When I came home from Northwest, the reception wasn’t exactly warm.
My decision to leave college was not popular with my parents.
Especially Big Ab.
He was pissed.
As far as he was concerned, I had wasted my time, squandered his money, and walked away from an opportunity plenty of other kids would have been grateful to have.
He wasn’t interested in what I had learned in the Phillips Hall stairwell.
He was interested in what I hadn’t earned.
A degree.
Once it became clear I wasn’t going back to college, the next move was obvious.
I needed to get a job.
Formalwear and Other Benefits
The job I found wasn’t exactly part of a long-range career plan.
I became an assistant manager at a tuxedo rental store.
It was actually a pretty good job.
Every day brought in a different cast of characters.
Grooms who had no idea what they wanted.
Fathers of the bride who knew exactly how much they wanted to spend.
Teenagers getting ready for prom.
Drunk best men trying to keep the groom out of trouble long enough to get him measured.
Everybody was preparing for some big moment in their lives, and for a little while, I got to be part of it.
I talked to people all day long.
Different ages.
Different backgrounds.
Different stories.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was still learning how to read a room.
The job also came with one benefit I hadn’t anticipated.
Bridal fashion shows.
Every so often, I got recruited to model the tuxedos.
We’d walk the runway while people stared at us and decided which gowns and tuxedos they wanted for their weddings.
I’d stroll out in formalwear, pretending I knew what I was doing, alongside some exceptionally attractive female models.
Suddenly, dropping out of college didn’t seem like a complete disaster.
At least not to me.
Big Ab probably remained unconvinced.
The bridal-show models weren’t the only attractive women who made the tuxedo business interesting.
There was a women’s clothing store next door, and a really cute girl worked there.
We started talking.
Then we started going to lunch together.
Several times, as I recall.
Nothing ever came of it.
Nearly fifty years later, Debbie and I went out to hear a local band.
And there she was.
The girl from the clothing store next door.
Let’s just say...
She looked a little different than I remembered.
Of course, I’m sure I looked exactly the same.
Debbie didn’t ask many questions when I told her the story.
She just laughed.
Debbie is a good sport.
A Real Job
The tuxedo business lasted about six months.
I was still playing a little music at night and on weekends, mostly in coffee shops, but music wasn’t paying enough to qualify as a career.
Then the company where Dad worked started hiring.
They paid really well.
That got my attention.
So I filled out an application.
Before I turned it in, Dad gave me one piece of advice.
“They won’t tolerate lying.”
Fair enough.
Then I reached a question on the application.
It was one of those old-school employment applications that apparently wanted to know everything you had ever done except what you were actually qualified to do.
The question read something like:
“Have you ever used hallucinogenic drugs?”
I stared at it for a while.
Dad had just told me they wouldn’t tolerate lying.
So I told the truth.
I checked yes.
I’m not sure whether honesty impressed them, they simply needed people badly enough to overlook it, or Big Ab had quietly put in a good word for me.
Whatever happened behind the scenes...
Somehow, they hired me anyway.
Big Ab had wanted me to find a real job.
Now I had one.
Bob’s Boy
I started at the absolute bottom.
The lowest guy on the totem pole.
On top of that, I wasn’t simply the new kid.
I was Bob’s boy.
Big Ab was a legend in that company.
Everybody knew him.
They respected him.
And if you happened to get on his bad side...
They feared him.
He managed four different production plants and operated by one simple rule:
Do your job, and do it well.
If you did that, you stayed on his good side.
If you didn’t...
Well...
You get the picture.
Being Bob’s boy probably helped me get the job.
Once I had it, though, the name came with expectations.
People knew who my father was.
They knew how he ran his plants.
And they were watching to see whether his son could measure up.
I never worked directly for Big Ab.
That would have been an obvious conflict.
He stayed out of my way and treated me like everyone else.
At least officially.
But I’m sure he kept an eye on me.
Big Ab had a way of knowing what was happening in all the plants.
Not just his.
I doubt his boy was the exception.
Every promotion had to be examined.
Every opportunity had to be justified.
Nobody wanted it to look like they were showing favoritism to Bob’s boy.
So I moved up the ladder a little more slowly than I expected.
Supposedly, that was because they couldn’t give Bob’s boy any special treatment.
Funny how that worked.
Being Bob’s boy got my foot in the door.
Then it became the reason they kept stepping on it.
The Helper
I started as a helper on the shop floor in the synthesis plant.
The absolute bottom.
My job title sounded simple enough.
Helper.
Help who?
With what?
Apparently, anyone who needed it and anything they didn’t want to do themselves.
Most of the people in the plant had worked for Big Ab at one point or another.
Now they had Bob’s boy standing in front of them.
They made sure I got all the dirty work.
The unpleasant jobs.
