As a rule I did his early ordering, a result of all the years we'd been doing this together. I would ask him beer or whiskey, or on this close August night, gin.

He would nod or frown or shrug, and he was usually thoroughly trashed by the time he began talking. This particular time it took several rounds of gin rickeys before the oracle finally spoke. When it did, it rumbled forth with such petulance I had to wonder why the words took so long to come out. And if they meant what I thought they did.

Another of the city's disappeared had wandered in from the unreasoning D.C. humidity to cadge a few smokes off the philanthropists at the bar. He didn t make it past the third millionaire before Benny, the Algerian national who owned the place, came blasting out of the kitchen in his fox skin hat and chef's apron, and offered to show him the door. Benny was particular about elbow room and had been known to refuse service even to those of agile means and thirst with no more explanation than, "We're closed." It endeared him to his regulars. In the struggle Benny's prized hat got knocked to the floor.

I jumped off my stool and retrieved it before donating my cigarettes to this unfortunate and easing him back outside. I didn t want Benny taken down again for roughing up street republicans. The INS was on his case as it was. One more time and he stood to lose his green card, to the chagrin of us all. He ran one of the few remaining neighborhood bars in Adams Morgan. And we locals were as eager to protect his green card as he was.

When I returned to my stool Van Etten muttered, "It is easier to have someone removed than reasoned with."

"What?" I asked him, although I'd heard him clearly enough.

After a long pause, he said, "Sherry s having an affair." He let these words hang out there in the blue smoke all on their own as though they carried no specific gravity. Which of course they did. Sherry was his wife.

His voice rumbled and he sounded pissed off and sad. Like he wanted to do something about it but couldn't.

I looked at him while he stared down his drink, then looked away. Van Etten talked about his wife the way old people talk about their health. I swear he stayed with her just to keep himself in a bad mood.

I liked his wife a lot, introduced them in fact, and still got along with her okay, even though bad marriages force everyone to take sides. From the start their match had not been heaven-made. Quite the opposite. It hadn't been marriage in the traditional sense. It had been full blown, technicolor capitulation.

"I've known about it for some time. She stopped by the studio today," Van Etten continued. "She couldn't hide it. She denied it, but I know better."

"If you know better then why don't you leave her? You make each other miserable."

He looked at me sullenly. If all artists need to be depressed in order to be creative then here's a vote for kitsch.

We talked for a while. And drank a little more. He was so upset he didn t notice I was matching him blow for blow, falling off the wagon with a loud thud. It had been a year since I d so much as sniffed an empty glass. Eventually, he looked at me with some degree of recognition and said, "Anyway, happy birthday."

"My 135th least."

"Is that why you're drinking?"

"Not exactly."

This hadn't been the world's most auspicious occasion. I d lost my job earlier in the day. The job that thrilled me, defined me, dragged me down, and ruthlessly preoccupied me had gone away never to return. And there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I was superannuated and I knew it. From the time I dropped out of college at age 19 right up until this morning, I'd been a police reporter for D.C.'s greatest newspaper. I did "night cops," as we say in the biz, plugged right into the city's guts. But no longer. I cleaned out my desk and left.

I'd seen it coming. They d been turning down my requests for leave to complete my bachelor's. I was hoping to qualify one day for a Neimann Fellowship. Instead, I found myself training a pointy-nosed Ivy Leaguer -- at two-thirds my age, half my salary, and utterly ingenious with verbs. I never claimed to be a great writer, or even a good one, I'd told my managing editor as he was letting me go. What an insidious phrase that is! But over the years I'd developed more sources than I would ever use and this bird would ever get turned down by. There was nothing on my beat I couldn't find out. You d think that would matter. It didn't.

It failed to register at all -- and I was a goner. New sources are always available for the stroking. I mentioned Al Lewis who knew everybody and who phoned in all his stories from the cop shop because he was essentially illiterate. But this ploy was worthless. When you re gone, you re gone.

And why was that? Simple. D.C. was not recession proof after all. Advertising lines were down. Company stock had dropped more than 130 points. And the message from the eighth floor was loud and clear: Cut, cut and cut again. Well, shit. Suddenly it turned out my life wasn't recession proof either.

My glass, as they say, was half empty. In commemoration, I surrendered myself to the demon. Once again I was on my way toward fulfilling my familial destiny -- successive generations of drunkards, excuse me, alcoholics. I also came from the middle class. But let us not split hairs. Whatever you called us, I came from a long wavy line of those who suffered from an affinity for firewater.

