I am Bill’s heart

Tell you what, though, it was kinda scary going under the knife. There was Ol’ Craig Smith making an incision on the breast bone just above me—I could hear the instrument like a saw comin’ right at me. And while they were sewin’ up the bypasses, they had to keep me kinda frozen. That’s the time I wanted to tell them to lay off—‘‘Keep you hands off me, you baboons, I wanted to scream, I come with this territory. I am the organ that kept the world’s most powerful man alive through all those excitin’ times. When we became governor of Arkansas and, later, chief occupant of the White House; when we bombed Baghdad and Bosnia and chatted up Gennifer and Paula; when Ken Starr came after us and we almost got impeached, it was me, you big gorillas, who kept Bill goin’. Me.’’

Well, anyways, after what seemed an age, they restarted me and before long we were a team again, Ol’ Bill and me. He’s now outta Intensive. From my very bottom, I promise, I’ll do my bit for this man who has brought me so much world fame. It makes me swell with pride even to think of it. I mean, Kerry may have won some Purple Hearts for Vietnam, but I am the Purple Heart of the Moment, man.

Folks sometimes ask where we went wrong in terms of healthcare. Awright, I don’t wanta rat on Ol’ Bill, but he did have some pers’nal habits I didn’t approve of. That inhalin’ thing, for starters. ‘‘I never inhaled,’’ he once said. Who’s he kidding? But that’s Bill, he was always kinda economical with the truth. And the trouble with lyin’ is that it does little for your high blood pressure.

Can you imagine what Bill and I went through during those Monica Lewinsky days? The moment I saw her I knew she was pure danger. I used to beat faster every time she came around with her thong underwear and little blue dress. I knew that Bill was a bit of a chucklehead. It was that combination of sexual courtship and courtin’ trouble that seemed to drive him those days.

Monica was a pizza freak. She kept plying us with pizzas. It couldn’t have done me any good, that stuff, for sure. Maybe that’s how I got all that cholest’rol stuff cloggin’ up my arteries. Now Bill, he never listens to reason. There was Hillary pushin’ him to eat hi-fiber, diet stuff and all he craved for was junk food—with giant-sized helpings of fries.

Life got complicated after Monica, that’s for sure. He had to lie that he didn’t have sex with ‘‘that woman’’ and to break down at breakfast prayer meetings saying that he had sinned. It kinda got to me, all that stress, with ABC polls claiming that 57 per cent Americans believed Clinton lied, Starr clanking out a 445-page report, and Bill being forced to concede that he may have lied under oath. And that Paula Jones woman, there she went filing a sexual harassment lawsuit against him!

But we survived, didn’t we? That’s what I love about Bill. He turned that Monica goof-up into a $10-million book proposition. There’s a survivor for you. Dil to pagal hai—the heart is mad—as they say in Indiya. They might as well say Bill to pagal hai. We may be a trifle looney but we’re tough, Bill and I, and we plan to hang on for many more years to come. Take it from me—this is straight from the heart, Bill’s heart.