97.9, 103.5, 95.3, 96.1 Do you know what these numbers mean. They are not equations from my stats homework; they are not measurements of appendages in millimeters and they aren’t numbers representing my weight though some people would assume so. These numbers represent some semi-saviors of mine. Back nearly a decade ago there was an extremely fresh faced Mitch who just started working his first legit summer job, 8-5 Monday through Friday. I was on an interior-painting crew that cleaned up section-8 $h*t holes and repainted them just to be trashed again by the new drug dealing-prostituting-meth using-porn addicted tenants.
The guys I worked with ranged from a summer working college student, recently paroled felons, high school dropouts, and illegal immigrants. I was the only high school student on the crews and one of two Mormons. Compared to guys who spent the night before work telling girls they were having a relationship with at that moment that they had AIDs just for the reaction, it didn’t matter how much of a punker I thought I was. I was a loaf of wonder bread to them. The first place I helped clean out and paint was a deserted brothel, I was put on sex toy watch. I was to locate any sex toy and store it in a separate bag for later unplanned pranks on the other paint crews. My innocence stood less of a chance than a remnant piece of cocaine on Hunter S. Thompson’s kitchen table. But what did the numbers mean!?!
These numbers are call signs, radio frequencies for all the rock stations in the Willamette Valley. We drove all over that valley for three months in crappy non-AC’d trucks filled with off white paint and old mattresses that some diabetic died a lonely death on two weeks before we cleaned it out of the apartment. But if there was one belief we had in common was that Journey was God. Rage against the Machine made you win any red light stare down no prob. You had insane echoes in an empty apartment with for guys singing more than a feeling. Metallica was a great morning wake-up call and the college radio gave all the Gin n’Juice we would ever need. These were fantastic eye-opening times, because every hourly wage worker in each city would be bumping the same jams. Walk into this paint shop you could finish your new wave anthem “Just what I needed”. The landscaping guys are busting some crazy latina-polka we just heard in the Taco Bell or Gn’R. The talk for all of august was how the college radio was doing every 15minutes up-dates on the top-less car wash going on in front of the West 11th 7/11. It really brought everyone together just like Duck football games did during the fall.
I was stripped of a lot of my innocence that summer, but I gained a chunk of confidence because I didn’t drown in (for the lack for a better word) the shiz of my co-workers but I learnt how to even do a very cocky, jack-assed butterfly stroke.
