the Shackle Report

WHETHER IN THE GRAVE, RECENTLY RETIRED OR MERELY SOULESS, THESE POWERFUL SPECTERS RATTLED KITTY’S CHAINS

1. Dick Cheney — March 13,2001
2. Jesse Helms — August 1, 2000
3. Alan Greenspan — January 4, 2000

Heart Failure

I don’t usually have nightmares, but last night at this Greek restaurant Max ordered octopus, and later I dreamt that Vice-President Dick Cheney was one. It was scary. He was no little hors d’oeuvre on a plate. He was a huge — like, giant — writhing squid thing full of suction cups, only with a Dick Cheney face. I dreamt that he was swimming in oil — not olive oil, but the Kuwaiti kind that spurts up out of the ground and catches fire.

Then, even weirder, after I wake up, this Republican guy, Scott Reed, on CNN’s “Live at Daybreak,” actually says out loud that Cheney is “almost like an octopus” because “he’s got his arms into every part of government”! I mean: Yikes. Never before has CNN channeled my unconscious. By noon I’m thinking: “Maybe Scott Reed and I . . . ” but then I realize that it’s those tentacles of Dick’s that are making my urge surge.

When Mr. Cheney first walks into my daydream, however, I have some trouble responding to him erotically. Partly because he’s staring at the gas meter instead of at me. I decide that he’s probably pumping himself up with pride because Bush asked him to oversee energy policy, and I figure I’d better let him, because those anticoagulants he takes for his bad heart are the dead opposite of Viagra, and he probably hasn’t had sex since his thirties.

To take the edge off his famous gravitas, I plant a big, lipstick-y kiss on his pate. I muss up a few wisps of his hair.

“I want you to drill my pristine wilderness, Dick,” I whisper into his ear. “Run pipe though my Gulf.”

When he smiles his thin smile, I hiss, “Violate my sanctions, Dickie-Boy” indicating that I know what he did last summer when he was still CEO of Halliburton and working through subsidiaries to get around sanctions against dealing with Iraq. He responds by biting my breast, and I have to coo words like “integrity,” “character” and “expertise” to make him stop.

As he comes up for air, he leaves two big smears of orange pancake makeup in my cleavage. Beneath its ruddy mask, Dick’s face is shagreen, the color unfashionable people call “shark.”

I gasp with remorse. Here I’ve been toying with the man, and any minute he could just up and perish, like George magazine.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Cheney,” I blubber. “I shouldn’t be trying to seduce you like this.”

But my dear Vice-President doesn’t want me to suffer on his account.

“First of all, Kitty,” he says patiently, “I’m refusing to die until I get that death tax repealed.”

I know I shouldn’t, but I feel reassured by this.

“Secondly,” he continues, “I really have no heart problem.”

“But you must!” I cry, unbuckling his pants. “Why else would CNN pundits ascribe your hospital visits to vague ‘chest pains,’ ‘episodes’ and ‘discomfort’ if they’re not covering up some massive coronary meltdown?”

“Well . . . ” he hesitates. I use the pause to feel around for the scar on his leg where, according to Arianna Huffington, the catheter went in for his balloon angioplasty — but there’s nothing there.

“It’s really classified . . . ” he stalls.

I beg him to confide in me by clasping his barrel chest and laying my pretty head on it. It’s a gesture that usually wins over the toughest of father figures, and Dick’s no exception. He has always secretly wanted a mostly heterosexual daughter.

“The bald truth is, Kitty,” he confesses, calm as a clam, “I do not have a heart at all.”

“But your special diet.” I burble, “The one The New York Times said you referred to twice as . . . ”

“My ‘food supply.’ Yes. That dissociated quasi-human diction was a nice touch. The hide-in-plain-sight gambit.”

In the ensuing moment of silence I listen for the coronary thump I associate with a living man, but I hear only the smooth rush of fossil fuel gushing through a pipeline.

“Why all the disinformation?” I ask nervously.

He explains how the non-existence of his heart might thwart the administration’s efforts to appear compassionate.

