the Shackle Report

Ms. Lyons Is a Bad Kitty, but the People Who Turn Her On Are a Lot Worse

1. Osama bin Laden — November 15, 2001
2. Marc Rich & Linda Rich — February 13, 2001
3. Pat Buchanan — November 10, 1999
4. Gary Condit & Chandra Levy — September 26, 2001

KILLER SEX

For Thanksgiving I’m here at Dad’s regressing grungily in what used to be my bedroom and is now my stepmother Deb’s museum of Christian kitsch. It is the very room in which I discovered, some eighteen years ago, that while most girls my age were masturbating to videos of Sid Vicious or David Bowie, I could only wank off on President Reagan pulling marines out of Beirut. Max, who has been increasingly skittish about my autoerotic proclivities, is off shooting pool in some dive that makes him feel single. When I go online to distract myself, CNN announces that Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted billionaire zealot, has been surrounded by hostile forces, and I can sort of relate.

I capture a MPEG of Osama in his ash-white turban, and my hand slips unbidden into my slacks. I find myself thinking without nearly enough irony that if he wasn’t a mass murderer and didn’t hate women and modern life and experimental sex and Buddhist art and Westerners — not to mention shaving — he would look awfully appealing. “With his gentle eyes, skeletal frame, long black beard and habitual Kalashnikov,” as Judith Miller wrote in the Times… my body knows many ways to finish that sentence, all of which, I fear, would horrify my husband.

In the next room, stepmother Deb is HEPA vacuuming her mail to eliminate anthrax spores so she can live to see that part of the Second Coming when God sends everyone but her and her friends to Hell. I realize that I must escape this soulless modern world immediately. I mean, why snort your fundamentalism diluted with Western democracy when you can shoot it pure and uncut in Kandahar?

Disguised as a woman, I sneak over the Afghan border. There, passing as just another starving refugee in a burqa, I make my way to Al-Qaeda’s cave-du-jour where I find Osama in his pajamas, surrounded by gorgeous bodyguards.

In still shots he’s an all-purpose caricature of The Enemy: his hooked nose, thick sensual lips and goaty beard evoke Bush’s idea of pure evil, Halloween’s devil mask, the Nazi’s cartoon Jew. But, peeking shyly through the mesh of my veil, I see that when he’s in motion, there’s an elegance and softness to him.

Osama makes one of his famous hand gestures. His forearm moves in a slight arc. The wrist, like a diva drifting towards a divan, leads his long fingers, supple as silk, into a swoon. No wonder Condoleeza Rice banned his videos: he has the hands of a saint, or at least a great gynecologist. At his signal, his bodyguards leave, and we’re alone.

“We don’t hate Islam,” I reassure him, taking a page from my president. (How can we, when we’re completely ignorant about it?) “Also, I think it was pathetic of South Park to suggest that you have a tiny dick and fuck camels,” I add, to let him know I would never stoop to facile stereotyping, even for a laugh.

“Get out of Israel,” he says, softly.

“Make me,” I dare him.

Suddenly he’s infiltrating my every border, and I’m pounding his rugged terrain without mercy. Am I scared? Of course. Sex with the enemy is the one sin they’ll burn you at the stake for, whether you’re in Kabul or at Comedy Central. But in the clinch with Osama I no longer care what the world thinks or whether those thugs from the Northern Alliance ever relinquish Kabul. Here, in my own private Afghanistan, I can’t lose at holy war. The second his little Muslim martyr explodes his way into heaven and glory and revenge everlasting my Judeo-Christian free-market swallows him up and spits him out as a widget.

Before I go, I plant a little bug in Osama’s beard so our special forces can smoke him out of his hole — and I can collect the $25 million reward. Chalk one up for Downtown Manhattan.

Max returns to find me sitting full-lotus as Deb’s edging tool bonks against the door of my retreat. Miraculously, when my husband sees bin Laden’s face stuck onto the body of an adonis on my laptop, he smiles with amusement instead of disapproval. Was it Deb’s negative example? The Taliban’s? Today he seems willing to enjoy my conflation of lust and power as warmheartedly as Bush does Putin’s.

