08 March 2008

The Monster

Portrait of the Willow Girl

It was raining, good rain, light but steady. Soaking over time, not a deluge that scours the caustic substances from the blacktop and rushes it to the storm drain and straight into the Potomac in a toxic flood.

Hillary's national campaign headquarters across the alley had gained some color. The building needs it, being stuck in the pre-demolition phase of its life.

Hector at the office told me that the building was where he became a naturalized US Citizen, back when it was the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Buckingham neighborhood was still the Golden Door to a new life.

He said at the time it was the biggest building at this end of the Ballston urban village. Now it is boxy and forlorn and dwarfed by the towers all around. Once the election and the recession are over, it will disappear and the lot will transform into something fancy.

Of course, before it had been INS it had been the Navy Investigative Service, a strange organization of military and civilians working counter-intelligence matters and chasing queers. The Service was always sensitive about that, minding Winston Churchill's great line that the traditions of the Sea Service were “Rum, Sodomy and the Lash.”

The argument about rum and the lash is largely over, and the other is one we have been directed not to ask about. The current organization that you see on television with Mark Harmon is a completely accurate portrayal of the new mission, which is exciting and glamorous and does not have anyone staking out public bathrooms.

Anyhow, the reason we were venturing out into the rain was that our pal Mac has decided to break out of his self-imposed seclusion. He is going to gradually re-enter the wider world now that the worst of the winter is gone

Due to the moisture, we emerged from one garage and circled Hillary's building to the entrance to The Monroe, a high-rise condominium that caters to the retired community. I was not surprised to see a whole new crop of bright Clinton signs taped to the windows around the door at the HQ. It had been a near thing this week, a coin-toss to see if we would see furniture being moved out on Wednesday after the elections.

The lease looks good right through the summer, and you could almost feel the renewed energy radiating from the place.

It was at the precise moment in the wet afternoon that we were pulling up in front of the Monroe that Samantha Power, one of Senator Obama's senior foreign policy advisers, quit the campaign. She had lost her cool in an interview with a Scottish newspaper and called Senator Clinton a “monster.”

There is going to be a lot of that sort of thing happening over the next few months; frustration and words said that betray what people are actually thinking, the ones right from the reptilian core of the brain where monsters live.

It is going to be like a long car trip with an ex-spouse, someone who knows how to push every button, and with whom you have a general agreement not to be too ugly, since the cost of unpleasantness is so great. That does not mean that the knife cannot be jabbed in subtle ways.

When asked about the scurrilous rumor that Senator Obama was a closet Muslim, she answered that was not true. As far as she knew.

As far as I knew, we were generally on time and Mac was waiting down in the lobby. He is very organized, and usually early for his appointments. I walked with him out to the waiting car, and we drove across the street and down into another garage so that we could all stay out of the wet.

Above us another tower soared, and we had the choice of taking the elevator up to exit to the Mexican place, or taking the lobby door into the Willow Restaurant. We chose the latter, and passed the dreamy large portrait of the thin woman with the enigmatic look.

She had that willowy mystical allure of fin de siècle Paris, or heroin. I could not tell which.

The Willow is a grand place, and no better place to be on a rainy afternoon than at the rich wood bar. The last of the lunch crowd was still in the dining room, lingering over glasses of decent wine and digesting the artistic, carefully-crafted seasonal dishes in unruffled surroundings.

They specialize French and Northern Italian cooking, if you are eating, and an excellent pour of spirits if you are not. The owner is Tracy O'Grady, and her husband Brian Wolken are on-site almost all the time. It is a very hands-on operation, which could be a pain in the ass to the employees, but they let the bar run on its own ambiance, and is not.

Todd the burly bartender filled us in, and up, as we got settled at the corner of the long bar. There had been a dust-up with the premium beer distributor, who loftily insisted on a twenty case minimum for purchase of fine hand-crafted lagers.

They no longer moved those sorts of quantities, concentrating more on fine wines by the glass, and Brian had put his foot down. Hence the new line-up of brews at the bar, which were provided by a consortium of upscale vendors with no minimum.

If you knew the place when it was called Gaffney's, the bones have not changed that much, though the sinews and spirit have. It was owned by a collection of absentee investors until Tracy took it over. What changed was the quality of the food, and I think the drinks are more bracing.

Mac ordered a margarita, with salt. Jake had a designer beer, a Dog Fish India Pale Ale, intending to work his way through the new line-up. I was chilled, a bit, and decided that a Maker's Mark Manhattan was the way to go. The whiskey burned a bit on the way down, but mellow, and I got out my notebook and pen.

