It was my first inkling that US democracy had achieved a new high. The phone rang. The caller was a friend who lives in Washington DC.
"So, Lafferty, did you see the Larry Flynt ad?"
"No," I said. I knew nothing about an advertisement from America's most infamous pornographer, publisher of Hustler magazine and subject of the movie The People Vs Larry Flynt.
"He's taken out a full-page ad in the Washington Post offering $1 million to anyone who can prove they had sex with a Congressman," said my friend. "What do you say we go over to Capitol Hill, wear some hot pants and trawl for DNA? We could retire."
Grateful that I choose my friends so carefully, a sense of humour being the primary criterion, I declined the "journey toward a million dollars". My friend and I dissolved into laughter at the vision of our middle-aged selves on such a Lewinsky-esque quest. But the idea that such a thing was possible was now real.
In fact, Mr Flynt is giving hypocrisy a run for its money and he is rich enough to do so. Flynt Publications, based in Los Angeles, employs 250 people and owns about 30 magazines, only five of which are sexually oriented. The rest concern themselves with matters of boating or computers.
But Mr Flynt, who went to jail for his defence of the First Amendment, is angry that politicians who may have committed the same acts as President Clinton will now sit in judgment of him during an impeachment inquiry.
Besides, as Mr Flynt told Time magazine, the independent prosecutor, Mr Kenneth Starr, has managed to do "what I could not do in a quarter-century: make pornography more widely available". So what kind of responses has Mr Flynt received? On Thursday afternoon my friend Greta Van Susteran (an on-air legal analyst for CNN who has reached the level of recognisable celebrity in the US) and I were driving around Los Angeles after a pleasant lunch at Spago. One of us - we are now arguing about who - looked up at the building bearing the name "Flynt Publications" on the corner of Wilshire and La Cienega Boulevards and said, "Hey! Let's drop in to see Larry Flynt, ask him how it's going."
Our half-serious prankishness evaporated as we discovered ourselves being ushered into the inner sanctum of Mr Flynt's empire, a lavish penthouse that is decorated in ornate gold stuff, heavy tapes tries, thick carpets and bronze statutes, all with a panoramic backdrop of the Hollywood Hills.
A secretary wheeled him in, in his famous $85,000 goldplated wheelchair. During one of his obscenity trials in 1978, Mr Flynt was shot by an assailant and remains paralysed from the waist down. He smiled and stretched out his hand. It's not often that Mr Flynt gets a celebrity like Ms Van Susteran showing up and he was delighted to see her.
"We don't get many visitors up here," he said.
The responses to his ad have amazed even him. So far, Mr Flynt is employing three full-time investigators to follow up on 2,000 telephone calls. From 250 leads, Mr Flynt's people have winnowed the good ones down to about a dozen. They are looking for documentation: photographs, videos, letters, anything to prove that someone had sex with a congressman, a senator or prominent officeholder. If they find it, they will publish it. But the million dollars is reserved for big fish.
"A freshman congressman would be worth only a hundred or two hundred thousand, if that," said Mr Flynt.
No, Mr Flynt lusts for something solidly sordid on the Republican leadership, people like the Speaker of the House, Mr Newt Gingrich. So far, let us say, he is optimistic. He mentions a few of the stories he is following up on. But it is unlikely he will be able to publish the results, in both his magazine and on the Internet, before the November elect ions.
"We have to apply the same journalistic standards anyone would," he says solemnly. No corner-cutting here.
We have been sitting chatting with Mr Flynt for about 30 minutes. After a few pleasantries, his wife offers to give us a tour of the adjacent apartment she and Mr Flynt use when he works late. I cannot tell you too much about it as I was in something of a daze at that point, but there are push buttons everywhere that open and close 12 ft window shades, ignite instant roaring flames in two fireplaces and adjust room-size video screens.
Back in the car on a sunny California street, we agree that the past hour has been fairly surreal. Kenneth Starr is inarguably a zealot, a true believer, perhaps a misguided Puritan, and to some, a threat to the Constitution of the US.
Larry Flynt is a man who publishes photographs of women in compromising positions with farm animals. He is also a man who abhors political hypocrisy and is willing to do and pay whatever it takes to expose it. But that very juxtaposition of villains - and each man is surely evil incarnate to different constituencies - defines the question.