07 February 2004

I ordered Chinese after Sam the Shutter guy finally got done with the job last night.

Sam has a sandy chort beard and intense blue eyes. He is a perfectionist. I wondered about offering him beer while he was trying to complete the installation of the Plantation shutters on the big glass windows. But he had spent the bulk of this long wet wintry day getting the panels to fit just right, so that the magnets clicked with authority when the panels closed.

I marveled at how the shutters changed the look of the place. Gave it some class, and with the upper louvers open and the lower ones closed, gave me the option to wander around the place in my boxer shorts.

Not that there is much space to wander. I can go to the kitchen, sit in the bathroom or walk into the closet. That is about the extent of the wandering. Hence the Murphy bed and my other attempts to maximize space. But it seemed like things were coming together. The bed is the next big step. I still must sleep upstairs in the old unit. I I just work a little harder this weekend I might be able to tip the balance and live downstairs full time.

I looked at the fried rice. I thought about the story I read concerning Kim Chong Il, the Dear Leader of North Korea. They say his rice must be cooked using a fire from wood gathered on the sacred mountain of Paektu, far in the rugged eastern part of the Hermit Kingdom.

Before I went upstairs to retire, I poured a night-cap. Mr. Kim drinks better than I do, too. I purchase Popv Vodka at the Class Six Store on base. The Dear Leader drinks only Hennessy Paradis cognac, and is said to spend around $700,000 annually to keep the strategic reserve stocked. I smoked a last cigarette from a long work-week on the patio outside the unit. Mr. Kim is also a smoker, as would everyone be in North Korea if they could find any cigarettes. A special search team was chartered to find the world's best cigarettes for his personal consumption. The team came up with a choice between Rothmans and Dunhill. I was not surprised to discover that the Dear Leader opted for Rothmans, and in keeping with the doctrine of the self-reliance contained in his father's Chuche Idea, he ordered indigenous production of a similar-tasting cigarette.

When I was there visiting, the Mercedes sedans they drove us around in had the star emblem on the hood replaced with one resembling the one from the North Korean flag. They told us they built the cars right there in the North. So I am going to assume that the Rothman's will come in a new box but otherwise be exactly the same ones I buy in the blue carton Duty-Free store at Heathrow in London.

Sam told me as I watched him work that he had grown up right in this neighborhood and the property on which Big Pink was built had been a little copse of trees. He had played in this very unit when they were building it of the characteristic rose brick specified by Mrs Freize, the imperious woman who had developed this hundred acres of property.

I listened with interest. I am always curious about how Arlington County developed, who lived here then and all those who have some to replace them. When Sam and the trash were gone I closed the shutters with satisfaction and put the remains of the rice in the refrigerator and walked down to the lobby to take the elevator to my bed. It is odd having one's bedroom five floors away.

I rose early and it was not my fault. I waited until the ambulance left the front of the building before I went downstairs. The shouting awakened me around four. I heard something about "eviction" and then the sound of confrontation. The cops were still out front, and I was a little curious. I put some more stuff from the old apartment into a shopping bag and went down to the lobby.

It is unusual to hear anything at all in Big Pink. The place was built solid, thick walls and plenty of silence.

The tall young man in the parka was talking to the two officers quietly. His friend, the stocky one, had been the one who assaulted John who was studying for his LSAT exam later today. I presume he was the one who was taken to the hospital. Peering our the peephole on my door I had seen him kicking the cover door to the elevator and wedging himself in the frame to keep from falling.

John had said he was going to call the cops and he was as good as his word. I talked to him briefly as he and his wife, the nice lady whose father had been a General Officer in the Royal Cambodian Army. Maybe the last one, but that is another story.

This seemed to be another exploration into Big Pink demographics. I have more in common with the older set than the younger, and mostly see the kids at the pool in the summertime. I would say the majority of the people that own places here are the older transients. There is a significant cadre of the very old, waiting here for the assisted living or death. This is a good way station for them, concierge at the desk, nice people. Pretty good security. No lawns or roofs to keep up.

Then there are the middle aged like me. We have a body of labor Lobbyists here in the building who maintain these small places as annexes to their real homes out in America. They have a little duplicate life here, more modest, perhaps, but this is an expensive place and it makes sense to own or rent long-term so they do not have to stay in hotels when they come to conduct their national business or brace their Representatives.

Those not doing business are the middle-aged in some sort of transition. Let me apologize for the euphemism. I am hardly middle-aged. If I was, that would suggest that I intend to live to be 104. I do not, or hope not, since that would suggest that I am going to move from here to assisted living eventually. I do not. I will have a house and lawn again, and windows that look out on something besides a communal walkway and a parking lot. But that is not the case for most of us. The single women of an age are fierce in their determination to have a safe and secure place to live, and while considerably wiser, appear no less to have a zest for life even if they are alone. They have formed a community of company, and accept me for what I am. Male, but not available.