If I was not taking notes, this would be a late afternoon on a work-day, in a bar, drinking.   Instead, we were conducting an oral history interview, which gave the enterprise a certain high-minded quality. Todd approved, and was solicitous. When the shift changed, and Jill the new bartender arrived, we had ventured a little off track.

The notes, as I review them this morning, begin in an organized enough fashion. Mac was wed in 1948, an excellent year for new beginnings, and elected to stay in the Navy. He was transferred to the European headquarters, which had taken over Ike's old headquarters on North Audley Street near the Embassy in London.

I think we had intended to discuss the great tides in international affairs that were going on then; the Greek Crisis, and the impact of the Marshall plan.

Instead we got off onto beds, though not literally, of course. Mac and his bride did not take much to England except their beds. The British slept on appalling mattresses, or at least that was the word in Washington, and the beds went to a row-house at 18 Maresfield Gardens, near the Swiss Cottage Tube stop.

It was an imposing three-story home that had been divided into three flats. Mac had the ground floor, with the garden, and with the good American mattresses beneath them, life was good.

What was interesting was that Sigmund Freud, the pioneer psychotherapist had lived just two doors down the row. He was dead, of course, the cancer having taken him in September of 1939. He had to get out of Austria with the growing madness there, and lived the last year of his life in the relative safety of London.

The house survived the Blitz, and his daughter Ana lived there most of the rest of her life. The house is a museum now, but in Mac's time, it was just Ana's residence, where she carried out her life's work refining the principles of her father.

Freud didn't exactly invent the idea of the conscious versus unconscious mind, but he certainly was responsible for making it popular. He also famously asked the question: “What do women want?” and never got a satisfactory answer.

In an round about fashion we had got onto the topic of bagpipes, which were funded in Iowa through the Department of War. The mechanics of playing the bagpipes involved both the conscious and unconscious minds, which had to be trained to work in concert.

Mac said you have to squeeze the bag with your left arm while blowing into the pipe and fingering the chanter. I thought that it sounded a lot like trying to strangle a cat while getting it to purr, but that in turn, was tied to life on a farm in Iowa, in the Great Depression.

We had moved backward from London, jumping right across the war and into a time when the banks were closed, and there was no money at all.

Imagine an America without cash! Everything was done in barter, vegetables and meat for dental services, professionals and farmers alike getting by as best they could.

That was where the pipes came in, since Mac played for three years in the Drum and Bugle Corps at the University of Iowa before he had to drop it to assume the duties of City Editor at the Daily Iowan, the campus newspaper.   He might have been a reporter, if the world had not lost its senses to the Monsters.

There was another beer, and a margarita and a Marker's Mark in there somewhere, though my notes are not clear as to the timing.

What is clear is Mac's recollection of change. His first president was Herbert Hoover, who inherited the first three years of the national disaster after the stock market crash in 1929. Those of us that did not live through it tend to see the thirties in scratchy black-and-white, flickering images of marching Germans and indomitable Franklin Roosevelt propped at a podium, easing the crisis with bold new programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration.

Mac was in favor of FDR, though he went down to the depot to watch Mr. Hoover's campaign train come through, and listen to a speech the president gave in his doomed campaign for reelection in 1932.

He was trying his best to turn things around, and he might have succeeded, since all these great economic things are cyclical, and largely beyond the power of any one person to alter.   

Mr. Roosevelt was selling hope, and change, and that is exactly what people wanted. It is the same thing in this cycle, which is why I continue to believe that Senator Obama is the likely next President.

That is what I think with the conscious mind, anyway, though Dr. Freud could tell you a lot about all that Id seething down below. That is what Samantha was talking about, not that Senator Clinton is really a monster, but that in the struggle for the nomination there is going to be scorched earth.

Eventually we got to the point where my notes no longer make any particular sense. The bar at Willow had filled up with vibrant pre-weekend noise, and it was time for us to move on. It was wonderful talking to Mac about FDR and Hoover. It is so cool to have history come alive, just like current events.

Jake deposited Mac at the Monroe, and me on the street below the office tower where I had to retrieve my car and re-enter the world of now. It was a little disconcerting. The cleaning crew was in the office when I ducked in to check the last e-mail, and saw the news about Samantha Powers and her unfortunate encounter with sincerity.

Being a woman herself, she knows exactly what she wants, even if Dr. Freud did not have a clue. She wants her candidate to be president, and she wants change and the personal and institutional opportunity that go with being on the ground floor. She hopes they can figure it out as they go.

Senator Clinton just wants to be President, and she is not going to take “no” for an answer. It is really as simple as that.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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