25 October 2003

I sometimes get plastered at the Café Asia on Wilson Blvd. Down in Rosslyn. They sell sushi and alcohol in a very post-modern airy room with big glass windows and the wait staff is all from Asia. Some of the girls are right off the boat and some are second and third generation Americans. It is a fun place, and I got to practice my Thai and Japanese and Korean, or at least the phrases that made them giggle.

I used to go there when I hung out with a younger crowd from the Department downtown. They would be launching their Friday as I faded after a couple drinks. They would go on dinner and clubs afterward and there are plenty of them. They had the money, they had the energy and they knew where all the little places were all up and down the Boulevard. Ah, sweet youth!

It is wasted on the young. I would go home and collapse.

I drove up the hill on the way home, passing the strip mall on the right past the Fire Station where Pho 75 sells the best damn Vietnamese soup in two or three different varieties with fresh vegetables. Steaming great bowls of it. We used to go there from the Pentagon, to sit under the pressed-tin roof amid the fake palms and talk about the war. "Pho" means hearty soup in Vietnamese and "75" was the year that the owner and his family stopped being the Finance Minister and became a refugee. Further up the street is another restaurant, a little more upscale owned by Minh, a general from the Republic of Vietnam Army, which is a perfectly logical career move, given the circumstances.

Which is the key to the vibrancy of Wilson Boulevard, is Metro and immigration. It is so hot here with activity that it sizzles. When I started out in the Navy Annex there wasn't much happening in Arlington. Or at least it didn't seem that way to the Commuter crowd, who bought homes where we could afford them with schools that spoke English. Arlington was filling up with all sorts of people. The Vietnamese were the first wave I noticed, though of course something has to be pretty well along before a commuter notices anything. And the waves of fugitives from unpleasantness elsewhere. Ethiopia and Eritrea, don't confuse them, and Pakistan and El Salvador and Guatemala all have large constituencies. I am encouraged to vote for people named "Khan" and "Pahlavi" for the House of Delegates and everyone here is fine with it. Proud of it, in fact. And in the neighborhoods behind the strip malls are the old-timers in little boxy houses from the fifties, regular Americans fading away and young people from all over pushing their way in, filling it up and bidding the prices to the moon.

If there is a recession it isn't happening around here. We are close in, we are on the Metro Orange Line. This is a place to be. Wilson Boulevard and its shadow Clarendon are constructed over the tunnels of the Orange Line. The first stop in the Old Dominion coming out of the District is Rosslyn, an artificial town of tall glass towers. It used to be a frantic center of activity during the week that closed up tight as a drum when the commuters left. There was stuff to do there during the day, but at night, forget about it. Silent as a tomb. May as well walk across the lovely arches of the Key Bridge to Georgetown.

But that changes rapidly. Silence turns into raucous life as you drive up the hill from the Potomac.

The traffic is bad, since the roads were all designed in the '30s. The whole "no merge" concept is a little challenging to deal with. But it is manageable, since we are all not headed lemming-like toward the horizon. We are coming and going to places that are right here. You see a lot of DC United bumper stickers, and Americans flags and religious phrases in Spanish. It is a pickup truck Mecca, not the old F-150s of Virginia but the little Japanese trucks you would see in Latin America. And those crazy little Honda sedans with the wings and crazy wheels. It is a regular Pho of cultures.

The night of the Quest for dinner started with tall drinks at the Cafe Asia. late afternoon had transitioned into evening. The boys wanted dinner and I gave in. They are well-paid government servants just starting the salad course of life and I am not. I ship my money to a couple Big Ten Universities and maintain a comfortable home for someone else in the suburbs. But the Boys have to eat out, since they don't know how to cook and don't have the time to do it anyway. I think they have maids, too. But the Boys know where everything is in Arlington, and because of the fierce competition between the dozens of cool places, there is a special happening somewhere all the time.

They know precisely where every good deal is located and at what time of day. There are lunch specials, of course, a cut-throat market. There are early-bird, drink and gender specials. The boys have a regular circuit where everything is a deal whenever they turn up. Half-price sushi at happy hour, or upscale vodka specials all night on Tuesday at one pub, and half-priced entrees on Wednesday at another. Their enthusiasm this night was contagious and I acquiesced to their youth. We walked up Wilson and tried to get a table at a boutique steak house two doors up from Pho 75. It has been written up in the Post Food Section for the quirky excellence of the prie fixe menu. No dice, we were told. No reservation, not dinner, and pay no attention to the empty tables. Someone important was expected. The Boys were not happy, half-bagged and a little full of themselves, knowing as they did every place on Wilson Boulevard.

We wound up back across the street at Red Hot and Blue BBQ where you can get a seat if the stuck-up steakhouse tells you they are full with more important diners. The ribs weren't bad, and then they were off to a strip club to look at naked ladies and I was off to my balcony to look at the traffic whizzing by on Route 50 in the darkness.