By this time I’ve also discovered that he lacks certain other human attributes as well.

“My daughters were sired by Michael Huffington, when he was still in the closet,” he sighs, as if yearning to come out of his own.

“What . .  What are you . . . ?” I stutter, knowing and dreading the answer.

With a sudden pop, Dick bursts from his vinyl carapace and I’m surrounded.Cool, motile, aquatic flesh strokes my body, buoys me up, slaps and slicks my coral crevices. It’s as CNN says — he’s “got his arms into every part” of me — Senate to Pentagon. And what supple, subtle, experienced arms! I’m encircled, overwhelmed with his unchecked
power. As his tentacles contract, suction cups pull from me cries of ecstatic submission.

Suddenly, I understand how stupid it is to be human. How limited. I laugh with him as his dark ink swirls.

The Great Helmsman

When things get dicey between me and my husband, as they have a little lately, my thoughts turn to Jesse Helms. Apart from all that homo-gyno-negro-phobia of his, I think he’s sweet, a perfect companion when you’re feeling guilty about having a hyperactive fantasy life in which your husband plays a lesser role than he’d like. To me, Jesse is the avuncular molester every girl dreams about, a personage heartless as sex itself and as courtly as you once hoped it would be.

I once asked my friend Mandy, a performance artist who impersonates a used tampon, how she imagines Jesse’s helm. She hates Helms — if he was going to make someone famous by denouncing that person’s work, why couldn’t he have at least picked her? “I imagine it resembles Karen Finley,” she snipes. “Droopy, abject, smeared with something sticky.”

But I myself imagine it as a pillar of society, one of the fluted columns that ring the portico of the Jesse Helms Center in Wingate, N.C. As I lie dying on my couch, all tropical with sweat (I’m skimping on air-conditioning to help the planet and because I took a pounding in tech stocks), before me stands Jesse “The Jackhammer” Helms, in red tie and blue blazer, welcoming me graciously. He says things like “Y’all” and “Come on in,” his voice all country honey.

Inside his eponymous temple (lavishly subsidized by tobacco lobbies) we are surrounded by photos of the man whose obstructionist stance earned him the moniker “Senator No.” In the pictures, he is palm-to-palm with people like Pinochet and Spiro Agnew.

Slowly, with a gentlemanly nod, Jesse turns to appraise me. At seventy-nine, he has the face of a cherub and eyes that ex-NEA chief Jane Alexander describes as “sharp as black buttons on a teddy bear.” I can see why Madeleine Albright gave him that “Somebody in the State Department Loves Me” T-shirt. For a Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, he’s cute.

Knowing that he thinks about bodily fluids all the time, and that what he thinks is that they are debasing and dirty, the juices of my peach rush forth to drown his loathing. Where, beyond the walls of Soon-Yi’s bedroom, could I ever find a man as ripe with the guilt and dread of desire? Prurience inspires in him elaborate acts of spiritual foreplay. The single rose, the julep, the sly compliments, the second and third juleps, a hundred charming jokes and endearments before the pounce and roll in the memorabilia. Penance heaven.

He turns off all the lights, does old Jess. The photos and citations vanish. It’s dark as a moonless African night now. We’re in some furtive hotel in the next county where no one respectable can find us, eyes shut tight so that he can’t see how lithe I am, how like an angel, a boy, a demon, and I can’t see how cruel time can be to a man’s midriff, his wattle, his lance.

To reconcile himself to the taste for pleasure that God has so devilishly bestowed upon our species, Jesse has mastered the missionary position, the sexual equivalent of kneeling in prayer. And his faith has the force of a rebel yell. He’s up for whatever angling or lifting of hips it takes to make his holy water gush miraculously — prostate cancer, quadruple bypass and knee replacements be damned!

Wheezing aside, the harmony of lust with shame intermingling in his every breath takes me back to an afternoon I spent in a church with my daddy, the harmonium moaning in mortal ecstasy up to the belfry and the belfry bong-bonging in eternally stern reply, a song whose chords, like desires, by blending, never end.

