Notes from the Night : A Life after Dark

Notes from the Night "Here in New York, a good night never ends. We will not let it. Though the hour is late, we are more awake than we have ever been in our lives, we are wild-eyed and grinning and dancing around like fools, and the music is thumping and the lights are flashing and the whole place is pulsating like a massive beating heart, and we do not want to go home, we do not want to go to sleep. Above all, we do... Full description

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The Day

Those who dream of drinking wine may weep when morning comes.

—Chuang Tzu

Here in New York, a good night never ends. We will not let it. Though the hour is late, we are more awake than we have ever been in our lives, we are wild-eyed and grinning and dancing around like fools, and the music is thumping and the lights are flashing and the whole place is pulsating like a massive beating heart, and we do not want to go home, we do not want to go to sleep. Above all, we do not want to miss anything.

It hardly matters that the nightclub finally kicks us out. The lights back on, the music cut, its sudden absence ringing in our ears. The hulking bouncers herding us to the door: “You don’t have to go home,” they call out with those barrel-chested voices, “but you can’t stay here.” Even then, when we’re pushed out into the strange predawn night—a twilight like dusk but darker, cleaner, bluer—even then, we will not let the night end. Indeed, it is at times like these, when anyone in their right mind would say, “It’s four-thirty in the morning, I need to get the fuck to bed,” that I sometimes hear my friend Zoo say, “Yeah, man, so what’s next, man—I’m just getting started. . . .”

So we move things back to a late-night, to an after-party at my apartment, or someone else’s, and there are cold cans of beer there, beautiful girls we hijacked from the last club, blaring music the neighbors must not even be able to comprehend—they must hear it and think it a dream—and though soon enough morning light comes streaming through the curtains, it is still the night because we have not slept.

Here in New York, a good night does not end until you sleep—if you sleep—and even then, in the morning, or the afternoon, when you awake, the taste of it is on your tongue and in your throbbing head. You stink of it—liquor and beer and cigarettes—and you carry that stench, and its accompanying hangover, with you into the following day. But a good night out stays with you in another way, too. Because the next day, there’s this sense that you were on the verge of something, as if you almost got there, the night before, but didn’t. As if you’d fought this epic battle, there in the deep New York night, but that nothing had been clearly won. And you think to yourself that if only the night had continued on just a couple more hours, there would have been something good that would have come of it, something certain and fulfilling and right, a victory of sorts. But the night ended too early, even though it ended too late, and so there remains this sense of something unfinished, of a search not quite complete. You know that there is more out there, you can feel it, all the endless possibilities of future nights, and you go to sleep satisfied that you will never be satisfied, you go to sleep—and then awake—with the wonderful, starving feeling that life is not over yet, and you are young.

And, of course, here in New York, a good night never ends because somehow another one is always just beginning.

A New Night Dawns

Several hours later, my phone rings at work, and it is Zoo. You would think it would be a relief to hear from a good friend, but in this case, it’s not. Part of the problem is that Zoo has a way of calling at the precise time when you least want to hear from him. Like when I am just drifting off into a lovely early-evening, post-work nap, or when I have sunk into my couch to watch a really funny episode of The Simpsons, or the first scene of a good movie. Or like now, when I am at the office, hung over as hell, and do not want to talk to anyone, least of all my cheery good friend:

“What’s up what’s up?” he says. “What’s going on?”

I manage, somehow, to reply in the appropriate manner:

“Nothing, dude, what’s going on with you?”

But I dread these calls, I really do. Because I know what the bastard is going to say next:

“Yeah, so what do you got lined up for this evening?”

And I want to say, Dude, come on, we went out last night, it’s one in the afternoon, my head is soaked thick with scotch and cigarettes, I feel like ass, how could I possibly already have plans for tonight, leave me the fuck alone, let me do my stupid work and drudge through this day so I can just go home and collapse on the couch in front of the TV and just fucking chill. But instead I say:

“Not much, man.”

“Yeah, I’m thinking about stepping out for a bit,” he says. This, you will learn, is an understatement, and Zoo is full of them. Last night we stepped out for a bit, and were up past five in the morning. “What do you think? You up for it?”

