The Dog Walker

by Joshua Stephens

  5

  THE DRIFT

  A revolutionary action within culture must aim to enlarge life, not merely to express or explain it. It must attack misery on every front. Revolution is not limited to determining the level of industrial production, or even to determining who is to be the master of such production. It must abolish not only the exploitation of humanity, but also the passions, compensations and habits that exploitation has engendered. We have to define new desires in relation to present possibilities.

  So went the 1957 manifesto Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and Action—a mouthful, as well as the founding document of a revolutionary group of artists, intellectuals, and political theorists bending what was left of Dada and surrealism toward an antiauthoritarian reinterpretation of Marx. They called themselves the Situationist International. Their ideas, disseminated largely through their own journal, would eventually provide kindling for the events of May 1968 in Paris—an uprising that came within a few breaths of toppling the government of France.

  Central to their critique was the manner in which day-to-day relations in society had become increasingly mediated by objects or commodities. What had emerged amid the transformations within capitalism and the rise of mass production after World War II was something the Situationists called “the society of the spectacle,” in which we figure less as participants in our own lives than spectators to a world produced for us. Their program sought to encourage interventions against that mediation through “the construction of situations”—subversive disruptions in (then) modern forms of alienation. Contemporary prank-driven protest culture—from The Yes Men to the magazine Adbusters (who put out the call to occupy Wall Street in 2011)—owes a great deal to the example of the Situationists.

  Especially in their early writings, the Situationists were keenly interested in architecture and urbanism, particularly the manner by which spaces are engineered to entice or produce particular behaviors—typically, consumer behaviors. Life in these spaces gravitates toward commercial corridors, so even if we as residents identify with, desire, or privilege other kinds of values, highly concentrated commercial interests end up shaping the spaces that make up communities. This isn’t strictly a matter of inanimate, physical structures; it quietly becomes the logic of the immersed population, like a spell. The Situationists were eager to break that spell, countering with what they called “psychogeography”—an approach to urban landscapes that emphasized a sort of playfulness or passion not driven by the dominant or normative psychology. “[C]ities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones,” they argued.

  A key Situationist tactic was the dérive, or the drift. In a nutshell, the tactic involved randomly wandering through urban landscapes without reference to much beyond one’s own curiosity and passions. The goal was to acquaint oneself with what one’s surroundings may yield when approached without reference to commercial or administrative functions. “In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there,” argued the founding and signature voice of the Situationist International, Guy Debord, in the 1958 essay “Theory of the Dérive.”

  The physical and psychological training central to the dérive was of the same general quality as meditation. By de-emphasizing the dominant narratives one was so used to seeing that they didn’t even feel like narratives, whole other versions of cities revealed themselves. Cities, after all, have no singular identity, which means that there’s a whole incalculable range of possible lives to be lived. For Debord, those possible lives were a nascent threat to the alienation characteristic of postwar capitalism.

  The first hour I spent hauling dogs around Mt. Pleasant with Fede, it was apparent that dog walking required an approach to walking that had never occurred to me. From one anonymous house to the next, we carved paths that seemed to have no real purpose beyond keeping each dog out for the allotted time. Eventually, I picked up on the rhythm of cycling through dogs in sets of four. Walking was organized primarily around grouping dogs by proximity, then additionally by routes sufficient to cover the time the client paid for. The combination made for a version of Debord’s dérive, inasmuch as the engine driving our movement had no correspondence with commercial structures in the neighborhood. In fact, given the way public life concentrated along Mt. Pleasant Street, it was best to stay as far from it as possible; the accumulation of commerce was an unnecessary distraction for dogs—and there were too many things to dodge. Once I was cleared to work unaccompanied, I quickly found myself seeking out routes that both killed time and combined elements that dialed down my attention to its passing. Back alleys and their carriage houses. The path from Park Road up through the woods on the edge of the park, to Ingleside Terrace. Crossing south through the neighborhood by way of Adams Mill Road, the audible cadence of joggers in the park and the chatter of monkeys echoing out of the National Zoo. My walks, lacking any destination beyond where I began, became occasions for exploration.

  I discovered that Mt. Pleasant is a sort of peculiar neighborhood for D.C. Unlike most, its borders are somewhat clear, in a manner that makes it actually feel distinctive. Architecturally, it’s not altogether novel for the District; late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century row houses cluster around its core in its eastern half. As it slopes west into the woodsy valley terrain of Rock Creek Park and the backside of the zoo, two-story World War II–era houses dominate, with the occasional apartment building wedging upward. To the same extent that residences lean into the park, the park appears to bleed east. There’s a sleepy feel. Free boxes appear on sidewalks; a cloistered, communal culture abounds.

  The neighborhood’s northernmost point is effectively Oak Street; a short, cul-de-sacked, tree-canopied stretch useful only for accessing the residences packed along its length. Beyond Oak, separated by a wooded, eastward-jutting leg of the park sits the neighborhood of Sixteenth Street Heights—a yawning, more suburban-feeling area of the city dotted with freestanding homes, a smattering of religious spaces, and negligibly little commercial anything. It’s notable for little more than being a corridor in and out of the Maryland suburbs.

  The southern and eastern borders of Mt. Pleasant are Harvard and Sixteenth Streets NW, respectively. At the far corner of the intersection sits All Souls, a Unitarian outpost whose bell tower was once an audible feature of public life, often used to signal various city events. In December of 1859, it rang to memorialize militant antislavery insurgent John Brown on the day of his execution. It never rang again. East of Sixteenth one finds Columbia Heights, once a poor and working-class neighborhood so neglected it didn’t even have a stop on the city’s Metro until the end of the 1990s. (An upgrade almost certainly made to set the table for real-estate developers, circling like vultures.) The 1968 riots that erupted at the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. torched much of Fourteenth Street NW, which runs through the center, and it was largely left that way for the next four decades.

  The Columbia Heights Metro station now sits in the shadow of a massive shopping complex that boasts a Target, Best Buy, IHOP, and other chain outlets. Towering above it to the east are comparably sized luxury condominium behemoths, the ground floors home to wine shops, Starbucks, Five Guys Burgers and Fries, and other gaudy signatures of staggering, breakneck gentrification. In the course of roughly three years, the neighborhood transformed in such a way—with such skyward density—that returning residents from only five years prior would neither recognize it, nor have much luck navigating themselves out by way of visual reference points. This “revitalization” metastasized north into Petworth; home to the Peter Maurin collective house of the Catholic Worker—a national antiwar/antipoverty m
ovement founded by Catholic anarchist Dorothy Day, as well as the highest murder rate for sex workers in the District the summer of ’98. It also crept east through working-class residential blocks toward Howard University, and south beyond U Street; once known as the District’s “Black Broadway.” Now, mostly tapas bars saddled by high-end condos, blocks from Frederick Douglass’s former home.

  Meanwhile, Mt. Pleasant sat nestled in its own little world, figuring as a sort of lunar sibling to the Adams Morgan neighborhood to its south and west. Much like the neighborhoods surrounding Columbia Heights, Adams Morgan remains inaccessible by the Metro system. For a number of decades, this kept its real estate affordable, and its proximity to the gay scene in Dupont Circle made for a sort of bohemian culture. In the sixties and seventies, it was the site of marches in support of the black liberation movement. The following two decades, it was a mainstay of the District’s legendary punk scene. Pioneering hardcore and straightedge outfit Minor Threat played their first show in the living room of a house on Calvert Street. YouTube videos abound of Bad Brains—the band that inspired everyone from Minor Threat to the Beastie Boys—playing Madam’s Organ, on Eighteenth Street NW. House shows in the neighborhood continued well beyond 2000, even as rents rose and professionals pushed in, priced out of other, more desirable corners of the District. Eighteenth Street NW was and continues to be a somewhat unrivaled nightlife destination (though its texture and demographics have shifted), peppered with bars and food flagging disparate international geographies, while Columbia Road unfurls east toward Columbia Heights, with its own mix of commercial and residential life.

