The (drunk) freaks still come out at night

People are interesting, I truly believe this. So when my editor suggested to me that I spend a night in a local establishment that stays open 24 hours a day and observe what kind of people go there, I thought, why not?
I decided to spend six hours at Lil’ Chef, 1720 S. Mission St., on a busy Thursday night and on into the Friday morning. I brought with me a couple of friends, some homework (which I never did), and I even skipped a day’s worth of classes so that I could nap and store up some sleep. The following is a list of some of the strange currencies of that night. Some names have been changed to protect the truly intoxicated and completely incoherent.
12:00 a.m. – As my friends and I wait by the door, some guy we don’t know (who we now call “Jack”) walks up to us and says, “There’s my friends!” We all look at one another to figure out who knows him. No one does.
12:03 a.m. – After we get our table, Jack sits with us and says, “I can do 150 jumping jacks in one minute, wanna see?” My friend Kelli says, “Sure, do them now.” He promises to do them either by our table or outside the window so that we can watch. He never does.*
12:37 a.m. – Somehow, my loud friends manage to offend the four innocent looking people with Bibles sitting near us. Maybe it’s the swearing that would make a trucker blush that they don’t like, I’m not sure.
1:26 a.m. – A group of people sing Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name” as they leave the restaurant – and they know all of the words.
1:42 a.m. – Now on my second cup of coffee, I can’t eat any more cheese (?) nachos.
1:57 a.m. – I have now finished my entire pot of coffee, which has done nothing to make me more awake but given me the shakes.
2:03 a.m. – Bars are letting out. The black pants/stamped hand crowd begins to show up.
2:24 a.m. – Stanley Hogan, Midland resident, sits at my table and sings “My Guy” into a spoon. He then bends two spoons into feet (a la Charlie Chaplin) and dances them on the table – at least until he notices a manager watching him. When I ask him what he’s doing at Lil’ Chef at such a late hour, he replies, “after getting kicked out of Wayside for underage drinking, I saw some hot girl come here, so I decided to come here too.” After that, he must have noticed her, because he took off real fast, leaving the bent spoons on the table to incriminate us.
2:37 a.m. – When my friend, Emily Hogan (no relation to Stanley), gets up to go to the bathroom, she is stopped by a booth of guys that have tried to pick up every girl in the restaurant. They ask her if she was checking one of them out.
2:45 a.m. – On my way to the bathroom, I am too stopped by the same guys. “You’re the eighth girl tonight to check out my friend!” one of them informs me. Really, I hadn’t noticed that I had been checking him out. Oh wait, that’s because I wasn’t.
2:53 a.m. – Jena D., a friend of mine who has been at the Pub all night sits down at our table. “I am so hungry, I will eat your food,” she tells us. “AND I WILL DO IT,” she tells everyone within yelling range. She orders nachos, against my suggestion, and tells us at least 500 times that she is very parched and “hungry as a hippo.” “You know how on the ‘Christmas Story,’ the kid eats like a pig? Should I do that?” We convince her that it’s a bad idea. Thankfully, she agrees.
2:58 a.m. – A table on the other side of the restaurant is singing “Lean On Me,” complete with clapping and arm motions. I had no idea that so many people enjoyed singing in public places late at night.
3:04 a.m. – I ask our waitress, Annie Tebbetts, a CMU sophomore, to tell me what kind of people come here late at night. She says that there’s two basic groups: the regulars, who are “coffee drinkers who stay here the whole night,” and the drunks. “You know the kind of guy at Wayside who’s old enough to be your dad standing in the corner wearing camouflage? They come here.” After hearing her stories and seeing first hand what she has to deal with, I know that all of these waitresses deserve big tips. However, drunk people are not known for their great math skills, so computing that 15 to 20 percent might be difficult.
4:19 a.m. – I am tired and cranky and I want my bed.
5:26 a.m. – I’m sure I’ve dozed a little bit. All my friends have long ago left me, and people are starting to come in for breakfast. This is a sign to me that it’s time for me to end my “investigative reporting” and go home. I need a long shower to wash the fry smell out of my hair and a nice nap before my damned Friday classes.
5:37 a.m. – Driving home, I hope that I can sleep with all of this caffeine in my system.
I realize there’s some really entertaining people here in Mount Pleasant, you just have to look for them in really weird spots at very late hours.
* Jack, I’m still waiting on that promise. I’ve got a stopwatch.