Sometimes I think the radio should come with a warning. Perhaps a small bulletin that comes on every time you start the car simply stating that once the music begins, there exists the possibility that a particular song will come on that will take you back to a moment in time that you may or may not want to remember. I’m sure everyone would ignore it, much like the warning on the side of a pack of cigarettes, but if it could save just one person from hearing a song that hurls them lengthwise into some unwanted memory, then perhaps it would be money well spent.
So it was with me this very evening. Innocently driving along, minding my own beeswax, (I’m sure you didn’t know I owned my own beeswax business) when on comes a song that reminds me of a long-forgotten summer. Obviously, you might be surprised to learn about the beeswax business but at the same time, it can’t surprise you that I don’t earn my living from writing. In fact, the only obvious thing is that there must be good money to be made in beeswax for me to continue putting out books that nobody on the planet wants to read. One could argue that bees are nature’s little enablers.
I don’t want you to get the idea that when the song came on, it hit me so violently I was startled and swerved dangerously and all the beeswax in my car suddenly went flying, covering the interior. Not at all. It took a little while for the music to whisk me away to that summer long ago.
The summer I sold books door-to-door. In Tennessee. Actually, a more accurate description would be the summer I tried to sell books door-to-door in Tennessee. Now that I think about it, it was actually great training for not selling books later in my life… but as I’ve just thought about it like that, I’ll let it go lest I risk grinding the entire tale to a halt. That assumes this story was ever moving forward in the first place. One could argue that it started at a halt and has just sat there from the opening paragraph.
Anyway, they corralled a bunch of college kids looking for summer work, drove us down to Tennessee, and separated us into two groups, girls and boys. The girls they dropped off in affluent neighborhoods each morning where people had money to buy books and could actually read and the boys were delivered to demilitarized zones where everyone was always home and looking to throw things and berate college kids trying to sell books door-to-door. Once the sun set in these parts of town, we’d have been murdered and our skulls made into ashtrays if the van would have been so much as five minutes late.
On the weekends, I’d drive up to the mountains with my best friend at the time and we’d listen to the radio and watch the sunset from the hood of his car. One song in particular- you know how these Top 40 stations are. They play a few songs over and over and there’s always one that seems to be on an endless loop.
That was the song I heard tonight. And I was back on the hood of the car. And I drove and spent tortured minutes trying to remember the guy’s name. My best friend at the time. The guy I spent every waking moment with for two months in the bowels of Tennessee enduring the heat and the rejection of America’s Least Educated day in and day out and now I couldn’t even remember his name. I kept thinking to myself what a dog-shit person I must be. And how people come in and out of your life and then disappear like they never existed. Like I was never in Tennessee at all.
Then I realized how gay the song was. So gay. If I told you the song, you’d probably assume we spent most of the time on the hood of the car fucking each other and how the hood was soaked with our cum and we’d keep sliding off due to the excessive amount of jizz on it. This one song would have you imagining all of the guys waking up each morning in Tennessee and having sex on the floor of the house we were staying and in the shower and in the kitchen and finally the homeowners asking us all to leave because of the staggering amount of semen covering every square inch of our living area due to the all blowing of loads that went on 24/7.
So to recap: the first half of the song, I was trying to remember this guy’s name, and the second half, I was laughing at how gay the song was.
The name of the song?
None of your beeswax.