There are other men of our age, of course, and if not commercial travelers like the Union guys, just guys cut loose from whatever it was they were doing before. There is a small but vibrant gay community, and they are neither loud nor quiet. They are just part of the Big Pink family.

We are all here for convenience and price. This vast building has location and comfort. Everything is minutes away. Gentrification is pushing out the largely Hispanic residents to the east, and the neighborhood around the great building is becoming more genuinely diverse.

Which brings me to the other significant component of our population. Since it is a condominium the transience is not nearly what it would be if this were still an apartment building. But living as close as we do, one notes the changes. Taken in the aggregate, for example, and placed on fast-forward, we would flicker in and out like the frames on an old film.

I have lived in three units here, all the small versions. I lost the lease on the first one that saved me from bouncing around the military installations in the area, slipping from one Bachelor Officer's Quarters to another every few nights. It had no balcony, but it was a welcome shelter from the cold. He husband died suddenly and she elected to return here and begin her transition to assisted living and was lucky enough to hyperventilate into a second on the Fifth Floor. That is how I joined the ranks of the resident eccentrics.

After we mistakenly bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the Balkan War we had a saying that even a building can be a mobile target- the Chinese had changed buildings and not informed the Agency targeteers. We said the buildings just moved very slowly. So I intend to do what many other owners of the little units do. I will live here while I need to and then either keep the place as a resting spot when I am back here or save it for one of the children to start out.

Which brings me to the cops and the two young men who were so drunk at 4:30 this morning. This is an expensive town. To own a decent sized home here in Arlington you would need to open your wallet to the high six figures. The kids who populate the ranks of the law firms and Congressional staffs don't have that kind of money, and living far enough out to find something affordable can put you in West Virginia.

So many of them take a lease on tiny apartments in places like Big Pink. I don't want to be snooty, but we have a certain cachet. We have standards. We had a Speaker of the House of Representatives live here. We have marble in the lobby and cameras over the access doors, tennis courts and a nice pool, an athletic facility and a sauna. This is a nice place to live.

So here they start. Rents for an efficiency are around $900 bucks a month. One and two bedrooms are available, infrequently, and so the highest turnover are the youngest tenants. They are the ones with the mountain bikes and the goatees and the sporty SUVs in the parking lot. They are also the ones who have enough energy to still be drinking when dawn is about to break.

I don't know how they came to be out in the hall. I could not recognize them from the fish-eye viewport on my door. Based on what I could hear before the stocky one began shoving John, it appeared that a long evening had got away from him. Perhaps he had lost his job. There is no permanence in most of the positions here in town. Political entry-level positions are not good for job security. Perhaps he had got into money problems, or perhaps he had been thrown out by an owner who had decided to cash out of the this red-hot real estate market and realized he was now headed for West Virginia. If that was the case he had my sympathy.

I hyperventilated about finding a place to live and lugging all my worldly belongings in the back seat of my convertible. I smelled a lot of cat urine soaking stairwells in the available apartments around here.

John and his wife were pulling an all-nighter. They both work during the week, she at State and he with a medical illustration concern. Both want to go to laws chool and start the climb up the Washington ladder. A law degree can never hurt. Anyhow, the shouting disturbed them and John is around half my age. I contemplated things from the security of my kitchen. I learned from a wise old Three Star that nothing good happens with a lot of likker after two in the morning. Unless there was a threat to my life or property, or an imminent threat to one of my neighbors I was not going to get involved.

John had enough coffee in him to feel moral outrage and that is how he wound up calling the cops. I would have, I suppose, but they have turned off my phone in the old unit, pending re-establishment in the new one. It had been a long day and the cell phone was dead, the re-charger plugged into the wall in the new unit.

So my option was to monitor the situation. John told the pair to get out of the building. He said something about calling the cops and that is what provoked the stocky ran to shove John against the wall. It was not much of an assault, but it certainly was the best one I have heard of on the Fifth floor. I can imagine how the adrenaline must have flowed.

The action got closer and closer to my door, since the old unit is directly across from the elevator bank. I peered through the peephole, watching the stocky young man kicking the door in frustration.

I was not surprised when the cops rolled up in front of Big Pink at 4:38, nor that an ambulance made a brief touch-and-go to scoop up the stocky young man.

I don't imagine John will file charges. But he could, I suppose. He may feel like it after he takes the Legal aptitude test later this morning.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra