Cover Story: After midnight

That craggy travel-book writer, Arthur Frommer, who criticized Atlanta for lacking a 24-hour downtown back when we were preparing to host the Olympics in 1996, obviously never set foot in Super Wal-Mart at midnight. This place is hopping. I’m here because I have a body clock that operates like a condemned wooden roller coaster due to my job as a foreign-language interpreter, which sometimes requires I cross time zones as if they were chalk lines in a really big game of hopscotch. And my friend Lary is here with me simply because he can’t pass up an opportunity to shop in his new pajamas.

We both figure it’s been four years since Frommer bluntly blasted our city for being “no Barcelona,” so we decided it’s time to check in on Atlanta’s efforts to meet Frommer’s criteria for a great tourist city, because in his own words Frommer said that though Atlanta has admirable museums and tourist sites, “so does Cincinnati. I don’t know of any great tourist city that doesn’t have a 24-hour downtown.”

Hence the red-eye run to Super Wal-Mart. Lary and I have decided that a good test of Atlanta’s 24-hour-city status is to conduct a normal day’s worth of errands after midnight. Wal-Mart is a good place to start but loses points right off the bat for being in Fayetteville as opposed to near downtown. But though downtown Atlanta has come a long way since Frommer called it “a spooky place after 5,” downtown has yet to open a 24-hour store where I can buy bath mats and beef jerky in the same place. Besides that, Fayetteville is only about 20 minutes south of the city in after-midnight traffic, and I was looking forward to this because I figured it was an opportunity to breeze through the place with the aisles to myself. Looking back I have to laugh.

“What’s with all these cars?” I say as we pull into the parking lot.

“Maybe they’re all abandoned vehicles,” offers Lary.

Inside, Wal-Mart is bustling as if it were 12 noon instead of 12 midnight. Whole families are migrating through the aisles with shopping carts. Cash registers print out receipts with the constant clatter of a casino. “It’s like this every night,” says Dexter Hall, who is shopping with his girlfriend Treneka Colin. Hall is an airport employee whose shift ends at 9 p.m., and the place is packed with people like him. It turns out Wal-Mart is the epicenter of an entire nocturnal society in this city, a reverse world that most of us who sleep at night and get up for work in the morning never see. And I’m not talking about the bar crawlers and post wedding-reception revelers who occasionally stay up until 4 a.m. to soak their heads in the odd trough of booze now and again.

These people are accomplishing tasks, they’re shopping with all the seriousness of a politician’s wife picking out menu items for a fund-raiser. Frommer would have foamed at the mouth ... kinda. “This time of night is the only time I can get anything done,” Hall said. See? It’s midnight, and people are getting things done.

Evidently this time of night is also when Wal-Mart schedules its restocking, because big boxes spilling out merchandise block almost every aisle. And the fitting rooms are locked in the men’s section, so a guy is trying on boxer shorts over his cargo pants right out in the open. A lot of people must have had the same idea, because empty T-shirt packages and their former contents are strewn about willy-nilly. All together it’s something I’ve never seen before at Wal-Mart during regular hours so I want to know if this type of customer behavior is indicative to post-midnight patrons.

“Oh, yes,” says Debra, a Wal-Mart employee who prefers to work the graveyard shift because, among other things, she hates traffic and likes to “beat the school buses.” One night she came across a group of Spanish-speaking customers disrupting shaving gel selections in the sundry aisle. It turns out they were inhaling all the aerosol from the cans. Her co-worker, Drew, complained that one night a troublesome group of girls had opened all the Kotex boxes in the same section. “They don’t know what size they wear?” she asks incredulously. “They grown people! They ain’t no kids!”

“Look,” she continues, pointing to a shelf, “there’s some boxes open now!”

Debra and Drew both remember the night a family of five came through the doors and proceeded to feed themselves directly from the dry-goods section. “They done had dinner, dessert and everything,” says Drew, who recalls she allowed the manager to handle the matter. “I didn’t say anything. You never know if somebody got a gun.”

From Wal-Mart Lary and I go to the Express Lanes bowling alley off Piedmont Road in Buckhead, not to run an errand per se, but to prove there’s something to do in Atlanta at 2 in the morning rather than booze it up in a smoke-filled bar. Express Lanes is busier than Wal-Mart, if you can believe that. Every lane is taken. “We don’t like places that close,” says Thena Gersten, who promptly rolls a gutter ball to the boisterous hoots of her group. “After this we’re going to Krystals. Krystals don’t close either.” She lines up another shot and this time is able to knock down exactly one pin.

“Of course it’s busy,” says Jeri Kowalski, the bowling-alley bartender. “You cannot get a lane here without waiting two hours, not unless you come in at 8 in the morning.” Kowalski, an Express Lanes veteran of 12 years who usually works until 4 a.m., theorizes that the bowling alley’s late-night popularity is due to the patronage of those who also work odd hours. “Employees from the airport come here, because at 4 in the morning where else is there to go if you don’t feel like nightclubs and loud music? Here it’s nice and centrally located.” It does get a little rowdy, she confesses, like the time some frat boys threw one of their friends down the lane head first and he ended up in the pin pit. “You can get hurt down there,” Kowalski says.

