The primal scream from comic or deranged man Sam Kinnison back before he was famous might be the way one would describe Lewis Black, who is in town with his 2014 “The Rant is Due” tour.
I say might because I didn’t see it. I had the fifteen seat, in the middle, in the Warner Theater’s orchestra- nice ticket- but I found the anxiety rising and was heading for a full scale panic attack.
I tried to calibrate myself at Willow- a couple glasses of wine would loosen me up, I could take a cab down, it would be all right. It was a glorious Spring Day, and I was productive and focused right up to the cocktail hour and the short drive over to the bar in the Bluesmobile. I can do these things, in fact, I used to do them quite well. Not so much any more.
I looked over at Old Jim, who was silhouetted by the lowering sun flooding through the side window that illuminates the Amen Corner as the days grow longer.
“They don’t grow longer,” says Jim. “There is just more goddamn daylight.”
It was a bit queer, really, since the televisions that are normally shuttered behind mahogany panels were uncovered above the bar and the Maters Golf Tournament was on- the sports door into Spring. I wanted to walk into it. I said that I appreciated the difference, but I just didn’t want to go downtown. Jim looked back at me and said: “Don’t go.”
I shook my head. “I said I would, I got invited months ago, I like the people who were going, and it was far enough away at the time that it didn’t seem to matter. I feel obligated.”
“If you don’t want to go, why not just do what you feel like.”
“I just want to have another glass of wine and go home.”
Jim shrugged and took a bite of one of the delightful cod sliders he slathered with hot sauce. I looked at the time display on the smart phone and asked Chanteuse Mary how long she thought it was going to take to get downtown at the tail end of the rush hour. She works at the Chamber, and does the commute every day. She pursed her brow and said” You should allow forty-five minutes, anyway.”
I looked at the phone to see when I needed to start walking down to the taxi stand across from the Metro. “But of course with the Cherry Blossom crowd you might want to make that an hour.”
I nodded. Cherry Blossoms and the freaking tourists, Jesus. I finished my glass of wine, paid the tab to Baby Jessica and bade my ersatz family adieu, asking them to wish me luck. It was still bright outside, and there was actually a cab at the stand, and it was actually available.
The driver was a fellow named Abdul. He was from the Tribal Areas of Pakistan and had been here for a quarter century. “Because of the many crowds at the Tidal Basin, I propose to take you a more circuitous route. It will cost a few dollars more, but will be much more efficient.” He had a dim view of the chaos caused by the tourists and considered Kashmir to be indisputably part of the Islamic Republic.
We weaved around from the Roosevelt Bridge, coming at the downtown away from the lovely trees and the wandering sightseers and dropping me by the National Press Club. I paid him a nice tip for the memory lane transit, and began to walk down to the Warner where Joe and his son Bryan were waiting under the marquee.
I don’t like crowds any more, and I looked warily at the specific crowd at the Warner Theater. It was overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly Boomer. You know the type. Mostly jeans and t-shirts, though you know damn well that they really were apparatchiks during the day in suit and tie. A sprinkling of millennial anarchists with sleeve-ink and pierced earlobes.
I got a rum-and-coke to take to my seat and realized, there in the middle of the row, that I was going to be stuck for a while. Should have hit the head, and I kicked myself mentally. I took a couple pictures of the interior of the theater. It was gilded and grand, and I flashed on the interior of the famed Bolshoi in Moscow, where I labored to get through the first act of a Russian opera before I fled at intermission to the coolness of Red Square.
Maybe it is ADD. I don’t know.
The lights didn’t come down for Mr. Bowman for about a half hour. John was amusing enough, though the f-bomb that sprinkled his monologue was a little irritating, and his schtick relied on a sort of pleasant truculence that I found uncomfortably familiar. Sort of like myself.
His act was another twenty or thirty minutes to get the crowd calibrated, and when he was done, he announced a fifteen minute intermission before Mr. Black would come on and do his rant. I filed out with the crowd and got into an interminable line at the head- one small blessing about being male is that at least our line went pretty quickly, but emerging to run into another long line at the bar at the bottom of the staircase, I felt suddenly claustrophobic.
Anxiety attack is the only way to put it. I could not bring myself to go back to my seat in the theater. I found the guys who had invited me- thank God, I couldn’t leave without saying that I was going- and made my apologies.
“I am angry enough as it is, Joe. I can’t take it this evening. I should never have accepted. I am so sorry.” Joe is a nice guy, and I felt bad. “My fault completely.”
Then I fled into the night. It was so weird going down to the Warner- I used to do the commute to New York Avenue every day to work for the Phone Company. I recognized everything in a human scale way, since I often traveled locally from Metro Center, which was a block away from the office. China Town just up the block. The old and the new all in a jumble, the long boom times in a capital bulked up with cash and change.
Now there are new Jersey Barriers blocking Lafayette Park, and the White House looms behind its black iron fences. Rain began to fall as I was trying to hail a cab. The reality of being in the middle of the Capital of the World- or what had been, anyway- was quite overwhelming. The cab ride home was uneventful, and I felt the stress leaking out of my system. I had left the Bluesmobile out in front of Willow, and after paying off Cabass, the Somali cabdriver, I decided to stop and get a glass of wine and stop hyperventilating.
None of the regulars were present, of course, since they were all long home by now. It was interesting to see our usual places filled with fresh faces, as though we had never been.
I stood at the bar about half way down and talked to Boomer and Dante, trying to decompress from the experience. There was a young man sitting next to me, Sebastian by name. He heard what I was saying and volunteered that he had seen Mr. Black perform. “I think the modern comedians are all deeply disturbed people. They do not seem to like the America that I do. It isn’t just the crudity.”
“I know, I know. I have quite the mouth when I get rolling, too,”
He nodded, and pulled a credit card out of his wallet to close his check. “But it is the weird deal between the audience and the comedian, the ridicule of the decent man for being decent and hard working. The mockery of the people who live in the double-wides. Of decency, of honor, of morals or virtue.”
“That is sort of profound,” I said.
He shrugged. “Just an observation,” he said, and got up to leave. I turned back to my glass of wine and wasn’t far behind him. I slid behind the wheel of the Bluesmobile profoundly blue myself.
I did not shout out anything profane on the way home. I didn’t have the energy for it.
When I rose in the morning I still felt bad. My mood brightened though with each cup of coffee, and the prospect of heading south for a sunny day and the afternoon spent clomping around on the farm.
As I tried to understand what happened, I listened to a Lewis Black concert on YouTube. This one was “In God We Rust.” It’s a little dated, a show from the State Theater In Minneapolis in 2010 or something, but Mr. Black is a talented fellow, by turns soothing and then punctuating his patter with shouted bursts of profanity.
His character- which is all that it is- is both angry and crazy, is true enough in the tradition of Rodney Dangerfield, in whose neckware Mr. Black shares a legacy. It was worth listening to, and I am glad I did to see what I missed. In one of the comments below the embedded video, Mr. Black was described as a national treasure.
He might well be, I suppose, but it seems to me that we are quite angry enough as it is.
Copyriight 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303