The tale you read below was penned for Professor Kristen L. Hanley on May 5, 2018.

It was written in order to complete a Bachelor of Arts in Political Communications from Regent University.

The tale told took place in the Summer of 2015, and has never before been published publicly.

It seems as if it happened a lifetime ago, capturing a world that is now lost, defining the true meaning of the phrase “Gone With the Wind.”

And for those Astrologically-inclined who are wondering…the Gram Cracker was a Leo.

Without further ado, I give you…

RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF IT

By Richard Barrett

2018 AD

In Washington D.C., bastion of freedom, command post of liberty, capital of the free world, the Christians United for Israel Conference is held in July of each year. 

Abbreviated CUFI, the organization that brings together God’s two houses to beat back Middle East evil will pay for high school and college students to come to D.C. from all over the United States. They front food and lodging in the poshest, swankiest hotels in Washington. And for three days, students can walk the three blocks over to the iron and steel D.C. convention center to hear about the War on Terror from the guys who fought it…heroes of the Israeli Defense Forces, fresh from the battlefields of Golan and Gaza. 

For those three days in this marble inlaid and gold corner of the world, life is transformed. For those select youth, sweatpants are thrown out for suits and ties and blouses and skirts. Messy hair, you do care as blondes, brunettes, and redheads all compete for skinny suited men’s attention in zipper-backed dresses of bright spring and summer colors. What slacker culture brings, swinger culture kills. 

I got in in the late afternoon, dropped my bags off to my room, and narrowed my eyes with the instinctual glimmer of a primal hunter shining. I left my room, sauntered down the halls, and began looking for nothing and everything. 

Though I stand at 5’5” and weigh only 146 pounds, my friends call me “Man of Steel” for my dark curled hair and black square glasses framing an iron jaw and ego the size of Texas. I was wearing a Banana Republic-style tailored summer suit with orange striped shirt as bright as the sun, unbuttoned to the chest, ‘70s style.  

Dressed to kill. 

I walked down the hallways and met up with some guys that I had bummed around with at CUFI the year before. This was my second time at CUFI. The last year I had attended, I had rubbed elbows with Israeli Army Officers and NCOs, heard the smartest minds of our time give us the scoop on Muslim Brotherhood mischief in the Middle East, and had enjoyed the view of all the lovely, lovely girls dressed like they were secretaries straight out of Mad Men. 

Most of the people who came to CUFI were from the far corners of the USA…Texas, Arizona, California, Florida. But I was from Northern Virginia. I lived 45 minutes away from the city…but that commute was about as usual as a solar eclipse. On any given day, I lived four hours away. Einstein must’ve gotten stuck in traffic on the I-95 when he theorized on the relevance of space and time. 

The atmosphere was congenial that night, like that of a reunion. Me and these two guys started roaming the halls like a pack of wolves, knocking on doors to find anybody we knew from the year before. We had hit three or four floors this way and reconnected with a few fellas whenever we found ourselves somehow in the basement of hotel, walking through a construction zone. It was ringed with plastic sheet walls and and concrete powder bags and drywall dust, a strange contrast to the marble and gold-inlaid walls that made you feel like the Palace of Versaille was a dump. 

For about two minutes we went on this way, asking each other with suspicion whether or not we were supposed to be in here (nobody wanted his room and board revoked), when finally we broke clear of the plastic sheeting walls and fluorescent light blinded our eyes. 

It was a workout room, with rushing treadmills and olympic weights gathering dust Ellipticals whired below TVs tuned to CNN, blaring John Kerry spewing some nonsense about the new Iranian nuclear deal he had so desperately tried to score. 

I took a look around, walked a few steps to see if it went anywhere, and was just about to turn around when from behind me I heard…a voice. 

*********

I turned around, my eyes slit devilish like a tiger, my brow cocked pleasurably, my lips pursed in a devious half smile.

That sound that I heard was a Slavic accent, unmistakably of the feminine variety. 

A lifetime of Bond films and Pulp Fiction books had given me a distinct and peculiar attraction to women with Slavic accents. The first one I ever met was a blonde chick from south Albania who married a Capital cop. I met her at a party for a neighbor kid. She could’ve been a Guess model, dressed like one too, and had brought her three year old son with her. Her love for that kid was unbelievable. You would’ve thought that kid was the Holy Grail.  What a girl. 

