Working The Graveyard Shift At Howard Johnsons

Originally posted at my blog Culturalpurveyor.com in May 2013

Once upon a time the highways of America were filled with a sea of orange called Howard Johnsons. You weren’t a respectable exit ramp if there weren’t a Hojo’s on the other side of the chain link fence separating ramp from parking lot. Billboards let families and late night drunks know that ice cream and fried clams were just miles away.

When I worked at HoJo’s in 1980 there were over one thousand restaurants. Today, all but two are gone. Where once stood the beacon of orange, they’ve now been converted into faux Tex-Mex chain slop like Chili’s or pitiful “family” fare such as Applebees. Howard Johnson’s was a mainstay of the American family summer vacation from the 1950’s through the 1970’s, but now it’s just a faint memory told by wheezing grandfathers and disgruntled former employees like me.

I met Ringo Starr at a Howard Johnsons when I was 18. I met other rock stars motoring on down the highway looking for middle of the night eats. I cooked the breakfasts for the cast and crew of Jimmy Cagney’s last movie there. I observed a mother-daughter prostitute team working there. (I kid you not). I worked with the woman I would end up living with for a decade working there.

When I filled out the application for the overnight cook position, I assumed I would flip a few burgers, pancakes, and eggs. I was in for a surprise. I had no idea what the late night culture was on that desolate stretch of Interstate 95 in 1980. Being 18, I thought I knew it all. I learned within a week that I knew nothing.

Looking back over three decades, it was an eight month period of time that opened my eyes in ways college and the rest of my jobs never would. (With the possible exception of two years driving an ice cream delivery truck within the inner cities during the crack epidemic beginnings and gang turf wars of the mid 1980s).

I was under the impression that I’d get a paper hat, apron, cooks whites, shown the menu for a few nights, watch the main cook and be on my own in a month or so. How naive I was…. less than an hour into my first shift, I was on my own as a bus pulled in off the highway. Those weary passengers were in for a dining experience. I was in for hell. Having a plastic menu folded open above the prep area and dealing with several screaming waitresses making a buck and change an hour breathing down your neck while they see their tips evaporate with each tick tick tick of the clock made any thoughts of an easy working gig fly out the window. Thankfully at eighteen the timeframe for caring is about five minutes.

Busses and truckers. Drunks and the lonely. If there was one constant on the 11pm to 7am shift, it was the type of customer that populated Howard Johnsons at that hour. While the straight world went to bed after Johnny Carson, the crooked world awoke and went to places that seem to vanish at the break of dawn. It’s like we were vampires, but instead of blood we were in search of a way out. Out from under the rules of society. It was a club of vampires. The hookers, their patrons, dishwasher, waitress, state cop, the crying alcoholic sitting in the same booth every night while the waitress stewed at the loss of real estate.

What I found fascinating in quick time was the lack of judgment from the HoJo’s staff towards the paying vampires and in return the non-judgment of the customers towards the working vampires. We all knew we didn’t fit the model of society and this is where we needed to be for the moment. For some, that moment had started back in the 1940’s.

I was welcomed into the vampires lair before I could cash my first paycheck. One didn’t last more than a few days at HoJo’s working the overnight unless they could shed that last skin of normalcy. My skin had been hanging by a thread anyway. I fit in well. Too well.

Here’s a little secret. Restaurant workers are incestious by nature. They flirt, they tease, they sleep with each other. It’s just sex, not usually romance. Most of the time it’s just sex anyway. When you have a population of single moms with multiple kids being watched by grandma and dicey men working as cooks and dishwashers bouncing from job to job and life to life… a looking for love in all the right places experience working the overnight shift ain’t happening. Work hard, play harder. Most of the woman wanted a shiftless man drinking up their tip money about as much as they wanted another kid. That didn’t stop man after shady man from making a go for that tip money anyway.

It was the norm to spend your off duty time with co-workers in search of cheap places to drink. Because of the rotating days off one night you might go drinking with the blonde waitress, the next night off might be with one of the brown haired waitresses or possibly a hostess. It was a learning experience for a young kid. I have to admit to tiptoeing into work a few times waiting for a catfight that never materialized. My ego was mildly bruised when other cooks relayed their own after hours backseat waitress adventures. I wasn’t special, just available.

