Gerry Girl, Part 1

So, I didn’t have my “Live Free or Cry” post on Hillary up eight minutes before one of my ex-girlfriends emails me and tells me I haven’t changed–that I’m the same sexist miscreant I always was (no, it wasn’t Kacie, and I can’t say who it is because her uncle is a District Attorney with umpteen law buddies, and she’s still so bitter that every few months she gets a few glasses of wine in her and pokes me with a stick hoping I’ll go off and she can sue me into oblivion–and get what? My ‘92 Honda Accord and the last four Blazers ‘77 Championship Dr. Pepper Commemorative glasses I still have left? Whatever. In any case, I can’t afford a lawyer, so I’m not going to take the bait and out her on the Internet, so I guess she wins. Anyway). Oh, sweet Jesus, I thought, this again?

In the first place, I never played the gender card on Hillary. The headline was a harmless play on the Granite State motto. She cried, or almost cried. My only point was that, after years portraying herself as a soulless, castrating robot, she actually showed real human emotion for one of the first times in her public life. Bravo! Crying–that’s what humans do. I’ve publicly admitted more than once that I welled up at the end of “Terms Of Endearment” and the series finale of “Six Feet Under”. So let’s just put that charge to bed right now.

But as I said, that shuriken comes out of nowhere and gets impaled in my forehead a lot more often than it should. There was the ultra-feminist I dated in the 90s–for three years mind you. If I’m such a relentless barefoot-and-pregnant ogre, how did we stay together three years? We had our arguments, but only once did I even remotely cross the line and do anything that could be considered chauvinistic (It was an argument about language, and she insisted that the word “history” is etymologically sexist. I was a little buzzed and in the mood to punch her buttons, so I told her that was ludicrous and that I thought she was being “hersterical”. She squirted me in the face with Sriracha and went and stayed at her lesbian carpenter friend’s house for three days. I’m man enough to admit that I probably deserved a couple hours in the doghouse for that one–but three days, and Sriracha? Jesus.)

And any woman in my life who’s ever seen my CD collection wouldn’t dare call me sexist–yet they still do. Sure, I’ve long since sold most of them, but in the late 90s, during the whole Lilith Fair “Menstrualpalooza” fad (okay, that might have been another step over the line–I once referred to Lilith Fair as a “traveling menstrual show” to a girl at a First Thursday gathering. That one just got me called an asshole), I had Shawn Colvin, Sarah McLachlan, Tori Amos, Suzanne Vega–I even owned Joan Osbourne and Paula-fucking-Cole! What kind of a “sexist miscreant” owns a Paula Cole CD??? (I traded it and the Joan for $3 in credit, which I put towards Outkast’s “Stankonia”) .

If you want a real laugh, one of these days I’ll post my divorce papers from my ex-wife, DeeDee. Read those and you’d think I was Phil Spector. One choice nugget had me “demanding I clean his soiled laundry”. First, I did the laundry most of the time, and once–just once–I asked her if she could get my shirt clean. It was my favorite shirt, and it wasn’t “soiled”; it had a lot of blood on it and I couldn’t get it out with Spray-N-Wash, so I thought maybe she could take a whack at it–maybe she knew some old wives’ treatment that I didn’t. (It was a lavender pastel short-sleeve button-down. I was watching a Packers game in a tavern in Springfield, Oregon, and I hate Green Bay, so during a particularly-intimate pile after a kickoff return, I said out loud, “I guess that’s why they call them ‘the Packers.’” And this idiot meatball in a Skil trucker’s cap and a Dorsey Levens jersey makes a comment about my “fag” shirt. I said I didn’t put much stock in a sexual-orientation assessment from someone who developed his GayDar face-down on the shower tile in the county lockup–-which, in a tavern in Springfield, was probably a pretty stupid thing to say. When I came to, I was in a dumpster out behind the bar, and my shirt was covered in blood–”soiled” makes me sound like I shat myself).

But then there was the Gerry Ferraro thing. I was pretty excited when Mondale picked her in ‘84 ( I was so terrified that it would be racially self-righteous “Kill Whitey” Demo also-ran, Jesse Jackson). It wasn’t until I saw her speaking outside of Carson Hall on the U of Oregon campus in October of 1984 that I was smitten (never mind that the retarded kid who scraped the trays in the Carson Dining Hall was standing behind me, shouting with retard strength, “Bow-eeeeeeee! David Bow-eeeeeeeeeeeeee!” [”China Girl” was still in heavy rotation on MTV at this point]). She was my Mrs. Robinson. My Anne Bancroft. My smoky-voiced, super-sexy Lauren Bacall, and she was in pole position to become the first female Vice President in U.S. history. I don’t care if she was old enough to be my young grandmother, at that moment there was nothing sexier than a powerful, tough-as-nails, hard-spoken woman who could become the second-most powerful person in the world (yes, the Cold War was still on, but Constantin Chernenko was already circling the drain and couldn’t carry the American Vice President’s jock). She was the new It Girl in my life (although the David Bowie thing was a little creepy, in retrospect).

Which brings me to the divorce papers: All I told DeeDee was that I thought it would be cute if she got a bob. That’s all. I never said I wouldn’t have intercourse with her if she didn’t get a Gerry Ferraro haircut. That was a lie. I mean, it would have been a lot sexier than that stupid albino peroxide thing she had going on that she called her “Daryl Hannah” (she looked like she was auditioning for a Siegfried & Roy tribute act), but I didn’t make any demands or anything.

Anyway, that was my bad. You shouldn’t marry a woman you meet throwing up in the parking lot of an OTB. But screw her if she thinks she can make my admiration for Gerry a bad thing. And, sure, I’ve got a little crush, but why not? She’s the only woman ever to win the Vice Presidential nomination. She’s the only woman to have a spot that high on any ticket (unless you count Lenora Fulani, who ran on the ticket of one of those parties you register from a form in the back of an alternative newsweekly, and she won about 136 votes from seven states over several elections). Anyway, more about me and Gerry tomorrow.