Opium Magazine has gracefully published this thing I wrote a long time ago. I was slightly obsessed with Nigella Lawson at the time, and though I pretend to say I’m less obsessed now, who could ever stop being obsessed with Nigella Lawson? Her writing is just so delicious.

I wrote this a while ago, too. I couldn’t think of a good title, so I just used the one Word gave me. Have a good weekend.

It was a few years back, when I still worked at the 7-11 over on Robertson Boulevard. I was just out of school—I don’t remember if it was high school or college, but I remember that I had just finished learning, or pretending to, anyway. I needed the money– I needed a schedule, any schedule at all, so I chose the one that went from 12 midnight – 6 a.m.

“It’s not bad, a good choice, really,” said the gruff, large, vaguely Mexican man(ager) who interviewed (that’s a story in itself, interviewed for a job at 7-11) and hired me. “Don’t listen to the horror stories of banditos and robbers,” he assured me, “it’s a 7-11. Nobody wants to make trouble at 2 a.m.” That actually described me, I thought, more than any would-be criminals who might miss the sign out in front that said I would only have fifty dollars on the premises after midnight. I didn’t want to make trouble, I thought, for myself or anyone else, and told my manager so. “Good kid,” he almost growled as he scratched his unshaven pair of chins. “Hell, that’s where I started—the midnight run—and look at me now…” I did look at him (it wasn’t easy), and took the job.

There are two kinds of customers, I quickly learned, who visit a 24-hour convenience store after midnight on weeknights. First, and easiest to deal with, are the Workers. They too are working stiffs like myself, forced (was I forced?) up at late hours to earn a living. Janitors, construction workers, nurses, truckers, delivery men and women—I was their first human contact, serving them their self-serve coffee, crumb cake, and doughnuts on their way to the still-dark, lonely outside world. Working late at night, and especially early morning, I concluded, is usually a very lonely proposition. Think of the man who vacuums the stock exchange on Wall Street, the woman who mops the floor of the Public Market in Seattle, the old man hired to hose down Hollywood Boulevard, the fake stars embedded into the empty pavement around him while the real stars shine harshly overhead, not quite as bright as the Hollywood sign in the distance. In some of the busiest, most populated places in the world, they toil alone, in preparation for the very crowds who are missing from the locales of their nighttime chores. These are the people I awoke and sent off with a hot cup of coffee and a few doughnuts in a bag, though they didn’t need me to wake up—they were all already awake with the half-sleep, patient eyes of those who work the third shift. I rang them out solemnly and sent them on their way, knowing I would see them again in a mere twenty-four hours.

But I didn’t notice the Workers as a group until I first noticed that there was another group of customers, who I called the Smokers. The Workers saw me at the beginning of their day and the end of mine, but I saw the Smokers at the beginning of my day and the end of theirs, if days existed for them at all. I started my shift at midnight, and they would begin to trickle in about an hour or so after that, as the clubs and bars around town closed. While I had quite a few Workers who were regulars, people I saw every day, it was a rare occurrence (not that I marveled at it much) that I would see a Smoker twice. While the Workers were always alone, Smokers were always accompanied, whether they came in with a friend or left a loud, laughing group in the car. They were better dressed, younger, and richer than the Workers, but they didn’t help themselves to coffee or choose a doughnut—they always headed straight for me, and asked for cigarettes while flipping through their wallets for change or dialing numbers on their cell phones. Workers needed human contact—they would look at me with their tired eyes or hold out their hand for change, but Smokers never looked at me—always played with their phones or signaled to the cars running outside waiting for them. I would lay their packs of cigarettes on the counter with their change, and they would swipe it all off and head for the door in one smooth motion.

I didn’t really prefer one group to the other—both gave me my change, and neither bothered me—the Workers paid and left, the Smokers paid and left. And I, in the middle of it all, sat and returned change, fetched cigarettes from the counter below, read the magazines I found in the racks, and earned $6.50 an hour at the 7-11 on Robertson Boulevard.