I Am NOT the Beastmaster

All Policing is Local

King Suckerman and Hard Revolution, by George Pelecanos

Sometimes I get the feeling that George Pelecanos writes his novels with an ADC map book close at hand.  In addition to writing and producing The Wire--he got all the gut-wrenching penultimate episodes--he's the author of sixteen crime novels set in and around Washington, DC.  And his geography is impeccable; you could navigate the greater DC metropolitan area using nothing but Pelecanos books.

That's not always to their credit.  This passage from King Suckerman crystallized the doubts that nagged at me throughout the novel:

They drove north on Wisconsin Avenue, out of the city.  Vivian bent forward to light a cigarette in the wind, and when it had burned down to the filter she lit another off the first.  She didn't try to argue or make conversation with Karras.  Wisconsin Avenue became Rockville Pike.

"Go right there," said Vivian, and Karras turned east onto Randolph Road.

They got over to Viers Mill and made another turn, entering a neighborhood of smallish houses originally offered to World War II veterans on the GI Bill.  Vivian was in the place in which she had been raised.

Anybody can follow that route to Vivian's neighborhood; I could even tell you what it looks like today.  But until Pelecanos feeds us that one thin line about the smallish houses and the GI Bill, I have absolutely no idea what it looked like in 1976 or who lived there, or what sets it apart from the novel's other locations that are equally defined by their street names and little else.  Pelecanos is renowned for writing about the DC you don't see much of in popular culture, the one that extends far beyond Pennsylvania Avenue and Capitol Hill, but King Suckerman pursues its geographic precision at the expense of the human detail that could bring that city to life.

That's a shame, because the book has great promise as prose blaxploitation set at blaxploitation's height.  (Pelecanos lavishes enough attention to the city's vanished movie houses that I had to get this book for Christmas.)  He gives us a wonderful description of an invented movie that reads like a surreal cross between Superfly and Bertolt Brecht, and the finale captures something of the freewheeling anarchy of DC on a Fourth of July, but otherwise King Suckerman comes across as less than the sum of its meticulously itemized cinematic, musical, and cartographic influences.

Hard Revolution, written several years later, does a much better job of setting the place without relying on street names.  The book still has a couple of ADC passages ("They walked the east side of Georgia's 6200 block...") but Pelecanos spends more time evoking an even more alien city, DC in early April, 1968, just before and just after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

I may not be the most reliable judge here.  When Pelecanos describes a chop shop in a lonely stretch of cinderblock and gravel in P.G. County, back when the county was home to white bikers instead of upscale black professionals--that's my neighborhood, and I can still see a few garages that might have stood alongside (if not inspired) Pelecanos's locale.  When he records a rally on the steps of Douglass Hall at Howard University--I teach classes there, and I can picture the students filling The Yard.  When he locates Derek Strange's apartment building "on the northeast corner of 13th and Clifton, just above Cardozo High School"--I have been in that building, and I've seen the million-dollar view that keeps Strange there.  (On the Fourth of July, no less, lining my experience up with King Suckerman, whose climax unfolds just on the other side of Meridian Hill Park.)  I can't evaluate the Pelecanos novels with any objectivity because I sit right in the bullseye for their ideal audience.  I can't walk away from DC any more easily than Strange can give up his view.

But the local color serves a purpose in Hard Revolution that it was missing in King Suckerman, possibly because Suckerman was about small-time criminals and Revolution is about police.  Pelecanos cops don't solve crimes through their ability to spot seemingly innocuous details, deduce improbable chains of events, or read a man's life story from the soil tracked on his shoe.  They don't solve crimes through any special knack for getting knocked on the head while shuttling from social caste to social caste either, although you might expect that would be closer to Pelecanos's generic turf.  His detectives, police or private, solve crimes because they are all DC locals who can draw on lifelong professional and social networks to identify and locate their suspects.  Detective work is a matter of diligently checking in with contacts, or making new ones, a social rather than intellectual trade.  In Hard Revolution, a robbery is foiled because a liquor-store employee happens to know one of DC's first black police officers through neighborhood ties; he also, completely by chance, knows Strange's father through the local American Legion post.  (This raises a question you could build another novel around--what the hell was going on in a black American Legion post in 1950s DC?--but that ground is left untrodden.)  In Pelecanos's world all policing is local, and you can't solve or punish a crime if you're not fully at home in the city where it's committed.

