This weblog is about AI search. That is the beat, and the beat has rules, and I am the one who made them. Today is Friday, and I am feeling extremely nostalgic today. This post breaks them on purpose: it is an obituary for a bar. Call it a Chris Abraham nostalgia dump—the first, if it is anything, of a boring series of brain downloads from someone who has aphantasia and SDAM: just one dude named Chris Abraham and his giant brain dump, for what it’s worth. I can’t picture that bar and I can’t replay it; a mind like mine doesn’t keep its past on tap, which is exactly why it gets written down in public. And it is a series, it just isn’t a series about Zack’s—if there are more dumps, they’ll range over the whole past, and Zack’s is simply this one’s subject. No promises about any of it. The tidier home for this material would be chrisabraham.com, but this site is the one called a weblog, after all, and a weblog is allowed its nostalgia dumps. Friday is for this.
Zack’s stood at 613 Pennsylvania Avenue SE, on Capitol Hill—Zack’s Restaurant & Bar, the name the way the directories carried it—in the neighborhood I lived in during the years this essay covers, and it has been gone a long time. Nobody wrote its obituary when it closed—nobody wrote anything: no closing notice, no farewell, no history. When this essay first went up, hours ago, it said there was no address in any record I could find, and no closing date. The address half of that was wrong, and it did not survive the afternoon: the address had been sitting in the period business listings all along, and the licensing record brackets the end. The dated sightings stop in 2005—a bar-crawl listing from around then and a novel from May of that year—and the next tenant’s voluntary agreement for the same premises, filed with the District’s liquor board, is dated March 31, 2006. So the end came somewhere in between, roughly 2005–2006, and nobody in print marked it. So this is late, and what survives is mostly what I kept myself: a name on a bar-crawl flyer, a novel, and a page I built out of the novel—plus, it turns out, a licensing trail and one pool column, which get their due below. Consider this the whole of it, assembled in one place at last: the bar, the lodge, the row, the room, the crew, the game, and the relic.
The center of the universe
To understand the world Zack’s sat inside, start at 330 Pennsylvania Avenue SE. That is Naval Lodge No. 4, my home lodge—my Blue Lodge. The building went up in 1894 and the lodge has met there since 1895; it is the oldest Masonic building in Washington still in Masonic use, and the lodge itself was chartered in 1805. The lodge room is on the fourth floor, and you reach it in a hand-operated elevator believed to be the oldest operating elevator in the District—a slow, deliberate ascent, which is the correct way to arrive at ritual. For a long time that building was the center of my universe on Capitol Hill.
I came to it from Hiram Takoma Lodge No. 10, my original lodge, which I demitted from properly and with full respect; Naval was the lodge I actually attended, the one that became home. And the center held: the building won a property-tax exemption in 2018 to keep it standing where it stands. The Lodge keeps its charter, its minutes, its archive. Institutions are built to be remembered by. Remember that; it matters at the end of this.
A tyled meeting ends the way it has ended for two centuries: the business is done, the door is opened, and the brothers ride down in the old elevator and go out into the night. And then they went to their own bars—and I want this stated plainly, because the first version of this piece got it wrong: the brothers did not go to Zack’s after meetings. Never. I think the Capitol Lounge is where the brothers would go afterwards: the Capitol Lounge, at 229–231 Pennsylvania Avenue SE, a block and a half down the avenue—Joe Englert’s place, cheap pitchers upstairs, a quieter martini-and-cigar bar in the basement, campaign memorabilia everywhere. It closed on September 20, 2020, after twenty-six years. The Tune Inn was the sometimes place. Zack’s was never on the lodge circuit at all. It was not even the lodge’s stretch of the avenue: Zack’s stood down at 613, toward Eastern Market. Directly opposite the Lodge, at 329, stood Hawk n’ Dove, and around it the whole bar row of that stretch of the avenue—but the row was my geography, not the lodge’s itinerary. The lodge had its bars. Zack’s was a separate sealed room that even the brothers’ bar circuit never touched.
The row
The row had a division of labor, the way a good street does. Hawk n’ Dove, at 329, was a mainstay—the registration point for the Capitol Hill Bunny Hop, the pub crawl that stitched the whole avenue together, and neighborhood furniture besides. The Little Pub was the same kind of furniture: unglamorous, reliable, there. Bullfeathers, Finn Mac Cool’s, the Ugly Mug, Kelly’s Irish Times—the crawl moved through them all, and so did we.
The Tune Inn, at 331, was my late-night place, part diner, part restaurant, part burger joint, and had been since the mid-90s or earlier. The address took the Tune Inn name in 1947, after earlier lives that included a Prohibition speakeasy, and it holds what is often cited as the second-oldest post-Prohibition liquor license in the District. Cheese fries and a last drink, at an hour when the rest of the avenue had gone dark. Hold the Tune Inn in mind, too: it is the row’s survivor, and we will come back to it.
But I ended up at Zack’s—the neighborhood room, and the pool, though let the record be exact about the pool: I was never part of the pool league. The league and the tour circuit existed at Zack’s: clubs traveled bar to bar, playing for awards, and the tour passed through the small dark room. I played pick-up pool only—the novel itself says it plainest: pick up pool, maybe a burger, and some bottles of Bud. I was a regular with a cue, not a league player. A bar you drift into is one thing. A bar where the tour passes through your neighborhood room, and the bartender stages your arrival, is another. Zack’s was home in the neighborhood sense, not the fixture-list sense.
And one correction the record should carry, because everything else about the place is reconstruction: Zack was a real man. The name was not a brand or a bit of signage poetry—Zack was a real dude, and the bar was a person’s name on his own place. I won’t invent him a surname or a biography; the archive doesn’t carry one, and this essay has made a discipline of not inventing what it cannot show. He gets what the bar got: his name, kept.
Small and dark
Hill Mole, the spy novel I began in 2005 in a basement apartment at 14th and A Streets SE, keeps returning to that room. One entry is simply titled “Zack’s is Small and Dark”:
“Zack’s is small and dark and people knew me from the neighborhood…So, after I pulled the documents onto the USB dongle on my keychain I took some time off and dropped by Zack’s for some pick up pool, maybe a burger, and some bottles of Bud.”
That is the whole establishment in one breath: small, dark, known, pool, burger, Bud. The novel is a book about surveillance and secret Washington, and its most honest sentences are about a bar.
Most nights, Zack’s was the last stop on a circuit, and the circuit explains the liturgy that follows. Work, work out, then Zack’s at nine or ten: I would leave work, train at the Washington Sports Club on Capitol Hill—the gym at 214 D Street SE, opened on February 16, 1981 as the Capitol Hill Squash Club, Elizabeth Taylor cutting the ribbon; the Washington Sports Club in my years; Balance Gym Capitol Hill since December 1, 2015—and then go drink with my buddies and play pick-up pool. I wrote about that gym at the time, too, and my own site still keeps a Washington Sports Club page from those years, FAQ and all. And for the record, because the building began as a squash club: I have never played squash, racquetball, pickleball, or tennis in my entire life. A squash club’s loyal member who never touched a racquet—I was there for the erg and the weights. Which is why the first Bud at Zack’s went down the way it did: the man drinking it had come straight from a workout, and treated it like the electrolyte drink it was pretending to replace.
The knowing was procedural, and it had a liturgy. The bartender at Zack’s knew that when I arrived, the first bottle of Bud—in the brown glass bottle—would be stood at the bar and guzzled straight down, as if it were an electrolyte drink, as if it were a Gatorade. He would have the second bottle already there when the first was done, and the second one I would sip. The first bottle of Bud whenever I arrived at Zack’s was a sacrificial guzzle: the evening could not properly start until something had been poured out, even if it was poured straight down. That is what “people knew me from the neighborhood” means when it stops being a sentence in a novel—a man behind a bar who stages your arrival without a word being said.
