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Nancy Reagan
and the
Ark of the Covenant
18.
When I got back to my hotel room, I called Roy Cohn.
“Hey Roy!”
“Oh, hey Nancy. Everything work out with that shoe box?”
“Funny you’d say that, Roy. Actually, it didn’t. Turns out you sent me to a nightmare home where I was attached.”
“So, you didn’t get the shoebox?”
“‘Am I okay?’ Thank you for asking Roy. No, I’m not okay. I was attacked!”
“Nancy, did you get the shoebox or not?”
So I hung up.
The next morning, Roy kept calling. He apologized for the night before, so I knew he was desperate. Then he explained that the house was the address on file for the retired FBI agent who snuck into Chaplin’s home in 1952, Nick Koenig. Except clearly, the address on file isn’t the address where he’s living.
I asked him, “So you’re telling me that when you sent me to Rancho Cucamonga in the middle of the night, you hadn’t even talked to the guy first? You’re not even sure that he has it?” But he did what he always does when he’s not listening anymore, attack. He went, “If you’d stop complaining for even half a second Nancy, you’d know that I already figured out a solution: Damien Vespers.”
19.
According to legend, Damien Vespers got his start in the political mailer business when he bought a plane ticket to Washington D.C. and spent a week hand copying the name and address of every American who had donated to any Republican federal candidate in the last ten years. It was his great idea to send every fundraising letter to every Republican possible. Now, both of the parties have more or less gotten on board, but the story around town is that Damien still has the biggest, most updated list you can find.
As much as I wish I could have just called Damien and asked him where this Nick lives, we aren’t currently on speaking terms. In the last election, he complained that Ronnie wasn’t far enough to the right and decided to endorse George Wallace instead. Now he rents out his services to the Dave Williams Society and all those freaks still complaining about the Panama Canal and OSHA.
I knew that that was my in. Those freaks adore me.
Personally, I was thrilled that things had started moving in this direction. Spy games are way outside of my comfort zone. But kissing up to political poindexters? I call that a Wednesday. I put on my brightest red suit and asked my driver to take me to the local chapter office of the Dave Williams Society.
20.
The Los Angeles Chapter of the Dave Williams Society runs out of a modest two story home. It was a busy, yellow building whose roof had more gables than traditional Euclidean geometry allows and a wrap-around porch with separate stairs for the main door and each of the three side doors. Despite having so much going on on the outside, the building itself was quite small. I doubt a family of four would have space for an au pair unless they made their kids share a room. It was like they had wasted half their budget on outdoor furnishings and then had to cut back on the house itself.
Inside the front door was a cute, makeshift lobby with long wooden benches and an empty coat rack. In the center of the room was a compact circular table with envelopes and a locked box for donations. It almost felt like I was in the world’s loneliest little church.
To the right was the meeting room. I arrived during what seemed to be some sort of conservative consciousness raising event. There were two dozen people sitting in folding chairs, watching a video of the octogenarian Dave Williams monologuing to camera. I waited for folks to turn around for the surprise of their sad little lives, but they were too focused on the giant head accusing the owners of NFL teams of being communists.
When the Facilitator came into the room–that’s what they call their paid staff–he had the common courtesy to notice me, scream, and drop his coffee. I don’t ask for much!
The spell of the giant head broken, everyone finally turned and looked. When I was done shaking hands, signing autographs, and pretending to be complimented by comparisons to Phyllis Schlafly, I asked the Facilitator if I could have a word. He took me down into a basement blanketed with old mailings.
This man, I kid you not, bowed to me. It felt great. Honestly, if there’s anyone out there obsessed with you, you gotta try it. When I told him what I needed, though, his face shrunk up.
“Oh,” he said. “Nick certainly is a popular guy this week, isn’t he.”
I asked him what he meant, but he had already stopped listening. He mumbled that he needed to make a call real quick and ran out of the room like he’d been needing to pee since Eisenhower was president.
