I was a little concerned with Wayne’s return to the fold, because of his commitment to not drinking, and my commitment to not stop drinking. Of course I knew I’d have to come over from my dark side and meet him. I missed my friend, and with the book coming out in August, we both know we’ve got the Lord’s work to do.

It was a learning experience from my standpoint. As someone who’s been unfamiliar with a completely sober lifestyle since the early days of the first Reagan Administration, most of my days are measured on the HUB Metric, or “Hours Until Beers.” I have the air of indestructibility of someone who spent his life imbibing like Charles Bukowski and have proudly never missed a day of work due to my avocation. Granted, it may seem odd to the occasional workplace observer that I perspire an inordinate amount for the relative paucity of exertion expended at pecking at a keyboard, but I have always gotten up in the morning and made the donuts. Also, like Charles Bukowski, I’ve been fond of referring to recovering alcoholics as “quitters.”

I’ve put all the boozer hubris behind me now, though I’ll keep a few arrows in my quiver for Christians and Republicans who embrace sobriety to curry favor after a criminal investigation or a prominent sexual indiscretion.

I have a different appreciation for the sober life now seeing Wayne approach it with the same focus and determination he used to apply towards screwing me out of Dan Quayle gym bags and autographed Hubert Humphrey speech albums in online auctions. He attended meetings every day that he was here, and out of support and curiosity, I promised to attend future meetings with him, if for no other reason than for the free coffee. I’m keeping an open mind and open ears and thinking I can learn something from him if I ever want to introduce sobriety into my life.

It’s just that that time isn’t now.

We had a wonderfully productive week while he was here and you’ll see big changes soon on the Veeps site (soon to be “www.veeps.us”) and the blog (moving soon to “veepsblog.com”). The book has not only gone from gorgeous to hypnotically dazzling, but is 127% more informative as well. We’ve both felt for too long that the canon of Executive Branch tomes is missing an expansive volume on this country’s Vice Presidents that is both informative and entertaining, and by the sheer beauty of its design is capable of producing erections in bibliophiles and others who experience visceral arousal at such things. We feel that we’ve accomplished all three.

In the meantime, there are questions to be answered, lists to be addressed, and shoe leather to be burned. Our first order of business is to get the galleys to America’s influential political personalities and reviewers to see if we can induce them into lending their imprimatur to this very important work; testimonials that we can present on the back of the book where they say, in their own distinguished voices and the parlance of their industry, “Damn, this fucker’s pretty good!”

Some naysayers may use the loaded term “mercenary,” but we are entirely inclusive and non-partisan in soliciting those who would graciously deign to lend their influential voices to this book. If Sean Hannity is particulary captivated by the flamboyant elegance of William Rufus DeVane King and Bill Moyers gets a chuckle out of the part where Aaron Burr severs a man’s arm, then we would have no compunction about posting their comments side by side. Much like VeepsBlog, the back cover of Veeps: Profiles In Insignificance will be a big tent.

We’re aiming for the fences here. If anyone out there knows how we can get the PDF of the book on George Will’s Blackberry, there’s a $25 gift card at Bed, Bath, and Beyond in it for you, compliments of Top Shelf Productions.

In any event, Veeps: Profiles In Insignificance is going to be the toast of the summer publishing season. Come August and September, this will be the hot read of the Indian summer set and will be seen in beach bags on sandy shores from Maine to Maui. And you can tell all your friends that you were then, before Bill and Wayne took the political and literary world by storm and introduced Vice Presidential anecdotes as a legitimate topic of social discourse in much the same way and with the same seismic result as Richard Knerr and Spud Melin achieved when they introduced the Hula Hoop.

Those impulses still get me in trouble. Wayne came to a point where he had to address his. But more about that in a moment.

