Eugene Robinson is a nice guy. Personable, charismatic, charming, well-spoken…for someone who happens to be 6’ 8” and 700 pounds of sheer ironclad muscle, he’s quite a conversationalist.

He also wants me to break up with my boyfriend.

“WELL, Helen…if WE were on a date, and I asked you simply, ‘Tell me about college,’ what would YOU say?” after I ask him, broadly, “Tell me about your book,” which comes out November 13.

Front man for the Neurot band Oxbow, Eugene, along with fighting professionally, finds time to write and run a porn site. Me? I’m a 20 year old English nerd who only knows how to speak to people after at least two beers. I’m also in the car on the way to Atlanta from Athens, having remembered that my dumb-ass arranged an interview with the vocalist during the time I’m en route. Being what they call a “n00b” in the interviewing realm, I determine that it would be considered “unprofessional” if I delayed the interview, so nervous as shit and under prepared, I ring up Eugene.

“For the purpose of this interview—“

He laughs. “Does there have to be a purpose?”

I, embarrassed, mumble something along the lines of, “Um. Doesn’t there always have to be? Ha?” A sad attempt at sarcasm. Lest I forget, the man has been blatantly hitting on me via email since July. So much for professionalism…Then again— professionalism? Who am I kidding? Flagpole won’t even return my e-mails. Looking at my next question, I cringe, swallow, and spit it out.

“The Narcotic Story …does it have an overarching theme?” How predictable.

“Well… You’ve listened to it right? I mean, I know you’ve listened to it. And did you read the lyrics?”

“Yeah,” as if I’m the one asking the question. Oh God. Did I?

“So, outside guess, what do you think the theme is…because I’m always curious about whether or not what people are reading and what I’m intending are the same. You know, I’m sending you a letter. And I’m always kind of curious whether you’re reading the letter the way I’ve written the letter.”

Shit. Fuck. Shit. “Um… For The Narcotic Story?” Look who forget to do their homework. “Well I can’t think of anything for The Narcotic Story.“

Which really gets him laughing.

“GAHH, you got me! OhmygodI’msonervousEugene!”

Still laughing, he says amiably, “I’m not trying to be difficult, I’m just trying to have a decent conversation.”

And for the most part, it turns out to be one despite my well visible journalistic green shoe. Things level out a little after my first I’m-so-unprepared-and-inexperienced outburst, though I somehow still manage to be overly-conscious yet incapable of remedying the series of “Umms”, “Likes”, and “I means” that come tumbling out of my mouth in bouts of word vomit. Eugene, on the other hand, articulate, humored, and a well-seasoned journalist himself, finds it (at least ostensibly) endearing.

I met Eugene for the first time in person back in June while studying abroad in England. After discovering Oxbow was playing in Birmingham as Love’s Holiday and as the full band in Milan, I decided to check both shows out, talking shortly with Eugene after the Birmingham show. Our on-and-off correspondence since then had been centered on my efforts at obtaining a copy of an out-of-print record of theirs, and lately, on putting together this interview. Most of the time, the exchange consists of me trying to maintain some form of normality while he effortlessly tips all my efforts off kilter. It only takes a few choice words to do the trick, and Eugene has more than just a knack at picking them.

“When was the last time YOU had a fight?” he returns my question. So much for the standard Q & A I had in mind.

“What kind of fight?”

“Any fight.”

That afternoon.

“With who?”

My boyfriend.

“See, that’s shitty.”

Why am I so nervous? Well, aside from Eugene’s past coming-ons, there’s the whole nature of the interview itself. It having been arranged after I discovered a comment he left on my blog on a review I wrote for his band’s last record in which I loosely liken him to a giddy rapist and Billy Madison. He doesn’t seem to care.

After shooting a few blanks, I finally manage to hook a couple good chunks of article-worthy material. The most substantial being on his and Nico’s (guitarist from Oxbow) acoustic project, Love’s Holiday.

“Love’s Holiday started off as a project I wanted to call The Servant. But some other band or two other bands were fighting over the use of that name, so I just figured, screw it. And initially I wanted to call it The Servant because it served a lot of philosophical purposes to me. There’s a Joseph Losey film called The Servant, which I think is probably one of the best movies ever made. Nico and I had been working on this thing as a duo, and then we started placing calls between records to play shows, only some of which the full band could do. In any case, it was a separate project with completely new songs, not intended to ever exist in an Oxbow format. We wanted to record them and then have shows to follow the recording, but what ended up happening is that we got so caught up playing without recording the songs that we thought, hey, this might not be too bad of a thing to do. So we kind of fucked around with the idea, and we were kind of lukewarm about it and then made mention of it to our booking agent, and he made mention of it to a club, and then they said, ‘You know the four-piece is too loud for this venue, we can’t really support it [or] pay them,’ so we thought, ‘We’ll just give it a try,’ and for the first year, 2004, I was really divided as to whether it was a mode of expression that made sense. In 2006, that’s when it finally clicked as something that made sense to do.”