“Jesse,” I whisper, “I love my husband, but you are divine,” at which utterance we both turn into rivers of butter like the evil tigers in Little Black Sambo, which I suspect was his favorite book as a child.

Afterwards, we share an incredibly tasty, nicotine-boosted cigarette — the kind they smoked without a second thought in the Old Carolinas when cotton wagons clattered through town, only the rich had electric and everybody was something leapt wild out of Faulkner: ancient, mad and deadly to the bone.

“I’m sorry if I seem a bit perverse,” I tell him, to be polite. “But I must thank you for making art matter again.”

“I just want you to remember, Kitty: Perversity has its rightful place,” he drawls, his eyes glittering in the dark, “but that place is not in any muse-ee-um. That place is in Congress.”

Kitty Gets Fed

I am determined to start off the Year 2000 with a sense of youth and freshness, but all this talk of the future has made me jumpy. When I try to access an image of Leonardo DiCaprio, instead of his smooth, warm, pink penis I keep fixating on the Titanic sinking in icy seas — with all of my Internet stocks aboard.

I realize then that a girl who is changing millennia can’t get off on just another pretty face. She wants a person with staying power, someone who can survive any administration, weather any storm, a man who can quell a panic with a whisper, a man she can adore like a god. She wants Alan Greenspan, 73, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank!

We start early in the evening because Alan has to wake up before dawn to control inflation and monitor foreign markets while he soaks in his bath. At his New York
apartment I sip some very smooth Burgundy. Its vintage reminds Alan of his jazz band days back in the ’40s when he blew sax and sometimes clarinet, taking only twenty-minute breaks between sets and playing until dawn. “Past successes are not to be taken as a guarantee of future performance,” he adds, charmingly. But my hopes are up.

Rather than jump right into bed the way you would with a rock star or a president, Alan and I chat about economic indicators first. Eventually, just by touching my back, he lets me know that he wants me to press my public offering against his thigh. But I don’t — not yet. It is best to play it cool with the man who warned us all against “irrational exuberance.”

Controlling one’s exuberance while undressing the most powerful man in America is tremendously exciting, like having sex in a room next door to a parent or a lonely single girlfriend in a summer share. My heart is pounding as I push off his tasseled loafers with my toes. Slowly unbuttoning his shirt, I spot his monogram, “AG.” No middle initial — it’s so glaringly unpretentious I could shout. But I mustn’t!

My self-regulation pays off. He touches me again, this time exactly where and how I want him to. I can feel the power of his famous tennis serve pulsing through his arm, but the way his hand tweaks the flow of my currency is so subtle, so responsive yet controlled, I never have to say, “A little to the right, Alan, higher, harder.” He knows. Whatever
this guy studied under Ayn Rand, it wasn’t her fantasy of being overwhelmed by masculine force. Some measured pressure here, there, exactly so, and my market expands and fluctuates, open, free.

The dim light of his bedroom hides slack skin and liver spots. The numerous corrugations on his brow appear magical, like the lightning-bolt scar on Harry Potter’s forehead — traces of battles he survived. And as we, in a leisurely and civilized manner, rise and fall, syncopated as the Dow, all the dragons he has slain snake sinuously through me, stirring up little orgasms with their coils. The crash of ’87 and how he persuaded big investors to hang in — who could fail to respond! And the S&L scandal, how none of the mud flung at his client, Charles Keating, ever splattered him — how could it when his moves are sooo smooth? How he contained the Asian contagion when Thailand crashed — when you think you’re going to explode he softens your landing! The way he bailed out that hedge fund and Mexico at taxpayer expense — spoil me like that, and I’ll follow you anywhere!

And every time I think he’s collapsed, tanked, and it’s all over, he’s up again. Warm and ready! Over and over, until we’ve reached a new paradigm. Our consuming desires and the power of our collective imagination are more real than goods, matter, even profits now. Marx’s materialism is history; we’ve entered an age of pure faith; the Nasdaq has hit 4,000 and those who believe are rewarded. O glimmering bliss!

