WHEN I MOVED TO WASHINGTON in the late 1980s, I was without a job; I saved face by calling myself a “freelancer.” And I had few friends; I found the next-best thing in bars. At 10 or so most weeknights, I’d walk down to the Blockhouse. I chose the place because it happened to be on the corner. But this was like choosing a horse at the county fair who turns out to be Secretariat. The Blockhouse was a temple of dedicated, rock-bottom, end-of-the-line dipsomania. They say excessive thirst affects all types—”from jail to Yale,” and all that. So on the one hand hanging around in bars is akin to mental illness. On the other, it’s considerably more varied and fascinating than people tend to grant. The Blockhouse regulars included a lawyer who had once argued cases before the Supreme Court (“but I hated the routine…’nother scotch?”), a 40-ish woman who’d written scholarly articles on Proust but been denied tenure around 1978 (she blamed—”hic!”—sexism, but claimed to find substitute teaching “more rewarding”), and a guy who’d drunk his way from being number three at a multinational corporation to being a “consultant” (a job description that, for him, served the same end that “freelancer” did for me). In short, most everybody there used to be someone really interesting. In the weeks before their stories got stale, they were all of them, each in his own way, delightful company. And then there was Ratface. Ratface was around 45 and came from Appalachia. He was, plain and simple, a psychopath. Back then, every other movie concerned someone with horrible memories of Vietnam who comes home, hallucinates, and shoots up a shopping mall. When Mrs. Proust said of Ratface “He’s a Vietnam vet,” she intended it to speak volumes. “Ratface” wasn’t one of those behind-the-back slurs. He actually answered to it. It had become not just his nickname but his name, and it was the kind of name you can carry only if you’re never in civilized company. How he had picked up that moniker was not exactly shrouded in mystery. He always sat alone and ordered the cheapest draft beer. Except when drinking, he’d stare directly into the suds, his eyes in a vicious squint. He looked afraid that the beer would dash out the front door if he relaxed his guard. His lips were constantly moving in a sputtering, angry whisper. You couldn’t tell what he was saying, but it had a lot of f-sounds in it. To the rest of us, he spoke only once an hour or so, always to interject something terrifying. If Mr. Lawyer and Mr. Consultant were discussing how Senator Whosis was on TV the other night, Ratface would snap his head up from the rim of his glass and say…very…slowly…”Sinnator Whosis bloangs in a shaller grave.” One night I was talking with Mrs. Proust when I got the sense that Ratface had awakened. Thirty feet down the bar, he was staring at me. His eyes were gleaming, almost as if he were challenging me to a fight. This was obviously a misimpression, I thought, since we’d never exchanged a single word, harsh or otherwise. But he clearly wanted something, so I walked down the bar to figure out what. “Hey,” I said, with a friendly smile. “Hey what?” Now his lips were pursed tight. “Well, sorry, I thought you were…em…trying to get my attention.” “Whadduf ah woz?” This was said in the spitting vengeful tones he usually saved for addressing his beer. There was no way to ignore his anger. “Em…,” I began, “I’d hate to think I’d done anything to upset you. Really, I’m a nice guy and—” As if that’s what mattered! A dozen years later I can still remember the sight of his bared, stained teeth as he spit out at me, “Ah hate nice guys!” I never went back to the Blockhouse, and that’s the end of the story. It’s a trivial episode in my life. It has risen into memory in the last three weeks, of course, only because of the attacks on the World Trade Center. Each of us, I imagine, is trying to come up with something in his own experience that would allow him to place this catastrophe under the rubric of the understandable. Unless you know a lot about Jonestown or Auschwitz, you won’t find it. It’s Ratface’s world now. Like most Americans, I’m out of my depth. The best I can do is dredge up a seconds-long confrontation that took place in the distant past, in a joint where dysfunction was the very merchandise. My conclusion: The kind of person who tries to convince a violent psycho that he himself is a “nice guy” is not going to be a good guide to the present situation. Our knee-jerk American response is to be nice, to search for some explanation of the hijackers’ actions at the moral level. Under today’s circumstances, such “explanations” are relativistic, cowardly, and obscene. The American instinct for niceness, if not exactly gone, is no longer sufficient as a guiding principle. It was a quality we always treasured in ourselves. But it turns out to have been as overrated as our dearest European friends warned us it was. It was merely another name for remoteness from evil. The world will miss it as much as we do.
