When I was in my 20s, I worked as a temp typist on the overnight shift. And it was one of my favorite jobs I ever had. I showed up at work at midnight. Downtown was completely dark. Nobody on the streets at all. And I'd take the elevator to the, you know, 20th floor or whatever it was. And it would be all lit up and bustling with activity, dozens of people rushing around. Usually we were hustling out some kind of legal brief or exhibit for court the next day. I loved being up when the rest of the world was asleep. And the next morning, when I would walk to the subway as the sun was coming up, I loved knowing that everybody else on the street was dragging themselves to their jobs and I was done for the day. It was like I was part of a secret society that's alive in the middle of the night. OK. Everybody, go home. We're about to start this. It's a regular thing for Austin and his high school friends at night. The pile into a Honda Odyssey minivan. They remove the backseats and drive around the Northern California suburbs, fake-kidnapping their buddies. 15 of them. Open the door! Open the door! Did you get him? Get in the back. Everybody in? Opa! The fake kidnapping is all part of a tradition that they've made up. They call it "going out living" or "living a little." It's not the weekend. The whole point of this is do this on a boring Monday or Tuesday or Thursday night. A school night when other people aren't out having fun. There's no destination. It's basically just glorified cruising. They drive around for hours, talking about whatever, singing along to the music. [SINGING] They bring their minivan to the top of a hill and put it in neutral, and then they all rock back and forth inside the van in unison until finally it rolls down the hill. Whoa! And then sometime after 1 AM, Ian, the driver, pulls out the soundtrack to the Disneyland ride Space Mountain. He's worked out a way to drive in sync with the soundtrack, to simulate the actual ride. Yeah. We're in the car driving very slowly up this dark hill. This is Austin. The headlights are very low. This kind of eerie music. Everyone's a little bit nervous, because you're about to do something-- probably the most dangerous thing we do. Launch control, LV. Go ahead. All video recorders off. Roger. At this point he flips on his emergency lights and starts speeding up a little bit up the hill, turns the car around. Lets the car roll down the hill, accelerating all the way. His lights are turning on and off, on and off, on and off. Driving very, very quickly, at this point, around turns. So basically, you're going down a hill? Yeah. We're going down a very steep, windy hill. It's remote enough, by the way, that in a year of doing this, they have never even seen another car. None of this would be fun during the daytime, Austin says. At night, nobody sees you. You can do anything. Late at night is kind of the whole fun of the event. People don't really pay attention to who's doing what at night. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our show, we spend an hour with the secret society that is up in the middle of the night. All the people doing things that they would never do during the daytime, and the people doing things that they might be during the day that just feel different when you do them at night. Moving products, and hauling across a war zone, and caring for sick kids, and just wandering the streets to get out of the house. Everything is different at night. We witness how in five acts. Stay with us. Eddie One-Way needs some pears. His name is actually Edward Joseph. They call him "Eddie One-Way" because he wants prices to go one way-- down. He's a buyer, one of thousands of guys who show up here every night. And they're buying for pretty much every grocery store, restaurant, corner market in the northeast. If you have ever bought a Golden Delicious apple or ate a salad in a restaurant between Philly and Boston, chances are it came through here. And it is nothing like when you or I buy a salad at a restaurant. There are no posted prices. It us pure supply and demand. And right now, demand-- that's Eddie One-Way, the buyer-- is looking for supply. Let's see here, where's my salesman? Oh, Mr. Timmy? Timmy is a salesman at one of the wholesalers here, to Rigo Brothers. He's close by. I think he's in one of these refrigerators. This place here is a stadium. I think you need GPS to get around here. It would help. Eventually, Eddie One-Way finds Timmy, and they enter into a ritual that will happen thousands of times throughout the night. They try to negotiate a price. Eddie thinks $15 for a box of pears seems fair. Timmy doesn't. No way. We could do it-- I told you 20 yesterday. Yesterday's gone. Today's a new day. $20 yesterday, 18 today. That's it. Stay close, Timmy. Timmy offers Eddie a different kind of pear for $15, which to me looked exactly the same. $15 on these, $18 on them. But Eddie One-Way knows things about pears that I will never know, and he ignores that ridiculous offer. Why do you want to pay $15? Why is 18--? I'd like to pay 13, but I'm being generous. All right. That's it, brother. That's it, man. 18 is the right number. You know it's what they're worth. The night's still young. Eventually Eddie One-Way walks away. The night is still young. At this hour the sellers, guys like Timmy, feel like they are in control. They don't want to give anything away too cheap yet. There's lots more buyers still to come. But Eddie, the buyer, is hoping that if he comes back later in the night, Timmy won't have sold that much. He'll be desperate to get rid of his pears, and will accept a lower price. But