It is painful for me to confess this, but confess I must. My past writings about my sexual relationship with Vice President Mike Pence were fictitious, written at the behest of George Soros and Saul Alinsky. I was paid handsomely for them, but not nearly enough to keep me from feeling tainted. I have always been perceived as an honourable person. Accepting many, many thousands of dollars to lie was well below the standard to which I had throughout my career in public service always held myself.

You deserve the truth. The truth is that Mickey (as his closest friends call him) and I weren’t an item in college. We met several years after in fact, when I realised a boyhood dream by giving up writing and rock and roll in favour of swimming pool maintenance. (I have always adored the smell of chlorine.) At the time, Mickey’s was one of only three swimming pools in the exclusive Sanctimony Hills gated community. (In Indiana, it’s either too cold or too hot for swimming an average of 345 days of the year, and the other 20 one has to live with the ignominy of being in the state that spawned John Mellencamp and REO Speedwagon.) I am Jewish and dark-complected, and was spending a lot of time keeping the other two pools spotless, and so might have looked vaguely Latino when Mickey’s butler phoned to ask if I could do the Pence pool too. 

It turned out that Mickey has a “thing” for Latino men. His butler, Gustavo, couldn’t have looked more like Erik Estrada on a bet, and Mike was forever coming out to the pool when I was cleaning it, “to say hi”, in just a skimpy bathrobe that was forever coming undone to reveal him naked underneath but for one-size-too-small Speedos. On one occasion, he offered me a massage, but I declined it, and it was actually his older son Deuteronomy — Chip to friends and family alike — with whom I first became, you know, involved.

Chip was studying medicine, with the ambition of one day treating malnourished children in African countries with significant Christian minority populations, and looked as though designed by Tom of Finland, with a 29-inch waist, huge pecs and biceps, souful blue eyes, and teeth that would have been the whitest I’d ever seen had I not seen Gustavo the butler’s, though of course the comparison wasn’t entirely fair since Gus’s dark skin made his teeth look whiter than they might have in someone else’s mouth, including Chip’s. Chip got through more poppers than any boyfriend I’d ever had, and my heart was well and truly broken when he dumped me in favour of the young man who delivered the Pences’ Indy Star every afternoon, though it was in fact a morning newspaper. 

I’ve always worn my heart on my sleeve, and dressed on the left, and Mickey is nothing if not deeply empathetic. He came out my first visit after Chip’s heartbreaking message and said, “I’d better not find that you’re crying in the pool.” That made me laugh in spite of myself, and the next thing I knew, Mickey had invited me into the house’s dedicated Bible study room to see if we couldn’t find something comforting in Scripture. He rang a bell and the newest in his endless parade of long-eyelashed, mocha-coloured houseboys, who looked vaguely Oaxacan, brought us steaming cups of hot chocolate and homemade-seeming chocolate chip cookies on a tray. I was worried that I might, in the throes of a sugar rush, do something I might regret later, but did not. It turned out that the cookies were from the Walmart bakery, to which Gustavo made a daily trip. 

I eventually met Mrs. Pence, who invited me to call her Judy. She was very cordial, as witness her having invited me to call her Judy, but pointedly ignored the future vice president, even after he said, “Did you have a pleasant and godly morning, Mother?” I later learned from Gustavo that the two of them had an unusual erotic relationship. While Mrs. Pence donned latex or rubber attire, Governor Pence would hide in the big closet in one of their guest bedrooms. Mrs. Pence would come in, tap on the closet door, and growl, “If there are any closeted gay men in there, they’re going to be in big trouble!” After a few minutes, Governor Pence would emerge naked, breathless, red-faced, and a little sticky, and have to recite Leviticus 18:22 in between kissing every grommet of her thigh-high lace-up boots in turn. If he got so much as a syllable wrong, she would slap him. 

Many of the evangelical and political leaders and NRA lobbyists on whom Mike depended for campaign contributions visited the Pences’ home while I was his pool cleaner. After an exhausting session trying to agree on how best to ensure the ongoing isolation and misery of persons whose erotic styles might have been slightly different from their own, Mike and guests would unwind by dressing up as bikers or members of Judas Priest and rimming or fisting each other into the wee (and by this I do not mean urine) hours. I was unusually gorgeous then, with lots of pectoral definition, and long eyelashes of my own, and it wasn’t long before Mike and his donors were passing me back and forth at their orgies like Danielle Steele novels in the break room of a DMV office with mostly female employees. When I began to lose my looks, Mike put me in charge of recruiting new “twinks” from Indianapolis’s many gay conversion facilities. He believed the clients of these facilities to be the horniest of all Hoosiers, and I was in no position to doubt him.