I’ve been listening to that song a lot lately. And watching the video; the video adds whole new layers of meaning that I didn’t know were there, as a good music video should. The ghosts of those teens looking through the passing freight train at the grown man as he’s clearly remembering when he was them really drives something home to this particular middle-aged small town boy.
(By the way, I think it’s kind of funny that “twenty years” after eighteen – i.e., thirty-eight – seems to be the default age for songs like this, where the singer is lost in bittersweet memory about their long-ago youth. I’m almost five years past thirty-eight myself, and of course Bob Seger is way past it by now. Thirty-eight doesn’t seem that old. But I suppose twenty years is a nice medium number when you’re talking a human time scale, where ten years isn’t enough to even realize that time is passing and thirty makes it ancient history. Twenty years is when you realize that time really has passed, that the world has changed and so have you, that you really aren’t young anymore, not like you were back then, and you’ve actually been dealing with adult things – good and bad – for some time now, and you’re past the scrambling-to-survive stage and maybe have a few moments to count the cost.)
Oddly enough, that song reminds me of a piece of art in another medium, though the connection might not be immediately obvious.
The piece of art in question is the comic book Trashed by John Backderf. Originally published in 2002 as a 50-page, magazine-sized comic, then published as a full-sized graphic novel in 2015, Trashed is based on Backderf’s year spent working as a garbage man at age 21. The original version seems to track more closely to Backderf’s actual experiences, while the expanded version fictionalizes the story a bit.
Backderf doesn’t seem to have enjoyed working as a garbage man the way the narrator of Like A Rock seems to have enjoyed whatever he did when he was “sweating in the Sun” and “working for peanuts”. In fact, he is miserable. But it was still a powerful formative experience for him. “Trash, I hate to admit,” he says at the end of the story, at the end of a hot summer hauling trash before he goes back to school, “Made a man out of me.”
Both of those works of art speak to me because they remind me of one hot summer when I was young – not so long ago when I first read Trashed, but long ago by the time I first really listened to “Like A Rock” – when I was the one who was working for peanuts and sweating in the Sun.
Is this a common experience for young men from rural areas or small towns? To have that one hot summer where you work manual labor and you’re in the best shape of your life and it’s hard work and maybe you don’t want to do it for the rest of your life but while you’re doing it, it’s simple and it’s almost fun, and when work is over you party with your buddies, and that summer is a happy memory in later years after life has become more complicated and responsibility has set in?
Do young urban men have some equivalent to that experience? Do women?
For me, that summer was the summer between sophomore and junior year of college. The previous summer’s summer job had been miserable. Working in a fire trap of a print shop with equipment that was older than I was and co-workers who had no interest in training the college boy, there wasn’t a second of that job that didn’t suck. It didn’t help that it was one of the few jobs in my life that I was genuinely bad at. I was ready to go back to my old job at McDonald’s because spending hours bent over a sink, up to my elbows in greasy water washing dishes for minimum wage was better than that. Then my father turned my whole summer around by telling me that the school district’s maintenance department needed some summer laborers. Still minimum wage, but it was a forty-hour week instead of the hit-or-miss hours of McDonald’s. I was on it like white on rice, which was The Right Choice.
Me and the other summer laborers, college boys all, were issued our own short bus. Yes, there were many jokes about how very fitting this was. We tore out some of the back seats to make room for our equipment, took “Camden School District” off the side (did you know it’s illegal, at least in New York State, to drive a vehicle that identifies itself as a school bus if you’re not using it as such? There are a whole set of traffic laws that apply to school busses that don’t apply to a short bus being used to transport tools.), and spent the rest of the summer tooling around the district, just three college knuckleheads doing whatever the full-time employees told us to do, which was mostly painting classrooms and weed-eating wherever those huge riding lawnmowers couldn’t reach.
(At first our supervisor drove us around the district, but that didn’t last long. Imagine someone driving badly enough to terrify a bunch of twenty-year-old boys. She was all over the road – on the shoulder, swerving into the other lane – and that was her seemingly awake and stone-cold sober! One day early in the summer we staged a mutiny. When it was time for us to move on to the next assignment, one of us was sitting in the driver’s seat and refused to move, and for the rest of the summer, it was one of us who drove the bus. No different than driving a van, really.)
We’d listen to Country and Nineties Rock and Howard Stern…that last one, I’ll admit, was one of the things about that summer I didn’t like. I still have a soft place in my heart for Shawn Colvin’s Sunny Came Home and The Verve Pipe’s The Freshmen because I associate them with this summer. Like A Rock became a favorite many years later because it reminded me of it.
I got perhaps the worst sunburn of my life one day when I forgot my sunblock. No wait, that’s not quite true. The sunburn I got when I forgot my sunblock was bad. The sunburn I got the next day when I used expired sunblock counted as a straight-up second degree burn, with the back of my neck actually cracking open and bleeding. I didn’t even know that sunblock could expire! Just a reminder that when you’re a pasty redhead like myself, you don’t just sweat in the Sun.
The working day was 7 AM to 3:30 PM, which was an early morning for someone who was used to a college schedule, but it left a good chunk of the afternoon free, which I often used for working out in one form or another – walking the roads, biking the roads (often out to my family’s camp on Panther Lake), lifting weights in the Middle School basement, in the weight room that had once been a locker room. I still find the cool smell of dank concrete comforting. I wasn’t quite in the best shape of my life – a good summer couldn’t make up for all the abuse I was putting my body through at college – but it was pretty damn good.
And of course, when work was over, you would party with your buddies. You’ve met mine before: Adam and Ryan from My Last Summer In Camden. We were already starting to drift apart even then, though I didn’t know it. There were already important things that they had shared that I hadn’t been there for. But that summer, I didn’t see it. As far as I was concerned, we were still the Three Musketeers. We still played Dungeons & Dragons, we still jumped off the bridge into Redfield Reservoir, and we still watched bad movies.
Sometimes, we would go to the Rome Drive-In to watch bad movies. Yes, Rome, New York still had a drive-in movie theatre back then. It was the last working drive-in that I can recall. Today you can’t tell it was ever there.
The particular bad movie I remember seeing with them at the Rome Drive-In was Escape from LA. Years later, on my first wedding day, when we were just kinda sitting around waiting while the ladies were out getting their hair done and whatever else they needed to prepare, we went to their hotel room, got out a bottle of wine, and watched Escape From LA on TNT.
Still, for all the fun it might have been, I counted every minute of that summer. Part of it was homesickness. As I mention in My Last Summer In Camden, I considered myself a citizen of St. Lawrence University at this point in time, and after a few weeks of visiting the family and the old hometown, I was ready to go home. But that’s not how summer break works in college.
But the other part, the much bigger part, was that I was young and I was in love, and every minute away from Her was an eternity. The weekend she came to visit were some of the happiest days I’d lived to that point, not least because two of our friends came to join us for a weekend at Panther Lake.
Oh, yes. Those two friends. Megan and Sarah. Another pair of friendships that I thought would last my whole life, but that ended before that school year was out. More than twenty years later it still hurts. But that summer weekend at Panther Lake, that wasn’t even on the radar.
I worked at the Maintenance Department the next summer as well, but it just wasn’t the same. Everyone knew I was going to be gone in six weeks, off to do an internship at a literary agency in New York City, especially me. I never settled in like I had the summer before.
That next summer was the last summer before my last year of college – my last summer ever, really, at least summer as I’d known it: the last summer that was as an interlude between the chapters of my life. And even then, I could see the Real World approaching.
Of course, a summer in New York City is an adventure in its own right. But that’s a story I’ll need to tell another time.