WASHINGTON -- When the jampacked crowd is good and warmed up, when it's after midnight and the band is smokin' and the very air is throbbing and those women lawyers from downtown start dancing and writhing on the bar top, that's when Bill Duggan feels he's burst loose from the storied Washington, the inside-the-Beltway fantasyland of politicians and monuments.

"This is a real bar in a town where not much is real," shouts Duggan, who owns the popular nightspot Madam's Organ.

Madam's, in the pulsing Latino-counterculture neighborhood of Adams Morgan, is not far from the marble and mahogany-paneled halls of official Washington. Not far from, say, the Senate Armed Services Committee or the East Room. Not far from "Meet the Press," from the campaign-financed, solemn-occasioned, issues-oriented, lobbyist-greased, photo-op'd national Capitol.

Not far. A mile, maybe. Light-years.

But there is a real Washington, even if it becomes less visible as the presidential inaugural sweeps into town this week.

That real Washington sprawls outside the surprisingly small enclave where Washington's official business -- politics, governance and tourism -- is conducted. President Bush will be driven in his limousine Saturday along the axis of this enclave, Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House, a distance of 1.7 miles.

Most government offices lie within a few blocks of the parade route. So do the monuments, the offices of lobbyists and lawyers, the grand hotels, the expense-account restaurants.

In the 60-odd square miles beyond, wedged between Maryland and the Potomac River, is the real Washington, a place where kids struggle through homework, where people fall in and out of love, wash the car, lug home groceries, fret about those dang Redskins, take out the trash. An ordinary place of ordinary people.

It's a race-conscious place, a majority-black town where whites have always held the real power and where the degree of de facto racial segregation is startling to outsiders.

With just over 600,000 people, Washington's about the size of Boston, El Paso or Memphis. About 60 percent of Washingtonians are African-American, 30 percent are white, 7 percent Hispanic, according to the latest available U.S. census figures.

Whites who live in the district cluster mostly in the northwest quadrant of the city. Blacks congregate in the northeast and southeast. The two are separated by Rock Creek Park.

"The fact of there being two Washingtons is a striking difference that I wasn't prepared for," said Joseph Carrillo, who came two years ago from California as a policy planner for the District of Columbia schools. "I don't say it's segregated per se, but it breaks along ethnicity and socioeconomic lines that are visible in restaurants and everywhere you go."

Paul Magno, director of the Father McKenna Center for homeless men, used to marvel, as he rode the P Street bus across town, at how the faces changed as the bus chugged east. "Past 16th Street and then 14th Street, there were no white faces left on board," he said.

Some 190,000 people work for the federal government in the district. Thousands of permanent, civil service federal workers, many of them black, crowd the sidewalks and subway stations at 5 p.m. en route home. The mostly white politicians, lobbyists and journalists who comprise Official Washington come to work later and stay until early evening, when they leave their offices to the largely Latino force of building cleaners.

Official Washington motors home weekday evenings in streams of Mercedes and BMWs that crawl away from Pennsylvania Avenue north to the Maryland suburbs and west toward Virginia. Some do stop in the district, in neighborhoods like Spring Valley and Palisades where home prices are figured in increments of $1 million.

Poor black neighborhoods have mostly relied on public buses. The D.C. subway system, which opened 25 years ago, was built to carry passengers between downtown and the mostly white suburbs in Maryland and Virginia. Not until this month did the last stations open along the line that links black neighborhoods in the far southeast to the job-rich downtown area.

"I've always been very conscious of there being two Washingtons. There's the Washington of power suits and power, and the Washington that's not white and not powerful and doesn't have a suit to wear," said Magno, a lay Jesuit social activist.

"It's easy for a person living in Washington to go through life without ever going through the other Washington," he said. "On either side."

That makes Washington a city of neighborhoods.

"If you're a black person and live here all your life, this really is a small town -- Chocolate City," said Connie Hoffman, a retired elementary school teacher who lives in a quiet neighborhood of big trees and well-kept homes in the southeast quadrant.

She insists, with a mischievously twinkling eye, that the term is not considered derogatory.

Chocolate City or not, the district is an unusual place.

Washington's Yellow Pages boast 249 caterers, 172 limousine services, 86 pages of lawyers, 11 pages of escort services. They serve the federal enclave. The Yellow Pages lists not one bowling alley in the district.

When a world-famous television newsman sets up on the sidewalk with his crew for a live stand-up, pedestrians push past without a glance. Not even kids bother to get into camera range and make monkey faces.

This is a city where only tourists watch when a multi-limousine motorcade screams past with flags and motorcycle outriders. Bush? One of the Clintons? The sultan of Brunei? Naw, just a noisy nuisance.

