“The most important ethical issues and the most difficult ones are the human ones because a reporter has enormous power to hurt people.”
—Carl Bernstein
“The Obamas have been through so much that, at this point, they feel no need to publicly address that kind of talk,” an insider exclusively dishes to In Touch. “The last thing either of them wants to do is try to explain their relationship to people.”
—Jennifer Lenhart, Michelle and Barack Obama ‘Don’t Care What Anyone Thinks’ About Their Marriage Amid Split Rumors
***
Amid the swirl of rumors about the status of the relationship between Barry O and Michelle, we tackle the pressing question: Are Michelle and Barry Obama getting divorced?
***
Just when Michelle Obama discovered that the democratic party, with her husband, Barry O, as its titular head, was a thing of the past, can’t exactly be known.
While she had her suspicions in the weeks leading up to the election that things weren’t going according to the lofty plans for conquest and salvation that Barry had laid out and insisted upon lo these past four years, she probably didn’t suspect that the gig was at an end, or at least wouldn’t accept it as such, until the night of January 6th, watching Donald J. Trump, felon, cruise to historic victory.
***
She had been sitting in the living room of her and Barry’s house in DC, watching the election returns on CNN and MSNBC.
Though Barry told her to use both television screens (“Michelle…IIII think it behooves us both…that weee…use-both-screens”) Michelle despised using them, preferring instead to flip back and forth using the previous channel button.
As the minutes ticked by in the Barry O underground, Michelle thumbed back and forth between the twain, watching the fate of the democratic party, and also her fate and Barry’s, unfold.
A lot of hay was being made about Kamala’s rise to power: she was going to sweep the nation with a glorious blue wave, the sun would shine brighter tomorrow, the air would be cleaner, and the birds, primed and prepared despite the wintry disdain outdoors, would bellow with glad whistling abandon at the top of their little lungs proclaiming that a new day had dawned in America to build back even better than better, now that Kamala would be queen.
Michelle Is A Woman With Intuition
Despite rumors to the contrary, Michelle is a woman, and being a woman she has a woman’s intuition.
For several years past that woman’s intuition whispered daily to her: she had long suspected that some kind of tryst had transpired lo these past four years during the tenure of the dumb white guy, as she called Joe Biden, between her husband and the Kamel (as she called Kamala), Kamel—the woman whose face she had ingrained into her mind; Kamel, the woman her husband spoke of so often.
Michelle thought about Kamel: in the morning, wondering if she had died in the night; plotted against her in the afternoon; and felt waves of bitter jealousy by evening and throughout the sleeplessness nights.
Each passing week of the dumb white guy administration, as Barry spent more and more time with Kamel (training her, as he called it); grooming her, is what it really was, for the possibility of what he called “further…aaand greater-leadership-responsibilities,” Michelle grew increasingly suspicious of this political arrangement.
Nor did Barry do anything to assuage those concerns.
Sometimes, Kamala visiting, Barry refused Michelle entree into his basement office, citing “aaaa…matter offff…national-security.”
And what with the soundproofing, Michelle, listening intently though she did at the door, could never quite be sure what was going on in there.
“Don’t worry, Meesh,” Barry always told her, “Iiiiiit’s business…it’sss…politics.”
***
During Joe’s first hundred, Michelle had bought the limn hook, line, and sinker. Sometimes even eagerly.
For if Kamala succeeded it would be Barry O’s fourth term in office, and that meant continuing relevance and power for both of them. Though she would never be president or vice president, she could at least live within the exclusive orbit of the world’s most powerful.
It was easy to justify turning a blind eye to what might or might not be going on in Barry’s basement office. The power and its prospects hung an opaque curtain before her eyes.
But now on election night, TV remote in hand, flipping endlessly and restlessly back and forth between the twin news services, Meesh couldn’t help looking at Kamel on the screen and sense—no, she could feel it coming in the air tonight—that long hair, those doe-like eyes, that olive-like skin—
Hell, she wasn’t even fucking black.
Michelle could understand Barry cheating on her with some big ass black woman with tits out to here and ass out to there and a big wig and the slut-strut bouncing all over the goddam place.
Michelle just wasn’t going to do the implants—she’d made that clear to Barry over and over again every time he asked, and he asked a lot—nor was she going to tone down the buck teeth at the hands of that probably homosexual Italian dentist Barry kept praising.
A big black woman might have been the straw that saved the camel’s marriage, so to speak, bring Barry O back from what she was pretty sure were binge nights watching porn on the 90 inch, bring him back to the bed, to mount her again and relive those fantasies of yore in which Barry O powdered his face with white makeup and played “Massah” to “slave Michelle”. Whiteface, they called it. It was more the hypocrisy of it all, rather than the coitus, that turned them both on.
But she wasn’t buying it anymore.
No way.
Watching Kamel there on the screen, she resolved within herself that if this thing went sideways, if dumb white guy lost—a very real possibility, given the debate between him and Trump, and more recently the phone call she’d just overheard between Joe and Barry O—and this was the crux of it—their dwindling marriage would be a thing for the dustbin, as George Clooney might say, and to stick around was a fool’s errand if ever there was one, especially a black woman like her, with a nice ass.
***
BARRY O: Joe, Barry here… How’ssss Kamala-looking?
JOE: Mr., uh, well you’re it’s I’m not so if you’ll just.
BARRY O: I agree….uhhh, say, Joe…how are youuuu…holding-up? Looks like Kamalaaa’s got this one…in the proverbial sack.
JOE: Like they are it’s one time the switch. Then the lever and I missed a fulcrum back on the highway. When you watch the sun, you know.
BARRY O: Joe, you crack me up.
JOE: I suspect Kamala’s gonna lose.
BARRY O: How you think?
There was of course no reply from Joe because the moment of lucidity had passed, and now, Michelle knew, wherever Joe might be in time and space, Joe would be mingling with the phantoms of La La Land, a place he knew so well.
Barry O hung up.
***
For the next hour he watched the results with a new interest, Michelle noted. It wasn’t like before. His face had sunk. It grew exceptionally dark, almost as dark as when he listened to Rush Limbaugh lambasting him, back when that fat piece of white shit was still alive—and good riddance.
“Damn white people,” Michelle said. “Man, fuck white people.”
Barry O paid no attention. His protege was pounding the podium, whipping her supporters into whatever little frenzy she could arrange, telling them how it was going to be when she won, how they were going to win, keep the dream alive, and et cetera….
Erstwhile and largely clueless Kamala Harris was going down in flames. Slowly, insidiously, the shadow of the felon crept forward.
Michelle wondered if Barry was chiding himself, the way she was silently chiding him right now, for not becoming a felon earlier in life, which, why not since it would have given him even more street cred with blacks who could’ve voted for him? Well, fuck them, too. A lot of good all that black-white crap was doing now. Why didn’t he have the balls for his own police force? Maybe they could have fixed the ballots, intimidated voters. They’d talked about it so many nights.
Barry continued his dark brooding. Michelle’s disdain for him grew from between her legs. She wanted to vomit it through her vocal cords and maybe push him into the marble ensconced fireplace.
Right there on that leather couch, an eight thousand dollar gift from Joe Biden, where Barry had done so much training and counseling with Kamel—Michelle the first black first lady; the first lady who would save the fat kids across the nation from the rapacious effects of fatty unhealthy school meals; the first lady who would once and for all put white folks in their place and black women in theirs—it was on that leather couch, maybe right where she was sitting, that she accepted that the thing with Kamel, along with all her hopes and dreams of future power, was going to hell.
“The fuck didn’t you stuff the ballots?” Michelle said.
Barry didn’t look at her. He took another swig of Seagram’s, straight from the bottle. Kept watching the channels flip back and forth.
“Trump has…spies everywhere,” he said after a few moments. “His minions watchhhh…everything now. Even thought about ballot mules putting contraband ballots in their rectums, orrrr swallow them and regurgitate during the count.”
“Just do what the fuck you did in the last one,” Michelle said.
She flipped faster when she was angry. The channels blurred and blended the broadcasts so that only a hodgepodge of incoherent reports came through.
Any other night, Barry O would have told her to calm it down, but now he only sat suckling his Seagram’s.
Her political fate and granite agenda for the nation were tied to whether this woman, Kamel, with whom her husband had probably been having an affair, won the election, well, it was all tied and bound up together now.
And she was going to make a big deal out of the years-long training tryst or whatever the hell he’d been having with Kamala.
If she went down—politically, and not just into her husband’s pants—she was going to say to hell with the whole thing, and she was going to shack up with her own tryst lover.
Maybe hook up with Doug Emhoff.
Fuck them all, fuck that bitch.
She was irate now. Turning to Barry, whose face had sunk into a deeper and darker black-gray, she said, “You were fucking her, weren’t you?”
“Who’s that?” Barry said.
“Fuck, I’m not Hillary. I’m not sticking around for the bullshit—Bill.”
Though Michelle didn’t have proof, per se, that Barry had been fucking Kamel for four years while he was grooming her for presidential power, it was Michelle’s womanly intuition that pushed her over the edge, made her as sure as an alert black woman could ever be, without hard proof, that she was a woman cheated on, that the thing had gone down plenty of times, and that, “You probably did it on the couch.”
Barry O paid no attention.
With the election aflame in a ball of doom hurtling through the very web he had spent nearly two decades weaving in DC, he got up from the couch and took off his silk Japanese robe, revealing his thin aging body. The soft sags jiggled when he walked.
Turning on the hot tub bubbles, he slipped in and eased his head back onto the waterproof pillow and closed his eyes and thought about the good times with Kamala. There wasn’t much to do now except let the bubbles massage his anus.
He didn’t have Kamala’s tongue for that anymore. He would have to make do….