The first bottle of Bud whenever I arrived at Zack’s was a sacrificial guzzle.
Understand the era and the guzzle stops looking like a stunt. This was pre-Nalgene civilization. Nobody carried a bottle of hydration liquid attached to his person; the only people who carried Nalgene bottles were legit hippies—Peruvian or Ecuadorian knit caps with the ball on top, the patchouli oil crowd. Everybody else just went to the water fountain, or drank at the bar. Hydration infrastructure was a fountain and a bartender, and by nine or ten at night I had already left the gym. The first Bud was not competing with a water bottle in my gym bag. There was no bottle. There was the bar.
The novel understood what the bar did for a man. In “Situational and Locational Drinking” the narrator explains that every place he goes makes him a slightly different fellow, and then he gets to Zack’s:
“At Zack’s I am a man. I smoke Camels and play pool. I hang out with the guys and hit on the girls. I eat blue cheese burgers and drink amber bottles of Bud.”
Everywhere else it was Stella Artois, Red Stripe, Newcastle—performed selves, chameleon stuff; the entry that follows in the book is literally about the chameleon in him, the subtle tells that give a man away. Zack’s was the unperformed one. Nobody performs in a small dark room where people know you from the neighborhood. The chameleon rested there. It may have been the only place he did.
The novel states the rule; the affectation ledger shows it running for decades. In the wider world my cigarettes were a cosmopolitan rotation—Dunhill Blue, Marlboro Red, Silk Cut, Gauloises, Gitanes, whatever the room’s latitude suggested. At Zack’s it was Camels, and only Camels, and the beer was bottled Budweiser and only bottled Budweiser, the first one guzzled. And the doctrine predates Zack’s by a decade. From 1993 to 1995 I was a local at Strangeways, at 2830 Wilson Boulevard in Clarendon, by the Courthouse Metro—not an Iota guy, not a Galaxy Hut guy, a Strangeways guy—and at Strangeways my drink was Newcastle Brown Ale, assigned by the room as surely as the Bud was assigned by Zack’s. Every room assigned its drink. The novel just wrote down the law.
Strangeways deserves its clause, being a prequel and not a second essay. It stood as Galaxy Hut’s near-twin on that stretch of Wilson; IOTA Club & Café was built next door at 2832 in 1993, and within a few years Strangeways had closed and IOTA had expanded into its physical space—IOTA, which lasted until 2017. And the two rooms sharing that wall were musical opposites: IOTA became a rockabilly and Southern rock room, importing independent Southern rock and rockabilly acts, while Strangeways was British to its bones—Britpop, new wave. So “not an Iota guy” was never a drinks preference; it was tribal, and it was musical, and when IOTA expanded through the wall it read as the other tribe taking the fort. Eve Zibart was covering that scene in the Washington Post as early as September 17, 1993, in a column called “Intelligent Life in the Galaxy.” I was never an Iota guy, and Iota literally swallowed my bar. Even the name arrived pre-loaded: I knew Strangeways from The Smiths—Strangeways, Here We Come—though I was studying at Norwich, in England, in those years. The reference reached me via Morrissey, not via the prison down the road that the album was named for. A British-prison name, carried by a Manchester band, hung on a Wilson Boulevard bar, decoded by an American local through a record. The cosmopolitan rotation again—it goes all the way down.
And it was the pressure valve. “A Bite to Eat at Zack’s” opens plain:
“I went to Zack’s for a bite to eat because I was hungry and especially thirsty.”
Hill Mole’s Washington is a courier’s city—and I had messengered those streets in 1989 and 1990, when you could still shoot into the Capitol cafeteria for grub and air conditioning between deliveries—watching post-9/11 security close over a town that used to be open door to door. The narrator is coming unglued under the strangeness of it, seeing patterns, feeling watched, drinking to get out of the apartment and out of himself. Zack’s is where he goes. Small and dark turns out to be a prescription.
