Hello ... Columbus?
Capitol Plaza Apartments
The studio at Capitol Plaza Apartments was cheap and within easy walking distance to Union Station. On the first floor of an eight-story building, it had a large window overlooking the basement roof and a hemmed-in view of surrounding structures. Small and dark, with parquet floors and “apartment-sized” appliances in the not-even-galley kitchen, it was a cozy cave, the right place to hide out for my final year of college. I moved in August 1991.
To pay the bills, I took out more student loans, got a better paying part-time job working in a library at a high-profile law firm. That’s where I met Chas.
Chas had recently divorced and was trying to figure out his newly single life at 39, the house gone, his routine changed. I was a loner 21, a strange combination of vulnerable and shuttered, talking more to the homeless men who bivouacked on my street than to my fellow college students. We were both in love with DC, with its high crime rate and crack wars and the insane mayor-for-life Marion Barry. The brick rowhouses, the policy wonks, the strange political celebrity, the feel of it all: It was home.
Chas had left Columbus, Ohio in the early 1970s and headed straight for the District. He would tell me stories of growing up the city, where his large family lived in a massive brick Victorian. It sounded exotic in its blandness, the spread-out burg with the solid architecture. “They just don’t make houses here like they do in Columbus,” he would chuckle, and I'd smile as if I knew what he was talking about. Chas got his own apartment at 16, a few years before he moved to DC. Since I’d been emancipated from parental supervision from the age of 14 or so, he felt like a kindred spirit, another concealed soul, self-protective and insular.
Most of our conversations took place on my early evening library shifts where there was no one else in the office to interrupt us. He would discuss the pursuit of church ladies (they were a tough bunch), explain his theories on electromagnetic radiation, how the destructive energy fields from power lines were spreading cancer and causing miscarriages. We would stare out the window at the office building across the street, watch the after hours workers work or not work, watch them watching us. There was one man who was always talking on the phone, standing with his back to the full-length window glass, earpiece pinned between head and shoulder. It was a performance just for us, the man’s hands swooping and slicing the air as though the person on the other end would be persuaded by gesture. On the street below, commuters dallied or rushed, flagged down taxis, spilled out of the Metro station on the corner.
A lone wolf on the streets of Dupont Circle.
I told Chas all about my former roommate Martha, my escapes to visit her in Chestertown, where our evenings at Andy’s were blurred through multiple glasses of Dark and Stormies, a potent mixture of Goslings Rum and ginger beer; he’d get the details of the Bass Ale-soaked nights we had at the Irish Times or the Dubliner. Sometimes I would give him sanitized versions of barhops with Abe, an old friend from Delaware. Abe and I usually mixed our liquor, beer, wining and cocktailing it to the final rounds of Long Island Ice Teas. These evenings generally ended in an argument over something petty. We screamed across disco lights and crowded dance floors, tossed barbs in the back alleys of Georgetown, only to do it over again a month later.
In none of these conversations did I tell Chas about my drunken flirtations, about the Marines Martha and I dragged back from the bar one night, about the make-out sessions with Eastern Shore acquaintances, the booze-fueled pursuit of contact. Alcohol always uncovered the chasm, brought the need for other people to the surface.
In between the pickups and the throw-ups and the work and the studying, I’d occasionally see my faraway half-boyfriend. But most weekends were quiet. “Friday night drinking night?" the corner liquor store owner asked me during one regular visit, to which I gave a weak nod and smile. I’d drink, study, write papers, maybe catch the PBS Saturday night movie on my crappy box of a television. The Capitol Building was close to my apartment and I would walk around its lit-up beauty at night in all kinds of weather, braving bracing November winds, floating through the incredible sweetness of spring, when the cherry trees and azaleas were in bloom. (“I am alive, I am alive” I would think as I walked a path of fallen pink petals, feeling the joy rise up in me).
The week before Martha drove me out to Illinois in a battered U-Haul truck, Chas and I went out for one last round of beers, a temporary goodbye. I had every intention of returning to DC immediately after graduating from library school. But then I met a guy who got a job and we moved to a new town together: Columbus, Ohio. We started to build a life, adopted some animals, and finally bought a house. It was a four-bedroom brick Queen Anne in the Old Towne East neighborhood, a steal at $125,000. When I gave Chas the address, he was quiet for a moment.
“That’s the same block I grew up on,” he finally told me. Almost exactly across the street from our new house was an empty lot, the location of Chas’s childhood home.
Franklin Avenue house and neighbor (we never had a flag up and the neighbor will have to be a story for another day). Photo from Old Towne East Neighborhood Association.
It was a strange coincidence. What were the odds?