Working the graveyard with the folks who don’t sleep.

*^*Dreams and Paper Coffee

It’s 2:34am. Across the street from Denny’s, a handful of yellow cabs look like a swarm of yellow jackets in the Travelodge parking lot. I walk into the restaurant, which is now packed with drunken diners feasting on eggs and waffles, to see how Stevens is dealing with the evening. “There’s been a lot of drunk people tonight,” she says. “It’s dollar drink night at the bars.”

Right now, she is cleaning up her stations. She makes sure each table has 16 sugars, eight Equals and eight Sweet ‘n’ Lows. She flips over every placemat to the side that shows a picture of a cup of coffee and a glass of orange juice.

“I just keep moving,” she says. “I’m burned out and tired, but I still go.”

While making each table look like it was never inhabited, Stevens divulges her dreams of attending nursing school and buying property in Big Sur. Stevens also tells me of a recurring nightmare she has while she gets her daily dose of sleep, which never numbers more than five hours. In it, she is working a hectic graveyard shift at Denny’s while holding her eight-month-old daughter in one arm. In a possible reflection of reality, a voice tells Stevens that if she messes up on the job then she will harm her baby.

At a booth in Stevens’ section, a middle-aged man wearing thick glasses lays a Clive Cussler paperback and a Walkman on the table in front of him. “A meat-lover’s over hard and a glass of water?” Stevens asks him. He simply nods his head affirmative. I ask him his name, and he points to his throat and shakes his head. I hand him my notebook, and he writes that his name is Joseph. Then, he scribbles: “I did it for 25 yrs. Graveyard.”