The Cult "Love Removal Machine"

I was ready to retire from ice cream.

I mean, I had worked 3 summers at Haley's, but now I was a college man. I needed a manlier job.

My friend Eric was working in a warehouse. Something about boxing up surf boards.

Cool. I could do that for the summer.

My first clue that maybe I wasn't in the right place, was during my interview with Ray, the foreman.

"Why do you want to work here?"

"Uh. It seems kind of interesting?"

"You're interested in circuit boards?"

Circuit boards? Not surf boards?! Well, I felt like an idiot, but I wasn't going to show my stupid, stupid hand.

"Yeah. It seems interesting. Sign me up."

And so it was. I spent a summer in a dirty, airless warehouse.

The gist of the work was this:

The company bought large sheets of copper circuit board from other businesses that had government contracts. If the board had a ding, or an imperfection, the whole 4 foot by 4 foot sheet had to be throw out.

My company made its business buying what was basically garbage to American companies, cleaning it up and cutting down the boards to get rid of the parts with the damage. They then sold the smaller, but perfectly good, pieces to the Japanese.

The business was growing in leaps and bounds as the late 80s demand for computer parts was rising. In fact, the company had recently moved from a smaller warehouse, into this warehouse.

Workers on forklifts, and with heavy machinery clanged away all day, pulling sheets from boxes, cutting metal, and shipping, shipping, shipping.

But the move had been so hasty, that they hadn't identified or marked what was in a number of boxes. I mean, a whole, cavernous aisle.

"Aisle 10 is yours. Find out what's in these boxes."

And that's what I did all summer. Grunt work. Opening boxes, testing copper, sorting, shipping. Grinding the days out.

Every morning at 6:30am, Eric would pick me up in his 1972 burnt orange Volvo station wagon. It was perhaps the ugliest, and therefore coolest, car in town.

I don't remember if the tape player was stuck, or if Eric just simply only had one tape. But we only listened to one album, every morning drive, every afternoon home, every day, all summer.

The Cult, "Electric."

And there were no complaints about this. We listened over and over and it felt right.

The warehouse was populated by guys who were older than us. Not much older, but older.

These were guys that had dropped out of high school. Burned out on drugs. Were hiding from warrants. Long dirty hair and mustaches that were thin and scraggly. And always outfitted in those concert t-shirts with the black 3/4 sleeves.

In the school halls, these would have been the guys on the fringes. In the warehouse, they were in their element.

They'd laugh at my lack of ability and agility with my tools, with the equipment. And on the rare occasion I'd commandeer a forklift, they wouldn't laugh, they'd yell, chasing after me because I was about to crash into something.

I was at the bottom of the hierarchy here.

They picked the music. They listened to classic rock and hair bands all damn day. The same stations playing the same songs every single day. And early every morning, and every late afternoon, I'll climb, tired (from the early morning, or the long work day) into the burnt orange 1972 Volvo station wagon with "Love Removal Machine" blasting.

Every day felt like the day before.

Somewhere near the end of the summer, as Fall semester was fast approaching, I said to my parents, "I will never, ever, ever drop out of college."

I was not cut out for manual labor. And I was not cut out for a life where every day from here forward until retirement, was the same thing, over and over and over and over.

Though I could still listen to "Electric" on loop for days on end, no problem.


Hear the song on Youtube.