What D.C. Does to an American
is there a traitor inside me?I know I should get back to regular blogging. I was thinking just that when I tried to go to sleep last night. It was an uneasy night. Some ancient nightmare ran through my bones and rattled my guts. I saw feverish, ugly things happening in D.C.: ghosts heckling men in suits, think tanks erupting in purple flames, my friends calling out my name but I couldn't help them. Awful things. Then a light grew in the middle of it, blotting out that vision and and a child's voice said "Get out!" My alarm clock woke me and I found a paper, slightly torn, and on the edges, wet. It had my handwriting on it, but not my current handwriting. More like the script the nuns taught my class in Sacred Heart in Bloomfield, New Jersey. Yes, in red ink in my childhood imitation of the Palmer method was this:
I want to drink cold sarsaparilla from a glass bottle and cheer my favorite third baseman. I want to read Edith Wharton’s jazz-age novels, and dance salsa at Cuba Libre in the city of brotherly love. I want to pretend I can see the rock shores of the Aran islands from a small beach town in New Jersey then eat a grotesquely large slice of pizza and throw a frisbee underneath the next day’s sunrise. On Friday I want to escape from this imperial city, from the bureaucrats and bloodless public philosophers, the empire-builders, the card-issuers and policy geeks, and I want to drive the backroads south and west all night and try on cowboy hats at truck stops, and dance with a pretty girl - on the edge of a wheat field under the Tennessee starlights, (she follows my lead by standing on my shoes)– to get drunk and yell my throat sore at the moon, then make it back in time for work on Monday. I want to shuck this business casual wardrobe, get in the ring and take a frozen jab to my eye– and remind myself that if Norman Mailer could box on Friday nights into his sixties I can sure as hell sock this brute in his ugly WASP chin. I want to laugh with the guys from my neighborhood as we walk the Brooklyn bridge. I want to drink sangrias and flirt over a table on the sidewalks of the East Village, and hear a country singer coo a song of heartbreak then kick over the mic stand in a low lit club on the Upper West Side. I want a sweet girl to use my grandmother’s recipe for blueberry muffins on a Sunday afternoon. I want to silently thank God for all that is good and then pull her to the couch. I want her to be close, to shake and sputter and I want the breath in her laughter on my neck.
It is probably a sign. I need to pay my taxes and turn this paper and myself over to Homeland Security for screening.
Michael Brendan Dougherty
in Personal Essays
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Do it right away or I will steal this.
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