So excited am I by his change of heart that when I fold into Max’s arms just then our bodies run together like those two chocolate turkeys that I mistakenly left on the radiator the night before. What follows, although too sticky and sweet to detail, is a genuine act of Thanksgiving. Which doesn’t stop me from wondering afterwards how I might someday get him to play Condi Rice.

RICH BASTARD

No sooner does my husband roll over into a post-orgasmic doze when I start wondering what it would be like with that zillionaire fugitive, Marc Rich, the one who ran off to Switzerland with $48 million in government money. Everybody — from New York’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani to House Speaker Tom DeLay — is furious at Clinton for pardoning Marc at the last minute, but the reason that I, Kitty, am attracted to him isn’t because I’m keen on tax evasion or embargo-breaking Iranian oil deals or whatever it is that Marc’s been doing over there in Zug. What gets me so interested in Mr. Richie Rich is his ex-wife, the five-hundred-times millionairess, New York celebrity-hugger, Denise.

The question for me isn’t “Did Denise’s generous campaign contributions and gifts to the Clinton war chest buy Marc’s pardon?” I mean: Duh! What intrigues me, though, is why a smart gal like Denise would compromise both herself and the Clintons just to snag a pardon for some felon who dumped her for a younger piece of lapcandy. All I can think of is that Marc-o the Shark-o must have been the most astounding, gut-wrenching, mind-bending fuck a girl has ever known. At least for her.

So, to maximize the experience, I imagine that I am Denise. Back in ’88, when she was still in her mid-forties, when her last eggs were screaming to get fertilized and being on the lam still felt glamorous. Back when she half-believed her husband innocent. Back before she wrote the songs that made the whole world (including Celine Dion and Aretha Franklin) sing. Back before Marc met that family-wrecking little rollatini, Gissela Rossi.

So here I am, Denise. Marc has just financed the Jamaican Olympic bobsled team, for which you’ve just got to love him. It’s three years after The Wall Street Journal described my beloved as “a beautifully sinister executive who could frame deals with the artistry of a pool shark.” It’s six years after he fled Giuliani’s flying monkeys (I think he’s right that Jews get indicted for tax fraud while gentiles get multibillion-dollar tax cuts).

We’ve left his make-shift five-bedroom mansion in Switzerland, the servants, the Picassos, for this little seaside estate in sunny Spain we’ve had to buy because they won’t let my husband even visit the Hamptons. Fernando brings the sangria — gracias, ‘Nando. Fernando returns my enormous smile. When he leaves I take off my top and the sun assures me that my ridiculous optimism is good. I hear the water.

Then, suddenly, a shadow falls over me. I look up into Marc’s hooded eyes. Anger, pain, avidity, larceny, lust, sexiness — I suddenly realize that all these things look alike, and maybe are. “Beautifully sinister,” he says, kissing me as if I was the last deal on earth. Half the songs I’ll eventually co-write well up in my throat, songs like You’re All I Know, I Would Walk Through Fire, In Over My Heart, Let’s Make It Last All Night, Your Love Is Everything, Love On and On and Poacher Man.

His rod is hard as platinum. His chest hair vicuna. He bites my neck like a gypsy testing a wedding ring stolen from a ravished bride. The waves that protect him from arrest beat on the shore and in my heart.

I take one ruby nipple between my lips and tug on it until he growls. My bandito. He smells like the money he’s getting from the U.S. Mint for all that copper and nickel and zinc he bought, God knows where. He touches me, tenderly, and when I open, sinks a thumb, another. “Goldfinger!” I gasp, making him laugh. The world is his, and I’m his world, spinning. Suddenly he’s behind me, pushing me into the warm sand. Now I’m a wave, breaking.

When he shoots his golden semen deep into my loins, like he was pumping Iraqi oil to Serbia, South Africa, Cuba, I feel the way the aluminum and tin markets might have felt — if they could feel — when he illegally cornered them . . . totally, utterly in his possession. And he is in mine. We are two waves — incoming ? outgoing — canceling each other out in a hiss of foam, a scurry of small birds.

