A Homer's Odyssey

"He likes dates and names and stuff, and he just remembers them," says Julie Ward, a friend who's a licensing management systems analyst at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "Once he gets interested in something, he just goes to town."

Take the amateur men's basketball team he formed in the early 1990s. Characteristically, Opsasnick wasn't content with pickup games in some high school gym. The players were stunned to find themselves going on the road to play Harvard, Providence, Holy Cross, Xavier. "Once he starts digging into something, he goes all the way to the top," says Ken Adrian, who coached the team and now is athletic director at Neuse Baptist Christian School in Raleigh, N.C.

To do this research, he haunts libraries and historical societies, performing such prodigiously tedious feats as reading every edition of the Prince George's Post from 1932 to 1984, and every entertainment section of the Washington Daily News from 1950 to 1971. He chats up old-timers in bars and records hundreds of hours of interviews.

Lately he's been giving bookstore readings, to an audience of nearly 50 in Kensington, more than 100 in Alexandria. He wears a beatnik beret he picked up at that Rehoboth Kmart. Bands play Doors tunes while he signs books.

He has a routine for preparing for the readings. He writes his speech on notecards. Then every evening for a week he walks from his house to the woods by Greenbelt Lake.

There, he stands on a log and lectures to the squirrels about the Lizard King as the sun goes down.

'The Exorcist' Revisited

On a Saturday afternoon in his writing room, he pulls one of his favorite books from the shelf, a volume so precious he keeps it wrapped in plastic. It is "Washington Confidential," the sensational, noirish 1951 classic about the dames and pols, rogues and bums who run the capital, and about the baroque subcultures they inhabit. Some lines about his county especially delight him:

"Prince George's is a long strip predominantly devoted to gaiety, night life, gambling and whoring. . . . There are more floating crap-games, illegal bookies and after-hour spots in Prince George's than there are in Reno."

"This is one of the reasons I got inspired to write about local music and history," he says. "I got interested in the forgotten subjects. So much of the culture just gets washed away."

He started in the mid-1980s specializing in what he calls "unexplained phenomena" and "cryptozoological" study. In other words: Bigfoot sightings. He had caught the Bigfoot bug at age 11, seeing "The Legend of Boggy Creek" at the Greenbelt Theatre.

He really wanted to believe in unexplained phenomena. "It makes the world a more exciting place if you have something to believe in besides God," he says. But he never could find evidence, and remains agnostic on the hairy beasts. He compiled "The Maryland Bigfoot Digest: A Survey of Creature Sightings in the Free State," which listed 300 claimed encounters from 1666 to the present. He interviewed police and witnesses and wrote essays on the more recent cases, including the Beltsville Beast, the Cecil County Gorilla, the Harewood Park Monster, the Harford County Bigfoot.

An impassioned rock fan since the days when he was watching "The Legend of Boggy Creek," he had noticed that some of the same joints featured in "Washington Confidential" -- including the legendary Dixie Pig of Patsy Cline fame -- evolved into the grungy but hallowed roadhouses of the country and rock era. As the last of those places were closing and the characters were burning out, Opsasnick interviewed hundreds of musicians, club owners and promoters to document that world in "Washington Rock and Roll: A Social History" and "Capitol Rock."