Three Days (not by Jane's Addiction)

I.

I go to the office on Friday, though I am not quite ready for it. It's my first appearance there since the email has gone out to all staff, since the "unpleasantness," we might say. My only reason is really to show my face and to have people see me in a relatively good mood, but I know from the minute I wake up that it's a bad idea. My timing is off, I am hoarse from yelling too much at the basketball game the night before, and my allergies are acting up in terrible ways.

Getting dressed is an ordeal. I didn't get the invite until it was relayed to me at the end of the previous night, and I can't decide on what is appropriate attire. I don't want too formal or too casual, and I struggle even to make it out the door. Then, every time I make it a few feet out the door, I remember something I've forgotten to bring or something I've forgotten to do before leaving, so that I'm fifteen minutes later than I wanted to be by the time I get going.

My hopes for a quiet entry are dashed when I bump into two smokers outside, who see me parking in the visitor's spot - "hey there, mr. visitor!" I run upstairs but quickly realize that I don't know where I'm supposed to go - where is my base of operations? Certainly not the office I used to occupy. Instead, I try to see as many people as I can before I face the conference room where most of the staff are enjoying a free breakfast courtesy of Mr. Omelette. I have reassuring encounters before making my way down there, but none of the nervousness dissipates. I just have to make it through a few minutes of a breakfast before I head back upstairs for a quick meeting, and I am so glad, for once, to have a meeting to look forward to.

When I finally do make it into the conference room, I have all these flashbacks to the high school cafeteria. I haven't shaved in well over a week, but I've hardly managed to grow a beard. I just look like shit, is all, having convinced myself that I ought not to shave before coming in to work for some weird reason (I figure it's something I can make jokes about, I tell myself it's a move I make to align myself with Deshawn Stevenson, and I also feel like I've made it a week and I might as well try to go for two weeks without shaving, if I can, to find out for sure whether I can in fact grow a beard or not.)

I agonize over where to sit, whom to avoid, whom to favor. My appetite is completely gone at this point. A couple of good friends make a point of coming over near me - something for which I'm still grateful in the same way that I am forever grateful to Catherine McPherson for inviting me to be her lab partner in chemistry on my first day of high school in the United States. Months later, as I began to appreciate the social hierarchy of my high school, I realized what she had done, and it was only a few years ago, at our ten year reunion, that I finally had the chance to thank her for it. I hereby thank my seatmates this past Friday - hopefully you know who you are. And I did thank some of the people there for making the situation as non-awkward as posisble, but as someone says later, "Um, that was totally awkward." Fair enough.

The meeting and my final rounds go smoothly, reassuringly so. I plan to maybe make it back for an all-staff meeting, but I am told this is not legally advisable. So instead I go home, clean the kitchen, go for a short run, and actually run the oven through a complete self-clean cycle. I meet Ms. Abstract Citizen halfway back on her walk from work, and she is bubbling over with good news, good stories. We have a nice evening until one of us notices a commotion outside - it looks like a gaggle of good samaritans has stopped someone from breaking into a car, though one of the car's windows is smashed. The police are called and we follow the story from our perch. Coffeemaker is set to autobrew at 8 a.m.; we drowse off, in anticipation of the last photography class.

II.

Saturday morning and we are off and running. The car's stereo stops working somewhere past Fessenden on Reno. We are not sure why, but it has gone silent. We are the first to arrive, and our class is somewhat diminished. Mother-and-daughter don't show, among others. We compare shots from last week's field trip, and we find surprising shots from unexpected people, and blah shots from people who we expected to take only great shots. We are out by 12:30, and stop by the Bethesda Bar Crawl to see some familiar faces before heading home.

That evening, we decide to make it a night of guilty pleasures, which usually begins with a couple of burgers and an order of fries from Five Guys. As we are leaving, we notice a suspicious character slowly eyeing up the cars on our street. Harkening back to the incident the night before, we decide to call the police. Our white-guilt conversation is short: are we profiling someone because of skin color? No, we are concerned about his behavior. He is slowly walking down the street, looking into the backseats of cars, checking to see whether doors are unlocked, and apparently stashing something for later. The 911 call is smooth, and they promise to send a car over to check it out. They call back shortly thereafter to say that the individual who had spent the past 45 minutes walking up and down our block was nowhere to be seen once the police arrived.

By the time we are ready to go to bed, the temperature still hasn't dropped to a comfortable point. It is hot outside, and people are acting strangely. In the song "9th and Hennepin," Tom Waits says, "Everyone is behaving like dogs." So, again, we spend a good 45 minutes watching life on Columbia Road at 11 p.m. on a Saturday night. Every time a car tries to force its way into a spot that is way too small, I wait for the car to make contact with the cars on either side - if the contact is severe, I yell out, "Hey, that's my car!" I love doing that. An SUV in particular - maroonish - kisses another car's bumper, and then simply revs its engine a little more, hoping that the additional two feet of space it needs will be yielded by a little more gas. After I yell, the driver zips off, and then parks illegally at the end of the block. A few minutes later, we see parking police issuing the car a ticket. Sweet justice.