Later I will love other outlaws, especially Billy C. But I will never love them the way I loved Marc, with nothing between his self and mine. I’m too me for that, now. Too sated with fame, money, charities, celebrity friends, family, all the small-R riches I made from all that humiliation and pain that big-”R” Rotter caused me. But in the end I got from him the one thing he had worth taking . . . The artistry of a pool shark. And, now I’ve got immunity, I’m sinking everybody’s balls big time. Watch me: I’m running the table.

GO, PAT, GO.

I’ve wanted Pat Buchanan ever since I saw him in a black cowboy hat, thumb erect and eyes gleaming with battle-fatigue. It was New Hampshire, 1996, the Rolling Thunder primary. He was dressed as a cowboy, something I find adorable in men over 12. I agree with Max, my husband, that Pat makes Attilla the Hun look like a cross between Gloria Steinem and Elie Weisel, but for me that only adds to his The Way We Were appeal. So, my lunch date having canceled, I take to my trusty couch ($800 cash in a sample sale) and summon him up.

We’re in Iowa, Pat and I, and Pat has been doing his favorite thing, which is taking a beating but staying in the ring, like Rocky in Rocky. I meet him in a waitress’ apartment above a steelworkers’ diner on the edge of Ames across from a Kum and Go convenience store, safe from the prying eyes of fundamentalists. It’s a scorcher and I’m in one of the waitress’ skirts — short, yellow, leg-friendly — pacing expectantly in my Easy Spirit sandals.

When he appears in the doorway, my heart sinks. Instead of his cowboy get-up or that red tie and dark suit he wears for journalists, he’s gone farmer. He’s sheathed in a stupid pair of overalls, his face scrubbed nearly stubble-free, his hair, normally wispy and touching, now greasing itself under some awful feed cap. To stay interested, I skip the hellos and concentrate on remembering that I’m in a small, hot room with a big, bellicose man who says things to his supporters like “Mount up and ride to the sound of guns!”

As decisively as I’d hoped, he throws his arm (so long!) around my waist and pulls me to him. As we kiss, I reach up and knock his cap to the floor. He tastes of tobacco, Tabasco and Maker’s Mark. His cheek is leathery but Kleig-light warm. He grunts, a half-growl. When I fumble with his suspenders, he tugs at my blouse, meaning that I’m to take it off while he strips down on his own. Sartorial sovereignty? Fair enough.

Shed of its campaign drag, his body is everything I’d hoped, battered yet pampered, vigorous with an aging overlay of padding. He lies back on the bed and glowers at me moodily with his abused-child eyes, uttering not one single word of encouragement.

Now what? How do you open up a man so fond of enclosure he cares more for babes in utero than born, who wants to contain the global flow of money and migrants within borders narrow and inviolable?

You use restraints, is my guess, so I throw the bedclothes over him and jump on top, pinning the sheets tightly around his groin with my knees. He swells against the printed lilacs of the Cannon queen, and I press my lips against him there and blow hot, wet air into the weave. He moans.

“Guns, thunder,” I prompt.

He gropes for me, delirious, and I move up along the ruin of him, and let him cup my breasts. He does it with the timidity of a man afraid of his own violence, and I couldn’t agree more. There are people you don’t want to know completely, and he’s one. But he’s so dark and furious you can’t but agree with George W: You want him in your war party.

When I peel down the sheet, his all-male constituency springs up, locked and loaded, a candidate bolting the GOP. I snug him inside me then, and I ride him oh so gently, oh so easily — a prairie trot to a place that has no boundaries, where I can’t play the market and he can’t rouse rabble, where I could be anyone — John Wayne or his sister Bay — clopping over ancestral sage, and he could be a black lady Marxist screaming for blood and fire, and, as we both turn into breaths of wild wind, I break over him like a wave on the shores of East Hampton and I whisper, “Jesus,” even though I’m one quarter Jewish on my born-again father’s side, and then, as a gift, I slap him, hard.

Without missing a beat (he’s been waiting for just this insult) he seizes my wrist, throws me over and pumps into me like a border guard gunning down a wetback, then comes with a curse, collapses. Perfect.

After an annoying minute trapped under a large, limp candidate, I tap him humorously on the shoulder. He rolls off. “Oh, it’s you, the cute little Wall Street parasite,” he smiles, an adversary again, and we part to chase our warring dreams.

DISORDERLY CONDIT

[Note: This was written before the recent terrorist attacks.]

