Cakes and Ale

Years ago the Divine Doc M and I were driving from Manhattan to Utica, N.Y. It’s a four hour drive and we made it just south of Albany before we needed to pull into the Thruway’s Malden service center. We were on our way to a scholarship awards ceremony for our daughter Victoria and were driving happily through late season snow squalls and driving rain.

Our first order of business was a visit to the restrooms. Martha carried a flannel shirt and slacks so she could change into more comfortable driving attire, and I slipped unencumbered into the men’s room.

As every dude knows, public bathrooms are places for minding one’s own business and what happens in men’s rooms stays in men’s rooms. Two men walked in just behind me and lined up at the row of urinals on each side of me. Both wore well-cut gray suits. Both pulled their jackets slightly apart, and after simultaneous zipping sounds the three of us were gazing slightly upwards and heaving contented sighs.

As we completed our missions, each affixing his gaze on the tiles in front of us, we re-zipped, readjusted our clothing and moved toward the row of sinks. Out of the corner of my eye I realized that one of the men seemed familiar and I stole a glance at his face. It was the former governor of New York, David Paterson.

The other man may have been an aide or a security agent. The three of us washed diligently and shook the water from our hands. Two of us stood back so the Governor could have first dibs at the paper towels, and then we departed.

Outside the bathroom,I watched as other customers began to recognize Paterson, who was simultaneously smiling and nodding and quickening his pace to get out of the place. He stopped ever so briefly to shake hands with an uncooperative child whose parents were pushing her toward him. When the Governor realized the kid was squirming away he turned abruptly and escaped through the open doors. As almost everyone knows, the former governor is legally blind, but that didn’t slow him down. In an instant he was gone.

It was several minutes before Martha emerged from the women’s room. As seasoned journalists, we try not to be impressed by celebrities, but this was one story on which I could not sit.

“You’ll never guess who was in there,” I said, gesturing to the men’s room. “Governor Paterson!”

“You’re kidding. Where is he?”

“He left,” I said.

“Did you get his picture?”

“Um. Nooo.”

“Why not?”

“It was the men’s room,” I said. “You don’t take pictures in the men’s room.”

“You should have gotten a picture.”

We bought some food and carried it to a table. I grabbed my smart phone and tapped an update to my Facebook status:

“Ran into ex-Gov David Paterson in the men’s room at the Malden service area on the Thruway,” I wrote. “Was he ever surprised to see me.”

Three hours later we pulled into a small motel in Utica and began to unwind for the day. I pulled out my phone to see if there were any messages. There on the small screen was evidence that meeting celebrities in bathrooms may be a universal and memorable experience.

The first Facebook response was from Aidsand Wright-Riggins III, then executive director of American Baptist National Ministries.      “Several years ago I was in the men’s room at the train station in NYC.” Aidsand wrote. “Looking straight ahead, as we’ve been taught to do, doing my man thing, I heard two voices that sounded really familiar to me. I looked around. To my right was Jesse Jackson. To my left was Al Sharpton. I managed to resist the temptation to try to shake hands.”

I read the response to Martha, who said all the talk about Men’s Room Protocols made her think of the lyrics to “Lovely Ladies” in the musical Les Miserables.

Old men, young men, take ’em as they come, 
Harbor rats and alley cats and every kind of scum:
Poor men, rich men, leaders of the land,
See them with their trousers off they’re never quite as grand. 

Martha also recalled standing in an interminable queue to the ladies’ room in a Broadway theater with an unexpectedly patient Liza Minelli, who probably grew up in Broadway bathroom lines. “There is no parity in lines to Broadway bathrooms,” Martha added, philosophically.

My brother Jim posted his own experience on Facebook: “I once peed next to Ed Bradley at a Broadway show. He still talks about it.”

Amid several additional FB comments, my friend Martin Bailey observed, “Sounds like you’ve got the makings of a great book.”

Now there’s an idea.

The proposition jogged my memory of an event years ago in New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington. The 1976 presidential campaign had begun and the church hosted an ecumenical gathering called, “Religion and the Presidency (RAP).” All the major Democratic candidates attended except the ultimate winner, Jimmy Carter – but no one cared because it was early in the campaign and he was an unknown long shot. The other candidates were more prominent and more likely: Sargent Shriver, Eugene McCarthy, Morris Udall, and Pennsylvania Governor Milton Shapp.

