Back to Phase One

Driving through Capitol Hill Sunday night to have dinner with Carole and Carl brought back a flood of memories. DC is the first place outside New York I lived, not counting my junior semester in Madrid. DC gave me much-needed distance from my family and from New York, where I had lived all 23 years of my life. I would have believed in New York as the center of the universe if it hadn't become a hollowed-out, crack-riddled shell of itself in the 1980s. Instead I opted for the smalltown feel of DC, which I highly recommend to anyone who wants an easy place to live, unless you're a Hill staffer or a lawyer.

The apartment I shared with my then boyfriend Jay was a spacious one-bedroom in Southeast, six blocks from the Capitol. Our monthly rent was $460. We lived on the top floor of a three-story townhouse, and within days we knew all of our neighbors. By contrast, I knew no one in Park Slope, which was cold, nasty, and run down and no place for a white boy like me to be.

Just days after the new year in 1986, Jay and I moved all our belongings in a Ryder truck to our new place. I had no job, no money, and no savings. Jay planned to apply to Georgetown Law School. I had already applied to Georgetown graduate school to pursue a master's in Spanish. I wanted to be a translator for the World Bank, and I planned to take Washington by storm. I later found out that Georgetown rejected me.

A month later, nearing the last pennies of my checking account, I got a call from a publishing company I'd interviewed with. They offered me a job as an editorial assistant for less than $15,000 a year. The company was at 716 E Street, and I lived at 717 E Street. I could see into the office from my living room window. No commute. I took the job.

In retrospect, the street we lived on was no better than where we lived in Park Slope. The auto garage across the street had overgrown weeds and questionable business practices, and the cashier's booth at the corner 7-Eleven had bulletproof glass, as did the Popeye's, the liquor store, and the video store. Bums peed almost daily in the alley behind our house, and drug deals were as common as congressional extramarital affairs. Yet, there was something charming about living there during that time.

The worst establishments, though, were the two gay bars on our block. The Bachelors' Mill, on the corner across the street, catered to a largely black gay clientele and was packed to capacity every night. Phase One, which was around the corner from our house and backed up to our alley, was the local lesbian hangout. The red wooden-slatted facade, with no windows to speak of, offered no welcome to the uninitiated. One night while sleeping, Jay and I were awakened by a tremendous crash in the alley. We rushed to the window, thinking someone might have fallen or tried to break a window. In the dim light we could make out two women, each with a bottle in her hand, circling each other like something out of a Pat Benatar video. We looked at each other in horror, then burst out laughing. Two lesbians with broken bottles were fighting in the alley. After we finished laughing, we called the police.

It wasn't the last time we witnessed this behavior. And the Bachelors' Mill was just as rowdy, except that the tussles were usually between drag queens, sending nails, shoes, and hair extensions flying everywhere.

"We're going to a new Belgian restaurant around the corner," Carole told us. Carole and Carl live two blocks from where I used to live. They bought a house there in the mid-1990s, almost 10 years after I fled for Northern Virginia. Although I enjoyed living on Capitol Hill, I wanted to live somewhere safer. If I'd known what it would become, maybe I would have stuck around.

"Holy shit," I said to Luis as we drove down Pennsylvania Avenue near Eastern Market Metro. A Starbuck's sign glistened where the check cashing place used to be. The entire street had been repaved, decorated with faux gaslights, and every storefront looked new. Only a handful of places remained--an old barber shop and the 7-Eleven. We'd eaten a number of times at the gay-friendly Banana Cafe on the corner where I used to live, the former site of the Bachelors' Mill.

The Shakespeare Theatre had taken over a former evangelical ministry, and the Chinese restaurant where I saw a waitress chase a giant rat with a broom is now a cute little cafe.

I felt like Marty McFly as we entered the Belgian restaurant, Belga Cafe. Capitol Video Sales, which is now a few doors down, used to occupy the space. The neighborhood was all so different, so transformed, so alluring. It looked like a movie set. The seediness was gone, obliterated by gentrification, just like Fifth Avenue in Park Slope. There were even signs along the street showing historic sites. I wondered briefly whether I could live in DC again.

During dinner, Carole told us that she'd recently been to a party where the proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage was being discussed. One man was vehemently opposed to the idea of homosexuals marrying. Carole's ears perked up. "Why?" she asked, ready with a defense; she was sure there was nothing the man could say that she couldn't shoot down. "Because," he said, "if you allow homosexuals to marry, then criminals in prison will just start pairing off and want to get married." Carole was floored and speechless. Particularly disturbing is that the man is a lawyer.

The Capitol looked magnificent set against the navy sky. The architecture in DC is spectacular, and culturally there's a lot to do. My friend Tony Greenberg, also a New Yorker, and I used to say that living in DC was like being on permanent vacation. But the things I loved about the city were overshadowed by the reasons why I despised it: provincialism, arrogance, and backstabbing. People who live and work for the government are out for themselves, and they truly have no connection to the real world outside the Beltway.

As we left Belga, a reminder from my past amid all the glitter caught my eye and made me smile: Phase One. It looked exactly the same, still forbidding and closed to outsiders. I imagined that asshole lawyer being taken out back by lesbians, and for a moment, I wished I lived there to watch it from my bedroom window.