybe they're failed gamblers. What a life for them and us, no? You get locked up in an office with a few hundred strangers and wonder what to do till they pay you off and send you out to a bungalow somewhere to wait for death. I hears some of them eve go back to those offices and sit there for nothing. They miss the phony camaraderie. That's one kind of desperation I will never have. Maybe Mike has it.
Hello, Mike? You're tired of house arrest?
I can appreciate that. We all get fatigued by something, don't we? You know I just talked to Paul and told him he should get a parrot and eat vitamins, Maybe a lizard to to float around and swim in his john. Paul's tired of being in jail. He's only been there are few days and already he's weary of the life in stir. Not like you, house arrest, an ankle bracelet, the run of your own house, a chance to throw in a quick one to some lover or whatever. It's a goddamn five by five cell like the ones in the old movies.
Yeah, he doesn’t like it. He knows there are worse situations. He cold have a roommate who's a murderer and a lifer. He's have nothing to lose by killing the poor bastard. He says they all watch the same television programs though. Yeah, no matter how creepy you are, you have the same reality. Action stuff.
People in prison some tell me are big fans of thrillers and violent cowboy movies. They like those Japanese horror films too. Yeah, Korean horror films are better. That is scary stuff. South Koreans like anything for a little stimulation, I suppose. North Koreans feel terrified just by walking down an empty street. I can imagine You don’t like being confined to your home. I've heard the same story from a lot of women with small kids. They do a few years of slavery too though we don't call it that. At least you don’t have to change any diapers in your place, Mike.
When you get old enough you might have to change our own. You're still a young guy. You luck has put it off for awhile.
Yeah, I talked to Marco about Vladimir. Ever hear of Ludwig Monstro? That's not his real name. Nobody is crazy enough to be called Monstro or for that matter Ludwig Monstro. that’s why he calls himself because he doesn’t want somebody kidnapping his family and killing them. Of course Marco is looking out for Vladimir thanks to me; he know the guy is looking for a musical career after he retries; he's sympathetic with that. He just doesn’t think there is an audience for what Vladimir has to offer people. Maybe he's right. I will be talking about it to our friend, don't worry.
What's up, Mike? Tired of being investigated by these stupid lawyers? We all are. I know you don't care, but it's no judgment on you, you know. People go to jail for what some hotshot can prove really happened whether it did or not, not for anything you really do or don't do. It's just Kismet who takes a look at you and thinks you might be very tasty for lunch or vulnerable to a snitch that can muscle somebody even bigger than a punk. I'm not saying you're a bum; you're after all a general. You can't be a general and bum, can you?
It's not easy. You might be a loafer but nobody ever gave you a serious war to fight; it's not your fault. You don't need a war in your life either; you could lose one and have to paddle out to Florida and live behind a crocodile moat sooner than you want. The kind of war we have are never won or lost by anyone. Too bad the soldiers have real deaths in them but that's better than a lot of stupid live in peacetime.
Big Al did real time in Alcatraz for a chump charge; that's justice. It's an all vulnerability or being able to take a walk; nobody ever asked anybody in a war very politely to be there.
I say anybody who's is in the middle of a war nowadays wants very much to be there. It doesn’t matter why. I’m not a psychologist I don't know the inner life of anybody including myself. What they want to do is another matter. Maybe ravage corpses. Most of them are happy sitting in a chair watching a tube. If that doesn’t satisfy them there's cruises to Bermuda, to5us of Puerto Rico, fishing for barracuda near the Jamaica. coast. If they want to get politically involved we can have them go on marches for or against having same sex bathrooms...Yeah, I guess it's a cause. I'd like to have same sex cemeteries. To me the whole world is a john.
Amway what's the trouble, Mike? You're doing okay. Many people would say you're involved in some variety of being honorably retired. One of the lawyers who talked to you from the other side said you might be up for treason? Well, that's a serious charge. Treason for what side? George Washington was guilty of treason, wasn't he? All the founders were.
You're in good company if that lawyer called you a champion of treason, Mike. I guess he means the sleazy deals we ran with Russia. It's been a kid of fashion to say that anybody who is sympathetic to Russia is guilty of that kind of betrayal of his country; is any of it true? What about all the college professors pretending we live in England. How about the crumbs pushing tamales and tacos at us in very copious volume?
I spent a lot of time with Mafia chiefs in Atlantic City; they were supposedly in a funky businesses, some did time like Charley Lucky but nobody thought they weren't patriots. Anyway all the things they were arrested for once turned out to be the very businesses that financially fuels whole cities and states like Nevada and New Jersey. Every damned state runs a lottery. What state thee days isn't running a lottery?
Look, all You really did was let on to the Russians that if I were elected they would have a friend in the White House. Sure there was some exchange of money; it our crowd there always is. That's all the Russian have is money. They get it from selling gas to Germany Do you think Russians were busy making a gas factory when all that foliage from the Jurassic age turned to gas they found it there, that's all.
