Precious Keepsakes of Our Fleeting Time Together

But seriously: What kind of person holds on to bloodied gauze and dirty needles for six or seven years?

An ex-cop, apparently.

We did not know until reading the New York Times this week that Brian McNamee, Roger Clemens’ ex-trainer and chief accuser, was a pre-Giuliani era member of that city’s police force, a resume entry his lawyers have cited to explain his retrieval and storage of items he claims to have use used while injecting Clements in the buttocks with steroids and human growth hormone at the Yankee pitcher’s New York apartment in 2000-01.

In other words, it supposedly was a prescient CYA move by a distrustful onetime law enforcement officer, not a manifestation of some heretofore undefined psychological malady or an effort to cash in on eBay down the road. (And one is moved to wonder whether Clemens, guilty or innocent, was inoculating himself against just such a possibility when he acknowledged early on that McNamee had given him injections in the backside, of Vitamin B12 and painkillers.) According what to an unnamed lawyer “familiar with the matter” told the Times for Thursday’s edition, McNamee says he spirited the detritus away from Clemens’ apartment and took it to “his home in Queens, where he had a medical waste-disposal box.” (Doesn’t everyone?) As to why McNamee only lately has stepped forward with this (alleged) evidence---well, that’s what Clemens gets for taping McNamee’s phone call to him and making it public.

Considering the intimate moments these two shared over the insertions of needles into one man’s tender spot---and we’ll refrain from calling further attention to the homoerotic undertones of those endeavors---theirs does not seem to have been a relationship built on trust.

Now comes word from the New York Daily News that McNamee is purporting to have hit Debbie Clemens with HGH before she posed in a bikini for Sports Illustrated’s 20003 swimsuit issue. (The Daily News did not report whether McNamee claims to have injected Mrs. Clemens in her tush.)

Damn, this is getting good---better than Season 5 of The Wire! And the cast is getting almost as large: According to Friday’s Times, Clemens, in the midst of his two-day meet-and-greet swing through congressmen’s offices on Capitol Hill, was “introduced” at his news conference by none other than "America’s Judge," U.S. Rep. Ted Poe, a onetime colleague of Clemens lawyer Rusty Hardin in the Harris County district attorney’s office (as well as of Chuck Rosenthal, whose would-be destroyer, like Clemens’s, is an ex-cop). We’re sure this wasn’t the first time Poe has given an accused drug user such consideration.

If you, like us, can’t get enough of this tale, we’d recommend this detail-rich profile of McNamee in the recent New York magazine, which includes a description of a 2001 episode that resulted in McNamee being investigated but not prosecuted for a rape involving GHB (said incident allegedly having taken place while McNamee was "partying" at a Tampa hotel with Bellaire High grad Chuck Knoblauch), as well as this observation on the nature of the ex-cop's relationship with The Rocket:

“McNamee got off on being the guy that Clemens deferred to,” says Pat Jordan, a veteran sportswriter who spent time with the two men in 2001. “The ‘greatest pitcher of our generation blah blah blah’ would have to ask McNamee what he could have for dinner, and McNamee got off on it. He was officious about it. He was pissed off I was intruding on their intimacy.”