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THE OFFAL OFFICE A Tale of Two Lovers
By G.W. Bush
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| MY FELLOW AMERICANS: recently I came out in favor of a constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriages. Contrary to popular belief, however, this decision was not based on any sort of hatred for people with non-traditional sexual orientations, nor did it have anything to do with the affluent religious and conservative groups which otherwise dictate my policies. The simple fact is: gay marriage won’t work. Just ask my first husband, Tony. I met Tony during the summer before my senior year at Yale. I had never had a homosexual experience up until that point, and I wasn’t looking for one, but Tony was just so, well, cool that I spent a lot of time with him on our family yacht. We played frisbee, fished, drank beer, wrestled in the sand, and otherwise had a great old time. One day he gave me this ring he found, and it was a really cool ring, and I wore it everywhere, until Jeb took me aside and explained that Tony was “gay.” Now, I don’t know about you, but no one in the Bush family would explain to me what “gay” really meant, how it was done, or how you got out of it. Tony would come in my cabin with just a towel on and I would take one look at the blonde hairs on his chest glinting in the bulb-light and I would pass out. When the summer ended, Tony gave me this multi-colored bandana thing that smelled like dandelions mixed with licorice, and I put it on and he told me to come out to the “Bay Area” so I could get away from all these “squares” and “join the revolution.” I just blinked and gripped my mother’s hand tight as Tony climbed inside his European van thingy and puttered away into the stupid sunset. When I was packing for school the next day, Neil and Jeb sat me down and told me why I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone about Tony. “It’s not because he’s gay,” they said, “honest.” “Then why?” I asked, my eyes feeling moist and a bit salty. “It’s because he went to Harvard.” And I understood. I didn’t get moist or salty for another man until the 1980s, when the Reagan revolution was in full swing and every college dude I knew was making lots of money and talking a lot about VCRs and Linda Ronstandt and something called “Atari.” I was down there in Texas poking sticks in armadillos and getting so jealous about the whole “New York thing” that I decided that the whole Reagan revolution was for stupid jerks and I just wanted a baseball team and some candy. And then I met Rob. Rob was actually a lot like Tony: he was always saying how the government wasn’t doing stuff very well and how he wanted to fight something called ”the system” and smash something else called “the patriarchy.” He also wore these like kick-ass leather jackets with crazy combinations of words that said “Bad Brains” and “Minor Threat” and “G.G. Allin Ate My Balls” and cut his hair to look like Mr. T hair. Me and ol’ Rob would go to these bars in Dallas all the time to see these really loud rock-n-roll bands that couldn’t sing very well and would kick holes into doors and, you guessed it, talk a lot about fighting this “system.” I didn’t know it at the time, but when they said stuff like “George Bush can kiss my ass” and I thought they were just drunk, they were actually talking about my dad, who lived like in Virginia or somewhere and was always busy calling up Russian guys and telling them to stop making rocket ships that could hurt people. Weird. One day I was sitting on Rob’s couch with my Walkman on listening to Huey Lewis when he walked up to me, took the headphones off, and stuck his tongue into my mouth. I bit down on it really hard and he screamed really loud and he was bleeding all over the place, but then he started like hugging me and trying to figure out what kind of underwear I was wearing like one of those guys on the cheerleader team at Yale used to do. I asked Jeb on the phone the next day about what the heck was going on but he told me to “shut the fuck up” because Neil was in some sort of “S&L trouble” and it was making the whole family look bad and why didn’t I just hang out with my wife the librarian more at least she had tits. So I did, but for some weird reason I couldn’t stop thinking about the time Rob gave me his leather jacket when it was cold outside and my pants were all wet, and it made me draw little doodles of Rob kicking holes into walls in the margins of my governor’s stationary. Two years later, Rob called me up one day and told me to meet him at the gym. When I got to the gym this Reagan revolution guy with a Members-Only jacket, short hair, and Nike tennis shoes came up to me and told me he was Rob. I said “No, Robb doesn’t wear Preferred Stock cologne” but he said “shut up George, yuppie is the new punk” and he shoved me into this room with all these ladies in tights and puffy socks doing this weird kind of non-contact karate in front of a mirror with disco music blasting really loud. But it turns out it was Rob, but he didn’t want to “fight the system” anymore, which I always thought was cool, he just wanted to “make a lot of money so I can buy lots of cocaine and go to San Tropez and not have to worry.” And I thought this was really lame, but I didn’t say anything because then Rob brought out this white powdery stuff and told me to breathe it in real fast and then I felt exactly like I did that time on my parents’ boat when Tony came in with his towel on. Ok, so I was never actually married to Tony or Rob, but I imagine my brief flings are exactly what a gay marriage would be like. And it sucks. |
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| G.W. Bush plays with toy cars and gets to be on TV a lot somewhere in a place called "Washington, D.C." This is the first of what we hope will be regular column by Mr. Bush for The Manifest. |
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