Excerpted from a manuscript that needs a lot of work.
I had a job in journalism in the DC area when I was a kid. I delivered
The Washington Post in my neighborhood in Arlington. We lived in a decent part, nothing fancy. The longest-held POW in Vietnam owned one of the homes on my route. There were other military notables as I recall, but the stench of the water treatment plant at the foot of the hill kept everyone equal and everything in perspective. The welfare homes of Glebe Road were not a quarter mile from our house. My paper route included run-down apartments and immaculate neo-Colonial homes, the
Post delivered pre-dawn. I was required to have the paper on the porch, not the driveway, and the headline was always to face the front door. Bad news on the doorstep, easily read without even opening the screen or storm door.
I was glad to see Northern Virginia hadn’t changed at all. The plebeians and patricians still live side by side. The boundaries that separate them are hard for the outsider to perceive, and in that region, the boundaries are ever shifting. What was a working class neighborhood twenty years ago might be a pricey and gentrified area today. And what was THE place to live in another decade might be a crumbling ghetto now. And the Glebe Road bungalows I remembered were no longer subsidized by the government.
But on this weekend we were with the private school crowd, where acceptance is a gift granted not just to the smartest and wealthiest, but to those who can demonstrate that they play well with others. In this world, children attend Cotillion classes and take tennis lessons. They belong to country clubs on the Potomac and have weekend homes in the country. To even join a church, where the women wear fur and the men’s manicured hands fold in prayer, one must find sponsorship from a current member in order to be accepted.
At the Sunday Cotillion, the country club ballroom was a sea of the well maintained. If a woman in that room was over fifty, she did not look it; or rather, she was doing her best not to look it. The botoxed and the mini-lifted were in attendance, the dyed, the implanted and the capped, pictures of perfection, American Royalty. Even their husbands, with the smooth, shiny skin of the day spa, the hands that work only in paper, keyboards, racquetball and golf, the teeth that glow beyond white to almost blue, were Royal. They made small talk well, and they were gracious in receiving the Floridians. They had been to Florida, yes, or they have a house in Florida, or Florida was damned cold when they were there last February. They too had taken Manners classes when they were children and they knew to look a person in the eye and introduce themselves with a firm handshake, to express, or at least feign, interest.
In my sister’s refined neighborhood, the boundaries of which were indistinguishable to me, the homes were originally built for railroad workers. My sister’s home was at one time a brothel; back when brothels were the kind of benefit that existed for the railroad workers, likely built by the railroad magnates to keep their men in good spirits. This neighborhood, where drunken men once caroused on mud streets covered in horse dung, is now a highly sought-after area with the residents jealously protecting its newfound image of a charming and quaint village, so much so that the village has hung banners on the main street that read “Where Main Street Still Exists.” As an advertiser and marketer, I thought that phrase needed work. Clearly the firm responsible did not offer enough alternatives; either that or the client chose the most clumsy and obvious phrase, the very one the firm hoped they wouldn’t choose.
Google Street View
But the Main Street they pretend existed never really did. The residents so protect this imaginary image that the local 7-Eleven, with its carefully altered façade blending with the local architecture so disguising it that I could not find it when searching for my morning cup of coffee, is considered to be an eyesore. They do not get their coffee there and why would they when a privately owned coffee shoppe with an extra “p” and “e” is just down the road and sells a far finer brew at a price that doesn’t matter to them?
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Father mows the tiny yard in his dirty dungarees, kicking the stray cats that have once again deposited their cat shit in the sandbox he made for Dick, Jane and Sally from railroad ties he hauled up from the train yard. Officer Mike, the brutish Irish cop who sometimes arrests Father, strolls by twirling his nightstick. He stops and looks at Father and asks Father if he’s keeping his nose clean. Father says something like, “About as clean as your wife’s knickers, ya Mick bastard.” Officer Mike points his nightstick at Father and says, “I’m watching you, Jones!” Mother, said Jane, what does Keep Your Nose Clean mean? It means don’t get so drunk on your visit to the brothel that you end up breaking windows and hurting people in fights. And Jane asks, Mother, what is a Brothel? Mother tells Jane, It is a place where men go to play cards and drink beer. Then why do you cry when Father says he is going to the Brothel, Mother? Because I don’t like it when he gets into fights and breaks windows, says Mother. I See, said Jane, Maybe Someday the Brothel will be a different place. Yes, Mother smiles, Maybe Someday.
Labels: Glebe Road, northern Virginia, Radio Free Babylon, times new romans, Washington DC
In China, I’ve been told; the state evaluators show up to the preschools one morning and put all the kids on a balance beam or a pommel horse. Those who do well at these things are taken away to Olympic camp, the rest are allowed to move on to kindergarten, where they will again be sifted for those who show giftedness toward factory management. Around third grade, the evaluators come back, looking for kids with a propensity to tell on other kids. These, of course, become spies. This process continues until their last year of high school, when the few students who haven’t been identified as workers, government drones or Olympians are allowed to move on to college, where they will become engineers, analysts, and chemists for the government. Their old classmates who got pulled in preschool are by this time Olympic coaches at the government’s Olympic camps. 
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