Night shift: When I first came to live in america in 1991 and settled in to study and teach at Columbia University in NYC I began working nights as a nightclub/bar bouncer. I lived in two very different worlds. By day the academic life of books and research and by night sex, drugs and rock and roll. It seemed there were two populations to the city – the day shift comprised of responsible, hard working and industrious people who made the city the economic powerhouse of the nation; and the night shift comprised of pleasure seekers, drifters, scam artists and thugs. I remember the words of Travis Bickle often running through my head as I worked the front doors and dance floors of the Apple, “all the animals come out at night…” As time passed I came to see that the city did not have two populations. Rather, it had one population that had two sides to them – the day and the night – and that hard working doctor, lawyer, city employee by day could be a very different person at night. We all have that duality of light and dark inside us and one side needs the other. The night was in a sense a release valve for the pressures of the day. Interestingly, Those people who got consumed by the night life and spent most of their time there used the day as their release valve, since too much time among that crowd created its own pressures. Here I am in my tiny Harlem apartment room in the early nineties…day shift over…night shift about to begin…
