American Rhapsody Read Free Page B

man with a tin cup singing a Robert Johnson song. It was a young Billy Clinton watching the curvy, ripe-peach painted women taking their tricks into the Plaza or the Parkway or the Ina Hotel in Hot Springs.
    All three learned to play their instruments in proximity to that corrupt, exhilarating, and life-giving red neon glow. Jerry Lee had his piano, Elvis had his voice, and Billy Clinton had a silver tongue.
    It was easy to forget now, in the nineties, when we were parents or grandparents so busily reshaping our pasts to become role models for our children or our junior executives, that behind the idealism and the social commitment and the herbal experiments related to self-awareness, the sixties were about sex.
    Even the drugs were tied to it: grass made us ecstatically sensitive to the slightest flick of a dry-mouthed tongue. A little bit of coke on our willard or her labia was a marathon stuntlike sex act. Quaaludes tranced us into an endless stretch toward orgasm. The sixties were, in a world without the lethal dangers of AIDS, a sexual smorgasbord. No small talk, no courting, no foreplay, just “Do you wanna fuck?” Or, if you wanted to be a little Jane Austenish about it, “I’d really love to ball you.”
    I spent the years from 1971 to 1975 as a senior editor at
Rolling Stone
in San Francisco, recently arrived from the Midwest, and found myself dining at this pink smorgasbord quickly and heartily. Some of the women at
Rolling Stone
were going to Braless Day rallies, where they hurled girdles, bras, and panties into a “Freedom Trash Can.” All the
Rolling Stone
editors, all of us male, expressed fervent solidarity with the gesture.
    The women at
Rolling Stone
were young, nubile, attractive and liked the phrase “I really want to ball you.” And they
did
. Goodness knows, I did, too . . . with Deborah and Kathy and Shauna and Sunny and Robin and Leyla and Janet and Deborah again, realizing quickly that they were balling the other editors on alternate nights, that this was about nothing, really, but a little bit of exercise and lots of pleasure. It was about having fun. It was a combination of athletics and theatrics, intimate communal performance art, best exemplified by the staffer who took his girlfriend into the parking lot each noon while other staffers lazily watched from the windows upstairs as she fellated him. (We named the show “Clarabel and the Zit Queen.”) When Jann went out of town, some of us borrowed his office for our couplings, but he came back from one trip, enraged to find “coke and come” all over his desk, and started locking his door.
    As I watched Bill Clinton with Hillary and heard Gennifer’s account of how Bill wanted to have sex with her in a rest room while Hillary stood outside, a few feet away, I remembered that during those years at
Rolling Stone
, I was married . . . and so were many of the other editors. And after those office or parking lot or backseat or Van Ness Avenue motel couplings, I’d go home to my wife, still smelling of sex, with Acapulco Gold coursing through my blood, and she and I would talk about Watergate or the price of not-yet-taboo abalone at Petrini’s.
    My wife wasn’t one of the hot and willing young sweetmeats at
Rolling Stone
. She was, in fact, sort of like Hillary: smart, poised, responsible, a partner in most ways, except the sexual ones. I didn’t marry my wife for sexual reasons, and it became obvious to me that Bill Clinton didn’t marry Hillary for sexual reasons, either. You could call Hillary many things, but not sexy. Drawn to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Bill Clinton had married Judy in Disguise with Glasses.
    Was it possible to imagine Bill wanting to take Hillary into that rest room while wife Gennifer was standing out there? But there was another deadly flip to that question: Would Bill Clinton have felt the need to take anyone into that rest room had he