A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row: a Memoir

by Eugene S. Robinson, Lydia Lunch (Foreword)

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
“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 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 eighties, taking a break to attend Stanford, and accidentally becoming a famous television personality in Germany. 

Genres: Music, Memoir, Punk

256 pages, Paperback

Published October 10, 2023

Reviews

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Memoir lives and dies on the basis of a writer’s voice. Eugene has a voice. You will hear it loud and clear on every page of this book. Punk, touring bands, love, human nature, pants on, pants off, a hundred wild stories and one really bad dad…

“My mother had built into me a resilience and a hard line that could not be negotiated around. It was this kind of rigor that I brought to how I read when I started reading, and very much part of what was going on when I started writing.

Get it right or go the fuck home.”

Not quite as often as he thinks, but a hell of a lot more often than most – Eugene gets it right.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

eugene's one of the few who can make you laugh, then a moment later break your fucking heart.

[Kit · Rating 5 out of 5]

scorching!

[Ricardo S. Amorim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, need a volume 2.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Jesus H. Christ. Is there anything quite as horrible as being a child?" Is how Eugene Robinson starts this book. Every age has it's challenges as he observes of the late Eighties: "In the grips of a sensation addiction that stretched back to, yeah, 1977, at almost ten years later, nothing was as I imagined it would be and discontent was mine." Reading this book I got a strong sense of a non-Hollywood/non-slick version of reality. Like the way intensity actually IS, as opposed to a constructed pantomime of intensity, centered around the physical awareness of a man who is always physically aware. He knows how to write like an athlete; a verbal story teller who has read some heavy books along the way, but knows how to keep the style spare. There is a chapter in "A Walk Across Dirty Water and Striaght Into Murderers Row" entitled "The Death of My Budding Bromance with Rollins" as in "Henry Rollins." I just say that because if anybody who appreciates the universe of hard rock, in particular the punk or hardcore side of the fence, but doesn't know who Eugene Robinson is, I start out with the gateway drug introduction "the black Henry Rollins." Which is massively inadequate. But a ripped, disciplined, driven singer of a hardcore band who does journalism and, in many ways, possesses a crazy level of polymathic capability, that would be the surface of the ice berg with Whipping Boy/Oxbow singer Eugene Robinson. He's also been a club owner, professional body builder, extra in Hollywood movies, comic book/record/gun store proprietor, professional fighter, bouncer, security, sex advice columnist, spoken word story teller, Stanford University alumni, editor on a magazine published by the Department of Defense out of Silicon Valley, and I don't know what else. None of that is padding. It sounds invented, but it's not. I've seen Oxbow several times over thirty years and they are... interesting. Hardcore but with something else, a nuance, a modiness, like the better indy hard rock outfits that evolved out of the hardcore ecosystem: The Jesus Lizard, the Melvins. This is a memoir published by Feral House that starts in the 1960's New York, comes of age in the late 70's where Eugene is among a very small number of young black men who hang out in New York punk rock clubs, and ends up in Northern California where the author is on the ground floor of hardcore in his band Whipping Boy that he describes as Straight Edge (except for copious amounts of LSD and sex when rarely offered). There is violence, starving poverty, cross country touring anecdotes and pre-emptive deconstructions of whatever the media makes of racial identity, a complicated thing. Regarding violence the point is made that if you can't do it, even to defend yourself, don't be surprised if you get snuffed — wisdom picked up as a little kid playing on the streets of the multi racial working class boroughs of New York. Some musings on the Seventies. For boys violence, not excluding homicide, for girls, abuse inside. All stuff he checked out and observed from a really young age. He wonders if it was, as some find their excuses, "the era" of experimentation in the sexed up Seventies that led to this, or something else. Not good in any case. Queue body building and always making sure he has a weapon. A really interesting chapter on California, where he first sees police brutality visited by the SFPD on two white punk rockers on Broadway, he gets a non-cliched point in about the not so sunny side of the Left Coast:

"I stayed standing in front of a video arcade and watched the cops nightstick them down to the asphalt, a blur of black stick and screams... But for the first time some of these kids felt like Negroes, in how they were treated by the cops... Though, if truth be told, cops had been complete non-factors in my life before leaving New York" despite the Son of Sam, street gangs and power outages. "Coming to California? A total wake up call."