Waiting for him, I started looking through the mailers thumb tacked to the wall. None of them were for the causes I was expecting. There were flyers for affordable housing, Earth Day picnics, and the Equal Rights Amendment. The Dave Williams Society I knew hated all those things. I looked even closer and saw that these weren’t Dave Williams flyers at all. They were from a group called the Women’s Worker's Party for American Socialism.
21.
When the Facilitator came back in the room, I tried to hide that I’d been snooping. He was too stressed to notice. Still looking at the floor, he started apologizing for wasting my time. I could tell by his tone that he wasn’t talking about the time it took to make his mysterious call. This dork was trying to blow me off, but he didn’t know who he was messing with. I’ve been helping Ronnie fundraise for the last thirty years. I went on the attack.
I asked him, nice as I could, “Wow, what a lovely space you have. How long have you been working here?”
He wouldn’t even look at me. He just went, “Thank you, and thank you for your patience, but…”
I knew I didn’t want to hear the end of that sentence, so I cut him off. “Are there always people watching videos here or do I just have good timing?”
“I really do wish that I could help you more, but…”
“Ooh, I see a ring on your finger. Can you tell me about your lovely wife?”
“Usually I would happily give you this address, but you see…”
“And those Dodgers, am I right? What a bunch of baseball!”
“...but someone came by earlier this week asking for the address. And after I gave it to him, I got a real talking to from my boss.”
This was valuable information. Clearly the Facilitator had given the Charlie Chaplin biographer Nick’s address. Now he wasn’t even going to give it to me, too!
“How do you think that boss is gonna feel about you blowing off the First Lady of the United States of America?”
“Well I’m as surprised as you, but…”
“You’re surprised? I’m stunned.”
“...but that was my boss I was talking to. And he told me not to.”
I looked around for something, anything to back this guy into a corner. Then I had an idea.
“Well, does your boss know your office is covered in communist propaganda?
This guy looked at me with giant question marks in his eyes. So I took one of the flyers off the wall and shook it in his face. Some directors might have found the performance over the top, but I always liked to act with a little extra zeal.
When he realized what I was talking about, he calmed down about twenty degrees and took a big sigh of relief. Frankly, the exact opposite of what I was hoping for.
He explained to me that the Dave Williams Society had printed every flyer I saw in that basement. Somewhere along the line, they realized that they could get twice as far with the wrong endorsement than the right one. With some of the liberal policies that are harder to argue against–things like affordable housing, better public schools, workplace safety regulations–it is easier to make the wrong person support it. He showed me half a dozen different organizations that had mailed flyers all across the country. Queer Chicanos Unite. Feminists Against Men. Urban Socialists for the Abolition of the American Family. He explained that these organizations only exist on paper. The closest things they’ve ever had to members were the Dave Williams devotees paying the dues that funded these phony flyers.
I asked him how come nobody ever noticed that they were getting flyers from a fake group, and he told me, “The secret is not to send them to anyone who cares about politics. I mean, if we sent them to members of the Dave Williams Society, they’d start looking for their local Queer Chicanos Unite chapter to protest. And if we sent them to any ardent liberals, they’d try to join. But if you send it to people who vote about a third of the time, they aren’t double checking. Mail isn’t about the letter, it’s about the address list. Could I show you what I mean?”
And here it was! I knew I’d get there. The sucker pulled out a giant binder with addresses for every Republican in California between Los Angeles and Monterey. He started walking me through all of the different categories they break people down into. As he’s doing that, I’m looking over his shoulder to see if Nick Koenig is on any of these pages.
Then the Facilitator slammed the book shut and said, “If you think that’s impressive, you should see the Orange County binder.”
He got up and went into the back room to retrieve the Orange County behemoth. I snagged the LA binder and tore out of there as fast as I could. I could hear him chasing me all the way back to my car, but I never looked back. After my recent raccoon practice, I was getting good at this sort of thing.
22.
While the Nazis interrogate Marion, Indiana Jones finds the Ark of the Covenant. As soon as he finds it, though, the Nazis find him and steal the ark away. This leads us to the big chase scene. Thank goodness! I just love chase scenes. Indiana Jones accidentally led the Nazis right to the Ark of the Covenant, so now he has to stop the truck carrying it to Germany? Yes, please! Where’s the popcorn?
We see a caravan of Nazi trucks racing down a dirt road. Luckily, Indiana Jones has the only thing faster than a car: Someone else’s horse! He rides his stolen steed over a hill and right up alongside the Nazi cars. The Nazis see him riding up and try to shoot him, but it is a movie, so they are firing blanks.
Indiana Jones catches up with one of the trucks and starts fighting with the two guys up front. They’re punching! They’re scrapping! They’re scrambling around in their seats! Heroically, Indy throws them out of the truck. Now he’s got a truck. Not just any truck, the truck with the Ark of the Covenant in it. That’s the good news. The bad news is that there are a half dozen soldiers in the rear. But it’s not their turn to be in the movie yet. So right now they’re just waiting patiently. First, Indiana Jones has to drive some Nazis off the road.
He starts doing my favorite movie car chase trope: swerving the car back and forth. Movies treat this as if it is an unstoppable fighting move. Indiana Jones turns his speeding truck a little to the left or right and trained soldiers fly into ditches, motorcycles flip into lakes, cars careen over cliffs! Who needs the ark when you already have the world’s most powerful weapon: a man driving in a serpentine pattern?
After Indiana Jones has driven the other cars off the road, it is time to fight the soldiers in the back of his truck. He’s able to knock most of them off by swerving a little bit, but two make it all the way to the front. One shoots him in the arm and the other throws him through the windshield. In true movie fashion, Jones doesn’t let those injuries slow him down! Not even when he is getting dragged behind the truck. No siree! He takes his broken body, climbs back up to the driver's seat, and kicks that Nazi in the face.
All foes vanquished, Jones takes the Nazi truck and races back to his hiding spot in Cairo. In some ways, he should consider himself kind of lucky that the Nazis caught him in the first place. If they hadn’t put the ark in this big truck, I don’t know how Indiana would have gotten it back to Cairo. Good luck walking that heavy box across the desert, pal. I hate walking through sand. If it was up to me, the beach would be carpet.
This is the point in the movie where I couldn’t get over the question: Why would the United States government send Indiana Jones on his own?Look at this French Archeologist. He has dozens of Nazi soldiers with him on top of hundreds of Egyptians working at the archeological site. Jones just has his ex-girlfriend and a friend who lives nearby. That isn’t how you staff a military intelligence operation. That’s how you form a rock band.
I mean, as soon as the Nazis find the Ark of the Covenant, they load it onto a truck and send multiple armed vehicles along to escort it safely. When Indiana Jones wants to catch up, he has to borrow a horse. Then, once Jones is done fighting Nazis, he still has to borrow their truck to get the ark to Cairo. Because for some reason, he has to do this whole thing on his own. Are you really telling me that there were no British soldiers at the Suez Canal who could take an afternoon break from making weak tea to help stop the Nazi military from capturing the most powerful weapon in the world? He can’t even get an ambassador’s assistant in a rental truck. I never thought I’d say this, but why can’t we support our archeologists more like the Europeans do?
23.
That night, Sallah arranges passage for Indiana, Marion, and the ark on a ship out of Cairo. As if they weren’t understaffed enough, Sallah is staying in Egypt.
Before boarding the boat, Marion goes up to Sallah and kisses him on his left cheek.
“That is for Fayah.”
Then his right cheek.
“That is for your children…”
Then on the lips.
“...and this is for you.”
Classic brunette move.
You know he’s married, harlot.
I don’t want to blame it all on her. Sallah’s still staggering around with hearts in his eyes like he just kissed Bugs Bunny in a dress.
