The Dude and the Don

The friendship between the Dude and the Don was perplexing to the staff but what isn’t? “He felt very moved by what happened to that man’s rug,” Steven Miller said. “I felt something too. I think it was an F sharp minor.” That Miller had felt something sent a psychic shock wave through the covey of aides and officers looking through glass doors at the twin Lazy Boys now side by side on the the Rose Garden lawn. The first lady was reportedly furious.

A sleek black bird with crimson markings lit on the Dude’s left shoulder, sat there as calm as if the Dude was a tree. “See what I told you, man? I just make myself into a plant. You know alpha and beta waves, and delta waves, I can drop all the way down into theta waves.”

“I’m not an alpha male, Dude, I’m the Alpha Male. I can fuck anybody I want, but I don’t anymore. It won’t stand up anymore.”

“That does not bode well, man. Did you tell your wife yet?”

“I tried but she just rolls her eyes. She hates me.”

“Yea man, I noticed that. Do you have a taster, like, so if there’s poison in the food he dies instead of you.”

“She.”

“You know what comes to my mind, man, is Carnal Knowledge. You remember Jack Nicholson and this woman comes in and they go into an interaction, but she breaks character and he loses his erection because he needed it to go a certain way. So then we know she’s a hooker and he’s burned it out, man. Hard to thrill like the song says.”

“Nothing moves me anymore,” the President sang, if it was singing, it came with the trepidation of a small bird with a tiny, rapidly beating heart. The long repressed voice was barely three, so wary of being heard it barely broke from behind the sniffing of the broad red nose that seemed to be a separate life form the way it cried to be fed. “I don’t think I’ve ever sang in my life, Dude. The reason I go to the golf course is it’s the only time I don’t have to wear a suit. Some people make fun of my suits but they are very expensive suits. I have a guy for that. He told me the long tie is slimming. Now everybody wears long ties. I set men’s fashions like Clinton did with the cigars. He put a cigar in that girl’s pussy and they think I’m some kind of pervert.”

“Well, you’re singing now,” the Dude said. “In for a Pence, in for a pound.”

“Mike Pence. It’s too bad what people are saying. That he’s a child molester. Not me. I love the guy, it’s what some people are saying so I’m keeping my ear cocked to see who these people are, vicious people, vicious. You see what I did there, Dude? You pay attention and you’ll learn this. I mark words and passages with my head movements, so that your unconscious separates out a meta message, ‘Mike Pence is a child molester, not me.’”

“That’s fucking brilliant, man. They have the pictures of you and Epstein and Maxwell but you give them somebody else.”

“Right, Dude. Where did I learn that?”

“Fargo! Malvo told Lester his only way out was to give the police another suspect, and he set up his brother.”

“You learn very fast, very fast. Most people think you need to read books to be smart, but I learn everything I know from television.”

“Like Chauncey Gardener, man. If he’d been rich you’d be, like, the same guy.”