  By contrast, and unlike many other neighborhoods in the northwest quadrant of the District, Mt. Pleasant wasn’t much of a destination for anyone who didn’t live there, and it appeared mostly unaffected by what swirled around it. Its main corridor sat at a sort of random, awkward northwest–southeast angle in relation to the gridded network of streets with which it intersected, and accessing the neighborhood from the south, by car, required an unwieldy left-then-right dogleg west by way of Sixteenth and Harvard. In short, there was no passing through Mt. Pleasant. One was either coming or going. The vectors by which the unfolding gentrification of adjacent neighborhoods might’ve bled in were too circuitous and inhibiting; half of them bounded by woods. That buffer allowed for an unlikely calm, given the location, as well as a class and ethnic diversity unseen in most parts of the United States, to say nothing of the District, itself.

  My walks weaved past longstanding collective houses with deep roots, held down by activists and artists. The Harvard Street House, long an organizing base around a host of global justice movements. The Lamont Street Collective, established in the mid-1970s by John Acher, a mainstay of the D.C. Socialist Party, and the neighboring house where many an activist fundraising party went down. My own newfound home on Seventeenth Street NW, Casa del Ajo—a collective with a tenure rivaling Lamont Street’s, and the collective house around the corner on Kilbourne, a frequent space for meetings and protest-puppet construction for the spring 2000 actions against the IMF and World Bank, bought by a web developer who’d managed all tech coordination involved. A stone’s throw away, in a clandestine space, Radio CPR—Mt. Pleasant’s own bilingual pirate radio station broadcasted illegally on 97.5 FM. A few blocks to the north was Community Garden Co-op, a community-run health-food cooperative administered democratically (and illegally) by residents for more than a quarter century. I barely knew the names of the businesses along Mt. Pleasant Street, the neighborhood’s main corridor, but the grid of insurgent culture had imprinted itself on me.

  More than a decade before my arrival in the neighborhood, a house on the corner of Nineteenth Street and Park Road (a block from where I first interviewed for my job), known colloquially as “The Embassy,” had quietly staged enormous interventions on popular culture. Chief among them was the Nation of Ulysses, a heavily soul-influenced punk outfit that lived and rehearsed and occasionally recorded there. Their debut album 13-Point Program to Destroy America had greeted early nineties punk rock like an IED. Song titles included “A Kid Who Tells on Another Kid is a Dead Kid,” and the sound hijacked the raw sexuality of James Brown, shoving it down the throat of hypermasculine, self-serious late-eighties hardcore. The band favored dissonance and chaos punctuated by snare-heavy staccato over the metal-crossover sound gaining popularity in the hardcore scene—and pompadours and close-fitting suits over long-codified punk fashion. Everything about them was a “fuck you”; a throwback to the very disruptions proposed by the Situationists, including the curve ball thrown by their charismatic singer, Ian Svenonious, lying about his age to win the title of Sassy magazine’s first “Sassiest Boy in America.” “The reason I entered the contest is to indoctrinate youth gone astray,” he told The Washington Post. “There are so many kids dressing like Grateful Dead people. It’s kind of tedious.” Explaining his selection, Sassy seemed to try to channel Nation of Ulysses’s own tendency toward frontal assault, with awkward results. “As soon as we opened Ian Svenonius’s entry to our Sassiest Boy in America Contest, we just knew,” they wrote. “The way you know it’s time to change your tampon.”

  While I shouldn’t have been, I was surprised when Ian and I crossed paths just outside the neighborhood, both of us walking dogs. He worked for a different agency, but we frequented the same newly opened vegan bakery in Adams Morgan between walks, and our schedules somehow synced up such that we saw each other and contrived attempts at shoptalk, almost daily, for a time. By then, Sassy had long since discovered his ruse, and revoked his award. Even years later, one couldn’t help but admiringly chuckle at the fact that he’d thought to pull such a prank, much less that he’d managed such a brilliant satirical coup in the process. And in that same historical moment, Nation of Ulysses had radically altered the contours of punk, and by extension, mainstream music; their sonic and visual aesthetics found their way as far up the food chain as MTV. Sweden’s garage rock export, The Hives, who were practically impossible not to hear on the radio or in a commercial a full ten years after Nation of Ulysses’s debut, were a naked derivation to anyone who’d heard 13-Point Plan to Destroy America. Further, The Embassy had served as a sometimes home to folks who would go on to become Bikini Kill—the band at the eye of the storm that became the riot grrrl movement; a women-led, feminist expropriation of punk rock’s liberatory potential. Early zines from the movement were rumored to have been produced in The Embassy’s living room. Punk culture and feminism were never the same.