The era’s establishing shot is the row of bikes locked to the parking meters outside the door. Of the posse, only three of us rode: Sherif, Andrew, and me. We would land at Zack’s on our bicycles and lock them to the meters, and the meters held them all evening like a tiny, honest coat check. Mine was a black Bianchi Pista—the 2000s single-speed track bike—bought on October 9, 2000, and by June 2006 running Specialized Armadillo 700×23c tires from Capitol Hill Bikes. And let the record be precise, because the summaries get it wrong: my Pista was set up with a freewheel and bullhorn bars. Not fixed. Never fixed. The AI Mode summary of my own archive calls it a fixie, and my word governs over the machine’s summary—the machine improvises, the regular corrects, which is more or less this whole essay. The bike did not survive the era either: it was stolen, eventually, and I replaced it by building up a custom SOMA Delancey, the “Gucci” bike. The meters outside Zack’s lost their regulars one machine at a time.
The room itself, on a good night, was the Hill before the Hill got sorted. My crew in it—my posse, and yes, we said posse: it sounds stupid now, but in the 1990s and 2000s everybody called their group their posse, so it wasn’t cringe then, and whether it’s cringe now I leave as an open question—were Min Le, David Gelles, Oliver Uberti, Andrew Curry, and Sherif Abushadi, and the list is not closed, because a room like that is never fully recalled in one sitting, and the names that surface at 3 a.m. will be added here where they belong. Andrew Curry was the only one of them my own age; Min, David, Oliver, and Sherif were all nine or ten years younger than me, and the room never once made it a thing. Around us: lesbians and gay men, neighborhood locals, kids in their twenties and super old people, pool clubs in off their tour, all of it in one small dark room on Pennsylvania Avenue. Some nights were Gallaudet nights, when the deaf students had the place and the bar went quiet except for what I can only call the sea-lion sound of deaf people laughing—a whole room talking with its hands, and the only sound in it was joy. I have been in fancier rooms. I am not sure I have been in a better one.
I used to say, in those years, that what we were all experiencing was a modern condition of young men everywhere: Zack’s before marriage. It was my running joke, and it worked because it echoed the old moral-era phrase—sex before marriage—repurposed for a pool bar: the pre-marriage years, spent around a pool table, as if that were simply the natural order of things.
Zack’s before marriage.
Where the crew is now, as best as the room’s far end can report it: David Gelles is a bigwig at The New York Times. Oliver Uberti is a bigwig in infographics and illustration. Min Le makes children’s books and comic books. Andrew Curry was studying to become a therapist, and might be one by now. Sherif Abushadi is the open file—something with training centers, or a school; he may even live in Turkey now. He lives a magical life, and the record is content to leave it exactly there. If one of them finds this page by searching his own name some night—and men do—then the homing beacon worked, and the room has one more night in it.
And one absence, which I still find funny: Mark Harrison never came to Zack’s. Mark is my best friend, and later the two of us started a company together—but my entire 2000s, right up until that company, were basically Mark-free. The Zack’s years are a whole decade of my life my best friend isn’t in. He has the rest of the archive. The small dark room he never got.
And the posse never leaked, either. Through the whole Zack’s era there was no crossover between those men and the rest of my life—not the Lodge, not work, not anybody. A sealed world, running alongside the Mark-free decade, sealed the same way. The seal broke exactly once, years later, and barely: while I was dating Betsy, from 2013 to 2017, Andrew Curry would get invited to the Christmas get-togethers with her and that circle. Andrew—the only one of them my age—was also the only one who ever crossed over. The age-peer got through the door. Nobody else ever did.