Then they take the gold bullion from Germany and they don’t know what to do with it. They look to bribe people with it like us; what do they need us for anyway? We don't compete economically with them. We don’t have huge tourist business bringing any of their people to us either, Mike; if we did none of the would cone back.
They want you to snitch on me, Mike. Hey, Mike, snitch away. What can you tell them? What did I do that can get me into trouble?
I took their money? Why not? I did them a few favors later? So what. That's what American politics is about. like strange flesh and dabble in it once in a while in private. I can afford it. Everybody wants the kind of life I have; I can afford it, that's all.
Maybe I can't; I'm in debt too. I'm not really rich the way we rich people would all like to be rich. The really rich folks, Mike are invisible. Nobody chows who the are. Their very existence is unthinkable. They are the only rich. Everybody else including me are punks.
I wish you would tell the world what I' am really like, though even you don’t know all the little thing I've doe that are on the dark side. As they put the cuffs on me and carted me off to the sages they have waiting for me I'd tell them they were making a mistake. They'd had government by ll the pious people in Washington and even out of Washington an what did it get them?
They were done in by the good guys, kid. The good guys were telling their brothers-in-law what to invest in and what to dump on the market, they were letting a lot of poor slobs rot in jail for smoking a reefer, they were letting veterans hospitals botch every operation they took up more than getting rid of a sore fingernail because once a soldier has his legs blown off he wasn’t much use to them.
They need a bad guy. I couldn’t to any worse than any of the good guys.
I know a lot more about life that somebody who hasn't been hanging with some very criminal people and maybe taking a snort of this and that to make it through the night too. I've seen the bottom of the world and I have thrived in it.
I'm not afraid of murderers and violent thieves. I know something about white collar frauds and hot shot phonies too. I didn't learn any of this stuff in Pennsylvania business school either. I have set and played poker with people who have killed a lot of other people.
Maybe they never took me seriously. For a guy who has taste for the gutter I've have a pretty conventional idea of what evil might be, kid. I haven’t done anything you haven't heard about somewhere. I often envy the people who commit crimes that nobody knows how to prosecute because they can't even name the felon; it’s not even in the language.
You’re one of the people I know can understand this, Mike. You are not on the level; you never were. I'll bet you cheated on your public school exams. You were born to be a lose and a bum. Maybe in a way I was too.
The country has had enough of the righteous guy who thinks were classic creeps. They voted them in and now they have voted them out. If we all have to go into the slammer to do it we are going to make this country work. We know all about the dark side. We don’t have police or courts to back us up when we do anything. We've only got our cunning and a pair of swift feet.
You know, my voting base is proof that when people get fed up they elect a guy who is one step from the slammer. They all feel they'd like live so that they were there with me when they carted me away to the big house. They're all would be crooks. most of us are. Some of us have the courage and honesty to have lives that are totally representative of us.
My voting base is a bunch of cowards and losers but they aren't so broken down that they can't vote for a guy who has successfully taken up a life of carnage and evil. I represent them in more ways than you know or anybody knows. When they hear how many times I’ve been married, how I've flimflammed people right and left, defrauded all kinds of women and women fancy or not so fancy they applaud and admire me in the shadows.
I might be a little more honest about who I am than you are , Mike. You're a general who never led a bunch of cub scours. You're good at setting at a desk. So are a lot of people I know and some I don't want to know. I tell Mike watching porno in an office doesn't make you a war hero.
Of course I like you and will always look out for you. You've been doing some very dark things for me, Mike; I appreciate that. I don’t mind bilking strangers but I am always loyal to my friends unless they are stupid and become a liability. You might be one but I m sticking by you all the way. You might be dumber than most of them but I' m sticking by you all the way.
You know, you were never all that careful. people are mostly on the rotten side but the ones who make enemies like you are also a little bit too transparent.. You become very vulnerable to the wrong people. You think you don't have any enemies. That's when they can get at you. You don't know they’re always there. They just might be invisible or almost invisible.
I will get behind you to the hilt. Whenever they arrest you and try to lock you up I will instantly pardon you. I already talked to some people an got you a fancy house arrest. Don't do anything the people I talked to don't like. They don't understand all you did is shuffle some business around, but that's the way lawyers are, Mike. Thy always have an adversary. They look to win cases, not to know or find out what really happened or what might really be true. You can't complain that lawyers act like lawyers anymore than you can criticize a lion for eating some scrawny prey in the outback.
If I were religious I would say God and the angels have reason to create everything and everybody we don't understand; I'm not even much of a moralist much less a conventional believer in anything. I would pardon you more quickly than I would pardon myself. I may have to do both. Maybe in the same day. I can do it. I'm good at forgiving.
It's not hard do to. Jesus had to persuade people to forgive others; he never would have that problem with me. I know what we are made of very well,
Mike. If I told you what my inner life was like you'd probably want to have me locked up. I wouldn't do that to myself, Mike. I know what sanity and reality is. Sometimes it's a little elusive. Not everybody can take it is if it's right in front of their eyes.
My voting base say they wanted a smart businessman; well, they got one. What does a guy in business do? He organizes people to make money for himself first, his employees last, his customers not at all. That might be impolite to say but so what? In any case it sure beats the people who run Washington who proceeded me. What did they do? They did nothing and took the money.