Eddie's really taking a risk here. I know. I actually saw this risk play out with carrots, and it was really stressful. Jeff Steinberg is a buyer like Eddie, and he was looking for this one particular kind of carrot. A fancy one. Loose California. And I followed him around, walking the aisles, one seller to another. And at first, everyone has the carrots, but Jeff is offended-- or at least acts offended-- by the high prices. And then an hour passes. And now nobody has Loose Californias anymore. Jeff can't find the carrots he needs at any price. So he's thinking he may have to settle for something inferior-- Loose Canadians. Eugh. Jeff asks a seller named Carlos how much for the Loose Canadians. Carlos tells him eight bucks a box. I'll be right back, then. What's he doing now? Going to look at something that he's going to come back and tell me he doesn't like. What does it mean that he's not going to like it? Probably because they're not good enough for his customers. He's fairly picky, so you have to give the right people the right stuff. And sure enough, Jeff comes out of the warehouse, shaking his head. No good. No good? And where are you going to look for carrots next? That's a good question, because I've pretty much looked all over the place. So it's 11:30 at night, and carrots are your problem at the moment. At the moment. It's coming down to that hour where I'm probably going to have to pay what they wanted, what I don't want to pay. Around midnight, it starts to get hectic. Buyers fill the streets. Sellers wave their arms and yell into faces and cell phones. There's a lot of sweating. And as the minutes pass, all these little stories emerge. Midnight, the big story-- tomatoes. They're on fire. Yesterday they were selling for $15. Now they're $25. Everyone is buying. Also breaking this hour-- leafy greens from California. They're huge, because as everyone says, they have weather out there. There's not enough leafy greens coming to satisfy the demand. It's around this time that we meet Angela Poricelli. Angela is the only woman we see the entire night. She says she knows of only one other woman who works here alongside something like 7,000 men. Her booth is decorated with pictures. She has a big cross. She brings in fresh flowers every week. She offered me candy. And hanging out with her, we learned that it's not all business here in the middle of the night. We keep seeing her next door neighbor, Henry Polio, stopping by on all sorts of dubious missions. Right now he's looking for a fork. Hello. Do you have a fork? Yes, I do. She's the loveliest woman in the market. Believe me, she's the most wonderful person in the world. I know who her family is. Our family, grandfathers know grandfathers, fathers knew fathers. Wonderful woman. Thank you, Henry. All right. Bye. When you buy a few hundred pounds of fruit or vegetables, there is so much you don't know. What's the quality? How long has it been on the truck? Is the price reasonable? And it's true-- sellers and buyers who don't know each other that well, they lie to each other all the time. So with all this uncertainty, there is tremendous economic value in long-term, trusting relationships. Hey Adam? You're overthinking it it's so much simpler than that. I followed Henry from Angela's back to his booth. You kind of have a crush on Angela? No, I do, since I'm a kid. But she always said no. Really? Yeah. I want to take her upstairs and she don't to. Have you ever asked her out? No, no, no. Does she know that you're interested? Oh, she knows. I tell her. You've worked next door to her for all these years and you're never been out with her? No! And I ain't going to. Why? Because It's not the right thing to do. She's my sister. She's not your sister. Well, she's close to it. You're not with anybody. Who, me? Yeah, I got a wife. Actually, I followed up. Henry doesn't have a wife. He did, but his marriage fell apart. And he blames the night shift for that. They never saw each other. He says all these guys here have wives they never see, kids never see. So I go back to Angela's, and turns out she's also divorced. She raised two boys on her own. And she says, yeah. The night shift definitely gets in the way of life. I remember my father. There's a lot of things he couldn't make it. On Sundays, if there was a wedding, he couldn't go. Sundays, work. My graduation, too, was on a Friday, and he couldn't come. Really? Yeah. But that's OK. I understood. So Henry, he said you'll never go out with them because you think of him as a brother. Yes. I agree with him there. That I do. Plus, I'm engaged to someone right now. His name is Wayne. He's a Green Bay Packer fan. Does he work in the market? No. Does he work days? Days, yes. How is it? It's hard to start a relationship. Very hard, very hard. It's just Friday and Saturday, really, that we see each other. Can I check back in with you? Yeah, go ahead. It's one o'clock in the morning, and I'm with Henry again. He's taking a quick break. I ordered lunch, I've got Guido here, and that makes tonight. It's one o'clock in the morning and you just ordered lunch. Yes, yes. So everything is going smooth. Tomatoes are on fire. Still? Yeah. We're sold out and they didn't come off the truck. This is the point in the night where the market really changes. There are none of those people buying fancy stuff for high-end restaurants and specialty Manhattan stores. They're all gone. There's no more high-end guys like Jeff inspecting every carrot. A whole new group of buyers enters the market now. And they're buying for not-so-fancy places-- bodegas and grocery stores in working class