What's So Secret About the Secret Service?
09/13/99
Peter B. Steiger

Believe it or not, back when I was a wee lad I used to have a
mischievous sense of humor.  The result was that I got into the kinds
of trouble all mischievous boys get into - frequent spankings for
things like putting exploding charges in my parents' cigarettes,
making obscene rhymes out of my classmates' names, and almost getting
deported by the Secret Service.

No, really.  By some stroke of good fortune, I'm Canadian by birth,
eh, and moved to Texas when I was six.  I never did get the hang of
being a Texan; after 27 years I still went around saying "Howdy, eh!"
Sometimes when I'm asked for identification, I'll show my green card,
which has the face of a grim-faced six-year-old at the Detroit port
of entry on August 26, 1969.  Oddly enough, most folks don't accept
this so I have to produce less interesting documentation.

But I digress.  It may also come as a surprise that friends weren't
swarming around a skinny foreigner who talked funny, read way too
many books, and couldn't figure out any sport if his life depended
on it.  So the friends I did end up with were equally strange:  We
all jumped to take the first computer course ever offered in a
public high school; we all played Dungeons and Dragons when we weren't
hanging out at Radio Shack learning about this amazing new device
called the TRS-80; we all watched Monty Python with religious fervor.
One member of this oddball group was a year older.  Dan had his own
quirks:  He claimed that he would accidentally write backwards unless
he conciously remembered to write forwards; when he was flipping
burgers at Wendy's he would speak to his co-workers like the Muppet
character of the Swedish Chef ("Hoon der boorger mit der flip-flip
hoon der boon der bork bork bork!")  In German class, where most
kids took a Germanized equivalent of their own names, Dan chose
to call himself Wotan, the German version of Norse god Odin. Not
just any Norse god, of course, but their king.  Yes, Dan was
definitely one of us.

In 1980 we went our separate ways:  Dan off to his first year of
college at the U of Texas, and for reasons my mother never really
made clear I spent the last half of my senior year with the 17
other members of the graduating class of 1981 at Crockett High
School in backwoods East Texas.

Here's yet another amazing fact:  In Crockett, Texas (pop. 7380) I
found *no* computer programming, science-fiction-reading,
dungeons-and-dragons- playing skinny kids who hated sports ("Yew
ain't from aroun' heah, are yew?" they'd ask with typical East Texas
perceptiveness.)  That's when I first became interested in writing,
because that was the only way I could communicate with my distant
friends in those primitive days before e-mail (yes, children, there
was a time when everyone in the world did NOT have America On Line!)

The result of all this was that the summer of 1981 was spent in a
flurry of mail going to and from Dan at the University of Texas and
my remaining friends in Houston.  Dan lived in some kind of dormitory
that received all mail in bulk, so his neighbors got to see the
envelopes before he did.  I decided to make sure his neighbors knew
all of Dan's dirty little secrets, and I would address things to him
with names like "Dan, president of the Students for Violent Anarchy"
or "The Society For Putting Things On Top Of Other Things".  Dan
responded in kind, but my mother already knew I was weird so he
couldn't embarrass me nearly as easily as I did him.

Somewhere along the way we both got interested in learning Russian.
I still have a tattered old pocket dictionary my sister used when
she was learning the language, and Dan went out and got his own.
From then on, we'd look up words in our dictionaries and do our
best at translating our letters into a sort of pidgin Russian (we
had NO clue what grammar to use, so it was strictly a word-for-word
translation).  Perhaps as a result of Dan's claims that he wrote
backwards unintentionally, we also got into the habit of mixing
some the our in up letters of words (I mean, "mixing up some of
the words in our letters.")

About mid-summer I ran out of clever Monty Python references and
had exhausted every variation I could think of on the Student
Communists for World Domination.  I was reading through a Doonesbury
book one day and started thinking about Richard Nixon, and thought of
a great play on his old CREEP organization - the Committee to RE-Elect
the President.  I whipped off another letter to Dan and addressed it
to CRAP - the Committee to Re-Assassinate the President.  Chuckling
wildly to myself, I stuffed the envelope in our mailbox, raised the
little flag, and didn't think about that letter again for about six
weeks.
      
That's how long it took for a Lufkin, Texas agent for the Secret
Service to track me down and call up asking to speak to me.  "Sure,"
I said when he identified himself, "and I'm Nikita Kruschchev."  
He asked me what I knew about a letter to the Committee to Re-
Assassinate the President.

There's a certain feeling you get in the pit of your stomach at the
exact moment you know your life is over.  It's that feeling you get
when you rise sleepily at noon, glance over at the clock, and realize
that final exams are today and yours was at 8AM.  Or when you write a
hysterically satirical message ridiculing the company president's body
odor problem and hit the SEND button only to realize that you sent it
to everyone in the company, instead of your friend down the hall. That's
the feeling I got when I realized this alleged Secret Service guy wasn't
kidding.  He made an appointment to come visit me, and I spent the next
twenty hours stuck there with the phone in my hand and my eyes frozen
wide in a total panic.

Suddenly Dan's reply to me made sense.  A few days earlier, I received
his reply back to my CRAP letter, and all it contained was a hastily
scribbled query as to whether or not I had heard from the SS (no, he
added, I don't mean the German kind I mean the American kind).  SS?
Was he expecting the Social Security people to call on me?  Was he
worried that I had forgotten to register with Selective Service?
Given that I already knew Dan was even more deranged than I, his
message meant nothing to me and I didn't give it a second thought
until that scary call from the SS (no, not the German kind).