Just as the interview starts to look up, the poor decision of calling Eugene in the car smacks me in the face—I can’t hear him yet he’s still talking. The road is roaring, speaker phone is gurgling, and yours truly is panicking. Should I interrupt? Yes, that would be the reasonable thing to do. Maybe then suggest we reschedule the interview. Do I interrupt? No. Instead, I nervously back-channel, “Right,” “Uh-huh” and strain my ear drums until they’re on the verge of popping inside out. Eventually, the background noise lets up, and I continue.

“The trouble with vocalists who aren’t playing an instrument,” I say, “is what to do on stage. I’ve seen you guys perform twice now, and you seem to have that down in a very affective way. Tell me about your live performance and how your message plays into that.”

“I don’t know if there’s nearly something as clear as a message. I mean, intellectually, analytically I incline to the fact that there is content to the performance, and this content is more significant than if I, like John Cage, came on stage and ate an apple and sat and watched the audience. I’m not entirely sure if it’s better or worse, I’m just saying it’s different. It certainly has meaning to me. I mean, it may be indiscernible to a casually viewing audience, but the shows closely capture my moods, you know. And if you were to speak about the show after and say, ‘Ah, Eugene. He comes out, and he does this angry thing,’ you know, I don’t see [it in] that type of monochromatic [way] at all. Anger is a very small emotional color on the palate of the performance. So you know, it’s about an hour [where you can] look into my face, and make some real determinations whether I’m enjoying being where I am or how it affects me to be here. So even though it manifests itself physically, presentation is nonphysical for me. It’s more about what’s going on in my head.”

“So when are you coming to Atlanta?”

Laughs. “I could be in Atlanta next week. You know, I could be there two days from now or tomorrow. It depends on the motivation. If you’re asking about professionally, I’ll probably more likely be there in January.”

“Is this for the Spoken Word Tour?”

“Yeah, that’s being booked as we speak. I think it largely depends on whether or not people in Atlanta are willing to pay a certain amount of money to see me talk about fighting or whatever it is they want to talk about. The whole thing will be from January fourth to January twenty-fifth.”

The tour Eugene’s referring to will be in promotion of his new book Fight: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Ass-Kicking but Were Afraid You’d Get Your Ass Kicked for Asking. And if Eugene’s latitude of experience in the fighting world isn’t enough to convince you he’s the man to go to for Ass-Kicking 101, then I’m sure he’d have no trouble persuading you otherwise. The least of your worries being his choke-hold.

In a laundry list of credentials, he shoots off, “I started with Shotokan Karate in Brooklyn. Boxing in the Boys Club. A little wrestling in high school. A little Jiu Jitsu, but not the Brazilian kind yet. Then a little wrestling in college. Then Kenpo Karate for eight years (won two or three noteworthy tournaments during this time), then Muay Thai for about a year. Then submission fighting/mixed martial arts. Then Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, then a few submission tournaments (won one, ass kicked in another), then fight club, then [had some] major injuries and here we are.”

“How did the idea for the book come about?”

“The book, well it started as a piece in the L.A. Weekly, so if you go to LAWeekly.com and you search my name, I think a piece comes up and it’s called ‘Anytime, Anywhere.’ The guy who’d eventually be my editor saw it, passed it on to Judith Regan before she was rousted out of Harper’s for her O.J. Simpson book. A five minute meeting turned into a 90 minute one, and it was a done deal.”

As I reach I-75/85 our “formal” interview draws to a close. For the next five minutes, we laugh about the Locust interview I read on his Web site and shoot the shit a bit before hanging up. After the effortlessness of the interview’s last 10 minutes wears off, I think about the exchange in its entirety, wince and spike my lousy cell phone out of the car window. Did I seriously ask Eugene if he loves his Mom and Dad? Did I really just throw my phone out the window? Did this whole interview actually happen? Does Eugene Robinson even exist? It was at that moment that I saw Thomas Pynchon in my rearview mirror pop his head up from behind the backseat and whistle the tune from “The Twilight Zone.”

And in case you’re wondering: yes, no, probably, (believe it or not) yes, and I wish.