Howard Johnsons at midnight in 1980 was part of the dying days of the sexual revolution. We were the only 24-hour restaurant on the highway for forty miles so truckers were a huge part of the overnight clientele. We had a massive parking lot in the back that catered to busses, truckers, and the aforementioned mom/daughter hooker team. Truckers up and down the east coast knew about the two of them. I was told the first night about Goldie and her daughter. Yeah, right, I thought. I figured the staff were testing the gullibility of the new kid.

That night I saw Goldie for the first (and sadly, not the last) time. She was probably not more than mid-thirties and appeared spent by life already. Drugs, alcohol, the vampire hours, and the truckers had used up her youth. Minutes later her daughter sauntered in with another scuzzy trucker. The daughter was maybe old enough to get a drivers license and already on the road to dying before her mom. Disheveled would be a kind description of both of them. They worked out of a shitty van in the back lot just off HoJo’s property. One van between them. They pulled tricks at the same time with a beach towel separating their activities.

As I think back it should have been more surreal to a young guy. It was gross, sure, but with the characters that came and went it didn’t seem that big of a deal. After every trick, the women made the truckers buy them coffee and a meal or just coffee if they had eaten already. The waitresses would almost come to blows over who had to wait on both hooker and john. Pleas of just take them and I’ll do your sidework were an every night occurrence. The dirty dishes would be grabbed in such a manner that areas which may have touched a mouth wouldn’t be handled. I would watch from behind the line and barely conceal laughing as the waitress virtually ran to the bus pans under the counter to dump the nasty dishes and utensils.

Hookers and trucker johns weren’t the only interesting characters though. Many a tour bus would pull in and out would pop one rock band or another. Blue Oyster Cult one night, Kansas another night, and so on. The first few times I’d get all excited looking into the front of the restaurant as drugged out rock stars came in for a beer from the bar and omelettes from me. After a couple of months the excitement wore off… until September 18, 1980.

One o’clock on a Monday night, one booth occupied by us bored workers. Not a customer in the place and the bar was closed. The three of us watched as a black limo pulled up and circled several times. Limos didn’t usually stop at HoJo’s other than prom night so our attention was peaked. An old dude walked in and looked the place over, glanced at the waitress, dishwasher and myself, and left. The old dude came back a minute later with another old dude… Ringo Starr.

A buddy had opened a musical at a nearby theatre and now Ringo was on his way back to New York. The other two working with me were tongue-tied. I made Ringo and his old dude breakfast and then talked with him for a good thirty minutes. Lovely fellow, couldn’t have been nicer. Massive earring collection. Ringo signed a guest check for me and was off. The funniest part was as the two of them were leaving two drunk guys walked in and cranked their necks in a double take at the Beatle walking out the door.

Two and a half months later I received a call in the middle of the night from the same waitress, who would become my decade-long girlfriend, telling me John Lennon was dead. My Beatles reunion fantasy was over. But that wasn’t my last celebrity experience at Howard Johnsons.

Ragtime was James Cagney’s last film. The case and crew spent a week or so filming some scenes nearby and needed food first thing in the morning each day of the movie shoot. A driver would be coming by to pick up breakfast served in styrofoam. The producers were sure not going all out for their crew by serving them HoJo’s. My excitement about cooking for James Cagney evaporated the first morning when the order came in for one hundred of the exact same breakfasts. I looked at the order, looked at the size of my grill, thought about the 15 minute drive to where they were shooting, and realized it was going to be cool breakfasts for everyone. I tried the best I could and it didn’t matter. The first eighty breakfasts were ice cold by the time the hundredth came off the grill. I fantasized which box Mr. Cagney would be handed. I was sure he would have someone drive him to the restaurant and smoosh the food in my face like his famous grapefruit scene in “The Public Enemy.” Alas, not a word was said the entire time about the frigid condition of the food. I guess actors are used to eating crap.

Cooking on the overnight shift meant an hour or two of being crushed with orders when the bars closed and six hours of trying to stay awake. Flirting took up some time, and food prep killed a couple of hours, but that still left three or four hours until daylight and the real bosses arriving. The overnight supervisors, if there was one scheduled, were not what one would call boss material. They were even lazier than us and we were damn lazy. All they expected was to be left alone to sleep in the locked office. Not a problem.