Also includes how he meets Ian MacKaye, long time collaborator Lydia Lunch, Richard Kern, Klaus Flouride, producing records, psychopath friends, feeling real madness and the fear that comes with it and kink that goes south.

Behind all of this the driving intensity to perform. To create... something that is yours. I got so inspired by this that after reading I started working out more.

Well worth reading.

[Matthew Webster · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author of this book is a friend of mine. You know what that means. Eugene knows what it means. Everybody knows that an objective “review” of a commercial prospect produced by a friend is essentially undermined by that relationship.

In journalistic terms, I am a tainted source. The situation challenges critical objectivity.
Rest assured Eugene doesn’t care about that. He trusts me not to embarrass him. Eugene’s a BJJ blackbelt, kid. That means theoretically he could easily beat up, like, all of you reading this, except for the other BJJ black belts.

But don’t worry! The author doesn’t want to hurt you. He wants you to read him, and unlike most accomplished authors he also actually wants you to contact him directly and tell him exactly what you thought of the book when you’re done. Go ahead, give it a shot. That’s how we became friends. Eugene has zero to prove, and he knows there’s no law against writing an unpaid review of a memoir that your friend wrote. So let’s move this thing forward, shall we?

Harley Flanagan, Eugene’s NYC hardcore friend and jiu jitsu simpatico from back in the day, has written an incomplete but seemingly honest memoir that anyone with an interest in punk would find illuminating, if only for its detailed descriptions of the 1970’s and 80’s Lower East Side, its volatility and its wildly various countercultures. Harley’s book is kind of a “normal” memoir. You get more or less what you’d hope to find.

But A Walk Across Dirty Water is a strange book. Because I know Eugene, this didn’t surprise me, but I was quite surprised by the degree of strangeness on array here. If you’re looking for strangeness, you’re in the right place.

The book’s not even presented as normally, in the sense of being exhaustively edited. Its publisher, Feral House, focuses on unvarnished nonfiction by working class authors and outsiders whose literary medicines would prove far too strong and bitter for readers raised on corporate fare. The imprint prefers not to intrude on or influence their authors’ authentic voices. As such Feral House is an indispensable platform for interesting people with something vital to communicate, with less interest in the stylings of conventionally digestible prose.

I found myself at times confused as to what exactly was happening in A Walk Across Dirty Water, or to whom. Yet the justified agony radiating from these pages is almost overwhelming.

Sexual violence predominates the author’s family pre-history, his childhood and adult relationships. The exceptional Brooklyn student and body builder who tested into New York’s most prestigious public high school is soon after carrying a loaded shotgun in the car traveling to his job Manhattan, and anywhere else he can find a place to hide it. The high school athlete gets accepted to Stanford on a wrestling scholarship and later finds himself troubled with headaches and depression he suspects derive from concussions he sustained playing club rugby. Large amounts of LSD do not improve the situation. His totally disinterested father rescinds his college tuition after surmising Eugene is “spending too much time” on his band, Whipping Boy, leaving the author to pay his own way. Band dudes on the road nearly come to blows over an apparently stolen two dollars that one group had set aside for laundry. Relief and satisfaction are fleeting.

If the police knocked on my door because they had me bang to rights on a minor motor vehicle charges, I would open the door and face my fate. But not Eugene! He’d say to me, “You’d just give in? Where’s the fight in that?” Because Eugene is above all a fighter.

