It was love at first word, at last word, at ever and ever at each given word.
Spicer, light of the podium, heat of the briefing room. My fiery friend, my spin machine. Spi-cey: the slip of the tongue sliding a sigh of two sips up the palate to slide, at last, out the stretched open lips. Spi. Cey. He was Sean, plain Sean, at the podium, standing erect in his suit. He was Bro Spice when chumming with his buddies from Portsmouth Abbey. He was Loser to the President. He was Sean Michael Spicer on the dotted line. But in my eyes he was always Spicey. Spi. Cey. Did he have a precursor? He did, indeed he did. In point of fact, there might have been no Spicey to me at all had I not interviewed, one election, another press secretary, under the previous administration, surrounded by cherry blossoms and the Secret Service. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Russia is what the other journalists, the Times, WAPO, and other noble-handed questioners, focused on. But I could see only my simmering Spicey, surrounded by enemies, strong and swollen with his slander.
Oh. Spi. Cey. Just look at this tangle of wires and half-truths.
I looked and looked at him, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved him more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth. He was only the vague-ghost aura of the archivist from the term before — but I loved him, this Spicey, pale and pointy-eared and blustering with another man’s lies. He could stammer and point — I didn’t care. I would still go crazy with lust at the mere sound of his voice.
You have to be a visionary and a magician of the mind, a being of unenviable melancholy, with a cauldron of hot caramel in your loins and a hyper-erotic combustion resolutely afire in your hooded eyes (oh, how you have to stammer and shrug!), in order to understand, by indisputable facts — the slightly feline sweep of hair, the fierceness of a furrowed brow, and other indices which lust and want and exhalations of breath forbid me to ruminate — the little sous chef of word salad among the earnest line; he stands recognized by them and unaware himself of his awe-inspiring gesticulations and syntax of circular logic.
I recall certain questions, those he would scorch with the white-hot heat of gas-light, when after asking their fill of him — after wonderful, loaded exertions that left them perplexed and word-bare–I would focus him in my sight with, at last, a inward groan of lustful wanting (his glowing skin glistening in the flashes coming from the hungry photographers through the windows of their cameras, his pale-blonde lashes blinking, his baby blue eyes more empty than ever–for all the world a little infant still in the confusion of the light after the womb)–and the affection would grow stronger and sink to shame and embarrassment, and I would simmer and silently attempt to sway my sweet simple Spicey to look at me, and breathe out his name, and caress his face gently with my eyes and mutely ask him his acquiescence, and at the peak of this faulted terrible selfless yearning (with my pen actually hanging over the naked page and ready to write), all at once, ironically, horribly, lust would swell again — and “the ban is not a ban, we’ve made that clear” Spicey would say with a sigh to heaven, and the next moment the sweetness and the haze — all would be destroyed in the wake of unknown answers, washed away is a tumultuous tide of torment released from his turgid tirade to leave me tepid and spent.
We had asked everything. We had really learned nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our pointed questions had only deflected with a winding path of half-truths the earnest, distrustful, impatient, dissatisfied country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of the under-educated, the bait clickers, the Snapchat news gatherers, those who could not grasp critical thinking, and his answers in the briefing room — every day, every day — were of little consequence, but still they laid my soul bare to his piercing gaze and distracted me with their feint-hearted promise of truth.
I love you. I was a mono-syllabic imbecile, but I love you. I was unfair and harsh, and biased, and everything you said, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais! And there were times when I knew how frustrated you felt, and it was hell to know it, my excitable one. Spicey boy, saucy Sean Spicer.
Briefings are brief. I begged you silently. From here to that solid podium you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very small path. I begged you again to make that walk. Now. Right now. To come to me as you were, so we shall live happily ever after.
It is the only thing that matters Spicey. The rest is just blues and fake news.