Grate Expectations

The heavy rubber bottoms of Robert Egger's boots clomped along a tired tile floor as he headed into his office for the final time. 'Office,' perhaps, is a generous label. Almost 24 years after he founded DC Central Kitchen (DCCK), Egger and his nonprofit organization had developed a reputation for redefining some less-than-glamorous things. There, windowless mop closets became executive offices, wasted food became balanced meals, and homeless ex-convicts became dedicated employees. Robert's six-by-six foot room, with its sagging, dropped ceiling and white cinderblock walls, had little in common with most workspaces belonging to people with titles like CEO or President. A clunky metal desk sat to the left and those white walls were nearly papered over with pictures and posters of his heroes, from Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman to Elvis Presley and Bruce Springsteen. The cramped closet hid its significance well. In Robert's desk drawers, Kodak prints and press clippings told a grander story. Bill and Hilary Clinton toured the Kitchen twice. Barack Obama brought his whole family. George H.W. Bush named Robert his 275th Point of Light. Oprah gave him an adoring hug on national television.

Robert was a young man when he started the Kitchen. His hair, once wavy and parted, eventually grayed and thinned slightly. He decided to crop it short. The angular jaw he used to shave daily was eventually covered, in part, by a silver goatee. After packing away his picture of The King and an oversized cardboard check from The Boss, Egger picked up his iPhone and handed it to a colleague, who snapped a photo of him standing in front of the stripped-down walls spotted with masking tape. Egger posted it to Facebook. Twenty-four people liked it instantly.

In the photo, he leans on a chair, smiling slightly. Aside from his pale skin and light hair, his figure is all black, from his tight t-shirt and jeans to his leather belt and biker boots. Robert has worn black for almost as long as he can remember. It was the appeal of a black robe that first inspired him to become an altar boy.

"Back then," he recalls, "the altar boy uniforms were really cool. Black with white trim. It was a great costume." Waiting in line before class began at his California Catholic school, Egger got a tap on the shoulder from a teacher, who asked him if he was interested in helping out at the poorly attended 6 p.m. mass. "Next thing I know, I'm up on the altar, with no training." His audiences, one earthly, one celestial, wracked him with nervous emotion. It was a young Robert's first experience with a stage, a high-stakes show fraught with complex implications for right and wrong, good and evil. He was part of a production that was designed not to entertain, but to enrapture, to make an audience think along life-changing lines.

Despite his gig moonlighting at church, Egger was never much for authority figures. As a third-grader, he and his friends had ambled into a nearby canyon, away from prying adult eyes, to screw around with some matches. The dry brush caught fire quickly, and soon a good swath of the canyon was ablaze. By the time the boys emerged from the smoke, a row of disapproving parents and firemen had assembled, alerted by the flickering lights on the horizon. "We were so busted," he says, chuckling. The local fire chief visited Robert's school the next day and summoned the boy to the principal's office. Dressed in full regalia, the chief told Egger he was to write a three-page report on the dangers of playing with fire. "I went home, grabbed the pencil with both hands, and wrote this report. I saw that this authority figure wanted it, so I wanted to do a really good job. I made a cover for it out of construction paper and everything. I was so ready for this fire chief to say 'Son, you've done great work.'" The fire chief never came back. The experience of having a good idea, working hard, and, in return, receiving nothing but disregard "really pissed off" Robert. "That was the first time I questioned authority," he says.

A military brat, Egger found himself periodically hauled across the country by his parents. After California, he attended middle school in Quantico, Virginia, began high school in Louisville, Kentucky, and finished it outside Washington, DC. Egger found stability in two great pillars of pop culture: movies and music. His favorite film was Casablanca. Robert idolized Rick Blaine, the coolest dude in the coolest nightclub on Earth. Rick never had to advertise his American Café. Everyone knew it was the place to be, whether it was for the show that happened out front, or the shady deals and sultry indulgences that took place in its backrooms. The more he watched Casablanca, the more Egger began wondering about the backrooms in his own life. The killings of two Kennedys and a King during his formative years only fueled his irreverent sense of inquiry. His favorite music liked to stick it to the status quo as well. He loved the later work of the Beatles, the music of Woodstock, and, later on, the "Fuck this, fuck that," mantra of the Sex Pistols.

Egger graduated high school in 1976, but says that he "was always the worst student. Organized thinking was not my bag." His parents moved to Indiana shortly thereafter. Robert followed but quickly tired of the place. Six months later, he was back in DC, learning to tend bar across the Potomac River at the Fish Market in Alexandria, Virginia. After a year of building up his skills, he nabbed a gig at the legendary Childe Harold in DC's Dupont Circle neighborhood. "This was the place where the Ramones played their first show in DC, where Springsteen played, Emmylou Harris, man," Egger says, still awed by his proximity to history. Beyond the names that showed up on stage, one of Childe Harold's most popular regulars was the cocaine on its bathroom counters. Egger followed its savvy, short-tempered manager like a shadow, taking notes for his own club, modeled on Rick's American Café. He bought a motorcycle and leased a one-bedroom apartment. "I was 22 and felt like I was on top of the world."

In the spring of 1982, Robert was enjoying another average day of the high life. He slept late, strolled down the sweeping green space of the National Mall to play a round of pick-up soccer, headed home for a nap and a bite to eat, and then hit the Childe Harold early to set up. The Clovers, an R&B band, were about to perform. A small contingent of especially eager fans trickled in, and while Robert handed them a few clinking glasses filled with gin, tonic, and ice, his head snapped over to the doorway on his right. "I looked over to the door and there was a silhouette, surrounded by light." In walked a lithe blonde...