And I pause for a second and shake my hurting head slowly and sigh, but there is a grin on my face beneath the pain, and even though I’ve been out two nights in a row and my body is drained almost to transparency and I know that going out again is the last thing in the world I need to do, I say, “I don’t know, dude, maybe, dude, maybe—we’ll see.”

But this is not good enough for Zoo. “Come on, now, dude, it’s Thursday,” he reminds me, and he says it with such conviction you almost consider it a valid point, but the fact of the matter is he would say the same thing if it was Tuesday: “Come on, now, dude, it’s Tuesday.” The thing is, there is no way to argue with Zoo. His logic is circular, flawless, impenetrable. Yes, Zoo, it is indeed Thursday, that I can’t deny. But what about the fact that yesterday was Wednesday, and we were out all night, and what about Tuesday, my man, what about that, I could say, but I don’t. There is simply no way to win. Besides, I don’t want to win. It is an obsession for me, this night. And it is not the alcohol that calls, or the drugs, or even the sex (far too infrequent). No, I am in love with possibility. Tonight, I cannot help but to think, tonight could be the night. Because heading out on the town, you never know what will happen, it could be anything, everything, and whatever it is, it is not this, this whining blue computer screen in front of me, the phones ringing, the halogen lights humming and buzzing and casting that dead light all around the office. Whatever Zoo has planned, it is not this, and though sometimes I feel like killing the bastard when he calls me, somehow all well-rested and chipper and buzzing with plans and possibilities, I know that he means well. And I know that whatever we end up doing, it’ll be something.

Work—or, One of the Reasons I Enjoy the Night Better than the Day

In these early-afternoon hours, when somehow my night has already reluctantly begun, the great nightclubs of New York are slumbering—big and empty and swept clean. In some of them, perhaps, a forbidden shaft of daylight squeezes through one of the frosted front windows, a slant in thick red curtains, and lands on the empty dance floor, sunlit fingers peeking in like dreams to the sleeping beasts. The day is night for these clubs, as it is for the people who frequent them, like me and Zoo.

Back in the day, Zoo could sleep like the dead—long, dreamless hours in which he’d grind his teeth with a dull, crunching, squeaking sound that sent pigeons outside his window fluttering toward the hills. Indeed, back then, when he was home for break from high school or college, it sometimes seemed that the only light Zoo ever saw was that of the dawn after a long night out, and it was this that would send him scurrying like a vampire for cover of shade-drawn darkness.

And me, well, I love the day and all, but I love the nights more, and it’s possible, perhaps, that I have spent more of my life awake at night than during the day. (It is certain I have seen more dawns from staying up than from getting up.) At one in the afternoon, I prefer to be slumbering, or maybe awakening slowly to a coffee or a cold Coke and a smoke, lolling about in soft, lazy sunlight, awaiting the night.

Feeling as I do about this, it is perhaps not surprising that the majority of my days at the office are spent in misery, the seconds like drops of water hanging stubbornly to the lip of a faucet, refusing to fall. Those are the days when I’m not hung over. When I am hung over, strangely enough, the day moves faster. Sure, my brain may be swollen and pressing against the back of my eyes and my tongue may taste of liquor and ash and when I stand up from my desk the room may lurch and tilt, but at least it’s a challenge—I can feel the strain and sweat of concentrating through this pain—at least I’m feeling something. Yes, for all its negative points, at least a hangover gives you something to do. And so I might even say that in some sort of masochistic way, I love the badass, haggard feeling of being hung over but doing your duty anyway. It is the nothing I hate. And the regular days at work, there is only this nothing, and I am just counting the seconds until the day is over and I can go home, and the night can begin.

Because on a good night out there is dancing and celebration, there is drink and laughter, there are good friends and unimaginable women—there are all the things you need to balance that dreary repetition of work and day. But the night is not just antidote, it is not only good because the days are bad. The night is night in and of itself, with or without the drudgery of day, and I can never get enough of it.

The Art of Recovery

Of course, there are undoubtedly those days after when you have had quite enough of it. You would think that with all the goddamn time I’ve spent out at night, I would have figured out by now how to avoid a hangover, but I haven’t, at least not completely. Sure, like everyone else, I...