There is nothing on Route 50 except concrete on ramps and mixed-use housing back from the verge. Route 50 is a way to get somewhere else, California, even. That is the difference with Wilson Boulevard. The Boulevard has shed the skin of old Arlington, the little art deco low-rise buildings with the silver letters like old bus terminals. Now the buildings are thrusting up to the sky and there are more places to live and have lunch that you can imagine. There are people everywhere, walking in the morning to the Metro to get downtown. Young people, homeless people, old farts like me.

What a Strip it is! It glitters with new glass towers and bangs with construction. At my one office there is a new building going up, the Hispanic workforce throwing the concrete skyward. They are going through the eighth floor now, and the masons are putting brick on the facing already, even as they are still pouring the roof. I'm not sure I apporve of the construction. It is all pillar and glass construction, and a well-placed rocket-propelled grenade could bring down a whole corner of it. But that is post-9-11 thinking and these places where bought and planned for before things changed. At my other office, or cubical rather, I am two Metro stops closer to the River. Same deal. Planks and metal braces as they pour a new floor, then pillar and planks again toward heavy, always with the hovering crane above. That one is rising behind the Chinese restaurant rumored to be owned by the People's Liberation Army and the Kebab Palace and a row-front sushi place and the franchise cottage shape of a former Little Tavern Hamburger place selling something to eat from Peru. Just off N. Barton St. is the Java Shack, a revolutionary coffee house with free newspaper and unlimited lounging behind the Mr.Tire.

Further west up the Boulevard at the intersection of North Veitch is a cluster of fine eclectic dining around the legal buildings. There is Ireland's Four Courts and whatever that wonderful diner was where at my ex's insistence, I met with a counselor to talk about my marriage. The psychologist was a prison counselor at the time and on his lunch break from the towering County Jail across the street. They have everything there at this stop, from courtroom to detention and plenty of places to have lunch. This stop on the Metro is called Courthouse. I didn't want to talk about the situation, but my wife really wanted it and we discussed the situation over sandwiches, or rather, I talked and he listened. I think it was a patty melt, for me. Good beef, and the sautéed onions were deliciously caramelized. When the story was over he recommended I get a divorce. I contemplated the way the American cheese slice had melted down around the patties and realized it was a perfect metaphor for my life.

That was at Courthouse. Further up toward my offices at Edgewood Street is the Iota Club and Cafe and the anchor of the transformation of the neighborhood, the Whole Foods Market. You could just browse right there in the grocery store, or walk across the street to The Market Common where there is Bertucci's Italian food and the Big Bowl stir-fry. If you are not hungry, or are playing hooky from something billable, there is a Barnes and Nobel and a Pottery Barn and a couple upscale home furnishings place to accommodate all the new apartment and condo dwellers. There is everything you could possibly want and you don't have to get in your car and drive outside the Beltway to Springfield or Potomac Mills or some other godawful asphalt oasis out in the county.

Another couple blocks west on Wilson and you are crawling distance from my new office. There is the legendary Whitlow's on Wilson, across from Faccia Luna. Half price burgers on Monday and half-price sandwiches on Tuesday at the former and excellent Italian-style pizza and pasta at the latter. At Garfield and Wilson is the Mexicali Blues (they are Honduran) and the Wood Fired and on the first floor of the Arlington Human Services Building is the Big Belly Deli, (excellent pastrami) and across the street is the Hard Times Café with both kinds of Chili, sweet and hot, and the Hot Shottes coffee house next to a strange place advertising British Food like they had any and down the cross street is that cute Indian place and two Vietnamese restaurants. On of them is to die for, the Boys say, and the other may just kill you. I don't know the difference and won't try to find out until they show me. The Clarendon Grill and Greek place on the same lot as Gold's Gym and the new Cheesecake Factory with the onion-shaped dome is opening up right in the middle of it. Mr. Day's is a sports bar on the ground floor of our building, which we pretend is just another office complex, but I have never been in there during working hours. I swear.

There is more food and places to go out at Ballston, where I pretend to work when I am not out on direct. There is the Flat Top stir-fryand that crazy Mexican place and a whole food court in the Ballston Mall and five or six delis, including the Eat-and-Run with superb gyros.

There is nothing beyond that. Wilson Boulevard turns toward Fairfax County, where the boundary marks the end of the old District and the beginning of real Virginia. They built so fast out there that anything interesting was bulldozed, and even the strip-malls are at least a half hour by car away from anything else.

It is not that way on Wilson Boulevard. I think about that famous New Yorker cartoon about the world as seen from Manhattan Island. Fifth Avenue is prominent, as is Central Park. The Five Boroughs quite distinct. Iowa is a blur on the horizon and China is a tiny island almost out of sight. I realize that I am getting the same way here in Arlington. As far as I'm concerned, the Fairfax County line marks the end of the known earth.

On Wilson Boulevard you can get anything you want. At least if you have some young kids to show you where there the specials are.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra.