Donald Trump Is Our Least Racist President Since Axl Rose

President Trump has been widely mocked in recent weeks for tampering with Facebook’s algorithms and for describing himself as The Least Racist Person You’ll Ever Interview. To this point, I hadn’t wanted to allow his and my past friendship to come to light, for fear some would say it prevents my assessing the Trump presidency dispassionately. I have now become convinced, though, that it’s time for a full disclosure.

We were friends while studying at the Wharton School, but that isn’t saying much. I don’t think you could find half a dozen Wharton alumni from those years who doesn’t remember Donald as a friend. He wasn’t only the best and brightest of us, but also the kindest, always willing to help a fellow Whart, as we students jocularly called each other, with his or her homework, always willing to stay up almost until dawn comforting those whose girlfriends (or, in the case of the gay students, boyfriends) had left them, or whose grandparents had just passed away. 

We were both in fraternities, Donald in Tau Bama Lama, I in Gamma Smegma Beta. The so-called Tau Bams had no keg parties, but instead spent their weekend nights taking the lonely out salsa-dancing, or just for churros and coffee, and washing the feet of lepers. Their initiation ritual was thought to be the most challenging on campus. One had to undergo a sex change, wear provocative clothing, and have unprotected sex with sailors on Philadelphia’s notorious South Street, with all the initiates’, well, honoraria put into a fund to shelter the homeless, though homelessness wouldn’t begin in earnest until the presidency of Ronald Reagan. 

As even the best friends do, Don and I lost touch in the decades after graduation. While I wrote a negative review of the first Led Zeppelin album and liner notes for a Kinks compilation, he built lo-cost housing, hospitals, and schools for the indigent, and established a chain of pay-what-u-can leper-washing salons extending from Greenwich, Connecticut, down to Charlottesville, Virginia. We hadn’t spoken for decades when, a couple of days after Xmas 2016, I was delighted to receive a phone call from hot White House communications director-designate Hope Hicks inviting me to attend Donald’s inauguration as his special guest. How could I say no? At the ball after the swearing-in, I had the pleasure of meeting and even salsa-dancing briefly with his wife Melania, whose sense of rhythm it grieves me to report needs work.

I stayed in Washington for 48 hours thereafter, and had the privilege of accompanying the new president on one of his secret late-night hikes through the impoverished Anacostia neighbourhood in Ward 8. (With his ludicrous coiffure dissembled and without the padding he wears to make himself appear obese, the president is pretty nearly unrecognisable.) It was on this walk that I saw first-hand how avidly non-racist he is. When we encountered Caucasian veterans huddled in the doorways of check-cashing facilities and liquor stores with ratty 7 Eleven coffee cups in front of them for spare change, Donald would invariably stop, kneel, and say something like, “I fully intend to make a contribution, brother, and to wash your feet, but first must ascertain if there are in the vicinity African American vets suffering privation comparable to your own. If so, I feel I should, to atone symbolically for our country’s appalling past racism, contribute to them first.” The closest any of his prospective beneficiaries came to disagreeing was the grizzled, bearded, urine-reeking Viet Nam vet who said, “But I would urge you, Mr. President, to accord Native Americans, Latinos, and Asians the same courtesy. Let’s face it, sir, to which of its minorities has America ever been kind?” 

“All that’s going to change now, my friend,” the new president said, with tears in his eyes, and I can’t imagine anyone saying he hasn’t been as good as his word, as witness his having appointed Dr. Ben Carson Secretary of the Inferior, and Rep. John Lewis of Georgia having become a fixture at Mar-a-Lago.

Where Thelonious Monk, David Brent, and Rod Stewart Converge

"Handbags and Gladrags" has fascinated me since the first time I heard it, on Rod Stewart’s first solo album, a million years ago. Rod rasped with palpable compassion about a spoiled young woman who’s trying to land a husband, though not yet out of school. Her “poor old grandad”, whom I saw in my mind’s eye as a labourer (office workers don’t sweat), struggles to keep her in trendy attire. Her having come to define herself in terms of her fashionable self-presentation is awful news for him, given the fickleness of fashion. “Once you think you’re in,” the song’s unidentified narrator laments at one point, “you’re out.” Or is he scolding more than lamenting? At song’s end, the narrator notes that our heroine hasn’t held up her end of the implicit bargain with Granddad — she’s missed school while Granddad’s sweating to buy her things — and is fatally disgusted with her. 