At one point during that hectic meeting I joined the testosteronal crowd that jammed into the church bathroom with all these potential leaders of the free world. I stood unobtrusively next to Sargent Shriver, staring politely ahead. But the image that sticks with me is of the petite Shapp squeezed unwillingly between ex-basketball star Udall and the lanky McCarthy. There is no parity in men’s rooms either.

What’s the big deal about meeting famous people in toilets? Jon Fox, a one-term Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, was delighted to discover that his House office had once been occupied by Congressman Richard M. Nixon. Fox routinely escorted his visitors to the bathroom so they could share an historic commode with a disgraced former president.

I had a similar experience at the original Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Sr. and Jr. had offices. During a World Council of Churches meeting in the church dining hall, I excused myself to use the bathroom. And as I stared into the scratched and stained urinal, a shiver came over me. Is this, I asked myself, the urinal – he – used?

There’s no real secret to the feelings that come over us when we engage in a universal and necessary act with rich or prominently powerful people. In this over-mediated age where film and video and blue tooth elevate the merely famous to demigods, it’s reassuring to be reminded that it’s merely an illusion. All human beings are created in the image of God, but God did not create all of us as stars. On a high-res flat screen TV, your governor or president is elevated far above you. But standing next to the dude at a urinal, you remember that God made us all the same.

There is an oft-told church tale that comes to my mind whenever I am in a crowded men’s room. I assume the story is apocryphal, but it makes the point.

According to the story, several Orthodox clergy gathered in Manhattan’s Interchurch Center for an ecumenical meeting. During a break all of the priests adjourned to the men’s room – including Iakovos, the archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.

“Your Eminence,” one of the young priests said, “How shall we conduct ourselves in such a place? Shall we line up according to ecclesial rank? Shall we address each other by our titles?”

“Brothers, relax,” Iakovos said. “We are all peers in here.”

Looking through some old blog posts, I came across a reference to Charles Colson’s death eight years ago this April 21. He was 80.

Boomers and other chronologically gifted persons may recognize the name but I suspect most will not. I’m willing to bet none of my six adult children know who he was. In the 1970s and 1980s he was nationally famous, mostly because of his connection with political scandal and, later, because of his religious fervor.

Toward the end of his life he had faded into the obscurity of right-wing political and evangelical extremism that was not as powerful as it is today. Indeed, had Colson lived beyond his 80th birthday, I wonder: would he have become a leader of the Trump pack of theologically dim zealots? Or would he have warned the nation about the disastrous consequences of following an uneducated, amoral, racist, self-obsessed, biblically ignorant political leader”?

Colson, as many will recall, was a high-ranking advisor to President Richard M. Nixon, best known for a crack about his campaign strategy, “I’d walk over my grandmother to assure Nixon’s re-election.” He was the dean of the dirty tricks school of politics which, though not invented by Nixon, was employed with singular creativity during his era.

Some of Colson’s tricks turned out to be illegal and he pleaded guilty to obstructing the investigation of a break-in at the office of Dr. Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers and a Nixon critic. Charges that Colson had orchestrated the break-in were dismissed for lack of concrete evidence, but he was ordered to prison in 1974 and served seven months of a three-year sentence.

When I interviewed Colson in 1977, I discovered the fastest way to witness his famous red-faced sneer was to suggest the Alan Wood Prison was a country club for white collar criminals. “It wasn’t,” he hissed, glaring at me. Whatever jail had been like for him, some may also remember that it inspired Colson – by then famously re-born as a Christian – to found Prison Fellowship, an evangelical organization to lead prisoners to Jesus.

I met Colson in his small Prison Fellowship office in the late fall of 1977. Sitting in the waiting room with me was Ken Clawson, another Watergate figure (best known for his plea for mercy to Bob Woodward, “I have a wife and a family and a dog and a cat!”) Clawson’s presence made me wonder if all Watergate figures hung out together, or if he was seeking spiritual guidance from Colson. But Colson, in a starched button-down shirt and paisley tie, emerged before I could talk to Clawson and escorted me to a chair in front of his desk.