Well, maybe I have some notions of reality, Mike. Nobody can take away from me the nights I sent with the flesh of that Playboy bunny, what was her name again, Karen Something. Yeah Karen McDougal.
What a piece of work around the haunches she was! Do you think she would have tumbled into the sack with me if I weren't a billionaire and threw her some hefty wads of cash I didn't miss, never even noticed was gone from my pocket? That' might not quite be reality to some people but it I to me. There’s a lot more women like that I've spent the night with that are just as real or unreal as Karen was.
Maybe I'll give her one more quick one before we both plop, who knows?
Look, You can even tell them I was in on the deal. That'll satisfy them. That's ho they got Nixon. Do you think Nixon was the worst President the United States ever had? The guy had enemies. Would you suspect Clinton who is a genuine certified snake is the only guy with a little power that gave a casual punk to somebody in the office? Clinton had neighbors who didn't like him. that happens in Washington.
As you may have noticed from watching television that a lot of people don’t like me much either. Luckily I'm still President. I'm President because one quarter of the America people preferred to have a con man like me running the United States. They thought i was better for them than that empty bladder Hillary. Nearly all of them didn't vote for me of course; they voted enthusiastically against somebody else.
It's a long habit in politics these days, Mike. More than half of them said the choice didn’t meet their very low standards either way. I say low because in a free country you don’t pay that much attention to a leader You're too busy. I respect that. I don't think I m the best President this country ever had....they won't send you to jail. If they try to do it I will pardon you. I can do that. Don't worry . You will have your life. You will have the same life you have now if it is your life.
I couldn’t pardon Paul yet because he hasn't been convicted of anything. You can't show mercy to anyone whose locked up but hasn't been convicted. Paul got himself in the hoosegow, not me. As soon as the warden saw that ostrich vest, that was it for him.
I told him to be careful what he said and did. He got on the phone and talked to many people he would have never even pretended he knew. The pope, Arnold Schwartzenegger , the whole Kardashian family. He got himself in big trouble.
I could pardon myself too, Mike. Is there a punishment for general stupidity? I didn't need any Russian help to beat Hillary. She committed political hari-kari all by herself. She is a charmless, empty screechy chilly bitch. Nobody wants her as a leader, not even a stray cockroach.
What did any of us think when Putin's people began to talk to us? What could he do that Hillary didn't do to herself she's going down in history as a candidate who couldn’t even beat the head of a Mafia whorehouse. That's what the professors will remember that skanky slut for
Speaking of traps, how's your love life? I told you those Playboy bunnies are expensive. You've got to shut them up with a wad of cash. That' all they want. They've got about fifteen years to cash in on their bodies; they are out there raking in the coin for a night in the hay in every brothel in the world, maybe working other planets too.
That's what they have for sale, Mike; I don't blame them. Other people are pitching designer shoes or can openers.
You could to let them know who you are, kid; a lot of people I know operate under another name. They even wear fake mustaches and blond wigs; they have a staff that are experts at disguising them as somebody else or even something else. The they show up at an anonymous hotel and pay nothing but a bit of coin as the bitch walks out the door.
Whatever you do, don't start a family,Mike It's excessive. The litigation is enough to drain even Rockefeller. Stick to Bunnies; you don't have to be passionate with them. They look upon any mention as weakness. They want civility. A whore is always afraid they will be killed by a john who didn't like her work in the bedroom.
That’s their nightmare. If you're polite to them they understand that and take it as a sign that you are not all that dangerous
You want to know about my plans for a Putin meeting? Well, it's a complex story. We held it in a swimming pool buck naked. That way we weren’t going to make tapes of each other.
Sure I trust him. I think he will always be Putin. He is reliable in the same kind of action if you may not like what he does all that much. In his country people kill their rivals. They reach out to London and the Congo and knock off operatives they don't like. They aren't worried about being caught. They just shrug and deny everything.
Take a bit of advice, Mike, look over the pizza guy with scrutiny when he brings you his delivery of pepperoni Pepperoni isn't pepperoni anymore.
(He closes the phone thoughtfully. He sings. ) .
Playboy Elegie
When Playboy bunnies turn rabbits
They aren't as cute as they'd been.
They might have the same carnal habits;
They can't flaunt their fabulous skin
They look ugly and fat in bikinis
As they lounge near the pink colored pool
Sipping their vodka martinis
Searching for one more fool.
Offering silvery treasure
If they aren't quite senile and plopping
Men who are casually shopping
Don't look much any younger or fresher.
One day this reveling party
Haunting its perished crew
Will appear with a glass of Bacardi
A box full of spiced barbecue.
(The phone rings. Donald picks it up.)(The phone rings. Donald picks it up.)
Hello...Vladimir?, how are you?..Really That's terrible. Well, maybe it's not so bad. Whenever your wife leaves you, you have one less potential enemy. The kids are being brought up to hate you? That’s good; they won’t be sucking you financially dry. After they insult you once and tell you to drop dead you'll be okay. Just don't come back.