It was still another year before Wayne and I finally met. We began sparring in a chatroom popular among VP foamers. It was a healthy give-and-take. I recommended he be drug-tested for even putting Levi Parsons Morton in the same league as John Nance Garner and he thought I was very nearly masturbatory on the subject of Thomas Riley Marshall. I began working on my revenge for him almost getting me shot or arrested by the police just so he could steal Dan Quayle’s duffle bag from me. I had a fairly elaborate ruse planned involving a date rape drug, a gallon of fake blood, and an amateur actress friend who convinced me she was born to play a murdered 17-year-old prostitute. My shrink talked me out of it, though, convincing me that this was a road that could easily escalate to my imprisonment.

I wasn’t happy about it but I had to concede he was probably right, and it’s my obsessive-compulsive nature that has lost me tens of thousands of dollars in ill-considered wagers over the years. That alone was a high-enough price to pay. Time behind bars seemed a little much still.

Through our gently-hostile exchanges in the VP chatroom we started realizing we had a practically disturbing amount in common: The Vice Presidential coincidences were notable but not terribly surprising given our particular shared passion–he’d gotten the phone number of one of the girls I was maced with at a Dan Quayle rally in Portland in 1991; I had tried unsuccessfully to infiltrate a 1979 audience Wayne’s Boy Scout Troop received with Walter Mondale where the Vice President took a liking to Wayne for his eleborate illustration of the Veep and nicknamed him “Hot Sauce” (I was 13 and all I could find was my old Cub Scout uniform, which red-flagged me instantly).

The personal parallels were a bit more startling. We’d gone to the same high school several years apart, ditto with college and I’d very likely served him on a fake ID when I was bartending at Taylor’s Tavern in Eugene, Oregon. We’d both snorted cocaine at Taylor’s during or after a Curtis Salgado show, and he threw up in the bathroom on my last night there during a Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs show when I was busy onstage responsible for making sure Jimmy never ran out of beer or bourbon.

In late summer 2001 I’d lost almost everything I had betting on a proprietary search technology that my bosses had tried to sell at the height of the dot-com boom for $80 million, but now the market had crashed. They had ruined the company in a storm of cocaine, strippers, and hubris, yet when the tech crash came, they were still poised to unload the search engine placement technology to a wealthy pornographer for $4 million, and I was a junior partner who stood to make a 12.5% share off this sale. I wasn’t getting paid and was living off what was left of my 401(k), but I stood to make $500 K off this windfall (it was weeks later that we finally learned that all the time they’d been wining and dining my one remaining boss [the other embezzled $800,000 from the company, abandoned his wife and four children and moved in with his 21-year-old mistress], they were learning how the pornographer’s college-age techie son could reverse-engineer the search placement tool for $3,000, and while my boss was waiting in a Holiday Inn in Inglewood to sign the final papers, they canceled his return flight home and refused to return his calls).

But I didn’t know any of that yet, and not working and with a big payday coming, I decided to take a vacation to Maryland for the fifth anniversary of Spiro Agnew’s death.

Unfortunately, that anniversary fell on September 17, 2001, and I had to take a Trailways across the country after the planes were grounded for the better part of the previous week. Nonetheless, I made it to Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens cemetary in Timonium, Maryland on the morning of September 17.

I had purchased a cheap pair of clippers and gave myself an Agnew buzzcut in the Trailways depot in Gary, Indiana in anticipation of my visit, but after five days on a bus I didn’t look good. I didn’t care, but I was quite frankly appalled at the dearth of mourners at Vice President Agnew’s gravesite. Yes, it was a Monday, and Humphrey and Mondale always got better play in Veep circles, and people were still freaked out about the terrorism thing, even though it had been almost more than a week. But I thought it was an absolute disgrace.

Nonetheless, I was more than a little annoyed at the one mourner who was there and was circling the grave with a video camera. He made a snide comment when I accidentally nudged the bouquet of Black-Eyed Susans that he’d already laid on the grave. I was leaving my own bouquet. I wasn’t trying to shove his out of the way or out-mourn him or anything. I just wanted to leave a respectful arrangement in a way that would offer my respects and make a good picture, and then I just wanted to take a few minutes and read from Agnew’s May 8, 1970 post-Kent State speech.

