DC By the Book

Excerpt: He drove under a railroad bridge and up an incline, and a little past that they crossed the line into D.C. He pulled the car to the curb in front of a motel sign advertising adult movies in each room.... The motel lounge was done in burnt orange a shade down from the orange in the lobby. The customers and staff of the lounge were all neighborhood types in their late thirties and early forties, and the music on the sound system reflected their collective past. The bartender had been playing the Commodores, BT Express and Ohio Players on the house stereo for most of the night.

Excerpt: "There was this scene in D.C. A real Beat scene, an underground. I used to go to this one club, Coffee and Confusion was the name of it, over on Tenth and K.... there were other joints. The Java Jungle, the Ontario Place--but Coffee and Confusion, that was it for me. Guys playing guitars, bongos, wearing shades inside the club. A real scene." --HISTORICAL CONTEXT--> In 1959 this block was home to the beatnik hangout Coffee n’ Confusion, a popular site for poetry readings and late night parties located at 945 K. This was an area in transition. The club’s neighbors included Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church, established in 1850 and at 900 Massachusetts Avenue since 1917, and the Tudor Hall apartments, whose residents complained of the club’s noise. The ACLU defended Coffee n’ Confusion from police attempts to shut it down. At this corner, the Carpenters Building, a former union headquarters, dates to 1926 and along with the few older buildings left on this block, is a National Historic Landmark. The wide setback from the street and architectural character of the only remaining houses on K Street’s 1000 block are remnants of the late 19th century, when this corridor was home to many of the city’s most well-to-do.

Excerpt: Constantine let the mist and wind bite his face as he stared out the window at the neon life of Georgia Avenue. Small bars, Caribbean nightspots, athletic-shoe stores, funeral parlors, independent insurers, Korean beer markets, and liquor stores blurred by. On every block there seemed to be an easel set on the sidewalk advertising beepers and answering services. Constantine noticed the cursive, neon sign for Posin's, the Hebrew grocery store where his mother had taken him weekly as a child, to shop for meat.

Excerpt: A young man in a hooded jacket and baggy jeans stood on the corner of Georgia and Buchanan, watching the Dodge and its occupants pass. He formed his hand into the shape o a pistol, pulled the trigger on Constantine. Constantine looked away. "Te thing I noticed," Constantine said, "since I been back in D.C. The young people -- none of them smile. It's like they don't know how to smile." He rubbed at his beard. "What the hell's going on here?" -- "Simple man," Randolph said. "It's the end of the motherfuckin' world."

Excerpt: "The Isleys, man. "Three Plus Three." Ernie wailed on that one.... 1973," Constantine said. "I had just gotten my license, bought this Dodge--a '66 Coronet Five Hundred. Yellow, with black buckets, a swivel tach.... I had this girlfriend then, girl by the name of Katherine. I used to drive her in that car through Rock Creek Park, on Saturday afternoons. The Mighty Burner was the DJ on WOL.... When I'd ride with Katherine in that car, I practically used to pray the Burner would play that song."

Excerpt: Constantine crossed to the west side of 27th, and started down the sidewalk. he buttoned his shit to the collar against the chill as he walked past St. John's, his Catholic military academy high school. Constantine had no feeling for the school at all.... Constantine had not wanted to attend St. John's--his father had insisted--so his years there had been spent working toward a kind of deliberate separateness from the school and its students.

Excerpt: At a curve in the road, 27th became Utah. Just past that, Constantine turned left and walked down McKinley. The structure of the neighborhood, its impression of low-key wealth, had not altered. Elegant, porched colonials sat rowed on the block, complemented by sensitive Volvos and ford Taurus wagons parked on the street in front of them. Only the trees had changed, their height and fullness exuding an old-world, botanical charm on the homes that stood beneath them.

Excerpt: ...he brushed past the hyacinths and shrubbery, taking the steps up to the playing field of his old elementary school, Lafayette. He went around the concrete walk that encircled the baseball field, passed a concrete pedestal water fountain that had been jammed on....and walked toward the school, remodeled now since his youth. He saw the brick wall where he had played stickball as a child, walked past the basketball court where as a teenager he had smoked reefer and shot hoops daily, walked past the hill where he had drunk Tango and Boone's Farm, where he had made love to Katherine on summer nights.

Excerpt: Constantine remembered the year--1973--and his team, a ragtag group of D.C.Rec boys. They took the city championship that summer, against a team from Anacostia, under the lights at Turkey Thicket.... Closing his eyes, he could still see the faces of his teamates in the infield: a stoic Irish boy at first, a genial, rifle-armed Indian at short, a fireplug Irish Catholic at third base. The pitcher was a tall lanky kid... [who] threw serious heat--the opposing teams reverently called him "The Greek from Rock Creek"--but Constantine could not remember his name.

