The radio says that the Roy half of Siegfried and Roy is showing some signs of improvement after being mauled and dragged by his neck offstage. A dramatic exit, to be sure, and a first in his career as a showman.

I feel a little like life has me the same way. It is just after six now. It is cold outside, not the real cold but a bit of a dank chill. Partly cloudy, but the stars and planets are still bright points in the darkness. Traffic is still light. The coffee isn’t working. I am tired and I don’t want to stay awake, much less drag myself to the office. I wonder at this fatigue.

Maybe it is a hangover from the discussion with my ex, she calling to complain about money, of course. This was in response to the insurance bill that came in the mail. The older boy took the truck to school with him this year. The bill for six months appears to be $1,000. Not unusual, it seems, but she says this stretches her to the breaking point. I told her she had the house, the only investment I ever made any money on, and all of my income for a year and most of it for another. I told her I was paying her most of my pension and two college educations on improvised credit. I handn’t missed a payment on jack-shit since this melt down started.

It was the same tired litany. According to the terms of the decree, she will start to receive about half of my retirement check directly from the finance people in Cleveland, and I will never see it. Which is fine, I suppose, but I have no idea what she will expect over and above that. I have some decisions to make later this month. But what I would like is to take a vacation and sleep for a week.

She doesn’t know about the disability claim I have filed with the Veterans Administration, either, so we will  not know what the final numbers will be or the Final Solution, if I may be permitted to borrow the phrase. I had to work right through the transition to try to make up the shortfall in the money, no break, no vacation. I’m whining, I know, but I don’t think I have had a week’s vacation in four years and I dreaded that one when it came and went back to work to escape the house.

I need a break. Finally I said there just wasn’t any more money, and all things being equal, I was tempted to quit and move back to Michigan and live in my parent’s garage. That seemed to get her attention. She called me back later to tell me how wonderful the kids are and I agreed.

Maybe this feeling is a result of starting yet another new job yesterday. There is a shortfall in one of the contracts, a paucity of appropriately-cleared people with the requisite experience. We had promised to provide them when the money came through on the contract, and it finally did and the Customer querulously asked where the employees were. He needed help, and he wanted it now. I don’t know what they think, that perhaps we have a locker filled with theoretical physicists and break them out when we need them. The overhead would kill us. But the illusion we sell is that we have exactly that. So to make up the gap they sent me. I smiled and glad-handed and got badged so I could come and go and the Customer seemed happy for now.

I sat in my cubical and listened to the contractor over the divider talk on the phone. I don’t have one. I was back in the bureaucracy I had been so happy to leave because of some of the people that worked there, and now I am working for them, seeking to make them happy.

I had realized this might be a practical consequence of the job I accepted, similar to the practical consequences of divorce. It is too hot in the building and I have no phone and stand in line for internet access because of the classified nature of the work that they do in the building. The elevators are small and inadequate to the task of serving the 13 floors- unlucky number- and the building was not designed for the current security situation. It is sleek and gleams and looks like a modern office building. It has its own tunnel to the Metro. Whic is closed now, for security reasons..

I was smoking a cigarette out on the sidewalk wondering at my fate and a foreign woman, young and dark, walked up to me and asked what the address was on the building. She was pointing to the State Department Credit Union, but I wondered if this was part of a target surveillance operation. Since the women started doing the bombings overseas I am no longer as guileless as I once was. Could someone be planning to bomb the credit union? There is no sign to tell who the occupant of the building is, but I don’t suppose it can be much of a secret to the neighborhood that the uniforms come and go.

I wondered if I should report the woman and did not know to whom I would do it.

I hung on through the afternoon, reading technical documents and taking careful notes. Some of the Government people came and asked me questions on how to do a budget review. I answered them with a sure-fire strategy and then cleaned my little cubical desk off and walked across the street to the Metro. It had been so much easier when the tunnel was still open. I went two stops west and walked ot my office building and returned some calls and organized the papers strewn across my desk there.

It was after six when I got clear, finally, and headed for the Country Club. The Club is a queer place. It was borne out of the efforts of the old Military, whose Officer class was a sort of club. The pay was so low that many did it only for the hobby value. Billy Mitchell, the roague Army officer who thought that Air Power was the way of the future once observed that if you could not entertain, you should not come to Washington. In the old days, just after the First War, most of the military people belonged to the Bethesda Country Club. Nice place, but increasingly the military folks felt that their salaries could not afford it. So a group of bright young officers, icluding Nimitz and Ike, decided they needed their own club.

They bought a hilltop in Arlington in a largely African-American neighborhood. There was a dilapidated house in the middle of if, and the monds of one of the old dirt fortresses that ringed the high ground around the capital during the Civil War. The Club, a private conern, was a creature of the age in which it was founded. Army Corps of Engineers labor crews built the first fairways as “training” exercies, and one of the few good deals of being assigned to the military in Washington was born. To join one of the clubs the lobbyists use it would cost thirty or forty grand to get in the door, much less the monthly dues. When I joined in 1990, the Army-Navy Country Club (I am still happy they chose not to change the name when the Air Force was born) it cost me $1,500 initiation fees and they let me pay over four months. The monthly fees, less food, of course, were around $200. It pinched, on Lieutenant Commander’s pay, but my ex, God love her, thought it was important to belong.

Tonight was the night of the annual General Membership Meeting, when we would elect the new members of the Board of Governors, the BOG. This meeting did not promise to be the contentious affair it has been in past years. There are no major capital improvement projects on the docket. Maybe that is why the turnout seemed light. In previous years there seemed to be a fight for the very soul of the institution. But not this year. The primary object for voting was the list of the candidates for the Board. There would be free beer and sandwiches when the meeting was over.

No free beer during the meeting, the Board isn’t that stupid.

Outside there was a knot of old men handing out a flyer on plain white paper. The accusations of bad governance were in boldface. They accused the current BOG of raising dues by 75% and were still angry about Project Five, the initiative that fixed the spare nine holes at the Main club and gave us the new clubhouse at the second course we own out in the County. I did the math and knew that it was not possible for the dues to have gone up that much- a third perhaps- and that was over the fifteen years I have been a member. So I wrote the old men off as nutcases with too much time on their hands.

I listened to the Old Business and the minutes of last year and my eyelids began to grow heavy. I saw the Chief of Staff of the Agency where I now sit in a cubical. I leaned forward to him and whispered to him if he would turn in my ballot. I don’t know if he recognized me, but I am fairly confident that my vote will be heard.

Then I rose and walked out of the meeting and drove back to my building. I had just hit the door, hadn’t even poured something to drink and my ex was on the phone, complaining about money. I remembered she hadn’t paid me her half of the club dues in months.

So maybe I won’t be going to the annual meeting next year.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra