Nixon was easy.\u00a0 We could go anywhere, really, but James had been talking about the 600 at Watergate South, which wasn\u2019t really the sort of place where we belonged\u2026but they had a full bar.\u00a0 We somehow managed to get in and get a drink, but it was clear that our time was limited, so it was just quick shots of bourbon for the three of us, giggling at the black tie and gown folks, talking in funny voices to the waiter and manager as we were herded back outside, and then onto the street with a shot of Nixon warming our bellies.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cPlease, god, can we skip Ford?\u201d David asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cThirty-eight!\u201d\u00a0 James shouted.\u00a0 \u201cBut not really elected, so I suppose so.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHow about we head back to my apartment?\u201d I suggested.\u00a0 \u201cStop spending money \u2013\u201c<\/p>\n
\u201cMy money.\u201d James hissed.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd take it easy for a few presidents.\u00a0 Then we can go to Chef Theo\u2019s for Obama.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIs that a negro bar?\u201d David asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is, actually.\u00a0 Black people and my aunt.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy\u2019s your aunt go there?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTo eat grilled cheese sandwiches and drink Heineken.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTwenty-two ounce Heineken freakout!\u201d James burbled.<\/p>\n
\u201cPrecisely.\u201d\u00a0 And I woke up in a cab careening through Rock Creek Park, carving our way out of DC and back into the suburbs.\u00a0 This time, hopefully, for good.\u00a0 If I could get feeling back into my arm, I was considering knocking James out and tying him down.\u00a0 End the night, end the pain.<\/p>\n
At my apartment, James shouldered past me and made right for the Bar Compass.\u00a0 He spun the wheel.\u00a0 \u201cYou have mixings to back this thing up?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMostly\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
The Bar Compass was a gag gift from my teetotaler grandmother,\u00a0 and always a nice conversation item.\u00a0 It was a hefty piece of metal with a list of common cocktails along the edge and a wheel that you spun to reveal the required ingredients.\u00a0 James now spun that inner wheel with his thumbs.<\/p>\n
\u201cTrying to decide?\u201d David asked, staring down at the thing as if mesmerized.<\/p>\n
\u201cSpirits.\u201d\u00a0 James muttered.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes\u2026?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe spirits are deciding!\u201d<\/p>\n
David glanced around.\u00a0 \u201cAre the spirits talking to you now, James?\u201d<\/p>\n
James had stopped.\u00a0 He handed the Bar Compass to me with pleading eyes.\u00a0 Kamikazi.<\/p>\n
\u201cThirty-nine, right?\u00a0 Jimmy Carter.\u201d<\/p>\n
David looked from the Compass to James, \u201cWhat\u2019s the connection?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cCarter was Navy.\u201d<\/p>\n
I shook my head, \u201cBut not during World War II.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe name for the drink came during the Occupation, which was when Carter was in the Navy.\u201d<\/p>\n
David narrowed his eyes, \u201cI don\u2019t know\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
James grabbed the Compass and started spinning again.\u00a0 Really, his choices were limited, and I was starting to get dizzy, so I took it back and said, \u201cKamikaze it is!\u00a0 Divine Wind.\u201d\u00a0 I put a hand on David\u2019s shoulder and led him into the kitchen, \u201cYou know how it got that name?\u00a0 Get me three little glasses from above the sink.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe typhoon that sunk the Mongol fleet.\u201d<\/p>\n
I released his shoulder, \u201cHow\u2019d you know that?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI went to school.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOh.\u00a0 Okay.\u201d\u00a0 I pulled out vodka and triple sec and glanced suspiciously at David until he drifted back into the living room with James.<\/p>\n
Later, after what felt like a typhoon, James was sprawled on the floor with my mom\u2019s old records, and David was perched on a stool reading Doctor Who Magazine<\/em> #126, the Patrick Troughton tribute issue from July 1987.\u00a0 I was talking about the attempted Mongol invasion of Japan when it hit me \u2013 the night was quickly slipping away from us.\u00a0 Dangerous to get this close and not finish.<\/p>\n \u201cHold it!\u201d I shouted, handing the Bar Compass down to James.\u00a0 \u201cWe\u2019re at one of the big ones.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNumber forty.\u201d David muttered, flipping through several pages.<\/p>\n \u201cRay gun.\u201d James hissed from the floor, his thumbs spinning the wheel again.\u00a0 \u201cTequila Sunrise.\u201d<\/p>\n David put down the magazine.\u00a0 \u201cOh\u2026 Perfect.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOn it.\u201d\u00a0 I skipped girlishly into the kitchen and started whipping together the three drinks.<\/p>\n We drank in silence, in honor of the great Reagan, though I was thinking about American Psycho<\/em> much of the time.\u00a0 We were losing steam fast, but only a few more to go.\u00a0 And, thankfully, all in the secure womb of my apartment.<\/p>\n The Bar Compass spirits said the first Bush was worth a few Black Russians, and those were vaguely unpleasant to suck down after a long day and night of drinking.\u00a0 Clinton was also fairly easy \u2013 Sex on the Beach.\u00a0 Though David argued for a Hairy Naval, citing the oral sex POV.