Right about then I was petrified about my future and in danger of making a point of it.

After Van Etten and I closed Benny's, I found my way home and tried unsuccessfully to get the code right. When I realized I was using variations of the personal identification number for my bank card and was too tanked to come up with another cogent set of numbers, I gave up and sat down on the front stoop. I knew eventually I would be able to worm my way in. In the meantime, I learned a lesson about my earlier generosity to the street republican. I craved a cigarette and no one was passing by.

Cigarettes, alcohol, coffee: they were all part of the same miserable daisy chain that I now needed to break all over again.

Late night traffic in buildings such as these was not at all uncommon, nor was it especially noteworthy. A while later a woman slinked out the door past me, hiding her face. I caught the door with my toe and slid inside trying not to care that she had stopped, given me a horrified look and taken off down the street. Everybody's running scared these days.

There was a busybody from upstairs who had escorted her down to the door. He was squat and short of hair on the top of his round head and flew into a canary-like song and dance as I went by. "Stranger on the hall. Stranger on the hall," he tweeted, flapping his arms and taking a step toward me before thinking twice and retreating to the stairwell.

At first I didn't know he was referring to me. Until glancing around I saw that the hall was mysteriously devoid of strangers.

I attempted to explain to him that I lived here but this only heightened his anxiety. "Stranger on the hall," he repeated. throwing a little shuffling routine into his dance.

Meanwhile, my bed was calling me.

When I turned away toward my apartment, he felt emboldened enough to follow at a discreet distance shouting out his warning. His high-pitched outcry was sharp enough to pierce the skin of the building's hard old walls. He was joined in short order by the night watchman who wasn't interested in my explanations either. He was a large man and was making ready to lay hands on me when my door opened and Kalle appeared at the threshold.

"Tell him I live here," I said to her. She smiled at the watchman. He returned the courtesy and backed off.

Kalle, the lithe one, my vision in kalichrome, with freckles that fell across the bridge of her nose and scattered like mist below her eyes, was forever dreaming up excuses to wear my clothes. Tonight she was wearing my only dress shirt. The one with the french cuffs that covered her hands, and the fraying collar partially hidden beneath her hair. Nightclubs made her clothes smell, she told me.

I threw an arm around her and we waltzed inside as though we had spent the evening that way. I had been so preoccupied I d forgotten all about our date. In the bedroom, the answering machine was blinking away. I set it on rewind. "Dennise," she said in that wonderful way she had of speaking English, "I will make you a coffee."

I lay on the bed and dropped an arm across my face.

"I know you're unhappy right now because of your job," she continued. "But it will be better soon, you ll see. Things will work out for you." Ah, the optimism of youth. Actually though, I was a pretty lucky fellow having someone like her around. It would be my own fault if I couldn't effect some serious re-evaluation here. Seize the day, as they used to say.

The tape chirped along obsequiously in reverse. There were many messages. And I noted with vague concern that I didn't care a fig for any of them.

"Dennis, why don't you buy a new answering machine? This one makes you sound like a cartoon. There's a sale on Saturday. I read this. I'll come along with you."

"Does that mean I have to eat pizza with you afterwards?"

"It's the only way I can get you to have lunch with me."

"That's not true and you know it."

She flipped the recorder to playback and left the room. "I prefer my pizza cold and in the morning," I called after her.

The messages warbled on at self-conscious length. My editor wanted to meet for drinks. Now, the bastard would try to sweet talk me out of my sources. Fat chance. The very next message was from my old pal Bachinski, the narc down in 3-D, D.C.'s Shaw area, the scene of race riots, desperate drug dealers, and now wrought iron yuppie integration. He was urging me to give him a call no matter how late. The bust they put on the other day had been my last A-1 story. Usually you get accolades for making the front page. What I got was fired.

Bachinski figured to be looking to turn his share over as quickly as possible. That s what I liked about him. He was always trying to sell me drugs so he could get something on me. He figured it would make us more or less even. Oh well, his calls would taper off as my byline faded into microfilm oblivion.

Then bang-bang, the gossip columnists from the City Paper and Washingtonian wanted to talk to me. Looking to trash my paper. How had they found out already? What did they care? I hadn't exactly been on the fast track and I'd never brought suit against the paper for discrimination. How could I? We re talking pure-bred WASP male here.

These calls caught me the wrong way and I rolled over to cut them off. I would hear the rest in the morning when I was in a more receptive frame of mind. The tone sounded and another voice sneaked in ahead of me. "Kak, this is Dad. I think somebody's trying to kill me."