By: Jill Mandrake, SFU Alumni
The collection of memoirs called All Night Gas Bar began its its journey in the mid-1970s: author Ernest Hekkanen sent it around to dozens of publishers, only to receive just as many rejections. Then the manuscript sat at the bottom of an archival box for almost forty years, until Hekkanen eventually dusted off the pages and had them published, for the benefit of university students across the ages.
All Night Gas Bar chronicles a struggling, twenty-something writer, enrolled in UBC’s Creative Writing Department. In order to support his wife and infant, he works the graveyard shift at a gas station on Hastings. In those days, if someone did a gas-and-dash (that is, filled the gas tank and then took off in a cloud of exhaust), the employee’s already-paltry paycheque was docked.
But the author hangs in there: working the night shift in this menacing environment actually inspires his writing. As Hekkanen writes, “I would take my old Underwood typewriter to work in the trunk of the car and, at the station, I would set it up on a stack of wooden Coke boxes in the bay and spend part of my shift pecking out stories in between serving customers at the pumps.” That’s a noteworthy difference between the 1970s and today; you don’t drag a typewriter around now to sneak in a little writing. But this surreptitious typing leads to self-doubt, not to mention flak from his in-laws. “By the age of twenty-five or twenty-six, I had come to the conclusion that I was, indeed, a kind of failure.”
At this point, the author’s wife enrols in professional development at SFU, with the goal of obtaining a teaching certificate. The author has to drop out of UBC, and while he is looking for safer, more lucrative job, he has no choice but to stay at the gas bar. By now, he’s been the victim of numerous robberies, and other hair-raising incidents.
After one such experience, he says, “Upon getting out of the hospital after being stabbed at the service station . . . I went to a café I knew would be open, namely, The Top Hat, which used to exist near the intersection of Granville and Broadway . . .” That quote is from the story, “I Work in the City,” a title evocative of “I Die Slowly” by the great Canadian crime writer Ross Macdonald. In addition to the similar title, Hekkanen’s story possesses the same hard-boiled, film noir style, where savage events come across as matter-of-fact.
All Night Gas Bar demonstrates the timeless triumph of working all night, taking classes during the day, raising a family, collecting a jumble of rejection slips, and skillfully surviving to tell the tale.