\u00a0 Which counts as an uncomfortable conversation, so we ignored him.\u00a0 Forty-Three is our own beloved Baby Bush, and the drink that best sums up the last eight years was a Long Island Iced Tea, and the lunatic fringe drunken terror that always accompanies it.\u00a0 Then it came.<\/p>\n \u201cForty-four.\u201d\u00a0 James put down the Bar Compass with an air of relief.\u00a0 \u201cI hate this thing,\u201d he muttered, tapping a finger against the screw in the center.<\/p>\n \u201cTime for the negro bar,\u201d David was putting on his coat.<\/p>\n Chef Theo\u2019s.\u00a0 A low rent strip mall restaurant, with poor service and low quality food.\u00a0 Tucked away in the shifty, pick-pocketing, ATM-mugging terror of the White Oak Shopping Center and serving, notably, my aunt, with rubbery grilled cheese sandwiches, box wine, and plastic tablecloths covered in cigarette burns even though there\u2019s been a smoking ban for the better part of a decade.\u00a0 The hostess is a deaf mongoloid, the waitress looks like she\u2019s washed up on the beach after a hurricane hit the worst trailer park on Atlantis, the cook occasionally bursts through the rear doors waving a spatula and screaming in Italian, and the clientele all sullenly sit in dark corners, sipping beers and sizing up anybody who dares to walk in.\u00a0 It\u2019s hardly the \u2018negro bar\u2019 that David wanted.\u00a0 I probably should have taken him to Takoma Station for that experience.\u00a0 But we were in no condition to drive, and I wasn\u2019t able to face cabs, busses, or even the short ride across the DC border.\u00a0 White Oak was a healthy black neighborhood, so David could soak up plenty of atmosphere.<\/p>\n How better to celebrate our great savior, the wondrous Obama, but to mingle with our black brothers and sisters on the streets of White Oak, and at the rickety tables in Chef Theo\u2019s?\u00a0 I think that was the thinking\u2026 Frankly, I was out of my mind.<\/p>\n And that was the first warning bell that should have made me insist we stay in the apartment, barricaded behind closed doors.\u00a0 The realization that insanity had set in.\u00a0 The second warning bell was when James, David, and I set out across fields and through the corridors and lobbies of the vast sea of apartment complexes encircling the White Oak Shopping Center, pretending we were commandos.<\/p>\n The third and final alarm bell was when James drunkenly ordered the ‘Sunday Beef Roast Special’ to a chorus of muttering and horrified gasps after we got a table at Chef Theo\u2019s.\u00a0 When the waitress took the order back to the kitchen, we all heard the chef start screaming.<\/p>\n James grinned with childlike malevolence.<\/p>\n Another president, another American Era, but everything still felt lost, hopeless, foolish.\u00a0 The unrelenting tide of poorly educated, desperate Americans continued to wear us down.\u00a0 The dreams of change and renewal were already shifting to fears of scandal and treachery.\u00a0 No matter what, all this, number forty-four, is just a different side of the same coin.\u00a0 Now we get blind, feverish, polarized liberals ranting and screaming at us instead of the blind, feverish, polarized conservatives.<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t mind the latter.\u00a0 You knew where they were coming from.\u00a0 They were hateful bigots, the voice of Middle America.\u00a0 Overalls and rattlesnake dancing, country twangs and pickups, gas guzzling clowns with tight suits and narrow views.\u00a0 We\u2019ve known them these last eight years, and we\u2019ve rolled our eyes because they\u2019ve been so predictable, cut from the same cloth, saying the same things we\u2019ve been hearing since Gingrich and Clinton\u2019s shameful second term.\u00a0 Hell, since Goldwater\u2026McCarthy\u2026 Since forever.<\/p>\n But these liberals.\u00a0 These people who have turned Obama into a Messiah.\u00a0 It\u2019s harder to get a handle on them.\u00a0 The urban wage slaves, the armchair liberals, the silver spoon socialists.\u00a0 They\u2019re a dangerous sort.\u00a0 Seething in their sad apartments, bleating painfully on internet social networking sites, creating and hanging out in exclusive clubs, writing in their third grade scrawl to any free daily that\u2019ll listen, attempting to round up their friends to protest the scandalous behavior du jour, reading their idiot life-affirming books, and trying to cut through the Zoloft and pain killers and lithium to make out even the simplest of headlines and draw wild assumptions.<\/p>\n I voted Obama, but I would have been happy with McCain.\u00a0 Better the devil you know.\u00a0 And America is the Devil\u2019s land.\u00a0 We do the Devil\u2019s work, and take secret joy in it.\u00a0 Whatever stops the voices, right?\u00a0 I worry when we put idealists in power, because they don\u2019t really have a sense of history.\u00a0 They don\u2019t understand who or what we all are.<\/p>\n It took 40 minutes for the roast to arrive, at which time James asked for it to go.\u00a0 The waitress seethed as she stomped away.\u00a0 We hadn\u2019t spoken for that entire time, the three of us pounding beer after beer, staring at patterns.\u00a0 Tablecloth, floor tiles, ceilings, the backs of our hands.\u00a0 A celebration turned maudlin.\u00a0 Whether black or white, young or old, the old boy network still survived, we were all still trapped in the city, and even if one of us escaped we would just discover that there is no Sanctuary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nixon was easy.\u00a0 We could go anywhere, really, but James had been talking about the 600 at Watergate South, which wasn\u2019t really the sort of place where we belonged\u2026but they had a full bar.\u00a0 We somehow managed to get in …<\/p>\n