Marriage is an artificial way of life. Vladimir. Kids are just a funny accident.
If they sue me, don't forget; I run the courts. If they want money, I print money. I will give them more trouble than their assault against you ever could bring them any sugared harvests . You've been investing on the Hong Kong Market and got wiped out in a drop on mut8utitons stocks/...Yes, I was in on that investment too, kid; I know I'd recommended him to you.
Hong Kong is an inscrutable place. I lost at least as much as you did in the collapse of those stocks.
How's your girl friend Titiana? Still as crazy and deceitful as ever?...It doesn’t surprise me at all. The closer you get to some lovers the less appetizing they are. If you look at a sewer from an airplane it may look like beautiful marble architecture. I didn't expect to hear from you this directly. You know I’m being investigated by my own employees for selling out the United States to you for a big wad of dollars. They probably have a tap on this phone
No, I'm not worried. People sell out their country all the time here, believe me. The ones that have enemies that can make trouble for them doing it are sometimes caught and locked up. The trick is not to have too many enemies. One of them might be the snitch that puts you in the slammer.
. Yeah, I've got those kinds of enemies but so far I'm still President. They haven’t got the goods on me fr anything really. They don’t indict me for running a phony college, never paying my workers, starting a bogus foundation or building hotels where even the whores who work the corridors are sort of grungy but how are they going to put me away for treason?
Look Vladimir, I know what you do with your enemies; I can't do it here, that's all. In Russia you kill them, you lock them up on file charges of corruption or whatever, you chase them to London, you even knock them off with nerve venoms when they think they’re safe on the lam quietly in Salisbury. You are one decisive guy, no question, but when it come to handling the enemies situation you might over-react. …
I know it's Russian tradition; I don't blame you. If you didn’t kill people right and left people in Russia would think you're weak. I undertone that; II just can't do that here,.I don't know what would happen if I did it; it ; I'm sure it wouldn't be good. …
Yeah, I know lot of people did it before me, probably the Clintons, maybe the Kennedys, maybe Allen Dulles to some people who didn't like the CIA, Allen Dulles, the Kennedys, the Clintons could get away with that crap; I can't. They were sons of bitches but they were never associated with the Mafia. I am. I ran a whorehouse in Atlantic city after all. How much more do you have to know about me?
If I knocked off beauty queens and television celebrities people would think I was corrupted by the Mafia. My connections on Wall Street think they’re a very moral bunch of people; they are if you ask them nothing at all like the Mafia. Outside of pizza they didn't like Italians all that much once ; they think Italians are one little step from being Mexicans. Either above or below. My voting base hates both of them. I'm planing to go back in four years and ask for their vote again. I can't get it if they think I'm a stone Mafioso.
Yeah I do make a lot of enemies but so does everybody else. We're a contentious species here and elsewhere, Vladimir. Every cow has an army of blades of grass that doesn’t like them all that much. How many kinds of life on Earth make it by sucking up starlight? Nobody.
We are all killers. We don’t murder each other here that quickly in America. We yell st each other till the public get tired of hearing both of us. Then we make new enemies. I I’m careful. haven’t made one of them that had the button men to kill me.
Yeah, they might think I'm not above some ordinary treason. Let me tell you, Vladimir, every professor claiming we're part of England, every media honcho pushing the Queen and that bunch of royalist sons of bitches she calls a family, is selling out his country more than I ever did or even could do.
Every professor pretending he's making his way though the local Hottentots, every pitchman selling life insurance with a British accent as if he just stepped out of a room in Whitehall is a mole or spy for somebody. As soon as anybody wants to do something that's not legal he's not just a criminal; he's committing a private bit of treason.
Treason is about being invisibly conventional; are either of us ready to be that kind of slave, Vladimir? Of course not; we do what we have to do, don't we? You murder a few people here and there, you take over Crimea. You don't like Hillary much so you hack her e-mails.,You throw a few of your old friends into jail or under the bus you wasn’t all that close to. One dry year I sell some idiots a chance to learn how to be rich; I run a whorehouse or two, I might be an income tax cheat. Who isn't?
We'd have to b crazy not to do all those things and things like them; we aren't crazy.
We're just smart. If the IRS won't put me in jail for bilking them why should I pay them a penny?
Do you think those Wall Street speculators like Warren Buffet are patriots? He wears a nice suit. He acts as if he might be Plato or maybe Jesus. Believe me, Warren and the boys run their global con games in Zurich, in Hong Kong, in India.
They're the worst of us all; at least I give the people I flimflam a hotel lobby to stay out of the rain. These bozos and fancy crooks give nothing; they take everything. Don't you think those Chinese Communists who aren't Communists at all are in on the take, Vladimir? Of course they are. Some of us do it in a suit.
I like priests more than you think, kid. Some of them voted for me. They do it in a cloud of Albanian perfume. Yeah, I'd like a priesthood in America. Maybe we have one in our Las Vegas whores. They're like priestesses. We make brandy but we never do it with any piety. Wouldn’t you like a fancy monk from Kentucky selling you some good Bourbon?
