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Saturday, January 05, 2002
By Peter B. King
When I was a teen-ager, I loved lying awake long past midnight.
The house was sunk into silence, interrupted only by the crackling of the heat registers or a gust of wind. My parents were asleep in the next room. I felt secure with them nearby, but, like most teens, I was glad they were out of my shoulder-length hair till morning. I would rest my Hemingway or Ray Bradbury or Ian Fleming paperback on the blankets, look out the window at the lights of the neighbors' houses, and dream.
That was 30 years ago. Now, in another city, in my own apartment, with my father dead and my mother 300 miles away, I'm still doing what I did back then. You might say that it's time to shed my late-night ways, which were acceptable when I was 17 but are less seemly now that I'm 47.
So why do I persist? Am I stuck in my adolescence? Is my habit a bad one or harmless or even healthy? Does the stereotype of a night crawler as a vaguely disreputable, unproductive character carry some truth, or is that "early to bed" maxim a few hundred years out of date?
I think I was born a night owl. Scientists tell us that genes play a role in whether we function best late at night or early in the morning. Some internal clocks predispose their owners to nod off before the end of "ER." Mine keeps me alert until the first birds start singing in the semidark.
So strong is my inclination that I can hardly fathom how anyone would like the day more than the night. Day evokes car-pooling, co-workers' bad jokes and a frantic struggle to sell more widgets than the competition. Night evokes mystery, poetry and romance. In my teens, I wandered the lamp-lit parks and leafy streets of the gorgeous suburb where I grew up, reciting, in my head, poetry by Shelley and Keats.
As an adult, I took jobs that reinforced my late-night habit. For two years, I eked out a living as a full-time musician, playing till 1:30 a.m. By the time I had packed up and driven home, it was a quarter of three, and I was still wired, thinking of some lick I had played or how a beautiful woman danced.
Later, I worked my way through college as a psychiatric aide on the 11-to-7 shift. There was occasional excitement -- I was slugged once by a patient who accused me of being part of "Satan's army." More often, the patients slept and I wrote song lyrics or did my homework, drinking strong tea and watching the light come slowly to the fragrant roses and gladioluses on the broad lawns outside the picture windows.
After graduation, I spent three years as a night general assignment reporter at a small paper in Norristown, a hard-shelled, hard-pressed little industrial city outside Philadelphia.
I would go to council meetings where, I confess, I could not keep myself from falling asleep due to boredom. As a planner droned on about upgrading signs and access ramps, the longhand in my reporter's notebook became increasingly illegible, until it looked like an electrocardiogram. I would jerk myself awake and frantically seek after-meeting comments to fill in what I had missed. Then I would hurry back to the office to file my story.
Around 1 a.m., I would say goodbye to the night watchman, take a deep breath of the intoxicating smell of pizzelles from the huge bakery next door, and find my car. Heading home, I would notice the sagging rooftops under a cold moon and think how much more contented Norristown seemed when most of its residents were asleep.
By chance or by choice, I kept landing night gigs. I became the pop music critic for The Pittsburgh Press. The gig involved endless trips to the old Syria Mosque, Star Lake and Civic Arena, secondhand pot smoke and upper-register hearing loss at shows that lasted till 10:30 or 11 p.m.
I remember driving the back roads out of Star Lake after loud, crowded concerts -- the sudden blackness and the brightness of the stars, the headlights catching rabbits and ghostly trees, and the clicking and whispering of night creatures in the quiet.
Back in the newsroom, I would polish and re-polish my analysis of the true meaning of Guns N' Roses until 4 a.m. -- just me, a sleepy copy editor and the hum of the fluorescent lights.
It's not as if I always enjoyed my night-crawling. There were times when lack of sunlight made a sometimes solitary existence that much more lonely. Walking the streets in darkness, on my way back home from a restaurant dinner for one, having nothing more intimate to say to anyone for an entire evening than "I'll take my check, please," I felt invisible.
I would sit near the back in movie theaters in Monroeville on a Friday night, slipping out quickly as the final credits rolled. Then I would drive to a Denny's for a late-night breakfast -- feeling conspicuous as I read my magazine surrounded by booths full of well-oiled, high-volume double-daters just back from the bars.
These days I do my movie-going and dining out with a female companion -- one who is smart, funny, kind-hearted and altogether better than I deserve. Utter aloneness is, I hope, a habit I've sworn off.
But still I love to stay up late. I shop in supermarkets at 1 a.m.-- a remarkably relaxed experience, even if all the on-sale orange juice is gone. I plan my turnpike trips for the wee hours, when roadwork and traffic don't slow me down. Back at home, telemarketers don't call. The whole world leaves me alone -- which is precisely the point.
The truth is, I stay up late because other people don't.
Like that 16-year-old kid with hair down to his shoulders, I prefer it when no adults are hovering, telling me what to do. If this sounds a bit self-indulgent, well, fair enough. My love of late nights suggests that I'm a little afraid of people, and also that I like the world best when all that's required is dreaming, as opposed to results.
Then again, some of the greatest human achievements started with a waking dream wandering lonely as a cloud into the mind of someone with a few hours to kill. A modicum of self-indulgent solitude can be a powerful thing.
Peter B. King is a Post-Gazette features copy editor (pking@post-gazette.com). 