Last night I pulled my first all-nighter in a long time. They were a regular occurrence back in college, and occasionally after, but it's been a long time since I've had so much that I had to get done before an 8:00 class that I had to stay up all night. (Granted, if I hadn't gone out for dinner and a movie earlier in the evening, it might not have been necessary to stay up all night, but dammit, Kelly and I wanted a night out, we had a free babysitter, and we both wanted to see Chicago, which is deserving of its scads of Oscar nominations.)

I stayed up all night for the first time when I was in my early teens. I was at Atlantic Beach, spending a week or so in the Tar Landing home of our friends the Prices. My brother David, Tripp and Ken Price, and the Butscher Sisters, Lisa and Amy, spent the night talking and laughing and (speaking for the boys) wishing there were more Butscher sisters (or at least half as many Prices and Cashwells). By the time the rays of dawn started peeping in the venetian blinds, I was pretty tired. I remember the pinkness of the sky cut into horizontal strips, but not much else.

I didn't have to pull a lot of all-nighters in high school--well, there was the epic weekend when I had to catch up on 600 pages of European history because my girlfriend had been in town for a week and I'd quit doing the reading, and Monday was the exam--but once I got to Carolina they cropped up rather more often, especially if I had a paper due. For example, I turned in one short story after pulling an all-nighter on the Tuesday night before it was due in Wednesday's class--and still failing to put anything together. I begged for a week's extension from my teacher, Bland Simpson, and he graciously gave it to me. What did I do with it? I waited until the next Tuesday night, started a story at 11:00 p.m., and finished it as the sun came up the next morning. (It was called "Rain Is a Feeling" and ended up being published in the UNC literary magazine, the Cellar Door, proving that deadline pressure can sometimes focus the mind wonderfully.)

The most brutal of all-nighters came when I was leaving for my junior year's exchange trip to Manchester, England. I still had an incomplete on my record because I owed Dr. Townsend Ludington a paper; I might ordinarily have let it slide, but he taught in the American Studies department, and the AS department was the group sponsoring the exchange. Rather than risk his well-placed wrath, I stayed up the night before I caught my plane and pounded out a paper on some topic or other--I no longer recall, which gives you an idea of how much insight I had into the subject--and hopped on the plane having had no sleep for twenty-four hours.

What I'd forgotten was that I can't sleep on planes. I've always been that way; something about the upright posture, the close quarters, the dry air--whatever it is, I can't sack out. I'd nod off briefly, only to jerk awake when my chin dropped to my chest, and kept up this same maddening cycle for the full trip. When I arrived at Heathrow, at dawn, GMT, I had a full load of luggage to haul to the train station and no brains left to do it with.

I can't sleep on trains either.

I staggered into the cab zone at Victoria Station in Manchester with the look of an Old Testament prophet, I feel sure. For one thing I was fully bearded and thoroughly hairy, and I was wearing a pair of white canvas painters' overalls. English friends later told me that only two groups of people wore such things at the time: house painters and homosexuals. Perhaps one of the cabbies was hoping to get lucky, or perhaps he wanted me to help him get right with God, but he let me load my cases into his cab for transport to my dorm. "Grosvenor Place, please," I mumbled as I climbed in. The cabby didn't say anything to me, but as we pulled out of the lot, he saw a friend on the same loop and rolled down his window. "I got Grosvenor Place!" spat my cabby disgustedly, which puzzled me a bit. I realized why when he pulled up to Grosvenor some three and a half minutes later--the station was perhaps half a mile from the dorm. The fare was just over a pound, total.

I was dead tired, stupid, and running on fumes after forty-seven straight hours of wakefulness. I'd have been incapable of walking that half-mile if I'd had my feet grafted to a pair of turtles.

I handed him a tenner and told him to keep the change. I didn't look back, but I hope his opinion of Hebrews and/or homosexuals went up as a result of that tip. I hauled my luggage to my room--the one at the absolute greatest distance from the entrance, of course--fell onto my unmade bed, tugged a blanket over myself, and didn't come out for fifteen hours.

I feel a lot like that now.
11:41 AM

.................................

