She took a shortcut through Montrose Park, the city dissolving into a distant hum as sun began to set along its footpaths. Another tedious week of temp work behind her bouncing between D. C. law offices, she headed down Wisconsin Avenue to the White Tower diner counter for sliders, then walked home to wash away the guilty pleasure lingering in scents of onion and ground beef and to sprawl across the studio apartment sofa bed—a young woman living small in a big town. This muggy August evening, however, had other plans.
A thunderous roar of Hells Angels’ motorcycles bombarded the street. One leapfrogged his Harley over the curb onto the sidewalk, blocking her way, grabbing at the hem of her skirt in a “Me Tarzan, You Jane” moment. The burly beady-eyed man sporting a Prospect pledge patch shouted: “You’re mine, Property,” said it as if Property were her name.
Terrified by this biker who seemed hopped up on meth, she hotfooted it into the Georgetown Inn as he revved his bike repeatedly. Afraid he’d enter the lobby, and he did, she huddled inside a vintage telephone booth. A bellhop and housekeeper stood frozen as he circled them before wheeling his way out, as she slipped into an open elevator and got off to hide in a stairwell—heart racing, stomach knotted, hands trembling.
A housekeeper, who had been caught in the middle of the lobby high jinks, let her into a vacant room. Too frightened to take the dimly lit cobblestone way home, she stayed fixed to a chair to watch through the window the line of motorcycles at Mr. Henry’s, determined not to become angelized by that man—beaten or terrorized into submission—as so many women notoriously were by Hells Angels.
As abruptly as their thunder broke the night’s earlier quiet, it did again, this time its convoy turning onto M St. toward Key Bridge, hooting and hollering as they popped wheelies. With them her bogeyman disappeared—gone, until hiking through a park; gone, until eating alone in a diner; gone, until walking a dark street home; gone, until hearing a rustling outside a hotel room; gone until an engine starts revving in an outpost in her head—angelized.