When I was 4, my parents brought me and my at-the-time-only sister Sarah to New York. My memories of the time consist, as early memories often do, of large swathes of color and sound ripped whole-cloth from any meaningful context. Clanking up a twisting staircase made of green metal, until my parents decided to turn us around and fight our way back down through a crowd of jostling elbows and angry looks -- years later my dad told me that that was an unsuccessful attempt to climb to the top of the statue of liberty. Burying my face into my mom's neck while some horrible, growling black shape loomed over me -- top of the empire state building, some guy dressed in a gorilla suit. I remember the brown and orange chevron pattern of carpet, the bang and clatter of a pinball machine with an Indian head staring our from the scoreboard, my grandfather yelling at me for something -- the hotel in Philadelphia where they were holding a Wright family reunion.
When I was 12 I rode the London Underground with my dad. When I was 15 I got what turned out to be a life-altering blowjob from the daughter of my homestay in Osaka. When I was 17 I stumbled home drunk from a pub in Tromso, Norway, at 2 in the morning with the sun still beating down on my head. At 19, I played with the Trojan Marching Band at the opening of the American exhibit at the World Expo in Lisbon, and at 24 I was ordering beer phonetically at an inzakaya in a small fishing village in Japan. Bii-ru o hi-to-tsu ku-da-sai.
But until last year, those disjointed flashes of something too unmoored to be properly called memories were the sum total of my experience of the east coast. It took me nearly a quarter of a century to make it further east than Chicago.
Yet even now that I've lived in New York for a few weeks shy of a year, I haven't strayed too far beyond the five boroughs -- but no, even that's too generous, seeing that I only went to Staten Island for one day to shoot in an abandoned insane asylum (seriously) and the only two times I've been to the Bronx were because I'd passed out on the subway. So, Manhattan then. Brooklyn, parts of Queens. Went upstate once. Played golf with my dad in Connecticut. Couple of trips to drop off people or equipment in Jersey City. That's it.
And so it was with a sense of wonder at how little of my own country I've seen that I came to the Washington, DC, the Big Deece itself. Weeks of sifting through the crazed dregs of New York for roommates who seemed least inclined to cut my throat in my sleep (a process that brought me to the brink honest-to-christ homelessness) -- and that, combined with a worrying bout of semi-employment, left me with no choice but to get the fuck out of there for a couple of days.
So, DC. Staying in a Hilton and suckling at the teat of my girlfriend's meager expense account, nursing something akin to guilt at the idea eating withered strips of bacon and overcooked eggs on a nonprofit organization's dime. Fuck it, writers gots to eat too. So while she busies herself with the problems of the world, my days are free to tool around this strange patchwork city -- a slice of San Francisco here, a sliver of Chicago there, a strip of West Hollywood there -- all the while with an uneasy sense of deja vu scraping at my neck like a loose collar. Walking around Washington is like walking around in an amnesiac daze, snapshots of a familiar world that no longer fits together the way it's supposed to. Throw then the mindfuck of the capitol itself onto the pile of smoldering almost-familiarity, the smooth marble domes, the carved columns and snickering phallic symbolism of the capitol seen nearly every day of our lives on TV, in movies, our money. But then there it is, not framed by banners and curlicues and green text proclaiming our nation's trust in god, but sharing space with some shitty post-modern architectural disaster of an office building, the unmistakable round emblem of a Starbucks, the chattering street vendors selling five-dollar pretzels.
Still, there's a certain giddy thrill at strolling past the halls of power, at seeing firsthand the smooth alabaster walls and knowing that this -- this -- is where we all get fucked. Camera comes out, gawk along with the other tourists. At one point I framed up the Treasury Department and held out a $20 bill in front of the lens before a sighing, visibly annoyed man in a Brooks Brothers suit scoffed that, god, everyone does that. Minutes later a cop on a bike wheeled up to me and demanded to see my ID and my camera, adding under his breath that he was required by law to inform me I was under no legal obligation to show him either one. I gave him my license, but withheld my camera, so he barked at me not to move while he muttered something into his walkie talkie. After a couple of minutes he tells me I won't be detained, then pointed to the trees and told me I was being watched by a lot of very paranoid people. The experience was unsettling, to put it mildly.
I split the rest of the day between various other Washington landmarks. Frowning Lincoln, brow creased nobly in reflection of how awesome it is to be the most slave-freeingest of all the presidents, past the brackish reflecting pool and long lawns that only deepen the sense of this city's country-clubbishness, past the base of the Washington Monyment and a squabble of guffawing fourth graders, and finally to the Smithsonian, holding a retrospective on the work of Jim Henson, where the whole day was given a bizarre coda by the sight of a roomful of adults singing along to a video of the theme song to Fraggle Rock. Dance your cares away. Clap-clap.
And perhaps it's fitting that this image is somehow the most poignant, that this somehow captures the spirit of this town more than any picture or postcard or history book can. Washington is a city of a threatening familiarity too subtle for words, but too deep and omnipresent to go unremarked, because for all of it's dressed-up stateliness, for all of it's marble columns and elegant fountains and monuments to its own greatness, this city is just fucking weird.
Clap-clap, indeed.
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