61 Frames Per Second by John Constantine Today in Nerve's videogame blog: Street Fighter. The movie. A new one. With that chick from that Superman show. Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about!
The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Mad Men's January Jones struts her stuff in Vanity Fair. Plus: Damages returns, the latest Gossip Girl guest star and Donna Martin capitulates.
Women love a man who loves life. Maybe that explains why Dubya's choice for Attorney General, John Ashcroft — who loves life even when that life is teenier than a Tic Tac — has gotten under my skin.
My dear husband has trudged off with his Digicam to the morgue (he is working on a documentary about how extreme sports kill young men, and it has made him so solemn he's refusing to laugh even when I make my cross-eyed fish face). I take to the damn sofa, from whence I summon the controversial Mr. A. My objective is to determine whether I should join his Senate colleagues in rubber-stamping his appointment over the objections of people like me.
John's from Missouri, "The Show Me State," so, to visibly demonstrate my friendliness, I consider greeting him in one of those "shoot Abe Lincoln" T-shirts that his favorite magazine, Southern Partisan, promotes, but since that's what Oklahoma bomber Tim McVeigh was wearing when he was arrested, it feels way too last week. Besides, I have a hunch that, like many homophobes, John has a sweet spot for crinolines. So I greet him wearing nothing but a hoop skirt and an old curtain, like that greatest of southern partisans, Scarlett O'Hara.
John himself is wearing one of his fat, pendulous neckties. Not, thank God, the baby-blue one that looks like a dead man's leg, but a patterned mega-wedge of cheesy yellow that's so anxiety-provoking it could sell insurance all by itself. I persuade him to let me use it as a sash, but instead of tying it around my own waist, I flip it around his stolid hips and draw him towards me.
Since he doesn't believe in drinking, dancing or extramarital sex play, I know he's going to resist, but I'm touched by how gently he goes about it. As I fondle his long, Buddha-like earlobes, his hands, always slightly cupped as if dunking a child into a pond, lightly push mine away. And he croons me a new gospel song he's written to the awkward tune of his best known composition, "Be Still and Know." This one's a love ballad called "Your Womb Is Mine."
Putting his lips to my ear he whispers about how he wants to teach me to sublimate all of my erotic impulses into useful social activities, like giving alms to campaign contributors or putting blacks on chain gangs for taking drugs that middle-class white people have replaced with Prozac.
I know that most people's "no" means no, but John's "no" isn't like the others'. Although he swears that he's prepared to rigorously enforce laws like Roe v.Wade that he morally equates with the Holocaust, I just don't believe that he's that untrue to his principles. So when I learn that he thinks a woman should have to give birth after being raped by her Dad and all her uncles, realize that when John says he's "pro-life" it isn't that he shares my husband's anguish about defective bungee-jumping cables. No. When John says he's "pro-life" he means, "I want to plant my teeming seed in your fertile loins," period.
The question is: how to get such a skilled sublimator to admit to himself that he wants me. Disguise myself as a virgin? Forge orders to have sex with me and sign them "Jefferson Davis?" And then I get an inspiration: Crisco!
"John," I lie, "I'll stop trying to seduce you if you'll let me anoint you Attorney General." When he bites, I get out a big bottle of Crisco oil, the kind his father used when trying to replicate some biblical initiation rites after one of John's successful electoral campaigns. I explain to him that a dab or two won't do the trick: he's got to strip and slather.
Once I get him greased up, the rest of my lubricious project goes quite smoothly. I even get him to laugh by pointing to the tent he's making in his pants and proposing that we hold a revival meeting under it.
Before long we're rolling our eyes, flopping about and speaking in tongues, saying, "Yalla-wah ca-ca dadda-ro-foonie!" and "Pee-pee-go-uppa-ze-la-la!" like a couple of those holy-roly folks that the Fox News Channel keeps calling "conservatives."
After his second coming, I tease him: "Uh oh! Our precious fertilized egg! It has failed to implant in the wall of God's uterus! I can't wait 'til I get to heaven and meet it on the other side," etc.
John looks wounded. "You're making fun of my religion," he rebukes me in his flat, Midwestern twang.
"Yes, John," I smile. "Get used to it."
Late, late that night, I ask John the decisive question: if he and I slipped up and had actually managed to create a politically embarrassing love child, would he steal from his first family to support it, like Reverend Jesse Jackson has been doing, or would he totally ignore me, like my husband has been doing? But I fall asleep before he comes up with a satisfactory answer.
