Come here, Mr. President, to Essex, to the narrow laundromat squeezed between the Avenue News and the Lutheran Mission Society Center on Eastern Avenue.

You will hear no jokes about dirty laundry, or aphorisms about how it will all come out in the wash, or questions about how best to clean soiled blue dresses. Instead, you will hear 58-year-old Louis Hock from Perry Hall, who is on your side.

"I'll tell you what I think," Hock bellows, a cigarette pinched between two fingers, a red U.S. Marine Corps baseball cap on his head. "What a man does in his private life is his own business."

He's not finished.

"I voted for Clinton and I'd vote for him again," says Hock, a truck driver. "I say it's nobody's business. They're trying to wreck his family. Leave the man to do his job. John F. Kennedy got away with it."

Nods all around. John Collins, 40, of Middle River, a truck-driving friend of Hock's, says, "I think they're pushing the issue too far."

"It's the Republicans who are pushing it," Hock says. "They want him out of there."

Brian Scandora of Dundalk, a 40-year-old restaurant worker, thinks that won't happen. He says Clinton has done a good job and the voters will protect him.

"It's no problem with me, as long as it doesn't interfere with the job. What might save him is the people don't want him out."

Hock stubs out his cigarette. "Too many people worry about what other people are doing," he says. "They ought to lift the carpet up in their own homes."

Stay here, Mr. President, among your friends. Don't venture toward the back of the laundromat, where Larry Carbone, 72, is folding his clothes. A retired brewery worker from Essex, Carbone is weary of hearing the national political debate transformed into letters to Penthouse.

"Run him out and start all over," Carbone says. "Just get it off the television and out of the newspapers. It makes me very disgusted."

His clothes clean and folded, Carbone is ready to begin a new week. If only it were that easy in the White House. WASHINGTON -- Absolut and cranberry in one hand, cigarette in the other, dancing among friends in Garrett's Bar on M Street in Georgetown Saturday, Sally Smith has to shout over the jukebox to share her thoughts on President Clinton and his numerous "I'm sorry's."

"Apologizing 20 times a day is out of control!" says the 25-year-old Republican from South Dakota, whose political experience includes a stint working for a senator from her home state. "He should have lied to the end and stayed with his story. You take that kind of stuff to the grave."

A moment later, she stops dancing long enough to clarify. "I don't say lying is good, but if you apologize so many times in a week, that isn't good. Everyone thinks you're a fool."

Upstairs, Tim Randall, 26, is tending bar below a photocopied picture of Monica Lewinsky and a handwritten chalkboard sign that reads: " 'Sexual Relations' Night in the Parlor: Grab a cigar from G'town Tobacco." Also advertised are a number of drink specials whose suggestive names seemed suddenly modest next to the contents of the Starr report.

Randall, a self-described recovering New Yorker who has lived in Washington for eight years, says everyone from his cab driver to his customers agrees that "this lurid, detailed report is public meat."

"I don't want to know that much about anybody I'm not in bed with," he says. "It's too much. The investigation went on long enough, and now this."

He's been serving drinks for six hours, he says. Earlier in the evening, when there was "more coherent" conversation at the bar, chatter about the Starr report abounded, he says.

"It's the hot topic forever," he says. "It's like talking about the weather in this town."

Judith Forman

'Give the man a chance'

It's an evening about promoting neighborhood rejuvenation. But as community activists at a Baltimore fund-raiser sift through their thoughts about the Starr report, it's as if they're describing the achy queasiness that precedes the flu: They are apprehensive of how bad it might get, and desperately hoping it would all go away.

"Right now, I'm hurting for this country. I've felt physically sick about all this," says educator JoAnn Cason, interim director of the New Schools Initiative for the city school system.

"I think President Clinton is doing the job we elected him to do. He made a big mistake, there was a lot of arrogance on his part. But he's human. And we, as a country, do not have time for all of this foolishness.

"I don't condone what he did, but resign? No. Impeach him? No! And I really hurt for the president's family that we would all be reading that salacious material."

Cason is one of several hundred people attending the first "Neighborhood Nosh" fund-raiser for the Citizens Planning and Housing Association at Maryland Art Place Saturday night. They have come to sample vegetable samosas, bid on auction items, and sway to music by Mambo Combo. But in a gathering of activists dedicated to improving civic life, the talk drifts naturally toward repairing the presidency.

Attorney Julie Squire, a homemaker and CPHA board member, says Clinton should stay in office.

"While I think the president's behavior is deplorable, it does not rise to the level of impeachment," she says.

Some think independent counsel Kenneth Starr and the media are mostly responsible for damaging the office.

"I wish they would leave President Clinton alone, he's been a good president," says Georgine Edgerton, a veteran neighborhood activist.