Excerpt: He looked in the yard.The shrubbery, the border around the walkway, the double-locked wood shed--all of it fastidiously and impersonally maintained.... Constantine looked into the second story of the Dutch colonial. The blue light of a television flickered in the room. In silhouette, he could see a thin head rising over a high-backed chair, and from the head, sparks of sparse, white, disheveled hair. He wondered what his father thought, sitting there, old and alone in the middle of the night, staring at the empty, insane images moving across the television screen.... Constantine felt himself hoping, against his cynicism, that his father would leave his chair just then, descend the pine staircase, pass through the small, dim kitchen, and walk out the back door, into the yard, to see and wrap his arms around his son.

Excerpt: The street opened up and seemed to brighten at U, at the bottom of a steep hill. It had taken twenty-five years, but the signs of regeneration--new businesses, new bars, theaters, and offices--grew through the ruin, like buds blooming impossibly from the concrete. When Constantine had left town, 14th Street had still been bloodied from the riots of '68, long rows of charred storefronts, all plywood and black iron.

Excerpt: "Pull over," Valdez said as the car drove by the projects named Frontiers, at S Street. Gorman slowed, guided the Caddy into a spot in front of a block of shabby rowhouse storefronts on the west side of 14th, and cut the engine. Across the street stood a place called For the Love of Children, its faded wooden sign hung over the pocked door. Next to that was a partially demolished structure, a banner slung loosely across its falling brick facade, announcing the coming of City Center. The mayor's signature, in black, was scrawled boldly beneath the announcement

Excerpt: Somewhere in this area Constantine and his friends had come one night as teenagers to check out the strip clubs, the tail end of an already dead downtown burlesque scene. His first experience had been at the Gold Rush, then the Silver Slipper, where he eagerly sat at the table nearest the stage as an aging transvestite lisped the introduction--"Welcome to the fabulous... fabulous... Silver Slipper"--and where he had been promptly thrown out after refusing to buy the minimum amount of watered-down drinks. ---------- The Silver Slipper was one of many hole-in-the-wall strip clubs that dominated these blocks. By the late 1970s, there were more than 40 bars with nude dancing in the city, most clustering here. The Slipper will live on in infamy as the place where stripper Fannie Foxe caught the eye of Rep. Wilbur Mills from Arkansas in July 1973. The Congressman was a regular in the club, spending as much as $1,500 in an evening on booze. Foxe stopped working at the club soon after she met Mills, and then Mills moved his family into the same Arlington apartment building Foxe lived in. At the time he had been Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee for more than 15 years, and was one of the most powerful Democrats in the House of Representatives. In October 1974, Mills and Foxe were in a car with several other people when Park Police stopped it near the Tidal Basin. Foxe jumped into the water to try and escape, and the story was splashed all over the news in the following days. Mills’ affair and alcoholism became public and although he resigned his powerful chairmanship, he easily won reelection a month later. He entered treatment for his alcoholism and served out his final two year term before retiring and dedicating himself to philanthropic work on alcoholism. The “Tidal Basin” scandal was ranked the #3 all-time U.S. political sex scandal by both Forbes and Time.

Excerpt: Constantine could see some club action on F Street, the lettered block that ran to 9th. A group of kids stood halfway down the block, most of them smoking, leaning against the gated front of a shoe store. They wore flannel shirts, all of them; it looked to Constantine as if the boots they wore on their feet were the same style he'd worn in the Marines. One of them yelled something at him, and the rest of them laughed. ---------- When it opened in 1888, the Atlantic Building was the city’s largest commercial building and one of the first with an elevator. It was built on spec as office space and although it hosted the meeting in 1889 that led to the foundation of the National Zoo, the building will primarily live on in history as the original site of the 9:30 Club. In the 1970s, there was little nightlife downtown besides adult bookstores, peepshows, and tiny theaters. A former used-furniture store in the rear had been turned into a live music venue called Atlantis, but no one wanted to come to a seedy downtown to see bands they could see in better suburban venues. In 1979 a young developer bought the building and his wife connected with people involved in local underground music. There was a dearth of performance space for the city’s burgeoning new wave and punk scene, and the 9:30 soon occupied that niche. The new owners scavenged furniture and fixtures from an Elk’s Lodge on 10th street that was being torn down (the original bar is installed downstairs in the club’s current location), and opened on May 31, 1980 with a show by The Lounge Lizards and Tiny Desk Unit. Although hugely influential as an incubator space for local talent, the club’s 199-person capacity stifled profitability, and after years of losing money, the owners sold it to local concert promoter IMP for around $100,000. The new owners ran it with the same constraints, but in 1993 started losing shows to the larger and nicer Black Cat that had opened on U Street. That spurred them to seek out a new space and eventually move to the current V Street location. After 15 years of legendary shows ranging from The Police to Public Enemy and every local band of the time, the club closed on December 31, 1995 with a raucous set from go go legends Trouble Funk.

