by Noah
If only there really was a Hell that matched the fairytale.
When Kissinger finally croaked his last the other day, I mentioned that my first reaction to the blessed news was that at least I got to tell him what I thought of him directly to his face. Since then I've been pondering the fact that I have also been within 6 feet of Donald Trump and Dick Nixon. With Nixon, it was one day when I walked into the record department at the Doubleday Bookstore on Fifth Avenue. The record department was small. The only people there were Tricky Dick, his daughter Julie and her husband David Eisenhower, a teenage kid at the counter, and two gigantic body guards who instantly demonstrated how professionally adept at how good they were at constantly positioning themselves between myself and the then ex-president, a man who they could just feel how much I detested. So I could have said something but... not a good idea.
Instead, I took some enjoyment in the irony of the fact that Tricky Dick was there buying boxes and boxes of blank cassette tapes. Also, I was struck by how charismatic Nixon was. I would have never expected that and it was more than his natural but not excessive tan and the very expensive royal blue coat he was wearing. Somehow, something of the importance of his former position had rubbed off on him despite his having had to resign in disgrace a mere 6 or 7 years earlier.
I felt bad for the clerk behind the counter. He was nervous as hell, knew who his customer was, and he was an African-American kid at that. At one point, he dropped a couple of the flimsy boxes and all the cassettes came out, half of them on the floor and half of them all over the counter. At that point, Nixon's very distinctive voice was heard to clearly say, "Aaahh, that's alright." No one made an attempt to help the kid but the tapes were bagged up, paid for and off they went. I managed a smirk at Julie. Less than a minute later, I was at the counter with the record I was buying. I did the whole transaction in my very passable Nixon voice. The kid cracked up laughing. I like to think the Nixon party heard us as they left the store but I'll never know.
So that's Kissinger and Nixon; two gone and one still polluting our world. My encounter with Trump was different. At the time, I didn't know a ton about him. Sure, I had zero respect for him. The discrimination cases he was involved in and his KKK approach toward the Central Park Five assured that. Like most New Yorkers, I knew that Donald Trump was a bad guy but I had no idea of the extent of it until later.
Here's my Trump story: As with my fleeting encounters with Nixon and Kissinger who were, to say the least, already known as a traitor and one of the world's worst mass murderers of all time respectively, It's simple a simple tale. As part of my job, I spent a lot of time in recording studios. One night, I dropped in at a place known as The Record Plant and the receptionist mistakenly directed me to the wrong studio. I opened the door and there he was, Donald Trump on the guest couch listening to a playback of some not so good music, a bimbo on either side of him. It's easy to imagine the story behind that scene.
Anyway, I quickly excused myself, closed the door and went into the studio kitchen across the hall to make myself some tea before I went back to the reception desk to find out what room I was really supposed to be in. In the years since, I have often thought of the good I could have done for the world just by grabbing a carving knife from the kitchen and going back to the wrong room. Alas! I didn't know and for that, I apologize.
Ah, but now I wonder. Yeah, I live in Manhattan and have for over forty years, but three separate chance encounters with three of the worst people in all of humanity? What are the odds? Was the flow of the Great Cosmos trying to send me a message that I had failed to heed? Or was it some sort of Kosmic Karma test? Like major earthquakes, these things seem to only come in threes. I guess I'm left to console myself with the notion that one hit out of three chances, even if it was only verbal, ain't bad. In baseball, they put you in the Hall Of Fame for that.