neighborhoods, pushcart vendors. They're not quite as concerned with getting the best possible quality. They want a good price. It's in this second phase that the dynamic between sellers and buyers starts to shift. Remember early in the night, when Eddie One-Way had to go searching for someone to sell him pears? Over the next couple hours, it's the reverse. The sellers are looking for the buyers. And this, says a warehouse man named Thomas Kilgaren-- Nickname Killer-- Is the time to see who is a great salesman and who's not. There's some guys down here that couldn't sell life insurance to the Kennedys. Know what I mean? But there's some that are pretty good. If you could sell something that somebody doesn't want, that's a good salesman. I come down here looking for lettuce, you sell me lettuce-- any moron could do that. Sell me something that I don't want-- you know what? That's a salesman. Selling something that no one wants? That is exactly what a guy named Mike Sack, Big Mike, is trying to do right now. We catch up with him toward the end of the night. Earlier in the night, buyers were begging Big Mike to lower his prices, and he didn't. He refused. And it worked out pretty well for him. He sold a lot of Red Globe grapes and mangoes, and he made a killing in persimmons. But now that daylight's approaching, he's got piles and piles of oranges from Chile, and he's the one begging. He's pleading with one of his regular carports, a guy named Amerigo Perrera, to buy some of those oranges. Amerigo is pretty clear about his wishes. No oranges. You've got to give in, Amerigo, today. You've got to be nice. What part of no oranges don't you understand? I'll give you one pallet. No! Stop playing. Be nice today. Be nice in front of the camera. There's a lady present. Shut up already. Can I give you one for $18? No, Mike, no. Just be nice. No. Why? I don't need it today. One skid only. Stop it, stop it, stop it. This stuff is being recorded, you understand? Yeah, but they just want to see, you know, and I've give you one skid. Be nice for the microphone, Amerigo. Amerigo, one skid. How about a 56. Why don't you stop playing around already? No. How about a 56? Amerigo! No! At around 4 AM, all of the sellers in the market find themselves pretty much in the same situation as Big Mike. Tired and with too many oranges. Listen to Henry-- so tired. Oranges. Oranges are moving slow, so you know, you try to give everybody some oranges. Even if they don't want it, they're taking them. You know what I mean? Poor couple. This is, like, what time do you go to bed at night? What time I go to bed? Probably like 11. So this is like your nine o'clock. You know? I hate the day. Wait, you hate the day? Oh, I hate it. What do you hate about the day? I don't know. The sun, everything. I get a headache. How are you, my friend? I just don't like the sun. I don't like it. I mean, I like it, but you know, like now, if the sun came up, I hate it. The morning, I ain't into. I like the dark. At 5 AM, Henry heads home. He rakes some leaves in the front yard, and then heads to sleep just as the sun comes out. And later that day, a fancy grocery store in Greenwich, Connecticut might have some very nice, but kind of pricey, tomatoes. A high-end restaurant in Manhattan may be offering the chef's tomato bisque. But further out, in poorer neighborhoods in South Boston, Brooklyn, Queens, tomatoes will be very hard to come by. Oranges, though, will be very cheap. And there will be lots of them. Chana Joffe-Walt and Adam Davidson of Planet Money, which is a co-production of our radio show and NPR news. You can hear them three times a week speaking in language anybody can understand about the human drama that's part of all kinds of economic systems at their podcast at www.npr.org/money. I reached over and secretly undid my seatbelt. And when his foot hit the break at the red light, I flung open the door and I ran. I had no shoes on. I was crying. I had no wallet. But I was OK, because I had my cigarettes. When you live with someone who has a temper, a very bad temper, a very, very bad temper, you learn to play around that. You learn, this time I'll play possum, and next time I'll just be real nice, or I'll say yes to everything, or you make yourself scarce, or you run. And this was one of the times when you just run. And as I was running, I thought, this was a great place to jump out. Because there were big lawns and there were cul-de-sacs, and sometimes he would come after me, and drive, and yell stuff at me to get back in, get back in, and I was like, no. I'm out of here. This is great. And I went and hid behind a cabana and he left. And I started to walk in this beautiful neighborhood. It was 10:30 at night. And there was no sound except for sprinklers. Ch, ch, ch, ch, brrrrr. Ch, ch, ch, ch, brrrr. And I was enjoying myself, and enjoying the absence of anger, and enjoying these few hours I knew I'd have of freedom. And just to perfect it, I thought, I'll have a smoke. And then it occurred to me, with horrifying speed, I don't have a light! Just then, as if in answer, I see a figure up ahead. Who is that? It's not him, OK. They don't have a dog. Who is that? What are they doing out on this suburban street? And the person comes closer, and I can see it's a woman. And then I can see she has her hands in her face. Oh, she's crying. And then she sees me, and she composes herself, and she gets closer, and I see she has no shoes on. And just as she passes me, she says, you got a cigarette? And I say, you got a light? And she says, damn, I hope so. And then first she digs into our cutoffs in the front-- nothing. And then