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Has Bill de Blasio become Bill de Blasé? Details regarding the former New York City mayor’s so-called “non-divorce” from Chirlane McCray, his lesbian wife of twenty-seven years, seem weird. For instance, their “trial separation” involves them continuing to live in the same house while they date other people. Still, compared to the headline-grabbing track record of de Blasio’s life, this latest revelation made Cockburn yawn. Even the way the couple arrived at the decision, “after another stale Saturday night of binge-watching television at their Brooklyn home,” is disappointingly run-of-the-mill.
The reason for the non-divorce, the non-couple explained in what the Daily Mail labeled “a notably gentle and deeply personal three-hour-long interview with the New York Times,” is, at least in part, because de Blasio got stressed out by his disastrous handling of the Covid pandemic, he became “emotionally very needy,” McCray found his 2020 presidential campaign embarrassing and at the end of the day, “I just want to have fun,” McCray said.
How McCray can think her husband-or-something is now Bill de Blasé blows Cockburn’s mind. This is the man, the Times reminds us, whose own biracial children “assured supporters that Mr. de Blasio was not ‘some boring white guy’” when he started politicking back in 2013. And oh how un-boring he turned out to be! Cockburn recalls fondly the time de Blasio went viral for forcefully reminding fellow candidates that he’s raising a black son in America, and the time he danced in Times Square on New Year’s Eve while the rest of the city was ordered to lockdown.
There was also the time he was partaking in a Groundhog Day event, dropped a groundhog and killed it. Cockburn remembers being heartened by the regret de Blasio expressed after the incident:
I go there and it’s seven in the morning, which means my motor skills are not at their best. I put on these gloves, and they’re like, “Here’s a groundhog.” I’m like, “What the fuck?” I’m like, “Don’t you have a little more coaching to go with this or whatever?”
It was idiocy. Why would you want an elected official to hold a groundhog? I don’t know anything about holding groundhogs. So the whole thing is just insane. There’s an original sin here. Don’t hand someone a groundhog, right?
Only trained groundhog holders. And do you squeeze it really tight? I mean, what do you do? So I’m like, talk about a lack of advance work.
It may be that de Blasio was worn down after years of controversy, and maybe he is less fun now than he used to be. Still, Cockburn can’t help but think McCray has much of a right to complain that de Blasio didn’t provide for her. It was her own husband, after all, who put McCray in charge of the city’s $850 million ThriveNYC program for the mentally ill, the money for which has been spent on no one knows what.
What’s more, it’s not as if de Blasio isn’t trying to get his groove back, either. The Times tells us:
Last year, he looked in the mirror and did not feel like himself.
“I never anticipated ever doing anything with hair color,” he said of his now strikingly dark close-crop, adding that the current shading is a bit more pronounced than he intended. “But I like feeling what I feel.”
Cockburn wishes de Blasio and McCray the best. Living with your non-ex-wife while she cuckolds you with women can’t be all that easy — no matter how normal it is in their Brooklyn neighborhood. But it may also be the only way de Blasio can afford a place to live at all, as the Times reports the NYC “Conflicts of Interest Board ordered him to pay nearly $500,000 in reimbursements and fines for using his security detail on presidential campaign trips.” Oops!