We're killers or con men. We can't help it, Vladimir. It's our natural instrument of making a picnic.. We're been doing in sheep, cattle, chickens and assorted goats for a hundred thousand years. We knock off a million wheat plants and call it a harvest. It's genteel treason, betrayal, pure and simple. They all trust us.
Maybe they're afraid of who might come down the street and run things themselves if they ever get rid of us. Look at what happened in your revolution. You thought the czar was a creep; he was all of that but he wasn't all that clever at being a crook as the Bolsheviks.
You ever think of selling out your own country?... Of course not, it's not a Russian thing. Russians go into exile when they don’t like how things are going at home; they go to Paris and eat snails in wine or become doormen wen they can't get a Norwegian or whatever. Every country has their national genius. Some of them are great at lying' some have a talent for assassination. I make make more enemies than I need but that's just my nature,
Vladimir. I have a temper. I am not really a passionate man but I get very irate when I am opposed by crumbs and creeps in anything. I know you and your operatives tried to corrupt me when I visited Russia a while ago but you found out I wasn't all that corruptible; I just like an occasional pretty young woman with a taste for money in my bed now and then but so does every man on this planet down to the bums puking in the gutter. .
Anyway what's bothering you if anything, Vladimir? You’re the head of two hundred million people even if most of them are lushes and tarts , you've knocked off most of your enemies, you can do whatever you want all day long if you're private about it and mostly hang out in the the sub-basement , you haven’t missed a meal, a tit or a glass of iced vodka either in a country that complains a lot they don't have enough booze and dry kasha. What's the hell is your problem?
You're depressed? What have you of all people got to feel lousy about? You 'aren't dying, are you? No. You're healthy, you like to wrestle with lions, you work out and can bench press three hundred pounds or more, you might have a little more hair on your head but they could say that about me too. As life goes on this planet you have the best.
Yeah, I’m glad you realize how good it is for you. Vladimir. Look, a half hour ago I convinced one of my pals he was better off sitting in jail, another buddy he was living in paradise while he he was under house arrest; I didn't have much of a case for either one. People call me to cheer them up; I am for them a source of ways to feel good or at least fatigued with too much easy pleasure . I can understand that. How the hell can I make you feel better when you have everything?
Look, I don't care what happens to Mike and Paul really. I respect them because they seem to admire me and even fawn over me for some reason; the truth is, if they were locked away in a maximum security prison, I wouldn't care.
Maybe I would mourn their loss I my life for half an hour. That's, the contract they cut with me. When it's time for somebody to take a bullet they have to be ready to take it. I have plenty of associates like that. It's a familiar story. It's something they ought to expect to happen to them if they have any sense of hat the world is about at our high level,..
You probably wouldn't care if I dropped dead in front of you either. I can live with it, Vladimir.
I don't even care about Marco. Hey, Marco doesn’t even trust himself. He is an honest man because he thinks it's his best shot at to being knocked off by somebody who might want revenge for something Marco did to him. It doesn’t guarantee Marco will wake up in the morning but it gives him better shot at it. Sometimes that' the only kind of honor you can count on.
Marco Gambino doesn’t have to worry about whether anybody else will take a bullet.
Maybe. There may be people higher up who give him an occasional telephoner call.
They they probably live in world much more of strangers and enemies than Marco does.
Maybe I should have been a psychiatrist; I do have the effect on people of making them feel better for no reason at all. I don't know why. Maybe it's a quality you're born with like being left handed or a talent for playing the harp. I tell people that they are going to feel great again in a country that will be great.
Again and they believe everything I say, When was America ever great or fun or easy to live in?It's always been even for the best of us barely tolerable. Maybe we don’t know any better but to keep on going. They believe me. I don’t even believe myself.
You know, I'm just as tired as everybody else in this country. I wear good suits and comb my hair over my pate and dye it orange but I'm still most of the time much too fatigued with everything and everybody. Why shouldn’t I be? I'm over seventy years old. Some people retire when they're born.
Do I take it easy? I've seen more people drop dead and be otherwise destroyed by slow torture of an ordinary chamber of horrors than a lot of minor angels under a just God. I know they're coming for me too. Let them come. I want to die playing golf. Why? Because I'm not so good at golf. I will never have to write down my number of bad putts when I keep on missing that little green hole.
Yeah, sometime don't know how good our life is, that's true...You want me to come to Russia and sit with you awhile to console you for all the wonderful bits of luck that have happens to you? That's easy enough stuff, Vladimir.
You say you feel lonely. Vladimir, everybody who isn't a bum sleeping on the street with a flask of cheap booze and a burlap blanket is alone. In fact sometimes they'd like to be more alike than they are. That bum has to deal with mosquitoes, ticks, ants, cold concrete and rats nibbling at his toes as he tries to get a few hours of sleep. None of them are his friends. All of them in fact are strangers and demons or worse; they don't single him out for impersonal punishment.
