the Shackle Report

THE GIRLS

What do women want? They want to be girls who have fun — with Kitty. Whether they’re running for office or running from the spotlight, Kitty has room for America’s women — Left, Right, Green and Whatever, under her big tent.

1. Monica Lewinsky — Jan. 18, 2000
2. Linda Chavez — Jan. 16, 2001
3. Hillary Clinton — Feb, 29, 2000
4. Mary Cheney and Candace Ginrich — Aug. 29, 2000

MONICA DEAREST

I have gotten to know Monica Lewinsky so intimately over the past two years of sex and perjury scandals, I feel like we’re practically old lovers. It’s with some disappointment that I learn that she is going to be a Jenny Craig spokeswoman who will teach us all to be more careful about what we put into our mouths. Somehow, the idea of her switching from nibbling the president’s love bar to chomping a bunch of celery sticks makes me sad for her. If she’s looking for a new career, I think we can do better.

To get her to think creatively about the alternatives I take her for lunch at the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City. Why, I ask her, should we be climbing a Stairmaster to nowhere in some musty gym when we could burn twice the calories by paddling Ken Starr or flogging Linda Tripp, right here at a nice hotel? Monica says, “ I am, like, so intrigued by that idea,” but she’s worried: once you start beating your enemies, will no one will think you’re a good person anymore? I assure her that people who get away with tastelessly exploiting a young woman inevitably suffer from the sort of guilt that thrills to a little discipline. The key, I tell her, is in dressing for the occasion. And I don’t just mean avoiding horizontal stripes.

So we round up the thong she flashed at Bill, the special tie she gave him, the Mary Tyler Moore beret she wore when she hugged him on video and, of course, that blue dress the Smithsonian would kill for. I pick up a few tools and toys, including a box of Godiva chocolate cigars (I have my limits, and second-hand smoke is one of them), then we book a suite. I set up while she invites everybody over for a little “ off-the-record, never-before-published testimony.”

Within minutes they start arriving, drooling with anticipation — Ken and Linda, followed by Matt Drudge in that adorable hat and Lucianne Goldberg. Monica and I greet them at the door dressed in a few choice pieces of legal evidence.

“ Hi — I have figured out a way to put you all behind me and move on,” she coos, showing her fabulous cleavage. I’m too busy stripping everybody down and trussing them up to beds and chairs and bureaus to waste my breath on formalities. Besides, showing up in nothing but a thong sort of says “ Hello” for you.

When I handcuff Matt Drudge’s wrists to the bar of the closet his excitement is so visible I hang his hat on it. Ken, bottoms up, is blushing prettily beside the bar (liquor, not legal). Lucianne and Linda are each in their favorite position — with their noses in someone else’s business.

“ Jenny Craig wants Monica and me to lose some weight every single day,” I announce to them. “ And you are going to help us.” I wag a cane (imported fresh from Singapore) in front of Ken’s face and his dimples go into contractions. Monica reaches into her purse and produces first a ping-pong paddle (which Lucianne eyes like a three-book deal), then a boar-bristle hairbrush, the sight of which does something wonderfully rejuvenating to Linda’s already revised face. I repeat aloud what Monica told Larry King: diet alone won’t produce weight loss unless we work on our issues — “ many of whom I believe are present here this afternoon,” I add with an elegant leer.

The next hour is a blur of strenuous activity. Monica is a bit timid at first with her strokes, but she quickly gets over it when Linda begs for more. Lucianne cries out that she wants to feel the burn, and Ken grants Monica immunity in between gasps.

When we’re all gleaming with sweat and they’re all welty (especially Matt), I reveal that I’ve videotaped everything — every flap of their flab, every sagging jowl, every love-handle, saddlebag and cellulite pucker — for Larry King to comment upon. And as we play the tapes back on CNN with scathing commentary, we finish off our gratified victims with the worst possible torture of all: Monica and I take our cigars and disappear into another room to have really hot screaming gluttonous lesbian sex — that we don’t let any of them watch.