And it went deeper than a guest list. I was completely compartmentalized—my words for that era, and the era’s governing fact. I never spoke of St. James, my church on the Hill, to anyone in the posse. I never spoke of being a Freemason—a Scottish Rite 32°, at that—to anyone in the posse, nor to anyone at New Media Strategies, where I worked in those years. I never talked about church. I never invited anybody to church. So picture it honestly: the same man who sat in a tyled room at 330 Pennsylvania drank his Bud in a bar where nobody knew he was a Mason—and where the brothers themselves never followed, because Zack’s was not their bar and never had been; a churchman drank in a room that had never heard of St. James; the posse knew neither the lodge nor the church nor Mark nor the job nor any of it. The compartments were total, each with its own door. Zack’s was not an escape from that architecture. It was one of the sealed rooms—maybe the warmest one.
And even inside the room there was a room I wasn’t in. When I got really involved at Zack’s I learned that the place kept going after closing: the innermost insiders could stay past the hour, the doors shut, and have a beer after hours, because Zack’s was treated less like a business than like a house party that was also a bar—it was like a house with a bar in it, as opposed to a bar with a house in it. That broke DC law completely, but what were DC laws anyway in the mid-2000s except suggestions. I knew it was there, and I brushed against it a couple of times, but the after-bar was never part of my culture, and the after-party people were a very different kind of person. Most of my Zack’s was weeknights anyway: I would drop in for some beers, some pool, an hour with my friends, and leave. Work the next day, and a gym circuit to keep, meant I often couldn’t stay even until closing, let alone after it. It was nice to know the other room existed. I did not belong to it. And the place taught me the lesson I have kept: just because you enter the doors of a bar doesn’t mean you have to be there till it closes—you can go for an hour, the way you don’t go to a gym and stay until it closes. So don’t go to a bar and stay until it closes. I’m not a party boy, I’m a Budweiser guzzler, and Budweiser guzzlers never have the kind of sustaining power. Zack’s was the only place that I had sustainability at. It never burnt me out and never made me feel like an alcoholic. That was the whole of my ambition in the place. My Zack’s ran on DC happy-hour culture, just shifted late: my happy hour was like 9:00 p.m. until 11:00 p.m.—work, gym, then the bar, home by eleven. I wanted to play a little pool. I knew my friends were there. I knew there was a Budweiser bottle there for me, a couple games of pool. I could say hey to my buddies—I knew that’s where they were—and then I freaking go home and go to bed like an adult. I just wanted to have a couple beers.
An author’s ruling, twenty years on, for anyone reading the novel as an archive: any bar scene in Hill Mole—any room where the narrator plays pool, drinks Budweiser, or meets his friends—is probably Zack’s as well, named or not. It was the default room. The unnamed bars are Zack’s without its name tag. And the ruling has evidence behind it: run the search yourself, across the whole aggregated text of the novel, and “pool” and “Bud” turn up only inside the Zack’s entries. The default room leaves fingerprints.
Even the walk home ran through it. “Taking Evasive Maneuvers,” four nights later:
“At night walking back from Zack’s or the Metro, I am highly attuned to my environment.”
He double-backs, vanishes into alleys, turns the table and follows the follower. Paranoid tradecraft on a Capitol Hill sidewalk, and the fixed point the route is measured from is the bar. Every spy needs a home station. His served burgers.
What the record kept
Here is the whole of Zack’s official trace, corrected and completed. One line in a mid-2000s Capitol Hill Bunny Hop bar-crawl listing, where it appears in the Pennsylvania Avenue circuit between Finn Mac Cool’s and the Little Pub, with registration across from the Lodge at Hawk n’ Dove: a flyer. A business listing—“Zacks,” 613 Pennsylvania Ave SE, two blocks from the Eastern Market Metro, phone (202) 543-7202—marked closed. A licensing trail: the next tenant’s voluntary agreement for the premises at 613 Pennsylvania Avenue SE, filed with the District’s liquor board and dated March 31, 2006, license 72633—the 18th Amendment in Zack’s rooms, and after it, from 2014, Barrel, which pours there still. And one piece of period press, which the first version of this essay missed outright: Roll Call’s pool column, “Mug Shots,” written while the room was alive. The city’s histories kept nothing of Zack’s at all; its pool column kept the room. Beyond the listings and the filings, what survives of the place is what I archived myself: the novel, and “Memories of Zack’s from the Mid 2000s,” a page on my own site where I gathered the Zack’s cluster of entries together—A Bite to Eat at Zack’s; Zack’s is Small and Dark; Situational and Locational Drinking; The Chameleon About Me; Ceding My Food Choice; A Spidey Sense; Fucking Haole; City Rules of Engagement; Fire Can Lick Behind These Eyes—under an introduction that begins: “A lot had changes in DC over the last 30 years but I found a great bit of memories from the mid-2000s that I wrote around 2005 when I was going to Zack’s Bar to play pool, drink, and hang out with my friends a lot.” The page even carries a photograph captioned “Zack’s Former Location.” The archivist is the author. There was nobody else for the job.