Except for his reaction to my country club reference, Colson was charming and soft spoken during out hour-long conversation. He was disarmingly likable; I was so disarmed, in fact, that the article I wrote about him in the January 1978 issue of The American Baptist magazine outraged most of my liberal friends who doubted the sincerity of his conversion. American Baptist prison chaplains were incensed that I gave attention to Colson rather than to them. Bill Cober, head of the American Baptist Home Mission Society, was furious that Colson had been quoted as saying Walter Rauschenbusch – a Baptist social activist, pacifist and saint – was not Christ centered. Colson was flat wrong on that point and I argued with him about it but elected not to include my own views in the article. Colson listened politely to my insistence that Rauschenbusch was devoutly Christ centered and shrugged non-committally.

I stayed in touch with Colson for several years, giving rise to rumors among my Baptist colleagues that he and I were buds. He once asked me if I’d like a job writing articles under his byline, which was flattering but the conversation never developed into a bonafide offer. Later, when I asked Colson to write something for The American Baptist, I got a glimpse of what the job might have been like. He quickly accepted my invitation and told me to contact his chief of staff. I called and began telling this obviously beleaguered staffer what I needed. He was silent for several moments before he drew an exasperated breath. “Shit,” he said. “Does Chuck think he doesn’t give us enough to do?”

Over the years Charles Colson drifted away from the mere Christianity of his idol, C.S. Lewis, and became associated with the Christian right-wing. His evangelical tactics also hardened to the extent that some of his critics suggested “Colson would walk over his grandmother for Jesus.”

But for a brief period years ago, I had nothing but the friendliest of feelings for the guy. My admiration – for better or for worse – is all too detectable in my editorial of January 1978:

Chuck Colson and the Social Gospel

A secretary had just told me that Mr. Colson would be delayed, and I settled in my chair to relax a few more minutes.

This is really strange, I told myself, listening to my friend Fred Rhodes as he bantered reassuringly. It wasn’t so long ago that I was a student protesting the Vietnam War, and casting helpless glances at the Nixon White House. I had been told about the men inside, about their callous indifference to the suffering in Vietnam. Sometimes I had nearly wept with frustration because the men in the White House wouldn’t even listen to our pleas – had, in fact, called us bums.

One of those men had been Charles W. Colson, special counsel to the President. White House tough guy. The archfiend. One of the most powerful men in the world.

Unexpectedly, he came through the door. The face I used to imagine twisted into a perpetual snarl was smiling warmly. His hair was slightly longer than it had been in the White House days, but it was carefully groomed. His blue shirt was neatly pressed and I was surprised to discover that he is about six inches taller than he looks on television. “Chuck Colson,” he said evenly, extending his hand. Soon I was sitting at his side, sticking a microphone in his face.

I had to get it off my chest. I told Chuck Colson about my errant youth on the field of protest, and admitted that I still felt pretty much the same way I did then.  “Is there a ground of reconciliation between us?”

He laughed. “Sure,” he said without hesitation. “Jesus Christ.” And the strangeness began to melt away. Reconciliation.

People who have read Chuck Colson’s best-selling book, Born Again, are familiar with that theme of reconciliation. It is one of the remarkable distinctives of his testimony.

Here was the White House “hatchet man,” the Nixon functionary who was supposed to have said (he never did) that he would run over his grandmother to assure Nixon’s re-election. The story has now been told time and again how Colson, sensing the emptiness of his life, invited Jesus Christ to take it over, how that new life in Christ had led Colson to deep fellowship with former Senator Harold Hughes and Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns – men who had been his enemies.

The story includes countless occasions when men and women who had been in opposite political poles from Colson had rallied to his side when he needed to be “Christ’s Man” and accept a prison sentence for his Watergate misdeeds.

Few people in public life have symbolized God’s power of redemption and reconciliation more than Chuck Colson. And I would have to confess that I was slightly moved to be sitting in Colson’s office. The former student protestor who Had been immobilized by a sense of powerlessness and insignificance; the former White House aide who had been intoxicated by his sense of power and position. And we were easily exploring a common, familiar ground against which all other differences fade: Jesus Christ.

In fact, I found it a bit disquieting to find myself in such agreement with Colson. I had gone to Washington at the invitation of Fred Rhodes, former government official and former vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention, in order to do a story on the Prison Fellowship founded by Colson and of which Fred is president.