It is both the nation's capital and a place of uncertain stature. Not a state. When the telephone directory-assistance robot asks, "What city and state?" you have to answer, "Washington -- no state." A frustrated hotel reservations clerk in New Mexico says, "Yes, I know it's Washington, D.C., but what STATE?"

Known and perhaps scorned outside the Beltway as a city of serious policy wonks, Washington "is a town with real soul," insists Mark Wenner, leader of a local blues and rockabilly band, the Nighthawks.

Duke Ellington grew up and performed on the district's U Street. Ramsey Lewis recorded "The In Crowd" in a U Street club, the Bohemian Caverns. Live music -- bluegrass, blues, Irish folk, classical and jazz -- resounds through the real Washington every night.

"People think of Washington as a couple of government buildings and monuments, people with their little suits on with their little briefcases," Wenner said. "They don't think of real people living here."

Connie and Gil Hoffman, for instance. Born and raised in large D.C. families, they met at Washington Teachers College. In 1964 they bought their five-bedroom, brick ranch house in Southeast. They raised four children there. Along the way, Connie earned a master's degree and Gil a doctorate in child and developmental psychology. He retired in 1991 as deputy superintendent of the district's public schools.

Many whites in the district view "Southeast," where the Hoffmans live, as a dangerous, ruined ghetto of drugs and murder. Said Gil, "That's like people in Europe thinking America is all cowboys and Indians -- it just comes out of ignorance."

Like many solidly middle-class African-Americans here, Gil Hoffman has a clear but not violently angry view of how the city really works.

Washington "is a city run by and for whites," he said. "They take every opportunity to support their contention that we're not capable of governing ourselves."

At the other end of the district, Brendan Sullivan and his younger brother Teddy grew up in the exclusive Spring Valley neighborhood in Northwest, attended private Episcopal schools in the shadow of the National Cathedral, and hardly ever ventured east of Rock Creek Park. Their father is a well-connected Washington lawyer who defended Oliver North in 1987 congressional hearings.

"The places we travel tend to be very, very white," said Brendan, 26. Growing up in Spring Valley, he added, "You'd really have no idea of the racial makeup of this city."

One other reality makes the real Washington a unique place.

The Constitution gives Congress the "exclusive" right to govern the district. That means, in effect, that while residents pay full federal taxes -- about $2 billion a year -- they have no representatives or senators in Congress. Consequently, the advice to "Write your congressman" evokes a sour response among Washingtonians.

Mayor Anthony Williams likes to say that in America, "Only three types of people are denied voting rights: children, criminals and citizens of the District of Columbia."

With 42 percent of its real property owned by the federal government or other tax-exempt organizations, the district is chronically strapped for income. Congress does chip in, this year allotting $445 million. In return, it controls the city's budget, and more. Congressional Republicans, for example, recently decreed that the city could not fund any needle-exchange program designed to prevent the spread of HIV.

Congress, prodded by Rep. Bob Barr, a conservative Georgia Republican, also confiscated and sealed the results of a recent nonbinding referendum on the medical use of marijuana.

"I call Washington the last colony," said local political commentator Mark Plotkin.

The most recent effort to extend full voting rights to D.C. residents ended last October when the U.S. Supreme Court, without hearing any arguments, dismissed without comment an appeal of a lower court ruling.

Mayor Williams recently authorized the slogan "Taxation Without Representation" to appear on D.C. license tags as an alternative to the current tourist slogan, "Celebrate & Discover." President Clinton ordered the White House limousine to carry the new plates; it's unclear whether Bush will continue the practice.

But it's a mystery why the real Washington hasn't taken more forceful steps to protest its political status, the way that, for instance, the original American colonists dumped tea and then mounted armed rebellion against "taxation without representation."

"I've lived here for 36 years and I'm still trying to explain it to myself," Plotkin said.

Perhaps the longtime Washington politician Walter Fauntroy had it right when he once quipped that Washington suffers from the four too's: too liberal, too urban, too Democratic and too black.

One of Washington's premier power brokers, superlobbyist Thomas Hale Boggs, was recently asked to explain why Washington, the capital of the world's most successful democracy, has never achieved full democracy.

"Well, there was the image problem," he said.

That's shorthand for the years when Washington's wildly controversial four-term mayor, Marion Barry, held power.

Barry was a tireless champion for African-Americans and for D.C. political rights. He was arrested in an FBI sting operation in January 1990 for cocaine possession and served six months in prison before being elected again in 1994 for a final term.

Beyond that, Boggs dismissed the question.

"It's not that big of a city," he said.