If his war so compels you, buy and read A Walk Across Dirty Water immediately, because there is much, much more to consider. But be advised: This author doesn’t like to make things easy. Like, there’s an orgy in the book where I wish the action would be clearer and more visually descriptive, but where’s the fight in that? With this jagged, smoldering dispatch, Eugene S. Robinson asks, “What would you fight for?”

[Mason Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's always interesting to read a memoir of someone with whom I'm acquainted, and whose "scene" or milieu I know well. So while Eugene's stories of growing up are of course new, once he's diving into the NYC hardcore scene, and reaches California and the SF punks, those connections touch me. But one of the things I like most about this book is that, yes, much of it's a punk band memoir but it's far more personal than that. Sure, we get touring and hanging out with Minor Threat, Black Flag, and the Dead Kennedys. But it's Eugene's story, not a punk scene story, and that's the interesting stuff anyway. How does someone go from a middle-class Brooklyn upbringing to a heavily-touring, Stanford-based, zine-publishing punk rock weirdo? Read this and find out. The book ends as his first (real) band, Whipping Boy, breaks up and turns into Oxbow, his current band. Hopefully we can look forward to a second volume carrying on from then.

[Benedetto M · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first time I've met someone in real life before getting to know about their past on a deeper level. I've followed Eugene's writing for longer than I've known him in person and having the privilege to look into his life beyond the murmuring heard courtesy of the music world is more than welcome. Unlike some memoirs I've read before, I didn't sit here reading this and feel like it was a friend telling me their life story. This wasn't a casual conversation or easy reading; you're reading stories that sometimes could make a person wince at the level of detail and raw humanity on display. In my opinion, candid accounts of life experiences don't seem as appreciated as they should be. This book is a reminder of the value of not skewing your perspective and being open to learning from a variety of people.

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Odd but entertaining read, sometimes beguilingly well expressed, frequently overwritten to the point of confusion. Needed a far heavier edit than it got, and that would done a lot to make it a more successful book. (Wouldn’t have changed its abrupt end and no particular arc, but those things could have been overcome.) Robinson has lived a truly fascinating life and I’d love to have hear even more about it, rather than a pastiche of anecdotes ending in the late ‘80s. Some of these anecdotes are great and some of Robinson’s turns of phrase are fantastic. Others I hard to read multiple times to make sense of (one of those I think was missing a verb)? This is worth a look for fans of early hardcore punk and the CBGBs scene, and also for anyone who loves a character, of whom Robinson is certainly one. But the writing really is all over.

[PhattandyPDX · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Sincerity is everything. And once you got that faked, you got it made.“

This was a great read. Used to see Whipping Boy play at the Varsity in Palo Alto in the mid 80s, and would visit CFY Records at House of Faith, whenever my band would record there. Eugene is a true Renaissance man on so many levels: hardcore, writing, you name it. I highly recommend this book and OXBOW’s latest album: Love’s Holiday.

[Nancy Barile · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed the wild ride Eugene took me on with this book. His unique perspective of a time period and a scene I loved was insightful and riveting. Eugene is a powerful writer. I couldn’t put this book down and read it in 2 days!

[Sean Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

In short, a fantastic scope into the mind and body of one of noise rock’s most influential and intelligent forces. Highly recommended.

[Cha · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book desperately needed an editor, amongst other things.

[Dan Agacki · Rating 5 out of 5]

A real page turner that you want to read slowly so it won’t end. Only covers a portion of his life but makes me think he would have the stories to fill multi volumes.

[Reza Mills · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hilarious and terrifying simultaneously, par for the course for Eugene S Robinson. A great autobiography of his childhood and Whipping Boy years. Check it out.

[Gregory · Rating 5 out of 5]

A compulsively readable account of the first 27 years of a life fully lived. Eugene S Robinson gives a fascinating insight into his growing up in late 1970s Flatbush and his young adulthood in early 1980s Stanford. I couldn't put it down. I hope there will be a follow-up about his life from the 1990s onwards.