STEVE BANNON WEEK: Under the Puke-Volcano — A Bender with Steve Bannon
a gross and stupid night
Stephen K. Bannon —the sentient sweat pimple who oozed his way into the White House after seizing Donald Trump as vessel for his white supremacy disguised as rightist populism — is drunk all the goddamn time. Just look at the guy: Overweight. Face marked by red spots — broken capillaries, a telltale sign of heavy drinking. Skin that doesn’t retain moisture well and sweats easily, common among chronic boozers following bad nights.
The former head of online hate-tract Breitbart, who — alongside bald cockbag Stephen Miller and Klan sympathizer Jeff Sessions— is responsible for this past weekend’s executive order banning travel from seven majority-Muslim nations, often appears coated in a patina of bacon grease, smegma and Heineken. This stems not only from his soul’s rot manifesting itself on his person, but also out-of-control drinking.
What follows is the account of a liquor-drenched night I spent with Bannon. I felt that as one of The Shocker’s most notorious drinkers (and its resident murderer), I’d be best equipped to conduct an interview with President Trump’s chief strategist. He contacted Shocker HQ, thinking that if he could empathize with “[you] weird pinko millennials,” that the administration might be legitimized in the eyes of the young. That Nazi sack of shit was wrong as fuck, but my duties to Shocktown demanded I undergo this experience for the sake of the truth. I present this to you, dear readers, with the goal of better knowing the enemy we face for at least the next four years.
We agreed to meet on neutral ground. While the governance of my adopted home state, Massachusetts, is the sort of big-tent, welcoming liberal system that Bannon finds repellent, Boston itself appealed to him with its history of populist patriotism. (I considered speaking at length about Crispus Attucks, the first Black American to be killed for the cause of American freedom in the Boston Massacre, but I decided not to troll so early.)
Having steeled myself for the interview/bar crawl by praying a full decade of the Rosary — as well as an immediate relapse into chain-smoking— I met the chief strategist at the DoubleTree Hotel bar in Downtown Crossing. A lone Secret Service agent accompanied him for protection, but he bought me a Hendricks martini and assured me, “Archibald’s with me at all times, but far as secrets go his mind’s a steel trap. He won’t spill anything to another paper or website. You guys are a website, right?”
“Yes, The Shocker,” I reminded him. “Most of our stories are surrealist NBA satire, but since our readers are becoming more socially aware — you know, woke — there’s been a clamor for political content.” Bannon, opting for a Seagram’s gin and tonic, shook his head and said, “These fucking ingrates. Always grasping for handouts, always ME ME ME. Ridiculous.”
I decided to neither humor nor immediately rebuke this statement. “Well, Steve, if there’s any hope of us understanding your policies it’ll help to understand you as a man. Tell us some things that maybe didn’t find their way into the profiles we’ve all seen.”
The heavyset, wild-haired man cleaned his glasses and appeared to consider this, but soon his brow furrowed into that bellicose, red-cheeked scowl we know from all extant photos of Bannon. “Fuck that. I said the media needs to shut up, and I meant it. This was a stupid idea.” He slapped himself on the forehead and said, “Stupid s-s-tuttering S-s-tephen!”
I inexplicably felt a burst of compassion for a man whose ideology I hated — which I hope wouldn’t bite me in the ass later — at the sight of this mild self-harm. “OK……you still want to get drunk?”
Bannon turned to me and I expected immediate refusal. But although his face stayed scowly, he said, “Why not. I got no one else to drink with. No one who’ll talk, anyway.” He gestured toward Archibald, the Secret Service man. Archibald glared back through mirrored sunglasses. In usual circumstances I’d point out that Archibald’s refusal to speak might stem from him being a Black American man serving as protection for a proclaimed white nationalist, but there was nothing usual about these circumstances. We downed the remnants of our drinks in single gulps.
[Editor’s note: Henceforth, the narrative becomes splintered, as we were forced to rely on Liam’s handwriting on hotel stationery and, in one case, paper scraps from a disassembled cigarette pack, to transcribe his account. Liam’s penmanship is borderline illegible as is — inebriation made it worse.]
…like three hours since I met Bannon at the DoubleTree and I’m fairly certain I haven’t been this drunk since I killed a half-liter of Jim Beam in an hour, freshman year of college. We’re outside a pizza place on Stuart Street that just threw us out after Bannon the bad man (Mannon?) said some shit about the cashier looking furtively swarthy. Archie and I tried to apologize but then the pizza chef chucked vats of marinara at us, and we bolted. (Bannon was too busy shouting epithets to notice Archie speaking, and still believe his protective agent to be a willing or impaired mute.)
