There is a highrise office building with random lights for the cleaning crew which looks like a computer board from a distance. And here's an all-night laundromat. Great place for co-conspirators to meet during the spin cycle with plans to rig an election. If you came to launder money, your limo made a wrong turn. Lester Young on sax.
This may be where John Le Carre did his best writing. Insomniacs congregate and bore each to sleep or watch single socks slither out the door…and then show up in a yard sale next month. Thelonius Monk.
Those round windows remind me of early television screens by Philco or Zenith. Who does their laundry in these wee hours? Maybe folks on their way to early Mass or nurses coming home on the graveyard shift. John Coltrane.
Dog-walkers on the verge of finding the meaning of life and dogs answering the moon. Shut-ins thinking great thoughts. Who is that painter outside the Night Hawk Cafe? ...and is that you Vincent releasing stars onto your canvas? Miles Davis.
Some guy just spilled ketchup on himself while eating at a 24 hour diner. I don’t see any diners anymore with the We Never Close sign but they must be out there at truck stops. Eighty-six on the egg salad. I can almost smell the java perking and hear Sinatra singing, Strangers In the Night. his phrases making stanzas of the nocturnal air.
CVS pharmacies with their lights on in this city that wishes it could sleep for shoppers who hate crowds or suddenly woke up in a panic because they ran out of Q-Tips. There's the pharmacist on the night shift left all the routine paperwork by the crew working days. Frederic Chopin.
I was a night-prowler once or twice cramming for final exams in college. Along with two friends I rode the subway through the wee hours to stay awake, tunneling under the boroughs with structural formulas in my head or botanical origins for a course called Materia Medica. Our brains stuffed with a glossary of Latin names, from rhizomes and roots to the inner rind of fruits. Facts as dead as those stars in the firmament with not the slightest relevance to my life as a pharmacist. Just an exercise in rote learning to prepare us to drop a name at some cocktail party that never happened. Gilbert and Sullivan.
Could it be, at the midnight hour, white sheets from the laundromat float over to the pharmacy like ghosts of alchemical ancestors over a smoky cauldron to do their sorcery in the dark shadows of a CVS inner sanctum? This is the hour of miracle healings and spontaneous remissions. Igor Stravinsky.
Around 3 A.M. millions of fellow seniors bumbling our way into bathrooms lit by night lights to empty our bladders. It's getting easier to not think. Now let’s see if we can inch our way back to bed, perchance to dream. Handel's Water Music.
You are setting my mind adrift with memories of being in my 20s and wandering through L.A. in search of places to go after "last call" closed the doors of the bars and dance clubs. "Help," a 24-hour vegetarian restaurant was a favorite as was Wampador's an after hours club. But nothing was quite as interesting at the 24 hour grocery store on Hollywood Boulevard ... I forget the name, but there were always an array of interesting characters there. As for laundry, in those days I went to one near the Boys Market in the Marina. I assume both the laundromat and grocery store are long gone.
ReplyDeleteThanks for unleashing the memories.
ReplyDeleteAnd let us not forget Zucky's on Wilshire Bl. in Santa Monica, and if we stayed up until dawn, our favorite breakfast was served at Rae's on Pico in Santa Monica. I think of all my old places, Rae's is the only one still standing.
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