For America
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FIRE AND WATER: INDEPENDENCE DAY IN NEW YORK

In the shadow of the White House, a mass of sweating bodies writhed to a mass of sweating beats. Independence Day in Washington, and the citizens of this new republic were out celebrating themselves. Amid the vagaries of political consensus and partisanship, here was a day of unashamed political certainty.

The flags waved, and the people cheered, but in the field overlooking the President's house, we were gyrating and thumping the ground, as the loud democracy of techno and hip-hop overtook us. Naked to the waist, we pushed against each other, man and woman, feeling the music as a sexual force in this sterile place. When the rain screamed down on us, we cheered, the thud-thud of hail sized drops seeming to accompany the DJs choice.

For a brief time, it seemed right. Behind us, the tall phallus of the Washington Memorial gleamed in the fading light, a reminder that the men who had built this place from the swamp were not like us, and yet part of us, part of our enduring history. Even here, where wide-eyed, unblinking folks in dreadlocks saw conspiracies on every tree-lined avenue, there was hope of a counter-culture, of another way. The revolution was coming.

But when the fireworks started, brought on by the storms of the night and the cheers of crowds, the music stopped. The scales, held in place by the seduction and camaraderie of the beats, fell from our eyes, washed away by torrents of water. There was no coming revolution and no community of sweating, dancing, touching people to hold it in place. The future was all around us, coming down in swathes of rain, and we would have to face it individually, alone as before.

RAIN IN DUPONT

It's raining hard in DC. An angry God or an angrier Gaia is pounding the pavements with all the liquid her rage can muster. I'm soaking wet, just the second time this has happened in all the weeks here, blinking through raindrops for the red 'M' of the Metro line, and putting pieces of paper into my damp pockets to barricade my passport from melting away.

'Here,' says the guy next to me, a street philosopher from Oregon who shares my sarcasm and place of work, as he stops on the corner of 15th Street and N, 'He'll pick us up here.' Eventually, through the rain and the darkness, I see the lights of a car stop, the driver waving. Then he's greeting me like an old friend, and talking like a new one, as he winds his way through Dupont Circle and on to the old roads of Georgetown.

This is the worst night of rain Washington has seen for a long time. Overnight, the streets that normally simmer in the sweltering humidity are washed clean. As we leave Dupont, there's a flash, and lights go off for miles around. The whole quarter has blacked out. By the morning, the area would find itself facing unprecedented flood damage.

At the house in Georgetown the party is already in full swing: men, mostly men, in shirts, ties and the blue and beige uniform of the conservative mindset ponder the lack of women in the house and the narrow interests of their lives. Up the stairs, I find what looks like a Confederate flag, and a small group of people arguing about politics.

Over the course of the next few hours, as rain pounds the terrace covering, which occasionally empties itself over some unsuspecting person, I listen with increasing dismay to a range of opinions that, in the land of my birth several thousand miles away, would normally only come from blue-rinsed old women. The language, the sentiments that I felt only came with age or irony echo around me, until finally I feel powerless to penetrate the dogma, unable to turn the tide of prejudice that I think is spreading like the rain outside.

As the car that takes us home sloshes off through the silence of the Washington morning, I look around with some nostalgia at the city, the now still heart at the centre of so many dreams, and think how rough-hewed and uncertain this world is, with its staggering inequalities and hordes of broken hopes, where young boys who have had all the privileges of this young empire can earnestly wish to deny them to others.

DOWN AND OUT IN DC

I didn't expect to find myself living in a women's homeless shelter, but then I didn't expect to be thrown out of my accommodation. The reasons I was are tortuously long, but involve misunderstandings, late nights and - strangely - a woman from Arkansas. In the blurred distinction of those last days, with people I'd only just met leaving me with long goodbyes and short words, the reasons become indistinct, now irrelevant.

For a time I embraced the uncertainty, sleeping in chairs and halls, in places I hadn't seen, occasionally with people I didn't know. Eventually, through a friend, I got a place in a women's homeless shelter, the management allowing me to stay in an airy room with nine Lutheran women and no curtains. For a few days I was shuddered conscious too early, as the women's beds creaked awake around me, and the rustle of their clothes and papers entwined with my morning dreams. Then, suddenly, they were gone, and I was alone in the room at night, each bed creaking out its history in that strange place.