digs in the back, and then she has this vest on that has 50 million little pockets on it. She's checking and checking, and it's looking bad. She digs back in the front again-- deep, deep-- and she pulls out a pack of matches that have been laundered at least once. We open it up and there is one match inside. OK. Oh my god. This takes on-- it's like Nassau. Now we've got to like, how are we going to do it? OK. And we hunker down. We crouch on the ground. And where's the wind coming from? We're stopping. I take out my cigarettes. Let's get the cigarettes ready. Oh, my brand, she says. And we both have our cigarettes at the ready. She strikes once, nothing. She strikes again-- yes, fire! Puff, inhale. Mm, sweet kiss of that cigarette. And we sit there, and we're loving the nicotine, and we both need this right now. Immediately we start to reminisce about our 30 second relationship. "I didn't think that was going to happen!" "Me neither!" "Oh, man, that was close!" "Oh, I'm so lucky I saw you!" "Yeah!' Then she surprises me by saying, "What was the fight about?" And I say, "What are they all about?" And she said, "I know what you mean." She said, "Was it a bad one?" And I said, "You know, like medium." She said, "Oh." And we start to trade stories about our lives. We're both from up north. We're both kind of newish to the neighborhood. This is in Florida. We both went to college. Not great colleges, but man, we graduated. And I'm actually finding myself a little jealous of her, because she has this really cool job washing dogs. She had horses back home, and she really loved animals, and she wants to be a vet, and I'm like, man, you're halfway there! I'm a waitress at an ice cream parlor. So I don't know where I want to be, but I know it's not that. And then it gets a little deeper, and we share some other stuff about what our lives are like. Things that I can't ever tell people at home. This girl-- I can tell her the really ugly stuff, and she still understands how it can still be pretty. She understands, like, how nice he's going to be when I get home, and how sweet that'll be. We are chain smoking off each other. Oh, that's almost out, come on! And we go through this entire pack until it's gone, and then I say, "You know what? This is a little funny, but you're going to have to show me the way to get home. Because although I'm 23 years old, I don't have my driver's license yet, and I just jumped out right when I needed to." And she says, "Well, why don't you come back to my house and I'll give you a ride?" I say, "OK, great," and we start walking. And we get to this-- lots of lights. And the roads are getting wider and wider, and there's more cars, and I see lots of stores. You know, laundromats, and dollar stores, and EmergiCenters. Then we cross over U.S. 1, and she leads me to someplace, and I think, no! But yes. Carl's Efficiency Apartments. This girl lives there. And it's horrible, and it's lit up so bright, just to illuminate the horribleness of it. It's the kind of place where you drive your car right up, and the door's right there, and there's 50 million cigarette butts outside, and there's like doors one through seven, and you know behind every single door there's some horrible misery going on. There's someone crying or drunk or lonely or cruel. And I think, oh, God. She lives here. How awful. We go to the door, door number four, and she very, very quietly keys in. As soon as the door opens, I hear the blare of television come out, and on the blue light of the television, the smoke of a hundred cigarettes in that little crack of light. And I hear the man, and he says, "Where were you?" And she says," "Never mind, I'm back." And he says, "You all right?" And she says, "Yeah, I'm all right." And then she turns me and says, "You want a beer?" And he says, "Who the [BLEEP] is that?" And she pulls me over, and he sees me, and he says, "Oh, hey." I'm not a threat. Just then he takes a drag of his cigarette and I follow the cigarette down. And I'm surprised when I see, int he crook of his arm, a little boy, sleeping. A toddler. And I think, [GASP]. And just then, the girl reaches underneath the bed and takes out a carton, and she taps out the last pack of cigarettes in there. And on the way up, she kisses the little boy, and then she kisses the man. And the man says again, "You all right?" And she says, "Yeah. I'm just going to go out and smoke with her." And so we go outside and sit amongst the cigarette butts and smoke. And I say, "Wow, that's your little boy?" And she says, "Yeah, isn't he beautiful?" And I say, "Yeah, he is. He is beautiful." "He's my light. He keeps me going," she says. We finish our cigarettes. She finishes her beer. I don't have a beer, because I can't go home with beer on my breath. And she goes inside to get the keys. She takes too long in there getting the keys, and I think something must be wrong. And she comes out and she says, "Look, I'm really sorry. But um, like we don't have any gas in the car, it's already on E, and he needs to get to work in the morning, and um, you know, I'm going to walk to work as it is. So what I did was, though, here, look, I drew out this map for you. And you really, you're like a mile and a half from home, and um, if you walk three streets over, you'll be back on that pretty street, and you just take that, and you'll be fine." And she also has wrapped up in toilet paper seven cigarettes for me. A third of her pack, I note. And a new pack of matches. And she tells me, "Goodbye!", and "That was great to meet you," and "How lucky," and "That was fun," and you know, "Let's be friends." And I say, "Yeah, OK!" and