The author, John Marek, is a writer and executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
For most of my elementary school years, my father worked second shift, what he called “three-to-’leven,” at the U.S. Gypsum plant down the road from our house. It probably wasn’t his first choice, but it paid a few cents more per hour than first shift, and at least it wasn’t third shift. On three-to-’leven, he could still live a fairly normal life, sleeping at night and awake during the day. Occasionally, my mother would let me stay up on a Friday night until he got home. It was an adventure to watch the big people shows, like “Love American Style” and the 11 o’clock news. The only other nights I was ever allowed to stay up past my bedtime were Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.
Although bedtimes became more and more lax as I got older, and disappeared altogether by the time I hit high school, I was still pretty reliably sawing wood by the time Johnny Carson came on through the end of my senior year. But, right after graduation, I moved from the breakfast/lunch shift at the restaurant where I worked as a dishwasher to the dinner shift, three until “closing.” Although the restaurant closed at 9, during the busy summer tourist season there were almost always people in the dining room until 9:30. Once they left, the dish crew was responsible for mopping the floors, cleaning the bathrooms and finishing it all off with a delightful mist of bug spray throughout the establishment. By the time all that was finished, it was typically close to 11. One of the very few perks of restaurant work is free or low-cost food and beverages, and I had access to unlimited fountain soda gratis. Washing dishes is hot, physical work, and over the course of a shift, I probably drank half a gallon of Pepsi, so I would arrive home after work hyped up on sugar and caffeine with no hope of sleeping anytime soon. I would usually head up to my room and listen to records or the radio until I was drowsy enough to nod off. WIOT, an album-oriented rock (AOR) station from Toledo, was my go-to in those days, but I never much liked their late-night programming, so I spun the dial and found a station from Cleveland, WGCL, that billed itself as G98. Their playlist skewed a bit more toward the Top 40 end of the rock spectrum, but their DJs were more fun. The weekend guy, who called himself Uncle Vic, took a lot of listener calls, especially night-shift workers who relayed their experiences and adventures.
“Uncle Vic, you will not believe what this guy that just walked into my convenience mart is wearing …”
“A bunch of us employees from Geauga Lake Park are having a party, could you play some Styx for us?”
Uncle Vic created an odd fraternity of insomniacs, partiers and bored minimum-wage workers that I came to view as “my people.” His signature song was “Deacon Blues” by Steely Dan, and although that band inhabited a part of the rock world I wouldn’t have claimed as my own, I became very invested in the words and the vibe of that song:
“I learned to work the saxophone
“I play just what I feel
“Drink scotch whiskey all night long
“And die behind the wheel”
Now, at that point in my life I had barely experienced Boones Farm, let alone drank scotch all night long, and I certainly had no skills on sax, but there was something about the desperation, the nihilistic carelessness, of those words that appealed to me:
“They’ve got a name for the winners in the world
“I want a name when I lose
“They call Alabama the Crimson Tide
“Call me Deacon Blues”
That a kid who wouldn’t turn 18 for another few weeks would somehow find comfort in the lament of an aging, washed-out musician, is, I suppose, a testament to the power of music, but also maybe a window into some of the emotions I was struggling with.
By the time summer rounded into the home stretch of August, I was staying up until “all hours of the night,” as my mother so emphatically put it, listening to Neil Young’s “Hey, Hey, My, My” through my headphones at eardrum-piercing level. Truer to my rock roots, but equally cynical:
“Out of the blue and into the black
“You pay for this but they give you that
“And once you’re gone you can’t come back
“When you’re out of the blue and into the black”
I recognize now that what I was feeling in those wee hours of the morning was my first taste of real freedom. In the night, while my parents and most of the world slept, I was free from the strictures and burdens of a society I perceived then as arbitrary and cruel. In the dark recesses, hidden in the night, I could construct a world to my own liking.
At summer’s end, I packed my maroon steamer trunk and headed off to college, where I would spend four – okay, five, perhaps not coincidentally – years further refining my nite owl predilections. David Letterman and I became best buddies, and midnight Super Beef Hoagie runs to Souvlakis became the norm. It wasn’t until I got my first nine-to-five office job in 1989 that I completely cast aside my late-night ways. It helped that by then I had forged a tenuous peace with my place in the world. These days, when I’m lucky to make it to 10 o’clock, and ’leven is a late night, indeed, I look back on that time with nostalgia, and more than a little wonder; how did I ever get by with so little sleep?