So what to do to kill the time? Sneaking beers from the closed bar was one way. A wink and a cajole of a waitress while the dishwasher made sure the supervisor was safely tucked into their office napping. Deals were made to feed the waitresses as they didn’t get free food like the cooks and dishwashers did. Takeout cups were perfect for hiding draft beers behind the line. You just made sure to use a lid and a straw and you were ready to rock and roll. Nothing like a cold draft beer at five in the morning while cooking eggs. On special occasions speed helped scramble the eggs just a little faster. It’s also amazing how fast a waitress can eat a meal when under the gun of a supervisor sighting.

The other way to kill time was to torment fellow co-workers. The restaurant world is not for the faint of heart or the thin of skin. Those who suffer either condition are weeded out and sent packing to real estate school quickly. There were no sacred cows when it came to what we would do. Leaving your meal unattended? Not a good idea. Your reuben sandwich could end up with any number of condiments and/or dead flies as added filler. That cold beverage you left in the waitress station to drink running between the party of drunk dudes with twenty hands and the trucker with no teeth and Marty Feldman eyes… that beverage might not be what you originally put in the cup.

One night I decided it would be fun to mess with my future girlfriends drink. She had water in a take out cup with a lid and straw. I snuck into the bar and grabbed a bottle of gin. I had been out drinking with her recently and knew she hated gin. I took the straw out of the cup, stuffed bits of napkin into the end of the straw and put it back in the take out cup. I filled most of the straw with gin. I added a drop of water on top in the hopes she wouldn’t smell the gin first. Minutes later I heard a retch followed by choking. She had inhaled the full straw of gin. I was laughing until the other waitresses started screaming at me, calling me asshole and worse. She was crying. I was no longer laughing. I still think it was kind of funny.

The overnight “supervisor” never came out to see the commotion. She was very busy thinking about where she had gone so horribly wrong in her life to be working at this Hojo’s in the middle of the night.

Weeks later on a very busy Saturday night I was buried with tickets, completely in the weeds. I cracked an egg and brown ooze came out. Huh. Cracked another egg. More brown ooze. And another egg. And another. I went through three flats of eggs all oozing brown. The tickets were coming in faster and the waitresses were getting madder by the moment. Tick tock. I woke my supervisor from her nap. She couldn’t figure it out either. Suddenly there was a hysterical laugh coming from the waitress station. It was my future girlfriend and the rest of the waitresses. She had taken the flats of eggs home, used a syringe to extract the eggs, and inserted brown mustard and water. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. The ranting by the rest of the staff was an act as they watched me lose my mind. Payback was a bitch.

The sex, drugs, and rock and roll lifestyle of the restaurant overnight shift is punishing. I knew I wasn’t cut out for it as a life choice. I liked sex, drugs, and rock and roll too much and feared I would never escape its clutches were I to stay for too long.

I saw what it did to the workers who stayed. The odd hours, the physical work, and the stress outlined faces that looked much older than the bodies they belonged to. Nobody that hasn’t worked in the restaurant business can really understand the toil it takes on a segment of people that are often living lives filled with incredible hardship at home.

HoJo’s paid miserable wages, offered no benefits, and was a place that sucked people in who felt they couldn’t do better while often treating the workers like crap. If you didn’t like your schedule the coming week, take a hike. Don’t like your waitress section tonight… take a hike. What’s that you say, you worked Christmas last year, too bad. You don’t come in Christmas Day, consider yourself unemployed. The work environment would go from funny to poisonous within minutes depending on the posting of a schedule, an assignment, or the supervisors pet getting the best moneymaking station. But most of the staff were good people that for one reason or another had ended up at the Howard Johnson’s at Exit 65.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but I knew that I didn’t want to stay for very long. The thought of being a supervisor after a few years and staring at ceiling tile wondering what did I do wrong in my last life didn’t appeal to me. I didn’t want to be that jerk who writes people up for stuffing gin down a straw or fires staff for having sex in their cars while on a 3 am break. Seriously, who cares. It’s 3 am. A big, dark parking lot. As long as you’re punched back in on time who cares?

I was never good management material.

It was time to move on and become a member of the daytime workers society. Be respectable, whatever that means. And I did it, I broke free from the trap Howard Johnsons had set… and it only took another twenty-five years in the restaurant business to set myself free.