You might imagine, as I did, that fatal disgust wouldn’t result from anything less than habitual truancy, and not just a single day’s. But that was hardly the lyrics’ sole misstep. The blind road-crosser who opens the song quickly disappears without a trace, and appears to have been present in the first place just to set up the rhyme about our heroine’s matrimonial ambitions  (I’m reminded of The Move’s "Curly", in which we’re told in the opening lines that the protagonist’s father is a practical man, which turns out to have nothing whatever to do with anything that follows.) Lazy songwriting! Further lassitude is evident in the brazen place-holding of the nursery rhyme-evoking bridge (“Sing a song of sixpence…”). But one forgives all in the end because the Floyd Cramer-ish piano motif is irresistible. 

Floyd was sort of the Chet Atkins of the piano, the country session player. His distinctive “slip-note” style bears a kinship to jazz giant Thelonious Monk’s. You read it here first.

Mike d’Abo, who was about to join Manfred Mann, wrote the song, in 1967, for submission to Chris Farlowe, who’d had a hit the year before with the Jagger-Richards concoction “Out of Time” in spite of producer Jagger’s having thought what the record really needed was him singing out-of-tune backing vocals. Much as I love Farlowe (the greatest of the British blue-eyed soul singers — better than Steve Marriott and even Steve Winwood), I don’t think you can argue very convincingly that he doesn’t rather overpower “Handbags.” Twent-four years later, a Welsh group called The Stereophonics, whose singer sounds very much like Rod Stewart, had a No. 4 hit with the song. But I am much more intrigued by its having been adapted, against all odds, as the theme of Ricky Gervais’s The Office. 

While I’m in rhapsodising mode, I’ll ask you that you let me rhapsodize for a moment about The Office, the best English-language television comedy series ever — greater than M*A*S*H and All in the Family, much greater than the hilarious but farcical Fawlty Towers. A lot of people took one look, found Gervais’s character desperately needy, self-deluded, and obnoxious, and said, “No, thanks.” A few even said, “When I work in an office all day, why do I want to come home and watch one on television?”

Because, if you gave it a few minutes, it tugged so hard at your heartstrings. David Brent was indeed desperately needy, self-deluded, and obnoxious, but if you gave it a few minutes, you saw that what he was mostly was pathetic, a lonely, emotionally tone-deaf misfit whose implacable attempts to get people to love him served only to repel them. I saw a lot of my dad in David Brent, and a lot of myself. And if Gervais’s writing was brilliant, it was nothing compared to his acting. The scene in the second series in which he suddenly loses his brave face and begs not to be fired tore my heart out as only the death of Jimmy Smits’ NYPD Blue character’s had before. (As good as he was — and he was terrific, Steve Carell in the surprisingly wonderful American version didn’t come close.)  

The Office is a work of sublime genius, and “Handbags and Gladrags”, along with The Kinks’ “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” and The Coasters’ “Shoppin’ for Clothes”, one of the three best rock-era songs about matters of the cuff. 

A Song for the War Machine

[ Hear the song ]

The cheque is blank, you generals

Let nothing you dismay

The world consists of black and white

No part of it is grey

Sign off on the body bag we’ve chosen for your son

but have i it back in 30 days. The battle’s far from won

The patriotic melodies that make our chests expand

(were) composed by eager sycophants whose sons bled in the sand

      

The warlords profit handsomely. The poor die for no reason

One marvels at our eager faith in their foul malfeasance

Your daughters served so bravely. We send her home now maimed

Don’t grouse though, There are benefits just waiting to be claimed

The drunken ballerina sprawls. The juggler’s down to just two balls

Within these bleak but hallowed halls, optimism’s vanished

His Ghastliness must be expelled, his puppy spayed, his kitten belled

the mighty oaks he’s climbed all felled, and all his minions banished

Down the sagging power lines the lie they’ve fed us crackles

The cotton for your pillowcase was picked by slaves in shackles

No refuge anymore in art. The dartboard’s ceased to fear the dart

With empty lungs and shattered heart you’re here and then departed

A woman of a certain age unlocks her husband’s gilded cage

For months he’s been consumed by rage. He hungers for revenge

A synagogue is first to burn, and then the church and mosque in turn

What next? We are afraid to learn. The Louvre or Stonehenge?