It's time for bed. Fan set in the window, we bemoan our lack of control over the central heat/air conditioning in our building. With the windows open - even with a fan running - the agitation of Columbia Road gets amplified into our bedroom. Buses shift into third gear and then abruptly slam on the brakes at the foot of our bed; drunk people laugh and stumble out of our closets, make phone calls on our pillows; and from inside our dresser drawers, we hear cars honking, temporarily drowning out whatever bass-driven song of choice emanates from their open windows. Spring time gives people a kind of fever, and I both love and hate it. I am buzzing as I try to fall asleep, thinking about basketball once again, thinking about my phone call to the police, trying to stay alert for the sound of broken glass.

III.

I hear a car revving its engine. I hear the car braking. I hear scraping. I hear "FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU!" a few times over (like background singers, David Berman would say, those curses come in threes.) Then I hear a distinctive sound: muffled shouts, dull thuds. "FUCKING N------!" from someone who sounds Latin American. "FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU" from someone who sounds like the target of the previous epithet. A few female cries, and again, the dull thuds of fists or something harder colliding with flesh. This all takes place over about ten seconds. I open our window, run for the phone, dial 911. 12 hours ago, I had never intentionally dialed 911. Now I have called twice in the space of 9 hours. It is 4 a.m., and already birds are chirpring. I was telling Ms. Abstract Citizen just the other day that birds are dumb, they have no idea when the sun is actually going to rise. The dispatcher finishes my sentence - "fight at..." "19th and Columbia?"

A few minutes later, sirens and police cars converge. I hear voices amplified by those megaphone-type things on cruisers. It sounds as though order has been restored. I am buzzing once again. Sunday is officially shot.

When we come to, it is almost time to start getting ready for the game. I try to have a good feeling about the game, but I don't. I know it will be an awful few hours, but I talk myself into feeling optimistic. R, my beer guy, insists on making the beers free for the second game in a row. He says he is pouring smaller cups and that I shouldn't worry about it, though I tip him accordingly. The Wizards insist on living and dying by the three even when it's not working, even when they are clearly better served by going inside and drawing contact. By the time Gilbert misses the final shot and the loss is official, we are completely deflated.

On the bus, riding back, I have flashes of the plane ride after France beat Brasil in 2006. Then too I was so disgusted with myself and my team that I did not even feel ashamed to be wearing a jersey. I thought about it for a second, concluded that losers ought to wear appropriate gear, and left it at that.

All I can mutter, every few minutes, is "Those motherfuckers." I am not sure if I am referring to the Wizards, the Cavs, or the louder-than-expected Cavs fans who were in the building. "Witnesses" to a shitty marketing campaign. My best trash talk during the game is, "I hope your state loses more manufacturing jobs!" It's petty and unfair, and I instantly regret it, but I was at wit's end and I will at least own up to having said it.

The rest of the day is a gray rain mess. I realize that I never decided whether I am partial to a particular spelling of the word - "grey" or "gray." By now, I should have a preference, but I just don't and I can't summon the energy.

We eat chili, Ms. Citizen bakes cookies. I am angry at myself in a teen-angsty kind of way - angry that I let myself believe that a win today was possible, that I fought against my better judgment (which is to assume that God's ongoing hatred of me means that any team I support ought to lose precisely when it means the most - which would be today.) Ms. Citizen is ready to throw all the bums out, and I'm almost angry enough to agree.

But mostly I am tired of feeling like nothing is ever decisevely lost: it just sort of trickles away until you have to get up and leave, without even having been given the satisfaction of a resounding defeat. Winning may be impermanent, but losing is hardly even a reality - losing is more like spending several hours in a state of denial until, at some point, you just sort of open your eyes and realize that the possibility of a victory is gone.

No one is told that they have failed at their ambitions, even the stupid ones - like growing a beard. One day you simply look at all of it put together and say to yourself, "I cannot grow a beard. I ought to shave all of it off." It's not like you look in the mirror, see something on your face, recognize it as a non-beard, and call it a day; it's more like you look in the mirror day after day and fail to see a beard. Eventually you realize that the non-beard will never become a beard. The difference sounds subtle, but it is also soul-crushing. It is like saying to yourself, "We have lost, and now it's time to go home, and if we don't have the common sense to recognize that, no one will even care."

Tomorrow is Monday. I am not sure what for, exactly, but I am eager.