Excerpt: They crossed to the east side of 9th, walked half a block down to a group of businesses lit by yellow blinking globes. Constantine recognized these businesses as porno shops.... Weiner entered a door under a white sign that read FUN PALACE. Constantine followed. Inside, the fluorescent light and cigarette smoke burned his eyes. Two dour Salvadorans stood behind the counter, casually examining their new customers.

Excerpt: A catalog of power fashion packed the lunch-hour sidewalk at Connecticut Avenue and K, the downtown hub of the city's lobbyists, and blue-chip law and brokerage firms. Armani suits and Louis Vuitton handbags paraded by, sharing the concrete with the homeless and vendors and the bums, the scent of Opium colliding with the stench of urine. At one particularly busy avenue storefront, Washington's working women--secretaries, attorneys, hookers--buzzed in and out of glass doors.... Mean Feet, D.C.'s premier shoe boutique had begun to heat up.

Excerpt: He had met her buying music at Olsson's at Dupont Circle, where she worked as a clerk when she wasn't studying for her undergrad degree at GW. He was looking to pick up an disc, "Mulligan Meets Monk," that had been reissued on CD. Olsson's didn't stock the CD, but she knew of it, and he had been impressed.

Excerpt: Jackson pulled the car over to the curb on Wisconsin Avenue and cut the engine. He looked through the windshield, took in the block: upper Northwest, a row of specialty, white-interest retailers--camping gear, Persian rugs, gourmet baked goods, women's books--and ethnic restaurants, pizza parlors, and beer halls servicing the students of American U. In the middle of it, all glass and florescent banners, stood a liquor store a quarter length of the block. The double glass doors swung in and out with regularity, even on this weekday, alkies and society folk and students alike cradling their brown paper bags like babies as they carried the good to their cars.... Uptown Liquors. So this was the motherfucker he was going to hit on Friday.... Three men stood behind the counter, speaking loudly to the customers and each other, ringing sales on two old-fashioned registers.... The way it worked, the customers came in, stepped up to the counter, ordered from one of the loud men, and the men--Jews, jackson guessed, two old and one young--would bullshit about the quality or the price, maybe suggest something else, and then the men would scream the order toward the entrance to the back room, at the end of the counter. After that, a black man would carry the order out to the counter, dolly it out if it was more than one case of beer, and when the customer had paid the tab the black man would take it out to the customer's car. The customers came to Uptown Liquors for that ritual. Jackson could see that they came here for the show.

Excerpt: Jackson tailed Isaac east, across town to 13th Street, south on 13th to Fairmont. Isaac drove to the middle of the residential block and parked.... Fairmont street consisted of row houses sectioned off into apartments, glass and litter, young men wearing beepers, and children playing ball on the blacktop. It was exactly the kind of dead-end bullshit Jackson had come back to after Vietnam.

Excerpt: "EZ Time Liquors, on the northeast corner of 14th and R.... As you can see, this is a small place, about 8,000 square feet. Liquors, beers, a small selection of fortified wines. And convenience store items, inner city style--condoms, dream books, disposable lighters, a numbers machine--that sort of thing." Weiner pointed to a small square in the right area of the store. "Here's the counter where the staff stand. Two Irish gentlemen, father and son, and another Irishman, older, an uncle I'd guess. Hard guys, all of them." -- "Guns," said Valdez. -- "All over the place," Weiner said. "No plexiglass between the customers and the staff. The Irishmen wear vests under their shirts. I figure each one of them's got access to a gun behind that counter. Also, I've been in the place on two separate days, and on both occasions, I saw the same newspaper spread out--same date, same edition--under the left register. I figure there's a sawed-off underneath the paper." -- "So they're heeled," Polk said. "What's the take?" -- Weiner smiled and made a victory sign with his fingers. "Two hundred grand."

Excerpt: Constantine pulled the Dodge over at the Shepherd Park library, a couple miles from the motel. He went inside, walked straight to the computerized index, a screen on a high table set next to a rutted pine card catalog.... he touched his finger to the alphabetized subjects on the screen. The subject windows became narrower with each touch. Finally he found the one that he was after. Constantine pulled a book, The Forgotten War by Clay Blair, from the shelf. He took the book to a table, had a seat across from a snoring homeless man who slept upright with a magazine stuck in his hand. Constantine sat there for the next hour, carefully reading a long chapter of the book.