A Friendly Phone Tap

Doug Wead, a longtime confidante to President George W. Bush, and now a man with a book to sell, recently disclosed tapes of his secretly recorded telephone conversations with the President, then governor of Texas. He explained that he taped the conversations because he believed they’d be an important historical legacy.

Some time ago, I began secretly tape-recording my telephone conversations with my friend and fellow writer, Renée. Some might view the public airing of these tapes as a betrayal of our friendship, a cheap publicity stunt, or long overdue revenge for her giving me stupid nicknames, like “Rockin’ Robin,” “Robin Red Breast,” and “Robin-laid-an-egg.” (For the record, I’ve never laid an egg.) I justify the secret tapings because I believe Renée’s going to be a huge historical figure one day. She’s an American, after all, and according to national obesity statistics, everyone who lives here is destined to become huge. I mean if I were on the telephone with Jesus or Paris Hilton, I would tape record them, too.

It’s true that many of our conversations concerned questions about Renée’s “immature” past. When she’d call me in the mornings to tell me she’d lost her house keys, her underwear, and her little Pekingese, Tater Tot, in the Astros locker room, she’d insist, however, that her activities involved nothing more than “just, you know, wild behavior.” But since I do know wild behavior, I turned up the recording device and articulated my questions very clearly.

“What about the rumors of cocaine?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t say cocaine,” Renée sniffed. “There are some code
words, ‘snow,’ ‘blow,’ ‘yayo’--proper ways to say things if you catch my
drift there, Robin-bobbin. Look, Ro-Ro, I’ve sinned and I’ve learned.”

The code words didn’t just apply to her drug and alcohol abuse and sexual promiscuity. She also used special words to talk about the gays. For example, when she met her fiancé’s parents, prominent evangelicals from Ohio, she knew her gay-hating in-laws wouldn’t like that she’d lived among the gays in New York and even allowed them to cut and color her hair. “I’ll just tell them my neighbors weren’t really homosexual, just French. Then I’ll fake a little trance, fall to the ground and writhe around some, and say everything changed when I accepted Christ into my life. It’s part of my schtick,” she said.

Renée also said a lot of harsh-sounding stuff about other writers even though, frankly, she’d still be a boozed-up loser blogging in her pajamas if it weren’t for my advice. “Joan Didion is going to wear very thin,” she said, accurately describing the writer’s physique. Philip Roth she dismissed as a “lucky hack. I will do nothing for him if he does to me what he did to Claire Bloom. Period. And there’s something fishy about Salman Rushdie, heh-heh-heh,” she laughed.

So if, all in all, the private Renée turns out to be not so different than the public one, then grossly selling out a close friend, disclosing her $10K-a-day powder habit, and breaking up her engagement, was nothing less than my patriotic duty to the public good. I just feel that the historical point I’m making—remember, Renée could be huge someday, and I happen to have a book to promote—trumps a personal relationship. I’ll always be friendly towards Renée, even if she doesn’t take my calls anymore.