I walk away. But I kind of know we're not going to be friends. I might not ever see her again. And I kind of know, I don't think she's ever going to be a vet. And I cross, and I walk away. And maybe this would have seemed like a visit from my possible future and scary, but it kind of does the opposite. On the walk home I'm like, man. That was really grim over there. And I'm going home now to my nice boyfriend, and he's going to be so extra happy to see me. And we have a one-bedroom apartment, and we have two trees, and there's a yard. And we have this jar in the kitchen where there's like loose money that we can use for anything. Like we would never, ever run out of gas. And I don't have a baby, you know? So I can leave whenever I want. I smoked all seven cigarettes on the way home. And people who have never smoked cigarettes just think ick, disgusting and poison. But unless you've had them, and held them dear, you don't know how great they can be, and what friends and comfort and kinship they can bring. It took me a long time to quit that the boyfriend, and then to quit smoking. And sometimes I still miss the smoking. Jenifer Hixson at The Moth. You can here more stories like this on The Moth's free weekly podcast at themoth.org. They also have a new weekly radio show, The Moth Radio Hour, that's on many public radio stations around the country. Coming up, the time of night in Iraq when you can fool yourself into thinking that you're not in Iraq at all. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues. OK. It's about nine o'clock. Shaina's trying to set up the tent right now. I would totally help her, but I'm busy reporting. How's it going, Shaina? Good. I think we put this into here, and then we can-- this is where I don't get-- how does this bend? Again, I would help, if I could, but I can't. I'm busy reporting. Can we interview you? What do you want to know about? Do you know how to set up tents? Yeah, actually I set that tent up. Do you know how to set up our tent? Yeah, I can set up your tent. That'd be awesome. The DJ will be shutting down about 11:30. At that time, most of the folks will sleep, and at roughly 4:30 in the morning, the DJ comes back, and we wake them up. It becomes a family-friendly event. Especially in the summer, you'll see whole families out here. So you'll see a whole list of rules about, you know, no drinking, and certain behavior. There's lots of dance contests. It's 11:23. We're sitting here in the parking lot across from Chick-Fil-A, just to see it from afar, I guess. I'm going to sit closer to you, if you're comfortable with that. Yeah, that's fine. I think we should describe what we see. Well, we're pretty much in like a regular strip mall parking lot. There's a Blockbuster. There's that that rib place that we ate earlier that I'm kind of regretting. Yeah. And basically, there's a lot of tents up. Easily the most tents I've ever seen in a fast food restaurant parking lot in my lifetime. It's weird with radio. You've got to fill in the blanks. The visuals. We should we should go get some celery and break it, like old time radio. So people will be like, what is that noise? Oh. I just broke my arm in two for no apparent reason. Hello? Hello? Hi. I'm Dave. I'm Ken Perkins. I'm Ann. But I call her Hanusha. Hanusha? Hanusha, in Ukrainian, is Ann. Oh, I like that. How long have you guys been married? We aren't married. We were married to somebody else. But he died, and she died. I think he gave her mushrooms or something. No! Poison mushrooms. No. My wife died of Alzheimer's just a little over a year ago. And then and her husband died two years ago. Three. She was lonesome, and I was lonesome, so we got our lonesomes together. Was it love at first sight for you guys? For me it was. But he didn't-- Not for me, not for me. I learned to love her. It took me a while. Why, why? This one, I'm going wild for this one, and I've only been been here like three minutes. Are you married? Well, we're like, no. We're not married. How would you say, as long as we're on the topic, how do you think we're doing as a couple? Like just from vibes, just work off of vibes. Go with your gut. You are a lovely couple. I think you're charming Really? Just me charming, or together charming? You should have beautiful children together. That's why we brought the tent. No, I'm just kidding. I'm going to play it slow. Oh, we're not really a couple. Taco Bell? That's my favorite. Taco Bell's your favorite? I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that. What is your name? John. No, not that name. The cool one. Veggie Oil Man, Clearwater, Florida. That's a pretty long nickname. Veggie OIl Man, Clearwater-- Florida. What about such Vegman300? Do you love Chick-Fil-A? I kind of do Been to about 32 grand openings. 