You know, life used to be more difficult for all of us in the past. My father told me bout it. people died all over the place; you were living in a graveyard from the moment you were born.. Nobody had much to eat. A lot of people didn't live too long and aged fast. You were lucky if you could get a bit of bread to nibble and find yourself a joint where there was fun and a few well glazed bed mates indoors somewhere. I'll bet it was no different for your grandfathers than my grandfathers. They walked through an endless cemetery.
If you don’t like your life why don't you retire from it? You can play golf on one of my courses. There's a hotel on every one of them that will feed you a good breakfast. I always make sure every place I run is very well stocked with whores too. You don't suffer for lack of what may seem to some people to be affection.
It's hard to retire from running Russia? Why don't y9u get a look-alike to do it while you play golf elsewhere? Let some poor slob who looks like you run the whole country while you try to figure out how to put a golf ball in a grassy hole in the ground. .there are many worst lives than that, Vladimir; I can tell you..
Maybe I don’t understand Russia. There's a lot of things I can't make head or tail of, Vladimir. I t doesn’t bother me. Luckily I pay people who are smarter than I am to be a lot smarter than I am. I'd rather con people than kill them. You can only murder people once. You can fool the same bunch forever.
Murder is like a bullet, Vladimir. You kill somebody once and they're dead; that's it. You can con people again and again because most of them want to be conned. They pick themselves off the floor and ask for more.
I'm glad I’m in the hotel business. I thought of building airports too. My airports would have lots of whores but no planes, nobody flying anywhere. I'd call it a hotel. It just looks from a distance like an airport.
I thought of being a bartender too. People like a guy like me they can tell their troubles to. I'm a good listener. People pay me to have some anonymous place they can go to with a big gaudy lobby and a few days and nights in a hotel suite with quick room service and a few tramps prowling the corridor outside looking for a bit of cash for a quick one. Who pays them I don't know. In the end I'm living off them, whoever they are.
They all have some bit of plastic from the American economic machine that keeps the cash oozing my way. What is in the middle of this enormous unseen contrivance even I don't know. Maybe nothing. Does it matter? Maybe it does. Maybe I'll find out why it matters later. Right now I don't have a clue.
You know, running a whorehouse or a hotel is like being President. You have to find somebody to carpet the floors, a bunch of people to turn out meals that aren’t from some frozen crypt where they keep the ice, a slew of whores that are willing to work the sites for what they can get from them, a staff of maintenance people to man the elevators and fix the plumbing.
Some were farmers have got to show up in trucks at the edge of our operations bringing everything from eggs to celery. The television sets in the rooms have to work. You can't ask your clientele to do without a bar with some tolerable brands of whiskey sitting in it waiting from somebody to guzzle down the liquor. Even the air conditioners have to cost me at least a few bucks.
Does it all sound like politics? Believe me, it is tougher than any political job. You might come here one day and try to run a hotel. Just don't tell them you worked for the Communists. When you run a hotel you are a honest and bountiful. I give people stupid and mildly expensive satisfaction, politicians give people nothing.
You know what's nice about running a hotel? Nobody elects the hotel owner. Nobody even knows who he is. You show up and if you've got a dollar or two that's wall and anybody else needs to know about you or the damned joint. You run a shuffle of plastic at a machine that eats ones an zeros and the deal is made.
Not that being elected is such a good thing for anybody. A guy who's in office a few years has to steal quickly and do it with haste to take off with enough coin to make the whole damn election worth it for him. You had it better with the czar. Royalty are a bunch of lumps. Some of the better ones throw fancy parties. Nobody elected any of them.
Here they elected a few hundred people and think they have a democracy. They have a bunch of con artists. It's never the top of the den of the ivies in suits either. Nobody knows who's at the top here, Vladimir. Nobody If they knew, they would be killed. Maybe even the gurus at the top don't know they are the big cheese.. Think about that.
I did have a nice talk with Kim Il Jong, that North Korean brat. He's fat nerd not even a tart would look at if he weren’t running an army. He has people killed like you all the time. He even knocks off his own relatives. A lot of family intimates might want to do that. He sprays nerve poisons over their face of something corrosive like that when they're walking peaceably through an airport. I guess he doesn’t like his family; maybe he's right. It could be they're all bums and not worth having on the planet.
Anyway, I said to Kim, I need you to give me a pile of corpses of all the American soldiers who died a long time ago in the Korean War; I'll bet you've got some of the bones in a dump somewhere. He said to me, after seventy years even if we had them there wouldn't be much left of them. He is we never collected them. They rotted in the cold of the mountains and were eaten by wolves.
We don’t have anything to send you unless we kill the wolves and say the bodies of your soldiers were somehow still inside the intestines these thankfully long expired ravening animals. The wolves are dead too. Even their children and grandchildren are long dead
Maybe he was thinking of knocked off some anonymous people who worked for him and saying they were all that was left of American soldiers. The son of a bitch is capable of that.
I told Kim, baby, send me nothing. Put the nothing in a nice-colored plastic envelope, even a coffin, whatever, but make sure inside there is absolutely nothing, maybe even less than nothing. I don't want anything from you more than nothing. Less than nothing is okay too. He had a hard time understanding that.
