Which is a nice kind of reputation to have, in some towns—but not in Little Rock, when you’re meeting in public with the next president in full view of the national press and fourteen Secret Service watchdogs. Nobody needs a headline like “Clinton Injured in Wild Brawl with Dope Fiends: Candidate Denies Drunkenness, Cancels Bus Trip, Flees.”
Well ... that didn’t happen. It was T. S. Eliot, I think, who wrote, “Between the idea/And the reality ... Falls the Shadow.”
Which turned out to be me.
I was the Shadow. Bill Clinton was not comfortable being in the same room with me. He is, after all, a career politician only a hundred or so days away from the presidency—provided he makes no mistakes before Election Day—and being involved in some kind of fracas in the back room of a downtown bar and grill would definitely be a Mistake.
Ah, but we’re getting ahead of our story.
Let’s go back about twenty hours to our Commandolike drop into the Little Rock Airport—where a huge blue and white sign, bigger than two Greyhound buses, said, “Little Rock Is Bush Country.”
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered to P.J. “What are we doing here?”
“Speak for yourself,” he said. “I feel right at home.”
“Of course,” I said. “You Nazi swine.”
He grinned and ate another Percodan to calm the pain in his gums.
“Do you have any more of those?” I asked him. “My broken back is killing me.”
“No,” he said. “I gave them all to Greider. I couldn’t stand his pitiful screams any longer.”
We were all injured. The plane was like a Civil War hospital. Bill Greider, our éminence grise, had ripped all the tendons out of his knee in a freak accident only two hours earlier on the Teterboro, New Jersey, tarmac and was in extreme pain.
“Don’t worry, Bubba,” I said to him. “I’m a doctor. Here, eat these pills.” I gave him sixteen Advils, which he resisted but finally swallowed anyway.
“I can’t stand pain,” I said. “Not even to be around it.”
“Thank God you’re here, Doc,” Bill said. “We’re all in this thing together.”
That elegant dictum, a testament to Brotherhood under stress, would be severely tested in the next twenty hours ... It was one nightmare after another as we were plunged into Mr. Bill’s Neighborhood.
Cazart! Yes. I see it all very clearly now. I was blind as a bat, but no longer.... So let me share it with you, Bubba: the fruits of my hard-earned Wisdom. Stand back!
Bill Clinton has no Sense of Humor. He eats a lot of French Fries and laughs at the wrong times and often manifests clinical signs of Schizophrenia. But he knows a good deal when he sees one, and on that murky Friday morning we were the good deal he was looking at—the Three Stooges, direct from New York on a big jet plane to legitimize the Deal.
Don’t get me wrong, Bubba. We had fun, despite our various crippling injuries and my own humiliation when Clinton denounced every thought I uttered and every question I asked, as if I were criminally insane . . .
The encounter took place in the back room of an artificially degraded replica of a standard-brand southern diner called Doe’s Eat Place (which I will hereafter and previously refer to as Doe’s Café, because I like café and I can’t stand the cuteness of the other) . . .
The encounter was what we had come for, the Mano a Mano gig with the man we all agreed would probably be the next president—unless ... Remember Willie Horton. Remember Gary Hart. Indeed. There are many rooms in the mansion, and there will always be wreckage in the Fast Lane. This is the Nineties, Bubba, and there is no such thing as Paranoia. It’s all true.
So it is probably not Fair to dismiss Clinton as a Cowardly Craven Fool for feeling a touch apprehensive when his scheduler set him up for an unprecedented and utterly unpredictable Lunch Forum ... It was a high-risk venture, for sure, and I had to like him for doing it.
Still, it seemed clear as we sat down for a lunch of Tamales, Tuna Fish, and French Fries with the Next President that he was not real eager to be there. He behaved in a queer, distracted manner and crushed my knuckles together when we shook hands. I shouted with pain, and Jann quickly intervened, saying: “Calm down, Governor. We’re on your side.”
I nodded meekly and sat down in a tin chair at what was either the Head or the Foot of the table, thinking that the Candidate would naturally sit at the Other End, far out of reach of me.
But no. The creepy bastard quickly sat down right next to me, about two feet away, and fixed me with a sleepy-looking stare that made me very uneasy. His eyes had narrowed to slits, and at first I thought he was dozing off ... But he appeared to be very tense, as if he were ready to pounce.