The Great American Saloon Series / Pilgrim's Progress
Jr, Aram Bakshian
Pilgrim's Progress by Aram Bakshian, Jr. / is eleven in the evening, and outside the front entrance of Washington's Mayflower Hotel, on Connecticut Avenue, a gaggle of cabbies—Pakistani, Iranian,...
...It is, however, a Cambodian and, besides levitating greenbacks, he can also do an astonishing variety of card tricks and other feats of legerdemain, including making the bras of female volunteers transmigrate from their owners to the bar with no visible human assistance and no disturbance of outer garments—an art most of us attempted in our high school years but never mastered...
...once served as a Capitol Hill policeman—may walk in at any time...
...Around the corner on DeSales Street, by the side entrance, there's a line of hookers waiting for out-of-town suckers...
...American waiters and waitresses, emigrants all, and many of them originally Cold War refugees...
...T he Mayflower itself goes back far longer than Sam...
...America," he observes between tricks, "is a wonderful country...
...No, it isn't one of the late General Lon Nol's aides-de-camp doing parlor tricks with the last of his CIA largesse...
...There's never a shortage of gasbags at the Mayflower, so one never leaves feeling thwarted...
...And just when you grow weary, Sam will levitate another fifty, liberate another bra, or extract a large red rubber ball from a petite blonde's ear and proceed to work a series of minor miracles with a deck of cards...
...Sam and Sitha are supported by an amiable, efficient crew of Asian, Ethiopian, and Latin Aram Bakshian, Jr., editor-in-chief of American Speaker, writes regularly on politics, history and the arts...
...Although my late father could remember when the site was still occupied by an old, walled Catholic convent—nuns once trod where the hookers now hover—the Mayflower has been around since 1925 and has remained one of the capital's most prestigious hostelries, thanks in part to several massive but tastefully-executed renovations and a constant flow of celebrity guests and events...
...By midnight, you've usually shot your quota of game...
...But what I've enjoyed most over time at the Town and Country is the puncturing of balloons...
...But the real action is inside at the hotel's Town and Country Bar, where what looks like a gold-braided, white-jacketed officer of the old Royal Cambodian General Staff is levitating a fifty-dollar bill in mid-air before an audience of amazed customers...
...Trade Representative from the Reagan years, and half of America's major league team owners, the latter celebrating their successful repulse of Bill Clinton's clammy but ineffectual mediating embrace earlier that day...
...The master perpetrator is Sambon "Sam" Lek, the Mayflower's head bartender...
...Sam, God bless him, is right...
...At the Town and Country, anyone—a cabinet member, a half-forgotten bimbo from an old congressional scandal, a well-known novelist, a crazed professor of English literature, and, on at least one occasion, a retired bank robber who had also (only in Washington...
...E. had a distinctly better way with words...
...Amid the soft murmurs and muted laughter, the plash and tinkle of ice cubes, the report of a champagne cork sounds in the background like the signal gun of a secure and happy garrison...
...13 The American Spectator May 1995 57...
...Call me biased, but I find them to be generally more pleasant, well-informed, and patriotic than many of their American-born patrons...
...Sam's second-in-command is a fellow Cambodian, Sitha, a bright, bespectacled little man who lost most of his upper-class family to Pol Pot's butchers during the Khmer Rouge terror...
...is eleven in the evening, and outside the front entrance of Washington's Mayflower Hotel, on Connecticut Avenue, a gaggle of cabbies—Pakistani, Iranian, Ethiopian—is conversing in Pidgin English...
...I have led the rhetorical charge against living and dead characters as different as Herman Melville, that whale-sized literary poseur, and Bill Clinton, another blubbery bore...
...During the course of one evening at the massive walnut bar a few months ago, I bumped into the current chairman of the Republican National Committee, a former U.S...
...I have defended figures as varied as George Eliot and Dan Quayle...
...The Town and Country is a place where network correspondents (ABC News is just around the corner) and print reporters (Washington bureaus of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Reader's Digest are all a short walk away, as are the evil towers of the Washington Post headquarters) mingle with well-heeled tourists, bar regulars and visiting statesmen, financiers and politicians...
...Sometimes one's conversational role is defensive, sometimes offensive...
...they share a certain wobbly, prepubescent asexuality, although Ms...
...Sam's potable and prestidigitation-al ministrations, his superb service and elfin sense of humor, have been delighting old friends and new visitors to this Washington landmark for nearly twenty years...
Vol. 28 • May 1995 • No. 5
