Take Me Out

It was the most glorious of days, a little cool, perhaps, but the tips of the trees are pastel tinged, and you don’t have a hair on your ass if the top of your car is not down.

I got the morning chores done, the dry cleaners, and gas (gulp!) and the commissary run for the week.

I saw Jack in the lobby and we chatted for a while. He used to play ball, and he knows everything about what is going on here, even about the lady that built the place, Allie Freed. Jack must have been a handsome devil forty years ago, when ground was broken for the palace just north of Route 50.

Big Pink was Allie’s  legacy, her magnum opus. She chose the pale rose of the brick personally, and had tons of it fired to her specifications. She stipulated the impressive thickness of the concrete walls. This building is built tough, and it reflects the grand dame’s personality.

Hard woman, she was, and always had the limo waiting outside the English-style office building on the little strip mall up from the Buckingham Theater.

The office building does mostly immigration law, now, and I get my hair cut downstairs from Ben, who is from Guatemala . The Theater is now a post office. But Allie would still recognize the place, not much changed except the people, from the day President Roosevelt came to see it.

Jack and I watched a parade of people coming through the lobby. They buzzed the door and walked across the gleaming marble floor to the desk and announced they were going to the open house in 504. I dragged Jack up there, to show him. I made an offer on the place a few weeks ago, before it came on the market.

I gulped hard and wrote a contract with the advice of my Persian Realtor. I offered $400,000 I didn’t have for the unit. It was seventy grand more than the last two bedroom had sold for a month ago.

The opposing Realtor laughed. He was a tall fellow of Norwegian heritage. I suspect there is more than a bit of the ruthless Viking in him. The Information Packet, stacked neatly on the dining table, informed me that this was the most undervalued property in North Arlington, and that “escalator clauses” on the bids would be welcomed, and that prospective purchasers would have to waive “appraisal-related terms.”

My Persian had told me he was going to put 504 on the market for $410,000, and was hoping for a ten percent up-bid. I gulped. That meant they were expecting to clear $450,000 on the place.

It seemed I was never going to find a place to live that was more than 520 square feet, and I would grow old, buried in the chaos of curios from far-off lands.

The rising panic of that vision led, by turns, through a tour conducted by my Persian guide of other buildings and other two-bedroom units in other neighborhoods in the half-million dollar range with no garage parking. I was beginning to hyperventilate. I didn’t want to leave Big Pink.

For Christ’s sake, I have been on the list for a parking space in the garage for over a year!

So, when Dorothy on the fourth floor put her place on the market two weekends ago, I jumped on it. I schemed with the Persian, and we pounced with a commanding bid of $375,000, twenty-five more than she was asking.

We won. That is the good news and the bad news. I won, now I have to come up with the money. But I am serene about that. Because if you are in the game, you win. You win by doing nothing except by helping to stoke the fires of the market fever.

I grabbed Jack and told him what they were asking for 504, and told him he had to see it. Jack has a one-bedroom, and remembers when the Speaker of the House lived here, and knocked a wall out of a two-bedroom unit so he could expand into the efficiency next door. The Speaker had the view of the city, and three bedrooms.

That was Big Pink living.

Jack mentioned that Allie’s sister had a thing for him, and would hug him on the street when he wasn’t up a pole or in a basement installing something.

Jack had quite a view from the poles in all the backyards, too. Don’t think Desperate Housewives is a new thing, after all. He had a unique view of everything, he said with a wink. He had all the keys, too, back in the day, and as a telephone installer, he still has a lot of them. He says he still has keys for all the basement doors in the Buckingham district, if you know what I mean.

The Realtor who was showing 504 didn’t know that I knew all about him. The owner was not there, and would have known I was a fraud. I showed Jack all the upgrades and wonderful additions in the unit, and the splendid view of Ballston’s towers over the budding trees from the dining room window.

I spoke loudly, so the other people wandering around would hear what a splendid bargain this place was, since if it goes for what they want, this unit will be the comp that mine will be valued against.

“ Great Building !” I said to one, whose voice seemed to be from England . “Swell people! Hand picked brick, and thick walls and floors!”

Jack marveled at it as we left. He is not going to be buying anything else. He is in his last place. He looked at me with his pale blue eyes, a little rheumy, but there is still a sparkle to them.

“Yeah, but you ain’t goin no where from here.” His voice had the angular softness of Inner Harbor Baltimore, or Bal’more. “Ya see, It’s all goin’ up. You run as hard as you want and you stay in the same place.”