Sometimes men make me sick.
When I got back to my hotel room, I called Roy Cohn.
“Hey Roy!”
“Oh, hey Nancy. Everything work out with that shoe box?”
“Funny you’d say that, Roy. Actually, it didn’t. Turns out you sent me to a nightmare home where I was attached.”
“So, you didn’t get the shoebox?”
“‘Am I okay?’ Thank you for asking Roy. No, I’m not okay. I was attacked!”
“Nancy, did you get the shoebox or not?”
So I hung up.
The next morning, Roy kept calling. He apologized for the night before, so I knew he was desperate. Then he explained that the house was the address on file for the retired FBI agent who snuck into Chaplin’s home in 1952, Nick Koenig. Except clearly, the address on file isn’t the address where he’s living.
I asked him, “So you’re telling me that when you sent me to Rancho Cucamonga in the middle of the night, you hadn’t even talked to the guy first? You’re not even sure that he has it?” But he did what he always does when he’s not listening anymore, attack. He went, “If you’d stop complaining for even half a second Nancy, you’d know that I already figured out a solution: Damien Vespers.”
19.
According to legend, Damien Vespers got his start in the political mailer business when he bought a plane ticket to Washington D.C. and spent a week hand copying the name and address of every American who had donated to any Republican federal candidate in the last ten years. It was his great idea to send every fundraising letter to every Republican possible. Now, both of the parties have more or less gotten on board, but the story around town is that Damien still has the biggest, most updated list you can find.
As much as I wish I could have just called Damien and asked him where this Nick lives, we aren’t currently on speaking terms. In the last election, he complained that Ronnie wasn’t far enough to the right and decided to endorse George Wallace instead. Now he rents out his services to the Dave Williams Society and all those freaks still complaining about the Panama Canal and OSHA.
I knew that that was my in. Those freaks adore me.
Personally, I was thrilled that things had started moving in this direction. Spy games are way outside of my comfort zone. But kissing up to political poindexters? I call that a Wednesday. I put on my brightest red suit and asked my driver to take me to the local chapter office of the Dave Williams Society.
20.
The Los Angeles Chapter of the Dave Williams Society runs out of a modest two story home. It was a busy, yellow building whose roof had more gables than traditional Euclidean geometry allows and a wrap-around porch with separate stairs for the main door and each of the three side doors. Despite having so much going on on the outside, the building itself was quite small. I doubt a family of four would have space for an au pair unless they made their kids share a room. It was like they had wasted half their budget on outdoor furnishings and then had to cut back on the house itself.
Inside the front door was a cute, makeshift lobby with long wooden benches and an empty coat rack. In the center of the room was a compact circular table with envelopes and a locked box for donations. It almost felt like I was in the world’s loneliest little church.
To the right was the meeting room. I arrived during what seemed to be some sort of conservative consciousness raising event. There were two dozen people sitting in folding chairs, watching a video of the octogenarian Dave Williams monologuing to camera. I waited for folks to turn around for the surprise of their sad little lives, but they were too focused on the giant head accusing the owners of NFL teams of being communists.
When the Facilitator came into the room–that’s what they call their paid staff–he had the common courtesy to notice me, scream, and drop his coffee. I don’t ask for much!
The spell of the giant head broken, everyone finally turned and looked. When I was done shaking hands, signing autographs, and pretending to be complimented by comparisons to Phyllis Schlafly, I asked the Facilitator if I could have a word. He took me down into a basement blanketed with old mailings.
This man, I kid you not, bowed to me. It felt great. Honestly, if there’s anyone out there obsessed with you, you gotta try it. When I told him what I needed, though, his face shrunk up.
“Oh,” he said. “Nick certainly is a popular guy this week, isn’t he.”
I asked him what he meant, but he had already stopped listening. He mumbled that he needed to make a call real quick and ran out of the room like he’d been needing to pee since Eisenhower was president.
