14 September 04

The Shouting Man

There was a genuinely demented man around the corner from the uniform store at the corner of 11th and New York Ave. I separate the genuine from the artificial for the practical reason of personal safety, or at least unexpected dry-cleaning expenses. This man was just around the corner from the Greek property on I Street, and he was shouting into an angle formed by the wall of the former uniform store with the soaped windows.

I could not understand what he was shouting. It was inchoate and filled with anger. It took a moment to realize that it was a human voice, and not the sound of a construction machine in the new buildings going up. I sized up the nature of disturbance. Formerly white t-shirt now a uniform tan, the same color as the trousers and the skin and the matted hair. A bedroll that had undoubtedly been some other color lay on the pavement. I did not see his face, nor did I wish to.

I chose not to walk down towards him. I was surveying the block because I smelled change and wanted to take a look before the last of the low-rise buildings came down. My suspicions were that it was sooner rather than later.

It was a Monday and a damned nice one, considering I was back at work. I had survived the morning meeting, no small accomplishment, since a colleague suggested that we commit to short working visits to Baghdad as a gesture of solidarity to the people executing our contracts there. I thought I showed remarkable aplomb, and not go over the conference table to take him by the throat.

Instead, I jotted a line in my red notebook. "No Baghdad ," I wrote carefully. Thirty years of deployments was enough. Someone else can do it. When the meeting broke up I left the office and took the freight elevator up to the rooftop garden to have a smoke and contemplate the city at my feet. The only alternative for the Bus Station's smokers is the pavement out front of the building. Security has been enhanced due to the pre-election terror alert, and it is inconvenient. Standing next to the tall ash-stands, it is not uncommon for one of the passing homeless to scoop a smoldering butt right in front of you, and walk off wreathed in used smoke.

The roof garden is 12 stories above New York Avenue, Northwest . There is a small triangular park below where the homeless still sleep, though the shiny new buildings have overwhelmed their former stronghold and swept by them to the north. They are still on the benches around the refurbished historical facade, as though they had not noticed the change and expected an intra-city Greyhound to pull up at any moment.

The balance has changed, and there are more of us than them. Their presence is not as intimidating as it once was, and it occurs to me they may be here for reasons of safety. In our suits and shiny shoes we are unlikely to attack them.

Smokers tend to be well informed, since we spend a lot of time standing around the ashtrays and we share. I have talked to the pioneers who first occupied the chromium-and-marble tower. They say when the building first opened, this was the frontier. In fact it was north of the frontier, and they had a queasy feeling when they went outside. Outnumbered. To the south a few blocks it was safer, near the Metro stop and the Hecht's Department Store that Mayor Berry made such a fuss about when the corporation agreed to establish a Flagship store in the old commercial core.

You would hardly believe it now. Only the homeless remain from the years when the area was on the skids. It had been skidding that way for years, but the riots over the assassination of Dr. King are what tore it.

The old Convention Center was part of the effort at renewal, but now there is a newer and more gigantic one further to the north. They are going to knock down the old one across 11th street from the Bus Station. The signs of coming demolition are up already. "Washington Wreckers" or some such entity is going to do it. Incongruous advertising.

I assume the inside is being wired with explosives and I will be excited to have it come down. It is a brown soul-less box, and the developers have promised a vibrant multi-use complex to replace it.

I hope so. Now it is just a long walk past nothing on the way to Chinatown , and the nooks and crannies of the building are being used by bums and riff-raff to sleep.

I feel bad for them. I talked to one the other day. He was a spry middle-aged man with a patchy beard and a short pony-tail. His sign said he had been a Marine. I gave him a buck in quarters and said "Semper Fi!" He asked me if I had watched the Redskins game. I had to say that I did not. He said he had watched it in the TV in the tent in the woods where he lived. His tent-mate had chosen to sleep through it in a drunken stupor. It appears that he commutes to work, too.

I wondered where he got power, out in the woods, or if he only imagined that he had it. But as he walked away he gave me the "urgh-ah!" of a real Marine, and he pumped his arm down and up, like the man walking point does when it is time to move out on patrol. He was one of the walking wounded, I thought, the upper crust of the bums. A man who retained the work ethic even while living in a thicket.

The Shouting Man was the other end of the spectrum and one of the reasons the land could be bought on the cheap here. For a while for a while the tiny lots were turned over by small-time operators. The buildings I was surveying across New York Avenue belonged to the Bulgarians and the Greeks. They had brought an ancient conflict across the ocean, refusing to deal with one another on grounds of national principle, and that is why they are among the last of the old to go.

I was smoking looking down from the 12 th floor and realized something was going to happen soon. The display in the window of 113 was different. The cigar-store Indians were missing from the facade. The cock-eyed weathervane was gone from the roof. Only the white porcelain-clad bathtub remained above the shop window. Against the side was an equally white sign that said "George Basiliko. I buy Houses. Condition unimportant. Since 1954."

I am accustomed to seeing the capital change, day by day. The building on the north side of the block towers over the parking lot and the thee remaining buildings. In my six months on the job at the Bus Station it has gone up five floors, the HVAC units have been placed on the roof and it is growing cinderblock skin between the reinforced concrete pillars.

