It wasn’t easy, believe me, dumping Ann Coulter and making her stay dumped (more of which later). I learned too late—and not without unappreciated effort on my part to stay the sane, rational one between the two of us—that Ann is not the sort of woman who is good at taking “Yes” for an answer when the question is “Do you want to break up?”
Nor does she deign to acknowledge the inherent thread of rejection running through phrases like “It’s over, Ann,” “I can’t live like this, Ann,” and “I’m not some side show freak to parade around at cocktail parties thrown by your Republican friends, Ann!”
Sadly, this last was the whole thing in a nutshell.
Before we started dating, someone must have really given it to Ann about being “pathologically inflexible” about her politics, and accused her of being this way because she was secretly “insecure.”
Well, you can only imagine what kind of quest she went on to prove this person wrong. She latched onto me at a party thrown by a mutual friend whose political persuasion was ambivalent at its strongest and nonexistent at its weakest. Though she denied it—while smashing a series of salad plates against the floor every time I took a step closer to her—I will go to my grave knowing that I overheard her telling Tucker Carlson on the phone that the only reason she’d even been at that party was to look for “a crybaby Clinton-loving liberal” just like me.
The next thing I knew, it was six weeks later and I was tangled up in the most ill-matched love affair I’ve ever been in. Perhaps “love affair” is too fierce a phrase to use; in fact, it is just plain the wrong phrase to use. What Ann Coulter and I had was an “arrangement based on mutual, perpetual animosity.”
The first thing my mother asked when I told her I was bringing Ann to dinner was if she just “put people on” during her talk show appearances. “I always think she’s a pretty girl, until she opens her mouth.”
I’m sure a lot of people believe that “Ann Coulter” is an act devised by a rational human being who knows she can make money by not only by stirring the turd whenever possible, but by dropping the turd in a blender set at its highest speed. Normal people can’t help but want her to be someone who is only playing at being acerbic and insensitive, full of hot air and hopelessly mixed up about her “facts.” Nobody likes to feel so embarrassed on behalf of another person unless there’s a chance the actions of the idiot in question might just be a big joke.
As my George Bush-hating mother and her George Bush-hating gentleman friend found out after Ann had spent some time with my family, Ann’s “work” and her life come together like some snorting two-headed monster charging at whoever happens to be standing nearby.
And if you think she’s bad on TV, you should see her at home after she’s been up all night drinking and watching ESPN. Tequila is a libation that’s not right for everyone, and Ann, regrettably, is one of those people. To give you an idea of what these early weekend-morning episodes were like, try to imagine how frightening Robert Louis Stevenson’s most famous story would be if it turned out there were no Dr. Jekyll, only a somewhat less evil Mr. Hyde that irreversibly morphs into the monstrously evil Mr. Hyde.
I figure it was Bill O’Reilly who’d accused Ann of being too uptight, because every time we bumped into him, Ann was like, “Oh, have you met my liberal girlfriend? She’s a yellow-dog Democrat and she hates my column! Isn’t it cute and so completely open-minded of me that we’re actually dating?”
O’Reilly, always a gentleman, would smirk and say, “Pleased to meet you—again,” before rolling his eyes and shaking his head.
Once, he’d added, hand on her shoulder, “By the way, Ann, try to eat something for God’s sake. But don’t let me catch you throwing it up out by the tool shed like that night we were both at Bill Safire’s for dinner. Keep an eye on her, willya—rice cakes, water crackers, anything, just make her eat,” he then said to me.
He looked genuinely concerned even as he scowled and swaggered away. Though merely cordial when I was with Ann, O’Reilly would always go out of his way to speak to me if we bumped into one another before or after Sunday Mass.
Matt Drudge was another story altogether, but I won’t get into that, especially since so many stories about “the Drudge” involve his lying face-down on Ann’s kitchen floor crying over Andrew Sullivan every other weekend. Compared to those two, Ann and I were like Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.
And believe me, my friends didn’t like her any better than her friends liked me. They knew I was miserable and unhappy, but that I would try to make it work for as long as I could, just like the time I dated Marty Stewart, who my friends hated even worse.
Maybe it was the age difference. Ann liked to punctuate workouts with, “Not bad for someone in her thirties, eh?” But she was way too into Three Dog Night to have been born any time after 1961. And I’ve never known a Sagittarius with so few of that sign’s good traits, though she’s managed to turn the Archer’s characteristic superficiality and tactlessness into a science, by God.
Was she ever sweet? Rarely, unless I agreed to cuddle up with her on the couch to watch The Speeches of Ronald Reagan with a bowl of popcorn (fat-free, no salt: in my book, good only for stringing between cranberries to decorate a Christmas tree. Is it any wonder things didn’t work out?). She always insisted that we watch this video with the lights turned very low. Obviously, many of the things that made her amorous made me dry heave. That was no good. I still have bad dreams sometimes.
Before all was said and done, Ann had shed rivers of tears. She made countless desperate promises and did lots of swearing to God that she cared “very deeply” about me despite the circumstances she’d contrived for us to get together. “I didn’t know I’d end up being crazy about you!” she would weep.
I wasn’t ever heartless enough to point out that I didn’t know she’d end up being so crazy, period.
I’d be lying if I said that I hadn’t at least tried to care deeply about her, as well, despite two gigantic flaws which were, in no particular order, her entire character and her demented world-view.
Snaps to her vocabulary, however, perhaps the only truly attractive thing about her.
To make a long story short, a month after I told Ann I didn’t want to see her anymore I had to move and changed my number to an unpublished listing. Finally, I had to go to an attorney and get a restraining order. She was totally out of control.
The end was not pretty. And I discovered (after rolling over almost every morning for two months and looking at her) that Ann wasn’t, either. Not even when she wasn’t talking.