The novel has other virtues.  Even non-DC lifers should be able to appreciate Hard Revolution's urgent blending of personal and public history as it chronicles the days (shockingly few) between LBJ's declaration that he would not run for re-election and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.  The riots that followed King's assassination were the most significant event to befall DC in the last sixty or seventy years; some neighborhoods still have yet to recover.  Pelecanos smartly intercuts the national and local tragedies with the more personal but equally devastating traumas that befall Derek Strange and his family.  The sprawling, citywide nature of the riots puts his penchant for geographic minutiae to good use, and he chronicles the spreading violence with admirable clarity.  He also identifies those parties most responsible for the local breakdown without passing easy judgment on them; he simply tracks their actions and lets their incompetence or posturing or inability to foresee the consequences speak for themselves.  (Stokely Carmichael does not come off well, nor does the Metropolitan Police Department.  I do wish he showed us the confrontation between Walter Washington and J. Edgar Hoover that he alludes to here--that would have been fantastic.)

Hard Revolution is far from perfect--it has a long, aimless prologue and a formulaic salt-and-pepper cop friendship, neither of which go anywhere--but it becomes a lot more than just another ADC crime novel.  By writing the story of the 1968 riots, Pelecanos has recorded the terrible birth of the modern DC.

This Weekend

Click here to view a larger version of this photo.

You can download an audio recording of Thursday's panel courtesy of Mike Rhode.

Fast Casual Noir

I think they're following me.

One week after their cartoon essay on the dickification of Adams Morgan, the writers of the Washington City Paper have stepped across the state line to rip College Park, Maryland a new one.  Or to take a crack at the well-worn old one, anyway--it's hardly news to anyone who's gone to the University of Maryland that the town of College Park is, with a few notable exceptions, a cultural wasteland.

At some point during my Music City Captivity the DC area real estate boom hit College Park.  A downtown (and by "downtown" I mean two blocks and one intersection) that had always been spotted with abandoned storefronts suddenly sprouted a half-dozen or more new stores between visits home--and every one of them was a fast casual restaraunt.  College Park is a great place to buy a six-dollar burrito, and that's about it.

Unless you're looking to riot after a basketball game.  Here's the best observation in the article:

Violence like this hasn't cropped up on campus or near it since the antiwar demonstrations of the '70s.  Now it happens because Duke sucks.

And the second best, the City Paper plan for riot abatement:

Students are obviously bored.  Try this: Make College Park worth not destroying.

Understand the second and you will understand College Park.  Understand the first and you will be on the trail of something much larger and more dangerous to public life.

As with the Adams Morgan piece, though, the City Paper makes College Park sound like Dodge City because it allows for moodier journalism.  And it's pretty damned easy to make a town look desolate when your photographer takes pictures of such distinctive local features as... a pay phone!  And... clouds!  Maybe the real problem is that College Park doesn't even offer anything interesting for wannabe noir journalists to feel disaffected from.

But I know that isn't true.  Real noir is portable: it can follow you anywhere.

By sheer coincidence, I happened to read the City Paper article right after a trip to College Park and the university that impressed upon me the essential non-noirishness of the place.  I was on the outlands of campus, walking to the gym to buy an alumni membership (Maryland will never be rid of me) when I remembered a similar day almost exactly three years ago.  Early autumn, sunny, another desolate corner of another campus--my former employers.   I had just encountered one of those logistical-bureaucratic breakdowns that roll right off you when you love your job and lodge under the skin when you don't.  I don't remember why, but at that moment it seemed like the university couldn't perform any of the basic functions you'd expect an institution of higher education to be able to do.  In my aggravated and probably overactive imagination the whole place was a scam perpetrated on students and staff alike, a long con that only called itself a university.

And that was when it hit me, caught in the midday glare of the sun belt:  This is noir.  You don't need gangsters and D.A.s and femmes fatales.  You don't even need shadows or neon or stockings with seams.  All you need, as Dave Fiore said so long ago, is existential estrangement, and maybe a corrupt society to be estranged from.

Like every other student past or present, I used to bitch about the bureaucracy at the University of Maryland, before I learned the difference between bureaucracies that deliver and bureaucracies that don't.  On Thursday afternoon I was thrilled to be back in the hands of one that delivers.  I was headed for my old gym, walking down an empty path with a wooded creek to one side and a titanic, completely deserted parking garage on the other.

