A Tale of Two Arches

Fear and Loathing in NYC and Washington DC

“NYC: Washington Square Park at Night is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

There’s a lot of talk about the president’s new Arch, planned to be plopped down on Washington DC, a city that doesn’t want it. Maybe DC deserves the Arch. Nah, that can’t be.

I don’t have a good feeling about the Capital city. I’ve been there twice.

First on my family’s one and only vacation. Mom lobbied and saved her grocery change in jelly jars until she had about two or three hundred bucks for it. My father had agreed to her plan only because he thought she couldn’t save that much. Something always came up. It was oh, 1966 or so. I was twelve, Christine fourteen, Joey fifteen.

Dad was furious the whole trip, like always. Mom tried to make it work, all chirpy and desperate. I stuck close by her, hoping there wouldn’t be a blow-up. Joey, a would-be James Dean type, mostly stayed down in the hotel garage in the car, playing the radio and smoking cigarettes, then rolling down the windows to air the car out. My father fumed and hauled his sullen butt upstairs around ten to at least sleep in the hotel room with us.

Next day, we all went to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Dad, ex-Navy and NYC cop, only wanted to see the Arlington National Cemetery and the Air and Space Museum. It was 104 degrees, a sweltering July day. Chrissy fainted, crashing to the ground in front of the immobile Third Regiment Honor Guard. They don’t react, it’s part of their trip to be inhuman, chiseled from a block of stone. Joey scooped his sister up and carried her to some shade. Mom cried. We drove back to the Bronx that day, cutting the trip short.

Second time, I was with a group of black and Spanish kids from the City University of New York. We were all presenting posters or talks on Capitol Hill. Back then the government funded affirmative action programs for science students. My professor was driving the bus to save the program some dough. Big and black, he had played football while getting his Biochemistry B.S., then gone to Johns Hopkins for the PhD. On his first night as a graduate student, he told me, the white men in the program roughed him up.

Like many Latinas, I was raised shy around men anyway, and this man was beyond imposing. I had never seen anyone say no to him or offer the slightest disrespect. As we cruised around Washington he called out, “If you look to your left, that round building is the Watergate.” The bus was raucous already back up in the Lincoln Tunnel, ten minutes from campus; we had now been driving for five hours and it was mayhem.

No one heard him except me, the unfortunate last-on, stuck sitting beside the professor up front. I leaned forward. “Wow. That one?”

I got a smile from him. “You know, I’ll bet we’re the only ones on the bus who know what happened there,” he said. “You’re a bit older. These kids are too young.” I was five to ten years older than the others. I kicked around a bit, before college. Watched Nixon resign in a bar, in 1972. There was a lot of hooting and hollering and we all got even drunker. The drinking age was 18 in NY back then, but I may have had a fake ID.

It was ’84 when I rode that bus to DC. To my friends, Watergate was about as distant as Appomattox. We were stopped in a traffic circle and all at once there was a cop at the passenger side window, rapping on the glass, ordering the driver out, with a jeer and a gesture. My jaw dropped. I sat there, amazed. The world did that thing where it goes into slow motion, the sounds feel distorted and the sun gets very very bright. I figured that cop was toast and waited for God or my professor to strike him dead.

Instead, he climbed down and stood mutely for a pat-down and a dressing down about nothing at all.

The bus was quiet. A row of young black and brown faces looking out the windows.

After checking his ID, the cop told the professor to climb back in, which he did, grim-faced. He turned to the back of the bus. “Welcome to the South,” he said to his dozen smart-mouthed New Yorkers. “Watch yourselves.”

That night, my friends and I were turned away from three nice hotel bars before we found one that wasn’t inexplicably, considering the empty spots we could plainly see behind the hostess, “All filled up, sorry.” I was surprised. I’m Puerto Rican / Guatemalan / Italian, and just white enough to go anywhere. My friends were not.

Next day, we gave our talks to the 511 congressmen and 24 women, their staffs, and lots of NIH bigwigs. Dr. Fauci spoke to us. He wasn’t an old guy trying to shore up Donald Trump back then. Fauci had brown hair, and a different clueless boss. Reagan hadn’t ever mentioned HIV yet, although the disease was big news in California, his original constituency, in 1981. Ha. After lunch, we toured some monuments and went home.

Our campus in NYC was way uptown, but in my college days I often hung by the Washington Square Arch in Greenwich Village. There were bookstores galore and bars where you could hear Chick Corea or Herbie Hancock. Late one night I left a bookstore poetry reading and headed north to the park. At the southwest corner just outside where the chess tables are, it was dark and deserted. One young black guy in an NYU hoodie, stood on the curb beside me, waiting to cross.

Suddenly, there was a homeless old man I had seen around, always slow and shaky, but running now, out the park, hell for leather, rags flapping behind him. Man, he was moving. A mounted cop emerged from the park, chasing him. The horse went galloping by, tack jingling, the cop standing tall in his stirrups and hollering. We watched the barefoot, pink-soled black man disappear down 6th Avenue toward McDougal St., his pursuer gaining on him. “United States Fucking Cavalry” the hoodie guy said to me. I nodded. “You want a drink?”

“Nah, I’m headed home.”

I crossed into the park. There was lightning and a crack of thunder. The sky opened up and poured down on me. I took shelter under the Washington Square Arch. It’s about 77 feet high. I huddled beneath the arch, a thoroughly drenched girl, waiting for the rain to let up. There were pictures of George Washington in War and Peace, carved into the marble.

No one I knew gave a care for Washington, whose famous false teeth were not wood as I had been taught in grade school, but gold and ivory with real teeth embedded that had been extracted from the mouth of a young Mount Vernon slave, in case you want to know.

And no one I know gives a care for the current lout, his smash-and-grab presidency, or his gilded 250-foot triumphal Arch — not if they’re paying any attention.

I hope to never again see a dignified professional black mensch roughed up for no reason at all. I hope to never see an old man, weary and poor, chased by men on horseback.

I thought things had changed. I thought we were done with all that.

Ah well. Maybe sometime the new arch will shelter some other hybrid mutt of an all-American kid on another dark night.

If it ever does anyone any good at all.