Then, goinnng! As my post-orgasmic bubble bursts I suddenly remember: most of his money is in blue chips and cash! The new paradigm’s devotional circle does not, apparently, include Mr. A-no-middle-initial-G himself. That bet-hedging faker.

Have I just slept with the Wizard of Oz? The Antichrist, like my dad believes, or as Mom would have it, the Pied Piper? Only the new year will tell.

But for now I’m awash in shame. Because how could I, Kitty Lyons, even imagine having sex with Alan Greenspan without asking whether or not he planned to raise interest rates in February?

Material on this page © Maggie Cutler all rights reserved.

THE LAW

1. John Ashcoft — January 30,2001
2. Antonin Scalia — April 11,2000
3. Clarence Thomas — April 24, 2001

Kiss My Ashcroft

Women love a man who loves life. Maybe that explains why Dubya’s choice for Attorney General, John Ashcroft — who loves life even when that life is teenier than a Tic Tac — has gotten under my skin.

My dear husband has trudged off with his Digicam to the morgue (he is working on a documentary about how extreme sports kill young men, and it has made him so solemn he’s refusing to laugh even when I make my cross-eyed fish face). I take to the damn sofa, from whence I summon the controversial Mr. A. My objective is to determine whether I should
join his Senate colleagues in rubber-stamping his appointment over the objections of people like me.

John’s from Missouri, “The Show Me State,” so, to visibly demonstrate my friendliness, I consider greeting him in one of those “shoot Abe Lincoln” T-shirts that his favorite magazine, Southern Partisan, promotes, but since that’s what Oklahoma bomber Tim McVeigh was wearing when he was arrested, it feels way too last week. Besides, I have a hunch that, like many homophobes, John has a sweet spot for crinolines. So I greet him wearing nothing but a hoop skirt and an old curtain, like that greatest of southern partisans, Scarlett O’Hara. .

John himself is wearing one of his fat, pendulous neckties. Not, thank God, the baby-blue one that looks like a dead man’s leg, but a patterned mega-wedge of cheesy yellow that’s so anxiety-provoking it could sell insurance all by itself. I persuade him to let me use it as
a sash, but instead of tying it around my own waist, I flip it around his stolid hips and draw him towards me.

Since he doesn’t believe in drinking, dancing or extramarital sex play, I know he’s going to resist, but I’m touched by how gently he goes about it. As I fondle his long, Buddha-like earlobes, his hands, always slightly cupped as if dunking a child into a pond, lightly push mine
away. And he croons me a new gospel song he’s written to the awkward tune of his best known composition, “Be Still and Know.” This one’s a love ballad called “Your Womb Is Mine.” .

Putting his lips to my ear he whispers about how he wants to teach me to sublimate all of my erotic impulses into useful social activities, like giving alms to campaign contributors or putting blacks on chain gangs for taking drugs that middle-class white people have replaced with Prozac.

I know that most people’s “no” means no, but John’s “no” isn’t like the others’. Although he swears that he’s prepared to rigorously enforce laws like Roe v.Wade that he morally equates with the Holocaust, I just don’t believe that he’s that untrue to his principles. So when I learn that he thinks a woman should have to give birth after being raped by her Dad and all
her uncles, realize that when John says he’s “pro-life” it isn’t that he shares my husband’s anguish about defective bungee-jumping cables. No. When John says he’s “pro-life” he means, “I want to plant my teeming seed in your fertile loins,” period.

The question is: how to get such a skilled sublimator to admit to himself that he wants me. Disguise myself as a virgin? Forge orders to have sex with me and sign them “Jefferson Davis?” And then I get an inspiration: Oil! And not olive oil or the kind they’ve got in Alaska, but Crisco. Because, while Crisco may not be the sacred oil of the Bible, it is the sacred oil of the Bible Belt.

“John,” I lie, “I’ll stop trying to seduce you if you’ll let me anoint you Attorney General.” When he bites, I get out a big bottle of Crisco oil, the kind his father used when trying to replicate some biblical initiation rites after one of John’s successful electoral campaigns. I
explain to him that a dab or two won’t do the trick: he’s got to strip and slather.