What Roll Call’s column kept is worth setting down as the column had it, because it is the era’s own press account of the room and not this essay’s verified fact. “Mug Shots” described Zack’s as acknowledged by many local shooters as the best place around the Hill to catch a game, and printed the address: 613 Pennsylvania Ave. SE. In the column’s account the room was the Hill’s pool headquarters, with more tables than any bar on the Hill—three 7-foot tables up, and one in the basement. Tournament trophies hung behind the bar; green conical lamps burned over green felt; a custom-built pool cue display case was mounted on the far wall. And the column had the place hosting trick-shot exhibitions, including appearances by Mike Massey, seven-time world trick-shot and artistic billiards champion. I never counted the tables, and I can’t check the lamps from here. But somebody at Roll Call stood in that room with a notebook while it was alive, which is more than the histories did—and this essay’s first draft never found the column at all. It was in the record the whole time.
Full disclosure, since this is an AI-search weblog even on its day off: that page is what Google’s AI Mode summarized when I asked the machine about myself. The machine already knows Zack’s. It learned it from my archive, and it improvises around the edges. Which means the beat and the bar meet on that page: everything I write here about AI search says the machine answers from what it can find, and what it can find about Zack’s is what one of its regulars bothered to keep. Citation is just memory with better distribution.
The rest of the row fared the same, only slower and better documented. Remingtons, the country-western gay bar at 637–639 Pennsylvania Avenue, closed on April 14, 2014, after more than thirty years; its building became a 7-Eleven and a Sprint store. Phase 1, on 8th Street, the longest-running lesbian bar in America, closed in 2016. The histories kept those two: Remingtons got its retrospective, Phase 1 got a preservation thesis. The Lodge endures across the street, exempted and chartered and minuted. And the Tune Inn—the one survivor—still stands at 331 with its 1947 name and its old license, still serving the avenue. By the mid-2010s the rest of the ecology of that stretch—bar crawls, gay bars weathering the Marine Barracks across the street, a pool tour working the row—was gone.
Gone asymmetrically, though. Stand at 330 today and the Lodge is still there, elevator and all. The brothers’ own bar, down the avenue at the Capitol Lounge, held on until 2020 and then it went too. Cross the avenue for a beer and you are standing in the archaeology of a row. The institution kept its building, its charter, its minutes, its archive. The bar kept nothing, because bars don’t. Bars are kept, or they aren’t.
The last relic
The written record kept the famous places. Zack’s got four entries in a spy novel nobody would mistake for history, a line on a flyer, a closed listing, one pool column, a page its own regular built to hold them, and the people who were known in it from the neighborhood. This post makes five entries, more or less. If you want to visit the bar, two doors are left, and I built them both: the Zack’s entries gathered on the Memories page, and all 309 entries of Hill Mole in the archives at hillmole.com. It is small and dark in there, and the Bud is cold, and people know you.
And one thing made it out of the room. When Zack’s closed, the regulars each bought a house cue at a discount—the bar distributing itself, piece by piece, into the hands of the people who had kept it. Mine was a beautiful emerald-green breakdown, a two-piece cue, and I was so proud of it I could have framed it. Then came the first game I ever played with it, and I scratched. She has been Molly McScratch from that game to this one. She is still mine, in her case, in a storage unit in Arlington—the one relic of Zack’s known to survive. The Lodge keeps its minutes; the novel keeps the room; Molly keeps the game. Small and dark, all three. That’s the whole obituary. It’s more than most bars get. It’s less than it deserved.
