I Dream of Jenna

IF YOU MISSED the First Twins on tv last week, I recommend tracking down the transcript. Jenna and Barbara Bush, combined age 44, demonstrated about one-half the intelligence and sophistication as Ilana Wexler, the spastic 12-year-old founder of Kids for Kerry who addressed the Democrats in Boston. I mention Wexler because a comparison to the Kerry daughters wouldn't be fair to Vanessa and Alexandra.

Whereas the Kerry girls told a competent bedtime story about a hamster, the Bush twins sputtered one-liners that could have been written by Katherine Harris. The twins were so bad that people who spent the rest of the week yelling obscenities at the screen were left mute. Lifelong feminists felt misogyny for the first time; Republican strategists experienced pangs of shame; Delta sisters around the world winced; Barbara Bush, the elder, let loose an embarrassed drop of pee into her Depends.

And yet the twins' speech wasn't completely without purpose. During these excruciating 10 minutes, America was finally informed of something it should have known during the 2000 election: George and Laura call each other "Bushy." Just let this dynastic detail roll around in your mind for a minute. Forget about Iraq, Swift Boat Liars for Truth, Halliburton, Enron, the tax cut, the "ownership society"-forget all that and just imagine George and Laura Bush in monogrammed slippers calling each other "Bushy" over a crystal pitcher of iced tea. Do this one mental exercise, and you're well on your way to understanding why so many Democrats are willing to overlook the profound corruption at the heart of their own party and prepare for November 2 like it was D-Day for American liberalism.

"Bushy, Jenna's on the phone from Prague. She's pregnant again."

"Well, tell her to get rid of it. She knows the drill. Just, uh, make sure it's real hush-hush. Where is she, France?"

"She's in Prague. In Czechoslovakia. She says-Oh, dear. She says she loves him and wants to keep the baby."

"Aw, heck, Bushy Wushy, I'm watchin' the game with Condi. Tell her if she doesn't have her li'l pumpkin scraped out by Thursday, she's comin' home and I'm doin' it myself."

During the summer of 2002, Jenna Bush really was in Prague. I was there too, working at a newspaper not unlike this one. When word hit town that the First Daughter was returning to reprise her drunken European tour of 2001, grand strategy sessions broke out around the city. For the Czech paparazzi and expatriate tabloid freelancers, one picture of Bruce Willis cutting up lines with an underage Czech model can pay rent and put chleba on the table for six months. A shot of Jenna Bush pulling on a spliff would easily mean six-figures American.

Thus did a Texas sorority girl become the Moby Dick of a tourist-choked ex-communist capital. Leonardo DiCaprio and Vin Diesel were also in town at the time, but next to Jenna, they were wooden coins.

I heard of Jenna's imminent arrival while sitting in a bar with Jeff Koyen and another friend. Immediately, the task before us was obvious: Someone had to score the clueless, moon-faced First Daughter. The three devils on our right shoulders crushed cans of Staropramen against their foreheads in unison.

The mission was doable. We knew Jenna's favorite bars from media accounts of her previous visit; we'd simply stake out those places until she appeared, loud sorority sisters and quiet Secret Service detail in tow. We'd pretend not to know or care who she was. We'd buy her and her friends lots of tequila, impress upon them the usual expat pick-up clichés, then lead the way to the real party.

The more we talked about the mission, the more ambitious it became. Soon a presidential pube and bragging rights weren't trophies enough. We wanted to inflict pain on the father, even complicate his relationship with his Christian base. None of us believed in violence, but mutual-consent sperm assassins we could be. Our new, bolder plan required only a small digital video camera and a plastic Osama bin Laden Halloween mask, both of which we had. Think Chasing Liberty meets the Paris Hilton video.

As the three of us watched the doors at the same bars and clubs night after night, we calculated the size of the window between making our Jenna porn public and the arrival of a government bullet equidistant between our hairline and eyebrows. Death would come swift, we all agreed. But we also agreed that some things were worth dying for, and that an internet video of a drunken Jenna Bush getting pounded by Osama bin Laden was one of them. We said our prayers and waited.

But we never sighted the whale. Nor did the Czech paparazzi. After almost two weeks of waiting, the Daily Telegraph sighted Jenna and her friends in Cote d'Azur, leading us to assume the original Prague report had been a ruse. We reluctantly called off the mission and got on with our lives.

A few weeks later, I was talking to an acquaintance with connections to the U.S. embassy in Prague. I told him about our plan and why it fell apart. His eyes lit up.

"Oh, she was here all right," he said. "She was at Klub Lavka every night for two weeks, mostly on her knees in the bathroom wiping her chin clean."

"Lavka?!?" Lavka is one of the cheesiest tourist traps in Prague.

"Yeah, she was there every night, right under your nose the whole time-wasted, too. They came home drunk by taxi every night."

Though now more divorced from reality than ever, my Jenna fantasy gained new life. Only now it evolved away from sadistic, suicidal sexploitation, toward kinder, gentler visions of opportunity lost. My thoughts turned to marriage. What if Jenna and I had fallen in love? We could have taken rowboats down the Vltava, weekend trips to Moravia. What if I had gotten her pregnant and she had the highest-profile abortion in history?

Or, what if I had gotten her pregnant and briskly went public with it to protect the unborn child and necessitate my shotgun marriage into the Bush family? Just as Jeb Bush's half-Hispanic son George is known as the "little dark one" of the WASP clan, I could have been the "communist circumcised one." Stealth miscegenation as guerilla class warfare-and upward mobility. I would name my son George Herbert Walker Zaitchik. I would worry never again about health insurance. My children would go to Yale. They would play croquet. "Pass the cranberry sauce, dad?" I'd say at Thanksgiving in Kennebunkport. And George W. Bushy would pass it, glaring at me like a bull possessed by Satan.

Watching Jenna skip through the local society pages and make a fool of herself on national television last week, I drifted back to those dreams of Jenna, back to the summer in Prague where they all could have come true. If only we had been tipped off about Klub Lavka, I could have been sharing a skybox with Uncle Neil during daddy's speech.

Of course, our plan could have been a Bay of Pigs, in which case Jenna's bitterness would have burned bright from the other side of the velvet ropes.

"Jenna! Jenna! Remember me? It's Alex, from Prague! I'm the guy who tried to put on the Osama mask while you were biting my pillow. Remember?"

"Omigod," she'd squeal. "Get away from me! You are such an immature loser."

The stupid skank would be right. But to paraphrase Winston Churchill, one of these days I'm going to grow up, and Jenna Bush will always be a stupid skank. Even if I never did get it on film. o