2002-06-16 - 4:37 a.m.
The first notable activity of Friday was a test on artifact identification, in which I correctly answered that Colbot was added to ceramics to make them appear whiter. The last was a club off Dupont Circle called Colbot.
It rained or poured or drizzled through the entire day, while remaining as steaming hot as Florida. On Tuesday, with no rain, we were carrying buckets on dirt in 90-degree temperatures. With the weather dreary, we didn’t do any excavations, but we did take an already-scheduled field trip to an excavation of the “Lost Towns of Anne Arundel County.”
Since the associate director handled the directions, we got lost after clearing Annapolis’s peninsula and wandered around the western shore of the Chesapeake in search of a road that doesn’t exist. We were still in the SUV usually taken for such adventures, and again listening to U2, The Joshua Tree. We passed the U.S. Naval Academy’s office golf course. “Bullet the Blue Sky” is playing:
And I can see those fighter planes
And I can see those fighter planes
Across the mud huts where the children sleep
Through the alleys of a quiet city street
You take the staircase to the first floor
Turn the key and slowly unlock the door
As a man breathes into a saxophone
And through the walls you hear the city groan
Outside is America
Outside is America
Across the field you see the sky ripped open
See the rain through a gaping wound
Pounding on the women and children
Who run
Into the arms
Of America
We would never have found the site if the associate director hadn’t figured out where his bad directions took us, and then driven there and told us the site was actually over further. There, with a drizzling mist, we saw a full-fledged archaeological dig, with archaeologists in ponchos sifting mud. “We’re out here in this weather,” said the Anne Arundel County Archaeologist, a small woman with freckles and long auburn hair tied back, “because we don’t have time. The owner of the property is building his house, and we’ve reached the salvage point.”
It was previously explained that on the enormous property, he was told, according to the Director of Archaeology in Annapolis, “’You know, if you build your house here, you’ll miss the archaeological site.’ But he was quite firm that for four centuries everyone had been right here, and that’s where he’s going to build his house.” Someone had asked him, they said, how big the house was going to be, and he just stretched his arms to encompass the entire site.
The site, to describe it briefly, had been occupied from the earliest period of colonization. The people who built the first structure came over as indentured servants, and when they got a hold of it they first put up a rudimentary structure. The buildings got bigger, and were made out of brick, and then in the fifth generation a family member inherited it and engaged in all sorts of activity “ruinous to his inheritance,” according to court records and other accounts. The site was occupied after that, but that’s all I remember.
The rain picked up, and while we received a lecture under a grove of trees the hard-core salvagers had to put tarps over their pits to protect them. We left and ate at McDonald’s, which only the upper-class high schooler and I objected to (although I had the tact not to say anything) before returning to Annapolis. We stood outside the Archaeology Lab there, in only a light mist, when Mark Leone came walking up. “You’re not getting the day off?” he asked.
After we got back inside, the staff had a meeting in a small back room and the students got to washing artifacts. After they got out, I had to ask Leone about this project that he had come up with and I had gotten involved with through the director of Archaeology in Annapolis. It takes about 50 fifth-grade black children in a program for kids from “the projects of Annapolis” (that’s what the director of the program calls it, Leone said which is a bit of a stretch and not used pejoratively) and will take then to the William Paca garden and give them Leone’s spheal on naturalizing ideology.
‘How is he going to bring that presentation down to the fifth-grade level?” someone asked when Leone first mentioned it. Now it’s my job, and along with the befuddled director of AA (from this point onward I will call Archaeology in Annapolis) to do it.
So that day Leone took me into the Garden, and described how I’m going to put down sheets of black plastic to recreate the 18th-century lines of perspective. “Take notes at every step,” Leone told me. If it’s successful, then it may be incorporated into the garden itself. “And then you publish it.”
I went back to the lab and Leone went back to College Park, and then I had to go back to the tedious task of washing artifacts. At the end of the day, I mailed a postcard to Maria, one with a clear view of the church and statehouse towers on the baroque street plan. The statehouse was iconified into a logo on the back of the postcard, and so I wrote on it “Leone’s Panopticon.”
When we got back to College Park, Heather and Ryan invited me to do something with them, but I declined. Previously, I’d made arrangements to possibly meet someone I’d met on the Internet in D.C., Dupont Circle. That didn’t pan out, and I had to spend even more time in AOL chat rooms, which are such lovely places, in order to find someone else to meet.
I should add, at this point, that these were not ordinary chat rooms, but rather, the ubiquitous “m4m” rooms, in this case of D.C. The rest of this should speak for itself.
I didn’t set out until about 10 p.m. In order to get to Dupont without passing through the ghetto, it was necessary to take the beltway around. Doing so, I listened to an altrock station that was doing a “blocks” weekend. Apparently Eminem qualifies as altrock these days, and “The Real Slim Shady” was playing. I have a fondness for Eminem, and listened to this song intensively the summer after my first year, when I was in Sarasota and had nothing to so, and had taken apart the lyrics: The creation of a fictional character as the narrator and the invitation of the listener to participate vicariously in his exploits. Ah, I understand his power.
