Five Years Later

It seems that five years came and went without notice. When I was younger I could quantify time passing with hallmarks. My parents’ divorce, my grandparents’ deaths, moving to California. On fingers I could count the time between, the little vignettes that separated one Allan from another. A girlfriend. A play. A death. A class. A game. Life was in itself linear and dependable. You work hard, you end up somewhere.

Five years ago today I was a Hill intern working for Jackie Speier. I had gone out to Washington in 2018 to be a politico and failed miserably. Failure to launch is normal for your twenties – I had couch-surfed with relatives in Maryland for three months before I found a room in Sherman Circle, dating had been dismal in the swamp, and I sacrificed too much for a dead-end job calling congressional staff that went nowhere while nightly I plotted a comeback as the whiz-bang wonk. You think at the time you’re progressing towards something. You have aspirations. You are ambitious. And so after much humble pie, in the fall of 2019, and at twenty-six years old, I applied to be a Capitol Hill intern again.

What are you thinking? That’s for twenty-year-olds. How will you manage? How will you keep up? It’s funny now but I was wracked with thinking I’d somehow slipped out of place in line and gone back to square one. You’re so old! But it was now or never, and working on the Hill was all I’d wanted until that point. I was going to sacrifice whatever I needed.

As I found out, it was quite easy this time around. I’d done this job twice before in college, a long day officially from 9:00 a.m to 5:00 p.m. fielding angry calls, writing correspondence, setting out the newspapers, refilling the jelly beans jar, stocking the drinks fridge with the district’s flavored-water-producing corporate constituency (no hints here whose name was on the bottles), dispersing mail to the staff, guiding visitors and tourists through the Capitol with a half-remembered list of trivia points (don’t miss the corn-husk-capitals atop the senate pillar entrance), hand-delivering a sealed consolatory note to Sen. Elizabeth Warren for her failed presidential run, cleaning out the basement storage closet of old phones and computers and the posters and campaign gimmicks of long dead causes, handing out ERA buttons to the suffragist-white-inspired Women’s Caucus at the State of the Union, organizing the mass-delivery of Valentines Day Jelly-Belly treats to the members Speier liked most of all. It was electric. And in my Macy’s shoes and Jos. A. Bank suit I felt like a king, getting paid for the first time out of three internships — approximately a salary of $12,000 a year. I had saved up to afford an unlivable wage. I showed up for work early every day, made my ambitions known, networked with anyone, and tried to be the best damn Hilltern that side of the Rayburn House Office Building. I stood on the floor of the House for the first time. I felt I had arrived.

So it was that five years ago today I was one of the last people on Capitol Hill as quarantine began on Friday, March 13. In the weeks prior, our office had stocked up on hand sanitizer and Clorox wipes — the member jokingly shook elbows with visitors in a chicken-like routine called the “Wuhan shake” — and many started working remotely. A few weeks home was bandied about a lot. You’ll still get paid, which was a nice thing to hear. We told visitors not to come, cancelled Capitol tours, waived off Ralph Nader stalking the halls for his next victim, and hilexed all the door handles and surfaces. I think Speier had gone home, as most members had already. My boss told me I needed to deliver a resolution to the Democratic cloakroom, the repository for all legislative actions and bills and private conversations just outside the floor.

Since there was nothing else to do, I took the long way, bypassing the Rayburn shuttle and strolling in through the Cannon Building to look at the artwork in the tunnels. Each year the districts held contests for local school-aged artists to get their work hung in the Capitol, and it was all deposited here — a range of occasional brilliance and mainly, politely put, abstracts. I carded in at the desk and entered the old tunnels, where often the narrow corridors were filled with tight-fitted suits in tapered cuts and cheap cologne ferrying their geriatric members to and from meetings. No need to polish the floors here: the never-ending sucking up on bended knees works better than any buffer. I had no worries of playing bumper cars today. I saw maybe one or two people, if that. I ignored taking the members’ gold elevator and took the old staircase up to the chambers’ floor. There I knocked — or was it buzzed — and handed over the resolution through the slot.

Suddenly it was apparent I was alone in the Capitol. Long vanished were the clicking heels of cheap shoes and whispered gossip and gobsmacked tourists. Silence reigned overhead. Even at night there was some activity, some kind of commotion, even the quieting action of a function or televised stunt fading away into the nine o’clock news slot. Now at 4:30 p.m., on what might have been any other Friday, I was alone. It was eerie enough to take a photo with the brand-new phone I’d bought for the job — no one might believe how time had suddenly stopped in the heart of the Capitol. I took my time on the long way back, saying goodnight to the guard at the tunnels’ entrance. I packed my things, held onto my Capitol ID badge since I’d need it when I came back to the office, and left unnoticed like a little politico stealing away into the night with his sunglasses and leather strapped briefcase. A few weeks. I’ll be back.

I never did. A week later I was in California praying my dad didn’t die of a heart attack or catch Covid-19 in the hospital. My flight had been empty and the ten-lane west coast freeways were barren. I spent eleven weeks stuck at home before I flew back fully bearded and politically incensed to march every day — only to find myself by summer’s end ready to let go of DC and politics altogether. I mailed back my ID and left in a van packed full of my junk.

Five years later feels like ten years on. I went on unemployment for the first time, moved back to California, drove for Lyft, tried painting like Bob Ross, picked up photography, did too many psychedelics, practiced my Daniel Plainview as an “oil man” at a refinery, learned to meditate and failed to practice consistently, earned a master’s degree in journalism, lived in Hawaii for six months and moved back home for another six — only to return to New York last year.

I hadn’t any gray hairs five years ago. The bags under my eyes were not so dark nor the weight so heavy. I was still stylish, had the lingo down and had my finger on the culture’s pulse. But everything now exists in the present, all the successes and failures and controversies and scandals. The tallies on the wall no longer reflect time passing. I am where I am now. The world, day by day, is ever-present.

Being thirty-one in the post-Pandemic comes with wondering every day where all the time went. Too much in a narrow pocket makes things seem longer than they were. But having teleported five years from those hallowed halls to a tight one-bed in central Harlem, I don’t grieve that young politico. Only sometimes do I wonder what might have become of him. I hope he might be as happy and settled as I feel today.