I said, once these fake boxes supposedly filled with poor slobs are buried do you think anyone will notice that there was nothing in the coffins in the first place? We'll just have a huge patriotic ceremony and put those wooden jackets into the ground at Arlington with a bugle call and a flourish of loud fanfares from a brass band. I've got just the speech that can send all this nothing off to paradise too. It was written for me by people who are worse liars than I am.
Then Kim said to me over the kim chee and raw fish , don't worry about all the dead North Koreans your country knocked off way back when. We don't want them. We don't want their bodies or their uniforms. We accept their oblivion. We really don't want them if they don't exist. . We really don't need to recycle your army clothing; we have too much of it in our warehouses already. It's make of wool and rots, stinking up wherever we hide them and scaring people. There might be a plague suppurating in dead bones around somewhere. Don't even send us a fingernail or a little toe.
I said, no problem, we didn’t keep them in some anonymous mausoleum anymore than you did our own troops. I suppose those bastards were eaten by wolves too. You know war is very good for wolves. They're always hungry but if you have a big field of dead bodies it gives them a banquet not even a stupid wolf could ever turn down.
You've got wolves in Russia, but they don't eat people? Well, maybe not lately but I'll bet they had a feast on you and the Germans during the Second World War. You can't keep a wolf or even a worm away from its natural lunch. That’s Nature's genius.
Yeah, I can come by the Kremlin for a while if you need me, Vladimir. I know you would like to be an American. Maybe I can teach you a few things about how to be good one in Russia. We'll talk over how to divide Syria too I've got a plan to make the country North Syria and South Syria.
I'm open to East Syria and West Syria. The important thing is to have stable borders and a sane emigration policy between the two countries we make, wherever they are..we can all understand East and west. We all know what North and South is If we find any North Syrians or East Syrians trying to cross the fence or the wall or whatever and try to build a South or West Syria we will send them back with a strong warning: don't do it again. The next time we will incarcerate you some place in the Caucasus or the bottom of the Colorado mountains.
Yeah, if we are decisive about that it'll maybe slow them own a little, who knows? You get the fancy Syrian olives; not just the giant black olives; all the damn gourmet olives. I'll take the apricots and most of the cantaloupes. I am also thinking of building a hotel I Damascus?... Who will stay there? If we don't get any clientele we might make it an insane asylum or a prison. If that doesn’t work we can turn the place into a museum of Syrian artifacts?...
Yeah that country had an interesting past. They’re' good at giant statues. Are there any other artifacts? Maybe a few spoons and miniatures of Moloch. How should I know; you think I spend my time studying the relics of Syria? It's a goddamn dump. Believe me I know nothing about Syria, maybe even less than nothing. We can always come up with some generic artifacts and say they're Syrian...I don't know what an artifact is exactly...
I guess it's a rhinoceros corpse or part of an old temple. Maybe it's an inscription on a stone wall talking of terror and victory. It might be a papyrus of an epic on some Syria hero. I'm not an archeologist; it's not my field, An epic is an epic, It's long, I'm sure most epics are lousy. You and I have people who can write epic s;nobody ever asked them to do it, that's all.
I'll leave the bum epics up to you, Vladimir You've got a Southern border filled with people who are out of a job and have nothing better to do than write a fake Syrian epic poem. ...Nobody know what Ancient Syrian was like; it could be complete gibberish...You Russians are great at coming up with fake evidence....
I once built a hotel in in Petrograd that I found out never existed in the first place. Your people walked off with the cash. One day I went there to sample the local caviar and all I found was a bit of landfill. I'm lucky there was a real Petrograd. Maybe it wasn't real. How do I know what a real or unreal Petrograd looks like?
I know you want to be a rock star here. That version of Blueberry Hill you did in Outer Mongolia made five millions dollars on the American market. People couldn't get enough of it. Of course it was a enormous lie. people know you're much more ambitious than finding a thrill on Blueberry hill. They know about Crimea and what you're up to elsewhere.
Yeah, if you retire from managing Russia and start touring in rural America I can get you a managerial team that will make you as famous as you can be in rock music, Vladimir. America music is a Mafia franchise; I am of course very tight with many of those people.
Why don't you write songs that are personally closer to you and your life, Vladimir. Fats Domino was a terrific guy but he was nothing at all like you. he entertained at a lot of weddings I went to. He was really very fat; he ate most of the wedding cake. He may have had a secret inner life, Vladimir. Somewhere he really needed and wanted to climb up Blueberry Hill. You need a set of songs that give you a different profile.
Did you ever think of rewriting the lyrics to Georgia On My Mind? You talk of invading Georgia? Any Georgia will do. You might have a hit there. people associate you with having not just Georgia on your mind but Crimea, the Ukraine and Siberia. You are perfect for reality shows.
You've got a nice voice, Vladimir. You play the piano a little like Elton John. You may have a musical future in America.
I'm glad I never had to run Russia along with America. I couldn't do it. I can't sing really. I guess I can croak. Maybe.