After we’re done, she admits she feels at least five pounds lighter thanks to me, and that her self-esteem has never been higher. I explain that she can do all this as a regular cable show and make a series of exercise videos that will pay her legal bills without Jenny Craig. And after she thanks me (I won’t say how), I kiss her on her dear foolish adorable star-fucking nose, at which point I realize that I do still have a terrible crush on her. After all these years.

THE SUB

George W’s nominees for cabinet have me so frenzied with lust I don’t know where to start. Attorney General Ashcroft, with his Boy Scout’s crush on Robert E. Lee? That Norton woman for Interior who championed manufacturers of poisonous lead paint? History decides for me. When Labor Secretary nominee Linda Chavez resigns, I must hurry to grab one last moment with her before she is replaced by a new right-winger from another minority group.

In my fantasy I am small and dark and strong, like one of her illegal workers. I have run from Guatemala and the badness there with no green card and I may starve. The Government says I must get minimum wage but, alas, I am not worthy. My English consists of only a few words (“Will work for food”).

But then I meet kind Linda Chavez. From her big heart she give me thousands of dollar “ spending money,” saying, “ Kitty, you down on yaw luck.” She feels so sorry for me, she lets me stay in her beautiful home two years. Just one rule: if anybody ask, she says, tell them I’m “ a free agent.” I learn those new words and repeat them often.

Being a free agent means figure out everything Linda wants, then do it before she asks. Because if she tells me, “ wash my panties,” then somebody in government might imagine that I am hired for not enough money and no overtime or taxes, in which case, Linda explain, I can be sent back to the badness.

I guess what will please Linda most is if I go do all the shopping then come home and clean the house, toilet to oven. After that, vacuum rugs, do laundry, cook dinner. And guess what? I am right! Linda, she loves it! I feel at last like I deserve to be there. So I do all that often.

One day, on television comes this lady, Kimba Wood. She almost gets appointed to a big, important office, but the Government learns she had a no-document worker in her home long ago, so she loses everything. Linda says Kimba is bad. But I get scared that Linda’s kindness to me will someday hurt her the same way.

“ Linda,” I say, “ let me prove that I clean for love, not money.” And guess what? She agrees! So that Tuesday, instead of doing the downstairs, I go upstairs and she is in a slip, lying on her big bed like a sunset on a mountain.

She has roses in a vase and a candle that smells of cinnamon. I come slowly towards her because I am so shy. I touch her leg. It is like silk, but firm underneath, like her fine mattress. I curl up at her feet and lick the arch of her foot. Then I lick higher. I go inch by inch like she was the kitchen floor and I was on my knees scrubbing gently with a magic cleanser, getting all the raisins up, all the teeny spots that make filth so quickly.

“ Lie still, and I’ll make you very clean,” I promise, and she lets the air out of her in a silent sigh. (She is so powerful that even her breath is something she governs.) Then I plunge my sponge in. Her smooth edge, her ruffled rim, the deeps beyond. The first abyss. The second. Inside, she has washed for me with a soap that tastes like lemonade.

I grip her thighs now at the top, firmly, like I’m steering the vacuum, and I push and pull against the secret bones inside her, licking and licking the shelf of her, her wall, her floor. Cleaning out all that terrible fear that the Government has put in her for being so good to me.

When her fear escapes, she tenses, pitches, grabs my hair, wraps her legs around me until I think I’m going to smother. We are one creature then, one blood. I feel what she feels.

Her eyes are soft afterwards. If every worker in America had my attitude, she says, this nation would be great once more. She is such a patriot, she thinks always of her country. And she promotes me then. “ I know what we can tell people,” she smiles, so much love for me in her, “ Instead of calling you a ’free agent’, we can say you’re a subcontractor. A sub!” And she laughs like champagne glasses clinking.

All that was long ago. Now I am a citizen and married to a fine man and happy. As Secretary of Labor she could have helped so many the way she helped me. I am so sad that it was because of her kindness to me that she was forced to bow out. I hope that nice religious man, Mr. Ashcroft, does better. The lead-paint Interior lady, too.

RUNNING UP HILL

When Hillary Clinton launched her official campaign for the New York State Senate, right away I got a buzz. I feel close to her because, like me, she hates to cook (except for omelettes), and also because I suspect that my husband Max, like hers, has not been 100.1% honest about his extracurricular sex life.

