Like my office, it is immaculate. The housekeeper comes once a week and cleans the place from top to bottom. She does an inventory of my refrigerator, getting rid of anything past its prime and replacing it, to ensure that my food is always fresh.
My refrigerator is packed with bottles of Corona, slices of capicola and cave-aged Gruyère (what I’ve always called “cave cheese”), sirloin and ribeye, Fresca, plastic clamshells full of prepared salads from Whole Foods, and many, many containers of Greek yogurt, one of every flavor available. In my freezer, there are bottles of pepper-infused vodka, three different kinds of ice cream (I am more interested in variety than I am loyal to any particular flavor), and frozen tater tots. I don’t often end up eating any of this food, I must admit, but it doesn’t always get wasted. When things are on the bubble, I encourage my housekeeper or gardener to take what they want for their own families.
I like my house to be empty of people when I arrive, but I also like the lights to be on and some soft music playing: old indie rock, ideally. Arcade Fire or the Strokes or the Killers or Franz Ferdinand or Tom Waits or something.
Tonight, I come home and head straight for my study on the top floor, which is in a gabled attic full of natural light. I pour myself a bourbon, filling to the brim the glass kept chilled in a little freezer up here. I sip it slowly at first, then more greedily until the warmth and sweetness spreads into my brain and my belly and I start to feel more solid, more sensible, freer.
I drink Fresca because LBJ drank Fresca. He remains my favorite executive and a model as a power player with respect to winning games by any means necessary. But Fresca doesn’t go very well with bourbon, so I have a supply of specially ordered “White Coke” up here in my study. I have several cases that I purchased illegally from North Korea, where the product is still manufactured. What else are you supposed to do with money? I don’t do normal snortable coke anymore. This is as close as I get.
During World War II, General Eisenhower once gave Marshal Zhukov of the Soviet Union a Coca-Cola. The two famous generals were keen admirers of each other, but even so, General Zhukov was flummoxed and frustrated with how much he enjoyed the rust-colored imperialist beverage. He asked for more. Much more. He drank as much as he could in secret while fighting the Nazis and guzzled it by the chilled bucketload afterward at the Potsdam conference. Yet he still couldn’t get enough.
After the war was over, Zhukov had to go back to Stalin’s Russia. It was a major drag for him. As a gift to Zhukov, when Eisenhower became president, he ordered the Coca-Cola corporation to find a way to remove the coloring from Coke and put the clear liquid in white bottles with straight sides, like vodka. The corporation even added a red star. Eisenhower then ordered Coca-Cola to begin shipping this White Coke directly to Zhukov via its Marshall Plan–era factories and distribution centers in Eastern Europe.
Zhukov returned the favor on his end, helping Coca-Cola move its products more easily through jointly controlled Austria. And Zhukov was able to enjoy drinking Coca-Cola directly in front of Stalin and his own troops, who assumed it was just vodka. Rust-colored Coke became White Coke, which eventually became a staple for the high command of many communist countries after the formula for Coke was outright stolen during the Brezhnev era. North Korea, my current supplier, was one of the first countries to begin manufacturing it in bulk.
I consider my supply a delicate luxury, and I hope it lasts me the rest of my life. It tastes the same as regular Coke, though one time there was a giant beetle in one of the bottles, which somehow only added to the authenticity and mystique.
I finish my first straight glass of Four Roses and then crack open a bottle of White Coke. I pour a little into the glass and mix it with more bourbon, then I stare out my attic window at the neighborhood below me. Young people are starting to come out to mingle at the bars across the street. I consider going out. But to do what? To meet someone new?
No. I finish my bourbon and White Coke, and by this time I’m a little hungry and a little sleepy. I make myself a full pan of tater tots, but I only end up eating a few. I eat a cup of blueberry yogurt and snuggle into my giant bed in my room, which is exactly the same as my giant bed at work. I fall into a deep, dreamless sleep that seems to yawn on forever, like a warm throat swallowing me for infinity. I only wake up once in the middle of the night, which is unusual for me. I typically wake up four or five times when I’m sleeping at home all alone. I get up to use the bathroom and while I’m sitting there on the toilet, staring through the open door at my empty bed, I suddenly realize that my children are older than I was when my mother killed herself.
“That means that I am a better mother than she was, by default,” I say out loud. I throw myself back into bed, and the next thing I know, I’ve been awoken by the doorbell, which someone is basically leaning on, ringing it over and over again.
I hit the buzzer that opens the door and then fumble around until I find a clean sweatshirt, which I slip on over the Arcade Fire T-shirt that doubles as my pajama top. Somehow I managed to fall back asleep with my pajama bottoms still attached to one of my