But it was this one asshole with the camera who wouldn’t step off and shut up for five minutes. He had no respect for the solemnity of the moment and was walking near and around the gravesite reciting bullet-point details from Agnew’s biography. Any moron who knows Maryland from Meryl Streep can tell you backwards and forwards Agnew’s career in Maryland politics, and no one needs to be reminded that his first name was really Ted. I had no idea for whose benefit he was doing this video, but he was rubbing my fur wrong eight ways from Sunday, and I told him with great restraint that it might be nice if he piped down for four seconds and let someone else give tribute. I probably shouldn’t have punctuated my request by suggesting he looked like he might be more comfortable at Rockefeller’s gravesite “doing your little half-Nelson there.”

It’s hard to explain to a layperson, but there’s nothing that an Agnewphile hates more than being at the butt end of a Nelson Rockefeller joke. You just don’t go there unless you’re looking for trouble.

It worked, and in a matter of minutes, we wound up in a scuffle that was arguably inappropriate for the solemn venue in which we had both come for ostensibly separate but equally reverent reasons. Timonium police had to be called and we were placed under arrest for battery, disturbing the peace, and desecration of a gravesite (we wound up rolling onto former Balitimore Colts’ assistant coach Don McAfferty’s grave and I tried to brain my aggressor with a horseshoe that a fan-mourner had left near McAfferty’s tombstone). It was when we both insisted we wanted to press charges against the other that I realized who this was. “Mr. Kelter, I should tell you that Mr. Shellabarger has also expressed his intent to pursue criminal charges against you.”

I couldn’t believe it. This could be a coincidence but it would be too remarkable. This was my nemesis and the bane of my Vice Presidential passions, Wayne Shellabarger. I was incredulous, but I kept my cool and grudgingly agreed to drop the charges if he would as well (we were in separate holding rooms). I didn’t want to press charges because I didn’t want to wind up in a legal imbroglio in Maryland (though it would have given me a notch on my belt to share with my deceased Veep hero, Spiro T.) that would wind up with a bench warrant for my arrest, because there was going to be no way I’d be able to come back for trial. The owners of the cemetery promised not to press charges if we agreed to a lifetime ban from the premises (not a worry; I was going to grow my hair back so I knew I could always sneak my way back in in a year or two when the heat cooled).

Besides, like the fake hostage call, I had a grudging but growing respect for Wayne that he and I were the only mourners to make the trip to Dulaney Valley for this solemn and criminally-overlooked anniversary. I agreed, and was released with a $175 fine for disturbing the peace.

Wayne and I caught up with one another outside the jail. He knew it was me as soon as they told him I wanted to press charges against him. We’d known for awhile that it was inevitable with our passion and our mutual history that we’d meet someday, but we never knew when that would be, and there was still enough posturing surface tension that neither of us was going to initiate. We’d come to blows on one of the most sacred pilgramages of each of our lives, so it seemed an apropos time to bury the hatchet and break bread like men–in this case, over four six-packs of Yuengling and a fifth of Burnett’s Vodka in my room at the Red Roof Inn in Linthicum Heights. We looked at our citations and realized that our lifetime ban from Dulaney Gardens didn’t officially start until September 18, so after dark we used the last hour or two of the day to head back to the cemetery pay our respects properly.

And the rest is history. Sure, it hasn’t been all Kumbaya and non-sexual man love since, but he’s become like a brother to me, and I’d take a Squeaky Fromme bullet for him. We realized that we would rather pursue our Veep passion on the same team than using it against one another.

We learned that we both have a shared misery in that our Veeps obsessions contributed to the dissolution of our respective marriages. And I learned that Wayne was a talented courtroom sketch artist who’s a rising star in America’s courtroom sketch artist community. I had no idea there was a courtroom sketch artist community, but on the other hand, I met someone last week who had no idea there was a VP foamers community.