But once I’ve pried myself away from the thrashing of the Nasdaq to concentrate on some thrashing of my own, I discover that fantasizing about Hillary is kind of like workfare: a lot of effort in return for very little compensation.

Maybe it’s a question of priorities: I feel that Hill will let all her old baggage — Bill, Whitewater, that health care mess — keep her from a here-and-now romance with me. But I, Kitty, deserve better from an elected official. I want someone who can lead me forward — away from past pain and Max’s Belgian patroness-tramp who I am not letting myself even think about — towards adoration, ecstasy, passion, hope.

If Hillary could only project the languid, seductive power of, say, Chloë Sevigny I’d have no trouble getting off. The light would bounce off the blue of her irises into my eyes and I’d think I was in some cerulean grotto off St. Tropez where no factories get relocated, no innocent immigrants get gunned down by police and nobody’s husband gets seduced by a pretentious opportunist with a big checkbook and a bad French accent. If Hillary looked at me with Chloë’s heavy-lidded, fire-banked dreaminess instead of her I’m-only-pretending-to-listen look, I’d follow her anywhere, even to Albany.

I tell Hillary, “ If you want to win this election, pretend I’m New York and try to seduce me. Forget what you’ve been through. Just act like Chloë Sevigny.” I loved her in Boys Don’t Cry — Chloë played a character who is so totally romantic that no matter how she gets lied-to by her lover (who’s a girl, kind of, pretending to be a guy), her desire for emotional contact makes her seem glamorous, not pathetic.

Once I show Hilly the poll numbers on her current attitude, Hillary obediently follows my instructions and adopts instead a sulky, lust-saturated gaze. She caresses my face with it and I hold her close to my heart. When our eyes lock and interpenetrate, I can believe that even if the only jobs I have to offer are in prisons, gravel pits and garbage dumps, the most beautiful of women would want to stay in my arms instead of moving west.

When she starts to talk about education policy — vouchers, equality, blah, blah — I thrust my breast into her mouth to shut her up. You want education? I’ll give you an education, I whisper.

Then I slide my tongue over her nipple and blow on it to make it cold and suck it gently when it stands up. I put my hands around her waist and squeeze. Her face softens like a landscape rescued from developers and she goes all Chloë again.

Then, once she’s convincingly receptive, I send her on a real live listening tour of my entire body from Canada to Long Island. She kisses my navel and I say, “ Seneca Falls, the birthplace of modern feminism,” and my slit, we agree, is the Erie Canal, historic gateway to the Heartland. Full of speechless ingenue awe, she explores my darkly beautiful Catskills and my still-pristine reservoirs with her pliant, hopeful fingers.

In return, I kiss her plump ankles; I wrap my arms around her earthy hips and press my mouth to her cunt. Speaking to it in a thousand tri-state accents, I guide her to victory. I murmur into her deepest crevice all of my state’s great secrets — how half of New York City believes graffiti is art and half of Hancock believes the world was created in seven days and half of Troy believes it’s a city.

“ Why,” she laughs, “ It’s just like Arkansas!”

“ Shhh! Don’t tell!“ I smile. As I stroke her and suck her until the Hillary who’s naked and alive obliterates the Hillary who’s pre-programmed by corporate professionals, I start to really care about her, and I don’t really notice if she is a woman or just a woman pretending to be a “ woman” or a lawyer or a starlet in a HBO chick flick with Ellen DeGeneres and Sharon Stone. When she comes, she shouts “ Fuck Giuliani!”

It’s a whole new Hillary.

But I, alas, am still mostly me. Fun as it was with Hill, I’m madder at Max than I want him to know. If he wants me tonight I’ll have to pretend he’s Jude Law again.

LIKE CANDY FOR MARY

I don’t realize quite how much I care about Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche as a couple until I hear that they’re quits. “ We are grateful for the three-and-a-half years we had together,” they told the tabs.

Only a thousand days, Anne? I feel cheated. They were supposed to have kids, the way Ellen did in that HBO special Anne directed. I was looking forward to prime time debates about whether celebrity lesbians can ever raise a “ normal” child — the way Godfearing Christian parents can somehow produce a Pee Wee Herman or a Richard Hatch.

