Nighthawk: Becoming the Pseudonym
It is nearing 2am and I am wide-awake. If one were trying to find me they needn’t look any further then in front of this computer screen in the wee small hours of the morning. I have begun to embody my screen name (well, part of my screen name) in an organized plot to thwart jetlag. Nighthawk at the Diner has been my MSN handle for about a year or so. It never made much sense. I never posted from a diner and, usually landing daytime shifts, I would have to reserve my late nights into early mornings to a strictly sporadic basis. It is one of many in a long line of online names used in my many years riding this road. Most of these “nicks” have been used and discarded like Paris Hilton on a Saturday night….or a Sunday afternoon….Wednesday at three… There has been Havok, Osirus, Kerouac and The Catcher in the Rye. Some of them remain, most are lost in the cyber ether. I even had a few handles pre-Internet discovery, if you could believe it.
Small towns latch themselves onto some strange fads at strange times. In the early 90s the youth of Cornwall got together and held a meeting to select the next big thing, the wave that would wash over everybody and leave your grabbing your surfboard to ride it. The meeting, I hear tell, lasted for three full days as the wise and pimply debated, rejected, ate pep and bacon pizza and traded Marvel Cards. When this epic symposium was over they sent the meekest of them to deliver the message and thus was the dawning of the CB Radio Era.
Antennas were purchased a placed outside of homes, on apartment balconies and onto Volkswagens that belonged to angry parents. CBs, once reserved truck drivers and taxi cabs, began popping up in the homes of even the technologically impaired, people who couldn’t figure out how to plug in a radio let alone run it. They were practically Amish! Friends of mine sold off their Nintendos, Patrick Roy rookie cards and kid brothers to own one and the bigger the radio the higher the social status. Not only did the radios have to resemble consoles normal used to land large aircraft but the microphones had to be the size of equivalent of telephone polls. It mattered very little to the CB enthusiast that just because you had a bigger mic didn’t necessarily mean you could contact Neptune on a nightly basis, it was simply that you had something of such girth veins popped when you lifted it off the table. In the land of the CB the Silver Eagle was king.
I admit I was lured into the craze but in these early teen years I would latch onto anything new with the vice like suction capacity of a Dirty Devil powered by the lips of Jenna Jameson. I still believe PogoBalls should have caught on. My buddy three doors down managed to coerce his mother into purchasing him a small handheld CB radio. With the promise of shoveled walks in the winter, mowed lawns in the summer and the vow to never again flood the basement to play Gilligan's Island, my mother also agreed and one visit to RadioShack later I was the proud owner of a CB radio of my very own. I took things one step to far, as I was prone to do, and purchased a three-foot antenna that I bolted to the fence outside. My room back then was in the basement and because I wasn’t too keen on sitting outside to chat with the CB folk in town I ran the cord inside through the backdoor. Thankfully on those nights I fell asleep to the soothing sounds of static I didn’t catch pneumonia and we were not robbed. The antenna would blow down nearly every five minutes and even with the thing hooked into my little handheld unit I could only contact people within the range of five feet but I was part of the in-crowd, brother!
My handle back then was Mercury after the lead singer of Queen. I would later move to higher ground and snag a larger base unit, as they were called, and I was able to reach clear into the US if the airwaves were clear. Truckers were patronized and annoyed by my antics clear through to Alexandria! Really, the CB Radio was an excuse to bicker, argue and piss people off you never had to see. Very much like the Internet, the CB radio was. Come to think of it, maybe we weren’t the geeks and losers 10-4ing and inquiring about 10-20s when we could have just walked three doors down. We were not the social outcasts meeting strangers at the nearest coffee shop and calling them Honey Bear, Minnie Mouse and Wildcat instead of whatever their actual names were. No, we were not a sad, sorry lot opting to avoid going to the school dance so we could key over the conversations of people we had never met but, by God, we didn’t like ‘em. Sure we may have been ostracized by even the Dungeons and Dragons playing types but we had soldering guns, microphones that made our voices echo and an outlet to vent our frustrations. We, ladies and gentlemen, were the pioneers. Like Galileo, Charles Darwin and In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida we were the forerunners of something years ahead of it’s time. That’s right kids, I had a portable before portable was cool. Sure, my wireless had wires but I just had to switch my band to channel seventeen and I had the ultimate party line. No charging necessary and no dropped calls. You keep your MP3 playing camera phone that can text message, do your taxes and download nude photos of Talia Shire. I gots me a Cobra 148 GTL. 12 watts of power, 40 channels and a dual conversion AM receiver. Fire up the Silver Eagle, Wildcat, my friend, we’re making a comeback!
