DC By the Book

Excerpt: Back then I worked out of the second floor of a two story building on F Street. The first floor held a wig and corset shop. The rent was cheap because the building would be gone inside a year. Just about every building on the block was making way for more Gap stores and Starbucks. Looking out across Ninth Street toward the Smithsonian American Art Museum, I wondered if they would also have to move. You could fit a pretty big Starbucks there.

Excerpt: An hour later, I parked outside a brick building on Second Street Northeast, a few blocks from Union Station. Late September in DC. The rain was forcing us to forget our summer drought. The streets were shiny, and clouds bearing down promised more, making the morning sky dark.

Excerpt: A block from my office was the Zamboanga Café. There’re two things I love about this place. The first was Chella, a Bockman’s alumna and Zamboanga’s owner. And the second was its complete lack of atmosphere-high ceilings with bare fluorescent lights, the house specials hand written on stiff manila paper thumb tacked to the walls, and five creaky booths that looked out the plate glass window onto F Street.

Excerpt: An hour later I crossed Seventeenth Street, near Lafayette Park, and walked past a satellite TV truck that was idling outside the MPAC building. The building looked like rows of mud-colored cement boxes, one on top of another, with a mud colored grid in front as an embellishment. You see these types of nondescript, 1960s buildings all over D.C. as if every architect in the city had fallen asleep and been taken over by alien pods. Pods who hated style, of course.

Excerpt: The air was warm and the sky was gray as I crossed H Street, past the statue of General Lafayette and the protesters who camped across the White House. I started my car, then listened to Bell Evans as I took Sixteenth to Massachusetts, past the statue of Winston Churchill, whose right hand was raised in a V for Victory. To paraphrase the great man, I was ready to meet the birthday partiers; whether they were ready for the ordeal of meeting me was an entirely different mater. I turned onto Jan and Janet’s street, then slowed, looking for parking.

Excerpt: After he visited his office to file the form and check messages, we walked a block to the Carlton Hotel. I love the Carlton. These days it’s called the St. Regis, but no matter-for me, it was and shall always be the Carlton. With its large rooms, soft beds, closets, pantries, and basement hallways, a kid could have a blast hiding out there. Which is exactly what I did for three weeks, during an early escape from Junior Village. The Carlton was like a second institution to me. The lobby bathroom impressed me, they had white cloth hand towels. I used to steal ten at a time.

Excerpt: The bar smelled of old leather and polished wood and expense accounts. High-tech jazz drifted from hidden speakers in the carved wooden ceiling, fourteen feet above us. Our table sat in the corner, between the fireplace and the bookshelves. When you walk in, you noticed the bookshelves right away-tiny yellow lights lined the shelves, casting an orange glow on the impressive leather bound volumes like the Iliad and The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. But from a different angle, you could see the bindings were only that-bindings. The pages of text, the substance and wisdom of these writers, had been cut away to save space, leaving only the illusion of stored knowledge. It was very D.C, and somehow comforting in a bizarre way.