Guerillas in chic camouflage invade the oligarchs’ garage 

but find that it’s a cruel mirage in which they’ll be imprisoned  

Those whose throats remain unsliced proclaim themselves as one with Christ

that charismatic poltergeist, so handsome and so risen

The patriotic melodies that make so red our blood

composed by eager sycophants whose sons drowned in the mud

The jeopardy in which they placed themselves was their reward

for living here. The pen is much less mighty than the sword

Spit-Roasting With Tim and Marcia

Tim and Marcia drove their daughter Ashlee up to Santa Barbara to begin college. They didn’t cry, as they had three years later when they’d driven Jared to Tempe to start his own college career. As the song suggests, the first cut is the deepest. Once having survived it, one gets a little tougher, a little less tearful. Tim managed not to make a spectacle of himself even when, just before parting, he noticed the terror in Ash’s eyes. A part of her wanted to blurt, "I'm scared, Daddy. Please don't go!"

Back in the car with Marcia, he kept himself from crying by asking Marcia what he’d been wanting to ask for years, but had resolved not to ask until both kids were out of the house — if Marcia had ever been unfaithful.

“I’ll show me mine if you’ll show me yours,” she said, in that way she had, which he’d found hilarious when they were much younger and she much more beautiful, but which he’d come to find infuriating. “I always wondered if you weren’t doing the rumpy-pumpy with What’s-Her-Name, that legal assistant you had on your team in the mid-90s. Gillian. Wasn’t that her name? Gillian?”

“Are you sure you want the truth?” Tim said, remembering a movie in which Jack Nicholson had chewed the scenery while posing a comparable question. “Are you sure you can handle it?” Fair was fair. If she could toy with him, he’d toy with her right back.

“The question isn’t whether I can handle it,” Marcia said, getting out her vape, “but whether Gillian did. Or was it Gloria? I know it was a G name.”

“If we’re thinking of the same person, it was actually Genevieve. From Quebec. She was engaged, and our interaction was entirely professional. As all my interactions with women have been. I won’t pretend I haven’t been tempted, but I’ve never cheated on you, Mar.” He half expected her, in that way she had, to pretend to be outraged by his having felt tempted. But maybe he was selling her short. 

“Fair enough. Now are you sure you’re able to handle the truth,” she said.

“Do you suppose I haven’t noticed that Ash looks a little bit like you, Mar, and not at all like me?”

Marcia sighed and put her vape away, and sighed again. She looked silently out her window at the ocean for so long that Tim wondered if she’d forgotten the question. But then she spoke. “I haven’t been as good as you claim to have been. Do you remember when we were having trouble with that old Maytag dryer my folks gave us? Well, I I think the guy who came out to service it may be Ash’s dad. I probably saw him for six months. You were busy trying to make partner at the time. I felt neglected. He still sends me money for Ash every few months, even though I’ve never told her about him.”

“Well, that’s noble of you,” Tim said. 

“You asked, Tim! I’m telling you, all right? After him, there were a couple of guys from the crew who put in our pool. And before you ask, yes — simultaneously. Spitroasting had always been something I wanted to try. I wasn’t disappointed. One of them returned to Mexico because he couldn’t bring his family up. I saw the other one, Rogelio, on and off for two years.

“Spit-roasting?” 

“Use your imagination, Tim. Two guys, one woman.  And then, around the time Jared started high school, there was Dan, from next door.”

“Dan, who you were always making fun of for being so in love with his car? Dan, for fuck’s sake?”

“You might remember Madeleine had just started chemotherapy. He was beside himself with worry. It started out as me just trying to ease his pain. He was losing his wife, his life partner. The guy was in agony.”

“There are no words for what I’m feeling at this moment,” Tim said.

“Did I say I was finished yet? There was also the odd customer at my shop. Maybe half a dozen over the years. Being around lingerie makes men so adorably nervous. They’re like little boys. And I won’t pretend I didn’t enjoy seducing some of the cuter ones.”

“Cuter ones,” Tim repeated. “What are we, back in middle school?”

“Oh, and your niece’s boyfriend when they came to spend the weekend with us in Tahoe that time. I can’t remember his name. Maybe you do. Mark? Matt? One of those one-syllable M names. Now there was a young man who knew his stuff erotically, at least.”

