ONE OF MY OLDEST and best friends from college days (daze?) is a guy named Pete Hamilton, and we’re still close. Our families are, too. We visit them, they visit us, gifts go back and forth, I’m Godfather to one of them, you get the picture. He has four daughters, each one prettier than the next, and this is near-perfect proof that God has a terrific sense of humor. In college, Hamilton was one of those handsome, charming guys who made females dilate just by entering a room, and he mowed a swath through the surrounding women’s schools that would make crop-circles look like a ribbon on a box of cufflinks. Years later, after his fourth girl was born, we were talking on the phone, and he said, “I don’t know what it is with all these girls.”
And I said, “Oh, I know what it is. It’s karma. Every woman you drove a truck over in school got together and held hands around a pentagram and put the quadruple whammy on you, but good.”
He kind of knew it then, but he sure knows it now. The oldest just finished her first year at Vanderbilt, and the youngest is four, so he’s looking at roughly eight thousand more nights of his doorbell being rung by an endless parade of up-to-no-good young swains just as devious as he was. Can you imagine those conversations? “Oh, hi, Mr. Hamilton, I’m here to–”
“–Excuse me, but I think I know exactly what you’re here to do. I believe we both very clearly know the reason you’re here. So please don’t insult either of us by pretending it’s something else. Yeah, yeah, let me guess, you sit behind her in Social Studies, and you really dig her take on the Peace of Westphalia. Come in and have a seat, while I put some salt peter in your Coke.”
Of course, this has ever been so. My mom, who had three brothers, used to love to tell a story about one of them up in his room making out with a local girl. She ran downstairs to the kitchen and breathlessly said, “Mom, Harry’s got a girl in his room!” As she used to tell it, my grandmother didn’t even look up from the stove, but just said, “Let her mother worry about it.”
I’ve also learned important lessons from Hamilton over the years, though not necessarily the ones he thought he was teaching. Back in the late ’80s, he and his family were living in London, and I went to visit. This was long before I was married, or even dating anyone for more than fifty hours, so I could just pop on a plane and do what I wanted; and I did. They were living in one of those great row houses in Kensington, with the living room and den on the main floor, the bedrooms and library on the upstairs floors, and the kitchen and dining room and service entrance downstairs.
I had been bopping around the city buying trifles and tokens and popped into his office around four, and just as we sat down the phone rang. It was his wife, Marsha, and she had forgotten about some parking tickets, and the car got “booted,” and it had to be picked up downtown, and she was very upset. He told her not to worry, he’d go get it with me, and everything was all right.
We paid the fine and got the car, and as he drove us back to Kensington, he said, “Now, Larry, remember what you’re about to see from here on in, because it will come in handy when you get married. Marsha has made a mistake, a costly one, and she knows it, and that gives me the upper hand. I’m going to drop the car off at home, give her the keys, and then you and I will go down to the local pub and spend the entire evening there. And she can’t say a thing about it.”
Well, I sure enough did learn a lesson about marriage that day. We walked into his house, and he said, “Wait here, I’ll be right back,” and walked downstairs to the kitchen with the same smile Custer must have had just before he galloped over that last hill. I will never forget the sound of his Church’s Balmorals on the wooden stairs getting softer and softer. I swear it was less than a minute–less–when I heard the shoes coming back upstairs. This time his hand was on the banister, and he was ashen and badly shaken, like someone coming out of a cellar during the Blitz. He stopped in front of me, breathing heavily, and I said, “Pete, what happened?” After a beat, he looked up and said, “I don’t know. But we have to go to a jewelry store.”
Talk about shock and awe. That was a pretty good lesson: Like a Kodiak bear, a woman is most dangerous when you think she’s cornered and wounded. I don’t know what she had waiting for him down there, what ace of trumps she had been holding for just such a day, but we went to the jewelry store straightaway, and right back home again, and spent the entire evening there, and he couldn’t say a thing about it.
Anyway, he taught me another lesson the other day, and it’s a good one. I needed to be straightened out, and he did the straightening.
I was losing faith. Very quickly, in the space of just a couple of days, I was slumped and pessimistic and, worse, losing hope.
Americans were being killed in Iraq, 1 and 2 at a time, 25 since the main fighting had stopped. The place was combed with awful Saddamites just thrilled to bleed us for years, and I had a horrible feeling we weren’t going to fight back and finish the job, that everything had been wasted.
Then the president sat down with all the Arab leaders at that resort, and they said the usual crappola they always say to American presidents, you know, that “Oh, we were kidding all those years. We’ve decided to give up power and bring our people out of the ninth century. In addition, it turns out we really love Jews.” Like the presidents before him, Mr. Bush was starting to look like he believed these guys, as if they had even the slightest desire to do anything other than build another solid gold soccer stadium.
Then he took that picture with Sharon and Abbas / Mazen, and I thought, “Oh, no, here we go with another holding-hands, “We-Are-The-World” Kodak moment.” Photos like that are virtual guarantors of an up-tick in murder and a loss of American prestige, and, in this case, a tragic but steady closing of the window of opportunity our soldiers had given us just a month before.
The cherry on top for me was President-For-Life-Arafat raising his saintly head and doing what he does best, craftily undermining what little influence he had given his “prime minister” in the first place.
Rumsfeld was off to Brussels, and I thought we were going to mend fences with those smelly you-know-whats, and. . . . In other words, it all looked bad to me, and I was depressed.
And then I called Hamilton. And he set me straight.
“President Bush is a Christian, and he stopped drinking on his own. He’s tough as nails, and he knows right from wrong, and he’s not going to do the politic thing, he’s going to do the right thing. Every time. He’s not his father, and he’s not anyone else, and he’s not interested in trying to make awful people like him. He’s interested in fighting evil where he finds it and making the world a better place, and he will, because he’s a man of his word. He knows he can’t free everybody, but if it’s a place that’s in our national best interest, he’ll make a plan, and he’ll do it. Period. He’s not going to turn gray or turn tail.
“We’re not going to be whittled away in Iraq. Bush and Rumsfeld won’t let that happen. They’re going to tell their commanders to do the job, and these guys will do it. The Arabs have seen that, and they will continue to see it, and that’s the only thing that will make them take notice. And they have. They’re going to help this peace process and not let it die, because someone’s going to force them to, and that someone is President Bush.
“Rumsfeld hasn’t changed a bit, either. He did everything we love about him in Europe. They said he was annoying and impolite and undiplomatic. They hated him. It was great! Hell, every time the French or German ministers stood up to say something, the guy practically pulled out a crossword puzzle and put on a Walkman.
“Donald Rumsfeld is going to tell these wine-tasters what to do, and they’re going to do it, and that’s that. None of this is going to slip away, in fact it’s all going to succeed, because this president decides what’s right and then does it.
“Bush is ending the days of nineteenth century diplomacy, where a lie wasn’t a lie, it was just a tool. Crap. He’s going to listen to everything they want, then cut it off and say, ‘Thanks for your valuable help. Now here’s what’s going to happen.'”
There was more, but those were the high points. He took out every dent in my head like a fifty-dollar body shop. Now that’s a friend, huh? Boy, did I feel better. “Thanks, Pete,” I said. “So how’s everything else, how’s the family?”
“Actually, I’ve got to run, I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said.
“What’s up?”
“I’ve got to get to the jewelry store before it closes.”
Larry Miller is a contributing humorist to The Daily Standard and a writer, actor, and comedian living in Los Angeles.