To replace what I’ve lost, I decide to assemble the perfect lesbian couple. My fantasy pair is Candace Gingrich — Newt’s gay half-sister — and Mary Cheney, daughter to veep nominee Dick. Candy and Mary have so much in common, I can’t imagine they won’t instantly bond for life. First off, both did promotional work in the gay community — Candace for gay rights and Mary for Coors beer. Second, they’re both sportspersons. Candy does rugby, while Mary’s a fly-fishing and ice hockey whiz. Lastly, they’re both witty dressers. I adored the labia-colored suit Candy wore to Newt’s most recent wedding, and I practically drooled over the nipple-tinted sweater Mary wore for the Republican convention (where she appeared sans Life Partner smiling and waving beside a hubby-flaunting sister). Their official wardrobes confirmed my life-long suspicion that when the going gets tough, the tough wear pink.

But they no sooner take possession of my mind when the differences between them start to tell. Candace rushes to embrace Mary who, feeling invaded, stiffens, before delivering a professionally friendly hug that strikes Candy as bogus. They each look at me as if to say, “ She’s a bit of an asshole,” before opening their arms to include me in their club even though I’m only bi, because I, too, was the sexually censored child of a puritanical male, and lived to brag about it.
In close, Mary’s teeth are as white as the Republican Party, and her eyes as bright as fishing lures. She smells like fresh air and family money with a soup?on of girls’ locker rooms. Candy has that political wedding smell still on her — lipstick, vanilla icing, cigars. The mix makes me so delirious I don’t care whether they like each other or not.

And they don’t. “ Did you read my book?,” Candy asks Mary. “ I have so little time to read . . . ” Mary blows her off with that faux regret that corporate players use to mask utter contempt.

“ Anybody, um, have a sexual preference — two-on-one or daisy-chain?” ventures Candy flowerchildishly, hoping against hope that we’re all in this life together.

“ I like equipment sports,” declares Mary as she whips a strapping strap-on from her Gucci satchel.

Candy’s eyes widen as if she’s never seen anything so unnatural and twisted, and my eyes widen as if I’ve never seen a bigger dick. It suddenly strikes me that the only thing these two dykes have in common is that I’m attracted to both of them.

“ Leave the sweater on!” I beg Mary as I fall to my knees between Candy’s legs, where I re-enact with my tongue her journey from the most obscure edge of American politics into the clitoral bulls-eye of the fifteen-minute spotlight.

Mary’s baton, on the other hand, is so like Dick Cheney &@8212; so firm and inflexible, I think I’m going to explode with gratitude.

After I get Candy to come (she’s a shouter), I flip over and pull the black scrunchie from Mary’s ponytail. She shakes out a bob so blonde it makes me feel completely deregulated. But Mary doesn’t let me off the line. She teases me out, like she’s fly-casting with her dad, flicking her rod like a mayfly, fooling my synapses until they surface and nibble hungrily at the bait, then, zam! The fight is on, tug and tumble. Her clit’s getting pounded. She grits her teeth. Over the ice our blades are slicing fronds of frost from the slick floor of the rink, our sticks clashing, our bodies slam into each other, push towards the blurred goal past staid old gentlemen and snooty ladies who’re slipping and tumbling on their asses like ninepins.

“ Fuck me, Jesus!” I cry, hardly an original remark, but at the moment heartfelt. Mary’s exclamations are wild and mournful, the song of life in the throat of abomination, as she dissolves into me, as globally warmed as a Republican icecap.

Later, Mary promises that if we inform anyone what we’ve done, we will regret it. “ And I’m not asking you,” she smiles, “ I’m telling you.”

Candace’s smile freezes, as in: “ These corporate imperialists crush anything that gets in their selfish way.”

“ I know how you feel about privacy,” she says.

Mary shoots me a look that says, “ Like hell she does, the liberal slacker slut.”

Me, I want to choke them both for caring about anything other than how adorable I am when I’m post-coital. But we all do manage to agree on one thing: We do greatly value the three-and-a-half hours we spent together.

Material on this page © Maggie Cutler all rights reserved. Illustration by Ward Sutton for HBO

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