Update, October 23, 2026, 3:40 PM: Published this afternoon, then expanded within the hour as the memories kept arriving: the open nostalgia framing, the row’s division of labor and the pool circuit, the Zack’s crew named, the Gallaudet nights, the Tune Inn’s survival, and Molly McScratch, the last relic, as the closing image.
Update, October 23, 2026, 3:44 PM: A second expansion, minutes later: where the crew is now, with the uncertainties left open; Mark Harrison’s total absence from the Zack’s years; Remingtons’ closing date pinned to April 14, 2014; the closing-year absence stated plainly; and the survival claim corrected—the city kept nothing, and what survives is what the author archived himself, including the curated “Memories of Zack’s from the Mid 2000s” page, now linked above.
Update, October 23, 2026, 3:46 PM: The publisher’s final word on shape—“bring it all together, write it and make a giant opus”—and so this is it: the essay expanded into the full opus above, assembling every dictated memory in one place, and registered in this site’s glossary and subject index. Deliberately not added to the wiki. There is nothing wikiable about this.
Update, October 23, 2026, 3:48 PM: The final dictated material folded in: the crew was his posse, with the cringe question left open the way he put it; Andrew Curry was the only posse member his own age, the rest nine or ten years younger; the posse’s world was sealed for the whole era, and Andrew’s invitations to the Betsy-era Christmas get-togethers, 2013 to 2017, were its single later bridge.
Update, October 23, 2026, 3:49 PM: The spine, dictated last: the era’s governing fact was total compartmentalization—St. James and his Scottish Rite 32° Masonry never spoken of to the posse or to his New Media Strategies colleagues; church never mentioned, nobody ever invited—so the lodge brother crossed Pennsylvania Avenue into a room that knew none of it. Woven into “Small and dark” as his own stated doctrine of that life.
Update, October 23, 2026, 3:50 PM: The arrival ritual, dictated verbatim: the first bottle of Bud, in the brown glass bottle, stood at the bar and guzzled straight down like a Gatorade; the bartender had the second already waiting, and the second one was sipped. His line, kept: the first bottle was a sacrificial guzzle.
Update, October 23, 2026, 3:55 PM: Two closing beats: Zack himself—a real man, the name a person’s, no biography invented—and the affectation ledger, with its prequel: Strangeways, 2830 Wilson Boulevard, 1993 to 1995, Newcastle Brown Ale, the name arriving via The Smiths during his Norwich years, and IOTA—the bar he was never a guy of—expanding into its space.
Update, October 23, 2026, 3:56 PM: One sharpening to the Strangeways beat: the two rooms sharing the wall were musical opposites—IOTA a rockabilly and Southern rock room, Strangeways British to its bones, Britpop and new wave—so the allegiance was tribal and musical, and IOTA’s expansion through the wall reads as the other tribe taking the fort.
Update, October 23, 2026, 3:57 PM: Ratified as a feature: the publisher has named this the first of a periodic series of Chris Abraham nostalgia dumps on this weblog—chrisabraham.com would be the tidier home, but chrisabraham.net is called a weblog, after all. The opening now says so, and the post carries the Nostalgia Dump category.
