My Best Friend Blago

Some good insight into Blago.

I used to go yo-hoing with the most disgraced politician in America. After a night carousing in Chicago, when we were both undergrads at Northwestern University in the late 1970s, a group of us would occasionally end up at a 24-hour diner called the Gold Coin, where we’d have a very early breakfast. And once or twice, just for hoots, we would “yo-ho.” That was our term for running out before paying the bill, thus stiffing some poor waitress working the overnight shift out of a five- or 10- dollar tip. In our youthful, drunken stupor, we thought this was hilarious.

God, we could be such assholes. To this day, 30 years down the road, it makes me shudder just thinking about it.

He’s “Blago” to you by now, the heretofore little-known politician with the unpronounceable last name and the funny head of hair. His hair, we’ve been told for the last several months, is ridiculous. To me it’s the same hair he had in college. I didn’t think it was particularly weird then, and I don’t think it is now. But that’s the thing about this American freak show that I’ve watched unfold from afar: The plethora of Blago hair jokes is the least of my confusion.

Occasionally, someone we know well becomes famous. Sometimes it happens for good reasons. Friends of “Sully,” the US Airways pilot, were delighted to tell stories about the guy they know after he landed a plane in the Hudson River. Then there are cases like Rod’s.

Rod and I weren’t just casual friends. Not “Hey, how you doin’, how ’bout those Cubbies?” type friends, but someone you think you know cold; you know what motivates them, and frightens them, and pisses them off, and makes them laugh. Some of my fondest memories are of spending weekends at his parents’ house on the west side of Chicago when we were at school. Rod’s father, a Serbian immigrant and retired steelworker, had a deep, booming voice, and laughed heartily around the family’s kitchen table. He did have a temper, though he didn’t speak a word of English so I had no idea what the hell he was going on about. Rod would translate in fluent Serbo-Croatian as we ate dinner, downing the occasional shot of slivovitz. Once in a while his father would start hollering about the damned Croatians. Rod would gently try to shush him.

Rod was hardly the typical Northwestern student. He was a working class kid in a world of preppies who commuted each day from his insular, ethnic enclave on the west side, either driving or taking the El to campus each day. He wore leather jackets and black T-shirts, while the rest of us wore khakis and button-down shirts. He was different, and he knew it. While the rest of us played “Born to Run” as loud as we could in our dorm rooms, he remained the die-hard Elvis fan, cranking “Blue Hawaii” and singing along in his room at home.

And, oh yes, lest I forget: He did comb his hair a lot.

Rod and his friends from the west side were fun to hang out with, and were for me a refreshing change from the standard-issue upper-middle-class white suburban kids at Northwestern. They provided entrée into parts of Chicago — bars, blues clubs, restaurants — I’d probably never have seen otherwise.

Rod loved to wind people up. Not in malicious ways — yo-hoing aside, his humor was rarely cruel — but in juvenile, faintly subversive ways that were often funny in the moment. He and his friends used to try to get crank calls past screeners on talk-radio shows, and they succeeded more often than not. Doing his best to sound Hispanic, Mike, Rod’s closest friend from the neighborhood, would call up a show, hosted by a guy named Dave, on Chicago’s WIND. “Allo, Dave, this is Rico La Verga here,” he would say. “Hello, Rico!” Dave would respond jovially, and we would all dissolve in laughter. Mike had just gotten on the air calling himself Rico the Dick.

Another time, on St. Patrick’s Day, the same show asked listeners what they loved about the Irish. Rod called, making sure to use a word that the host wouldn’t understand.

“Hi, Dave, this is Bert from the west side.”

“Thanks for calling, Bert. So tell me, what do you think about the Irish?”

“Well, Dave, I think they’re a bunch of sloths.”

Pause. “What?”

“Sloths.”

Click.

Rod was so proud of these calls that he made a tape of them. He called them “The Classics.”

We never had steady girlfriends, so we used to chase girls in bars and clubs in the city. There was the occasional one-night stand (Rod was charming, and — this will come as a shock — a little brash), but he wasn’t relentless about it. He was much more inclined to collect people, to befriend those who seemed as odd to him as he did to them. One of them was an accounting major at Northwestern business school named Rob who began hanging out with us. This guy was everything you would expect an accounting major to be, which is to say he was about as nerdy as you get. Why, suddenly, he was part of the group was a mystery to me. But I remember once at a Bulls game, Rod spent the entire first half trying to convince Rob that a player wearing a protective device over his nose — which he’d broken in a previous game — actually had no nose.

“Seriously, Rob, this guy has no nose. Can you believe that? That’s an artificial nose the guy’s playing with.” The accountant never bit, but Rod was having a fine old time trying his damnedest to convince the guy. And it hit me that he thought poor Rob was just a sap, who could be told any thing and be made to believe it — if you were sincere and convincing enough.

Which is to say, he was honing his craft.

I know enough without getting any more “insight”. Thanks anyway.

Good background material in the article. Also, the comments lend further inside information.

I went back and read the comments. You were right. What’s an FOF?

FOF is a designation for a piece of hardware that, based upon parameters, determines whether an unknown object is a ‘friend’ or ‘foe.’

Quite a bit of interesting "texture" in that piece and among the comments as well.

There's something almost literary or epic about the whole Blago affair.

I don't think we've seen the last of him. At the very least, Scorsese's got a helluva movie here.

Wow, very interesting article, good info.

What I’m wondering is: Where is the article like this from one of Obama’s best friends in college, hmmmm?

I might be alone in this but Blago comes across as an all right guy in this article. He yo-ho’d a bit, had some sophmoric fun, nothing wrong with that. I stand guilty as well.

He came from a good working class family w/a Dad who busted his ass and was anti-commie. The truly sad thing is that he became a ‘Rat. I’d rather he become a car salesman, an insurance agent He’s someone who’d be a joy to meet at the neighborhood bar.

I am sorry to see him slipping below the waves of the public observation because I know he has a key to the dismantling of this horrid lefty administration. Of course, one has to find someone willing to put the key into the lock.

Vince

I think because Blago was coming from the Chicago political machine it didn’t matter if he was Democrat or Republican, they are ALL corrupt.
I thought it was interesting that his heroes were Nixon and Reagan...too bad he didn’t focus on Reagan more...
I don’t know why, but I kept rooting for him because I wanted him to out all of BO’s buddies. I don’t condone what he did, but I just can’t help but get a kick out of him...
I wonder if he fears for his life? Or has he been paid off...I think he had great insight to name a senator (Burriss) that nobody could openly criticise due to the race factor.