The Night Canadian: Life and Laughter on the Late Shift
A few years back, when I worked as a foreign correspondent for a certain Los Angeles-based newspaper, two editors on our desk were country cousins of a sort.
Both, as it turned out, were named Bruce.
Both were Canadian.
Not only that, they grew up strangers in Montreal, one neighborhood apart.
Now the first Bruce was the foreign editor, the top guy, the big cheese, perhaps a nice Quebec Laliberte.
He liked hockey (surprise!) and used to watch playoff games in his office on deadline. He consorted all day with the other pressed suits — attending meetings, playing politics, making the decisions on our global coverage.
The other Bruce was anything but the corporate type, a hipster Laurel Canyon alleycat with a wiry beard and debonair mustache, who wore his long gray hair in a ponytail.
He had a subversive air about him and he liked to laugh.
A lot.
He was the guy to whom you shared the blunt, the mate you wanted drinking next to you at the pub, when you leaned over the bar and said “What the hell?” and ordered two more shots of top-shelf tequila.
This Bruce worked the late shift.
I called him the Night Canadian.
My office in Seoul was 17 hours ahead of LA. So when Bruce slid into his editing chair at 4 p.m., it was already the next morning in South Korea.
But it wasn’t until after 10 p.m., when all the other editors had gone home and Bruce was alone at his post, that the laughter ensued.
He would often call, not with any story to discuss, but just to yack and catch up on newsroom gossip. Being 6,000 miles and too many time zones from the home office, I was rarely in the know.
But Bruce filled me in, especially when the gossip involved me.
He was my co-conspirator in that way.
He’d laugh and say something in his Abbie Hoffman-meets-Jerry Rubin kind of way, like “Far Out.”
Only in his Night Canadian accent it came across as “Far Owt.”
In my years at the paper, I was pretty much known (or dismissed) as a feature writer.
I covered the news, did my share of deadline stories — you couldn’t escape them — but in this business you often got tagged with a rap, fair or not, that you could not shake.
I was, as an editor once said, John “Not Necessarily the News” Glionna.
Then there was my, ahem, personality.
Wild man. AWOL. Hurry, duck for cover or you might get that BS on you.
That kind of thing.
But Bruce didn’t traffic in any of it.
He knew I was insane, and told me so during each and every one of our conversations.
Batshit, crazy I think, was the phrase he used.
But he didn’t care.
I think Bruce actually preferred my method of madness after so many hours of working among the newsroom button-downs and career jockeys.
He was one of the few editors who valued what I did. He loved a good yarn about a Japanese porn star, Indonesian hooker or South Korean illicit motel.
He got me.
Top editors insisted that not all the stories I did would be fun. Nonetheless, they insisted, I had to do them. I had to take Calculus in college, not just those offbeat classes I preferred, like “Lesbian Literature of the 1930s.”
Bruce understood.
And he filled me in on the latest scuttlebutt, about that story I didn’t do but should have.
When I got down, he brought me back up.
He once told the higher-ups there wasn’t another reporter out there who did what I did — file stories few others found, about subcultures you never knew existed.
“Just let Glionna go,” he said. “Let him do what he does.”
His advice, of course, fell on deaf ears.
The bigs wanted to know how Japan's yen was doing against the dollar.
Bruce was frustrated. So was I.
“I don’t know, it’s like these people want some kind of Bach or Beethoven,” he said one night. “But you’re neither of those, man.
"You’re the fucking Rolling Stones.”
One of my first foreign stories was about the Seal Men of Seoul, those bottom rungs of the economic ladder — beggars with physical ailments — who dragged themselves along crowded pedestrian walkways, purposefully in the way.
After it ran, a fellow correspondent pulled me aside one night at a bar.
‘I’ve been here for years and never even noticed that story,” he said.
Bruce hadn’t edited the piece, but he loved the feedback.
Some wags on the foreign desk began talking.
I could find a story on way to the outhouse, they said.
For me, that was a compliment.
I used to call Bruce at night and read him my leads.
Whenever I needed a sounding board for some bizarro idea, I always called the Night Canadian, who without fail offered encouragement and insight.
Like the shunned Indonesian villager known as the Tree Man, whose body seemed to sprout branches.
Or the concept of Han, the cloud of arrogance and insecurity that plagues all Koreans.
Or Tokyo’s 80-year-old male porn star.
Sometimes, this Canadian of the Night joined the insanity.
One Saturday, he called to say he needed a brief blog post from Asia, a story that would run online but not in the print edition.
That gave us a bit more, shall we say, leeway.
“Look around on the wires and find something fun,” he said.
I called back within minutes.
“You got two choices,” I said.
The first was a sordid little tale about a group of Kiwis who’d been electrocuted when their hot-air balloon slammed into a power line on the South Island of New Zealand.
Nah, he said. Too violent.
But he absolutely loved the second idea.
A new study had found that Australians, per capita, smoked more pot than Jamaicans.
“Get to work,’ Bruce said. “I need it in half an hour.”
I started with some suggested tongue-in-cheek revisions to the Dictionary of Australian Slang in light of these rampant weed-smokers.
As I wrote, Bruce kept emailing me ideas.
One-liners like Great Barrier Reefers and Billabongs.
Bruce wrote the lead himself, which went something like:
“How far can the average Australian throw a boomerang? Who knows? By the time it comes back, he’s already so stoned he forgot that he threw it.”
We laughed. We filed. We laughed some more.
The next day, the editors weighed in on the post.
They hated it.
Bruce told me that on his evening call.
But for the Night Canadian and me, it was all in a day’s work on the late shift.
Just the other night, I dialed the LA number a mutual friend had passed on.
It has been awhile.
“Can I speak to the Night Canadian?” I said.
Then came that conspiratorial laugh.
We caught up.
He stayed at the paper longer than I did, but left after the job almost gave him a heart attack.
Years later, he’s still footloose Bruce.
He’s driven across the U.S. to Lac Megantic, Quebec four times with his dogs. With this COVID business, he no longer feels comfortable staying in motels with the shepherds, so he’s thinking of buying a travel trailer.
He still lives in Laurel Canyon with his longtime partner and wife Sara, on a street whose name perfectly fits this former Night Canadian.
Hermits Gln.
On the phone, we laughed about how his nickname caught on among other correspondents, who would file their weekly beat memos with lines like “Well, the Night Canadian said this” and “The Night Canadian said that.”
He said he aways wondered if the name was a put-down (like night soil) or something cool.
Cooler than cool, I assured him.
Then I reminded him about his line about the Stones.
“I said that?” he laughed. “That's brilliant! I should’ve written that shit down.”
I sent him a draft of this piece before I posted. Like always, he found some mindless grammar flubs and added a few funny lines.
Because if I was indeed the reportorial Rolling Stones, Bruce was the Keith Richards to my Mick Jagger, laying down those backup vocals and guitar licks to some pretty crazy tunes.
We were out there somewhere on the late shift, me and that outrageous Night Canadian, tossing our boomerangs, always laughing, most times having forgotten we'd thrown them.