The chief strategist can fucking DRINK. He’s had, by my count, two gin-and-tonics, two martinis and four bottles of Heineken Light (“Looking to slim down a bit,” he explained) whereas I’ve only had three martinis. And he’s picking the most bottom-shelf gin — Seagram’s, Gordon’s, New Amsterdam. Archie, meanwhile, has had just one beer in each of the three bars we’ve patronized, keeping silent, likely in some corner of his heart wishing he could claim we suddenly became radicalized terrorists who had to be shot. I light a cigarette and Bannon follows suit but he lights and smokes two simultaneously. His brand is USA Gold, a choice I find disgusting beyond measure. He is a walking, breathing monument to American bad taste. He is Why They Hate Us. (They hate a lot of shit, but Steve Bannon has to be high on their list. He’s as vulgarly American as a fucking KFC Famous Bowl.) While Archie goes to get the limousine from the parking garage he used, Bannon begins loudly singing “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and punctuates the line that ends just before “His truth is marching on” with a trumpeting fart of considerable volume —
…now, having not only guzzled two more G&Ts, Bannon also pays for all the gin bottles in this bar — Society 9 or something like that, it’s club-esque with low dark-blue lighting but decidedly un-club in its atmosphere, though the ladies behind the bar with plunging-neckline tank tops seem to have been directed to dress as if it is — and lays them out before us. “We’re gonna get outta here and go drink in the streets like real Americans,” Bannon says. This is the first time I’ve agreed with him on anything — public intoxication is U.S.A. as fuck. “Here” — he stumbles on my name, then light dawns sick-yellow in his drunken eyes — “Liam! Right, Liam. You can have the fancy stuff,” pushing the Hendricks and Bombay Sapphire toward me. “Now don’t gemme wrong,” he slurred, “I appreciate high-end things. I like purebred cats, for fucksakes! Don’t call people snobs for likin’ fancy stuff like all the rubes think I do.” (I assume by “rubes” he means the infuriated out-of-work manufacturing employees throughout middle America and the Rust Belt, as well as the rednecks and evangelicals from all corners, who made his toupeed god-king president.) “But tastewise when I wanna get loaded I wanna feel the burn. Y’know?”
A dramatic pause, then: “Pity about the Jewy guy who went against Clinton…what was his…Sanders, right? Sanders! Had real convictions, not that different from the President in certain ways. One of the good ones, I guess.” The minor portion of my cultural heritage that is loudmouthed Brooklyn Jew somehow manages to keep quiet. Bannon undoes the top on his bottle of choice — a local-distilled gin, Bully Boy — and after guzzling says, “Liam! Right. Like Liam Neeson. You like the movie Taken? That’s good shit.” I tell him, truthfully, that I do, although not for the reasons he does. I recommend he check out Run All Night and A Walk Among The Tombstones. Why I’m giving this fuckboy good movie picks, I have no idea — has to be the drink. A guy walks by in hoodie and vintage Golden State Warriors fitted cap, and Bannon grabs his shoulders, spins him around and screams, “I can see into your soul through this circle on your headwear!” pointing to the circular “City” logo. “You are a man of strange tastes who once asked a prostitute to peg you with two Slim Jims!” The dude bolts, and just as the bar’s bouncers start making their way toward the source of the conflagration — poor Warriors-cap guy rushing into the arms of his bewildered girlfriend, sobbing into her pea-coat -covered shoulder — Archibald explains that we’re leaving. Taking the gin bottles with us, we do just that, as Bannon giggles uncontrollably and tells me and his Secret Service agent, “I can’t really see into people’s souls. Least not on a Thursday night. I was just projecting with that whole Slim-Jim thing.” I stand still for a moment before I simultaneously light and smoke three cigarettes at once in a madcap effort to avoid vomiting —
…walks away from us all, muttering, “I didn’t want the shoes THAT badly, shit.” I don’t know what the guy means. I’m too busy watching the chief strategist of the fucking White House puke a thick continuous spew of clear liquor, yellow-green bile and a brown/red blend that’s probably half-digested pizza, all onto a patch of half-frosted grass and soil in the Boston Public Garden, near the rickety dark green dock that holds the swan boats in the spring. Bannon probably needs Prilosec or something like that and I hope he doesn’t know it. It’d be no great loss. Archibald observes this sad affair alongside me and I ask him, sotto voce, if he could just kick Bannon directly in the ass, watch the man plop into the pond like a stone made of Hardee’s burgers, and call it an accident. Archibald sighs deeply, then says, “Damn it, man, I took an oath. And it’s to, like, people, not the greater good.”
