Secret Histories

[Begin Page 63]

When I was twenty-two, I moved out of my parents' house in the Maryland suburbs and down into Washington, D.C. I was fresh out of art school with a hundred dollars in the bank, an entirely useless degree in drawing and painting, no job and no place to live. It was 1982, well past the tail end of radical hippiedom in DC but long before gentrification, and most of the city was affordable for people like me, and it wasn't as if I was moving into unknown territory. Rick, a guy I knew from art school, had moved in with a bunch of his pothead friends, who lived on the east side of Rock Creek Park, in a group house near 16th Street. Some people he knew had a room to rent, and he invited me to meet them at a party in the offices of Steamin' Reams Press.

Steamin' Reams was an offset press machine in the basement of an Asian grocery store in the Adams Morgan neighborhood; it was the sole publisher of The Secret History of the Seventies, a seven-hundred-page indictment of Nixon, lavishly illustrated with color cartoons. I guess at the party we were supposed to buy copies, which were stacked on folding chairs, but I don't remember anyone buying anything. The basement was crowded, dark and noisy and smelled of printer's ink. Instead of focusing on the politics of the day, Rick led me over to Rebecca, my future landlady, who handed me a pair of tweezers so I could smoke the roach-end of her joint. She was pudgy and fluffy-haired; she introduced me to her husband, Doug, who was frighteningly thin and wore a red bandana.

"They live on Florida Avenue," Rick said in my ear, loud enough to be heard over the third reprise of "London Calling." "At the bottom of Adams Morgan. You know where that is?"

I remember nodding with enthusiasm, even though I had no clear idea.

"Jessie," Rebecca said, as though she was trying really hard to remember my name. "Jessie. You're looking for a place? We've got an attic. It's a nice attic. We live on Florida. You could live in the attic."

"Sounds great!" I said and sucked the last of the smoking roach through my teeth.

I went to look the place over the next day. It was late October, when there was nothing remotely Floridian about DC. The street was trashy, and the house was right next door to an obviously abandoned three-story apartment building. Bicycle wheels hung in the crooked little tree out front. Doug showed me the back of the house, where a wooden fire escape ran up the back to my own private entrance. We trudged up the stairs in the damp, chilly afternoon, and at the top Doug turned his skinny body in a theatrical motion and extended his arm to indicate the wilds of Rock Creek Park, which claimed the entire neighborhood of Adams Morgan as its easternmost boundary. To the west, the park ran for a couple of miles, stopped to make room for the National Zoo and then became the stately backyards of the mansions on Connecticut Avenue.

I stood at the top of the stairs in the nascent winter drizzle and said to Doug, "Do you know your neighbors?" which seemed like a very wise question for me to ask.

"Oh, sure," Doug said.

I paid my fifty bucks for the month and lugged my stuff in that night, even though the attic ceiling was so low I couldn't stand up straight and it was clear that the shower was going to leak all over the floor. The kitchen was a just a tiny fridge and a hotplate, and as fall turned into winter I discovered that there was barely any heat. I was cold all the time, but I was out on my own, and in the mornings...