Book Excerpt: 'Sammy's House'

Kristin Gore's novel features a heroine who's a sort of political Bridget Jones.

ByABC News via logo
July 9, 2007, 11:26 AM

July 10, 2007 — -- "Sammy's House" is Kristin Gore's follow-up to 2004's "Sammy's Hill."

The sequel finds the heroine, Sammy, working as a research staffer for the vice president. The 20-something handles crisis after crisis. She soon learns the president has fallen off the wagon and is secretly drinking. Even though Sammy's party is in power, the opposition remains fierce.

The book has a more serious tone than its predecessor. You can read an excerpt from "Sammy's House" below.

It was when she started stripping that everyone realized something was wrong. This was an official White House event. A somewhat boring, completely respectable cruise on the Potomac River to thank everyone in the West Wing for the hard work that had won the election. But it was no longer boring.Until the woman whipped off her tailored black jacket to reveal a star-spangled bra and a surprisingly elaborate dragon tattoo, the only remarkable thing about this cruise was that it was nineteen months late. The celebratory boat ride had been promised long ago, in the first month of our new administration, but no one minded that the business of running the country had continuously delayed its actual launch. Victory was prize enough?who needed a cruise?

I tore my eyes away from the increasingly explicit show to scan the crowd for RG. He'd gone below deck to take a call from President Wye, and I was relieved that he still seemed to be there, unaware of these antics. He was the vice president, and as a member of the White House staff, one of my duties was to protect him from public embarrassment whenever possible. That job had become significantly harder in the last thirty seconds.I looked quickly around for help, but most people seemed frozen, capable only of staring with wide-open mouths. The stereo system played on, its background hum now transformed into a striptease soundtrack. Someone needed to shut it off. Someone needed to shut her off. I searched for the Secret Service agents posted throughout the boat. Would they get involved only if they deemed the stripper a security threat? By now, she'd reached a point where concealed weapons seemed an impossibility.Upon closer examination, the dragon tatooed on her shoulder appeared to be wearing a tufted pink tutu. I pondered its significance. Perhaps this unknown woman, who until a minute ago everyone had taken for an inhibited waitress offering shrimp dip and taquitos, belonged to a hard-livin', rough-and-tumble gang of rebel ballerinas. She was certainly nimble, judging by the ease with which she was now pirouetting out of her panties.

I was blinking from the flashes, both photographic and pornographic, and had just noticed the tattoo of a tap-dancing minotaur on the stripper's upper thigh when Harry Danson, the president's chief of staff, suddenly pushed through the crowd and covered her with his jacket. She tried to shrug it off, but Harry was very firm. It's in his job description.

"Just what is this all about?" he demanded fiercely, painfully aware of all the photos that had already been taken.There wasn't any press aboard; the cruise was for staff only. But though everyone was ostensibly loyally intent on protecting the administration from unnecessary scandal, it was hard to keep a story like this from getting out. I myself could think of five people I planned to regale immediately with this sordid tale. It wasn't often that one attended an office function and got entertained by a scantily clad exhibitionist inked with dancing fantasy creatures. It would be selfish to keep this to myself."I'm a gift from the Exterminators," the stripper answered. "They say congratulations for making it this far. They didn't think you had it in you."I watched Harry's jawline stiffen. When he got angry, which was distressingly often, he looked like he'd had steel cheek implants. I'd met few people more ripe for a hernia."Thank you, that will be all," he ground out through clenched teeth.

Harry and a couple Secret Service agents ushered the woman through the still-stunned crowd toward the caterers' station. The hushed silence that had accompanied her performance exploded into the sounds of a hundred and seventy-five people talking at once.The Exterminators were a very disgruntled band of former officials from the previous administration. Most of them had stayed in D.C. to form an opposition think tank, and nothing seemed to please them more than perpetrating juvenile pranks while they worked very seriously to sabotage every policy change we tried to make.They hadn't named their think tank the Exterminators. That particular moniker derived from one of the many vindictive stunts they'd pulled on their way out of the West Wing, which they had vandalized to the best of their abilities in a rage against their ouster. In addition to rigging booby traps and carving their initials into various pieces of furniture, they had also taken the time to enact a much more elaborate and dastardly scheme.

They'd ordered cases of frozen feeder mice -- available on the Internet to pet owners in need of food for raptors and reptiles -- and, in an impressive labor of hate, had carefully sewn several hundred of these tiny frozen mice into the hems of all the heavy West Wing drapes.

We'd noticed an unpleasant odor a few days after we'd moved in, but couldn't be positive that wasn't the way the place always smelled. But as the frozen feeder mice had thawed in their thick fabric tombs, the smell had intensified rapidly. In a little over a week, it had become unbearably wretched, rendering the West Wing virtually uninhabitable.

It had been difficult to locate the precise source, since the horrific stench had seemed to emanate from the very walls around us. The maintenance crew had finally discovered the tiny rotting rodent corpses after their fourth thorough search. That very day, a case of champagne had been delivered to the West Wing with a note that read: "To wash down the smell. Enjoy yourselves while you last, because we'll be rid of you before you know it. Love and kisses, the Exterminators." And thus, an annoying nickname had been born.

Even after the discovery and removal of the mice carcasses, the gut-gripping stink had lingered for nearly two months, despite all efforts to eradicate it. To their obnoxious delight, the Exterminators had inflicted a parting gift that had kept on giving.

I knew that my own party was perfectly capable of similar pettiness, because the previous administration had complained instantly to the press when they'd moved into the White House eight years earlier to find tuna sandwiches locked in all their file cabinets and their computers rigged to print the chorus of Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man" no matter what the command. Some in the press had privately enjoyed the specter of then President Pile's political guru Carl Jones battling rebellious office machinery that taunted him with the words "Because something is happening here but you don't know what it is. Do you, Mister Jones?" printed over and over again, but the majority of columns and articles had chastised the outgoing administration for such childishness.