Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
A Night at Ben’s Chili Bowl
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
Serving as the only teacher on my school district’s legislative advocacy committee, I am in Washington, D.C. to lobby Congress for more money for schools. Basically, I am nagging anyone who will listen. I make the point that teachers and parents turn out at election time.
After a frustrating day of political doublespeak, I want the solitude that I know I can find at Ben’s Chili Bowl. Sometimes the safest place to hide is in a crowd, and Ben’s is always crowded.
Unlike dissembling legislators, I take a firm stand on The Chili Question. I dislike chili—its taste and its texture. I always vote against ordering myself a chili hot dog.
I like a half-smoke, a local delicacy native to the D.C. area. It’s larger, rounder, thicker than a hot dog. The meat more coarsely-ground. Spicier. Half-pork, half-beef. Smoked, then grilled on one of Ben’s gigantic cast iron griddles. I take mine with mustard and finely chopped onions, nothing else.
Schools and chili dogs aside, Washington is filled with perfectly normal-looking people pretending to be someone else. Spies and counterspies. Once I heard an FBI agent tell an audience that he shadowed Russian diplomats to IKEA and Costco in case an ‘accidental’ contact with an American official occurred.
Espionage and counterespionage are the tradecraft of Washington. Behind the walls of 175 embassies and international cultural centers, secrets are stored, stolen and traded. Some are cooked up and served in misinformation campaigns.
In some large and small ways, we are all spies. We all have secrets and secret lives. We are all pretenders about something. By pretending, we avoid getting hurt by the truth—the truth about ourselves, about our friends, our futures, our realities.
At Ben’s, a man in his mid-fifties shuffles his way in my direction. He wears a dark greyish wool fedora and collared polo shirt with alternating red and grey horizontal stripes.
Without asking, he sits down opposite me, leaning tight against the table as if owns it. Settling into his chair, he squares his back to the door.
He tells me he is a postman and Ben’s is on his route. He says he is a regular. Part of the furniture, he says.
Intentionally, or so it seems to me, he is making us look like friends catching up on the latest news or perhaps chewing over renaming the Washington Redskins. He doesn’t volunteer a name.
His monologue is hypnotic. His voice has a paced, unfolding quality as if he is measuring out his magnetism. Within minutes, I am his verbal prisoner, incapable of silencing him.
Without looking around, Mr. Fedora seems to sense the room. I think he might be waiting for someone.
A memory of an uncle creeps into focus. He made a habit of slipping in and out of my childhood with stories and gifts, but only talked with me at family gatherings. Even as a kid, I realized I was being used as cover. He was avoiding my parents whose politics he despised.
Activating a ploy I used to escape my uncle, I nod in the direction of the bathroom. At the back of the diner, past the storage area, I quick-step out into the alley and then lose myself down the steps of the nearest metro station.
I too know something about tradecraft. Every kid does.
