The New Paper Column: Night

On a late night several weeks ago one of my floormates was getting sick of being killed by zombies in Resident Evil 4. Another was hungry, a third “kind of remembered where this really famous 24-hour place was”, and that was how I ended up going out at three in the morning in search of the elusive Papaya Dog.

Papaya Dog, by the way, is an American chain that sells ‘hot dog with papaya juice’ combos. No, I don’t understand it either. But this is the country that greenlighted Son Of The Mask, the country that allowed Britney Spears to have a baby, and the country that continues to tolerate the Bush administration, so I suppose ‘hot dog and papaya juice’ companies make about as much sense as anything else.

In any case, it was three in the morning, and, because my floormate had insisted that he could remember where the place was without a “wussy” map, we were always “almost there”.

Drug dealers who would laugh in our faces if they knew how much money we had were offering us crack, police cars were having fun slowing down when they drove past us, and hobos were yelling things about our mothers this family paper probably couldn’t print, but we were “almost there, really. The next avenue, I think”.

The thing is, after forty-five minutes of ‘almost there’s, you start to tune out the sound, much like the way you automatically begin wondering how many fingers will fall off from the cold, and the way you start trying to remember the exact definition of ‘justifiable homicide’.

But at the same time, little details begin to catch your senses. The way drunks weave, stagger, and twirl one another around, for example, with oddly poetic grace (this is, of course, before they all fall down, like a weird NC-17 nursery rhyme).

The way people who are gangsters in the day enter Dunkin Donuts at night and ask politely for croissants.

The way the empty streets almost glow in the fluorescently amber hue of night lamps, as bits of paper and pages of newspapers flirt and dance above the tarmac ground.

The way friends, gathered in the a.m. hours under alfresco awnings, reminisce, gossip, and laugh in ways you just know would never happen at any other time, their voices seemingly coaxed out of their mouths by the night itself.

We did find Papaya Dog in the end (“Man! I totally told you it was here, didn’t I?”). And about half an hour after we found it, I was staring outside my 13th floor NYU dorm clear glass window. Some apartment lights that were switched on before we left were still on, and I felt really sorry for them.

My mother had warned me about Manhattan after dark (my brother, on the other hand, warned me that most drug dealers after dark were really undercover policemen), but she didn’t put much effort into it.

Maybe she knew it was futile, but I also think that maybe she also knew she’d brought me up in a way that would allow her to sleep at night while I’m here.

Because, really, my mother’s too smart not to know that people, especially teenagers, won’t just switch off after 11 p.m.