Suds after sunrise

For 3^rd Shift workers, a.m. happy hours are business as usual

 

By Brian Francis Smith

Philly EDGE Correspondent

 

            It’s 7:07 a.m. and John McKenzie orders his first beer of the day: a Budweiser.

            He lights a Marlboro Red and slumps in his stool while letting out a satisfied exhale. It’s just after quitting time and life is good for him as he relaxes at the Mill Creek Inn in Levittown. For McKenzie and many others in the Philly region, the morning sunrise signifies the end of perhaps the least understood job scene in the modern workforce: the night shift.

             The “third shift” or the “graveyard shift,” as it’s referred to by some, is that curious period generally lasting from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. After dawn breaks, certain area bars open their doors to accommodate an a.m. drinking crowd.

           “For (third shift workers), that’s their five o’clock,” Maria Barry, owner of The Beer Factory in Riverside, NJ says. Her bar opens at 6 a.m. on weekdays to accommodate patrons who work at nearby hospitals, plants and manufacturing facilities in Delran and Cinnaminson.

          “They want to relax and unwind like anyone else would,” Barry says. “They watch Good Morning America, play pool, listen to the CD player… normal things.”

          The Palmyra resident, who has operated the bar for 21 years, says that her morning bartender, Bernadette, who she joking calls her “enforcer,” sees the a.m. scene on a daily basis.

          “She’s a feisty one,” Barry says of Bernadette. “She keeps them in line.”

           So, a morning bar scene does exist, but it’s a flipped existence where everything is upside-down and out of place in comparison to the “normal” 9-to-5 world.

            Take sports, for instance.

            All the sports on TV at this hour are usually either reruns from the night before, or absurdly overeager pre-game shows. It appears that ESPN’s SportsCenter is the a.m. drinker’s program of choice.

             Makes sense. Somehow, The View, just wouldn’t feel right.

             Another oddity of the graveyard bar scene is “closing time,” there is none to speak of.  When morning rolls into afternoon and the lunchtime crowd arrives, an a.m. boozer may be flagged for overindulging. At noon.

             Upside-down? Yep.  But them’s the rules. And when it comes to food, try watching some dude devour a cheesesteak with raw onions at 7:30 in the morning. It hurts.

            TV, food, beer…it’s all there, just like Eastern Standard Drinking (ESD); but somehow, everything is just a little off. Imagine the day after a 6^th Grade sleepover, when no one sleeps and the next morning everyone feels kind of out-of-kilter. That’s the third shift bar scene.

             “It’s tough, man,” said the bartender at the Maple Glen Tavern, a bar that opens early in the morning in Ambler.  “My dad started opening up at 7 a.m., but after he retires, I may not open ’til noon.”

             Unfortunately, his sentiments are often the norm. In a job environment increasingly shifting towards stay-at-home technology and flexible hours, blue-collar night work appears to be drying up in spots.

           But not necessarily in the Delaware Valley.

           Not far from the Maple Glen Tavern is The Phils Tavern in Blue Bell which opens at 8 a.m. daily and has long been a destination for third shifters coming off a work day/night. Other bars, taverns and inns also open for business earlier than most people would think about taking their day’s first drink.

            “I’ve (opened at 6 a.m.) ever since I’ve had the bar,” Barry says of her decades-long tenure at The Beer Factory. “It was very good, and then (with plant closings and a slower economy) it dropped off. Now it is picking up again.”

 

            Walking into the Mill Creek Inn at sunrise is reminiscent of an’80’s Stallone movie. (Think: Cobra.) Harley-Davidson types and tattooed men glance up from their beers with little amusement. The jukebox is dead. Everyone is smoking. SportsCenter drones on TV.

            After the novelty of a newcomer wears off, the disinterested drinkers return to their beers. One gentleman, sporting leather riding chaps and a ’do-rag fashioned from a Confederate flag, hustles out of the bar, yelling back, “I’m late for work.”

           It appears that 8 a.m. is that sad crossover hour when some hardcore drinkers may intermix with earnest factory workers who have just gotten off shift.  This can give the morning bar scene a bad name; an outsider may perceive that all a.m. drinkers are ne’er-do-wells and shiftless drifters.  

            But there are a few drunks, inherent in any bar scene; be it Old City on a Saturday night, or here at the Mill Creek at 8 in the morning. The problem is that the drinking window of the graveyard shift worker seems weird to the right-side-up world.

            Third shifters are aware of this stigma, and may sometimes be paralyzed by it. Aside from McKenzie, who is quoted in the beginning of this article, almost every a.m. patron declined to be interviewed or refused to get their picture taken.

             Even the bartenders.

             This is a rare thing, as most bar/nightlife interviews conclude with 12 dudes jumping in front of the camera.

            “You don’t want to interview me, bro,” says a skinny guy in a white T-shirt at the Mill Creek Inn.

          “There’s nothing to say. The night shift? Ahh...What to say? My neighbors get disgusted when they see me having a beer on my porch in the morning,” he laughs through a deep, phlegmy laugh. “They don’t understand.”

            Back at the Maple Glen Tavern, a guy at the end of the bar is talking golf with the bartender.

         “Do you know the sixth hole? The sixth hole is the toughest,” he says.

          The bartender, who’s in his late 20s and sleepy, sips his coffee and shakes his head.    

          “No.”

          “Well. Trust me,” the man continues. “You don’t want to go right on the sixth. If you do, forget about it.”

            The golf talk makes sense. Limekiln Country Club is located right down the road, and perhaps golfers periodically do pop in for a brew before their tee time. Golf is a morning sport, and it’s 7:15 in the morning.

           Alright! This is the first event in this opposite world that conforms to the context of Eastern Standard Time. The bartender walks away and the man continues talking to no one in particular.  

           “The seventh hole, that’s the hardest,” he says as he raises his voice. “And the eighth hole, that’s the hardest hole on the course.”

            And suddenly it becomes evident that the man may be insane. He’s not a golfer, but rather a burnt-out groundskeeper, perhaps damaged from years of inhaling fertilizing chemicals.

            Come to think of it, he even looks a bit like the fictional Carl Spackler, the affected lawnsman portrayed by actor Bill Murray in Caddyshack.

            And now the third shift bar scene makes complete sense again...because nothing makes sense at all. The world is turned inside out, sunset to sunrise. 

 

- Philly EDGE editor Joe Student contributed to this story

                       

The Beer Factory