The Great American Saloon Series/Love Childe
Carnegie, M. D.
THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES Love Childe by M.D. Carnegie I dropped out of college in 1984 to move in with a Chinese girl in Washington I thought I loved. My family was mortified, and not for...
...I write for The American Spectator," I replied...
...My dear chap, we must keep in touch," Aram always announced at the end of the eve in his marvelous, mellifluous boom...
...The years since have shown, beyond reasonable doubt, I have lousy taste in women but a good nose for a bar...
...The Childe remains a favorite place to quench a thirst...
...And sure enough, she was...
...At another pub I might have been caught out...
...At the time of the Fiske inquiry into Vince Foster's death, one of the few lawyers I've met there assured me the proceedings were a sham...
...Bonnie...
...Single women tell me it's the one bar in Washington they feel completely secure in: the bartenders routinely warn customers who to watch out for, and they don't tolerate any nonsense...
...It opened its doors in 1967, and in those purple hazy days live music was often featured upstairs...
...The American Spectator April 1995 55 Supermajority Men by Grover G. Norquist POLITICS Th,41,1 r, We argued excitedly about literature and politics until closing time, and to this day remain dear friends...
...Carnegie is assistant editor of The American Spectator...
...My family was mortified, and not for the last time...
...And so we would—the very next evening...
...Pinstriped arbitrageurs were then in the ascendant, and our classmates were flocking to Wall Street by the loft-load...
...There are some things a gentleman, or even a soda jerk, just doesn't do...
...A burly ex-con explained one afternoon why he was in favor of capital punishment—for the criminals, he swore, it really is a deterrent—then returned that night, motioned for me to follow him into the jakes, and shocked me by thrusting a handful of marijuana in my shirt pocket as we stood attending to our business...
...The burgers are widely known as the best in Washington...
...And the barkeeps are friendly and efficient: even when the place is jammed, you don't go thirsty...
...Youth really is wasted on the young, and I can hardly forget it...
...I took a job as a soda jerk...
...Clock-counting attorneys, a mercifully small contingent at the Childe, shudder in disbelief at Springsteen's contract, which hangs unceremoniously over a table: it's about a paragraph long, and a form letter to boot...
...It was at the Childe that I made the acquaintance of Aram Bakshian, chief speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and a frequent contributor to these pages...
...She gave me her number anyway, but I never called...
...Such a dazzling selection from the dramatis personae in our little human comedy is not readily found...
...when our paths cross, he kisses me affectionately in the Arab manner and calls me a "bleepity bleeping Republican bleep...
...Hers wasn't thrilled: her father actually took me out to breakfast and asked me "what my plans were...
...Belly up day or night, and you'll be elbow-to-elbow with construction workers and journalists, artists and Ph.D.'s, teachers and actors, immigrants and life-long Washingtonians, left-wing radicals and conservative hard-liners, and some who never talk politics at all...
...Thick-necked frat boys and stumblebum lushes are the only people unwelcome here...
...B ut what really makes the Childe is the clientele...
...then I realized he was trying to pick me up...
...And I was...
...A couple of months before making history by appearing on the cover of Newsweek and Time in the same week, Bruce Springsteen came through for a two-night gig...
...Ask any criminal attorney...
...He correctly read my wordless rejection, genially bought us another round, and disappeared into the night...
...His eyes glowed with what I took to be a conspiracy theorist's glee...
...It was Fawaz Turki, the legendary Palestinian activist and author...
...You're all right," he told me affably in his lit-up Southern twang...
...They didn't do a psychological profile on Foster," the attorney told me, "and that's standard procedure when investigating any suicide...
...During one of my nine-hour lunches I made the acquaintance of a woman from Paris who publishes a magazine about sado-masochism...
...The upstairs dining room features the same menu as the downstairs bar, the preferred spot of the regulars...
...Bakshian only drinks scotch and soda at the Childe, one reason why he never got crocked during our frequent symposia—I drank ale, and gin tonics, and schnapps, and scotch, and very dry martinis, no olive...
...here I just introduced her to the guy on the next stool down, a playwright who moonlights as a bodyguard for a professional dominatrix...
...I probably got more girls dishing out ice cream than I have ever since...
...It was cool and dark amidst the wood and brick, the staff was friendly and prompt, and nobody ever bothered sixteenyear-old Lisa, who'd slipped me her number one night as I scooped her a sundae...
...He's just s000 sexy," she cooed...
...Live music's been dispensed with, and you can't find underage girls there now—at least I can't...
...You could just about hear her Maybelline cracking...
...A Tammy Faye Bakker lookalike was flirting with me at the bar one night when she informed me she'd been a high-level administrative assistant in Little Rock for a Governor Bill Clinton...
...We would sip glasses of beer as I counted the 0-rings orbiting the pale of her wrists—Madonna was getting popular then—and entertained thoughts that would have made Nabokov blush...
...Stopping in after a black-tie dinner for Lloyd Bentsen once, I met a bearded, pony-tailed hippie in a sleeveless black T-shirt who was lacking his full complement of molars...
...I thought at first it was Jerry Garcia, and then I heard him speak—perfect, Parisian French...
...Even my improbably named Lulu, who fancied herself more than a little Bohemian, was working for an investment firm and wearing natty suits to the office...
...It smells, and it smells bad...
...Williams and the late Danny Gatton, a local whose virtuosity made him a guitar legend...
...While Lulu was out bringing home the dumplings, I spent my afternoons getting acquainted with the Childe Harold, a pub just north of Dupont Circle that soon became a favorite haunt...
...Raiff played there, as did the marvelous jazz drummer Tony M.D...
...I didn't believe her, so she gave me her old business card...
...Since Lulu was in town, the greatest change in going to the Childe is that I don't take women there any more...
...But then again I meet a different sort of woman now...
Vol. 28 • April 1995 • No. 4