As they crossed the Ventura County line, Tim almost regretted having raised the subject.

The Best Pop Male Vocal of the 21st Century

I have come to understand that it’s not very manly to be interested in clothes. When one’s wife or girlfriend says, “Hon, do you think it might be time to get you some new duds?” a man is supposed to yank the bill of his ball cap down (provided, of course, that he isn’t wearing it in the tres chic backward style) and petulantly grumble, “Do we gotta?” Once at K Mart, he’s expected to look terribly embarrassed and uncomfortable as Wifey ascertains how many X’s (as in XL, XXL, and so on) he’s come to require, and to dash off to look at fishing equipment or guns or other manly items while Wifey makes the actual purchasing decisions. 

Procol Harum, 1967

When I was young and irrepressibly priapic, I was friendly with the English band Procol Harum, who went on stage in the clothes they wore on the bus and plane, which is to say they were the mid-60s equivalent of our grumbly ball cap-wearer at KMart. I’d seen this photo of them from back in the days when they looked rather more interesting, and asked why they’d become so inattentive to visual presentation. They were aghast. In their eyes, dressing up to go on stage diminished the music. Did I imagine they were pop stars, rather than Serious Musicians? 

On the opposite end of the scale were groups that seemed to have been assembled on the basis of their common devotion to fashion. One such group was LA’s Shady Lady, who always had the coolest new things Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were wearing months before any of the anglophile boutiques in West Hollywood could get them. Unlike Faces, whose Ronnie Lane never seemed to fully embrace the group’s sartorial aesthetic, there were no curve-lowerers among them. They all looked pop stars from head to toe at all times. They aped the Stones, poorly, but no more poorly than The New York Dolls did. Only one of the five approached competence on his instrument, but that didn’t keep them from swaggering. Oh, did they swagger! Seemingly having been coached by Kim Fowley, they would eagerly tell you within the first five milliseconds of having been introduced all about how they had a hotshot manager and a record deal, and were absolutely guaranteed to be The Next Big Thing. Looking as they did, you almost believed them.

I wrote about them for a local newspaper. They played a concert (which they later claimed had in fact been a rehearsal) at the Lindy Opera House in LA’s Mid-Wilshire to an audience of around a dozen fashion-conscious young women. The highpoint of the show was the singer firing a starting gun during one song. Local Newspaper didn’t publish my review, but word nonetheless got around that I’d thought them awful, and the drummer, who didn’t lack for chutzpah, came — alone!— to one of my own band’s gigs to holler, “You suck!” from the back of the club. When I gently (there was something oddly fearsome about him) confronted him between sets, he said we needed to figure out a way to co-exist, as both our bands were obviously destined to be around a long time. 

Both bands were in fact defunct within six months, his in large part because of their deplorable behaviour after a gigantic record biz party in San Francisco. They’d made quite an entrance. Having recently seen A Clockwork Orange, they weren’t just glamorous, but also a little scary. The singer brandished a cane with which he looked intent on giving someone a good thrashing. They’d apparently been signed to the short-lived label that was throwing the $25,000 ($427,000 in 2018 money) party. Afterward, when the million Los Angeles scenemakers who had to get back to the airport piled into taxis in front of the hotel in which the event had taken place, they roughly ejected a woman of my acquaintance from theirs. They later explained, as you’d have expected they would, that women were forever hurling themselves at them, and that their brutishness had been reflexive and self-defensive. Would Mick or Keef have had to apologise for such behaviour? Their label apparently disliked their explanation and dropped them. 

The singer turned out to be a nice guy. We played basketball at that big synagogue on the residential part of Hollywood Blvd. west of Grauman's Chinese Theatre. I didn't pass him the ball often enough to suit him, but he wasn't horrid about it. The drummer went on to join Zolar-X, a Bowie-aping foursome whose principal claim to fame was pretending not to speak any terrestrial language, which made things dicey for them when they went into Guitar Center to buy strings. More recently, I understand he’s serving an extended sentence for manslaughter. I was right about him being dangerous. 

