Servos are strange places. Spend long enough in one and you’ll soon notice something jarring about their intensity. The unremitting bath of halogen, its white rays pinballing off extravagantly overpriced products packed with nuclear amounts of salt, caffeine and sugar. The beeping of the console. The slamming of fridge doors. The droning hum of ice-cream freezers and slurpee machines. All of this wraps you in a kind of technicolour scream where everything is turned up to 17.
With more than 20m cars on our roads, servos are beyond ubiquitous in Australia and have even claimed a small corner of our beloved “o”-suffixed lingo: there’s the avo, smoko, reno, garbo, bottle-o, this arvo, and, of course, goin’ to fill up at the servo.
Whether stopping off after work for a quick tank-fill, grabbing some ice for the esky on the way to a music festival, or politely declining the inevitable hard sell of two king-sized Mars bars for five bucks, the servo is a hub for a vast cross-section of society.
But all of this is during the day. At night, servos breed a more distinct and immersive flavour of madness. And I should know, having spent more than 15,000 hours of my life working in them, and overwhelmingly after midnight.
Servo work was my first ever job. I was a shy, skinny arts student who needed cash but knew next to nothing of the world. I’d managed to bluff my way through the retail interview, but soon began to reassess when I was offered only graveyard shifts and took in the anti-jump protection wire cage. It soon turned out to be everything I’d feared: a shambolic menagerie of psychosis, sirens and broken glass. My sleep, social life and uni attendance plummeted, while my intake of caffeine, terrible junk food and less legal intoxicants all skyrocketed. There’s a reason they call it the graveyard shift: it murders you.
I worked in servos all over Melbourne’s wild west, from St Albans to Laverton to Broadmeadows. But it was in my home town of Werribee and surrounds where things got impressively weird. I quickly became convinced that somewhere in the grounds of my home servo was an unholy tear in the space-time continuum, from which emerged hapless and accursed creatures, unnerving in their alienness but still somehow strangely human.
Like the bald, spindly proselytiser who screamed in on a bright green Kawasaki Ninja, and strode into the store in a flowing cream-coloured robe with nothing on underneath. Armed with a bulging amphetamine glare, for 25 minutes he preached, informing me that I was ripe for Satan’s waiting mansion of fire.
Or a craggy and slightly ethereal drifter named Randall, a retired wizard who worshipped black holes as cosmic deities. A dead ringer for Nick Nolte’s mugshot when sideways on GHB, I got to know Randall well over the years, as he floated up and down my aisles like the narcotised Ghost of Christmas Past, bumming smokes from customers, staring through me and recounting his many galactic adventures as he strummed absent-mindedly on his cherry-red acoustic guitar.
There was something surreal in the wash of the lights that brought to mind a sort of stage, and with it all the many addled thespians of night – security guards, drug dealers, shift workers, addicts and random miscreants all playing out tragicomic lives amid the junk food and engine oils as the respectable majority were tucked up in bed.
Somehow, this shy little introvert grew to love it all: the unpredictability, the constant threat of danger and the steady conveyer belt of confounding strangeness. The bosses weren’t around and I was completely free to figure things out for myself and connect with people in ways that only the night allows.
The milkman was a philosophy nut, and we’d often spend a small chunk of our mornings passionately discussing Sartre and Socrates as he shouted me a free banana Big M. Other times I mediated ketamine-flavoured conferences on gender relations, in-between marathon soccer games where the store room door and the entrance served as opposing goals.
From mangy lunatics on speed, to the guy who would only mime what he wanted (complete with exaggerated frowns when I misinterpreted him), I was suspended in a fluorescent Dali painting from midnight to sun-up, for more years than I could count.
I’m no longer the ringleader of that strange nocturnal circus, and while I’ll admit there’s a tiny part of me that misses all the chaos, I also very much enjoy my normal circadian rhythm and not being pinned down by the glinting eyes of a speed freak at 3am. To those still behind the console, I raise my slurpee in solidarity.
Servo: Tales from the Graveyard Shift by David Goodwin is published by Hachette ($34.99) on 28 February
