Nighter
Nighttime always held fascination for me, especially as a youth. Staying up with my friends, camping out underneath covers in the basement. The night was silent, it was calming, even if we weren’t so calm down there with our movies and our Nintendo. I was in love with all of it.
When I was eight, at some point during summer vacation, I decided that I would become what I called a “nighter.” I told my babysitter that for the rest of the summer, I was going to sleep during the day and stay up at night. She laughed and said, “Okay.” So I went upstairs to the bedroom that I shared with my brother Dave and got in the upper bunk, ready to sleep all day and stay up all night. I tossed and turned because of course I couldn’t change what my body had become used to over the entire eight years of my existence. Staying up late was easy, going to bed early was not. Besides, the light coming in from the window was a greyish tone inside my closed eyes. So I rolled over from my back to my side. I punched the bed. Nothing doing.
I’m not sure how long this lasted. It seemed like a long time, but probably wasn’t. Finally, my babysitter rustled me from my false sleep and told me to get up, to go play.
Later, I decided to try the opposite tactic: I would stay up all night. But my parents made me go to bed at some sort of reasonable hour. After all, all-night basement playtime was a special occasion, not a lifestyle.
I became a legitimate “nighter” nearly thirty years later. April, 2018, to be exact. I was thirty-seven years old. The thing was, I’d been having terrible troubles with my bladder and it had been affecting my work as a deli clerk at one of the largest regional supermarket chains in the Northeast. I would take frequent bathroom breaks and just stand at the urinal with my dick in my hand going drip, drip, drip. A bladder squeeze and a few more drips.
The bladder condition was making me irritable with customers. I’m generally not very social by nature, so customer interactions were never the easiest thing for me, but the condition didn’t help my disposition. I just couldn’t put on that mask of normalcy. I’d fucking had it.
Luckily, an overnight position became available. General stocking of products, breaking down pallets, unloading trucks. That kind of thing. There would be a minimum of customers to worry about, since we would only be open a couple of hours while I was there, and for most of that time I’d be in the back. And I could take as many bathroom breaks as I needed.
The overnight shift is one of the most difficult in the company, which is why I was the only person who applied. No competition made it easy to get the job. Hell, they were lucky I applied. Usually, I’d come to find out, no one would apply for the position and they would have to find someone externally, on hiring sites like Indeed. This external recruiting for a full-time position almost never happens for other positions in the store.
And there you are. Before long you understand sentences like, “I just threw live. You want me to condition or help someone else?” You take your lunch break around 2 a.m. The music from the single earbud you’re allowed blends surreally with the music your naked ear hears from the store’s speakers, which, annoyingly, don’t turn off after the customers go home.
I’ve seen just about everything working night shift. A few years ago, I saw a guy crack in real time. One of the worst cases of seasonal depression I’d ever seen. Good guy, at first, but slowly he started to become more and more irritable. Even yelled at me once for not answering the night door when he was in a much closer aisle. Like, what the fuck, man? But the thing about the guy that made him so easy to break was that he was incredibly social. Busy, athletic, with all sorts of friends. A normal dude. But if you work at night you have to sleep at some point, and oftentimes that’s when your friends are doing their thing.
And so he cracked. He walked around mumbling and he never smiled. Eventually management had to step in and get him a daytime position. I think they had him doing my old job in the deli.
And that’s the thing. The only way not to crack is to be comfortable with isolation, or at least more so than your average daywalker. Your friends are going to do things without you. The best you can do is try to hold on to them as best you can. Because if you’re in retail, that means working on weekends, too. Sure, you can see them up until eight or whenever you have to get ready for work, but their party will probably last a lot longer than yours. The utter exhaustion of trying to keep up with it all will almost inevitably mean that you’ll have less of a social life than someone who works days.
We get an extra $1.50 per hour over our base pay for working night shift. The differential, they call it. I suppose that’s because being a nighter means you’ll likely die early. Or earlier than you otherwise might. At least that’s what a bunch of articles tell me.
Nighttime is oppressive. There’s a weight to it. It moves in a strange, unconscious dance. It swirls.
I hardly see my wife, even on my off night on Fridays. There’s nothing to do but read and watch TV. I watch too much TV. I suppose I could clean the house. Maybe do some writing. But my body aches from the previous night’s work. I just want to relax. That’s my mantra these days.
It’s all insane. Sometimes I feel like I’m another species. Something disconnected, something shadowy. I’m alienated.
Morning shines bright and the light stings. Everything seems to crawl the wrong way. I can only turn my head away, hands shaking.