As I was asking Chuck Colson about the Prison Fellowship and its services to society, it occurred to me that he was beginning to sound a bit non-Nixonian. I pointed out that the Prison Fellowship and its efforts at reform sounded like the Rauschenbusch Social Gospel. “Will somebody someday accuse you of being a political liberal?” I asked? “Rauschenbusch believed man could do good in his own right,” he said slowly. “He did not have Christ as the center of his life. And I think the disciples of  Rauschenbusch down through the years  have … largely been consumed by their own social concerns, but believed they were doing it by themselves, not Christ.”

He noted the other side of the spectrum, the church’s conservative wing, people who emphasize life style, soul saving, salvation. “I come out somewhere in the middle,” he mused. “So long as He lives in me and leads me, it is Christ and not Chuck Colson. But I believe that Jesus Christ calls us to a social concern … We are commanded to love the world, and it seems to me that we are being called to a lot more than sitting in a pew, praying one hour a week, and being happy that we are saved and going to heaven. I believe that Christianity hasn’t failed, it just hasn’t been tried.”

As our interview ended, I sheepishly shoved toward him my copy of Born Again for an autograph.

As he scribbled on the flyleaf, he chuckled, and asked, “Well? Am I a liberal?” I stammered something noncommittally.

But it was clear to me that there weren’t many differences on things that really mattered between the former liberal student and the former conservative presidential aide.

That may have been a small, even routine miracle for those who trust Jesus Christ.

But it continues to astonish me.

April 1, 2020

It was a day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times.

And in the best interest of the historical record, I feel compelled to retell the story each April First.

It all began in October 1964. I was in basic training at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, struggling to find my niche in the military hegemony.

I got a nearly perfect score in the Air Force aptitude test in mechanics, achieved by guessing my way through several pages of multiple choice questions, and I tested high in typing. Early on, it looked like I’d be spending four years repairing jets or typing supply requisitions. Neither possibility seemed heroic (although as I think about, it’s improbable that jets maintained by me would stay in the air long enough to liberate the Mekong Delta). I began to question whether volunteering for military service had been such a good idea.

Then one morning Sergeant Ellefson, our barracks chief, said he detected stubble on my face. This was likely a ruse because, at 18, I had never shaved a day in my life, but sergeants had a highly personalized view of reality and it was rarely a good idea to challenge it. So I checked an impulse to stroke my fuzz-free cheeks and said, “Yes, Sergeant.”

“And this is what I’m gonna do about it,” Ellefson said. He led me into the barracks latrine – a room equipped with an open-bay shower, 12 sinks and two rows of redolent commodes facing each other – and said the words that would change my life.

“You’re gonna be my Latrine Queen,” Ellefson said. “And every morning I wanna see these commodes so clean General LeMay can eat breakfast out of ’em.”

Ellefson didn’t seem like the kind of guy who used hyperbole, so I said, “How does he like his eggs?”

“You’ll find out,” he said, and left me alone in the Latrine.

It is now almost forgotten that Curtis E. LeMay was the Air Force chief of staff. He was a hard-nosed S.O.B., the father of the Strategic Air Command, and the World War II commander who oversaw the destruction of Japan from the air. Later, he applied the same strategy to North Vietnam.

I was stunned when Sgt. Ellefson strode out of the latrine, leaving me alone with so much stained porcelain.

But I had grown up in a household where clean toilets and godliness were theologically fused and I knew exactly what to do. I armed myself with sponges, scowering powder and cans of pungent disinfectant and set to work. By the end of the day, my nose smarted with lingering fumes of ammonia. More to the point, the harsh glare of white porcelain that glowed like our transfigured Lord, brought tears to my eyes.

The next morning, Sgt. Ellefson’s mouth dropped open when he came into the latrine.

“God DAMN,” he said. “God DAMN.”

He stroked the silvery faucet of one of the sinks, and admired his unblemished reflection in one of the mirrors. He stepped back to view the full pristine panorama and he began to smile. “God DAMN.”

Sergeant Ellefson placed me on full-time latrine duty. That was fine with me because it replaced the more onerous trials of boot camp, like precision drilling and olfactory comparison drills to prove you could tell the difference between tear gas and human pheromones.

And politically, Latrine Queen proved to be an extremely powerful position. It gave me the authority to impose such time-saving measures as requiring my barracks mates to use the latrines in the mess hall and shower in the rain.

But as the eleven weeks of basic training neared at end, I began to worry what the next four years might hold. There were no medals for exceptional commode cleansing, nor did a four year career of urinal polishing seem likely to generate diverting tales to spin in American Legion bars.

