POSTCARD FROM WILTON, N.Y.: The Overnight Shift

WILTON, N.Y.—Thin, muscular and about 45, Gary always wears tight jeans and a cowboy hat. He addresses me as “pretty lady,” as in “thank you, pretty lady,” when I bring him black coffee and half a toasted banana nut muffin every morning at 3 a.m.

Aside from being a regular at the diner where I’m an overnight waitress and a trainer of top horses who loves his job, Gary is also a bright spot in my morning. He tells interesting stories, doesn’t hit on me, leaves a good tip and even empties his own ashtray. To me—and this could just be the three-job-induced lack of sleep talking here—Gary represents the best of humanity. He’s kind, interesting, helpful and simple in a way that means a lot to a truck stop staffer at 3 a.m. And he’s also a good, quiet influence on the sometimes-tough-to-handle bar crowd, which usually stops in to sober up about the same time Gary is coming in for his muffin before a morning of thoroughbreds.

“Scotty’s” is a place of absolutely no pretension, and I like that. It is a place that employs a lot of single moms, and is a stop for truckers bound for Canada craving a hot meal. We fix our toothpick dispenser with a bang on the counter and carry hot plates stacked up our arms, while trying to soothe the extremely overworked short-order cook. We use violent metaphors like “hurricane” and “slamming” for understaffed busy moments—common to the 11 p.m.-7 a.m. crew, which is also the smallest (Scotty’s motto: “We never close”). We call everybody “hon” and we always dance when the Destiny’s Child classic “Independent Woman” comes on the radio (“All the women who are independent/Throw your hands up at me”). The tricks to avoid being overwhelmed, as my trainer Ruthie taught me, are to always do something, and to know that anything can be kept clean with hot water and bleach.

My coworkers have inspired me to a brand new “can-do” attitude, while teaching me much about what a hard life really is. When I realized how much and where I would have to work I felt sorry for myself. But my self-pity met an early death when I realized that many of my coworkers clock more hours working more jobs than I do, and then go home to raise incredible kids with little help. Anyway, the people are so interesting that I’m lucky to get to know them, and I love finding small ways to make their lives easier. (And I love it when they call me “sunshine” and tell me not to go back to school.)

Scotty’s does have a sketchy element. (As my boyfriend said, “go figure...sketchiness at a truck stop.”) Men brag about how many wheels are on their trucks to my best friend Lisa and me—the youngest employees there, and to some minds that equates to us being fresh meat. Every day, she’s offered a place in a truck on its way to Canada, and I’m offered some guy’s phone number or a trip to his house—sometimes jokingly, and sometimes not. (So far, Lisa’s always been asked to Canada and I’ve been asked to go home with them. Go figure.) Every day, we commiserate that in order to earn a decent wage we need to chuckle and pour coffee to men who joke about wanting “somethin’ not on the menu.” But, with three more years of college ahead for each of us, we’ve both overcome the urge to be too polite and make a guy feel unsketchy in a downright sketchy request, and we’ve found a place where Barbara Bush’s “just say no” mantra can really be applied.

We are also never bored. At slow moments, we argue politics with Richie, the conservative cook from Brooklyn whose quotable quote about Clinton was “how could you like for president a man who doesn’t have the common sense to know how to smoke pot?” (Richie really, really wants to see a Harvard party and talk politics with us. I wonder if he knows what he’s in for.)

My career plans have also gotten some reality tweaking. Tim, a hilarious cook who blares top-40 music and dances when he’s not busy, became quite interested in what I’m going to be when he found out where I go to school. When I told him my dream-of-the-month, to be a social-working lawyer, he asked “how are you going to gouge people and help them at the same time?”

Now, inspired by my coworkers—whose real jobs are my summer job— I wonder over my expensive habits and what is a minimum living for me, and hope like heck that I don’t get too greedy after the dream-corrosion of grad school and student loans.

Lauren R. Dorgan ’04, a Crimson editor, is a history concentrator in Quincy House. In addition to sleeping days to recover from her overnight shift, she is writing feature articles for her hometown paper.