 She’d walk in a room and you’d have thought the sun had just come up because everything before she entered was pitch black. She loved her God, her Country, her Child, and her Man.

There’s nothing more that a red-blooded American could ask for.

Now, in this unfinished basement of a gym in D.C.’s swankiest hotel, I knew the meaning of the words, “I’ve got the world on a string.” 

This particular chick was sitting on an unused weight lifting bench. She was talking to a friend, also on the bench. From the angle I was standing, she was facing away from me. 

So I walked over there like I own the world, my tiger eyes shining, and she turned around.

Goodness! 

This chick looked like Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman. She had the eyes of a cat and cheekbones so high they could’ve given the Himalayas a run for their money. Her hair was black and long and curly like she’d hit the hairdresser who did all the Pre-Raphaelite paintings. The chick was tall too, and leggy as heck in her short summer shorts and her lovely forest green camisole top. She had to be 5’8”, 5’9” when she stood up. 

I’ve got the world on a string, indeed. 

“That’s a beautiful accent you’ve got,” I tell her, grinning. “Where’re you from?”

This chick’s eyes sparkled suspiciously,  sizing me up. There was life burning up in those eyes. 

“You like my accent, huh?” she interrogated, her chin tilted upward like a bust of Queen Nefertiti. 

“I’m not screwing with you, I really do,” I said emphatically. 

“Ok…I am from Moldova, you know where that is?” 

“Oh Moldova, huh? I know where that is.” 

“Yeah, right.” 

My eyes slit at her ignorance, as if she had just told me the sky was green. 

“Yeah, I do,” I said. “It’s broken up into Moldova and the Transnistrian Republic of Moldova occupied by 40,000 Russian soldiers.” 

She smiled satisfactorily, looking off into the distance. 

“Very good, not many people know that,” she said. 

“I do. I’ve written and published two books, I think I know where Moldova’s at.” 

Her bright eyes grew wide with disbelief. 

“You write two books?” 

I love it when Slavic chicks screw up our grammar. 

“Yes I did. I wrote my first one last year and I just finished my second two months ago. I’m here to push it with the big dogs at the convention.” 

“You’re kidding,” she said, the gleam of her wide cat eyes dancing like an undulating flame. 

“I know where Moldova’s at, don’t I?” 

She shrugged her shoulders. 

“My names Richard Barrett,” I said, extending a hand. “What’s your name?” 

“My name is Gram Cracker.” 

I looked down at her like a little kid playing dress up. 

“Your name is Gram Cracker,” I said playfully. 

“Yeah, my name is Gram Cracker.”

Her friend, who had stayed as still as a corpse the whole time, broke her silence. 

“Her name is Dariana Grama,” she said.

“But everybody calls me Gram Cracker. G-R-A-M. Not G-R-A-H-A-M.”

“Well then,” I grinned. “Gram Cracker it is. You fly all the way over here from Moldova, Gram Cracker? Or you live somewhere in the States?” 

“I live in California. This is my first time in D.C.”

“You never seen D.C. before?”

“No, first time.”

“Well I’m from D.C., round up your friends and I’ll take you guys on a tour.” 

*********

We agreed to all meet in the lobby. I went back through the plastic wall sheeting to the elevator and up, up, up until I reached my room, grabbing a phone-book sized orange tome with a pre-Raphaelite picture of Arab Bedouin tribesmen. 

The title read All Men Follow the Strongman: The Forgotten History of the Iraq War, by Richard Barrett II. 

Down, down, down went the elevator as the bell dinged and the doors opened into the marble and gold lobby. 

Gram Cracker was sitting there with her friend on a lush sofa situated in the lobby’s center. 

“Take a look at this, Gram Cracker.”

I held the book out in front of her. 

Her cat eyes widened into perfect almonds.

“Wow!” she said, breathless. “You wrote this?” 

“Yeah,” I turned to the last page. “That’s my picture, right there.” 

“Wow…” she said again, thumbing through pages of big block texts and pictures of Saddam Hussein. “How long did it take you to write this?” she said. 

“This one took me two months. My last book took me five.” 