I took the elevator down to ground level and walked across the Avenue. The Greek's brick row house had a canvas sign slung on it, advertising the coming of a Buffalo Wings and Billiard parlor. He lives up in Maryland someplace now, and does his real estate by remote control. The Bulgarians are still in residence during business hours.

A couple weeks ago the poster for the chicken was gone and a crew of large men with a Bobcat earthmover showed up and began some work around the front. Then the porches went, and now the front of the building is flat and shored up with plywood. I was sorry that the architectural details went. I would like to think someone had saved them, but I know they just went to a landfill.

I feel like a human time-lapse camera sometimes. The loss of the crazy weather vane on top of George Basiliko's building struck me hard because it was the last folk-whimsy in this neighborhood. The last human-scale thing, except for the shouting human. Maybe that was why he was angry. But the fact that its loss moved me is odd, since I my presence is a symptom of the change.

I walked past the uniform store on the corner and away from the shouting. Above me towered a billboard of a husky African-American, perhaps a football player, attired in harlequin glasses, a styled gray wig and lipstick. I didn't know what it was supposed to mean, or if I was supposed to know the player.

The door to the Basilko headquarters was open, which it has rarely been of late. A thickset man with wire-gray hair emerged. I asked him if he was the owner, and he said he was not. He said he was Dmitiri, the brother, but that George was inside and I was welcome to go in.

I could not resist the invitation. Once, the building had been a shop with a small apartment upstairs for the owner. Now it was a warehouse for the flotsam and jetsam people had left behind in all the houses the Basilko brothers had flipped in their real estate deals as the old city vanished under concrete and marble.

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George Basiliko was seated on a tall Victorian chair. He was surrounded by the detritus of a lost world. I introduced myself and he shook my hand. His skin was the texture of parchment. He must be in his late 80s. He sat like a king, or a sultan of the old Empire. A nephew who was my age sat across from him at a desk with a broken leg.

The desk had the broken leg. The nephew looked quite spry.

George was the sultan of junk. It was everywhere. There were harpoons and bandoliers of expended cartridges. "Thirty caliber," said the nephew, as I picked one up. It was connected by the links that break away as the shell are ejected by the machine gun. Like the links of what had once connected this neighborhood.

"This is incredible," I said.

"They have taken two truck loads already," said George. "They will auction it all down on E street."

I had no idea who would bid on this stuff. There were ancient cheesecake calendars and light fixtures, a postcard from Hugh Hefner peppered with pinholes, advertising a Playboy subscription for the 1964 production year. George shifted lightly on his throne. "I admire your shoes," he said. "They have a nice polish. Did you do it yourself?"

I looked down at the black pumped with the black leather kiltie and the holes tooled across the toe. "No," I said. "I had them polished. I was in the military. I know I cannot do it this well."

George appeared to have dealt with men in ties and starched shirts and well-shined shoes. "A man should know his limitations," he said with a dry voice. "It wasn't the national Guard, was it?"

"Nope," I responded."Regular Navy."

I asked him why the building was coming down now. He said he had turned down a lot of offers, mostly to stymie the Greek down the block, and to ensure that the men with the shiny shoes could not flip the property and deliver the whole block to the developers at a hefty increase from which he would not profit.

He said this was the summer. The Greek got out from under his chicken obligation, and that is what made the decision. Last month he agreed to sell out his 3,600 square feet to the French firm of Louis Dreyfus.

The deal had been working a long time. There were twenty different landowners involved. Some of them crazy. I think George is still mad at the Greek.

He was the last hold-out. Dreyfus went to him with drawings of a grand new building that took the whole block, and another set that showed the brick row-house surrounded in an implacable grip of marble and steel.

I heard that Dreyfus leaders had coffee with the Greek fifty times, in a low-end diner in Silver Springs and they dressed down. But in the end, the Greek only agreed to lease the land to Dreyfus for 98 years, as though he was the Chinese emperor and Dreyfus the British Crown. Dreyfus has an option to buy the land after that, when we are all safely in our tombs and the neighborhood is ready to change again. Or perhaps this will be just a terrain of bubbled green glass. It is not going to be my problem, though of course I have contributed to the world that will be by the way I lived in the one that was.

Here in the two story building with the pretty stonework, George said he was tired. He no longer cared. He took cash, but the Greek was a problem right to the end. Dreyfus finally agreed to pay him $100,000 a year in rent, or $9.8 million over the life of the lease. The French intend to throw up a 380,000 square foot office building, which is already half leased to the national tax consulting firm of Ernst & Young. It is scheduled to be completed by mid-2007.

I will watch it rise, but by the time Ernst & Young arrive, I hope to be somewhere else altogether. And now that I have the choice, I do not think the likely destinations include Baghdad . I thanked George for his time and walked out past the junk and the display window and across the avenue to my tower. I swiped my magnetic security badge on the card reader and smiled at the security guard.

I imagine I will emerge from the building one day this week and discover the three buildings across the street will have disappeared into a gigantic hole in the ground. Given the human condition, it has a certain symmetry, don't you think?

However it turns out, I think it will still be some time before there is no one shouting at the building. Ours has been up for a decade, and they are still outside, waiting for a bus.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra