THE RED FOX & THE RED LINE: for Eric (& the other guys from Bethesda, MD)
Mark Sanders was baffled. He could not delete The Memory, a task he could perform easily with the shiny
BlackBerry Pearl 8100 that had accompanied him all the way from California to his native Bethesda. Of course The Memory was not digital; consciously he knew that as well as anyone in the cyber-world of 2009. But still–
Flesh and blood. Despite his logical turn of mind, Sanders kept seeing The Memory as a living thing. Never before had he felt this way. (Friends still called him Sanders the Skeptic). Something in the air? Crazy. From the moment he’d stepped onto the steep escalator at the Bethesda Metro station he feared the town where he’d grown up was about to destroy his sanity.
Red Lines, Blue Lines, dull gray stucco. Everyone got along without it when he was a kid. Would the damn thing never stop climbing? What lurked below the surface, now destroyed forever? Buried treasure. Maybe the bottle from his first Bud lay there in a pile of other trash. The nickel bag his friend Peter Begley had dropped one day and never recovered, the idiot. So what if he went to Harvard.
He, Mark Sanders, had the guts to go far away to Stanford.
The Memory became more vivid as he walked up Old Georgetown Road. Fairmont, that’s where it was. The Red Fox Inn on Fairmont between Norfolk and Old Georgetown. All he had to do was keep walking straight. But for some reason he turned left at his old elementary school (so big! so fancy!) and found himself on Arlington Road towards Bradley. Damn, the longer he walked the more urgent his wish to relive that lost moment, more than any other moments of 1976, the last year he had spent in Bethesda aside from sporadic visits to his parents who had long ago moved to Florida.
A few houses, a park. Could he actually be lost? Maybe he’d wandered into a futurist version of Arlington Road, a sort of parallel universe. Absurd. Hadn’t he just passed Bruce Variety and Bradley Drugs, the old barber shop? Exactly the same. But where was Maloney’s Concrete with its vast steel drums, the dreadful noise it spewed into the Super Giant which for some mysterious reason had moved to the opposite side of the street. And Lowen’s, where he and Peter had more than once stolen a few Hot Wheels cars . . . People’s Drugs. The shoe store in the Bradley Shopping Plaza, Trak Auto.
Stop, he ordered himself. It’s not 1978. Year of the
Bicentennial, Carter vs. Ford, Entebbe, Son of Sam, the Ramones. King Kong. Bob Dylan’s High Rain. Legionnaires Disease. The year he had graduated from Walt Whitman High School, almost 30 years ago. His first keg party, first speeding ticket. Nothing more than memories. No substance.
He shuddered despite the midsummer heat. Maybe The Memory was just as insubstantial as the rest. No, no, no.
Emmylou Harris was singing “Boulder to Birmingham,” her elegy to Gram Parsons, at the Red Fox, a shabby bluegrass “inn” on Fairmont St. That moment when he caught sight
of dark-haired Amanda in her sequined micro-mini skirt. If I thought I could see. I could see your face, Harris sang,
her long blonde hair swaying with the rhythm as if dancing. What a voice, both sad and twangy. Forget Emmylou, she was already too famous. But there was Amanda, who always snubbed him in Dr. Boyle’s English class, Amanda sitting in the next row with some preppy jock from the Whitman soccer team.
Stop it, Sanders, it was just a memory like Peter Begley’s bright blue Corvette Stingray (Peter’s father worked for the World Bank and it was rumored he had a mistress) and old Mrs. Quigg’s scream when he and Pete (accidentally) hit a baseball through her bedroom window on York Lane.
If he walked the other way he’d be back on Old Georgetown. Turn left, just a few more blocks. Mark Sanders’ urge to return to the Red Fox Inn had become so overwhelming he nearly got run over by a strange wooden vehicle called the Bethesda Connector. Amanda. Amanda Lucianna Delacorte. Finally he would capture Amanda from the greasy clutches of the soccer jock, carry her back to Marin County where he worked in fiber optics and lived with his two kids and his wife Jessica, a Walter Johnson graduate and a tort lawyer.
“Don’t go there,” Jessica had said. “ My sister went Back East last year and the changes were awesome. Just go to your conference in D.C.”
Never mind Jessica and her torts. No. He had to find the Red Fox. Never had he felt so driven in his life. Damn, where the hell was it? The Red Fox Inn, a wooden shack near a place that sold auto parts, famous for its bluegrass concerts, original home of the Seldom Seen; the place where Warner Brothers had offered Emmylou Harris her first recording contract; where Gram Parsons, King of American Cosmic, and Emmylou sang together until his tragic death; where the Country Gentlemen performed. But where the hell was it?
Fearing he had lapsed into dementia–that’s what happens when you go Back East, he could hear Jessica saying– he began to ask directions. A man with blue mirror sunglasses said “You crazy or something? We got no Red Foxes here.” Two young women wearing tight shorts and red spike-heeled sandals, each talking into her cell phone, just laughed. An older woman, her black LL Bean bag hanging from a shoulder, broke in. “Excuse me, but I think the Red Fox stood where Positano’s now stands. It was a pretty wild place in its day. You should try Positano’s. Great Italian food. We held my daughter’s wedding reception there. It’s just up the block.” She pointed to a large ivy-covered pseudo-Mediterranean restaurant with a turquoise awning and matching trim.
It had an outdoor area with round tables covered with white linen cloths; between the tables were topiary bushes and large flower pots. No, no. Mark leaned against a
railing and watched a middle-aged couple eating an enormous platter of sea food. They cracked open the mussels and clams with their fingers! What a bitch, that woman must have been putting me on. This absolutely couldn’t be the site of the Red Fox Inn. If it were, surely there would be a sign. Nothing except a poster advertising Banquet Rooms. Ah, I bet they incorporated the Red Fox somewhere inside, maybe an intimate room with old photos for special parties. Maybe it was upstairs. . .Where else would that wrought-iron staircase lead? Damn, its gate was locked. Those arched red and orange doors set back from the street…yes, the space in front of the center door, that must be the very spot where Sanders listened to “Boulder to Birmingham” and spotted Amanda. If I thought I could see, I could see your face. . .
But he couldn’t bring himself to go inside, stood staring at the beige bricks of a parking garage across the street. Another couple of lines from Emmylou’s song began playing inside his head: The last time I felt like this/ it was the wilderness and the canyon was on fire. He walked
aimlessly when suddenly he saw the Tastee Diner. A little spiffed up on the
outside, but nearly the same inside. Same jukeboxes at each booth, same
cantankerous waitresses, same smell of gravy. A dark-haired woman was
sitting nearby with two young kids.
“Amanda?”
The woman said nothing. He tried again, “Amanda
Lucianna Delacourt from Dr. Boyle’s English class?”
“You crazy? Get away from me. This place is full of wackos. Ever since the fire.”
Moving to another booth, he ordered a stack of pancakes, bread pudding, a plate of chicken fingers, and for dessert a slice of lemon pie whose meringue peaks tasted like chalk. The food hadn’t changed since he came
here with his buddies to sober up almost 30 years ago. He knew he had to take the Red Line back to D.C. and his conference, but first he stood up and sang to the drunks and waitresses and lonely old women and men his favorite line from “Boulder to Birmingham”: And the hardest part is knowing I’ll survive.
When he returned to the Metro he couldn’t find his Farecard. And had only a $50 bill in his wallet. The man in the booth said he couldn’t make change; Sanders had to find a bank. Or buy something at CVS.
So for the second time in his life Mark Sanders rode up the escalator into the streets of Bethesda.