The miserable jobs.
The jobs everyone else had learned how to avoid.
Was it vindictive?
Maybe.
Or maybe they were simply making sure Big Ab’s boy earned his place the same way they had.
Either way, I learned how to work.
I also learned when to keep my mouth shut.
Mostly.
People are actually pretty simple.
If they push and you don’t push back, they usually push harder.
The key is learning when they’ve gone too far—and how to push back without making things worse.
There’s a difference between paying your dues and allowing someone to walk over you.
That was a life lesson.
Fortunately, I was a quick learner.
It was a strange place for me to land.
I had slept through most of chemistry class.
Now I was working in a chemical synthesis plant.
Maybe that employment application should have asked whether I had ever paid attention during school.
That answer might have concerned them more than the one about hallucinogenic drugs.
Little Ab
One day, I was cleaning the floor around one of the tanks.
It was a mess.
I was digging years of old, funky dirt and God knows what else out from underneath it.
It was hot.
It stunk.
And it was nasty.
Nobody had told me to do it.
It simply needed to be done.
Besides, I was probably bored.
There was an older supervisor in the plant.
Really old school.
He knew Big Ab well.
What I didn’t know was that he had been standing off to the side, watching me work for quite a while.
Eventually, I noticed him.
He walked over, looked at me, and said:
“Little Ab, you don’t impress me one bit.”
Little Ab.
That was another name some of them had for me.
I looked back at him.
“I’m not trying to impress you. I’m just doing my job.”
Then, because I apparently couldn’t leave well enough alone, I added:
“I wouldn’t think someone doing their job would impress you unless it’s a pretty rare event.”
He loved me from that day forward.
I think he had been testing me.
Maybe he wanted to see whether I would brag about working so hard.
Maybe he wanted to see whether Bob’s boy expected a pat on the back.
Or maybe he just wanted to see if Little Ab had any backbone.
Whatever answer he was looking for...
Apparently, I gave it to him.
Three Days On
The job introduced me to rotating shift work.
Three days on.
Three days off.
Seven in the morning until seven at night.
Then the next week, seven at night until seven in the morning.
Twelve-hour shifts were long.
By the end of one, I was usually tired, dirty, and ready to get as far away from a synthesis plant as possible.
But the schedule had one major advantage.
Days off.
Lots of them.
While most people were working five days to earn a two-day weekend, I worked three and got three.
My body never knew whether it was supposed to be awake or asleep.
But my guitar didn’t care.
Those days off gave me time to write.
More and more, I found myself picking up the guitar and trying to turn thoughts into songs.
Some of those thoughts followed me home from the plant.
The Night School
The synthesis floor was filled with characters.
Especially on the midnight shift.
There’s something about working through the middle of the night that gets people talking.
Maybe it’s the darkness.
Maybe it’s the exhaustion.
Maybe it’s simply knowing the rest of the world is asleep.
Whatever the reason, people told stories.
Real stories.
There were men whose lives reached back through World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.
There were stories about marriages.
Divorces.
Children.
Mistakes.
Places they had been and things they had seen that I had never dreamed of.
They came from all over the country and from all kinds of backgrounds.
Iranian.
Cajun.
Mexican.
Black.
White.
People who might never have crossed paths anywhere else found themselves working side by side through twelve-hour shifts in the same chemical plant.
I had gone to college expecting professors to teach me about the world.
Instead, much of what I learned came from listening to the people working beside me at three o’clock in the morning.
They didn’t know it...
But they were giving a young songwriter material.
The World’s Foremost Authority on Everything
A lot of the guys were serious hunters and fishermen.
They also enjoyed telling stories about hunting and fishing.
Those stories tended to improve with age.
The fish got longer.
The deer got heavier.
The weather got worse.
The danger became greater.
And somehow, the storyteller became a little more heroic every time the story was told.
One guy took that tradition further than anyone else.
He had an answer for everything.
It didn’t matter what subject came up.
Hunting.
Fishing.
Racing cars.
Politics.
Machinery.
Women.
War.
If someone mentioned it, he was already an expert.
He was so completely full of shit that we gave him an honorary title:
The World’s Foremost Authority on Everything.
His lunchroom stories were epic.
We rarely believed a word he said.
But we never wanted him to stop talking.
I would pull up a chair in the corner of that dim factory lunchroom, eat whatever passed for food from the vending machines, and listen with a grin as each story grew upon the one before it.
Decades later, he found his way into a song.
By then, the world had changed.
The factory lunchroom had become social media.
The stories had become homemade facts.
The audience had become followers.
And the World’s Foremost Authority on Everything had discovered politics, religion, and a way to monetize all that expertise.
The man from the midnight shift became the starting point.
But the song wasn’t only about him anymore.
It was about all of them.