You Russians might be better liars than I am. I may pretend to be and do a lot of things but it's all small scale. I don't have a large talent for lying, only a gift to flimflam a few fools. I could never make up whole worlds like your Isaac Asimov. He's American, not Russian? Well, I still couldn't do it.
Russians are basically science fiction writers who have a day job describing the real world. They get confused between what they imagine is on Venus and what is in front of them. Politically it's a headache. No wonder you drink to stop the pain. I would too. I'm lucky I'm not Russian like Isaac Asimov. Oh yeah, he isn't Russian.
I'll tell you how Russia is a swamp, Vladimir. It's a good swamp. It has crocodiles. You can't have a classical swamp without them. First of all you Russians have two classes: people who kill other people an people who get killed by them. Then we've got a bunch of people who work at s something in n office, don't ask me what too closely please, Vladimir. We've got a maintenance crew too but that’s mostly Mexicans; I’m' planning to throw them out of the country but maybe we can reparable them with Filipinos or some complicated plastic machine. In America we have another way to look at classes and class life than you do. We have people in the gutter that nobody wanted to bother with because they have nothing, can do nothing, and sit in the street guzzling cheap wine. Then we have people we can corral into an office, give them a suit and tell them they aren’t fancy trash. At my level we have people who are followed by teams of detectives to dig up all kind of stuff we all do on a dry day. that got me on a few numbers. Nothing serious, a few bounces in the haw with the local riffraff, that's all.
We give jobs to a lot of sleuths without a caper to look much into. Of course I did all the things they say I did . Why wouldn't I do it? I have the money. I wanted to do it. I shut them up by stuffing their panties with cash but lately since I've been in politics they're been trying to hit me for more of a bundle, selling their lurid tales to Hillary and other scurvy people. do you think we might get Hillary as a lezzie?
I can usually smell lezzies. I think she might be into women. It's no big deal. My voting base likes to know what I do in the sack; if I don't do it they think I must have been sick and died. You don't have any of thee problems, do you, Vladimir, baby? Nobody talks to your media about your bedroom peccadilloes, do they? They might find themselves left in a trash can somewhere in landfill out in the Moscow wastelands.
That would be a waste of a lot of beauty, Vladimir, but you don't care; you've got a lot of beautiful Russian women if they never walk around in a bikini anywhere; it's too dammed cold. Well, at least you can save money on refrigerators. Your hotels don't have any air conditioning either. It ups the profit margin for people like me.
I did what I could do for you partially because it was easy. You knew, we never did have any real dirt on Hillary. What is it to have a private e-mail account ? What kind of crime is that. A crime should be something like murder or arson. This woman was so utterly empty that she didn't even know how to be evil.
She was hard to attack for that reason, Vladimir. She's charmless, dull, opaque because there's nothing inside her but bits of landfill. What do you do to attack a woman like that? Nobody thinks it's a felony to be tedious. They haven't suffered yet from enough tedium.
She had a yapping sound like a small dog. Nobody liked her. I don't blame Bill Clinton for sleeping out on her. The poor guy had to endure her; I didn't. If somebody told her munching o cow patty and pouring catsup over it was what she need to do to get elected she would have done it.
You people in Russia spend too much time indoors drinking vodka. Yes, I know it's cold out there where you are. Put on a fur coat. Ear two sets of socks. Get a hat on your head; you've got no hair there. You will need every edge in Russia you can get.
(He hangs up the phone.)
The poor guy. Wanting to quit managing Russia to be a rock star is a step up, no doubt about it. You get the adulation, the money, the parties, the little girls and the fame but nobody wants to kill you and replace you with themselves. Then they can sit around waiting to be killed. That's why the Arts area better racket than politics. He's been to a ranch but he's never been a moneyed lounger at a Playboy swimming pool.
That makes him half naive. He only knows a part of America. Besides, George W. never could have been a cowboy anymore than he was a good businessman or a competent President. he would have been better off as Vice President. They're supposed to be charming and do nothing. I'll bet under his management his cattle are dead and the chickens are all sick with some tropical disease. If George would have run a Playboy Club all the Bunnies would have been ugly, morbidly obese, and infected everybody with some viral cancer. They wouldn't be all that friendly either. George has a destiny to take up endless disaster; I don''t. I think in another lifetime offends some minor Abyssinian god. I might be locked into a lot of struggle but I am not a traveling arena as George is for catastrophe.
(He sings to himself.)
Pedophilic Meditations
I love the look at women who are barely seventeen
At it from their infancy, incredibly obscene
Bedible and edible yet otherwise forgettable
Who have the look of prostitutes turned out by a machine.
They offer their mentality of meaningless abnormality
Their local popularity, the folly of morality
They smile at you when you request some novel abnormality .
That might lack any notion of virtue or legality .
Even if they're Indians they all have yellow hair
Glazed muscles from hard labor in gym
Suntans from a session with a lamp and easy chair
Look statuesque willowy,and slim.
One can't expect from such etudes in carnality
With roses who've never been in bloom
Anything that might suggest some sharing of mortality;
That's hardly why one's come into the room.
(Exit Donald.
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