But even while I was adjusting to the place, it was adjusting to me. My arrival at the shelter upset the dynamics of the area. The women, finally finding a refuge from their lives on the street, saw in me an unsettling reminder of the currency of sex. Being the newest of the very few men in the place, I was the object of catcalls, of declarations of love and suggestions of sex; in that cool place my innocent friendliness threatened to upset their entire lives. Here, in the one place where the women didn't need to sell themselves or find security and stability in another, I was a constant reminder of how the world out there worked. I couldn't stay.

There were other reasons to leave as well; my activities in the capital city were drawing to an end, and the whole place was shutting down as the summer creaked to a close. There was nothing left in the city for me, and so with only a few hours warning I took a flight to Los Angeles, planning to find more dreams in the city that made them.

LEAVING LAURA - Part 1

Leaving Los Angeles, and I was trying to find her. The bus from Sunset Blvd abruptly stopped at the corner of La Brea Avenue, as three fire engines roared past to a building visibly belching flames. For too long we waited, the engine purring, impatient with the flames and impatient with the driver, as I played out the human drama of the night in my head. Here I was in Hollywood, trying to get across the city to Laura, only to leave her.

Days earlier, as the Los Angeles night had ticked towards the morning, I was traipsing through the city trying to find a place to stay. In Venice, in sight of the misty darkness where the Pacific lay, I found a place, and found Laura. We exchanged few words over the next few days, but found, I thought, a strange connection in each other. I tried to see more of her, but never did, finally promising to spend these last hours with her.

I was leaving, and was strangely pleased about that. Here in Venice, the world was different, the air filled with the voices of people who were silenced elsewhere. On the sandy boardwalk they plied their trades, offering massages for the soul, poetry for the mind, unsubstantial, maybe essential, essences. And I was different too - different from the person in Washington, having left him behind when I'd left that city.

I knew I wouldn't see Laura again after tonight, and there was a calmness in that, a sense of having a few hours to base our relationship on, walking away from her with memories intact, and nothing unsaid; a small air-pocket in the swamp of this world. Over the next few hours we would determine the only memories of each other.

But I couldn't get there. Barrier after barrier was raised in front of me, as the minutes and then hours ticked away. Midnight approached and buses stopped. In deserted bus shelters I searched for ways out, unsure whether to wait or go. In the end I persuaded an off-duty driver to take me to Venice, a small human token amid the sprawling city.

From the intersection on Pacific Avenue I still had a short way to walk, feeling as if I was getting later at every step, as if she'd be gone before I got there. In reception no-one had seen her, in the kitchen, the common area, no-one knew where she was. 'She said she was going out with someone,' one said, and, briefly, finally, a thought flickered that maybe I wouldn't get to see her again, that the story really would end here.

LEAVING LAURA - Part 2

I heard her before I saw her, hidden behind the door of her room, still there waiting. Her eyes scanned mine briefly. Slowly, ritually, she gathered up her things: a bag, a towel, a book of poems, checking them as if we were preparing for a long journey rather than a walk down the beach. Something about the way she did it, the gravity of it all, made me check and re-check my pockets, where for days and days now I'd carried the essentials of my life.

Outside it was completely silent. The people gone, the whole beach had an eerie stillness to it, punctuated by startling, inexplicable sounds. We walked down to the water, shifting sand and saying nothing, waiting. In the cold air, we undressed completely, talking in laughter, stepping tentatively into the now-freezing water.

There, watching her silhouette dance before the unruly waves, massive in their darkness, suddenly oppressive in their randomness, I wanted to turn around and go, just leave right then, and keep the memory of her and that place and the growling of the waves forever.

I felt, suddenly, part of a history, part of a growing picture. I remembered looking out over the Mediterranean, miles away and years ago in Alexandria, to the same photo-darkness. Now here was the same picture, with a new piece added, pasted in by some unseen workman in the darkroom of memory.

