When I was a child, the gargoyle drinkers would come swimming through the Press Club bar to grasp my father's hand and buy him drinks, or have him buy them. Sometimes my mother would be there at the Press Club, either in the small lounge off the front lobby that was known as the Tampax Room (because it admitted women) or in the (women-allowed) rear dining room, which I always hated, far in the back of the club, a sort of steerage, the equivalent of the back of the Maryland roadhouse where the blacks would do their drinking, begging drinks from the white bartender through the hole in the wall.

The men's bar had about it the twilight muzz of an alcoholic brain, a certain slow-motion depressive air. The gargoyles were men who had, I vaguely understood, lost their jobs as Washington correspondents for papers like the New Orleans Picayune but somehow managed to hold on to their Press Club memberships and to pay their bar bills. I suppose there was a much larger tribe of those who had lost their jobs and did not keep the bar privileges but faded and died as drunks do or else perhaps sobered up and were seen no more in the Press Club bar in any case.

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