it—is he really tall, does he really carry the president’s nuts, does he have a gun or something, how do you feel about the term “power couple”?

“Eh, he’s probably gay. He had on basketball shoes and weird socks…gay socks.”

“Jesus, you think everybody is gay.”

“That’s ’cause everybody is gay.”

Fifteen

THE NEW B WORD

Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

I’ve got this good friend who happens also to be black. He was in an important meeting for work when someone said, “nuclear’s the new N word.” Ahh, okay. That’s fine. Just hold on a second while the rest of us dust off our universal translators. [Insert futuristic computing sounds here.] Got it. So, what you meant to say was that nuclear is the twenty-first century’s version of something so vile it cannot be named—sort of like the Lord Voldemort of physics. What you did not mean to say was that nuclear energy is some nigger-shit.

Even with the aid of advanced Federation technology, the safe-for-work reaction to such highly paid stupidity is purely a game-time decision. Leap over the conference table to choke someone out or nod your head knowingly, all the while ignoring the piercing holes being drilled into your face by all the other cowards at the table.

Celebrations should be in order for all those nonpostal heroes who choose the latter. This same friend of mine sent out an e-mail asking whether or not he should feel some kind of way about the whole thing. I responded something like, “Well, I don’t think he meant any harm by it.” What I meant was, pretending your coworkers are philosophers as opposed to racists is most certainly the more spineless option. It’s also a recession. So there you go.

The same principle applied to another e-mail I got.

“Maureen wants you to go out with Barack’s body guy, Reggie Love. When can you do drinks?” It should be noted here that Maureen Dowd does not speak about herself in the third person, nor does she send her own e-mails. This was from Ashley, her assistant. When I first started at the Times two years before, Maureen was between assistants. The girl I replaced at the news desk applied for the job but didn’t get it. Word around the fax machines was that she lacked a certain cool, which left Maureen with no one to show her how to do stuff. The calls would start coming in at around 11:00 p.m.

“Remember that character from Li’l Abner? Who always had the cloud over his head? What was his name?”

“Maureen?”

“I need to send the column up to New York. How do I do that?”

“You mean via e-mail?”

“Sure, yeah.”

“Okay, first open up your Outlook by double clicking your mouse on the desktop icon, then go to ‘compose mail,’ which should be—”

“How ’bout you just come back here.”

When Ashley, having met the cool specifications, arrived a week later, I looked upon her with pity and a bit of jealousy. She’d be an all-things-normal oracle on columnists’ row. I told her to start looking for her next job by year two, lest she get sucked into that black hole never to come out.

Then when I got my job at Politico, Maureen (Ashley) sent me flowers and a Mylar balloon that read “Congratulations” in crazy crayon letters. Once it was deflated, I stuck it above my computer with a pushpin. Passersby would nod in its direction, “From who?” and I’d answer “Maureen” without swiveling my chair around, leaving whomever to guess. “Maureen Dooowd, she means,” chimed in my work wife Emily. “Oooh,” they’d say.

After I’d spent a year covering Congressman What’s-His-Guts’ hair plugs and profiling his chief-of-staff’s allergic reaction to jeans, the higher-ups asked if I wanted another shot at Barack Obama, since my South Carolina story was pretty decent. I was on my way back to Washington from Los Angeles, where I’d spent the weekend celebrating Gina’s great-grandmother’s one-hundredth birthday at the Chester Washington Golf Course of Gardena and trying to get over the fact that my sorority sister died at twenty-seven just the week before. For the sit-down-dinner portion of the afternoon, we got to choose between chicken, beef, or fish. When I answered “beef,” a teenager in black pants gave me a piece of red construction paper. I figured it’d be a while and headed for the door before someone cued up the tape for a cousin’s gospel rendition of “I Believe I Can Fly.”

While I was outside admiring the neat carpet lines of the golf green, an old “boyfriend,” probably bored