I Married a Spy - Chapter One

I met Batman in 1967 after I dropped out of college. It was the Fall Semester after the Summer of Love in San Francisco. The college poetry teacher suggested that everybody drop out and go experience the renaissance. I drove from Los Angeles to my aunt's home in Sacramento. She went with me to San Francisco because she could tell that my head was facing backwards.

When I got to San Francisco, the first thing I needed was a place to live and a job. I found a couple of roommates on Cathedral Hill and a job at J. Walter Thompson, the big Madison Avenue Advertising Company. It was anything but a renaissance. I sat in a glass office all day watching cruise ships leaving the harbor, everybody waving, streamers flying.

They put me in the accounting department. Unknown to me, I was being trained to replace the company schizophrenic, and she knew about it. She made things entirely confusing and yelled at me all day long, like my mother had done. Eventually I quit in tears and sat on a park bench crying my eyes out.

Then I got a job with Kelly Girl. They sent me to the Bank of America at the corner of Haight and Ashbury. The one that they eventually burned down in protest over Viet Nam. I worked in the vault sorting index cards. I had no idea where I was or what I was doing in San Francisco. I suppose if you want to wax poetic, I was experiencing and living in the age of Aquarius, and taking a lunch break from 1:00 to 2:00.

The line was non-stop at the teller windows. All those hippies had a lot of money they withdrew from their bank accounts. It was expensive to live like a hippie. Nobody was giving anything away for free either. Not working, smoking pot all day, hanging out at Jerry Garcia's place all day, that costs serious money. None of them appeared to be from California at all. They appeared to be from New York and Boston. I was completely confused why anybody would ever leave New York or Boston to cram themselves into this overpriced town.

My roommates lived in a high-rise luxury apartment. There were four of us: Senta, Pandy, What's Her Name, and me. Senta was straight from Germany, the oldest. She was 27, and offered sage advice to the rest of us. Pandy was a dental hygenist, dating a dentist. What's her name was also 27 and a singer, God knows where she worked during the day.  She stalked church youth groups for her prey, and dragged this 19 year old around with her.  

I should have realized that immediately, that age didn't matter. After our divorce, he went straight out and married his own mother and adopted his own siblings.

Whats her name asked me if I wanted to go out with Batman, because she didn't want him anymore. Senta was not very pleased and offered in broken German, "I don't like ziss guy."

I would date anybody in pants. I had no dating life at all. Senta was afraid I would go out and ruin my life because I was so entirely stupid, and she was right. That's exactly what I did. I married a spy for the NSA, who is right now, wiretapping everybody he can get his hands on.

Batman has been at the NSA for 30 long years, and not once has anybody from any investigative service ever asked me a thing about him. I was married to him for eight years, so you would think somebody at some point, would go "hey, do you have an ex-wife and a little girl you never told us about?"

No, I had to go find them and convince them to listen to me. Do you know what happens when you call up anybody in Washington DC and go "hey, my ex husband there works for the NSA, and he's been there for 30 years, and nobody ever told me about it - and he's a deadbeat?" Do you really know what your chances of telling anybody on the Beltway anything, that they don't discover themselves?

They hang the phone up on you and laugh in your face. Want a list of names? Let's start with Hillary Clinton. I called Hillary, thinking that she was the champion of the downtrodden. Her intern answered the phone and laughed, then hung up.

I called the Senate Intelligence Committee. The intern said "well, if he's been here for 30 years, he must be fine" then she hung up. Then I went through Diane Feinstein, who suggested that I go hire a Harvard attorney.

Nobody in Washington DC ever really advocates for the rest of us. They have to discover facts on their own, the way that children potty-train themselves. Unless a member of Congress experiences an outrage, they simply are not interested in hearing form you. So now that that is understood, I can tell the best spy story in America, because I was married to one of the nation's biggest players in the spy business, and nobody cares what I say.

Yes, I married Batman. He came in with a swoosh straight from the Presbyterian youth groups, trying to nail a few cougars, offering up his life's ambition "to be a minister". He embellished the story by claiming to be an altar boy. So was Ted Bundy.

Well, he was never a minister then, and he's certainly not a minister today. I told him again and again, if you want to be a minister, then you have to actually go to church and not just to nail a few cougars. I think we went to church twice during our marriage, which is slim pickin's for a guy who claims a right to wiretap Congress.

(Pardon my errors and edits, I'm writing to resolve a few anger issues)