I had to agree with him. But there are a lot of people here who cannot even run to stay even, falling behind. I said goodbye to Jack, and went back to the unit at poolside to put the groceries away. Thank God, I thought. In town for a whole week. Travel after that, gone all week, to Beantown and to Michigan before I get back, and I have the awful feeling that I am gone the next day for the Coast.

I’m not sure I will have time to pack.

But tuck that thought away for now. I turned on the Opera from the Met in New York . I think it was Mozart’s The Magic Flute, not that I know much about it. I like the opera on Saturday afternoons. It is a good time to sleep, and drift in someone else’s aria for a change.

I don’t know why Texaco stopped sponsoring it after fifty years. It was the only time I have ever had a kind thought about those avaricious bastards.

The Magic Flute was doing something clever, something to do with puppets, I think. The birds sang and I dreamed of having a real bed, with a box spring and everything.

I woke to the sound of my son banging on the door. He had come to take me out to the ballgame.

I think it is criminal to play baseball at night on the weekend, when we should have spent the afternoon under the blue skies. But we have been without baseball here for three decades, and you take what they give you. We purchased the mini-season ticket package of twenty games.

I blinked the sleep from my eyes as we knocked back a beer on the patio. Big Frank from the Steelworkers came up the sidewalk by the pool, looking for Joe, the President of the National, who lives next door, or Tony, the senior lobbyist who lives across from me. I told him Tony was around somewhere. “I haven’t seen Joe in a couple weeks, though,” I said. “But did Tony buy that new black ‘Vette in the lot?”

“Yeah,” growled Frank. “He’s having another life crisis or sumptin.”

My son glanced at me with apprehension, since I am Tony’s age. I made a dismissive wave to him as Frank walked away. 

We drove to the Metro at Ballston and parked what used to be my car in the structure. The train was packed with transplanted Virginians, hundreds of them, all streaming into the capital to work for the government or lobby it. Young lawyers and economists with their Washington Nationals caps on backwards, red for guys and the women favoring pink, with the “W” in flowing script like a fat worm.

We stood, packed in the middle of the car, for the ride down the Orange Line, through Clarendon and Rosslyn and into the District, under the Federal Triangle and Smithsonian, and around the Capitol and finally past Potomac Avenue and to the Armory stop.

There were thousands flowing up from the platform, and out onto the boulevard. Barnum and Bailey’s Ringling Brothers Circus was at the DC Armory, and the two crowds mingled for what was the Greatest Show on Earth on one side, and a general circus on the other in the middle of the stadium with the big swooping roof.

On opening day, grand old RFK Stadium had been filled to capacity, 45,596 fans. All the movers and shakers were there, including the President.

When we mounted the ramps, we found the tickets were good, perched right over the first base line, and in range of the cannon that fires tightly rolled t-shirts into the crowd. The opening day paint was still on the grass, and some of the commentators said the enthusiasm wouldn’t last. But RFK was pretty much full, and the field that once hosted the Redskins gridiron has been configured in a comfy sort of way.

We were pretty raucous in the upper deck, in a nice way. We booed the Diamondbacks and cheered the home team, a novelty. There were enough people in the stands to carry off The Wave. The upper decks could go all the way around, though the expensive seats down below stop at the yellow foul poles.

Nats pitcher John Patterson (1-1) threw seven shutout innings, and the hometown boys from Montreal broke open a tight game by sending 11 men to the plate and scoring seven runs in the seventh. We had two beers, Miller Genuine Draft, a soft pretzel and a hot dog apiece. The dog could have been hotter, but they will improve. Maybe they didn’t think there would be that many of us here tonight. I have confidence in them.

On the field, under the brilliant lights, a fellow I haven’t met yet named Vinnie Castilla went 3-3 for the Nationals, with four runs-batted-in. After two home games, he has yet to make an out. He is a pistol.

It was a great show, and we sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” at the seventh inning stretch. I was comforted that they have stopped singing “ America the Beautiful,” which they did for a while after 9/11.

That is one tradition I can do without.

My son and I have nineteen more games to go this season, spread all the way to September and all across the National League. We left after an unsettling D-Backs rally in the top of the eighth in which they put together three quick runs. I didn’t think they could catch us, though, and we were able to actually sit down in the  Metro going home.

It was the longest train I have ever seen on the tracks, maybe ten cars in length. At Ballston, we scaled the escalators and walked across the sky-bridges to the parking structure. My son dropped me at Big Pink well past my bedtime.

I checked the final before I climbed back into the Murphy Bed for the trip to Neverland.

Nationals 9, Diamondbacks 3. Not bad for the new kids. First place in the NL Eastern Division. But it is early, of course, and there is a long way to go to September. I yawned and turned off the lights and let the darkness take me out.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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