"The forbidden delicacy!" he said. "Let me have it!"

"Are you off your rocker, Casey?" I shot back. "The tetrodotoxin in that thing would kill a rhino!"

But seeing the CIA director's crazed, lustful look, I realized there was no arguing with him. I jabbed the fugu liver with my fruit fork and laid it gently on the gravelly tongue lolling out of Casey's mouth.

Within a few minutes Casey was mumbling thickly that his fingers had gone numb, and a short time after that he had convulsed, hacking bile and bits of tissue onto his plate.

I was certain I'd catch hell from the President, who had been observing our exchange. But he just came over, laid a hand on my shoulder and said, "Tim, now I know why you never believed the one about Rod Stewart and the gallon of spooge."

It was one of many times Reagan impressed me with his ability to keep his sense of humor in a very tense situation.

At a dire moment moment during the Iran-Iraq war, Cap Weinberger hit on an idea to boost the Iraqis' morale by publicly embarrassing Iran's Ayatollah. In the Defense Secretary's plan, I would be deposited in the port city of Bandar-e Ma'Shur by a team of frogmen, then charm my way up to Teheran and sell Khomeini a bootleg tape from the Blues For Allah tour. Reagan's eyes lit up at the notion.

"But Mr. President," I said, "I'm just a South Jersey mick! I couldn't bluff my way past a cadre of Persian mullahs!"

Reagan gazed gravely into my eyes and said in a firm but kindly tone, "Tim, are you gonna strap on a pair or do I have to smack you like a ho?"

I walked out of that meeting with my spine stiffened, though as it turned out Khomeini was really in the market for a dupe of Golden Throats vol. 2, which I'd had the foresight to secret in the folds of my kaftan.

Even knowing President Reagan's reputation as a practical joker, I was surprised one morning to find him standing on K Street, with an Eisenhower-vintage Homburg on the sidewalk beside him. The President explained that there was an injured bird under the hat, and asked me to keep an eye on it while he went for help.

Half an hour later, a sanitation crew came by, and before I could say anything one of the workers speared the hat and tossed it into the bin. I saw that underneath there wasn't a bird at all, but a large, runny turd.

Determined to play along with the joke, I ran out and bought an identical Homburg, and a few weeks later, during a meeting in Ed Meese's office, I presented it to him, saying, "Mr. President, I'm sure you want your hat back."

Without missing a beat, Reagan replied, "Pull my finger."

Though I had my differences with Meese, I felt sorry for his evident confusion as the President and I giggled like schoolgirls. Meese was notoriously prudish about matters like this, which just made us laugh harder.

Issue Number One at the Reykjavik summit was whether President Reagan would agree to Soviet Premier Gorbachev's request that we abandon the Strategic Defense Initiative. "Star Wars" had been taking a lot of hits in the European press, and we calculated that a face-to-face meeting was the ideal forum to present our argument clearly.

During the two leaders' now-famous "walk in the woods," George Shultz suggested we take advantage of our downtime by picking up a whore. Shultz and I were in the middle of a very satisfying session with a blonde Icelandic beauty when I looked up to see that Reagan and Gorby were already back from their stroll!

"You see?" Gorbachev said, pointing. "The first chance they get, the rentiers batten on the marrow of the laboring classes!"

"Blow it out your ass, Pinky," Reagan replied, giving Gorbachev a two-fingered Moe Howard eye jab.

The President never mentioned the incident, but Schultz and I were delighted to see that he'd held firm on SDI.

Though it was already becoming clear that Ferdinand Marcos had become a liability, Reagan was determined to be civil even while we changed direction in the Philippines. During one of the Marcos' last visits to Washington, the President assigned me to hire a male stripper to entertain Nancy and Imelda. Thinking I'd really make a splash, I found a lithe young Filipino who was eager to leave behind his day job as a bus boy at The Palm.

The President insisted on checking out the talent beforehand, so I arranged for a private show in the Oval Office. After just a few minutes, however, he came bursting out and collared me at Mike Deaver's desk.

"What the hell's wrong with you?" Reagan demanded. "He's hung like a peanut!"

Where his beloved Nancy was concerned, Reagan wanted nothing but the best, every time.