Once I get him greased up, the rest of my lubricious project goes quite smoothly. I even get him to laugh by pointing to the tent he’s making in his pants and proposing that we hold a revival meeting under it.

Before long we’re rolling our eyes, flopping about and speaking in tongues, saying, “Yalla-wah ca-ca dadda-ro-foonie!” and “Pee-pee-go-uppa-ze-la-la!” like a couple of those holy-roly folks that the Fox News Channel keeps calling “conservatives.”

After his second coming, I tease him: “Uh oh! Our precious fertilized egg! It has failed to implant in the wall of God’s uterus! I can’t wait ’til I get to heaven and meet it on the other side,” etc.

John looks wounded. “You’re making fun of my religion,” he rebukes me in his flat, Midwestern twang.

“Yes, John,” I smile. “Get used to it.”

Late, late that night, I ask John the decisive question: if he and I slipped up and had actually managed to create a politically embarrassing love child, would he steal from his first family to
support it, like Reverend Jesse Jackson has been doing, or would he totally ignore me, like my husband has been doing? But I fall asleep before he comes up with a satisfactory answer.

Courting Scalia

The U.S. Supreme Court just decided that lawmakers in Erie, Pennsylvania have a constitutional right to make nude dancers wear pasties! How could they? This news deflates me totally because I learn it just as NASDAQ undergoes a correction, nearly taking me down with it.

Craving distraction, I end up in some chat room, pretending to be a topless dancer named Kittenesca who’s pissed about the decision because men don’t tip as much for pasties and a girl needs every cent she can get. To my amazement I get a response from “Nino,” which I happen to know is what his friends call Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court’s wittiest, most desirable political reactionary. His message? If I prove to him that my nude nipples are a true form of self-expression as conceived by the Founding Fathers — exposing nuances that tassled ones can’t convey — he will consider reversing his position.

“I, Kittenesca, would be delighted to perform for your Supremeness,” I find myself answering. “Can I assume you will you be wearing your robes?”

“Ignorant slut, I would not be a Supreme Court Justice without them,” Nino replies. “And, BTW, First Amendment protection of the G-string is at issue as well.”

At this moment I feel like my own portfolio: my values are leaping and falling all over the place. Having sex with the powerful is a dance I’ve always performed for myself alone. Except for that one time when I had Max pretend to be a skirt-chasing, money-mad Donald Trump (which I’m afraid gave him Ideas), my fantasies have not been under anyone’s control but
my own.

“Okay,” I bite, “I’m going to start expressing myself freely, slowly and with my red dress on. It has a plunging back, like an Oscar winner’s, and I look like Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted, only I’m wearing black mascara, like her brother, to indicate that I have a dark secret.”

Nino admits to having, “on behalf of the state, a compelling interest in the above.”

I tell him I’m going to dance to Malcom McLaren’s R&B version of “Carmen,” followed by his “Madame Butterfly,” because I once read that the justice is an opera fan — Scalia no doubt loves the sound of a passionate, sinful woman swooning herself to death.

Then I explain to him that I’m standing over his ample, lap, shimmying my shoulders in his meaty, well-groomed face. He asks what I’m expressing.

“The desire to be passionately and sinfully desired by an Italian-American who rose from Queens to Harvard Law and from there to the very top,” I explain. “Plus, a belief that animal appetites, properly channeled, degrade neither sex, and that lust has been known to
emotionally equalize people of different social classes.”

“I’m responding to your testimony,” says cyber-Nino, “in my notoriously originalist and hypothetical manner, as follows: If you had an organ that resembled a pen and it suddenly turned into a cucumber, would Alexander Hamilton have held you legally responsible for its behavior, and would you not be constitutionally justified in feeling confused and degraded if some trollop’s naked breast had the power to produce the aforementioned transmogrification entirely against your well-educated will?”

“Not if my cucumberic transformation was produced by a trollop as divinely beautiful as Kittenesca,” I assure him, adding that now my dress has slithered off my body like water and I’m wearing a G-string made of fluffy feathers that I am plucking out one by one as I rotate
and undulate slowly before him while wetting my lips with my pointy little tongue.