32? Now, wouldn't the thing to do, rather than spend the money on all that travelling, is just save that money and put that money towards the chicken? Travel's free. I got a Mercedes that runs on used cooking oil for free. You have a what? I got a Mercedes, a diesel Mercedes. An '83 station wagon that runs on used cooking oil for free. That's what you drove here tonight in? Yeah. That's what I go to the grand openings in. Do you think anything crazy's going to happen in the middle of the night? I don't know. This is a bad neighborhood. Is it? Yeah. As long as you stay in the parking lot, you'd be OK. But I wouldn't go out walking around outside. Is there a lot of riffraff around here? Yeah. Is there a lot of riffraff here? They said the hood is right across the street a couple blocks. The hood? Yeah. What do you mean, the hood? You know. And across the street over the other way is the redneck trailer park. What what goes on over there? I don't know, but we've seen a lot of people over there earlier today. Oh, you went over to the redneck trailer park? No, we seen them when we got our food at the drive-through. They were hanging out over there drinking beer on the porch. I'm going to sleep. Hello? OK. What's your name? My name's Cole Naismith. And what time is it? Do you know what time it is? It's probably about 1:15. Is it like what you expected? I didn't know what to expect. I looked around and I thought, there's definitely a type here. And you're probably going to ask follow up questions about what that means. Because I feel like-- I feel like I don't want to be the type. What is the type? I feel like most of the people that I've seen here seem to be a little bit twiddling their thumbs in life, not just for 24 hours? Something as ridiculous as sitting out in front of a Chick-Fil-A makes you ask questions about, am I wasting my life? I don't want to look around and seem like I'm judging others' actions. But it definitely has caused me to be introspective about my own. Oh hey. This is Dave. It's about 4:15 AM and there's not much action going on right now. Shaina's back in the tent. Not sure what she's doing. Probably thinking about me, I guess. Tension's been-- not a bad tension. Just excitement, I guess, between us. It's been pretty incredible. It's now 4:15, and everybody is sleeping, for the most part. I think it's going pretty well. I like Dave. He's so nice. Wish I could figure out if he was straight or gay. I can't really figure it out. But if I figured out if he was straight or gay, then I would totally set him up with someone. Just have to figure out what his type is, you know? OK. Check this out. Have you ever looked with love in your heart? This guy, it's like five in the morning. And this guy just came from out of nowhere and is screaming and preaching. Have you ever stolen anything? Yes! Well, the Bible says that all thieves will end up in hell. I'm going to hell. Now folks, have you ever used God's name in a curse word? I want you to think about it like that. You don't curse Hitler's name. You don't curse bin Laden's name. But you use the name of God who gave you life and breath, who has allowed Chick-Fil-A to give away free meals, and you curse his name! Jesus Christ out on the cross! He paid-- Excuse me--oh. For your sins and my sins! Folks, did you know the Bible says that God sees hatred as murder? A lot of you right now hate me this morning for coming out here and sharing the gospel with you, therefore committed murder in your hearts! Excuse me. All the sins of the world were placed upon Jesus Christ. Oh, excuse me. Can I interview you? Sure. Um, what brings you to Chick-Fil-A? To preach the gospel. How did you know to come now? Did you come because, were you just driving by? No, because I knew there was a crowd. Oh, OK. I'm Jason, by the way. Oh, hey. Oh, yeah, I saw the name tag. I'm Dave. Nice to meet you, Dave. Is this your first Chick-Fil-A opening? Yes. I woke them up for sure. Yeah. That was kind of funny. I'm always a little loud. Do you do this sort of thing often? Like go to, doesn't have to be a fast food restaurant, but like in public, yelling? Well, I try not to make it look like I'm yelling. I'm trying to preach. Well, not yelling. You're just making it so people can hear your voice in a loud way. I woke up my wife this morning. I said, babe, I'm going to Chick-Fil-A, and I'll be back right before I've got to go to work. And she was like, all right. I'm going back to bed. She's like, what? Yeah. Then she went back to bed. OK. It is now 5:40 in the morning, and people are lined up to get their 52 coupons. And everyone is looking really, incredibly jazzed. When I say count, we're going to count down from five, all right? Five! Four! Three! Two! One! Eat more chicken! Hey Shaina, let's sing the song we wrote. Ready? Yeah. All right. Here we go. Chick-Fil-A. Chick-Fil-A. If you like chicken, go to-- Chick-Fil-A. Chick-Fil-A. Chick-Fil-A. If you like chicken, why not-- Go to Chick-Fil-A! Waffle fries and lemonade. These are just a couple of the items that they have available at Chick-Fil-A. And at first that carrot and raisin salad is a little bit suspicious. But you know what, I've tried it. And as it turns out-- Quite delicious. That's right. Chick-Fil-A, Chick-Fil-A... Dave Hill and Shaina Feinberg. It's a pretty amazing scene. I mean, especially when I'm like the front truck, and I can see this line of lights behind me, because we're so tightly compact within our convoy that we brighten up that whole night road. I always think of it that we're stringing through Iraq like Christmas tree lights. A bunch of white, big, bright lights snaking through the dark desert. And we usually are the biggest light out there, because not many local nationals like to drive at night. You're saying local national, Iraqis? Right. And sometimes they're out there. There are not too many of them. And if we do see them, they're usually a lot nearer their own types of Iraqi rest stops, which are like their kind of markets or whatever. So that's the side of the road. Or a fuel station, which can be a tanker truck with a hose hooked onto it with a little kid ready to fuel up to make money for the day, and markets along the back of it. You'll just see these on the side of the road as you're driving? Yeah, exactly. They're just out in the middle of the desert, sometimes in the middle of nowhere. They're usually to the side of the road. It's their version a Starbucks or whatnot. In the email