got to know Joe Martinson when he was a bartender at a wild, short-lived, tiny dance bar near Chinatown aptly called the Crawlspace. At the time his trademark was cotton oxford shirts, the sleeves of which he tore off and fashioned as headbands. The bar was always sweatsoaked and to capacity with drunks, and opened at about the time that slam-dancing had a brief run of popularity in D.C. The slamming eventually closed it down, when some Potomac preppies came in for “the experience,” walked out with bloody noses, and sued the owners. But for one hot, lunatic summer, that had been the place to go.
“Nick,” he said, and shook my hand. He was wearing black pants with a tuxedo shirt and a black bow tie. Though working out had heavied him up in the chest and shoulder department, he looked less tough than in his earlier, wiry incarnation. “What are you doing here?”
“I should be asking you that, Joe.”
“A bar is a bar,” he said, “and anyway, that scene is over with. I wouldn’t fit in if it were happening.”
“Yeah, but this place?”
“If I remember right, you were some kind of art major in college, Nick. I’ve seen your ads in the Post, and let me tell you, you cut out pictures of television sets very artistically.” We laughed uneasily.
“How about a shot,” I said, “and pour one for yourself.”
“Sure, Nick,” he said, and looked at me as if I didn’t need one. I looked over the railing to one of the bars near the dance floor. McGinnes was standing very close to a girl twenty years his junior, talking to her with his mouth very nearly on her ear. Her companion, a pretty young blond boy with a wedge haircut wearing a white mock turtleneck, was standing on the other side of her gripping a beer bottle, angry but timid nonetheless.
Joe Martinson pushed a shot glass towards me and picked up his own. I looked in my glass and then up at him.
“Bourbon,” he said.
“Rail?”
He frowned an of-course-not and said, “Grand-Dad.”
We did the shots, and I finished my beer before placing the glass back on the bar. A couple walked by me, whispered to each other, and chuckled. Martinson slid a fresh Bud in front of me and I took it by the neck.
They were playing some Pet Shop Boys now and the dance floor was packing up. Lee was with a group of friends at one corner of the floor, pointing up at me and smiling. I raised my beer to them, and one of them laughed and said something to Lee, who winked at me, then turned back to her friends.
I fished the photographs out of my jacket pocket and put the graduation picture on the bar, pushing it towards Joe Martinson.
“You recognize this guy?” I asked.
“No,” he said without thought.
“How about this one?” I placed the doctored, bald-pated photo of Jimmy Broda on the bar. He looked it over and shook his head.
“I don’t know him. What’s his story?”
“A runaway I’m trying to locate. I think he’s hanging with skinheads. Thought you might have seen him.”
“Not in this place. They don’t even let those guys through the door anymore, after they came in one night and pushed some gays around. That was one time I took the side of the bouncers here.”
“Where would they hang out?”
“Depending on who’s playing, either the Snake Pit or maybe the Knight’s Work on Eleventh, in Southeast. But they’ve pretty much stopped going to the Knight’s Work—the Marines down there were kicking the living shit out of those guys on a regular basis.”
“You know any names, people I should be talking to?”
“Not a one, Nick.”
I put the photos in my jacket and looked back over the railing at the floor below. I noticed some movement from the right side of the room. A bouncer was pushing through the crowd, heading for the main bar. The DJ had begun spinning the twelve-inch version of Big Audio Dynamite’s “Hollywood Boulevard.”
I looked to the center of the bar. McGinnes had his hands on the blond boy’s chest, bunching up his turtleneck and breathing right up in the kid’s face. Martinson yelled something to my back as I moved towards the steps.
The stairs were a blur. I was on the dance floor, the strobe light stylizing the rapidly scattering partners as it synchronized its patterns with the song’s drum machine.
I was vaguely aware of large bodies converging from the left and right, and as