And in the process of formally getting to know one another, we discovered that we both shared a dream of opening a Vice Presidential museum to honor this most unfairly maligned class of American statesmen. Since then, we’ve been pooling our eBay windfalls and portions of our disposable income towards that end, and as of today we’ve saved nearly $3,100 to put towards our dream.

Granted, that’s already mostly spent on blueprints and then we’re spending the rest through a renowned Veep collector but it isn’t going to buy us more than some sequins off of Lady Bird Johnson’s 1961 Inaugural gown, a a lens from James Schoolcraft Sherman’s glasses, an actual bucket from John Nance Garner’s family farm (it’s wooden but we’re going to attach a metal bottom, add yellow food coloring and keep it on a hidden hotplate on simmer so it’s constantly steaming–get it?), a half-smoked pack of Chesterfields from Richard Nixon, and the pistol that a cobbler named Thaddeus Pursival was going to use to assassinate Schuyler Colfax (not too many people know about this but if you go to the library at Mid Plains Community College in North Platte, Nebraska, they’ve got transcripts of the definitive oral history of the incident, and there’s a librarian there named Loy Folger who will talk your ear off about it and how Pursival was certain that Colfax was complicit in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination because he refused an invitation to Ford’s Theater with Lincoln on April 14, 1965). But it’s a start.

The rest we’ll get from our own collections (I can’t get him to cop to how he got it, but he’s already agreed to loan the Quayle gym bag) and from donations. Given my propensity for what he thinks are blind impulse wagers and my lifetime gambling record, Wayne isn’t too keen on me throwing down our hard-raised sawbucks so recklessly, but I don’t bet on a whim, and if it’s a lock I can double or triple our money, I still think I can sell him.

A surer bet is our book, Veeps: Profiles In Insignificance, due out in August on Top Shelf Publications. Everything that the IRS and our various attorneys, plaintiffs, and creditors don’t get is going to our museum.

That was supposed to be our plan for 2008, after our mutual divorces and our respective vices throwing wrenches into the engines of our lives, and it’s still going to happen if we’ve got anything to say about it, but we ran into a bit of a speedbump early in January. Wayne’s a slave to his his own bad habits as much as I am. He has an affection for the drink as deep as mine, and he has no compunction about imbibing before indulging one of his other loves, which is golf. He’s as paycheck-to-paycheck as I am, and country club dues would cut into the money we’re saving for our museum, so Wayne has always fancied sneaking into golf courses before they open and squeezing in a quick nine holes.

This isn’t an occasional thing, either. If I’m not getting laid, at the end of a hard night of drinking, I need a large plate of carnage, a nearby pack of smokes that I can stumble outside with, my couch, and a television in front of it showing an uncensored cut of Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction, Apocalypse Now, or The Godfather.

That’s my comfort zone. Wayne’s is an unattended golf course. When we’ve been drinking together, it’s only been a problem when we’ve been on a road trip. If I wake up and he’s gone, that means I need to get the car and find the nearest golf course and go looking for him. Because he didn’t make it back by dawn, it’s always a race against the clock, because that means that he golfed himself really drunk (which is no mean feat after our storied consumption sessions, which always played out the night before). I need to find him before the golf course opens and someone else finds him. It doesn’t happen that often, but it happens often enough that I’ve had to buy a pair of binoculars for the first time in my life, to try and find his unconscious ass without having to get out of the car and walk the whole goddamn course.

Unfortunately, on a recent crack-of-dawn visit to Moraga Country Club, Wayne celebrated his 37 by polishing a pint of Crown Royal and two Oxycontin and managed to find his way into the clubhouse, where the club pro found him unconscious at noon that day. I don’t know why he went into the clubhouse, and I sure don’t know how he got in there, but he told me later that he thought he remembered that the late Portuguese-American golfing sensation Champagne Tony Lema had a club on display inside the clubhouse (turns out it was in Monarch Bay in San Leandro, which makes sense because that’s where the “Tony Lema Golf Course” is, but I’ll cut him some slack, because when we’ve had roaring streams of liquor coursing through our bloodstreams, no one ever accused us of spending too much time thinking things through clearly).