And that was when it hit me:  This is science fiction.  Colossal high-modernist structures built by heuristic bureaucracies that have outlasted their makers.  Radically discontinuous microworlds butting against one another.  A solitary human figure in the interface, marking the differences between past and present as he wakes up from his slumber.  Alienation, without the estrangement.  Without the corruption and despair that makes for true noir and not the urban-weekly-goes-slumming-in-the-suburbs variety.

Ah, but it's all in the context.  I could walk a hundred yards and find the gym, crowded with students and exactly as I remembered it (equally science fictional in its own panoptic way, but that's another story).  I could go to downtown College Park at closing time and find all the homophobic alcoholics training for the day when they work up the nerve to go down to Adams Morgan and piss me off there.  I could ignore the comic store I've been going to since high school, the bookstore that beats anything they have in certain cities of half a million people, and see only the fast casual places that have grown inside the record stores and coffee houses I used to love.

Yeah, College Park is a wasteland.  But it's my wasteland.

Harmacy 2

Looks like somebody else is as unimpressed by the aging frat boys and bachelorettes invading Adams Morgan as I was.  From the Washington City Paper, artist Greg Houston brings you a portfolio of illustrations from DC's hottest nightspot in decline.

The funny thing is, to view these pictures and read the accompanying text you'd get the impression that Adams Morgan is Yoshiwara, and maybe it's as close as DC comes.  But when I went there in August I was disoriented by how tame the place felt as the slummers finally overwhelmed the neighborhood.

I don't think these two observations are mutually exclusive.  The slummers bring their own slum with them, a moveable feast of spilled beers and emptied stomachs and bumped shoulders and drunken fights.  Nothing "Funky, ethnic, bohemian" about them or the trouble they cause--that's just shit they wouldn't leave on their own doorstep.  All of which is to say that as Adams Morgan becomes rowdier it also becomes less of a break from the city around it, just another Georgetown filled with the very assholes it was supposed to be an escape from.

But the underlying neighborhood is still there.  Most of my recent visits have been off-peak; one Sunday night it was deserted, prompting some good comedy about Adams Morgan after the rapture.  (On reflection we were dead wrong.  Adams Morgan would be more crowded after the rapture.)  The Pharmacy, I'm happy to report, is as solid as ever.  On my last trip there wasn't a polo shirt in sight.  But then, we had the good sense to get out long before closing.

Sign of the times.  The last time I was down in Adams Morgan--in the middle of a placid post-drizzle afternoon--I saw an advertisement that perfectly captures this city in its local and national obsessions.  Bear in mind that the skyrocketing real estate market here has finally started to cool, if not collapse.

The poster was for a real estate agent looking to attract sellers eager to dump their houses.  The caption read

WHAT'S YOUR EXIT STRATEGY?

Harmacy

They're invading my favorite bar.

I managed to pay sporadic visits to the finest drinking establishment in DC and therefore the world during my Nashville exile, probably around once a year.  Other bars flared brightly only to burn out; even the mighty Common Share went down in a tide of slumming legislative assistants, although that will happen when you have the balls to sell Guinness at two bucks a glass.  But this place remained in its effortless indie rock-meets-Baltic expatriate groove.  It was one of the last places in the city where I still ran into friends completely by chance.  Only the jukebox (best one in town) would tell you it wasn't 1999.

We stopped in last night--a little on the early side, I admit--to find the place filled with polo-shirted post-collegiate preppies.  They're still prepping for something, I guess.  Eighties clothing was bad enough the first time around that the resurgence of the placket is a sure sign of a culture that has run out of ideas.  Funny thing is, the culture industry was trying to sell an eighties nostalgia kick when I left--anyone remember "That 80s Show"? or want to?--but it wasn't taking.  I guess the last couple of years have been rough enough to wear down even the hardiest immune systems; shit, with all the war, recession, and state-sanctioned torture those polo shirts almost look like they belong.   But to see them spilling into the Pharmacy fucking killed me.