Mid-afternoon the day after the agent called, this battered old
station wagon rumbled down our six miles of dirt road (we didn't
live right in the big city of Crockett; we lived in the suburbs)
and into our driveway. A tired looking man with a briefcase made
his way through the mob of dogs, cats, chickens, and who knows
what other wildlife.  We let him in, although I tried my best to
convince my mother we should instead hide in the attic until he
went away.

The agent was nice enough, and didn't yell at me or point any of
his numerous guns at me.  But he did open up this manila envelope
which contained two plastic bags.  One of them contained the
envelope addressed to CREEP, and the other contained my letter to
Dan.

I have to describe this letter.  This was at the peak of our various
fads to see who could write the strangest letters, and mine was the
clear winner.  There was the funny name on the envelope, of course,
and about half the words were written in Russian.  At the time, I
was struggling with one of Dan's more cryptic efforts at juggling
all the words around, so the first paragraph read something like
this:

    You stupid moron, I got a headache trying to unscramble your
    last letter!  I hope this makes your brain explode.  Other
    than that, things are going well here.

Now, picture that paragraph translated into Russian - with the
actual Cyrillic characters, not transliterated using western
characters.  Then every ten words were randomly scrambled around
into a different order, making it read something like this (except
with half the words, shown below in parentheses, in Russian):

    (headache) to (I) a your You trying got (stupid) (unscramble)
    (moron), makes (hope) Other last (explode).  (letter)!  (brain)
    (I) this your going are than (well) here that, (things).

The nice agent with all the guns showed me this first page, smiled
sweetly, and said in that inimitable dialect of East Texas, "Nahw,
would yew cayuh tuh explain jest whut this heah says?"

How the heck would I know?  I just wrote that stuff; I sure didn't
know what it meant.  I ran and got my dictionary and fumbled through
it looking up the words I had translated.  The whole time I was
nervously flipping through pages, the room seemed to be about 700
degrees fahrenheit.  Actually, since it was the middle of August
in late afternoon in a house that had only a window unit for air
conditioning, it probably WAS close to 700 degrees, but for whatever
reason I was doing a lot of sweating as I read off the translation.

I tried to explain that it was a paragraph griping that I got a
headache trying to understand Dan's last letter to me.  But the
explanation sounded so implausible, I didn't believe me myself.
I was sure he was going to whip out his gun then and there and
put me out of my misery.  At least I hoped he would.

Just that first paragraph in our secret code, coupled with the
incriminating name on the envelope, was enough to send both of
us to prison for life, but it got worse.  At the top of the page
was a big hammer-and-sickle Communist emblem.  Was I content
with that much incrimating evidence?  No, of course not! In the
blank space on the bottom half of the last page of the letter, I
had added the crowning touch:  I drew the outline of a memo
paper-clipped to the letter, and on the memo I wrote something
like "To the director of the CIA:  This is the evidence I was
talking about. We've definitely caught our spies.  Just be sure
to remove this note before you reseal the envelope and forward
the mail on to our target."

Why didn't I just give the guy a signed confession and let him
drag me to prison?  Clearly I was TRYING to get arrested.

My mother tried to help by explaining that I was involved with a
subversive organization.  OK, she didn't say that, but she did
run off to my room and come back with a letter from the MAD
Magazine fan club, with a similarly funny address on it, to show
that my CRAP address was just one in a whole series of funny
envelopes that didn't seem quite so funny at the moment.

Right about now I hope I've made it clear that my life had long
since flashed before my eyes and I was just waiting for the axe
to fall, but even then I had a greater worry:  Dan.  See, I was
clearly just a weird high school kid with a vivid imagination who
lived off in backwoods East Texas with a computer for companionship.
Dan was a college student who was getting involved in politics, had
recently been to Washington, and - best of all - collected guns.  I
could just picture the SWAT team kicking down Dan's door at his house
in Houston, throwing his parents to the ground, and confiscating all
those guns for evidence.

In the end, either we convinced him that it was just a prank gone
awry or he had already reached that conclusion before he even came
out to visit me.  I suspect he already knew it was just a joke;
he had already visited Dan and got the background on the letters,
and he took pains to explain to me just how seriously the government,
from the postmaster who first saw the envelope to the Secret Service
agents who investigated, take threats to the life of the president.
He took a sample of all ten of my fingerprints, and put them in yet
another little plastic bag to be kept in what is probably now a
massive file of evidence with my name on it.  He also gave me a
form to fill out with samples of my handwriting so they could
easily recognize my handiwork the next time I sent a letter to the
White House ("Dear Mr. President.  By the time you read this, the
bomb will have gone off and killed you... ha ha, just kidding!")

As soon as he left, I ran for cover in case he was going back to his
car for the government-issue bazooka, but he just got in and drove
away.  My mother and stepfather, who watched him leave, told me later
that he actually had to stop walking several times on his way back to
the car, because he was literally doubled over with laughter.

Shortly after that Dan was back in Houston visiting his parents,
so I called up to see how things went with him.  His mother recognized
my voice and asked "Do you know anything about a letter that got Dan
in so much trouble?"  Who, me?  "That sounds terrible," I agreed.  I
changed the subject as quickly as possible and got out of the
conversation in a hurry when I learned that Dan wasn't at home.

Now, some 18 years later, nothing else has come of my close brush with
the man who would take a bullet for the president.  Perhaps I wouldn't
be eligible for military service if I ever went insane and pursued
that career; perhaps I'll never be able to get a job with the Secret
Service myself.  But that's OK - flipping burgers is good enough
for me.  Bork bork bork!