In any case, this wasn’t the first time Wayne had been caught on the somnolent end of a slightly lubricated and uninvited morning on the links, and it was the opinion of the courts that his latest unauthorized sojourn on the front nine suggested a problem that needed addressing and mandated four weeks of institutionalized reflection.

So, this year has been bittersweet, but it’s been all great this week as Wayne is whipsmart, the picture of sobriety, and back in the fold. We’ve had to make a few minor readjustments to our interpersonal dynamic, but he’s assured me he’s not going to take me to task for my continued affection for drink as long as I stop short of anything that involves tears, unconsciousness, inappropriate nudity or arrest. Five days, and so far so good!

As I’ve said, Wayne’s return has been the reason for the lapse in the blog the last few days, but it’s all for the greater good. My friend is back in the fold and our plans are back on track. With one of us sober and one of us 50% less drunk, the energy that we’ve got to bring to our Veeps: Profiles In Insignificance book and our in-development Veeps museum is mighty, and we’re just that much more of a force to be reckoned with.

Also, the common ground we’ve discovered in our recalibrated choice of consumables is only going to be a boon for the American tobacco industry, which in a recessed economy, can only contribute to a rising tide that will lift everyone’s boats.

And another thing is for certain: The next several months will belong to us and the gravitas and esteem that will be help deliver at long last to the forever disrespected office of the American Vice Presidency. We’re going to be spectacular and we’re going to change the world as we know it. 2007 owned us, but we’re going to own 2008 and make it our bitch. This is the year we make our names in the world. I would prefer it’s for all the right reasons, but I’ll take it either way.

Tomorrow I have a long day at my third job, some long-overdue personal business, and then an alcohol-involved barbecue. So, your temporary patience is appreciated as I take only my 3rd and 4th days off from VeepsBlog 2008 since the Iowa Caucuses on January 3rd.

This time off will make this a better blog, and an outstanding book when Veeps: Profiles in Insignificance is released in August.

Seriously, this is going to be the best-looking book on the Vice Presidents ever written, and I will stand by that with every penny of my $2,140.08 worth of personal assets. And that includes my Luscious Jackson CDs.

I know I’m going to laugh about all of this someday–the threatening letters from the IRS, the $0.68 noodle bowls for lunch, one of my two sole pairs of pants literally dissolving from being washed three times a week. This is all about character-building and some hokum about the night being darkest before the dawn.

But thank you, loyal reader, for tuning in and following the spellbinding and protracted train derailment that is currently my life. You’ll be able to say you were there when, and we’ll all have a good chuckle together a year from now when Wayne and I are the toast of all the Vice Presidential literature chatrooms and young women are stealing our clothing out of the dryers of our apartment building laundry rooms just to grab a piece of a tandem en fuego with the process of becoming great.

I will be back on Sunday morning, with “Waxin’ Wayne, Part 2.” In the meantime, please continue through this blog and peruse the archives of a nearly-uninterrupted four months of blogging  to experience what you might have missed. You brew the coffee and I’ll be back in your breakfast nook with fresh reflections in 32 hours.

]]> http://veepsblog.com/2008/05/03/coming-sunday-waxin-wayne-part-2/feed/ 0 veeps2008 http://veepsblog.com/2008/05/01/waxin-wayne-part-1/ http://veepsblog.com/2008/05/01/waxin-wayne-part-1/#comments Fri, 02 May 2008 07:59:17 +0000 Bill K. http://veeps2008.wordpress.com/?p=150 Continue reading →]]> I’ll be brief tonight, simply because there’s not much night left. The blog entries are going to be a bit light this week and next for the most ironic of reasons: I don’t have time to write because the co-author of our book, Veeps: Profiles In Insignificance is in town for a visit, and I’ll be busy reconnecting with him and plotting our next move in taking our book from the galleys to the stratosphere.