Correction, October 23, 2026, 4:05 PM: Stated plainly, because the first version of this piece got it wrong: the lodge brothers did not go to Zack’s after meetings. Never. All “unofficial annex” language is out, here and in the site glossary. After Naval Lodge No. 4 meetings the brothers went to the Tune Inn sometimes, and mainly—I think—to the Capitol Lounge, at 229–231 Pennsylvania Avenue SE, Joe Englert’s bar: cheap pitchers upstairs, a quieter martini-and-cigar bar in the basement, campaign memorabilia everywhere; it closed on September 20, 2020, after twenty-six years. Zack’s was never on the lodge circuit at all—a separate sealed room the brothers’ circuit never touched, which strengthens the compartment this essay is about. Two more corrections in the same pass: the series framing is settled—a boring series of brain downloads from a man with aphantasia and SDAM, not a series about Zack’s, and the opening now says exactly that, without fanfare or promises; and I was never part of the pool league—the tour passed through Zack’s, but I played pick-up pool only. The period joke is in now, too, where it belongs: Zack’s before marriage.
Update, October 23, 2026, 4:07 PM: The nightly circuit, dictated last: most nights Zack’s came after the gym—work, work out at the Washington Sports Club on Capitol Hill (214 D Street SE; opened February 16, 1981 as the Capitol Hill Squash Club, Elizabeth Taylor cutting the ribbon; Balance Gym Capitol Hill since December 1, 2015), then Zack’s at nine or ten for buddies and pick-up pool, with his own period WSC page on chrisabraham.com cross-linked. It reframes the sacrificial guzzle: the first Bud was drunk by a man straight from a workout, like the electrolyte drink it was pretending to replace. And a one-line correction, his: he has never played squash, racquetball, pickleball, or tennis in his entire life—WSC was for working out, and nothing in this piece should put him on its courts.
Update, October 23, 2026, 4:09 PM: Scene texture for the guzzle, dictated last: it was pre-Nalgene civilization—nobody carried a bottle of hydration liquid attached to them, and the only Nalgene carriers were legit hippies, knit caps with the ball on top and patchouli oil; everybody else used the water fountain, or drank at the bar. That is the world the sacrificial guzzle happened in, and the paragraph is in above.
Update, October 23, 2026, 4:11 PM: The arrival, dictated last: of the posse, only Sherif, Andrew, and the author rode bicycles, and they landed at Zack’s and locked them to the parking meters outside—the era’s establishing shot, now in above. His bike: a black Bianchi Pista, bought October 9, 2000, on Specialized Armadillo 700×23c tires from Capitol Hill Bikes by June 2006, set up with a freewheel and bullhorn bars—not fixed, his precision, and the essay corrects the AI Mode summary of his own archive, which calls it a fixie. The Pista was eventually stolen; he replaced it with a custom SOMA Delancey, the “Gucci” bike. The meter-locked bike outside the bar did not survive the era either.
Correction, October 23, 2026, 4:26 PM: The address, and the column. This piece was published saying there was no address for Zack’s in any record I could find. There was one all along: period business listings carry Zack’s Restaurant & Bar at 613 Pennsylvania Ave SE, marked closed—it surfaced hours after publication, the same afternoon, once the digging went deeper. The licensing record brackets the end: the 18th Amendment’s voluntary agreement for the premises at 613, filed with the District’s liquor board, license 72633, is dated March 31, 2006, so Zack’s closed roughly 2005–2006, after the novel’s last sightings and before its successor signed; Barrel has poured at 613 since 2014. The same deeper dig recovered Roll Call’s pool column, “Mug Shots,” which praised the room while it lived; the column’s account is in the piece now, attributed as the era’s press, not laundered into the essay’s own fact. The miss was the research’s, and it was lazy—the publisher said so, in those words, and the correction style of this site is to print it. What the machine summaries add on their own—serpentine bars, square footage, fluorescent lights—stays out, as before. One last beat arrived at the wire and is in above: the after-hours circle, the insiders who stayed past closing—known to the author, brushed against a couple of times, never his culture; his Zack’s was weeknights, an hour at a time, and the lesson the place taught him is in, in his words—and so is his last word on the whole matter: he just wanted to have a couple beers. Also in this pass, at the publisher’s instruction, the textbook furniture: the Hill Mole passages set as block quotes, pull quotes from the author’s own lines, and sidebars for the succession at 613, the fates of the row, and the posse as last seen. The wiki still gets nothing. There is still nothing wikiable about this.