I was born in 1963, so I have no real memory of the days before the Fab Four ruled the pop music universe. At first, their omnipresence irritated me. I also really, really hated "Michelle," which seemed to be the Beatles song most likely to be played on any radio station during my childhood. They also had an animated show on TV that struck me as pretty lame, and when a five-year-old calls something lame, it's got to be lame indeed. Besides, I was a Monkees fan--they had a live-action show, and as far as I was concerned, that made them superior in just about every respect, especially since even then I knew "Last Train to Clarksville" was a great song. When the Beatles broke up, I was in first grade and didn't think much about it; I was still waiting to lose my first tooth.

Things began to change over the next few years when Mom and Dad got a car equipped with an eight-track tape player. They snagged Carole King's Tapestry, Paul Simon's There Goes Rhymin' Simon, and The London Chuck Berry Sessions, but they also got a copy of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and played it frequently. Soon they picked up Hey, Jude, the American-only collection of singles that featured both late-period hits (the title track and "The Ballad of John and Yoko") and raw and energetic tunes from the band's early days ("Can't Buy Me Love" and "I Should Have Known Better"), and I began to appreciate the Beatles. Granted, my taste in Beatles tunes was at first rather odd; I had no idea who wrote or sang which songs--to this day I'll sometimes confuse Paul's voice with John's--but the ones I disliked the most tended to be edgy, repetitive things. "Rain" and "Don't Let Me Down" just made me want to change the program entirely, something you could do with a satisfying "ka-chunk" on an eight-track player. But I loved the carnival atmosphere of "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite," the weird rhythms of "Old Brown Shoe," and the driving piano of "Lady Madonna." At that point, I had to admit, I'd become a Beatles fan. The Monkees had fallen by the wayside.

And then I wandered into Lisa Crumpton's bedroom.

Lisa was the older sister of my friend Bruce, and her room was at the opposite end of the upstairs hall from his. When I was playing at Bruce's house, there wasn't much reason for me to go down that long hall, but on one occasion when we did so, I saw on her wall a strange poster: photos of John, Paul, George, and Ringo slapped together in a free-form collage. Lisa, who was at least four grades ahead of us and never had much interest in us, tolerated our presence in her room on this occasion and mentioned that the poster had come from something called "The White Album." I'm still not sure why I asked to borrow it, let alone why she agreed, but her copy of the White Album went home with me.

Well.

For the first time, the lyrics seemed to step forward into the light. Certain mysterious phrases I'd read in comics or encountered in books began to make their origins known: "Happiness is a warm gun..." "My guitar gently weeps..." "The Walrus was Paul..." The music was fascinating in its own right, though. "Rocky Raccoon" was an immediate favorite, as were "Piggies" and "Julia." I found much of sides three and four upsetting or off-putting; "Helter Skelter" and "Revolution 9" were creepy even if you didn't know squat about the Manson murders. I was also intrigued to discover the originals of several covers--I'd first heard "Blackbird" as a Billy Preston song, and as far as I knew, "Mother Nature's Son" was John Denver's.

Since then, a lot has changed. I've learned to play several instruments, which changed my opinion of a number of songs--"Rain" and "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" are spectacularly cool tunes to play. The band's influence has waxed and waned, and the brief decade of their pre-eminence has been followed by three more, and now only Ringo and Sir Paul are left. My musical tastes have shifted in many directions, but there has always been a fondness for the Beatles under everything. When I launched myself into full-blown worship of XTC or Robyn Hitchcock, it's not because I was consciously searching for music that aped the Beatles, but because their musical vocabulary, like my own, uses familiar words, words that were first spoken to us by John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

After September 11th, magazine covers seemed engaged in a perpetual contest to show us something more depressing about our world every week. That contest was finally ended when Time featured a black-and-white cover of George Harrison, one hand behind his back, holding a sunflower to his chest. George's death wasn't welcome, no, but that memorial cover was; for the first time in months, America seemed able to feel that something other than terror was significant. Even George seemed to know how important he was; I don't mean in the egotistical sense, or even in the socially relevant sense. Sure, he was famous, and he'd done his best to use his fame to help people, such as the citizens of Bangladesh. But he knew, I think, that he was important because beauty is important, and the makers of beauty, even that strange kind of beauty in rock and roll, are important because of what they make. You can see it in his face on that cover--a knowledge that in this flawed, cold, and grubby world, there are still flowers worth the cultivating, and still gardeners worthy of our respect.
1:17 PM

.................................