She laughed at me when she turned round and I had left the water. She briefly mocked me, then continued to play, eventually coming up the steps of the lifeguard's watchtower to join me. There were sounds on the beach, shadowy shapes far away which approached but never arrived. In the distance the lights of Santa Monica blazed, like some neon mirage.

We stayed there that night, in a small space that for a few hours was ours, talking about things that meant nothing to anyone but us, nowhere but then. In the morning, while an impatient driver shouted for me, and several people called for her, we held each other harshly in a silent goodbye, before turning different ways and away to different lives.

A SHORT RETURN

When I got back to DC, pressure in my ears from the flight, pressure in my memory, I slept in the airport amid the chattering night staff, on a dusty blue blanket Laura had smuggled out for me.

Eventually I got a bed in a cramped, tight hostel directly above my old Adams Morgan haunts. The lights, the sounds were the same; the people different but the same, interchangeable in that great nightly dance. As before, I looked out on a shimmering sea of privilege, of expensively-clad decadence.

But the world had changed. Now in Washington without the suits, without the friends, without the recognised badges of membership, I was part of a different world, a different rhythm.

The days were mine: long afternoons in Tryst, a café-lounge and congregating area of writers, perhaps thinkers, occasionally talkers. Here I would sit for hours at a time, anonymous, my plates and cups silently replenished, as the old business of the new world unfolded around me.

But the nights belonged to the others, to the old me-s, strutting confidently, searching the sea of lights for people and faces, for the night's experiences. I saw another side of the city those nights alone, a side I'd previously ignored, or registered only on the edges of sight: the arguments between residents of the street, the police harassment of locals and the homeless that had kept the old me safe. Now I could stop and stand, watch these lives unfold, as the huge blank mating dance of the trendy city passed by me.

But if my mind was expanding, my body was contracting. Ever since I'd stepped back into DC, I felt myself shrinking into myself - the wet heat closed my shoulders, put tensions in my arms, the crammed hostel dripped us like treacle into common areas, and packed us like inmates at night.

Maybe the people were colder; maybe not. After the raging individuality and collective consciousness of Venice, DC felt stale, rigid. It felt as if the world had gone to the beach to party, and we hadn't been invited.

BEFORE THE STORM: Last days in New York

In the city that never sleeps, I couldn't sleep. I woke one morning in Washington to be told I had to leave the hostel whose common area had become my bed and the locus of my brief time there. Whatever the circumstances of the night before that led to my dismissal, neither the German Johannes nor the Scottish girls could tell me. Silently fantasising about a dramatic, cruel departure, I left instead quietly, more focused on breakfast.

With nowhere to go, I went, like thousands before me, to New York, seeking refuge amid the murky half-light of its back streets and darker areas. In the comforting crowds of the Lower East Side night, I lost myself, becoming a solitary figure who nodded to well-built Muslims guarding doors, and held court on pool tables under assumed names.

But I couldn't sleep. In cramped communal rooms with chattering men from the Far East, or on makeshift mattresses in the houses of friends, where paint peeled on the walls and the business of the night carried on outside, I found unconsciousness slipping away from me, even as I reached out to embrace it.

Dawn often found me amid the New York streets, head down, hood up, on my way to bed, where half-formed dreams filtered my recent memories only to scatter them like a prism. Here, in embryonic form, were fragments of faces from coast to coast: the Armenian sadomasochist who'd shaved my head, the ex-Cripps gangbanger I'd chased women with, the homeless woman who'd declared her love for me; the Turkish refugee I couldn't remember, and the Canadian hippie I couldn't forget.

Their voices and faces blended with the people from Washington, giving me false memories of non-existent events that vanished as soon as I remembered them. Circumstances were drawing me away from the city, but memories, I felt sure, would bring me back.

As the night ferry took me to Staten Island on my way to other scenes, I watched the colossus retreat from the shimmering waters, black fingers lit by light, row on row of lives and worlds flickering goodbye in the twilight. The next day, fire no-one ever expected fell from the sky and tore out the heart of New York. In an hour, the old city died and a new, darker one was born.



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