Next Lary and I finally find some solitude at the 24-hour CVS Pharmacy on Cheshire Bridge Road. Unlike Wal-Mart or the bowling alley, at 3 a.m. the place was a mausoleum. This surprises me, since I for one could easily spend the night in a drug store just in the hair-dye section alone, and I always envisioned a 24-hour pharmacy with the hum of constant customers since almost any overnight emergency can be quickly remedied by something they stock. Condoms? Aisle 8. Cough medicine? Aisle 3. Ice cream? Aisle 1. But pharmacist Mark Moore has been working the 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. shift at this location for two years, and he says it’s usually pretty quiet this time of night. He does get interesting phone calls though, like the time he talked to the man who had taken too much Viagra.

“It worked really well,” recalls Moore. “In fact, too well.” The man had had no relief for 48 hours. “I told him to proceed to the nearest emergency room,” says Moore.

Another time a woman had called to say she thought her cat was having a seizure, “and I told her he probably was,” he sighs. “There was nothing more I could do.”

Inspired by the Viagra story, Lary and I next go to the sex shop Inserection on Cheshire Bridge Road, which was celebrating its first 24-hour business day since deciding to remain open around the clock Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. I figure this would be a good place to pick up a gag wedding-shower gift for my sister, who’s getting married next month. Once there Lary suggests an item called the Pecker Cookie Cutter. “She could gag on this,” he says. “Definitely.”

The clerk, Tony, is a Chicago transplant, which he says qualifies him as a connoisseur of 24-hour cities. “In actuality, Atlanta is not a 24-hour city,” he protests, “because in the middle of the night basically all you’ve got is the three K’s: Krispy Kreme, Kroger and Krystals.” But he commends Inserection’s decision to go 24 hours. “You need porno in your house,” he insists. “Otherwise what are your children going to do when you leave?”

Next stop: The 24-hour Home Depot on Sidney Marcus Boulevard, which I hear is known as a good place to pick up people for anonymous gay sex. Though Frommer didn’t say it directly, round-the-clock anonymous gay sex is a big tourist attraction in some circles, I’m told. At Home Depot, though, no one is rutting in the aisles as we do a quick pass-through, so I send Lary to the men’s room to check on the action: Nothing. Must be a slow night, so I talk to one of the clerks, who requested anonymity, and ask him what a typical overnight shift entails for him. Surprisingly, he never even mentions orgies.

“What disturbs me most are the children,” he says. “They come in with their parents at 3 in the morning. They should be in bed, not in a shopping cart. And the college kids, they buy funnels and hoses, I know what they’re doing with those. Believe me, nothing fazes me. When he walked by in his pajamas,” he says, indicating Lary, “I didn’t even blink. One time I caught a guy dyeing his hair in the bathroom.” In the winter, homeless people come in to get out of the cold, and sometimes they burrow into the displays and fall asleep. “If they’re not bothering anyone we usually look the other way,” he says.

As Lary checks out at the register — he’s buying some squirrel food and a bat house — Ann the cashier tells us her grandson had been born the day before. “His name is Dillan Charles,” she says proudly. “Make sure to put that in your article.”

On the way home we stop at Riviera, the 24-hour nightclub that replaced Club Anytime in the same Peachtree Street location. It’s 4 a.m., and the rock band Vagrant has just commenced its set. The place is awash with purple neon light, and a disco ball the size of a weather balloon hangs over the dance floor. The woman-to-man ratio is about 3-1, and most of the girls wear spiked heels so high they could use them to spear lobsters. “Every day when my shift ends the sun is up,” says Riviera bartender Matt Gunston, a bona fide member of Atlanta nocturnal society, who works at the Riviera three nights a week and says he needs the other four to recuperate. “Every day,” he reiterates. Behind him a group of revelers engage in a cluster hug on the dance floor. In fact, Gunston is a late-night bowler at Express Lanes, showing up there regularly between 4 and 8 in the morning. “That place is always packed,” he says.

Also, interestingly, Gunston happens to know my husband Chris, who, too, is a bartender, and he regales me with some of their adventures from before we met. It’s funny the things you learn when you eavesdrop on Atlanta’s inverted business world. For one, you learn some of the members of this secret society are stationed among us like double agents. Take my husband; I had no idea he likes red wine and pasta marinara at 7 in the morning.

“Really,” insists Gunston, “Chris made me ride my bike at sunrise so I could pick up the bottle.” And then there was the time they bartended together all night, boozed it up and then ran the Peachtree Road Race drunk. Gunston laughs at the recollection, “Chris wore a Viking hat with horns and smoked a cigar the whole route. A lady told him he was disgusting. Ask him what he said back to her,” he laughs. “Go ahead, ask him ... OK., I’ll tell you, he said, ‘No, lady, you in Spandex ... now that’s disgusting.’” Gunston slaps the bar between hearty guffaws. Gunston then makes ominous reference to a past episode involving Chris at Backstreet, Atlanta’s other 24-hour nightclub. “Go ahead,” he goads, “ask him to tell you about the incident at Backstreet. You’re gonna die.”

This time Gunston isn’t forthcoming with a description of the entire circumstance, just that it involved a deck of cards, a transvestite and bare-chested dancing. At that I decide it’s time for Lary and me to end our nocturnal excursion.

It’s 5 a.m., Frommer’s clock — opposite to the end of a business day, which means our work is done. So off we go into the early-morning night, Lary to put his new pajamas to the test and me to wake up Chris — if that’s his real name and if he wasn’t awake already — to ask him to tell me about the incident at Backstreet.??