Remembering the joy of a summer job during the age of benign neglect

“Run and get some beer,” Steve told me one day.

I couldn’t say no to my boss. I wasn’t going to remind him I was 17 and I’d never bought booze before. I had to be a man about it.

Not that I felt like one. If they asked me for ID, I would collapse dead on the spot, I knew that much.

In the store, I grabbed a case of Old Vienna. Despite the peach fuzz moustache and skinny arms poking through my white tank top, I willed myself to be two years older.

Heart pounding, I forked over Steve’s $20. And got the beer. Yes! In that moment, I was the coolest dude I knew.

It’s only dawning on me now, almost four decades later, what a privilege it was to be a member of the last badly supervised, ill-mentored generation. Adults told you what to do and assumed you’d do it and if you got hurt doing it, that was your own damn fault.

My high school buddy got me the summer job. Steve scared me. He was about 50, tough as nails, a Korean War veteran with a toxic White Owl cigar clamped in his jaws. I picture Ernest Borgnine when I think of him.

Steve ran an engine rebuilding company, although I never saw him rebuild an engine. Mainly, he answered the phone in a raspy voice, growled “goddammit” a lot and talked to people about con rods. By 4 p.m. (or 3), it was happy hour and Steve’s buddies dropped in for a cold OV from the beer cooler.

The machine shop was a glorious artifact from the Industrial Revolution, its sharp edges filed down only slightly in deference to a more enlightened age. A bikini-model-holding-tools calendar was prominently displayed, of course.

Sequestered in the back was a steel bin full of “caustic,” a heated solution that stripped grease from engine parts with piranha efficiency. Given the acid-droplet tingles on your skin, it probably would have been smart to wear a mask and goggles around the caustic tank. But it probably would have been smart to do a lot of things.

Steve called my buddy and me “punkers,” which I think was a nod to our enviable youth. You’re rich with it at 17, and spend it freely.

But the best thing about Steve is that he didn’t seem to know what we weren’t capable of.

He got me to drive a forklift from the shop to his house about 15 minutes away. I didn’t know how to drive a forklift but I must have learned because I remember bouncing along the busiest street in the industrial area feeling like the king of the world.

One week, Steve got us to sledgehammer his concrete driveway and take the rubble to the landfill in a 1950s oneton. He probably assumed we wouldn’t try to do it in two trips. There was so little weight on the front tires that they would leave the ground on bumps, making steering a hypothetical thing.

Inside the shop, we had stacked row after row of incredibly heavy crankshafts.

At the end of the odd day, Steve let the punkers have a beer. We made a game of flicking the caps with our fingers to flying-saucer them across the room. One landed in the middle of the cranks. My buddy went to retrieve it. He knocked a crankshaft over. The rest dominoed in a deafening clatter.

Steve was angry but didn’t say much.

We said even less while we repositioned the crankshafts. Steel-toed boots would have been a good idea. Beer cap flying saucers weren’t.