Then one day as I was using a cotton swab to clear calcium deposits from the shower heads, I heard a commotion in the barracks. A high-pitched voice yelled, “Ten HUT,” followed by a thunderous rumble as fifty guys leaped off their bunks and slammed their brogues on the linoleum floor.

“Where’s the latrine?” a gravely voice shouted with urgency. “Gotta crap.” This was not an unusual occurrence in San Antonio where northeastern stomachs were introduced to green sausa and burritos. After lunch, stricken officers often found it necessary to pop into the first barracks they passed.

“This way, Sir.” Ellefson’s muffled voice sounded uncharacteristically polite.

“Outa my way, goddam it.”

The latrine door sprung open and in marched a scowling officer clenching a huge Cuban Cohiba in his teeth – unusual even in the earliest days of the Cuban economic boycott. The officer was barrel-chested with thick steel-gray hair. There were four twinkling silver stars on each of his shoulders.

Before I could stammer, “General LeMay, Sir,” he pushed me out of his way and moved earnestly toward the bank of sparkling commodes. But the unblemished souls of his spit-shined low-quarter shoes were too new to resist the polished tiles of the cleanest latrine in the Air Force.

Down went the general.

I watched transfixed as the general’s feet rose and his posterior descended in a fluidly graceful motion, while his arms shot out like a uniformed cruciform.

Abruptly, he was on his back with his limbs fully extended like DaVinci’s Vitruvian man. His wide body spun in a clockwise motion on the shiny floor.

The general’s gabardine uniform offered little resistance to the polished tiles, but when he stopped revolving he surrendered the back of his head to the hard floor. He appeared to be carefully assessing his situation, like the great tactician he was.

I could think of no chapter in the USAF Customs and Courtesies manual that addressed this particular situation. I stood cautiously over the general and leaned forward to make eye contact with him. He scowled upwards at me, furiously chewing the Cohiba.

“General LeMay,” I ventured.

The general narrowed his eyes menacingly. I think he said, “Grempf,” but he might have been swallowing a piece of tobacco.

“How do you like your eggs?”

He appeared to think about it briefly, but then he spat the wetly chewed cigar out of his mouth so forcefully that it smacked against a urinal on the far side of the room.

“Help me up, goddam it. Gotta crap.”

I placed my hands under his arms and pulled him to his feet. As soon as he was erect, he shoved me aside and skidded toward the commodes. He dropped his gabardine drawers and plopped down on the seat. I had gotten used to seeing young basic-trainees seated in the humiliating ritual of collective crapping, but the Air Force chief of staff seemed out of place.

The general carried it off with dignity but never stopped scowling at me. I wasn’t sure what the rules called for, but I assumed they had something to do with standing at strict attention. I refrained from saluting.

Soon (and I spare the reader the auditory and olfactory details of the scene) the general was finished. He stood and tightened his belt.

General LeMay walked to one of the sinks. As he washed his hands he looked around the cleanest latrine in the Air Force.

“Goddam,” he said. “This must be the cleanest latrine in the Air Force.”

Now seemed like an appropriate time to salute. I snapped my right hand rigidly to my forehead, and he responded with a more casual gesture that looked as if he were shooing a fly from his face.

Silently, the general pulled a neatly folded towel from the shelf and dried his hands. When he walked out, I picked up the reeking cigar butt and threw it away.

General LeMay retired from active duty early in my Air Force career, and I saw him rarely after that first latrine rendezvous. When I did see him, it was usually when the chief of staff was called to accompany President Lyndon B. Johnson on his visits to military installations. For the remainder of the general’s career, whenever word came down that LBJ was planning to visit a base, I got a call from a chief master sergeant in the chief’s Pentagon office.

“The old man wants the President to have access to the cleanest latrine in the Air Force,” the sergeant would say. “Get to work.”

On such occasions I would spend a week getting the presidential latrine in shape for presidential elimination, whichever form it might take. On occasion, General LeMay would invite me outside to shake hands with the president.

“Goddam,” LBJ would say. “That must be the cleanest latrine in the Air Force,” and General LeMay would nod happily. I would stand modestly between the two men, trying not to expose the pride that was swelling in my chest.

But pride was warranted. I was the best Latrine Queen in the Air Force.

And I have a letter from the commander-in-chief to prove it.