And you left with the interpreter, noting two straggly kings parked outside the bedroom in simple camp chairs. Your trip to the White House Began to take on the auras of an uncomfortable dream. The ceilings over you were cracked, the chandeliers were filthy, the rugs had bold wounds in them, as if tigers prowled the floor. But not one soldier on the stairs to guard “Brother Frank” from insurrection. Any lunatic could visit the President of the United States.  All you had to do was get past the sailor with the eyebrows. Were those really kings in the hall? They looked unsavory to the brigadier [Polish]. What would he write to his people? He’d been to Brother Franklin’s home. The White House appeared to be under a murky spell. He wondered if the rest of America was one monstrous hallucination conceived by FDR to dupe Polish brigadiers?  Franklin Roosevelt was like a seedy wizard in his bed. He shook hands with you, laughed, offered you peanuts, told you a riddle, fondled his dog [Fela], but what could you say about him? The smile, the pince-nez, the cigarette holder, the young sailor, the lumpy robe, they were all conundrums. The brigadier nodded to the canon on the lawn. He got out of Roosevelt’s city with the sense of having been spooked by a sailor,  a dog, and a President who wore a magical  robe to bed.

Prologue – The Wizard in Bed –The Franklin Scare – Jerome Charyn – 1977

You might wonder how Jerome Charyn could possibly write a novel in which a retired New York City Police Commissioner, Isaac Sidel, becomes mayor of NY and then ultimately in a fictitious 80s becomes a gun toting (a Glock) President of the United States. And as Charyn writes in Winter Warning (2017) Sidel is the US’s first Yid head of state. And to do that there with biting detail Chartyn describes a White House very much like our present one..

But the fact that nestled into those almost 40 novels and about 19 nonfiction books, there are two that I am now going to baptize as the White House Novels. They will add up to three with the just released Winter Warning.

The above quote involves a young sailor, Seaman Oliver Beebe who starts as Franklin Roosevelt’s barber and ends up being a sort of Abdul to Franklin’s Victoria . There are many detailed accounts in the Franklin Scare of the goings on in the White House.

In Charyn’s I Am Abraham (a first person account ) novel there are further details on another White House in the time of War.

I would venture to say that with the Trump White House being the mess it is Charyn had a great time telling us how President Isaac Sidel is ignored by his staff, keeps dropping his Glock on the carpet and is haunted by Abraham Lincoln.

 My blogs on Jerome Charyn