you sent to us, you said that the night convoys were part of an agreement between the U.S. military and the Iraqis. Explain that. We conduct our operations at night. It's just our agreement so that we don't interrupt their life as much. Just because we are a really long and big convoy. So I mean, that is kind of a big deal, and that is kind of an interrupter, I guess you could say. And they don't like us, and you can tell that. Because some traffic, if we're headed northbound, you know, they'll be going both ways in the southbound lane. So basically, they would rather cram traffic going in two directions into one lane rather than try to share the lane that your convoy's in. Right, exactly. They don't want to be near us. Because we have big cruiser weapons on our vehicles. We have bright lights. We try to be nice and try to turn off the left side or something, so we dim the lights for them. So you're not kind of blinding other drivers. Right, exactly. But usually they just don't like being near us, so they'll pull off the road completely and just turn their flashers on and wait for us to pass. How many of these convoys have you done? Probably 20 or 30. I mean, it can get pretty mundane. Now on eight hour missions, they're like a quickie, you know, really fast. Because how long are the long ones? The longest we've had is about 15 hours. It seems very, very long and drawn out, and your legs get pretty tired staying in that one position for a long time when you only have one stop throughout those 15 to 16 hours, you know. But for the most part, we are pretty energy drink fulfilled, with a cooler next to our gunner's turret, and we just reach behind him, and grab our energy drinks. And I think I drink probably about three energy drinks in one convoy. Which is not good, you know. Not good for you. But it helps. Especially on the boring convoys, and the long, long drawn out convoys. I mean, we always usually have at least one or two breakdowns of our third country national supply trucks. I think one convoy, our 15 hour convoy, what we had probably about seven or eight breakdowns. It was ridiculous. Is there ever a time, when you're driving or you're stopped, that you almost forget where you are? Oh yeah, for sure. Sometimes I feel like I'm driving in, you know, the desert of the U.S., like Arizona or something like that. You know, it looks like a normal highway within the States. Because A, it's dark, and B, it's just a normal paved road. Yeah, it's not as kept up as well as how the states keep it up, and half the road isn't even painted where the stripes are supposed to be, but for the most part, it reminds you of a normal highway. And so sometimes I feel like I'm on a long roadtrip. Sometimes I feel like I'm driving a big freight truck, like if I was a truck driver back home, you know. It's usually a pretty quick feeling, because you can be brought back pretty fast. There's tires everywhere. They line the road. I mean, I'm not even kidding when I say that. Most Iraqis, they run out their tires until they're completely destroyed to smithereens, and so they'll just leave those pieces on the side of the road. There's no type of cleanup crew to come clean up the trash on the road. There's no type of officer to come pick up the destroyed tire that's in the right lane. So that's usually just what seems to bring me back to being in Iraq. And then, you know, sometimes I look down-- wait, I have my body armor on. I'm in still in Iraq. Specialist Lindsay Freeland of Alpha Company 141 with the Organ National Guard in Iraq, talking with Nancy Updike. This night, a lot of adults wanted to go out, so my mom volunteered to babysit about seven of us kids altogether. And all the kids' bunks were upstairs in this old, old log cabin, and the staircase to get upstairs had no railing. It was just kind of, shoots out into the middle of the room. And I remember we all got our pajamas on, and we all ran upstairs. And I'm not exactly sure if you slipped or got bumped by the herd of children running up the stairs-- This is my mom. But you were falling. And I managed to grab your ankle as your head smashed into the concrete floor. From about eight feet up. And everybody, all the kids were just frozen on the stairs. And-- ugh, this is creepy. So I had to do something. So I'm trying to comfort you, and then you'd be crying and crying-- I mean, like, screaming. And then you'd say, oh, I'm so sleepy. You'd get really calm and still, and kind of go limp a little bit. And then you'd start screaming again. My part, embarrassingly, was I was drinking at Pine Stump Junction. You remember the name of it? Pine Stump Junction. Everybody knows that place. So that's my dad. My mom somehow piled seven kids into a car that wasn't even hers, that was sitting in the driveway, and drove us all to the bar. And she didn't know how to get there, but an eight year old in the car did, so he instructed her. And my mom and my dad, and me and my brother-- we just drove to the nearest hospital, which was in Newberry, which was a really, really tiny town in the Upper Peninsula. And you weren't quite unconscious, but you weren't conscious. And you weren't responsive or alert. And when we got down to Newberry, it was after hours in the clinic, and night was following, and the only guy there, physician, was some retired part-time guy. Older fellow. So I had just started practicing dentistry, and the things that were just fresh in my mind from the medical school aspect of my education-- so it was very, very scary. wait, Wait, what kind of stuff? Well, like when you're looking at a patient, and they're kind of alert, and they're