A WALK ACROSS DIRTY WATER AND STRAIGHT INTO MURDERER'S ROW: A Memoir

by Eugene S Robinson, Lydia Lunch (Foreword by)

Overview

A rollicking no-holds barred memoir from journalist and musician Eugene S. Robinson that takes readers along through the story of his life.

“A weird rollicking ride” frames how author Eugene S. Robinson views his journey from a Brooklyn kid with decidedly offbeat punk rock proclivities to the realities of California hardcore and dark detours into shows, tours, drugs, porn, guns, MMA fighting, an Ivy League-esque education and his eventual entry into the US Defense industry just in time to see his boss dragged into Contragate.

Robinson’s writing mirrors his fighting style intensity, ferocity, and brutal truth. He knows exactly who he is and how he is perceived by the white people and white culture that surrounds him. Robinson challenges accepted norms. He fights against easy answers and safe passages. He says:

“No one who ever gets a life sentence for just about anything really expects it to last a lifetime. Even if the modifier is "without the possibility of parole." Hope springs eternal but there's always the undiscussed other option. The one where the fate is chosen, freely, and the protagonist has about as much interest in escaping as he does of being almost anywhere else at all. Which is to say: not at all.”

A Walk Across Dirty Water is Robinson’s memoir of growing up in Brooklyn during the 1970s, playing in punk bands and touring the world during the

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781627311427
Publisher:	Feral House
Publication date:	10/10/2023
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Eugene Robinson has written for GQ, The Wire, Grappling Magazine, LA Weekly, Vice Magazine, Hustler, and Decibel, among many others. He has also been Editor-in-Chief of OZY, Code and EQ. He grew up in New York City, where he first understood the surreal joy of a bloody nose obtained through fighting. The 6'1", 235-pound Robinson has worked in magazine publishing, film, and television. He has studied boxing, Kenpo karate, Muay Thai (mixed martial arts), wrestling, and Brazilian jiu jitsu. Robinson is the vocalist and front man for Oxbow, a rock group-cum-fight club. He is also the vocalist for the critically acclaimed punk-metal supergroup, Buñuel. He lives in the San Francisco area.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

In the lineage of kids crashing through the chaos of 1970s New York City finding a voice in punk music and radical literature Eugene is like a possessed sprinter racing past the finish line into the unknown, the entire universe both at his heels and in his heart. His creative impulse is essentially his organic love emanating through all prisms of the human condition, from intellectual consideration to delirious anger. The man is a brilliant sun shower of inspired

energy spraying the room. We can only wallow in the anointment.

Thurston Moore, London 2022

Eugene Robinson is a great writer and I admire him. His imposing size and association with fight culture imply an overpowering personality, but uniquely among his peers, he is unafraid to risk vulnerability. He writes intelligently about fights and fighting of course, but for me he is most enlightening when he writes about life between blows: Frank accounts of aspirations in art or music, personal and societal relationships, his moments of fear or compromise, what he got wrong about a person or situation, what he misunderstood, what he endured. This introspection is rendered as clearly as a crisp left hook and that makes all the difference between limbic alpha-male yowling and the expression of a complete mind, artful, thoughtful, unafraid of itself and aware of its role in its own problems. Most writing, non-fiction included, buffers the writer from consequence with some kind of bullshit. The writer's voice keeps you at a distance with writerly devices, wordplay, echoes of received style or import. I have the luxury of knowing Eugene apart from his writing, and I am certain he is not bullshitting you.

Steve Albini, Chicago 2022

what would Fanon say?


Leaving a new baby — me — donning a Black Tail Magazine t-shirt and driving 2 hours round-trip to meet a random guy was unusual but felt absolutely necessary. He was editor of a new magazine that was all the rage and — inspired — I'd reached out, and he reached back. To thank him and as a show of support, I was going to meet The Man — as he referred to himself on his voicemail message — face to face at the nearest stop to Cleveland his band would make.



In Sandusky, Ohio — known as home to America's oldest roller coasters, a throughway on the Underground Railroad, and the site of the brutal public dragging and lynching of William Taylor —2 feet of dreads, aforementioned swag unironically celebrating classic Afro-American pornography — I am the Blackest person in the room, for miles, for about an hour, until Eugene S. Robinson takes the stage. All smiles, hugs, and hail-to-thee backstage, at the microphone, ears taped, bare teeth, and inexplicably pantsless in a pair of faded black draws, he means business, and — judging from the room full of young, white Clampetts, largely focused on his crotch and whatever else Eugene might be selling — business is good. Angry, sensual, hypnotizing, and disturbing: I'd seen hardcore, but this was Oxbow. This performance was a violation, but today, over 20 years later, the violator and the victim are still indiscernible to me. Franz Fanon, the French psychoanalyst who examined the gentle waltz of dysfunction between black people and the white world — what would he say? I asked Eugene. He smiles. "Right?" he said with a chuckle. Often, Eugene's prose is equally as confounding.


Virtually unknown to The Negro World, file Eugene's work, in general, somewhere between Sun Ra for White People and the collected works of Carl Hancock Rux. "Well-spoken," shiny, and articulate, he's art rock's best black friend. Fanon would say Eugene is free-thinking, free-writing, and free-range — unrelentingly talented: stand-up and principled, ready to die but not without a fight. Clearly, one of the Blackest people in the room and, as such, perhaps one of the most dangerous people alive. “Dirty Water,” joins a canon of works like Ellison's "Invisible Man," Baldwin's "Another Country" and Rux's "Pagan Operetta" as an earnest dispatch from the front: the DuBoisian Doo-Wop origin story of every Black Man I know.


— jimi izrael is a professor, podcaster, journalist, and author of "The Denzel Principle" on St Martin's Press
www.jimiizrael.com