“Expressing?” he reminds me, sticking to the juridical point.

“I’m expressing the wooziness inside me,” I explain, “the fear that certain men feel just before the sleaziness of shame, concealment and commerce give way to the terrifying beauty of naked being. And I am expressing that I am hot as a bottle rocket.”

“Oh, Kitten!” types my Nino, “I have just handed down my decision. Clearly there is nothing more a person can express through dance than what you have managed to communicate, feathered pasties and all! Anything more would cause me to commit the sort of unspecified crimes that the state must trample every right to prevent.”

“Wait!” I beg, distressed that he has reached his verdict before I have completed my closing argument. “Please Nino — it’s only by revealing myself fully as a physical object that I can properly imply the utter privacy and mystery of my true spirit!”

But Nino won’t hear my case. “Because I am sworn to uphold the proposition that the rigor of constitutional law is more important than any of the silly, subjective, inconsistent people it governs,” he replies, “I must leave you high and dry. But the next time we meet, most fabulous Kittenesca, I intend to be an entirely different man.”

Before running off to my sofa to finish the dirty job that this mystery person started, I must admit I bookmarked the page.

Court and Spark

I catch my husband fibbing about how late he stayed at the editing room, and it makes me nostalgic for some real honest-to-goodness perjury. Curling up on my red velvet couch, I imagine that I’ve wandered behind the red velvet curtain, the one Supreme Court justices
emerge from to throw elections. I push open a massive door and who should I find but Clarence Thomas, deep in a fantasy about what Florida’s voters intended.

His back is to me. I see his plump hand on the chair’s arm, and I’m exciting myself by imagining it running up my thigh when he spins around. To my amazement, he is dressed as a nun.

I mean, I’m really amazed, because this is supposed to be my sex fantasy. I had planned an Anita Hill scenario — Coke can, Long Dong video, all building to the perjury-esque scene in which he swears to the Senate Confirmation Committee that he has never discussed Roe v. Wade with anyone ever. But now that I see Clarence in his wimple, I realize that I’m going to have to improvise.

“Why a nun?” I ask edgily. He’s been doing so much tongue-holding lately, I figure maybe he went and joined a silent order.

But today he’s feeling chatty. After his dirt-poor parents dumped him, he explains, the kindly sisters in Catholic school gave him the discipline he needed to escape squalor. He now has warm feelings about the brides of Christ.

Okay, I get it, C.T.: I vaguely remember that you once told a journalist that you and your wife “ride around together like a couple of nuns.” You like nuns. Love them. But what’s in this for little Kitty, I ask, besides an abortion ban and tort reform?

At the mention of abortion, Clarence starts muttering about “feminazis.” He tears off his wimple, robes and briefs and to my delight starts stomping the starch out of them. “O corpus delectable,” I growl, doffing my flimsy excuse for a dress.

At the sight of my irresistibleness, desire and dread have their way with Clarence. Rigid with ambivalence, he slips into me much as he slipped into the high court — on a slick of bad faith. “If this is judicial activism,” I whimper, “I’m all for it.” Then our thoughts break up like fifty states under Anti-Federalist attack. I shout that I hate men, the liars. And I want them all. He shouts that I’m a white angel, or one of those be-deviled black activists who only “bitch,
bitch, bitch, moan and whine and whine.”

It’s true that I’m moaning.

Later, he tries to cover himself: “I didn’t mean,” he explains, “that race politics are without merit; it’s just that neither Sharpton nor Jackson can get the president on the phone. But I can.”

Ah Clarence! Bare to the bone, you’re so like me: Doesn’t your heart, like mine, go wherever the power flows, and don’t you take what you need from the powerful, reality be damned? Sweaty and sated, I blush at the absolute truth of it: Clarence Thomas and I are sisters under the
skin.

Material on this page © Maggie Cutler all rights reserved.

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Click here to read Kitty’s new column: “Kitty Lyons Claws the Sofa”