Henry the K joins the eternal, as does my shame. He’s not squiring Jill St. John nor even holding hands with Hillary, who proudly claimed him as a mentor.

My guilt by association resurfaces, decades after Henry and I hung out together.

It’s 1980. Here I am at F. Scott’s, a hip, upper-crust bar in Georgetown with an art deco motif. Looks like Reagan will win the White House. Winds of change are coming, particularly at über-liberal programs such as Action (Peace Corps, VISTA, etc…), where I’m in the legal office. 

Some occasion has brought my whole office, still wearing suits, to the bar for drinks. I’m with a girlfriend who makes her bread as a torch singer of Cole Porter and George Gershwin standards. She sings in a private nightclub called the Gaslight Club, where old-hand lobbyist types hang out. Rumors of deals cut during card games. The Gaslight’s Gay ’90s motif was legendary in the heyday of LBJ — dark rooms worlds from the see-me-now crowd of the brightly lit F. Scott’s.

I’m feeling no pain. Drinking rock ’em, sock ’em ice cream drinks, the sweet girlie kind that really sneak up on a man. Now I’m in the john, whistling a merry tune and thinking what a bright boy am I, ready to whiz in one of those marvelous marble stalls sticking out from the wall like angel wings, the urinal packed with ice like a weird snow cone.

As I unzip, a man slips into the stall to my right. Nobel Peace Prize winner Henry Kissinger. A spry 57.

Always loathed him. I had a lady pal whose good friend was the widow of a Chilean minister under Allende. The former minister, a foe of Pinochet and an opponent of foreign investment in Chile, was blown up while driving along Washington’s Embassy Row. My friend despises all things Kissinger, who helped usher in Pinochet’s dictatorship.

A great conundrum faces me. I have a chance to symbolically avenge the widow, and so many more, and thrill my friend. All I need to do is power-wash Kissinger’s shiny black left wing tip. With any luck, collateral damage to his left ankle. Easy to act very drunk, being very drunk, and make profound apologies about the accident.

A sudden wobbling of my knees. I know that, whether or not he believes me, Kissinger can get me good. Even if Reagan wasn’t coming to town. Knows people.

But the Peace Prize, what a travesty! Pinochet, murderous jerk. Cambodia. Nixon’s secret plan to end — prolong! — the Vietnam War. Bombing as a campaign strategy. Thumbs-up to massacres in East Timor and Bangladesh, civil wars in Africa, coups in Latin America.

And I didn’t know the half of it. The wink at Argentina’s disappeared. Undermining LBJ’s Vietnam peace talks – treason! Estimates of up to four million dead from his antics. Or more, consider just the fertile ground bombs plowed for Pol Pot. Kissinger lowered the bar for what our too-clever-by-half power players figure they can get away with, sowing seeds of chaos and shattered childhoods. His endorsing pre-emption and regime change in Iraq greased our Forever Wars. How many can claim a posthumous body count? I didn’t know all his somethings wicked coming our way. But I knew enough.

My thoughts race. Is revenge really a dish best served hot? How would the office react? Who cares, I can dine out for years on being the guy who was kicked out of F. Scott’s for pissing on Kissinger’s shoe.

I hold back. Realpolitik pressure builds like a fire hydrant. I so need to pee. I so want to pee on Kissinger’s shoe. I size up the trajectory, ready my aim …

And I stall out. My chilled gaze returns to the ice in my urinal. I hear Henry grunt and zip and he’s finished. With a glance my way and a nod, he steps back. I nod too, but in shame. Does he know how close he came? Does he ever even consider the possibility? Opportunity knocks. I hesitate. Opportunity moves on. I face my moment of truth — and clutch like a Jayhawk in the Final Four. Pissing on his grave wouldn’t be the same. Anyone can, under cover of darkness.

I lived haunted by this spectre, praying for opportunity’s redemptive knock. In cheeky mood, I sometimes sent a recollection of my Kissinger summit to sponsors of his public appearances, imagining Henry’s eyes scanning the crowd, him wary in the can. 