I should have seen it coming; we spotted two different bachelorette parties roaming down 18th Street and I'm sure there were more inside the clubs.  Christy turned to me after the second one and said you knew a place was ruined once the bridezillas started moving in.  This is the ugly face of gentrification, and it wears a veil.  Now it's only a matter of time before some tipsy policy wonk is demanding that I suck Life Savers off a beer-stained T-shirt that's touched the lips of every other motherfucker in Adams Morgan.

I'm glad to see the neighborhood is doing so well that the Georgetown crowd thinks it's safe--I always found it plenty safe--but the last thing DC needs is another Georgetown.  This city has too much fucking money, and that money likes to transform every neighborhood into the same crass habitation for itself.

An aside to the three people in the world who will appreciate this:  now I know what Morgan Adams' last case must be.

Everything else from the tap to the jukebox to the rest of the crowd was as good as ever, although there was this bizarre video hunting game that offered the white-knuckled, hyperrealistic experience of standing in an open field and blowing away herds of animals that stood calmly about ten feet away.  The polo shirts loved it.

Blue Line

Last October:

They are from here but they're not from here.  Three teenaged girls, white, just crossing the line over zoftig in semidismantled semiformal uniforms:  pre-tied bowties dangling unclasped around open collars, that sort of thing.  I would immediately peg them as waiters just getting off duty from some gala event but none of them seems to have the slightest clue where they're going.  They're ambling through the humid sump of the Blue Line platform at L'Enfant Plaza--it's mid-autumn but this is still Washington, and all the heat and water vapor are held in by the stone cradle that suspends the Green and Yellow Lines overhead.  They're looking for Metro Center and they have no idea how close they are and they're broadcasting their confusion for everyone to hear in the exhausted silence of eleven-thirty.  They look and act like don't belong, like nobody's told them how to get home from whatever unimportant ceremony they have just been honored at/paid for and now they're good and lost in a strange city, but their voices tell me they are more at home here than they know.

"Blew line.  Is this the blew line?"  In that flat Chesapeake drone.  This city is their inheritance, too, and this may be the first night they have ever navigated it alone.  Maybe they'll retreat from it later to become the sort of exurbanites who refuse even to drive through the city at night, while visions of crack-fiends dance through their heads, but they are here now, so young and so brazenly ignorant that I know they will get home just fine because even more than the bold, fortune favors the foolish.  If they blunder about like this often enough then soon the whole city will be theirs.  They will graduate from the childishly simple Metro system to the highways and then surface streets, and when asked in later years they will discard the names of their suburban incubators and identify their home simply as DC.

I didn't cross that line until comparatively late, when a friend moved into the middle of downtown and my late-night ferries forced a firsthand awareness of the city's geography that I'd always avoided; I'd been too dependent on the Metro to shepherd me around.  Will Self wrote a wonderful essay about the myopia of the lifelong urbanite (it was called "The Big Dome" when I read it in Harper's, although I've seen it published under the fantastically dull title of "Self's London") where he talks about the multicolored spaghetti strands of the Underground map as a projection of "the child's unintegrated vision" of the city. The subway divorces all destinations from one another, mystifying any awareness of the whole.

As it happened this moment of unspoken connection with those three girls, "Nausicaa" without the naughty bits, was the second transportation-related epiphany of the evening.  The first one occurred close to an hour earlier while I was waiting on the platform back at National Airport.  My train was a long time coming but I didn't mind the delay; luminous architectural icons floated just across the Potomac, filling half my field of vision.  I realized that I didn't love my home in spite of all its infrastructural shortcomings but, in some sense, because of them--that, living in Nashville, I had come to miss just how damn difficult it could be to get across town.  This is what makes me one of Will Self's urban provincials:  it's not that the view across the Potomac makes the insane commutes worthwhile, it's that the commutes make the view worthwhile as well.  But then, anything worth having is worth working for.

Tomorrow I'm heading back to Nashville, where everywhere is twenty minutes from everywhere else but there's no reason to go there.  Too harsh?  Probably.  It's a perfectly liveable city--if you have a car--but I notice that after nearly three years of living there I haven't written about it once, except to grouse about how it suffers by comparison to more interesting, more aggravating places.

But this is not the real problem.  The real problem, hardly Nashville's fault, is that it will always lose out to the place where a snatch of overheard conversation can trigger a rush of memory and kinship, where the arc of my life can be fit into a child's query about the Blue Line.

Red Line/Green Line

So, what happened to May?

