My Night with Trump

It was 1994. I was pregnant with our oldest child (she's now 22). My husband wiped the evening's meal off of Donald Trump’s limo. My morning sickness was terrible at night - Which somehow helped me blend in with the 2am bar patrons, unlike when our group entered Madison Square Garden for the KISS concert earlier in the evening. We did not blend in then, on a summer night in New York City, twenty years ago. Needless to say, we had a feeling this was going to be an interesting evening.

I was star struck as we drove through the city, but it wasn't The Donald that held my attention. Or his hair. It was the buildings. I couldn’t help it, I was young, but the good kind of young with an innocence that carried my up and through the sunroof of his limo. I stood with the warm summer air patting at my cheeks. Trump and his wife sat at my feet, my husband chalking up my odd behavior to howmones.  It was a brief escape for my square peg through that round hole of New York's elite. It’s hard enough to feel like you belong anywhere when you are in your twenties, still trying desperately to discover who you really are and what you really want. The other wives were coiffed with designer clothes. Their hair was Blonde. The men were silver. The driver was anxious.

I was six months along. The top of my swollen belly pressed against the sunroof frame. Something about pregnancy makes you bold - brave enough anyway to allow Donald Trump to witness my swollen ankles like elephant feet cut off at the knees; the kind they make coffee tables out of. 

We arrived at Madison Square Garden. As we entered the building, the audience began to stir like bees in a hive. Word travels fast in a sea of New Yorkers. They must have seen the hair. As we walked to our seats, the crowd grew louder, and louder.

Then he did it. The Donald raised his hand to the air - like Hitler with a toupee. The king of New York had addressed his subjects. (Remember, this was twenty years ago.)

The Garden rumbled. I turned to The Donald with a question mark. He shrugged his shoulders to the girl from the sunroof. He was used to all of this. The buzzing. The Garden. Girls thrusting through his sun roof. in that moment 80,000 swarming bees began to notice their king bee entering the hive as they waited for the KISS concert to begin. I envied people who were used to such things. It meant they belonged to something larger than themselves.

Then the chanting began. Dah-nuld! Dah-nuld! Dah-nuld! 
We followed him through The Garden like baby bees. Then they got louder. Dah-nuld! Dah-nuld! I had never seen anything like it in my life, Nonetheless been stared at by so many people at once. Of course, they weren’t looking at me, but still, the sense of visual invasion was so overwhelming I wanted to suck my head so deep into my neck that it would lodge in my ribcage. But Dah-nuld? He loved it.

Trump is Trump. Love to hate him or hate to love him. Either way, it spurs a response. Sometimes a nauseating one. I tried to chalk that up to morning sickness, at night.

We finally made it to our seats. And I made it through the concert without throwing up. Until we went to dinner afterwards. And got back in his limo. A piercing stab in the corners of my jaw stung my bones. Gentle waves of nausea lapped at the back of my throat. My skin clammed and faintness overtook my jovial mood. Pull over, we had to pull over. I couldn’t do this in his limo. Lord knows what ever else happened in Dah-nuld's limo, but it sure wasn't going to mix with the precious juices of my pregnancy. My husband rang the alarm. She’s gonna blow! The limo came to a stop against the curb, I scuttled to the opened door overlooking the gutter, my head just barely reaching the moist wall of humid summer air. And it happened. I threw up all over Donald Trump’s limo. 

I don’t think he ever knew I did that as he went home after dinner in another car. In twenty years I don’t think I have ever even mentioned it to his wife, so why not just blog about it, I said to myself. I mean how many people get to blog about the night they strolled into a garden amidst a sea of bees and christen the limo of a king? And so, I did.