kind of talking, and then one of their eyes dilates, and they start to slow down and slur a little bit, and then the other eye dilates, and they're gone. And was it happening? No. Oh. No, no. But I was checking every five minutes. And I would snap my fingers and see if you were-- just because you were just listless. You just were a little while lump. So they told my dad that they weren't even going to call a radiologist until the morning to do X-rays. And they wanted to just keep me there, overnight, like, sitting there. And I just-- I couldn't believe that I was hearing this. That he was going to make us wait until eight or nine o'clock the next morning before we even called the radiologist. This was up in the middle of BFE, and it was at night. And I thought, this is bad. Because she could be gone by morning. And I can't do nothing overnight. So I called the nurse in, and your mother and I talked about it a little bit, and then we called him in and said, we're taking her. And I remember thinking, we're going to be out in the middle of the UP now. Nowhere near a hospital. In a car with a sick little girl and another little boy. And we have something like a five and a half hour drive to get home. Home, at the time, was Ann Arbor, Michigan, where my dad went to school and where they knew there was a trauma center where if, you know, worst case scenario was happening, something could be done about it. And I remember very little from that night, but just coming to in little flashes in the first hospital, and in the car. And I remember everything looked like I was in that movie Tron. You know, it was all very, like, black, and the edges of everything kind of glowed bright neon colors. And I wasn't walking, and I wasn't really moving much, except to throw up. The first leg of the trip was really-- actually scary to me. Because the UP in the middle of the night-- there's no lights. There's nobody there. It's desolate. And you kind of look for lights in houses. Kind of trying to get an idea of the time. You know, our car at the time didn't have a clock in it. Oh really? Oh yeah. Cars didn't use to have clocks on the dashboard, and I didn't use to wear a watch. So I didn't really even know what time it was. So you'd kind of watch the windows and see if there's people up. Of course there was no traffic. I don't think we stopped. If we did, we stopped for fuel. That's kind of a long trip. So I know we had to have stopped for fuel. But we didn't really need-- anything. Didn't need anything. There was no need to stop. It was still really scary. I remember wondering if you were going to be trapped, somehow. Like that same little girl would be trapped with a brain injury. I mean, you couldn't walk at that point because you were so dizzy. But of course, in my mind, I'm connecting that with you can't walk. You know? Things aren't going to work anymore. And I don't think your dad and I talked about any of that on the way home. I worried that there was an undiagnosed spinal injury, and that you would have to fight with a wheelchair your whole life. I worried that you'd have migraines and puke all your life. Which you do. That's true. That was one of the main lasting effects of the accident. We got to the hospital, and they did a CT scan, and found that I had what's called a contrecoup lesion in my brain. And I wasn't really able to walk for a couple of weeks. And then I didn't get back to school regularly-- I think I was out for like a month. So that first night driving home after the accident just led to hundreds and hundreds of nights like that, where I was up all night sick. I started getting really bad migraines. I would always get them, like, two, three, four in the morning. I would wake up and I'd see these sparkly lights kind of around the edge of my field of vision. Then there's a little bit of, like, TV v static that gets bigger and bigger over the course of an hour until I'm blind. And then it's like worst-- pain so bad that it makes you throw up. And that whole thing is like a big cluster [BLEEP]. Because you'd come in the bedroom and bend over me and say, I'm seeing those lights, Mom, I'm seeing those lights. I do remember, as a mom, in the middle of the night when you would wake me up about that, feeling like a good mom. Because I just got up. You know? And I just remember as a kid when I was sick, a lot of times people didn't have time for that. What do you mean? Here's a blanket. You know? Go get a puke bowl. And kind of being sick by myself. So I know I do remember feeling good that I wasn't going to be that kind of mom. It was nice of them to get up with me like that. But after a while, it just started to seem pointless, because there wasn't really anything that they could do to make me feel better. My mom says when you do get up to take care of kids in the middle of the night, it can feel like you're the only people awake in the whole world. And that was true the first night, when we drove through the Upper Peninsula. And it was true for all the nights my mom got up with me. And it's true now that I have to deal with it all by myself. Jane Feltes. Our program was produced today by Robyn Semien with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Sara Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Aaron Scott. Seth Lind is our production manager, Emily Condon our office manager. Our music consultant is Jessica Hopper. Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who comes to me every week as I'm preparing the credits of the program and pleads with me-- nice today. Be nice for the microphone. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.