The Eternity of Friday Night

The Whole String of 'Em

I don’t suppose angels would all look alike, but if you saw them, wouldn’t you’d know they were angels still?

Christmases are like that, and Friday nights. Some label, or brand, or something that says I come from the same factory.

I spent some Friday nights running the soundboard at the punk club, shutting down after the third band howled to a close. Wind the cables, throw out the trash, go in the back for the teenage gas money. Don would dole it out, looking over his glasses. I didn’t know it at the time. I thought he was too tough, but his ministry was the living it, and he was always fair. He taught without saying.

It would be nearly midnight. “Have a nice evening” he’d say, and I’d say the same, and trod out over the orange kitchen floor tiles, ears still ringing from the lo-fi onslaught that I had equalized and adjusted.

Have a nice evening. What a great thing to say in the middle of the night. I do it to this day.

There were the Friday nights with the brothers, walking to get Chinese takeout and ice cream, and the one time they finessed me into watching The Woman in Black. I needed Nyquil to sleep. “It’s not even that scary, man.”

I thought of those nights the other night when the moon hung in a hot hazy sky and a song that wasn’t old at the time but is now came on the radio. The sight wove a highway to anytime I’d like. (I should have taken it.)

Then the salsa club nights not long ago, but yet lifetimes, in other times back when I liked living by the city and my hat bills were all flat: the getting ready, the step out onto the porch to smell the evening breeze, like some cologne-wearing otter out for a prowl, a splash into the river of the road, the flow increasing as the lights flew by, parking, checking the hair, paying the cover, the fake glamour of the club, and trying to keep track of that beat. The trick was to jump in, and not be shy. It was hard.

There was a red curtain that helped me, though. Hung against some brick wall off to the side, it would be a painting every time some lonely soul paused in front of it, thinking they were unseen, but suddenly becoming a live action Cezanne for an instant. Crowds are lonely, especially when more than half of them have overcome fear. But if everyone feels like that…

The sweat, the concentration, the feeling of flying, and ears ringing, a bid goodnight to the doorman, and the long drive home along an empty boulevard.

The sodium vapor lamps cast such an orange glow that I could almost see my thoughts floating around at one in the morning. Sometimes the apartments on the hill in the distance would glitter and look like an emerald city, with everything promised there. The Emerald Heights. Maybe she lived there. I never found out. But I did find God along those orange and green pathways once, or rather, not find Him, and realize he wasn’t there where I was, and that Middle wasn’t up, but that everything was Down, and that started something growing, like how Shortleaf Pine seeds need fire to germinate.

It’s a long way from the other Friday nights now. I’m rolling through the outskirts of another city into one of those blue evenings that haunt the beach and the mountains and anywhere eternal, which is everywhere. It’s another late night working. Make hay while the sun shines.

Everyone has been making hay this week, and it’s lovely, the fields waiting for the baler, or with hundreds of the mysterious round shapes lurking, waiting for something. (They says tractors move them, but I suspect they roam in the wee hours.)

Up over a crest, then into pastures with oaks until the pines close in, dense in the dense air, sprinkling their fragrance onto it like mom used to sprinkle flour on the counter before she kneaded the dough. It would still stick, though, like my shirt sticks to my back.

That’s okay, it’s another Friday night. And somehow, it’s the same.

God bless ‘em.

A Friday night in the mountains.