One of the best and most beneficial things about coming East now and then is that it tends to provoke a powerful understanding of the “Westward Movement” in U.S. history. After a few years on the Coast or even Colorado you tend to forget just exactly what it was that put you on the road, going west, in the first place. You live in L.A. a while and before long you start cursing traffic jams on the freeways in the warm Pacific dusk . . . and you tend to forget that in New York City you can’t even park; forget about driving.
Even in Washington, which is still a relatively loose and open city in terms of traffic, it costs me about $1.50 an hour every time I park downtown . . . which is nasty: but the shock is not so much the money-cost as the rude understanding that it is no longer considered either sane or natural to park on the city streets. If you happen to find a spot beside an open parking meter you don’t dare use it, because the odds are better than even that somebody will come along and either steal your car or reduce it to twisted rubble because you haven’t left the keys in it.
There is nothing unusual, they tell me, about coming back to your car and finding the radio aerial torn off, the windshield wipers bent up in the air like spaghetti and all the windows smashed . . . for no particular reason except to make sure you know just exactly where it’s at these days.
Where indeed?
“It’s a Goddamn Jungle!”
Washington Post columnist Nicholas von Hoffman recently pointed out that the Nixon-Mitchell administration—seemingly obsessed with restoring Law and Order in the land, at almost any cost—seems totally unconcerned that Washington, D.C., has become the “Rape Capital of the World.”
One of the most dangerous areas in town is the once-fashionable district known as Capitol Hill. This is the section immediately surrounding the Senate/Congress office buildings, a very convenient place to live for the thousands of young clerks, aides and secretaries who work up there at the pinnacle. The peaceful, tree-shaded streets on Capitol Hill look anything but menacing: brick colonial townhouses with cut glass doors and tall windows looking out on the Library of Congress and the Washington Monument . . . When I came here to look for a house or apartment, about a month ago, I checked around town and figured Capitol Hill was the logical place to locate.
“Good God, man!” said my friend from the liberal New York Post. “You can’t live there! It’s a goddamn jungle!”
Crime figures for “The District” are so heinous that they embarrass even J. Edgar Hoover. Rape is up 80 percent this year over 1970, and a recent rash of murders (averaging about one every day) has mashed the morale of the local police to a new low. Of the 250 murders this year, only 36 have been solved . . . and the Washington Post says the cops are about to give up.
Meanwhile, things like burglaries, street muggings, and random assaults are so common that they are no longer considered news. The Washington Evening Star, one of the city’s three dailies, is located in the Southeast District—a few blocks from the Capitol—in a windowless building that looks like the vault at Fort Knox. Getting into the Star to see somebody is almost as difficult as getting into the White House. Visitors are scrutinized by hired cops and ordered to fill out forms that double as “hall passes.” So many Star reporters have been mugged, raped, and menaced that they come & go in fast taxis, like people running the gauntlet—fearful, with good reason, of every sudden footfall between the street and the bright-lit safety of the newsroom guard station.
This kind of attitude is hard for a stranger to cope with. For the past few years I have lived in a place where I never even bothered to take the keys out of my car, much less try to lock up the house. Locks were more a symbol than a reality, and if things ever got serious there was always the .44 Magnum. But in Washington you get the impression—if you believe what you hear from even the most “liberal” insiders—that just about everybody you see on the street is holding at least a .38 Special, and maybe worse.
Not that it matters a hell of a lot at ten feet . . . but it makes you a trifle nervous to hear that nobody in his or her right mind would dare to walk alone from the Capitol Building to a car in the parking lot without fear of later on having to crawl, naked and bleeding, to the nearest police station.
There is no way to avoid “racist undertones” here. The simple heavy truth is that Washington is mainly a Black City, and that most of the violent crime is therefore committed by blacks—not always against whites, but often enough to make the relatively wealthy white population very nervous about random social contacts with their black fellow citizens. After only ten days in this town I have noticed the Fear/Syndrome clouding even my own mind: I find myself ignoring black hitchhikers, and every time I do it I wonder, Why the fuck did you do that? And I tell myself, Well, I’ll pick up the next one I see. And sometimes I do, but not always . . .