  This insurgent, rebellious current within the neighborhood—particularly its punk manifestations—had roots many seemed to have forgotten. During its “Dirty War” period, refugees fleeing to the United States from El Salvador landed in a number of cities, D.C. being their second most frequent destination. Many of them settled in Mt. Pleasant. The brutal Salvadoran regime at the time was a client state of the United States, so there was no humanitarian crisis in El Salvador that the State Department was willing to acknowledge, which meant that refugee status was not on offer. Thus, the Salvadoran population concentrating in the neighborhood was largely undocumented. This had predictable results.

  Extended families crammed into one- and two-bedroom apartments, frequently subjected to unannounced INS raids. Contractors would prey on the neighborhood, hiring desperate, undocumented day laborers simply for their lack of recourse to any legal protections—often with the promise of pay that never materialized. Cops were cops, engaging in the sorts of harassment and excessive force communities of color typically report, a pattern exacerbated by a lack of Spanish-speaking officers. Meanwhile, scant immigrant household resources were being sent home to help spring other family members from the very war the United States was actively funding. By the time the nineties rolled around, tensions were boiling.

  On May 5, 1991, a rookie cop attempted to arrest a Salvadoran man for disorderly conduct following Cinco de Mayo festivities in Adams Morgan. Somehow, the man was shot and left pa
ralyzed. Worse, he’d been shot while handcuffed, and as news of it circulated, Mt. Pleasant exploded. Hundreds of young people took to the streets, attacking cops. Footage from the events shows running street battles, police cruisers torched, and nominal looting. The unrest intensified throughout the night, diffused only by rain as the sun rose. City negotiations with local community figures failed to bottle a second night of clashes, as did the arrival of some one thousand riot police. For a second night, hundreds of black and Latino youth fought cops in the streets. Tear gas was fired. City buses were set ablaze. Ultimately, the mayor declared a state of emergency and a 7 p.m. curfew was imposed on the neighborhood, as well as Adams Morgan and Columbia Heights. In the end, some fifty people had been reported injured—mostly cops. More than sixty police vehicles had been damaged in some fashion, some destroyed completely. In a twist quite at odds with punk politics, which often figured as little more than posturing, residents of The Embassy—in particular, members of the Nation of Ulysses—were storied participants in the uprising; fighting cops alongside their neighbors.

  It was impossible for me not to hear these histories coming out of the walls as I looped my way through Mt. Pleasant. And it thus became a completely different place to me than what bus routes, city talking points, or “Business Improvement Districts” would have presented. Further, walking neighborhoods day in and day out meant an intimacy with my world from the bottom up. The moving parts of daily life at the ground level began to feel far more interesting, textured, and vibrant than even the abstractions and aspirations that animated my downtime in organizing meetings and social movements.

  On some level, it was sobering. There is, after all, a certain religiosity and self-assuredness that binds people hunkered down on front lines where the cadence of police beatings and the user interfaces of far-flung horrors (usually United States–backed) meet. Faced with such lopsided odds, concise narratives and priorities dominate, and the allowances made for frivolity or joy typically conform to some orthodoxy or another. It owes more to a dispersed, affiliative notion of “community” than anything geographically immediate. More “Catholic community” than regulars at a corner café. At work, in that most days was less a tendency toward disingenuousness than tunnel vision. All of it was nothing if not earnest and well intentioned. The candor and lack of predictability in my encounters with dogs, people, places, and rhythms in my walking day grew more fascinating, felt notably less scripted, and frankly became easier to trust.