Tails From the Night Shift

Were I — like too many of my contemporaries — inclined to rewrite history based on my personal biases rather than the handed-down accounts of eyewitnesses, I would posit that Thomas Alva Edison should have been hanged by the neck for his crimes against humanity. His ego-based, tenacious pursuit of science negated millions of years of natural evolution wherein mankind learned to labor from sunrise til sunset and spend their nighttime hours in repose (or recreational procreation).

It was Edison’s diabolical invention of the lightbulb that watered the greed of industrial tycoons and sprouted the concept of peons slaving through the night by the devilish luminance of incandescent bulbs. I would succumb to that greed early in life as I discovered that night shift jobs were readily available and that nighttime wages were generally more robust than those earned by the normal segment of society laboring beneath the sun’s rays.

I got my first taste of night work in seventh grade when my father cut a deal with the couple who owned a donut shop next to his real estate office. For a dollar and a nickel per hour, I cleaned their shop every weekday after school until 7:30pm, but on Saturdays and Sundays, I worked as a fry-cook from 5:00am until noon making a dollar and a quarter per hour for my willingness to rise at such an ungodly hour.

By the time I was in ninth grade, Dunkin Donuts built a sparkly new shop and put my mom-and-pop employers out of business. I parlayed my vast “donut experience” into a genuine night shift job working through the night on Friday and Saturday nights. I learned to mix, rise, cut, fry, and glaze Dunkin donuts before I was fifteen years old. I also learned to hate the taste of them with a passion.

The next year, I entered the vocational track at my high school and went to work making real money as a draftsman. That daytime career path took me through high school, a year of fulltime drafting, and my first two years of college. But sooner or later, the money always runs out and the best wages to be earned in a college town are nighttime wages. I was back to spending my weekend nights cutting and cooking those tasty round fat pills.

My typical schedule was to arrive at the shop by 10:00pm and run a fifty-pound batch of dough to replenish the showcase — a job I could pull off in two hours due to the myriad corners I’d learned to cut in my previous yeast-and-grease career. The next run of donuts wasn’t due to hit the shelves until 6:00am which left me ample time for taking naps atop the giant flour sacks in the back room and studying for my college classes using the shop owner’s desk.

As I mentioned, I’d come to hate the sugary taste of donuts but 10:00pm til 7:00am was a long shift to go without food so I improvised. In particular, I struck up a petty larceny conspiracy with the college kid who worked nights at the U-Totem convenience store across the street. I’d occasionally stroll over and trade him a dozen pilfered donuts for anything edible without sugar in it.

On one of those occasions, the kid offered me a package of Eckridge sausage (a foot-long piece of ultra-processed meat biproduct). It may have been the stuff that would cause a vegan to stroke out but to me it was like a culinary goldmine. Not wanting to eat it cold, I tossed it in the deep fryer for five minutes and it came out like something a gourmet chef would prepare. I even shared it with the salesgirl who served our customers all night long.

A couple hours later, I began the morning run of donuts, and just to be sure the sausage hadn’t tainted the deep fryer, I tasted one of the first donuts to fry. It tasted like what I’d imagine a pro athlete’s tennis shoe would taste like right after the big game.

Fortunately, I was a smart college kid with lots of donut shop experience. I quickly hooked up the three-inch flexible stainless tube we used to run hot grease through a strainer in the back room. I then drained the offending liquid right out our back door where it disappeared down our steep parking lot onto the street and down the sloped street gutter into a storm drain. Problem solved. Worst case: the owner might scratch his head about the extra grease usage at the end of the month.

The rest of the night went well and the showcase was brimming with all manner of artery-clogging edibles by 6:00am. I was just wrapping up my shift and cleaning the kitchen when the owner walked through the back door to begin the day shift. He was a middle-aged guy with the red nose of a lifetime alcoholic but that morning, his entire face was the color and texture of an over-ripe strawberry.

“What the F_ _ K,” he screamed. My feigned look of astonishment apparently didn’t fool him so he dragged me out the back door. There, on our asphalt parking lot, was what appeared to be a giant orange arrowhead with the tip at the exact point where the hose had ended and the broad base of the arrowhead about twenty feet downhill where the street began. It could easily have passed as a painted pop-art masterpiece were it not for the six mongrel dogs lapping it up.

Rather than firing me on the spot, the owner commanded me to hook the water hose to the drain on our enormous water heater and use the nozzle to wash away every speck of that grease before someone from the health department spotted it. My superb argument that the health department didn’t work weekends and that by Monday, the dogs would have dealt with the mess, fell on deaf ears.

Consequently, I spent the next two hours coaxing the orange waxy mess into the storm drain with a constant stream of near-boiling water. I even had to don some kitchen gloves because the metal nozzle got so hot. Even worse, I had to scald more than one dog, who, though their tongues bled from licking the asphalt, were not willing to walk away from that delicious grease. Dogs are stupid animals.

That’s when I discovered the true value of a knucklehead willing to inhabit the unnatural realm of the night shift. Faced with working a double shift if he fired me, the owner told me to be back the following evening and to never cook anything but donuts in his fryer again. He did, however, make a menacing gesture when I asked about being paid for the two hours I’d spent cleaning up the grease artwork.

A meeting of great minds who think alike