FLY FISHING WITH DARTH VADER by MATT LABASH

Author:MATT LABASH
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2010-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

A RAKE’S PROGRESS

Marion Barry Bares (Almost) All

Let me live in a house by the side of the road,

Where the race of men go by;

The men who are good and the men who are bad,

As good and as bad as I.

—from Sam Walter Foss’s “House by the Side of the Road,” the first poem Marion Barry recited in church as a boy

In most conceptions of Washington, D.C., the city operates on Eastern Standard Time. But those who pass through Marion Barry’s orbit know there’s another zone, which has nothing to do with the mean solar time of the seventy-fifth meridian west of the Greenwich Royal Observatory. It’s called “Barry Time.” The former four-term mayor of D.C. will show up for speeches, meetings, and civic events whenever he damn well pleases.

This translates into many minutes, even hours, of waiting for Barry to appear. So after being slated to hang out with Barry for several days, I am surprised to receive a call from his spokesperson, Natalie Williams, two days before we’re supposed to meet.

“Mr. Barry wants to start early,” Natalie informs me. “He wants you to come to church with him tomorrow.”

“Great,” I say. “What time does church start?”

“Eleven a.m.,” she says.

“Okay. And what time should I meet him before church?” I ask.

“Eleven-thirty,” she responds with complete seriousness.

Barry, now in his second postmayoral term as a councilman representing the city’s poorest ward, is these days something less than a political powerhouse, but my interest had recently been rekindled in the man universally known as one of the two or three finest crack-smoking politicians our nation has ever produced. A 1990 FBI sting yielded grainy video of Barry holding a crack pipe to his lips that was broadcast around the world (launching a booming “bitch set me up” T-shirt industry), and his name became a late-night comic’s rim shot, especially as he won one more mayoral term in 1994 after serving six months in jail.

Now, after a relatively dormant postmayoral period of local politicking, serial brushes with the law, health and taxman problems, with the occasional drug relapse, Barry seemed to be enjoying a renaissance for both good and bad reasons. The good, for him, has come in the form of a balanced, years-in-the-making documentary called The Nine Lives of Marion Barry, now in regular rotation on HBO. It traces Barry’s arc from an idealistic, dashiki-wearing civil rights activist, through his rise and fall as mayor, to his current redemptive plateau period, a life that has made him the singular figure in the history of D.C.’s municipal politics.

The bad came this past Fourth of July weekend, when Barry was arrested for “stalking” his former girlfriend Donna Watts-Brighthaupt after an argument they’d had on the way to Rehoboth Beach. She changed her mind about the trip and returned to D.C., flagging down an officer when Barry was allegedly pursuing her in his car. The stalking charge looked like an honest lover’s tiff, amounted to nothing, and was quickly dropped.

In typical Barry fashion, however, there were baroque touches that gave the story national oxygen.

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