Bad people do bad things

My Washington weave

Some scattered impressions from walking around Washington DC for 2 weeks. It’s me doing a bit of “the weave” as defined by Donald Trump:

I do the weave. You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about, like, nine different things that they all come back brilliantly together. And it’s like friends of mine that are like English professors, they say: ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’ But the fake news, you know what they say, ‘He rambled.’ It’s not rambling. What you do is you get off a subject to mention another little tidbit, then you get back on to the subject, and you go through this and you do it for two hours, and you don’t even mispronounce one word.

I will keep my weave down to less than nine different things and try not to mispronounce one word or misspell one either.

Tidbit 1:

It’s early afternoon and I am walking to the metro station near my hotel when suddenly a black man comes at me as if he’s going to accost me, shouting: This is my city, bitch!What I register in the shock of the moment is his appearance: ball cap, white t-shirt, middle-aged, unshaven, unhealthily thin. Also, staggering somewhat. He is glaring at me, my (white, bald, backpack full of stuff, I know where I’m sleeping tonight and where my next meal is coming from) presence offends him deeply. This is my city, bitch! After I’ve had a moment to recover my composure, this is what I think: First, I resent being called a bitch but I tell myself that I shouldn’t take it personally, not the insult or the insinuation. Second, MY city?! He’s got to be kidding – since when? This is the fantasy of a racialized and ghettoized underclass, of those who compensate with verbal rage for a lifetime of being dispossessed, of their city always being someone else’s. Compensate with a sense of community which, since it is based on deprivation and overlaid with addictions and afflictions, is angry and embittered: I have no privilege except the privilege of calling you out as not belonging here. I back away from him and he staggers on, maybe to lash out at someone else (or at himself), while a few moments later an older black man, all gone gray, walks out of the station softly singing a Sam Cooke tune: If you ever change your mind/About leaving, leaving me behind …

Tidbit 2:

I am in the wrong kind of store. I know this immediately because there’s too much stuff on display: cheap electronics of all kinds but mostly cell phones and related paraphernalia, all in plastic packages on shelves and in glass cases that can only be accessed by people behind the counter. In my sort of store, the merchandise is all in the back room; the public area is bright and uncluttered where staff and customers interact as equals who don’t so much buy and sell as ‘problem-solve’.

I’d been on a search for a US sim card to save a few bucks on cell phone roaming charges while I’m staying in DC, but I had no idea where I was going and ended up in a section of town too tawdry to be in any tourist guide. The streets were treeless and mostly what they had on offer was liquor and fast food. Occasionally I’d pass a clothing store with merchandise in the window that looked like it had been there too long to be fashionable and not long enough to be vintage, worn by mannequins that looked distressed by what they had to wear. The sparse sidewalk traffic was made up of a few old folks bent over grocery carts and mothers on cell phones with kids clutching at their coats. Every so often a skateboard would speed by, and I was struck by the fact that the riders, crowned with the usual turned-around ball cap, weren’t boys but men, in their thirties it seemed. Or as I smugly told myself: men who never stopped being boys. Which just added to my feeling of being out of place: no pleasantness was to be had in such a neighborhood. But since this was a rather trivial purchase I was looking to make, I persisted, only to find myself bouncing around from one store to another. The third try brought me to the store that I was now in.

It's busy. There are several customers waiting while the guy behind the counter talks to a pair who I take it to be a mother and daughter. These are working class people, all of color and no doubt all from the neighborhood. And though they wait their turn quietly and politely, I suspect they also do so with the uneasiness that comes with any situation involving money when you’ve never had enough of it. Cell phones are among the worst of such situations because of how bewildering they are. You have to have one – that much you know. On one level you understand that this is for work or to stay in touch with family and friends, but on another level you can’t help feeling that without this gadget, you are a nobody. And nothing is more humiliating than that for someone who, in the grand social scheme of things, already is a nobody. But this thing isn’t like other possessions, say a tv or a car. There is the gadget itself with all its complications: iPhone or android, locked or unlocked, new or used, memory, screen size, 4Gs or 5Gs (whatever that is), and then there’s choosing which plan to get from which so-called ‘provider’ and after that figuring out what all the buttons do and what the hell apps are. You just want to go home and call your sister and not panic every time the thing starts dinging or buzzing and not have to worry that at the end of the month there’ll be this horrendous charge on your credit card bill. But if all that is churning away inside, outwardly the only sign of it on the people in the store is a tightening around the eyes and an almost palpable nervous silence as they stand and wait.

The first thing I notice about the pair at the counter is the hoodie the daughter is wearing: it’s white and the logo on the back reads ESSENTIALS in big print and beneath that FEAR OF GOD in smaller print. Never having seen this before I assumed it was a marker of a religious affiliation. And it is, but of the clothing brand rather than the customer, as I would find out later. The other thing I would find out is that FEAR OF GOD is a luxury brand (Christ stands corrected: You can fear god and serve mammon), so that hoodie didn’t come cheap. Mother and daughter are small, one a little under 5 feet, the other a little over; the mother is in her forties, the kid in her teens. It’s mum who’s doing the talking, though mostly she’s just listening to and nodding at the clerk. The kid is a picture of gawkiness: skinny, unsexy glasses, limp hair, some acne, hunched shoulders and when they leave I notice that she limps. Her mother is buying her a phone and the clerk is guiding them through the labyrinth with a practiced patience. Sometimes the mother gives the kid a hopeful glance but the girl doesn’t raise her head, she just keeps staring at the floor. I’m guessing that this is breaking the mother’s heart a little. The clerk has gotten through the number-crunching stuff (data, texts, unlimited this and that) and now he asks the mother what kind of case she wants, and the choices, so far as I can tell, are plain or fancy. Again there’s a glance at the kid and again no response; fancy says the mum. Then there’s other stuff like ear buds and screen covers, each one another k-ching on some infernal cash register and another little act of quiet maternal desperation. Finally they leave, the mother now probably bereft of her disposable income for several months and the child, possessed of the bounties of both digital and fashion heaven, still staring morosely at her feet.

They didn’t have the type of sim card I needed at this place, the clerk explained that they didn’t do much business with tourists. But he was helpful and directed me to the sort of store where I belonged.

Tidbit 3:

Bad people do bad things. A guy in a Secret Service flack jacket explaining to me why there are no trash cans on any of the streets near the White House. It struck me, standing near the nerve center of the American empire, that there was something profound about this statement, as if I’d come into contact with an oracle.

Helpthehome Helpthehome Helpthehome … The man is old, frail, squatting on the sidewalk in front of a restaurant called Mozart. His utterings have become stuck in an incoherent groove, like a vinyl disc eternally skipping, and so never getting to the next syllable: less less less. Which might be the subtext of his message or else just something so painful he can no longer say it.

Happy Hour is the American Dream mocking itself. Every bar in Washington has one.

Americans came to liberate, not to conquer, to restore freedom and end tyranny. This is an inscription carved into a stone bench at a war memorial across the way from the Washington Monument. And on this bench sits an elderly woman wearing a hijab. It’s as if reality itself is begging to differ.

Tidbit 4:

I ran into J. Alfred Prufrock while I was in Washington. It turns out that he lost his mind and is now homeless. He is camped out on G Street, a faceless front of darkened office buildings. I notice him because of a sudden burst of yelling coming from behind a parked impeccably blue SUV:

What you want now?? … Many fuck yous … The asshole speaks … Get out motherfucker … Help me help me … Fuck you, help yourself loser … Pull down your panties.

His visible possessions are beer cans and a pack of smokes, also a cardboard box that he’s sitting on. In front of him there’s a takeout coffee cup for handouts, but it’s empty. At this time of evening the only traffic is the constant zipping past of cars, there’s nobody out walking around. He’s not entirely uncared for: his clothes aren’t filthy and he has shaved (or been shaved) in the last day or two. But he looks emaciated and his hair, what’s left of it, is a scraggily halo. Prufrock, the patron saint of non-alpha males. The women come and go … help me help me … the women come and go … pull down your panties … the women come and go.

When I try talking to him, he seems to have moments of lucidity. Yes, he did eventually find love, and out of his box he pulls some tattered porn magazines. When he stares at the pictures, there’s a softness that comes over his face, as if he were reliving an old romance. But it’s a passing moment, and now he’s rocking back and forth, and making scowling faces. In short I was afraid … in short … I was afraid. He shakes his coffee cup at me, he wants money. I offer him a couple of singles but he wants more. I ask him if he’ll let me take his picture but this starts him yelling: Many fuck yous! You loser, get lost! I hurry away, with his shouting and howling in my wake … total motherfucking loser! The empty street seems to echo with his noise.

Suddenly a crowd materializes out of nowhere and is crossing the street towards me. It’s a crowd of teenagers, mostly girls with a few boys, and they all seem pretty and blond. There are about thirty of them, in packs of three or four, and trailing them are their adult minders, middle-aged and overweight and not blond, two wearing ties and one in a clerical collar. Some sort of Christian youth group. My guess is that they’re heading for an ice cream parlor I’d seen a few blocks away and this will take them directly past Prufrock. Will he treat them to some trash talk? I turn around to listen but all I hear are these kids. Some are singing a Taylor Swift song: I don’t wanna live forever/ Cause I know I’ll be living in vain; others are laughing and horsing around. They march past him, a file of delighted aliveness, and I can see that he is staring at them in silence as he sits on his box of porn.