Secret Addictions

Dick Cheney's thoughts turned to this more and more often.  At first it was just a wild fling, something to do while his wife was out of town.  But in May, when the rain never seemed to stop and the skies always seemed gray, he found himself craving it more and more and more.  He tried to turn to other distractions--like using secret Heurich Society resources to tamper with the stock market or playing that Donald Rumsfeld Churchill solitaire game--but nothing ever felt as good as this.  He parked his SUV with the tinted windows, examining all the mirrored 360-degree views to see who might be out there to see him at a place like this.  Then he got out of the car.

A few miles away, Congressman Paul Ryan's chauffeur pulled up his own tinted-window SUV to the Apolline in Dupont Circle.  The Secret Service assisted the baseball-capped, casually dressed Speaker of the House out of the car, into the lower level of the building, all the way to the door of Ryan's secret refuge.  He smiled sheepishly at the stone-faced agents and walked inside for his appointment.  Ever since accidentally finding and impulsively purloining a Groupon printed out by one of his junior staffers, the Speaker had discovered the only thing in Washington that made him feel good:  Thaitastic!  He smiled at the familiar face (whose name he still mispronounced), went into the private room to undress, then lay down and waited for the magical moment when she would press her knees into the pressure points in his buttocks.  Ahhhh!  He could hardly breathe when she was on top of him like this, but it didn't matter--he could breathe the other twenty-three hours of the day.  Ahhhh!  She poked him, prodded him, twisted him, stretched him, kneaded him, curled on top of him--and it was all guilt-free for him!  Not that he really wanted anybody finding out about this--well, they wouldn't understand, would they?  He had been begged and pleaded with to take over as Speaker of the House, but nobody--NOBODY--could have predicted to him that he would be forced to endorse a sack of shit like Donald Trump for President.  Every choice he made felt wrong; every sight he saw felt wrong; every move he made felt wrong.  Except here:  she took his breath away, and when she was done with him, for a brief time, it all felt right.

A few miles away, psychiatrist Ermann Esse had come up with the only solution he could see to extricating himself from effectively being blackmailed into doing secret prisoner interrogations for the CIA:  he would take drugs until he failed a security pee-in-a-cup test.  He had prided himself on rendering drug-free psychotherapy for years--with a large clientele of Washingtonians who needed serious help but could not risk drug tests at work--but now he was desperate to get his previous life back.  After briefly considering an array of illegal substances, he decided it would be safer and more convenient to prescribe himself an addictive pain killer.  He did careful research on which had the most accidental overdoses, which showed up most reliably on urine tests, and which were easiest to recover from; then he selected Vicodin.  The problem was that, since he was not working in a hospital, he would have to fill his own prescription at a pharmacy, and they would never agree to handing over a ton of pills.  Therefore, he devised a plan to fill prescriptions for three different pain killers at three different pharmacy chains in Washington, and supplement this with some over-the-counter remedies.  He figured it would take two or three weeks to become seriously addicted, and he hoped to fail a urine test before then.  He read all the medication insert warnings one more time, rechecked the pill-popping schedule he had planned out for himself, then filled a glass with water.

Out in Virginia, Bridezilla had not decided to extricate herself from her current situation, but she was starting to wonder if it was off somehow.  She sat down at her home computer, turned on the private browsing mode, and ran a search for sex addiction to husband:  thousands and thousands of results.  She looked around self-consciously, even though she knew Marco was out.  They had had sex in almost every room in the apartment this weekend, as well as the car on Friday night.  "I couldn't talk to him about anything," she read on one sight.  "I only felt married when we were having sex."  She unconsciously ran her fingers through her hair, yet consciously knew she had not even read those sentences without suddenly wanting to have sex with him again.  For months she had felt this was totally normal for newlyweds, but his recent one-week business trip to Europe had left her so messed up that she couldn't even get out of the airport parking lot Friday night before jumping his bones.  Yet she had not missed talking to him at all:  in fact, they had only emailed and texted each other, with no phone calls all week.  The things she used to enjoy--shopping, Facebooking, editing her fifteen-year plan for becoming Governor of Virginia--no longer held any appeal for her.  Even her recent reinstatement as a partner at Prince and Prowling had done very little to elevate her mood--until she and Marco had celebrated it in bed.  She felt dirty.  I'm married--why do I feel dirty?  And then a little voice started nagging her:  ARE you?  ARE you married?

Over in upper Georgetown, "Mama Vazquez" was looking over the ground-floor bedroom that her son and daughter-in-law had prepared for her.  "It's time," Marcos Vazquez had finally said to Golden Fawn on the phone from Puerto Rico during an emergency trip to visit his mother, and she had agreed.  Between her worsening rheumatoid arthritis, fear of the Zika virus, the increasingly frequent home robberies because of the island financial crisis, and the arrest of a caregiver for tying Mama Vazquez down while she went out to the apartment swimming pool, the situation was no longer acceptable.  Marcos had sold off the furniture and kitchen items, shipped the linens, clothing, artwork, and personal things ahead, then flown with his mother back to Washington.  There was a time when he had assumed he would eventually use his Coast Guard seniority to get a transfer back to the island to take care of his mother, as her only son, but Golden Fawn had changed all that.  Mama Vazquez said she was tired and wanted to lie down, so they left her alone in the bedroom.  She looked at the paintings hung on the walls, the framed photos and bric-a-brac that Golden Fawn had arranged on the dresser top, the books their adopted son had arranged on the shelving, and her familiar bedspread lying on top of the unfamiliar bed.  She opened her purse and pulled out one of her last remaining marijuana-laced brownies from its heavy layer of plastic wrap and chewed it carefully.  Tomorrow she would get a taxi while they were all at work or school to go see one of those doctors that prescribed medicinal marijuana.  She was ashamed of how badly she wanted it, and never wanted to tell them.

A few miles away, Dick Cheney--who also never wanted to tell his family about it--slowly approached the magical room.  He was wearing a duck-hunting cap pulled down low, a white t-shirt, overalls, and a fake beard.  He forked over his money and went over to stand patiently in line.  He pulled out his phone to play Donald Rumsfeld Churchill solitaire, but he was too excited and put it back in his pocket.  There was nobody there his own age, but he didn't care.  At last it was his turn, and he walked through the door.  Then a smile spread over his face as he saw his first butterfly--blue, bold, beautiful--at the exhibit on the upper floor of the National Museum of Natural History.  Then he forgot everything else.  The ghost of Henry Samuelson, who had followed him in there, shook his head in disgust.

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COMING UP:  Running with the pack!