Waiting for him, I started looking through the mailers thumb tacked to the wall. None of them were for the causes I was expecting. There were flyers for affordable housing, Earth Day picnics, and the Equal Rights Amendment. The Dave Williams Society I knew hated all those things. I looked even closer and saw that these weren’t Dave Williams flyers at all. They were from a group called the Women’s Worker's Party for American Socialism.
21.
When the Facilitator came back in the room, I tried to hide that I’d been snooping. He was too stressed to notice. Still looking at the floor, he started apologizing for wasting my time. I could tell by his tone that he wasn’t talking about the time it took to make his mysterious call. This dork was trying to blow me off, but he didn’t know who he was messing with. I’ve been helping Ronnie fundraise for the last thirty years. I went on the attack.
I asked him, nice as I could, “Wow, what a lovely space you have. How long have you been working here?”
He wouldn’t even look at me. He just went, “Thank you, and thank you for your patience, but…”
I knew I didn’t want to hear the end of that sentence, so I cut him off. “Are there always people watching videos here or do I just have good timing?”
“I really do wish that I could help you more, but…”
“Ooh, I see a ring on your finger. Can you tell me about your lovely wife?”
“Usually I would happily give you this address, but you see…”
“And those Dodgers, am I right? What a bunch of baseball!”
“...but someone came by earlier this week asking for the address. And after I gave it to him, I got a real talking to from my boss.”
This was valuable information. Clearly the Facilitator had given the Charlie Chaplin biographer Nick’s address. Now he wasn’t even going to give it to me, too!
“How do you think that boss is gonna feel about you blowing off the First Lady of the United States of America?”
“Well I’m as surprised as you, but…”
“You’re surprised? I’m stunned.”
“...but that was my boss I was talking to. And he told me not to.”
I looked around for something, anything to back this guy into a corner. Then I had an idea.
“Well, does your boss know your office is covered in communist propaganda?
This guy looked at me with giant question marks in his eyes. So I took one of the flyers off the wall and shook it in his face. Some directors might have found the performance over the top, but I always liked to act with a little extra zeal.
When he realized what I was talking about, he calmed down about twenty degrees and took a big sigh of relief. Frankly, the exact opposite of what I was hoping for.
He explained to me that the Dave Williams Society had printed every flyer I saw in that basement. Somewhere along the line, they realized that they could get twice as far with the wrong endorsement than the right one. With some of the liberal policies that are harder to argue against–things like affordable housing, better public schools, workplace safety regulations–it is easier to make the wrong person support it. He showed me half a dozen different organizations that had mailed flyers all across the country. Queer Chicanos Unite. Feminists Against Men. Urban Socialists for the Abolition of the American Family. He explained that these organizations only exist on paper. The closest things they’ve ever had to members were the Dave Williams devotees paying the dues that funded these phony flyers.
I asked him how come nobody ever noticed that they were getting flyers from a fake group, and he told me, “The secret is not to send them to anyone who cares about politics. I mean, if we sent them to members of the Dave Williams Society, they’d start looking for their local Queer Chicanos Unite chapter to protest. And if we sent them to any ardent liberals, they’d try to join. But if you send it to people who vote about a third of the time, they aren’t double checking. Mail isn’t about the letter, it’s about the address list. Could I show you what I mean?”
And here it was! I knew I’d get there. The sucker pulled out a giant binder with addresses for every Republican in California between Los Angeles and Monterey. He started walking me through all of the different categories they break people down into. As he’s doing that, I’m looking over his shoulder to see if Nick Koenig is on any of these pages.
Then the Facilitator slammed the book shut and said, “If you think that’s impressive, you should see the Orange County binder.”
He got up and went into the back room to retrieve the Orange County behemoth. I snagged the LA binder and tore out of there as fast as I could. I could hear him chasing me all the way back to my car, but I never looked back. After my recent raccoon practice, I was getting good at this sort of thing.
22.