Then his latest came on, “White America.” It was fine up until:
“That’s all it took, and they were instantly hooked right in, and they connected with me too because I look like them /
That’s why they put my lyrics up under a microscope, searchin’ with a fine tooth comb…
It was a little disturbing to have myself implicated in the song, and to have the fervor with which I listened then attributed with racial implications. But it continued:
“So to the parents of America
I am the derringer aimed at little Erica, to attack her character
The ringleader of this circus of worthless pawns
Set to lead the march right up to the steps of Congress
And piss on the lawns of the White House
and replace it with a Parental Advisory sticker
To spit liquor in the face in this democracy of hypocrisy
Fuck you Ms. Cheney!
Fuck you Tipper Gore!
Fuck you with the freest of speech this divided states of embarrassment will allow me to have,
Fuck you!
That such an anti-American triad could play on the radio, and achieve incredible popularity, in this time of national McCarthyism heartened but also disturbed me. There’s no constructive message attached to this—it’s just a rant. Could there have been? Or not?
After that, the radio station played a block of Foo Fighters, which was much more laid-back. I got off the beltway and headed inward on Connecticut Avenue. The converging lines of streetlights and circles with radiating avenues, evoked the lines of sight and Baroque street plan of Annapolis. The Marxist understanding of their meaning replayed in my head as I watched the lights shift and direct me along the circles and avenues. I drove inward.
Managing my way into Dupont Circle, I somehow found parking on the street (which would be attributed later to the foul weather that day). I went into the bar that I was supposed to meet this guy at, JR’s. “Do you need to see my ID?” I asked the guy at the door. He looked at me and declined.
The bar was, of course, all male. Television screens were positioned throughout, playing scenes from Queer as Folk and, in the time I was there, a video from Cher. I found the guy, Marc. He was not the trash you would expect from the internet—28, blond, tall, and well dressed. He’d struck up a conversation with another guy, of Asian decent and shorter and stocky, or built.
We were talking, and Marc said that he’d just moved to D.C. for a job. Later he mentioned, “We have beer in the fridge at work,” Marc said. Ha, I said, where do you work? “The Senate office building.”
Marc said he’s always known he was gay but that various issues prevented him from pursuing it, such as going to a gay bar or on a date and fearing someone from work would see you. I told him that I felt about the same way, that I’d gone through various permutations but that since coming to D.C. and deciding to go out all the way I’d been able to act much more decisively.
That is how I think about it, that I’m acting a lot more decisively, but it is usually too complicated to share how I’m actually thinking about it, which is much more ambiguous. I think that bisexuality does exist, and I buy into all that Kinsley scale thinking, but I feel like I’ve erred to long on the normal side of things, to no avail.
Marc said that he tried to date girls for a while, but was unsuccessful. “I thought that I might be unattractive,” he said, “but I was giving off the wrong vibes—girls could sense it.” I told him that I got the same thing, that a friend of mine—Jamie, actually—told me that I wasn’t getting any because I didn’t really want it.
I mentioned that this was actually the first gay bar I’d ever been to, which surprised both Marc and the other guy we were talking to, as did my mention that I’d only recently turned 21. The average in this bar was older, but the range of ages was pretty good.
Marc went to the bathroom and when he came back, said, “You know about running into someone from work? Well I just ran into someone from the Democratic National Committee.”
The guy we were talking to—whose name is complicated but I have it written down somewhere—asked another guy nearby where people go after this place. What was interesting about the random guy he asked was that he carried himself and had mannerisms strikingly similar to Drew’s ex-boyfriend Justin. Anyway, he said “Colbot” down the street is popular.
You’re good at striking up conversations with people, I told him, and he replied, “It’s because I don’t have any motivations. When you have ulterior motive, it’s hard to talk to people.” Huh.
We went to Colbot, which like JR’s, didn’t have a cover charge. Marc even bought me a drink, which was only my second because I was driving back. I have never seen anyplace as intense as this club—the density of the people, the mass of bodies, the attractiveness of the people, and the tight surroundings and stunning lights. Some of the lights were entirely fixed on rotating mounts, and changed colors and flashed, leaving streaks of light across my retina.
At one point in my life, more specifically my first year, I began to dance when drinking and saw a connection that made me think I would never be able to dance sober. I wasn’t entirely sober, but I was dancing, and that along with the time I’ve spent in regular clubs recently tells me that maybe I’m a different person now then I was then. I don’t want to exaggerate the extent to which I’ve changed, or matured or anything, but this entire Maryland experience has made me feel more powerful than anything I’ve done before.
It really struck me when I was driving in—I pictured myself five years ago, when I had nothing, and now, when I have almost everything I could want or feel like it’s within my grasp, either the short term or through long-term planning.
Marc and the other guy left Colbot not long after we got there. I stayed a little while longer and then safely drove home. Saturday night friends from the field school and I went to Baltimore.
Possibly to be continued, but if it's not, I want to end with the last song I heard on the radio tonight: I don't want to come back down from this cloud / It's taken me all this time to find out what I need