After about 12 minutes of uninterrupted vomiting — some blood coloring it briefly around minute six — Steve Bannon stops retching. He uses the sleeve of his off-the-rack Sears blazer to wipe stray chunks from his muzzle/snout area (it helps to think of this man in more animalistic terms; it’s what serial killers do so they can’t empathize with their victims, and while my murdering is generally on a contract and/or self-defense basis I can see why they try this shit JESUS DON’T GIVE THE SECRETS AWAY WHAT THE FUCK??!!). Then he screams a bunch of indecipherable phrases that don’t sound like any language known to human beans, his eyes blazing yellow-red for a second that feels like an eternity. Maybe it is an eternity. I turn to Archibald, the gesture asking, Is this normal? The agent shrugs it off.
Bannon returns to some semblance of normal human appearance. Semblance being a key word here. “Sorry about that. When puke-time happens I start to revert to” — pregnant pause, the alcoholic fascist’s eyes welling up with tears — “s-s-s-st-stuttering s-s-s-s-St-Steven, and then I have to call on the tripartite forces of Azazel, Beelzebub and Yogsoggoth. Normal stuff. Y’know, H.P. Lovecraft, in a lot of ways, was a noteworthy precursor of the attitudes I’m trying — trying to — e-e-x-p-p-p-pr-press!” Archibald and I both move out of the way as Bannon releases another geyser of ejecta from his mouth-hole; I light one cigarette to smoke and hand another to the Secret Service man, who looks dubiously at it before taking two deep puffs and then throwing it at Bannon’s hunched back. It burns a hole in the prostrate nationalist’s blazer but he doesn’t seem to notice — lucky for Archibald — as a gaggle of Emerson College stoners walk by laughing —
…asking why we’re here slumped over the bar of a strip club when only one of us — me, obvs — is at all interested in the dancers. I don’t really have a good explanation for the dancer, a petite, sorta thick brunette woman in her mid-20s who puts her bra on as she sits down for a rum and Coke after her routine. Because, honestly, I’m not even here for the sexual release — that’s what, like, Kristina Rose videos and Tinder are for — but I’m the only one of myself, fucking Bannon and Archibald who’s been properly tipping the three dancers who have come onstage in our time here. (It’s just good decorum to do that, far as I’m concerned. Acknowledge the difficulties of the service industry in all its permutations and respect those who work in it, IMO.) Archibald is in the midst of some Southern Baptist-style moral breakdown amid all the naked ladies, clutching the gold cross he’s pulled out from under his white shirt and black tie, and Bannon appears catatonic.
“I’m just here for journalism,” I say, giving a brief explanation of The Shocker and hoping Bannon doesn’t hear — this night’s been contingent on me pretending not to take notes. He doesn’t move or speak.
The brunette dancer doesn’t look fully convinced — she’s probably heard an infinity of reasons for being in a strip joint from men who lacked the honesty to say “I’m horny as shit” — but nods. “You seem like you’ve had a rough one and you tipped me real well while I danced, so I won’t charge for this chat. Least not until I finish this drink,” she said, gesturing with an onyx-ringed finger at the rum and Coke. “After that it’s back to straight capitalism.”
“I understand,” I say. “Won’t be here much longer given the way these two look. I’m gonna have a beer to settle my stomach, and then” —
Steve Bannon bursts to life from his stasis like a man electroshocked. I see his face widen, horrified, in the backbar mirror above the bottles. The skinny white girl on stage shaking an ass she doesn’t have to “Feelin’ Myself” by Nicki Minaj and Beyonce stops, flabbergasted as everyone else. A column of harsh white light shoots from the fat man’s mouth, then dissipates.
After yelping some of the unintelligible things from earlier, Bannon shouts, “And I saw before me the lord of all GOP, him called Eisenhower…and he said I was a bad person! That he had to send Asgamarth after me to judge me! FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!!”
I turn to Archibald and say, “Dude, you’re on your own.” I leave $10 on the bar for my last drink and bolt, trying once again to keep the vomit from rising and shooting from my mouth, splattering all over this cursed earth —