"They're just picking the man to death," her friend Jessie Pettigrew agrees.

"Let he without sin cast the first stone," Edgerton says. "We need to give the man a chance."

Linell Smith

Criticism for Starr

SILVER SPRING

SILVER SPRING -- On the sun-drenched patio of a suburban Starbucks, soccer moms and Saturday-morning cyclists toss around the phrase "rabid dog." "He has made the U.S. the laughingstock of the world," someone says.

Everyone agrees: Kenneth Starr should suffer. Not that anyone is too happy with President Clinton, but here, Starr and his report are the target of anger and disgust.

Many of the patrons sipping lattes under green umbrellas say they have tried to avoid the more sordid details of the report -- but found it impossible.

"I was in a bank yesterday trying to do my business as quickly as possible because CNN had on the most explicit sexual stuff you can imagine," says Michael Druhan, 48, a Chevy Chase resident who says he is making a personal protest by not reading the report.

It's disturbing enough that X-rated scenes are readily available in family newspapers and on the Internet, where kids can read them. But equally chilling, says Pam Druhan, 47, is the message being sent to would-be politicians: You could be next.

"Everybody's got some dirt somewhere," she says.

Les Partridge, whose newspaper is open to a story about the White House sex scandal, is a stockbroker and registered Independent who didn't like Clinton at first. Now, he says, he feels sympathetic toward the president.

Partridge, 48, predicts Clinton, a man practiced in the art of the comeback, will draw on those skills now: "He'll probably do a much better job now that it's out in the open. Now he has to redeem himself."

@

Sarah Pekkanen

'He's still a human being'

Down in Fells Point at the Waterfront Hotel, a k a the cop bar in the TV show "Homicide: Life on the Street," the rallying cry is "Free Clinton!"

Leading the cheers is longtime political guru Gene Raynor, who after reading the newspaper excerpts of the Starr report, is in a forgiving mood.

"If any one of us knew all there was to know about any other one of us, we'd be shocked," he says. "I firmly believe that."

He adds: "I think these kinds of personal encounters that do not affect his decision-making as a president should not be used against him." Clinton, Raynor suggests, "will absolutely weather the storm."

Waiter Chris Kurek, 26, says, "I think it's kind of a joke everybody's involved in his personal life. He may be president of the United States, but he's still a human being."

Kurek thinks something should be done if the president committed perjury or abused his presidential power. But he's not sure that that should be impeachment.

Pouring a Miller Lite, bartender Ryan McCormick, 24, declares the Lewinsky affair "a bad move" on the president's part. He should have known his every move is scrutinized, McCormick says.

"Not to mention the fact that my taxes pay for that office that he was using when he did this. And those Secret Service agents and other people that he used to help coordinate this little affair are also paid for by my tax money.

"I don't think that was appropriate use of my tax money or government resources."

;/ "Amen," says the guy drinking the Miller's.

Carl Schoettler

They've heard enough

WASHINGTON

WASHINGTON -- At the Alpha Tonsorial Barbershop, where blues hounds gather each Saturday for an afternoon of guitar picking and harmonica playing, the goings-on around the Capital were cause for disgust, embarrassment and a bit of anger about the "porno book" that hit the streets over the weekend.

Theorian O'Neal, World War II veteran and one of the barbershop's elder statesmen, said he had heard enough.

"I'm sick of it. I don't want to hear it anymore," he said, cradling his beautiful black Gibson Les Paul guitar across his lap.

No one wanted to hear more about it, but all had a ready response when asked. Some, recalling Mayor Marion Barry's arrest, thought Clinton had been set up. Others thought the scandal much ado about not much. After all, any adulterer most likely would say, "No" when asked about an affair, said Mike Baytop, 50. He also thought the media was somewhat to blame for the hype.

"The media is turning into the Jerry Springer show," said Baytop, a government employee and weekend bluesman. "They think they know what people want."

At the barbershop, what people wanted was less news about Kenneth Starr, Monica Lewinsky and the president's sexual indiscretions. Doug Grabill, who recently left his job at the Newseum, offered up the "Mo Blues," perhaps the best and last words on the subject.

"My television's crying, telling me about that girl named Mo. I don't want to hear another word about where did that red lipstick go," Grabill, 34, sang in a nervous voice. Saturday was his first time singing before the barbershop crowd. "I got them Mo Blues, lowdown, meanest blues of all. Monica Lewinsky's made me blue. Clinton's gonna take the fall."

He got a round of applause and a few laughs. Everybody in the barbershop knew what he was talking about. They had all heard enough. Yeah, President Clinton had made some dumb moves, but there was no call for impeachment. At the Alpha Tonsorial, they just wanted to play the blues.

M. Dion Thompson

Pub Date: 9/14/98