Richard Stevenson - Strachey's folly

"Who brought the charge, and what was the nature of the assault?"

"The alleged victim was a Carmen LoBello. LoBello is a man who used to do a drag act, pretending to be Mrs. Liddy Dole. The so-called assault was this: Suter gave LoBello herpes, LoBello claims, and now LoBello's got a big cold sore on his upper lip half the time. LoBello can only do G. Gordon Liddy Dole, with a big mustache that covers up the cold sore. Except, nobody wants to go see a drag act with somebody called G. Gordon Liddy Dole. So LoBello is up shit creek. You queers sure pick up some interesting ways to get yourself in trouble,"

Craig said, and I had to agree with that.

Of course I'm going to sue that evil man!" LoBello spat out. "Because of Jim Suter my career is in ruins! Until I kissed Jim Suter, I was a star! God, I was fabulous. I did Hillary to a tee, my Jamie Gorelick was dead-on, and I had Dianne Feinstein nailed, and Barbara Bush and Maxine Waters, and- God, can you imagine what the demand would be for my smarmy-marmy Liddy Dole now that that nine-faced Southern bitch is all over the tube, doing her white-bread Oprah routine at the Republican convention! I'd be doing Liddy on Jay, on Let-terman, on Nightline. Instead, I'm still pushing mine-acid reports around, and it's all because of that lying, manipulative, vicious, evil rodent Jim Suter. Oh, I'm suing him, all right. I'll sue his ass from Dupont Circle to the Supreme Court!

When I catch up with Mr. Pretty-head-herpes-mouth Jim Suter, just you watch the subpoenas fly!"

The three of us were seated around a small outside table at the cafe with the excellent croissants on Second Street, SE. The early-morning Capitol Hill before-work crowd had been arriving for some time, and those seated closest to us must have been having trouble concentrating on their Posts and Timeses and lattes. LoBello was a strikingly attractive man, with the womanly-as opposed to effeminate-manner of the best drag queens. He had longish, swept-back, perfectly groomed dark hair in the style of an Italian maestro, and a fine-boned face that could have been out of La Dolce Vita except for the spectacularly large cold sore that took up about a quarter of his nicely shaped upper lip. The mustache LoBello had grown for his G. Gordon Liddy Dole act, and to cover up the sore, was gone now, as was the fat cigar.

Timmy had set up the meeting with LoBello while I was in Mexico. We had known that LoBello was a disgruntled former boyfriend of Suter's who, we figured, might have quilt-panel sewing ability. This was before Suter theorized to me that the panel had in fact been a warning to him from the drug gang, but also before Ray Craig had come up with the news that LoBello had once charged Suter with assault-assault to the upper lip with an ugly virus.

I said to LoBello, "I guess you don't know where Jim Suter is. Otherwise you would have launched your suit against him." "I haven't got a clue where Jim is.

Wherever he is, I'm sure the place has turned into Chernobyl just from his presence. I could probably just keep my eyes peeled for emotional mushroom clouds rising. Meanwhile, I was thinking of hiring a private detective to locate the elusive Jimmy. And Timothy tells me you're a dick. Since you're looking for him anyway, perhaps you would do me the kindness when you locate Jim to give me or my attorney a jingle. You can bill me for whatever you want- up to twenty dollars, if you don't mind." "Okay."

"I've done everything I could think of to smoke Suter out. But he's gone. His phone's disconnected, and I've waited outside his building dozens of times, sometimes for hours, just sitting on the curb nursing my rage. But he never goes in and he never goes out. It's hard to imagine that Jim Suter could stay away from Washington for long. This town is where he's a star-a big, big star.

Jim's the Jane Fonda-I used to do her, too, by the way-he's the Jane Fonda of backroom, right-wing-political Washington, is what he is-as Jim will be the first to let you know."

"Suter may be a star," Timmy said, "but he seems not to be a well-loved star."

"No, Mary Tillotson, Jimmy is not." LoBello dabbed at the filmy latte mustache that didn't begin to camouflage his large cold sore. "There's a good chance, of course, that he's here in town and he's hiding out. There are probably dozens of Washington men looking for his ass so they can take legal action. Either on grounds of mental cruelty-which won't get them far in one of the local homophobic courts of law-or for passing his hideous herpes around, as in my unhappy case. My attorney has advised me that anybody whose livelihood is dependent on their physical appearance-and let's face it, whose isn't? — could make an airtight legal case against any person who ruined that physical appearance. Legally, it's disfigurement."

"You're still quite lovely, Carmen," I said sincerely.

"Thanks, but I'll never be Liddy Dole again. Do you think Liddy Dole would leave her apartment looking like this? Oh, no. 'No. Thanks,' the great lady of the Red Cross would say, 'but no thanks.' I mean, did Clara Barton have herpes? I don't believe so."

"Don't cold sores tend to come and go?" Timmy said. "I know people with herpes of that type, and they'll sometimes go for months without a sore breaking out."

LoBello gave Timmy a duh look and said, "Timothy, honey, do you know what makes cold sores break out?"

"I've heard fatigue can do it. And of course stress."

LoBello grimaced theatrically and said, "Say no more. Also, it's not just that Suter gave me herpes. It's that, like everything else, he lied about the sore on his lip when we went to bed. He said it was just some dumb zit. I told him, 'Honey, you better stay away from those candy bars.' Later, when I broke out with this grotesque thing on my lip, and I caught up with Jim and made him admit to the truth, he not only confessed. He admitted to me that he himself had picked up the viais from rimming some closeted right-wing queen on Jesse Helms's staff who had anal herpes. God, if I ever run into Helms, I'd love to plant a big, wet one on that ugly kisser of his."

Timmy was staring at my mouth. I said, "I can appreciate, Carmen, why you might be upset about this."

"Upset? That hardly describes how I feel about James Suter."

"And I can see why you're determined to track Jim down."

"My latest tactic," LoBello said, leaning closer to me and lowering his voice, "has been trying to smoke Jim out by using what I have to admit is a kind of tasteless stunt." He glanced quickly around the cafe and, his face flushed, said, "I know you know about a panel in the AIDS quilt with Jim's name on it, even though as far as I know he's not dead. He doesn't even have AIDS or HIV."

"We're aware of the quilt panel," I said.

"I know you are. I saw you looking at it on Saturday."

"Uh-huh."

"Well-I did it. I made and submitted the quilt panel in memory of Mr. Suter."

LoBello grinned nervously and fluttered his eyelashes.

"You did this to smoke Jim out?"

"Yes, and it's been all over the media. I thought, if I can't find Jim, maybe the press can. Although they haven't so far apparently. Anyway, I knew he'd hear about it, and it was a way of telling Jim exactly what I thought of him. I'm sure he knows who did it."

I said, "Why is that, Carmen?"

"Because I took one of his old manuscripts out of his apartment the last time I was in it, and I kept it, and in May I sewed pages from the manuscript into the quilt panel. I took the manuscript in the first place because I thought there was some dirt in it that I could use against Jim, though it turned out there wasn't. It was just his Betty Krumfutz campaign biography-a piece of cheap political hackery. But I stuck it on the quilt panel to humiliate Jim-and maybe to fuck him up professionally, the way he did me-and to lower him in the eyes of his good pal and onetime employer, that obnoxious right-wing Republican witch, Betty Krumfutz."