Midnighters
Text By George P. Pelecanos

In the early 1960s, my father worked nights managing my grandfather's lunch counter, Frank's Carry-Out, on 14th and R Streets in Northwest.

Lying in bed in my parent's house in Silver Spring, I'd sometimes hear him enter our home after 3 a.m. He was sleeping when I woke; later in the day, by the time I returned from school, he was gone.

In the mid-Sixties, when my father bought his own business, The Jefferson Coffee Shop (19th Street between M and N), his work-pattern was reversed: he woke around 4:30 and left the house by 5 a.m. I'd listen to his footsteps going down our carpeted stairs, and then the hermetic close of our front door. Afterwards, I'd hear the ignition of my father's blue-over-blue Dodge Monaco, and the hiss of its tires rolling up our street.

I always wondered what he was seeing, and feeling, out there in the night.

It wasn't until 1976, when I stepped into my father's shoes and briefly ran his business, that I got a chance to see and feel it for myself. Cruising down 16th Street in my jacked-up `70 Camaro, I shared the road with delivery men, nightcrawlers, and the occasional cop, the streetlight reflections sliding off the waxed hood of my ride. Dylan's Desire, Lou Reed's Coney Island Baby, and Funkadelic's Let's Take it to the Stage played loudly from my 8-track deck as the wind rushed through my open windows.

To drive through the city in the middle of the night was to witness a special brand of beauty; it was in the layout of the streets, the fit of nature to things man-made, and in the clean, concrete lines of architecture set against the sky. There was a freedom to it as well—an empty road with blinking yellow traffic lights was a car freak's dream, an invite to downshift and punch the gas.

And there were other things to see, pulse-quickening things in the corners of the frame that appeared only at night.

The beauty and the dark possibilities are still there. In the deep green of Stanton and Lincoln Parks in Northeast, pools of shadow are inked beneath the trees. On the western bank of the Anacostia River, the dock lights of the old marinas glow just south of the Sousa Bridge.

From atop 13th at Clifton Street, downtown sprawls out, illuminated and landmarked with familiar monuments, from atop 13th at Clifton Street, the edge of the Piedmont plateau. Here a young man casually shows me the butt of his automatic, holstered in the waistband of his trousers, as he crosses in front of my car. It's a flash study in modern-metropolis contrast: the magnificence, and the danger, implicit in the night.

Deep night clears the city of the straight world, as other forms of human and animal life emerge. Rats move freely over streets, dropping into sewer slats and scampering over dirt mounds piled at the edges of construction sights. Men shoot craps, their crouched silhouettes set against yellow-lit project stairwells and courtyards enshrouded in haze. Boys in their early teens, lookouts for drug runners, sit atop trash cans and mailboxes, their eyes both unemotional and alert. A prostitute smokes a cigarette in the doorway of furniture store on 7th above New York Avenue, blocks away from any potential Johns, her hotbox embers revealing a hard, almost masculine face. Insomniacs, hookers, and junkies on a chocolate Jones haunt the all night CVS below Thomas Circle.

All of them share this time with the midnighters, those who make their living working the late shift.

For working men and women, the rhythm of the night is split, and dictated by, the closing time of the legal nightclubs and bars. From midnight to around two-thirty, bandit tow-truck drivers, cabbies, police, drug dealers, diner waitresses, strippers and go-go dancers, prostitutes, musicians, tenders, bouncers, and hospital emergency-room staff are kept busy. As the bars close and the patrons spill out onto the sidewalks, there is another flurry of activity, and then, after three, a calm until the first of the work force heads into the city near dawn. In these couple of hours the Washington area truly seems to be at rest. Newspaper and bread delivery men, bakers, toll booth workers, convenience store clerks, cleaning crews, security guards, cardplayers and after-hours drinkers are still active, but under the wheels of their trucks, on the clock, or behind locked doors.

Eventually, the sky begins to lighten, and traffic slowly builds. The midnighters' day is ending, just as ours begins. CONTINUE>>