Beer Money for Almost Nothing
Beer Money for Almost Nothing
“Holdin’ on to sixteen as long as you can
Change is coming ’round real soon
Make us women and men.”
John Cougar Mellencamp, “Jack and Diane”
The Rolling Rock Brewery, red brick behemoth, stood just down the street. I’d had some of the palest ale already, but in nineteen-eighty-two I stepped inside. Beneficiary of a truck-driver uncle, I showed up in my college-boy summer to earn the prized union wage of twelve bucks an hour. Eighteen, and life was richer than I knew. Assigned to watch the swirl of green glass bottles clatter together as they shuttled along, I was just a cog in the conveyor belt, with a ladle to latch onto the broken or deformed, to keep those ones dry as dust in the lake of light lager. So young, I could not take part in the relaxed drinking, open bottles or cans of Rolling Rock perched everywhere within someone else’s reach. I stood, I ladled, I learned to put up with adulthood, its noise, repetition and love of TGIF. I remember the din, the boredom. I remember being young and ready to rock and roll.
Gary Ciocco teaches Philosophy at Carlow University and other schools. His poetry has been published in Backbone Mountain Review and Seminary Ridge Review and is also forthcoming in anthologies from Madville Publishing and Moonstone Arts. He lives south of Pittsburgh and goes far and wide to hear and promote poetry.
