Summertime

I know that in the Commonwealth, teenagers are told that they can never get a job unless some patron in the government gives it to them. Maybe that’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not my problem, though, I had a lot of cool jobs when I was a kid.

When I was 18, I worked as a security guard in Irvine, California. We drove company cars around company properties, which mostly consisted of small malls, large apartment complexes, and large tracts of undeveloped land and orange groves.

Actually, I started off as a lobby guard in office buildings. I hated that. Talk about boring. So I kissed major butt with the bosses and pleaded for a promotion to patrol. I lied and said I’d get a haircut, too. I was one shaggy looking kid.

Ah, patrol, what a great job, not being pinned down to a desk, driving around, filling out my logs, and working, sometimes, the graveyard shift, snug and happy in the patrol car as the rest of the town slumbered.

During high school senior year, I usually worked “swing shift,” from 3pm to midnight, though I’d have to show up a bit late. During the summer before college, I’d sometimes add the graveyard shift to the swing shift, pulling in overtime.

It was a great summer.

I had two supervisors, John and Steve. John wanted to become a radio personality some day. Steve, like many security guards, wanted to become a cop. As for me, I wanted to get in and out of college (UCLA) in four years and get accepted by the Navy ROTC. I stressed out a lot about that, the specter of being such a small fish in such a big pond, as I had to leave all my pals behind. John and Steve, who seemed like old men to me since they were in their early 20s, were always encouraging.

Many a night, at 11pm, or 2am, in a Denny’s coffee shop, John and I would huddle over a cup of java, as he reviewed my plans for college and ROTC, and as I heard his plans for his radio career. We were both too young to be daunted, but both too young to be fully confident either. Later in life, I’ve come to be completely confident and completely daunted.

John, by the way, did become a radio personality. I ran into him in California just after I got out of the Navy, he had just interviewed Waylon Jennings for his (John’s) radio show. He didn’t recognize me at first, on account of my short military hair.

And Steve, well, I ran into him too. He had indeed become a cop, and had been promoted to detective. The short hair threw him, too, and he a detective, no less!

Like John and Steve, I, too, realized my goals, or at least the goals I had back then. I would never have had a chance if I didn’t have a low-wage job like security work to get a little coin in my pocket. Actually, I don’t think I would have had a chance without guys like John and Steve to keep me motivated, they seemed so old and wise to me then.

Know what? Turns out, they were wise. I’m lucky to have had such supervisors and friends.

True, my meager pay would not have supported a family. It was not a “living wage,” but I was not on the “breed now, think later” program in life, so that wasn’t an issue. But the money—and workplace lessons—were enough to help launch my scrawny bones into college, to prime the pump, as it were.

Am I lecturing anyone on work ethic? Heck no. People can sit in their own filth for all I care. They can vegetate in front of TV if they want. They can breed like flies if they want. They can do all the butane whifferdills they can stand. They can steal from each other, or jam meth into their eyeballs with rusty needles for all I care. They can tell us that the government owes them a job. They can vote for politicians that kill the economy, then watch the job market die along with it, and then complain about the lack of jobs (now there’s logic for you).

Hey, it’s fine with me. People are what they are, and I don’t think they can really change.

They have their summers to face. They have their summers to remember. And I have mine. At the end of the road, maybe that’s all we’ve got.

(Ed Stephens Jr. is an economist and columnist for the Saipan Tribune. E-mail him at Ed4Saipan@yahoo.com.)