Cocktailhag, the blog

When my Dad was practicing criminal law in Portland in the 1960′s, he exposed my innocent, Holy Names educated mother to a lot of street smarts and lingo that stuck with her forever, and every so often she would unexpectedly astonish me with some expression or term more suited to a jaded beat cop than the sweet first grade teacher I knew. I was once attempting to repair and paint a particularly crappy cabinet in the basement stairwell, and she said, “Well, some rapist built that.  Your father thought I’d be safe because I was eight months pregnant at the time.”  I had already learned that the reason she drove so many strange cars when we were little also had to do with this curious aspect of criminal law finance, and I could never help but wonder what the guy who gave us the Kirby vacuum with its 700 attachments was accused of doing.  Another time, she almost absently told me that she had spotted and reported two hookers that had shown up at the Thunderbird bar, the hotel/restaurant where she also worked as a cashier to make ends meet and eagerly helped get me a job there busing tables as soon as I was old enough.  ”How did you know they were hookers?”  I asked, naturally curious as all teenagers are about such things, and chagrined that I hadn’t been there.  ”Oh, you could tell.  They were a salt and pepper pair.” (!)   Other times I would point out some frightening looking dive bar, and she’d say, as often as not, “I’ve been in there.  Your father took me once so he could meet a witness.”

Since my parents divorced when I was too young to have experienced this weird underworld first hand, and since then Dad had moved to Burns, Oregon where he had become a respectable country lawyer and later DA, all this seemed almost too unbelievable, in a good way, to be true.   His firm even represented the locally infamous Nate Zussman, who owned night clubs that were extra profitable because they had what was then called “procuring” as a side business.  This proved fleetingly awkward when somebody started to try to make an “arrangement” with my mom while he and my dad were conferring across the crowded room, and Nate had to run over to intervene, if only for appearance’s sake.  ”Of course he’s guilty,” Dad later dismissively told my mom by way of explanation.  Zussman also didn’t settle his bills with Oldsmobiles, vacuum cleaners, or bad cabinetry, needless to say, so the matter was thus settled.

Probably my favorite term I learned through these sporadic inquiries was the one used for those who liked to expose themselves to the unsuspecting, “lily wavers,” but I’d forgotten it for many years until today, when I read a story about Rahm Emanuel.  (h/t Huffpo…)

Outgoing Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) had some choice words for White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel during a recent radio interview in which he called the top Obama adviser “the son of the devil’s spawn.”

“He is an individual who would sell his mother to get a vote. He would strap his children to the front end of a steam locomotive,” Massa said of Emanuel’s desire to lock up vital votes on health care reform. “You think that somehow they didn’tcome after me to get rid of me because my vote is the deciding vote in the health care bill? Then, ladies and gentlemen, you live today in a world that is so innocent as to not understand what’s going on in Washington, D.C.”

According to an account given by Massa, he and Emanuel have had tense confrontations in the past, including one particularly memorable incident in the shower of the Congressional gym.

“Let me tell you a story about Rahm Emanuel,” Massa started. “I was a congressman in my first eight weeks, and I was in the congressional gym, and I went down and I worked out and I went into the showers…I’m sitting there showering, naked as a jaybird and here comes Rahm Emanuel not even with a towel wrapped around his tush, poking his finger in my chest, yelling at me because I wasn’t going to vote for the president’s budget. Do you know how awkward it is to have a political argument with a naked man?

Well, if you’re a repressed homo, which it seems that Massa is, and you’re also sort of doughy and revolting in the nude, and a wiry, aggressive guy like Rahm who probably knows about you gets in your space, it could be awkward, indeed.  The kind of lily wavers my dad used to defend were blessedly free of any political agenda, much less one as reprehensible and sleazy as Rahm’s, and would probably disaffiliate Rahm from their guild for such a breach of protocol.  Lily waving is for pleasure, not business.