The Honorable Anthony David Weiner
House Office Building
Washington, D.C.
Dear Congressman Weiner:
Your recent misadventures in cyberspace lead me to challenge you, for educational purposes, to a long-distance Arizona watering contest. True confession: I have a long-standing 4,998-foot lead on you.
This watering contest is the kind of thing we males do from time to time to demonstrate how male we are. Most of us get over that need by the time we’re old enough to vote — and you, Congressman, at 46, are quite old enough to vote. More yet, we have been fortunate indeed, these recent years, to have had Anthony Weiner down there within the Beltway (sorry about that) scrapping and voting the way he usually does. Which is what turns this comedy — nay, this farce — into tragedy.
More true confession: A lifetime ago, back when I was a college kid bucking to make the staff of the college daily newspaper, the worst thing anybody could say to you was: “Don’t be high school.”
I can hear Tom Braden, the tough Dubuque-bred editor in chief — my role model — saying it now: “Don’t be high school, kid.” I can hear tough Bronx-bred Paul Sann, executive editor of the New York Post and not my role model — saying it three wars and a half-dozen presidents later: “Don’t be a sophomore, Tallmer.” I can even hear Norman Mailer saying: “You going to be a college boy all your life?” and then going off and doing something utterly sophomoric himself.
Something along the lines of the Great Arizona Long-Distance Watering Contest.
I was neither a freshman nor a sophomore for Round 1 of the Great Arizona Long-Distance Watering Contest. That summer of 1940, I’m ashamed to say, I was 19 years old and headed into my junior year at Dartmouth College. Goering’s bombs were burning London to ashes, and Harry Jacobs and I were soaking in the United States, driving to California and back in my black convertible Ford.
There were gas stations all along the route. Harry and I had a sort of competition on spotting the lowest cents-per-gallon number — “19,” “18 1/2,” “18” — on the pumps as we sped past.
And then we came to Arizona, and a sign that said, “To the Grand Canyon,” so we thought we should really take a look. Which we did. And then, properly impressed, either Harry said or I said, reaching for our zippers: “Should we?”
There was no other human being in sight. We took our wieners out, and there, side by side, Harry Alan Jacobs and Jerry Tallmer urinated all the way down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon of Arizona — 5,000 feet. Straight down. You could look it up. I did, just now.
Why did we do this? Because we were adolescent, infantile, boastful, irreverent males, that’s why. Though we didn’t go on Tweety, or whatever the hell that is, to spread the news. Because mercifully there was no Tweety or all that other looney-toons hardware / software then.
Incidentally, Congressman, throughout my life I’ve known four of five Weiners, several in the Army. None of them were self-conscious about their names, so far as I know.
I am very far from the only one who is baffled by the sexual question. Bill Clinton — yes indeed, that was/is sexual… . And let him who is without sin (Newt Gingrich, say) cast the first stone. But Tweety photos? Sex? That, to me, is as cold as yesterday’s mashed potatoes.
In the end, Congressman, the answer lies not 5,000 feet down in in the Grand Canyon but, as so often, in First Corinthians: 13:
When I was a child, I spake as a child,
I understood as a child,
I thought as a child.
When I became a man, I put away childish things.
Yours very truly,
JERRY TALLMER