“Wow…that is incredible,” she said trance-like, her eyes fixed on page after page of cutting-edge Iraqi commentary. “I love history, it is one of my favorite things in the world.”

A Slavic chick hypnotized by history. 

I really did have the world on a string.

*********

We walked outside into the warm night breeze of D.C. The sky was pitch-black, lit up by the lights of H&M and Barnes and Nobles storefronts, Starbucks and McDonalds, hotels that housed sleeping lobbyists and dark street corners crawling with the homeless. 

The group was 7 or 8 strong, composed mostly of Gram Cracker’s crew of second-generation Slavs come all the way from Florida. Their parents had come over years ago, when the wall came down. The old country held about as much relevance to them as Disneyland does to an adult. It might’ve well as been a galaxy far, far away. 

But not Gram Cracker.

Gram Cracker didn’t just have the accent and the style. She had the story to back it up. 

She had been over here for three years, pursuing her associate’s degree in computer science before going on to get a bachelor’s degree in the same thing. She went over to the old country all the time…her family was still over there, and she was going to visit them for three weeks after CUFI. 

As we walked down the dark street lighted by the flickering othe neon signs, she told me about how her father had been rounded up by Stalin’s goons and thrown in the gulag for ten years. He survived, was released to go back to his family. He always taught Gram Cracker that freedom was free, “And if we’re not careful,” she said, “It can all be gone so fast.” 

As we talked, we approached a great square with a Classical-style statue of the great Revolutionary War hero, Casimir Pulaski. A Polish nobleman, he came over to America and fought with George Washington. He won his spurs fighting the Ivans from Moscow and the jackboot thugs of Prussia. That round in the great freedom-fight of humanity he lost. But instead of throwing in the towel, he decided to roll the dice again. His goal was a payday bigger than cash. 

He led the American cavalry, our special forces striking arm of the 18th century. He funded them out of his own pocket, and trained harder than anybody else in the cavalry branch. He gave our horse-soldiers the hell-bent-for-leather attitude that characterizes our Special Forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria today. 

Pulaski didn’t have to fight, but he did anyway. 

He died at the Battle of Savannah in 1779.

Looking up at that Michelangelo-esque hero of old, standing contrapposto tall in the stoicism of stone, and looking over at the Slavic goddess standing next to me, the image of her grandfather surviving the gulag came to mind. 

Pulaski and her grandpa were from the same mold. 

*********

Gram Cracker and I had hit it off. Two type-A egomaniacs running up and down the National Mall at 3:00 in the morning would’ve made Tristram and Isolde jealous. Juliet would’ve drunk the poison in the first act if she could see us now. Burton and Taylor had nothing on us. 

We sat atop obscure monuments made nameless by the plaque-obscuring darkness of the night, and had our pictures taken. We looked up at the endless sky-ward march of the Washington monument as shot up toward the stratosphere like a rocket, ringed by American flags. I pulled her out of a crosswalk she almost walked into like an absent-minded woodland fairy princess as a speeding Toyota Prius zoomed by. 

We continued along, passing by the glittering water of the Reflecting pool to our left, the fragrant bloom of the thick, twisting American elms bordering our right. 

Down the granite-squared pavement we walked until we reached what we had come here for…America’s temple, with marble stones mined from every state in the Union forming its base, and the man himself sitting on his throne of freedom. 

The Lincoln Memorial. 

Together, our group walked up the mighty steps toward the great artifice. There sat Lincoln, regal on his marble throne, tough and wise and wistful all at the same time. 

I turned back from Lincoln and looked out over the Reflecting Pool. I slowly trod the vast stairs and drank in the warm, American night air. There was a big Indian wedding party, men in tuxedos and women in traditional saris while the bride wore classic white. In my group were second-generation Ukranians whose parents had birthed their kids here so they could have a better life.

And then there was Gram Cracker, Slavic beauty of Moldova, whose character had been forged by her freedom-fighting grandfather in Stalin’s gulags. 

This then was America, a melting pot of liberty, a shining city on a hill that all people made in the image of God looked to as a beacon of justice and freedom.

My tiger eyes slit and gleamed with a star-spangled light. 

Here I was, right in the middle of it!

Richard Barrett

Published 09-18-2024, at 8:36 PM

Written 05-05-2018

Written somewhere in the USA…