From Mercury to Kerouc, this Nighthawk has had many aliases. The current one derives from two sources:
This painting became my favorite piece of artwork the moment I laid eyes on it in a downtown Ottawa poster replication shop. It edged out long time champion Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh. The piece evokes such solitude and sorrow. You could almost smell the coffee lingering in that room and hear the bacon sizzling. The painting was born out of the gloom and fears that encapsulated America in the 1940s, one of my favorite eras in history. My love of this time period is not due to the bleakness of the times but from the shift massive cultural shift in artistic creativity. Everything from music, literature, art and cinema underwent a darker transformation. From this era the swing era of jazz exploded into bop and the down on their luck would wallow their troubles away to the sounds of Bird and Diz or some unknown and never discovered hot quintet. Hardboiled detectives and curvaceous femme fatales began to populate the silver screens in films that found creative ways to tell edgier, graphic stories of violence, greed and lust while still flying under the radar of the production code. Gaining much inspiration from the popular pulp novels of the time, this genre of film would later be known as film-noir. Abstract expressionism would gain prominence and criticism but the auteurs like Pollock, Brooks and Gorky would continue to amaze and influence using this bold and liberating style. Hopper’s painting from this period (though not abstract expressionism) has become one of the most recognizable pieces of American art. Painted after the December 1942 attacks on Pearl Harbor, it encapsulated in dismal detail the mood of the mass populace at the time. The streets are desolate, the diner patrons unsmiling and lost within their own fears. The mood is sullen, sulky and disheartening. Every time I look upon this piece I cannot help but wonder what stories those four could tell. What has brought them there gathered silently in themselves? What are they thinking? I begin to create lives for these one dimensional characters on canvass. The woman in red, Agnus, is thinking of leaving her husband to join her sister on the cabaret circuit. Jim, sitting next to her, just stabbed his partner in the back and is trying to convince Agnus to follow him to Chicago where he’ll buy her a fur with the money he stole. The stranger, back to us, decides that this is his last cup of coffee and today will be the day he finally puts his neck to the noose. Oswald fixes them all breakfast but when Mack walks on in he’s going to smile, punch him smack in the nose and utter the glorious words: “I quit”. Sure, Mary’ll be sore but he knows a guy who runs the horse racket and they’ll be swimming in the dough in no time. Nighthawks breeds imagination.
Nighthawks at the Diner (an obvious homage to Hopper’s painting) is an album I have to listen to at least once a month. Though very difficult to pick a favorite album by the genius that is Tom Waits, this one has held this place for over five years. Recorded in 1975, it was only the third album for Waits and a bold release with it not only being a live album of new material but also a double album from an pretty much unknown musician. Waits cut his teeth playing lounges and smokey rooms and when you spin this disc you are instantly transported into this sort of atmosphere. Part bluesy jazz and part stand up routine, Waits intertwines humorous antidotes and beautiful melodies together effortlessly. The lyrics read like the best of beat poetry. Waits takes the album title, and I my nom de plume, from track #6:
(lyrics by Tom Waits)
nighthawks at the diner
of emma's 49er, there's a rendezvous
of strangers around the coffee urn tonight
all the gypsy hacks, the insomniacs
now the paper's been read
now the waitress said
eggs and sausage and a side of toast
coffee and a roll, hash browns over easy
chile in a bowl with burgers and fries
what kind of pie?
in a graveyard charade, a late shift masquerade
2 for a quarter, dime for a dance
with Woolworth rhinestone diamond
earrings, and a sideway's glance
and now the register rings
and now the waitress sings
eggs and sausage and a side of toast
coffee and a roll, hash browns over easy
chile in a bowl with burgers and fries
what kind of pie?
the classified section offered no direction
it's a cold caffeine in a nicotine cloud
now the touch of your fingers
lingers burning in my memory
i've been 86ed from your scheme
i'm in a melodramatic nocturnal scene
i'm a refugee from a disconcerted affair
as the lead pipe morning falls
and the waitress calls
eggs and sausage and a side of toast
coffee and a roll, hash browns over easy
chile in a bowl with burgers and fries
what kind of pie?
It’s Hopper in song lyrics. Though I have heard this album over a hundred times the punchlines always put a smile on my face and the tunes always fill me with lonesome longing. It remains a perfect escape and a release from the weight dolled out sometimes by the modern existence.
And so, knowing I will soon be entering into a colossal shift of time zones, I decided to live up to the term nighthawk and with the clock clicking over to 3:10 AM I can say I am doing my namesake justice. Japan is 14 hours into the future now. For a real time comparison of the here and there you can view the clocks I’ve inserted at the top of the page, there to ensure I don’t call friends and family believing it to be prime time back home when in actuality it is 2 AM. The difference at the outset is sure to be jarring but I have stayed up later and later with each passing week in an effort to make the transition a smoother one. Colbert and Stewart are my midnight companions and these journal ramblings keep me going until the eyes sag weighted and I no longer can muster the energy to type. The words have always flowed out of me best, and at their most abundant, in the quiet hours before dawn and I hope that this is a precursor to achieving the goal of squeezing a screenplay out of me while abroad. I have to admit that writing again, even if it is (mainly) non-fictional accounts of my personal life, has been invigorating to my creative thinking patterns. I’ve put more words down in the last month then I have in the last five years and if the trend continues, and the imagination finds the right spark, maybe there’s room for a short story or two and, dare I say, a novel? If all it takes is a keyboard and the early morning hours to ignite that spark then the Nighthawk will abide.