For those of you who’ve read much on this blog and our accompanying profile in the Cedar Rapids Gazette this past January, you know that Wayne and I share a unique history centered around our passion for the Vice Presidents. We both caught the Veep bug early. For years, we brushed past one another in Veep chatrooms and jousting one another for Vice Presidential memorabilia on eBay.

Before we even met one another, I received a torrent of hateful emails from him when I landed an Alben Barkley undershirt in a 1999 online auction on an eBay offshoot. I didn’t do anything technically wrong, but I contacted the seller in Silver Springs, Maryland, and promised him a rare bootleg copy of 1968 Curtis LeMay stump speeches that I happened to have two copies of if he’d withdraw his auction at the last minute and let me pay $5 over what it looked like Wayne was going to pay. That wasn’t wrong. That was just shrewd wheeling and dealing, and smart strategy.

Well, he didn’t see it that way. It was early in 2000 that we were waiting out an auction for a Dan Quayle gym bag and jar of Ben-Gay from his House of Representative years when he was known more for his pickup basketball sessions in the Congressional gymnasium than his legislative dedication. I didn’t have any tricks up my sleeve this time. I thought we’d just fight it out like men.

That made one of us. I was at my computer counting down the last 120 seconds before the auction closed, confident that my wrist and fingers were faster than Wayne’s and the winning last-second bid would be mine.

I had my hand on my mouse and was waiting for the magic hour when I heard sirens. I didn’t think anything of it. I had an auction to worry about. The sirens kept getting closer, and closer. I figured they’d just blow past.

Then they stopped in front of my apartment. I still didn’t pay much attention. I wanted that goddamned Quayle swag, and I sure as well wasn’t going to let Wayne have it. I didn’t care if the house was burning.

Fifteen seconds later and 90 seconds until the close of the auction and there are people pounding at my door, telling me to open it right goddamn now or it was coming off the hinges. I was spooked, and I had no idea what the hell was going on. I heard the “police” part, and I sure as hell heard the pounding and threats, but I was quite frankly befuddled why they were so anxious to get inside my apartment, and with 65 seconds left until the auction’s close, I still didn’t want to get up and answer the door.

I heard more sirens approaching and more tires screeching to a halt in front of my home, and I was pretty damned rattled at this point–35 seconds before the auction closed. I had my bid ready. I was there. And I’d deal with this obviously pressing issue afterward–in, like, 45 seconds. As soon as I heard my name–”Mr. Kelter, we are entering this apartment in ten seconds if you do not open this door!”–I had to rethink my dedication to winning the auction.

Uncle. They called me by my name. I don’t know what the hell is going on, but they’re obviously here for me, and I’ve just heard no less than four police cars skid to a halt in front of the house in which I rent an apartment. In a moment of clarity, I realized this could all end badly, so I left my computer and yelled that I was unarmed and coming to let them in.

Well, they’d received a phone call that a Bill Kelter was holding his girlfriend, Tipper–a fairly clever touch I thought–at knifepoint and was going to slit her throat and then take a revolver and blow his brains out because he was yelling out the window about how he was tired of being a loser and was going to end his miserable life right here and now.

It took about 90 minutes to sort the whole mess out. They wouldn’t believe the auction motive, but it was clear fairly quickly there was no hostage situation occurring inside my apartment. But the auction was over and someone–”suckitfanboy2000″ who just created their account that afternoon and had a PO box in San Francisco just a few miles from where I knew Wayne lived–came away with the Quayle collectibles. I still wasn’t out of the woods until they told me days later that the call came from a cell phone somewhere in the Bay Area that they weren’t able to locate and was registered under an assumed name.

He never ‘fessed to it, but he didn’t need to–after we became friends, I saw the dufflebag and the Ben-Gay in his trophy case in his apartment (he still claims he bought it re-auctioned in 2003).

Anyway, there are a number of choice things I can say about Wayne, and some of them are quite choice given that, beyond all odds, he would become one of my best friends and closest compatriots. More on this tomorrow.