As a fatherly hypocrite who preys on frizzy-haired young women and rides a Harley when he isn’t voting for prayer in schools, Congressman Gary Condit is sort of a parody version of my father and therefore perfect fantasy fodder for the solitary side of my libido. But he was so vile and queasy-making when interviewed by Connie Chung the other week that any attraction I might have ever felt towards him would normally have disappeared — suddenly and utterly without a trace — if it had not been for a weird twist of events.

It’s my husband, Max. He gets all hot to make a film about the brittlestar, this starfish he read about in the Science Times. Ophiocoma wendtii. Its entire exoskeleton consists of thousands of tiny crystals that act as lenses so the whole animal is one big compound eye, a voyeur’s wet dream. It also can’t have escaped Max’s notice that Dr. Joanna Aizenberg, the scientist who discovered the brittlestar’s unique crystal-lens array, looks like the young Bonnie Bedelia in Heart Like a Wheel. Which is all maybe why, in bed that night, I start to imagine that Max’s body can see mine all over and that to his critical vision every iota of my physiognomy appears inferior to Joanna’s.

Because I want to get this over with quickly, I am trying to fake my first orgasm. I squint my eyes and pull back the corners of my mouth; I blither with what I hope will never pass for ecstasy, but none of it
fools my brittlestar husband who shakes his all-seeing head knowingly. Suddenly I have this flash on how it feels to be Gary and his wife Carolyn, hostile little lenses turned on them from every angle, their
fall a stimulating distraction from a tumbling Dow. And even though on camera they look for all the world as though they killed and ate Jon Benet raw, I am moved to a certain tenderness towards them.

By the time Max shifts into a slow, sideways sliding action to give me another chance, I am imagining the Condits as a young couple of nineteen speeding through the streets of Tulsa in his dad’s Corvette just after she’d given birth to Chad, their firstborn. They’re only doing sixty-five but it feels fast. The car is yellow and there’s a hot wind in her blonde hair and he’s flying into the sun. Even after the cop tickets him for reckless driving, they still feel golden. Her body’s sore yet from the baby so she gives him a handjob and he can smell the street-dust on her, baked by the Oklahoma heat. Gary’s just bad enough for Carolyn, and she’s just the right amount of better-than-him for him.

Then, somewhere along the road, their good-girl/bad-boy deal goes metaphysical. They begin to turn each other on — and turn on each other, too — in ways beyond their comprehension. She’ll be raising money for some orphan when she’ll subliminally feel him poking his crutch into some pitching, moaning, big-haired woman clear across the country until her head starts to explode. Or he’ll be sitting with some babe at his favorite café, The Tryst, in D.C. and he’ll feel her delicacy wafting East over the plains like a nuclear test ban treaty, begging to be violated.

Then I come along, half his age and every bit as ambitious. I feel twisty about power like he does, playful, game. I know, for example, not to mess his hair, even though it’s blow-dried in a way that makes you want to ruffle it. I know to lick all the muscles that middle-aged body he works so hard to pump up. I’m hard to shock, easy to snow and he loves it. We do the usual hide-and-seek adultery stuff — the pretend-we’re-not-together two-step, the elevator trick where you get off on the floor marked “preacher’s son” and I get off on “Israeli sabra” — but although the breaking of commandments and flouting of parents’ mores excites us, we stop needing it. I ban the handcuffs. He
can just knot together a couple of neckties, because I’m already bound to him. He stops desecrating his wife’s goodness, because I let him desecrate mine. Looking into his eyes while we’re fucking, I’m touring the pit of hell because everything interesting and everything wrong about people is there. Desire and anguish, a ferocity of ambition that feels murderous. We reek, the two of us, of original sin. Fuck me, California Gary. Move that Mister Modesto, Blue-dog soon-to-be-redistricted-out-of-existence-Democrat butt of yours, every defect of which is precious in my all-encompassing gaze. Let me love you whole. Fly into my sun. Let me take you down  . . . where I’m going, too. And I promise I’ll never, ever tell. Oh, oh so
sadly ever, ever, ever.

And Max, who sees everything visible, doesn’t know that I just came for the
fall of Gary Condit instead of for the brilliant auteur of “Brittlestar.”

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