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!