My Dinner (Sort of) With Donald tRump

I was on assignment; he was eating & cheating

My NYC orbits near the worst man on our planet (take one)

Back in the late 1980s, I wrote a few articles for Paper magazine. The ear-to-the-hip-ground Downtown Manhattan-based publication had pages of these nifty little capsules, about 150 to 250 words, that would spotlight or tout cool and notable stuff around town to be seen, heard, patronized or purchased and such.

I did one on public access cable TV porn queen Robin Byrd, and another on a cult indie movie from a few years before that continued to show on the art house circuit, “UFOria,” with Cindy Williams (of “Laverne & Shirley” fame), Harry Dean Stanton, Fred Ward and Harry Carey Jr. Around about that time, I ran into a fellow I knew – named either Brendan or Brandon; memory glitches – that I’d met when he was a manager at the Hard Rock Cafe on West 57th Street.

He told me was now managing a just-opened place called The Sporting Club in Tribeca on Hudson Street, just below Canal. It was in the same stretch of renewing industrial buildings as the popular post-disco dance club Area and the also-recently-opened jam band-breeding music venue Wetlands. The Sporting Club was one of if not the first high-end sports bar/steakhouse in Manhattan. He invited me to stop by some time and dine.

Told him I could give probably the joint a lil write-up in Paper. He offered to comp me a dinner. Ran it by my editor, David Herskovits, a rather laissez faire guy yet canny journalist. His response: We don’t pay much, so enjoy the free meal.

One early-in-the-week evening I headed to The Sporting Club to dine. When I arrived, Brendan/Brandon was at the maître d’ podium with the hostess. “Donald tRump is here,” he said rather excitedly. I stifled voicing what I thought: So?

Donnie likes his steaks beyond well done

Manhattan in the ‘80s boasted a vibrant nightlife scene regularly covered in the tabloid gossip and social photo pages as well as the the delightful La Dolce Musto column in the Village Voice. Trump yearned just like the striving outer-boroughs arriviste he was to become a big Manhattan cheese in those media pages, aided by his bogus “PR man” guise John Barron. (It’s perversely bizarre that he assigned his fake self’s surname as his youngest son’s first name.)

So I understood why Brendon/Brandon was glad a celebrity was there and didn’t want to harsh his enthusiasm. But I’d read enough of the reporting on his schemes in the Village Voice to know Disco Douche Donnie was a slimeball, and every other impression I got of the press-hungry narcissist made my stomach churn like I was gonna puke. I chuckled with delight the first time I read him described so perfectly as a “short-fingered vulgarian” in the ingeniously sharp and cutting Spy magazine. We perceptive New Yorkers had his scummy number early on.

As the Sporting Club’s hostess led me to my table, the only other male patron on the place was dining over at the other side of the room was the vulgarian. With an attractive younger woman who was not his wife Ivana. As I dined, I paid tRump little mind other than a few quick glances his way. It was obvious he was trying to impress his dinner date, holding court as if he was some wise and esteemed grandee. It was a few years later that I realized she was Marla Maples, who’d been having an on-and-off affair with Mr. Mar-a-Lardo during the ‘80s and later became his wife about two months after she dropped an anchor baby, their daughter Tiffany, into his fortune.

I was far enough away from this happy (?) couple to not have my dinner spoiled.

When I wrote up my article on the Sporting Club, I didn’t mention tRump (of course).

Since he was installed into the Oval Office due to an Electoral College imbalance that should be rectified – lest we forget, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by more than 2.8 million votes – I’ve pondered the what-if notion of traveling back in time to that night, knowing what I now know about the man. Would I do what was needed to save the world from all the suffering, strife and other many and myriad horrors he has plagued onto our nation and the world?

Alas, I subscribe to the principle “Thou Shalt Not Kill” not just spiritually but morally. But that didn’t stop me from wishing Donnie J. Poopenfarter would just die in a previous Echo From the Margins post.

Stay tuned for another near fly-by with the man who never should have been president, following soon. It will be even more entertaining than this one, and a bit salacious.