Emil Pitkin

Whenever the Washington cutthroat of House of Cards renown Frank Underwood needed to recede from the world, he traded the crisp linens of elite DC and stepped over the threshold of Freddy’s BBQ Joint to roll up his sleeves and gorge on ribs. Secluded in his booth he enjoyed the double incognito protection from the simple fact that nobody would ever think to look there for him.

I had a Freddy’s of my own. Whenever I felt the world was too much with me I walked up Rhode Island Avenue, turned onto the 14th St. corridor and just after S street, ducked my head and walked into Chicken and Whiskey, a refreshingly descriptive name of a joint bisected by a heavy steel door: chicken in the front, whiskey in the back.

Always “half a pollo, por favor” to which the Incan-looking chicken cutter always smiled and cut a little more than half of the pollo with his chicken-cutting scissors. Some sweet fried plantains, rice and beans, mounds of yellow sauce and orange sauce (they were unmarked, unnamed), all piled on a greasy sheet, a can of guarana, what the Brazilians call the drink of happiness – the antipode of my sociable club dinners – and I’d settle apart from the other people, along the rail that ran the whole perimeter of the joint. I’d take a fork and knife (a civilized instinct always gripped me for a moment in front of the silverware cups), lay them aside, and maul the chicken, alone, apart, silent, and happy. I wonder what Epicurus would have thought.

Other times I followed in the steps I had serendipitously first taken in 2008, a 20-year-old summer intern. Out and across Key Bridge into Georgetown, up the slope until the gothic spires of the university, like spectral stalagmites against the night, signaled that I had almost come to where I needed most to be. Up the entrance into Healey Hall, up three flights (“walk in like you own the place,” as the Social Security actuary once taught me, whenever I stepped into places not my own), open the heavy wooden doors into the hall announced with a “Gaston Hall” plaque, remark on how the stained-glass, ecclesiastical hall reminds you of Sanders Theater in Harvard and that when you returned from DC for your senior year of college and you went to Sanders Theater for your roommate’s a cappella concert it made you think of Gaston Hall here, but ten years have passed, hop onto the stage, settle onto the black leather bench, lightly pull up your trousers and flip the tails of your blazer over the back, like my mother had taught me, and get up two hours later, after bringing Chopin and Rachmaninoff, Liszt and Scarlatti and Schubert to sit with you, not alone, though apart, silent, moved, and happy.