Memories of Jumbo

“I’ll tell y’all why we’re in Vee-yet Nahm,” the President said as he unzipped his fly before the journalists assembled on Air Force One and whipped out his God-given endowment. The new aide looked on from the secretarial quarters. The President took no more questions and prepared to disembark. The aide followed him to the front of the plane.

“Hold up, I gotta take a dump,” the President said, opening the door to the bathroom in his suite in the aircraft’s nose cone.

“Waste removal is underway, Mr. President,” the aide said. “I’m not sure if the holding tank is–”

“Take a memo!” the President barked from the toilet seat, the bathroom door left wide open. “Madmen find solace in the bedbugs of a garland. Unsalted chips are terrible.”

The aide took down those words as the President did his business, scratching his thighs methodically. He wiped and flushed and stripped down till he was naked. The President seemed to like his body, the aide noted.

“Here’s the deal. It’s no good going outside as yourself. Life needs costuming to make it sweeter.”

The President’s dressing room on Air Force One was stuffed with splendorous garments, and he draped himself in the blue gown of an ancient Chinese scholar, then laid out black pajamas and a pair of rubber sandals for the aide.

They finished changing, exited the armored Boeing and walked with a security escort across the tarmac. “What did you think of Jumbo, by the way?” the President said.

“Jumbo, sir?”

“My big ol’ pecker. It’s so big my tailor had to make more room in my pants.”

“I can see you’re proud of Jumbo, sir.”

When they reached the motorcade the President wanted to drive the car.

“It’s not S.O.P., Mr. President,” the driver said.

“Shut your mouth boy or I’ll try you for treason,” the President said.

On the road, the President asked the aide in the passenger seat, “Do you smoke cigarettes?”

“Sure, Mr. President. Chesterfield Kings.”

“Used to smoke two packs a day back in the Senate,” the President said. “Absolute hell to quit, but my heart attack cinched the deal. I made a pledge that when my second term is up and I retire to my cattle ranch down in Stonewall, the first thing I’ll do is light up a menthol. And you know what I’ll do next?”

“What’s that, sir?”

“I’m gonna carve a big wooden sculpture of the Buddha. I’m thinking butternut wood. Know anything about Buddhism, son? It’s the monks that do it for me. So stoic. Bet you could tie their nut sacks to their bungholes with some fence wire and they wouldn’t even let out a fart.”

The aide nodded attentively, but wondered who in the executive office or the Cabinet, if anyone, should be informed that the President was having spiritual troubles.

“There’s something else,” the President said. He looked vulnerable as he reached into the breast pocket of his scholar’s gown and took out some folded sheets of typewritten paper. “You see, I’ve written some poetry and I was hoping, if you have time of course, that you could look it over and offer a critique.”

The aide unfolded the papers and glossed the top page.

The Buddha came down to my old cowshed

As a Hereford-lover should.

“I’ll take one to bed, for Chairman Mao said

It’s never too late to do good.”

There were hundreds more of such lines containing detailed acts of bestiality. The aide let them fall on his lap.

“When we get back to the White House,” the President said, “I need to scout a good hiding spot in the staff kitchen. I’m gonna hide in a trash bin and jump out to ambush some folks, buck-ass nude of course.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then I need you to stop the first person on Quimby Street you see wearing tortoise shell glasses and hire them to teach me salsa dancing.”

“Consider it done, Mr. President.”

The President watched the road, his face pale and puffy as dough, his head lolling over his collar like a bag of melted icing.

“What’s on your mind today, Mr. President?” the aide asked after a pause.

“The same thing that’s on my mind every day. The piles and piles of dead boys in Indochina, American and Asian. Massacre, rape, napalm, this war.”

“You mustn’t take it personally, Mr. President.”

“But I do. I break out in hives and rashes, all over my arms and legs, even my poor Jumbo. Nothing relieves the pain. I cannot cry for the millions of lives I’ve wasted so I scratch till my skin weeps blood and pus. Every morning I wake up feeling like a great block of tungsten hovers over me, and I am only spared from a crushing oblivion due to an act of Grace I neither deserve nor understand. God I need a cigarette, just a wee puff.”

“It’s all right, Mr. President.”

“No, it’s not. I’m a bastard, a mighty huge bastard. I know it. I don’t even deserve to breathe the free air.”

He jerked the steering wheel to the right. Their car broke out of the motorcade and launched itself onto a dewy patch of no man’s land before the riverbank.

“Oh no, I can’t control it,” the President cried while the aide braced himself on the dashboard.

The Potomac river filled up the windshield in a second. Then it rushed away as the car swerved leftward at the last possible instant. Motorists screeched and honked, the pages of poetry settled on the dashboard and floor, and they were cruising on the freeway’s middle lane once again, the white buildings of DC coming into view.

“Haw, just kidding,” the President said.