Vicki Albright met Reed Ramlow on Dewey Beach, a more conservative, quieter resort than Rehoboth or Ocean City. She was there with friends from Washington, all aides to one Congressman or another, all Democrat, all progressive in spirit and policy. There was a heady enthusiasm among these young women. all of whom felt they were on God's side in the struggle against the evil in the White House, and all of whom shared a camaraderie that was based on political commitment but annealed by a youthful enthusiasm. After all they were not just clerks in a five-and-dime but big deals, successful women who had come to Washington not to make their fortune but to make a difference.
Reed was also a Congressional aide, but to a Senator and in a senior advisory position. He had been in Washington since the first Trump administration, had served his master well during the penitential Biden years, and was now in the full flush of celebratory enthusiasm now that Trump was beginning his second, decisive term.
Vicki and Reed met at Joe's Bar, a Dewey Beach hangout popular with the Washington crowd and absent day-trippers, casual tourists, and the curious from Baltimore. Joe's could have been in downtown Washington but was perched on a pier over the Atlantic Ocean. Dry martinis, crab cakes, insider talk and sidling up - the ironic term used by these up-and-comers for sexual interest.
Joe's was the place to see and be seen and was distinctly bi-partisan. Somehow the beach, the ocean, and the summer did away with political allegiances and opened social commerce to both sides; and so it was that Vicki and Reed found each other side by side at the bar drinking oyster shooters, well on their way to the happy abandon for which they had driven three hours.
They 'sidled' around workday affiliations - this being an eclectic, aisle-free, open season kind of place where it didn't pay to show one's colors or raise one's political flags - and found each other attractive, interesting, and available. One thing led to another, and they went home together - or rather to The Rodney, a simple, rundown hotel on Airlie Avenue blocks from the beach but comfortable and anonymous.
Their sex was surprisingly successful. After all, Vicki, well-brought up in a strict Iowa farm family was not one to jump into bed with just anyone; but in these halcyon days of youthful adventure and independence, why not. AIDS was a thing of the past, contraceptives were state of the art, and abuse and discard were but feminist cant.
It didn't take much pillow talk to out the obvious - not only were they partisans of opposing political parties, they were committed advocates for their policies. Vicki was convinced that the black man represented America's best hope for sentient revival. He, descendant of African tribes which resonated with the tribal energies of the forest, endowed with a primal intelligence which put white pretentious academicism to shame would soon rise to the top of the human pyramid.
He, a frequent traveler to Africa, thanks to his Senator's place on the Foreign Relations Committee, found the continent a sinkhole of pestilence, corruption, misrule, and barely concealed jungle primitivism.
How on earth would he and Vicki ever find each other?
They smoked a Bombay Black - the finest Moroccan hash mixed with Afghan opium - and found common ground. In a marvelous riff Reed created a hilarious send-off of Africa, a cavalcade of intellectual dwarves dancing around cauldrons of white men, whipping up an appetite for human liver.
He stood up, took off his shirt, blackened his face with burnt Moet Chandon cork and in a vaudevillian reprise of the strutting Stokely Carmichael, old Black Panther black revolutionary, channeled every black leader from Rap Brown to Black Lives Matter.
Vicki howled with delight, charmed by the antics of her new lover with whom she had found a unique bi-partisan place. One could be for the black man but not deny the outrageously hilarious caricatures of him.
Her turn - a marvelous word salad, incomprehensible, ditzy rendition of Kamala Harris who had run for President on the I Am Black ticket and turned out to be a clown, the most insanely ridiculous cartoon character to ever show up on an American political stage.
One could be for the progressive agenda incoherently proposed by this demented harridan and laugh behind her back.
Sobriety, and particularly the hangover kind, can quash any budding relationship; but theirs - Vicki's and Reed's seemed to have staying power in the light of day. Washed, showered, and dressed, they still found each other attractive and appealing.
This was what was unusual in the sexual street games of Washington. Political differences tend to divide at every level. Bitter enemies on the House floor, antagonistic lovers in bed; but Vicki and Reed (she couldn't help thinking of a porn star stud whenever she heard his name) shared common ground - idiocy.
It was this - not only getting the vaudevillian hilarity of Washington, but loving it. The popular word is 'embrace' but it was really just a rolling, rollicking belly laugh.
How could anyone take seriously uppity black Black Lives Matter welfare queens lecturing in ghetto-speak about George Floyd, a career criminal, doped up and stupid, as an icon of black American residency? Or Joe Biden, shuffled to the podium like a rag doll, then left to his own demented meanderings.
'When I was a boy', Biden said, I filled buckets of water for my sand castle. Now, why did I do that?', and there he paused, befuddled by the lines in his prepared script about Indonesian democracy, seeing only images of tsunamis and rijsttafel. 'My mother' he said, looking up at the rafters, hoping to see her, an angel surely there to help him, 'was a saint'. Hooked off the stage like a bad vaudevillian at Grossinger's, he managed a Nixon high wave
Or The Haircut, Gavin Newsom, or dumb-as-a-sack-of-hammers AOC, 'the reason why instructions are put on shampoo bottles', or...God alone could have created such a menagerie.
Why was there nothing so ridiculous about her party? No transgender, rainbow silked, gay float boys? No tough girl flannel and e-booted Bernal Heights dames? No callused lettuce pickers in serapes? No rainbow coalition of dwarves and cotton-pickers?
The parade down Pennsylvania Avenue was all white, tall, blonde, blue-eyed and normal. The sounds of waltzes and Frank Sinatra came through the windows open to the Rose Garden. There wasn't an oddity among them, not one creep or tart.
They screwed till the lights went out, Vicki and Reed, and never let incidentals intrude. 'We are a dyad' said Reed, rolling over on his side to look at Vicki. 'Just look at us, ebony and ivory', proof that politics are not the barriers to sexual entry they once were. "
Easier said than done, of course, for once back in Washington, the rumors and innuendoes began. The Vicki-Reed affair, far from the spotlight on a buggering, unfaithful Washington the tabloids were used to, made the rounds in lower-level, aspiring circles.
'How could she?' was the question, for it was always the woman who was the victim; but by this time Vicki had become fully liberated and would fuck whomever she pleased, and when the affair with Reed Ramlow petered out as they all did, she was ready for the next, whichever wind brought it through the lace curtains to her.
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