Lots of other well dressed groups came and went, one of the most notable being the Queen-aping American group Angel, all tight-fitting white satin and beautiful hair. But the singer, of all people, had a distracting monobrow that doomed ‘em. Prince and his band dressed quite wonderfully, but I don’t think I’ve ever admired a pop act’s attire more than when Gnarls Barkley, augmented by a female string section and backing singers, performed “Crazy” on Top of the Pops dressed as a flight crew. The attentive will also note that CeeLo Green’s is the best pop male vocal of the 21st century so far. Can you name a track on which Otis Redding or Luther Vandross or even the glorious Smokey or Stevie or Marvin even comes close?

Mrs. Trump, Her Secret Service Thug, and the Honduran Swimming Pool Cleaner She Loves

Just in time for Valentines Day, we now know much more about  the First Lady’s formerly clandestine romance with the handsome Honduran swimming pool cleaner Jorge Luis Mejía. 

There are three swimming pools at the White House, each with its own caretaker. There’s an Olympic-sized pool between the Millard Fillmore Bedroom and Chester A. Arthur Powder Room (it emerged only in 2012, and then with minimal publicity, to spare his ancestors embarrassment, that President Arthur was an avid crossdresser). There is of course a small endless pool in the president’s bedroom, in which President Trump, as contemptuous of exercise as of humility, hasn’t so much as dipped a toe. Jorge Luis Mejía, cares for the koi pond, a gift to the United States from Emperor Hirohito after World War II. 

We are now able to confirm that he and Mrs. Trump met one evening in December when she skinny-dipped in the pool. In her bathing cap, Jorge didn’t recognise her, and scolded her for frightening the fish, and seemed no less indignant even after her Secret Service bodyguard, Everett “Thud” Langley, identified her. She was impressed rather than affronted. 

Once Langley had dried her off, the First Lady pronounced herself peckish, and the threesome retired to the White House kitchen, where they found Executive Chef Cristeta Pasia Comerford in tears. “I am, without blowing my own horn, one of the most talented chefs in America. I have competed successfully on Iron Chef America. I have cooked for four presidents and their families, and countless heads of state, and shoulders! And what does that horrid orange nincompoop want for his dinner? Big Macs! Filet-o-Fishes! Did the great Escoffier have to withstand such humiliation? Marie-Antoine Carême, the originator of haute cuisine?  Guy fucking Fieri?” As she ran wailing from her kitchen, Jorge Luis put on an apron and made Mrs. Trump the most delicious, (and first) bowl of sopa de caracol, a dish all Honduran are required by law to adore, but which she, being Slovenian, had never eaten. Langley liked it too.

They then retired to the White House library. She disclosed her special love of the magical realism of the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. She recounted having asked her husband to rename Mar-a-Lago after Macondo, the utopian city José Arcadio Buendía establishes in 100 Years of Solitude, but the future president had mocked the idea, snickering, “Sure, and while I’m at it, maybe I should rename Trump Tower Sugar Mountain." She had felt so foolish!

“One as beautiful as you deserves gentler treatment,” Jorge Luis said with great sadness in his brown eyes. He read aloud to her from Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. 

They talked about Melania’s son. She told him she’d wanted to name him Zdravko, after Zdravko Čolić. her favourite recording artist during her girlhood in Slovenia, but that the future president had insisted on Barron, thinking it would  get him more favourable coverage in Barron’s, the financial investment newspaper. “I suppose I should be grateful he didn’t insist on Forbes,” Mrs. Trump laughed, for the first time in Jorge’s presence, and he’d never wanted a woman more. They kissed, and the universe blazed with glorious colour. Jorge said he would love to teach Zdrav, as he proclaimed he would call Melania’s son, all a man needs to know — how to hunt and fish and start fires, how to make his woman feel valued, how to make her sopa de caracol when her spirits ebb. 

Fearing his answer, Mrs. Trump asked if Jorge were seeing anyone. He admitted he’d been dating Heather L—, an intern in the presidential tweeting pool, but had for weeks been trying to figure out a way to tell her he couldn’t envision a future with her. Should he point out they were two different people? Would saying that it was his failure, and not hers, cause her less pain? Mrs. Trump said she’d get Stephanie Grisham, her director of communications, or one of her Secret Service studs to do it. Behind her, out of her view, Langley rolled his eyes. 

Jorge admitted to finding the name Secret Service comical, as everyone seemed to know about it. Mrs Trump giggled in delight — the misnomer had never occurred to her — and her girlishness melted that part of Jorge’s heart that had withstood her joke about Forbes. Even Thud Langley could see they were already in love.