While the Nazis interrogate Marion, Indiana Jones finds the Ark of the Covenant. As soon as he finds it, though, the Nazis find him and steal the ark away. This leads us to the big chase scene. Thank goodness! I just love chase scenes. Indiana Jones accidentally led the Nazis right to the Ark of the Covenant, so now he has to stop the truck carrying it to Germany? Yes, please! Where’s the popcorn?
We see a caravan of Nazi trucks racing down a dirt road. Luckily, Indiana Jones has the only thing faster than a car: Someone else’s horse! He rides his stolen steed over a hill and right up alongside the Nazi cars. The Nazis see him riding up and try to shoot him, but it is a movie, so they are firing blanks.
Indiana Jones catches up with one of the trucks and starts fighting with the two guys up front. They’re punching! They’re scrapping! They’re scrambling around in their seats! Heroically, Indy throws them out of the truck. Now he’s got a truck. Not just any truck, the truck with the Ark of the Covenant in it. That’s the good news. The bad news is that there are a half dozen soldiers in the rear. But it’s not their turn to be in the movie yet. So right now they’re just waiting patiently. First, Indiana Jones has to drive some Nazis off the road.
He starts doing my favorite movie car chase trope: swerving the car back and forth. Movies treat this as if it is an unstoppable fighting move. Indiana Jones turns his speeding truck a little to the left or right and trained soldiers fly into ditches, motorcycles flip into lakes, cars careen over cliffs! Who needs the ark when you already have the world’s most powerful weapon: a man driving in a serpentine pattern?
After Indiana Jones has driven the other cars off the road, it is time to fight the soldiers in the back of his truck. He’s able to knock most of them off by swerving a little bit, but two make it all the way to the front. One shoots him in the arm and the other throws him through the windshield. In true movie fashion, Jones doesn’t let those injuries slow him down! Not even when he is getting dragged behind the truck. No siree! He takes his broken body, climbs back up to the driver's seat, and kicks that Nazi in the face.
All foes vanquished, Jones takes the Nazi truck and races back to his hiding spot in Cairo. In some ways, he should consider himself kind of lucky that the Nazis caught him in the first place. If they hadn’t put the ark in this big truck, I don’t know how Indiana would have gotten it back to Cairo. Good luck walking that heavy box across the desert, pal. I hate walking through sand. If it was up to me, the beach would be carpet.
This is the point in the movie where I couldn’t get over the question: Why would the United States government send Indiana Jones on his own?Look at this French Archeologist. He has dozens of Nazi soldiers with him on top of hundreds of Egyptians working at the archeological site. Jones just has his ex-girlfriend and a friend who lives nearby. That isn’t how you staff a military intelligence operation. That’s how you form a rock band.
I mean, as soon as the Nazis find the Ark of the Covenant, they load it onto a truck and send multiple armed vehicles along to escort it safely. When Indiana Jones wants to catch up, he has to borrow a horse. Then, once Jones is done fighting Nazis, he still has to borrow their truck to get the ark to Cairo. Because for some reason, he has to do this whole thing on his own. Are you really telling me that there were no British soldiers at the Suez Canal who could take an afternoon break from making weak tea to help stop the Nazi military from capturing the most powerful weapon in the world? He can’t even get an ambassador’s assistant in a rental truck. I never thought I’d say this, but why can’t we support our archeologists more like the Europeans do?
23.
That night, Sallah arranges passage for Indiana, Marion, and the ark on a ship out of Cairo. As if they weren’t understaffed enough, Sallah is staying in Egypt.
Before boarding the boat, Marion goes up to Sallah and kisses him on his left cheek.
“That is for Fayah.”
Then his right cheek.
“That is for your children…”
Then on the lips.
“...and this is for you.”
Classic brunette move.
You know he’s married, harlot.
I don’t want to blame it all on her. Sallah’s still staggering around with hearts in his eyes like he just kissed Bugs Bunny in a dress.
Sometimes men make me sick.
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