Republicans I Have Loved
They were moral. I was flexible.
by Steve Almond
November 3, 2008
None of what I'm about to tell you could have happened after Bush v. Gore.
For those of you who missed that episode of The Daily Show, Bush v. Gore was the Supreme Court case that handed the 2000 presidential race — let's not confuse matters by calling it an "election" — to George W. Bush by halting a recount in Florida. But Bush v. Gore represented something far more personal for me, a kind of politico-sexual fault line. Simply put: it marked the end of my willingness to fuck Republicans.
Note the word choice here: "willingness." I don't mean to imply that my desire for Republicans dried up with Bush's coronation. No, ma'am. Despite my best intentions — and a happy marriage! — I retain an illicit lust for right-wing hotties. Show me the left-wing horndog who hasn't fantasized about stirring Sarah Palin's moose stew and I'll show you a liar (though if we're going to be completely honest, my Palin fantasies tend to involve Biblical reenactment, light bondage and bacon grease).
But here I am, getting all hot and bothered about our next Sex Prez, when my purpose was simply to share a few memories from my years of sleeping with the enemy. . .
* * *
Was her name really Muffy McBride? It was not. I can't tell you her real name, because we grew up in the same town and our families remain acquainted. I know this because her father mentioned, during my one and only dinner at the McBride compound, that he knew my grandfather from such-and-such a club. (Which, it turned out, was the sort of club that had proven its enlightenment by allowing Jews to join.)
Did I realize Muffy was a Republican? The size and location of her home were clues, as was the unironic wearing of seersucker by McBride males. But we were sixteen and Muffy had a great ass, an exquisite shelf-like protuberance, which I wanted to rub. (If possible, with my Hebrew National.) Our affair was brief and non-ejaculatory, its climax arriving on the night we snuck into the pool at Rinconada Park and groped one another in the deep end. Then we hung from the diving board and panted. With her wet hair swept back I could see the high noble forehead, the moneyed smile and the blue water lit beneath her.
I was a goner.
But Muffy wanted a dalliance at most. She was a virgin, tightly wound, intrigued by me, but also a little disgusted. I discovered this on the night I picked her up for our final date. I was sucking on a cherry Lifesaver. "That smells good," she said, and I, in a maneuver I saw as hopelessly debonair, pressed my mouth against hers and passed the Lifesaver from my tongue to hers. She squirmed away, spit the candy onto her palm and threw it out the window.
* * *
And what of the bank teller in El Paso? She was tall and quietly smoldering, with ringlets of reddish hair moussed stiff. My pals and I showed up every week with our puny checks and our hanging tongues. Her name was (let's say) Lourdes and I was (let's say) Sad and Ugly.
I eventually invited her to go see a George Strait concert. Why would I have tickets to a George Strait concert? Had someone dropped a large brick on my head? No, I was the music critic at the daily paper. It was my job.
Lourdes showed up in painted-on jeans and a cowboy hat. That was the first sign I might be in the presence of a Republicana — the second being that she knew the words to all of George Strait's songs. But I had a hard time seeing how Lourdes could be conservative, because she was Mexican-American and she worked in the service sector. It struck me as impossible that such a creature could support a greed-deranged plutocracy. I suppose I should mention that I was twenty-two years old.
We had a few more dates, all terrifically awkward, before I managed to get her back to my disgusting bachelor pad where we drank a gallon of wine. How lovely her long body looked in the moonlight! "I'm not going to do that," she kept saying.
Then she went ahead and did that. I lay beneath and quietly prayed to my mystical Jew God for forbidden trespass into this possible Republicana. Her breasts heaved poignantly. Her slickness pressed down hot upon me and slid lengthwise. I raised my thighs so as to allow that final animal plunge. But her soft musculature pulsed and she rocked forward. "No no no," she said. "Wait. Not that."
Such a flip-flopper! How many times did we engage in this sticky contortion? I would estimate a hundred. Crack went my kneecaps. Thump went her ass. Boing went my confused and purplish cock. Her virtue was at issue, the wine was gone, and I was a poorly designed rowing machine. And I was a liberal. (Remember?) I didn't have the stomach for coercive sex. Plus, Lourdes was a smoker and her tongue, without the wine, tasted like an ashtray.
So we lunged apart and tucked our nasties back where they belonged, and I drove her home. We lingered in the car, our hands lurid with the sudden possibility of late-inning automotive diddling. Then I noticed the cop car parked in front of her house. Had we been followed? Lourdes laughed. "Don't worry," she said. "That's my dad's cruiser. Or, wait, it's my brother's."
"You're kidding," I said. But Lourdes wasn't a kidder. Her father and brother were men in blue. I, on the other hand, was a man in blueballs, a little Michael Dukakis love doll, riding around in a tank of my own bad hormones. I gave Lourdes one final look — her eyes webbed in mascara, her ardent mouth — then found another bank.
* * *
Much later, well into the nineties. I'd managed to steer clear of Republicanas for a decade, restricting myself to the occasional hard-up independent. Now I was an adjunct professor in Boston, meaning I encountered exactly zero GOPers in any given month. I never even suspected Emily. And honestly, would it have mattered?
No. Emily was gorgeous by any standard, one of those blazing Midwestern beauties reared on supercharged corn and good manners. I had never been in the same room with such absurd pulchritude. And why was she interested in a dork like me? Near as I could reckon, she was trying to break free of her family, and a radical Jewish pornographer was just the ticket.
But her family came later. In the beginning, it was all symphonies and starry nights on her roof and dry-humping. Then I had to say I loved her, which was easy. You couldn't look at her face and not register the drooling depths of love. Our sex was fumbling and reckless, with much worshipful staring at her mysteriously tanned parts. I remember gazing at her sleeping form, the broad, womanly curves of her lower body. All I could think was: I would happily live in this woman's ass. There are worse conditions, friend.
But as the 2000 presidential race heated up, our talk inevitably turned to politics. And here she delivered a shocking revelation: she liked Bush.
"Well, of course," I said leeringly. "Who doesn't?"
She was serious.
"But you write poetry! You've lived in Mexico!"
"He's a compassionate conservative," she explained calmly.
I thought I could win her over. (We progressive schmoes always do.) Together, we attended lectures and seminars. I made her take an on-line policy quiz, which revealed that her stated positions were most closely aligned with Ralph Nader. She absorbed my implorations with patience and smiled her blazing smile. Then she took me to Mass.
Some months later I was on an airplane, headed for the Midwestern state that contained Emily's mishpokhe. They were gathered to greet me in the kitchen, peering with great curiosity at this foreign species: the East Coast liberal. I recognized Emily's little sister — I'd met her previously, in Boston, where she'd spent a disquieting hour insisting that the Clintons were murderers. There was a documentary on the subject, and I shouldn't let the media fool me. Sis was now pregnant by her college boyfriend, to whom she was not yet wed. It was all quite Palinesque.
Politics was not discussed during our visit, if you don't count the blubbery blandishments issuing from talk radio. But it was impossible to ignore the photo on the fridge: Emily's parents flanking George W. Bush. Still, I was ready to stand by Emily, or, at the very least, to lay with her. Extreme beauty does this. It dulls the conscience.
Then came the pool party, at which Emily's little sis was encouraged to perform a flip off the diving board. She didn't want to. Anyone could see that. She was pregnant and frightened of injury. But her male relatives weren't taking no for an answer. They hooted at her as she stood awkwardly at end of the diving board. Emily's face was a mask of sorrow. She wanted to protect her sister. Deep down, she was a bleeding heart. She was more decent than her family. But her blood had frozen. It's the fatal flaw with Republicans, even the sexy ones. In the end, they go along with the mob, and convince themselves that certain feelings — weakness, doubt, mercy — don't matter. And you can't fuck your way to a softer heart.
We lasted only through the early primaries.
©2008 Steve Almond and hooksexup.com