Afternoons in My Apartment
Afternoon, for as long as I can remember, has been the most special part of the day. Particularly on sunny warm days, afternoon has yielded disproportionately more memories than any other time—most notably Monday mornings. Having returned to DC to begin my filmmaking career in earnest, reconnect with my father, and soak up a bit more of my hometown before I go to wherever it is that I’m going to end up, I’ve rediscovered the light that made goodbyes so long when I was in “the fives” at the Columbia Road School. In those days, before we knew our last names and would call Martin’s mom ‘Mrs. Martin’ and Roberto’s mom ‘Mrs. Roberto’ the afternoon would beckon all day until we were competing to see who could swing the highest or jump the furthest. I’m willing to concede that part of it is the sentiment Richard Rodriguez refers to in his aptly titled The Hunger of Memory, but not so forgiving that I might refuse to believe what I feel now as strongly as ever—the afternoon light in DC is special. Even the afternoons in Barcelona, my home during my most triumphant year, and certainly one of the world’s most beautiful cities, do not quite stack up to DC’s. If I owned the cinematographer’s manual, it might be possible to look up color temperature statistics for DC afternoons and find a comparable match elsewhere on the globe—minus this empirical data, though, I’ll take it on faith that I’m going somewhere with this. Anyway, the cinematographer’s manual doesn’t have aesthetic evaluations of these things, just the numbers, baby.
My father’s apartment, on the ninth floor of the Woodner, provides an impressive view of the green that separates white from black in DC, Rock Creek Park, that is. Just an hour south of the northernmost southern city, Baltimore, Washington, DC shares with its neighbor just to the north, many remnants of old southern culture. Racism is not just in the gunsmoke of four officers’ 41 shots, but in architecture and in cities, and in the lush green that turns bright red in November as I switch from a windbreaker to a vest. Like Baltimore, DC’s urban chic bears a cached influence of ‘necks who drive in town to party on weekends, and whose calls to local radio shows give even the “new rock” stations a touch of the old south.
The over-pronounced letter “r”, however, is not limited to ‘necks, ‘bamas use it too. Derived from “Alabama,” the word ’bama is a part of the chocolate city slang, and is similar in use and meaning to the word nigga (as differentiated from the word nigger) in the black community—straddling the pejorative/term of endearment line with equal agility--though “you my bama,” just doesn’t sound right, and is never said. The DC accent, proliferated by those ‘bamas on dc’s identical yet competing black radio stations, seeks to pronounce the words “Maryland” and “area” as if the first “a” did not exist-- the mrrrrryland DC rrrrrea. “It’s a gang of ‘bamas in DC,” complained one radio host, perhaps unaware of the self-reflexivity of his words—translation, “There are a lot of us here.” Rock Creek Park, in a sense, separates the ‘bamas from the ‘necks, and all of the well meaning black and white folks whose education and income necessitate that they not know or associate with people who call themselves ‘bamas and ‘necks, but don’t want to live next to each other either. Recently, however, more and more white folks are living on this side of Rock Creek Park, as property values in the ‘hood skyrocket. The ‘bamas who used to live in these homes are selling and taking their fools’ gold all the way to Prince George’s County where the white folks used to live.
Because the apartment is above the trees, the rays of sunsets feel like they come in through the balcony at an angle parallel to the floor. Pillowy soft and orange, like all sunsets, the parallel light on the balconies on or above the ninth floor provide the perfect setting for drinking a beer, smoking a cigarette, or cursing out your boss after eight man-hours on the job. I usually imagine how far I could throw my bottle, spend a few seconds trying to find a pattern in the intermittent flashing of red lights on two distant radio towers, and if it’s dark enough, look for Venus, Mercury, or a satellite that might be floating just above the crown of trees that span the horizon. Those rays are a song I name in reference to a Bud Powell tune, How High the Moon--How Soft the Sun. I wear my sunglasses when sitting at my computer on afternoons so I can leave the blinds open.
“I just need to lamp,”
My friend B said once while we were in college. I had always wanted to use the word “lamp”—slang for chill—ever since I butchered it on the extra credit section of a geometry test in ninth grade, I’ll explain. The teacher would give a couple of extra points to whomever wrote the funniest answer to the last question on the test, reading them aloud for the class to hear. Since I had never used the word “lamp” myself, and had just learned it from a rap song, I had no business trotting it out in a room full of rich white kids, if but anonymously. After no one understood the joke, myself included, (“I’m jes lamping”—I don’t remember the question) I subconsciously put the word ‘lamp’ on my list of slang that I can’t use, until B said it in college. I laughed loudly, not because what he said was so funny, but because it was a defining moment in my life—I had survived my “civil war” years of white private schools, as B had too, and was finally around someone else who got it. I had arrived. And I too just needed to lamp. Lamping is not only one of my favorite activities on lazy afternoons, but one of a few things that I proudly proclaim myself as needing to do from time to time.
The lamps in the apartment make, perhaps, the strongest statement of the beauty of sunlight. These competitors modern man has invented to replace the sun in her nightly absence supplicate themselves to her beauty on afternoons. More like functional sculptures, lamps, and the unique shadows they throw are subtle reminders of man’s ultimate symbiosis with nature. Just as the afternoon light fades past the horizon I turn on the lamp that sits atop my father’s prodigious stereo system. The interplay of the weak lamp against what cinematographers refer to as the magic hour is quite a transition. The magic hour occurs for some 20 to 60 minutes just after the sun has fallen below the horizon, and before a major change in the outdoor lighting is noticed (or in the morning at an inversely proportional hour). Because there are no rays of sun to directly outshine the lamp, it would seem plausible that the lamp might actually affect the lighting of the room. Of course it does not, and it is as the magic hour fades that the 75 or so watts in the living room become relevant. Like the soft light craved by still photographers on overcast days, the magic hour provides the sunlit version of such, and is generally preferable for shooting the human face as it masks small imperfections in the skin. The magic hour is also that nostalgic time of day when the afternoon’s majesty bows to introduce the night’s black complexity.
Sometimes, when returning home, greeted by the luster of Kodak orange stripes of light crossing the dining room, living room, and coming to rest on my father’s awesome collection of records, I cross the confounding pattern of light with a brief grin before I start the routine--slippers, email, and the first beer of the night. On one such afternoon nearly a year ago, those beams and the open door to the balcony soothed whatever churning in my day that had brought me to that point—a) I was at home, and b) my father was probably grilling something for dinner. After the routine, I joined Pops for late summer barbecue. I had three beers in the fridge, and with the stressful day I’d had, I knew that a trip to the store, a trip I did not want to make, would be in order if I offered one to my dad and he accepted. Because he doesn’t drink, I also knew that my stash was likely not imperiled by a simple, if insincere, gesture. A quandary. Maybe it was the scent of the b-b-q, or those long fading strips of light. Maybe it was the latent aggressiveness I felt towards his religion before I changed my last name, or my constant want to reach out and pour what has become, sadly, mine. I pulled two Bud Lights from the fridge and headed out to the balcony. We sat and enjoyed cold beer, and later chicken just the way I like it—a little burnt. My first beer with my dad is a cornerstone event in my appreciation of DC afternoons, always will be.
[Washington, DC 2003]