Over the last two years I've settled into a winning pattern for the end of the academic year:  get my grading done as quickly as possible and get the hell out of Nashville.  A week or so in Washington, DC is enough to flush all memories of the year right out of my system and ensure a productive summer.

This summer has been a little more productive than most.  Christy and I came up to DC after the semester ended to repair and sell the house we held onto when we moved down to Nashville; we're still here now.  A month and then some of home repair doesn't leave a lot of time for blogging, especially since I haven't bought any comics, thus depriving this blog of most of what passes for its content.

Well, that's not entirely true:  there were a couple of issues of 52, a couple of summer blockbusters, the last book of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, Eddie Campbell's The Fate of the Artist, and a great David B. story in a volume of Mome that otherwise offers a depressing index of the monotony of most indie comics.  (What grim vigilantes and dead girlfriends in refrigerators are to mainstream American comics, emotionally stunted loners and foulmouthed funny-animal characters flopping ironically out of panel are to independent  ones.)  I wasn't hurting for lack of material, just a lack of energy.  The first week I even wrote up a little post to explain why I wouldn't be posting for a while; but what's the point of blogging about why you can't be bothered to update your blog?

There's nothing like stepping away from blogging for a few weeks to make you realize how unnecessary it all is.  If you don't genuinely care about the material, you're probably not going to say anything that a dozen other irate and/or delighted fanboys haven't already said.  (This probably explains why my blogging hiatus so perfectly matches the delay in Seven Soldiers, almost my last tether to monthly comics.)  The world doesn't need another ambivalent review of X3.

The world probably doesn't need my thoughts on my working vacation, either, but that's what I care about right now.  Not the work or the vacation, actually, but the city that's playing host to both.  I grew up in the DC area, and most of my travel over the last three years has taken me back here for family holidays, friends' weddings, academic conferences, or home improvements.  They hardly qualify as vacations, but somehow they always leave me cleansed and recharged as if I've been visiting a completely new city.

It wasn't until now, on the last of these trips, that I realized I have been.

We usually stay with Christy's parents, who live in a quiet residential neighborhood that's less than ten minutes' walk from an urban shopping district and a Metro station on the Red Line, which runs between affluent Montgomery County, Maryland and affluent Northwest DC.  The house we're working on, the house we used to live in, is a substantially longer walk from a Metro station on the Green Line, which runs from less affluent Prince George's County, Maryland through far less affluent parts of Northwest, parts that aren't nearly as gentrified as the Red Line's Friendship Heights/Cleveland Park/Dupont Circle axis.  Staying over here on the Red Line I can catch a movie at the Uptown, dinner in Dupont Circle, and drinks in Adams Morgan all without opening a car door.  Riding a different line puts me in a different Washington.

Yes, the lines do connect eventually, but the system only has about three transfer points and they're all downtown and getting from PG County to the other side of Rock Creek by train is a royal pain in the ass.  More to the point, while the places I've visited are all places I've been before--many, many times--some important psychic barrier is lowered once you no longer have to drive across the breadth of the city to get to them.  The casual access creates a sense of habitation, belonging, entitlement.  It's the difference between being a bridge-and-tunnel kid (if that label applies when you cross neither bridge nor tunnel) versus an urbanite.

Our trips up here to the land of the Red Line, in other words, have been trips of class tourism:  chances to walk the unguttered streets of diplomats and investment analysts who live in seven-figure homes and enjoy their unfettered access to the city's finest neighborhoods.

Frankly, it's beginning to get a bit much.  The neighborhood is set to open a new stretch of shops that developers are billing as "the Rodeo Drive of the East Coast."  While the rest of the nation staggers through a jobless recovery and a war whose costs we have barely begun to pay, the architects of those failures, and the loyal, toothless opposition, have been doing quite well for themselves.  This is their big opportunity to buy into the kind of conspicuous class stratification rarely seen outside of Manhattan or Westside Los Angeles.  It's not like the money wasn't already piling up when I left--it's just that living somewhere else for a while throws the area's new-gilded-age grandiosity into stark relief.

But the tradeoff is that I get to be an urbanite pedestrian for a few weeks, not an easy thing to do once you move west of the Applachians.  In a better world, the walks and the Metro would be my everyday routine and not a series of increasingly busy vacations, and that's just one reason I'm glad my DC tourism is about to come to an end.