I swore I would never date a Republican. Ever. Then I met Miles. Alcohol and its logic-impairing effects were undeniably contributing factors. We met at some soirée in San Francisco’s Mission District, which served as a veritable breeding ground of multiculturalism before the dotcom explosion rocked the ‘hood into gentrification. It was during the rein of the first Bush administration, and with all of the glory and trauma of the Gulf War still a sore wound in my mind, it seemed unlikely that I would bond with someone so radically opposed to my progressive ideology.

But I did.

Three dry martinis into the evening I met Miles, a disarray of limbs and a blur of khaki and plaid. With a full head of wavy, auburn hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and alabaster skin, he appeared too straight, too conservative, too damn uptight for my taste. Oddly enough, Miles turned out to be a good kisser. A great kisser. A most supreme kisser with a killer physique to match. What he lacked in aesthetic appeal, he made up for with animal magnetism. He possessed that rare combination of child-like wonder and wanton virility that made me want to rip off his starch-white Polo button-down shirts with my bare hands.

He tried to convince me that he wasn’t like the rest of his ilk. Sure, he shared many neoconservative views, but he was definitely not racist, sexist, or homophobic. This, however, begged the question: why then are you a Republican?

And just because someone is a flag-waving, family-values, NRA-lovin’, pro-prayer-in-schools, three-strikes-you’re-out, say-NO-to-drugs-abortion-and-porno, capital-driven political aficionado doesn’t necessarily mean you should avoid dating them. You have to keep an open mind and put your tolerant liberal theories into practice for a change, I told myself. Opposites attract. Look at Maria and Arnold, an ill-conceived convergence of brains and muscle, a couple who have remained happily married despite their political rivalry and his roving hands.

I tried. God knows I tried.

At first I desperately tried to overlook certain things, but slowly they began to fester in my head, causing what I feared to be a brain hemorrhage. When he attempted to regale me with diabolical sentiments such as “if it weren’t for Rush Limbaugh,” or lauded Ronald Reagan for his trickle-down economic policy in public, or lambasted “fat, lazy welfare mothers” for milking the system dry, I could feel the blood rush straight to my cortex. At moments like this, I would cringe my face into a spasm and walk to the nearest wall and hammer my head against it. Hard.

The fact that we met during a hell-ridden recession that left both of us out of work and flat broke didn’t help. Poverty, our common denominator, was the source of our bonding and dissension. Who’d pick up the tab was the terminal sore spot of our dates. Usually we’d end up splitting it in half, but more often than not I picked up the bill for no other reason than to avoid a scene. To my dismay, he was able to attend dinner parties, cocktail parties, pool parties, backyard parties, football parties, campaign parties, office parties, and rooftop parties without spending a dime. I held anti-party-parties. Parties where no one showed up — except me and a bottle of wine. I drank to forget him.

But it didn’t work.

At the time, I lived with three guys from Italy in a flat where the blow, the booze, and the women revolved through the front door 24/7. The first time Miles came over for a house party, I found myself avoiding him at every turn. I orbited the room in chronic circles, veering off into the crowd, dodging in and out of conversations, making small talk with complete strangers. Off in the distance I heard Miles’ voice rise: “Bunch of fucking illegal immigrants can’t even speak English …” I knew he was referring to my roommates. When Giovanni turned to me with a questioning look that said, “Where did you find this fucking whack job,” I did the first thing that came to mind. I ran. Down the hall, out the door, up the hill, and into the first place I spotted with lights on — an Irish pub. There I lingered, sunk deep in the dark recesses of the tavern until last call, and then stumbled home only to find the place completely empty except for a note on the refrigerator that simply read: “Dump him.”

But I didn’t.

While I spent my days as a Food Not Bombs volunteer doling out bread and soup to the lines of homeless snaking around the Civic Center, Miles would trek downtown in a three-piece suit to the swanky offices of the Republican Party. What he did there I never knew — and never cared to ask. When we met at night, both tired yet filled with an unwavering and often vying sense of purpose, most of our time was comprised of political discussions — which somehow led to sex. Miles rendered the brain an erogenous zone. It constituted mental masturbation: verbal intercourse as a form of foreplay. Tax cuts made him horny. Defense spending kicked his testosterone production into overdrive. For Miles, sex and politics were mutually combustible, and I often wondered whether he was tempted to jerk off whenever politicians debated issues like they do at the Republican National Convention. As a proponent of hand-and-mouth probing, I seldom found myself hot after analyzing Third World debt or the trade deficit. Occasionally, I marveled at his ability to get me so riled up that I would collapse on my back, screaming my lungs out, and kicking my legs in the air. Miles, ever the opportunist, would pounce on top and attempt to dazzle me with his latest trick. And it often worked.

Miles turned out to be pathologically ambivalent. Outside of the sack, I couldn’t tell if he even had a pulse. Void of an interior landscape, he averted his eyes, clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, and didn’t so much as even glance in my direction to meet my unrelenting glare whenever I brought up a topic remotely related to emotions. Seven beers later, he would gradually begin to respond, grasping at words, pausing between breaths, staring at the door, where long periods of silence filled the void while the shape of thoughts were still breeding in his mind. What an idiot, I thought; what a goddamn piece of work. Say something. Anything.

Nothing.

He sits in silence, jaw clenched, arms folded across chest.

If we couldn’t talk about politics or anything remotely related to matters of the heart, there was only one thing left to do. Around 12:30 a.m., we return to his over-priced, under-furnished, rat-sized studio in the Marina. We’re sprawled out on a florescent orange beanbag couch, some fleabag relic left over from the tacky 70s Partridge Family décor, watching Saturday Night Live in a drunken stupor. He crawls on top and soon we lie naked, tongues licking skin, mouths forming sounds, hands touching the most intimate parts of our being. Here, the lines blur, and there are no boundaries between us. We kiss, and our bodies entwine in a wordless conversation, a place where an unspoken language gives birth to a whole new territory. And, somehow, even this is not enough to keep our passion alive.  

We knew that we were headed nowhere, that we were traversing a hopeless trajectory. We will forever remain a half-read novel, with good dialogue but a weak plot whose ending we predict in advance without enduring a painstaking read of its final pages. Cut to the last chapter. Hurry. Read the last sentence, and then close the book. This how this story will end.

I will always be longing. For Miles, for San Francisco, for the years that passed like clouds racing through the sky, for the days when love seemed so close I could taste it in the air. I will always wish we could have conquered a bold new land, carved our names in it, and erased the borders with our own two hands. I will always be hoping for a new ending.

In The Fray Contributor