Now Kissinger no longer need heed my sporting notice: Fair warning, Henry. Wear your storm rubbers.

Skip Kaltenheuser is a lawyer & Traveling Boy writer in Washington, DC.

The post Henry, a remembrance… of the night I almost peed on Kissinger appeared first on Traveling Archive.

Raoul’s Two Cents: May 28, 2021

Out of This World

News flash! Aliens are real!

Yup!  Those nerds wearing aluminum foil hats have finally been vindicated. The presence of the elephant in the room of the US Defense Department has been officially recognized.  If you are not convinced that UFOs are real, you’re way behind in the news. This is one news story that all the media outlets seem to agree on. 60 Minutes had an interview with a pilot who claimed UFO sightings was an everyday occurrence for a year. That pilot is just one among many. And this has been going on for years. This is a pretty wild admission of the limitation of 21st century science.

Garie, a good friend of mine who heads a satelite operation in the Philippines told me that they get messages from the US military surveillance all the time. “I’m really impressed. If anything is going on in the earth atmosphere, they know about it. They tell when there are near misses like ICBMs (Intercontinental Balastic Missiles) or falling space debris.”  They know if something originates from Russia or China. So if the US Department of Defense say they do not know who these guys are … that doesn’t seem comforting at all.

Men in Black, here we come. We don’t know who you are, why you exist or why you expose yourself — I mean, what happened to your “cloak of invisibility?” Did you run out of “invisibility batteries?” Are you having fun at our expense? We know your technology can cause unimaginable destruction if you wanted to so we think you’re here to observe … at least for now. (Boy, I’d love to see your “selfies.” ) You can defy gravity and other physical laws. Why do you need to ride a vehicle in different models? — disk, round, triangular, silvery, greenish, quiet, loud, big, small, etc. there are many of you. Is one for cruising to pick up chicks — literally — as in “beam me up Scotty?” We’re even open to the possibility that you walk among us. (Spielberg, Elon … are you one of them? Well, for Zuckerberg … we’ve always known he is one of them.) Sometimes I look in our dog’s eyes and wonder if he is one of you.

What implications does the existence of UFOs have on Christianity? Could Jesus have been a UFO? Does God (a supreme being) really exist? If He does, is He the same God of Abraham? Is time travel possible? There’s a smorgasbord of uncomfortable possibilities. The rules of the game of life have suddenly changed. The rule book I followed didn’t say that our worlds would collide like this.

A quick internet research tells me that very few people in the church have dared speak about this authoritatively. (You can’t blame them for their ignorance.) But just because we can’t explain it … just because they are not explicitly mentioned in the Bible … it doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Most scholars believe that they are spiritual beings. And scripture tells us there is an ongoing spiritual battle. If you never believed in angels and demons, now is a good time to start.

So where should the Christian faith stand in all of this?  One of the more sensitive contemporary Christian songwriters, Sara Groves, shares my sentiments with her song “What do I know?” In her attempt to console an old widow whose husband had just passed away, Sara is at a loss for words because she has no answers for the woman’s misfortune. But what she does know is enough to strengthen her faith:

Well, I don’t know that there are harps in heaven,
Or the process for earning your wings.
And, I don’t know of bright lights at the ends of tunnels,
Or any of those things.

But I know to be absent from this body is to be present with the Lord,
and from what I know of him, that must be pretty good.
Oh, I know to be absent from this body is to be present with the Lord,
and from what I know of him, that must be very good.

Share your thoughts.  Have you seen them? Write me … especially if YOU are one of them.

TGIF people! Have a great Memorial day weekend.

Raoul

“Accept what is, let go of what was, and have faith in what will be.”
— Anonymous

Thanks to Peter Paul of South Pasadena, CA for this joke.

Original Art by Raoul Pascual

Video of the Week

Thanks to Don of Kelowna, B.C. Reagan should have been a stand up comedian.

Parting Shots

Thanks to Dean of Vancouver, B.C.

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