I pick him up at ten outside CNN's Capitol Hill offices. His tie is loose and he's swinging his briefcase in the wind, the end of another day of bloviating against the selfish legions out to steal our way of life. There's a war in the streets against America, and fate--in an unlikely choice--has asked this former business correspondent to be the spokesman for its rage. I tell him to hurry up and get in the car. I'm parked at an expired meter and I don't have a quarter.

We stop first at one of the District's corner liquor stores. They keep the tills behind thick plexiglass shields in these places, but Lou's head is like the blunt end of a battering ram, his legs a catapult's spring. The clerks are all immigrants, terrified men from Bangalore and Banda Aceh who don't know what to make of this beast in a blazer and rep tie, bellowing and repeatedly launching himself at their smudgy plastic fortress, his head pounding the glass until it breaks. We usually clear around 500, and take an armload of Mad Dog with us for the road.

Outside, Lou stands under a fluorescent streetlight, his face splotched by blood and slick with sweat. He looks like he just murdered his father.

"We're playing for keeps, Tanto," he tells me. "This is how we roll."

From there it just depends on what Lou's up for. Sometimes we jack a Cutlass and joyride the Parkway. Sometimes we scale the Capitol dome, two drunken men in ragged clothes screaming out over the city, daring the huddled masses to take their best shot. We've befriended the guards who work the night shift. There's a little hatch in the roof, and a ladder that goes up to the Statue of Freedom.

"Come and get us," Lou says, to the black sky, his face purple with rage.

Don't ask me where it comes from, this fury I see two, maybe three nights a week, depending on how often he calls and whether I have other plans. It's not as if the teeming shores are sending out waves of angry media celebrities to steal his job. It's something else that has him, some form of re-directed anger I can never comprehend.

When four o'clock rolls around Lou wants to steal an outboard from one of the boathouses on the Potomac. From there we tool out on the placid water, with only the white noise of the Parkway between us and blessed silence. Lou takes pot-shots at the river buoys with the handgun he keeps in his pants. He thinks he's capping illegals on the Rio Grande. I never have the heart to tell him, and anyway he's too far gone to understand the simplest explanations.

By sunrise Lou is exhausted. He leans over the back of the boat, throwing up and crying, his massive, broken body dappled in the orange rays spilling over the Arlington Memorial. We haven't even made it under the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, several miles up from where the river disappears. From where we are, you can't even see the ocean.

I drop him off at CNN at six. Somewhere inside he'll find a cot in a closet and sleep it off. Later, he'll force down a massive lunch at the employee buffet, a clerk will take his coat and send him to the showers in the gym, and makeup will resurrect his face and hair.

By evening Lou will be himself again. His producer won't even know he's only had four hours of sleep. They'll set the lights and cue the music. Then, as Lou works his way through his talking points, the rage will build again, quietly at first, but soon into a fury so strong and so pure it seems to come from somewhere else, as if it had a spirit of its own.

Honestly, I don't know how he does it.