The first time I ever seriously listened to a Republican was on Valentine's Day, 1992. I was posted up by a squat rack. About to do some squats. He pulled up to the rack next to me and he did two amazing things after we started talking.
A balding man of about 47 he got the whole "I'm not cruising you" thing out of the way right out the gate: "I've been married four times! FOUR TIMES man!" Maybe it had something to do with Valentine's Day.
"Does that make you lucky?" I asked. "Or stupid?" I laughed. Then he laughed.
"Here…lemme show you!"
And he started pulling wallet-sized photos out of his wallet. One after another. Like the whole handkerchief-from-the-hat deal that magicians do. I was tempted and prepared to just say something empty, and nice, after coming in too hot on the whole "stupid" thing.
I…forcibly worked the idea out of my head that he was here because of the sex column I'd been doing…
But I looked. And then I stared. The women were all attractive. Unexpectedly so, given his general look and cut of his jib. That's not what caught me though. I stared just to make sure my eyes weren't tricking me and he hadn't just showed me four pictures of the exact same woman.
That is, they all appeared to be the exact same woman.
I look up and he's smiling and at me. And nodding. Slowly.
"They're pretty attractive," I say about the 30-something brunettes in the pictures. "But…"
"They all look alike right? Well if you got a good thing why change?"
We squatted in silence after that. But they had moved TVs into Gold's Gym and a news story came on about the then President George H.W. Bush. I launched into some non-specific punk rock-fueled screed. Something I'm sure having to do with Bush being shit, Reagan being shit, and the entire Republican mise en scène being shit-fueled.
It wouldn't have raised a single eyebrow among and amidst my fellow travelers. But Lover Man was not this.
"Since when is it a sin to want to make a profit?"
This was actually the right question asked at the right time and I was absolutely the right person to ask. I'd been running a record label since 1981, and at the time had the only record-tape-tshirt-video-gun-and-tattoo-parlor in the world, as far as I knew. I had also been audited three times, and suffered one tax seizure.
I mouthed some empty, well worked phrases, but what stuck with me more than anything was this: maybe the enemy is not them. Maybe it's us. And if that's the case, when and how aggressively do we redraw battle lines?
Flash forward to Minton's. In Harlem. Better known as the birthplace of bebop. I was at a VIP dinner for a festival my company was sponsoring in Central Park. VIP dinners are weird since you never know who's going to show up but when I saw Karl Rove's name on the list of attendees I started to sharpen my knives.
I spotted…Katie Couric, which was very much like spotting a leprechaun. This has nothing to do with her height, really. It's just hard to believe she exists in reality.
Much like my previously described moment with Jerry Ceppos, this would be my chance. In the briefest of interregnums between soup and dinner I might be able to ask him to explain himself or, at the very least, offer some expression of outrage for him being what I had said was, paraphrasing Travis Bickle, the worst scum sucking scum ever. Like: ever.
I spotted Trombone Shorty. Katie Couric, which was very much like spotting a leprechaun. This has nothing to do with her height, really. It's just hard to believe she exists in reality.
And then, like the song says, across the crowded disco floor, through a maze of dancing people, I spot Karl Rove. Not only do I spot Karl Rove, but it's clear that Karl Rove has spotted me. Which is as weird as when you have an idea and then they start talking about that idea you have on TV….after you had it.
In other words you could see this going all kinds of wrong very fast. And as he was clearly making his way toward me I did a brief head check to make sure I wasn't standing in front of George Bush or something and then I turned back to face…the face of Karl Rove.
"There you are!"
There's another Eugene Robinson out there. He's a journalist too. He won a Pulitzer. He writes for the Washington Post. I write about murderers, Mafiosi, sex criminals and clowns.
It should be easy to not confuse us, but we are confused. I get his hate mail. I sometimes get his checks. I hate to think what he gets of mine but in this instance I got Rove.
"So you're looking for me?" I laugh.
"Sure! I had to meet The Man."
Unsure of what he had read of mine, I knit my brows and forcibly worked the idea out of my head that he was here because of the sex column I'd been doing for the last nine years called "Sex With Eugene."
But we were off to races and I was waiting for providence to provide the TA-DAH moment when I could spring my attack. I waited while we talked about history, we talked about music, film, and eventually books. He had just written one and I had written a few.
Then as happens at VIP dinners someone pulls us away to meet someone else and it was over and gone with it was my moment. But I'm not going to lie. I wasn't getting closer to my moment. I was, in fact, getting much, much further away. Because like Al Pacino says in one of his turns where he played the Devil, the key is to never let them see you coming.
I didn't see Karl Rove coming even as he was coming toward me.
Deeper than that Karl Rove had been explaining to me without explaining to me that much like the CP Snow and FR Leavis squabble, there were two cultures afoot here, throughout all of our struggles over politics, race, culture, class and creed, and it was animal and elemental. There were people with eyes to see and ears to hear and everyone else.
"Jesus Christ…who are these people in cut rate Calvin Klein t-shirts feeding their kids Cheetos for breakfast?"
He was, in the best and worst of all possible ways, an elitist. And so was Anton LaVey. And so was Allen Ginsberg. And so was Lydia Lunch. And, admittedly, so am I.
You ever go to Walmart on a Sunday morning and while wandering, for even the briefest of moments you find yourself thinking "Jesus Christ…who are these people in cut rate Calvin Klein t-shirts feeding their kids Cheetos for breakfast?" Yeah? So are you.
I spent a week angry with myself. I mentioned it to a former Texas progressive politico friend of mine and he laughed at me: "You got honey dicked by ROVE!!!" He could have added "nah nah nah-nah nah" but he didn't have to, since I heard it just the same.
And then this last week there was the dust-up with Trump the Delusionist and Rove. Rove said that CPAC and the GOP should dump Trump. Trump said Fox should fold Rove.
How Rove doesn't see a direct connection between what he did to the GOP and Trump blows my mind, but in reading Rove's anti-Trump breakdown I remember what I could most compare my conversation with Rove to and it was meeting and eating with a Nazi in Hamburg a few years ago. It was at a friend's wedding and the Nazi was his now dead father.
He and Rove both had this fugue state thing going of "well, yes, this was/is my job, but any smart person in my position would not have done differently."
In short, all of what he had done, all of what he said …to America? It was the smart money move and, to paraphrase a line from Catch-22, he'd have been a fool to do it any other way.
If you were an astronaut wouldn't you strive to be the best astronaut possible? I mean it's not personal. It is, clearly, some kind of business. Dirty or clean is not for him to say but if he had to say he'd probably say since when is it a sin to want to make a profit?
Outside of all the fucking time?
I don't know. But I feel unclean just the same. For not knowing. And most assuredly, for not saying.
The shrimp that night at Minton's though? To die for.