Mid-70's

Saturday. You'd start off in very early evening, kinda slow. Driving up 14th Street past the strip joints and the first shift of hookers to the Iguana Club for tea, folk music and Paul Simon imitations. Parking the car was an adventure because you never knew if it'd be there by the time you got out. After that, you'd move Southwest, mood, whim and instinct would direct you - maybe Foggy Bottom and the Red Lion or Tammany Hall (with all of the barflys from GWU, angling for free drinks for a smile); or Downtown to the Exchange, or the Aeroplane. And then, hours later, there'd be Gtown. Oh, there'd be the usual parking space roulette, (at which my friend Edmund was the Master at winning), but eventually you'd find a spot, and then it might be a stroll along the canal before a direct assault on Clyde's, or Mr. Henry's, Pall Mall's, or a half dozen drinking holes now forgotten. But my fave was Guncher's - zombies for $2 and antique arcade games that only a drunk could win.
Like the beginning, the end of the evening was preordained, at around 2AM it was to the much beloved and missed Cafe de Paris. Last Call and the finest food in town. French fries, (really potato wedges), marinated in Worcester sauce and wine; french onion soup so thick you could pave a roadbed with it, pastries whose memories alone can cause my heart to seize up, and a steak tartar* that I still have fevered dreams over. Amazing. There has never been a finer way to salute a full night of debauchery and excess.
At last, we'd head home. Poorer - but Richer. A few hours sleep and then back on the hunt - to Old Town to Maison de Crepes. Escargot crepes with triple sec on shaved ice, (NOT cubed), would give one the physical and spiritual strength to face another day.
With the exception of Clyde's, I'm pretty sure all of these places are gone. I've not even been in most of those neighborhoods for years, (Old Town excepted). Steak tartar is practically illegal. And the closest I've come to a zombie in decades was in watching some old horror movies, and triple sec, with or without shave ice, is a distant memory. Parking in Gtown is no longer chance - it's impossible. 14th Street is cleaned up. The streets roamed are only in my memory. A small slice of life buzzing between some greying synapses. Me and Peter Lorre....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM7LR46zrQU


*True story - I was down at William & Mary on my ill-fated academic career, and was telling some of the folks there about the fries and steak tartar. I got so inspired in the telling that I left, bagging the rest of that week's classes and drove the 150miles home to partake.
Well, I did way it was ill-fated...