Charles Bronson - The Story Of My Life
Hooray, it’s payday, just like every other fifteenth day. But with a job that pays me checks like this, it’s just a 15 hour joke that’s getting less and less funny. And oh, it’s so funny when there’s never enough money. And it’s the story of my fucking life, so what else can I do but swallow my pride and sink deeper into debt until I die? Or am I already dead? Because this isn’t what I call living. I’m 21 and instead of having fun, I just worry about too much shit and my cash is number one. And there’s a million more just like me, and we’re all on the same ship, choking on this plastic noose our lives surround. And this fucker’s going down in the moat around this card that’s got us in the hole with a permanent foot on our throats. Struggling a lifetime to break even is not an achievement—it’s reality.
I bought the Possessed To Skate compilation LP, on 625 Records, in the summer of 1997. I was 21 years old, working for a fly-by-night business that cleaned ventilation systems for restaurants (an incredibly dirty job), and at the tail end of a two-year dalliance with credit cards that left me $8000 in debt (haven’t had one since). I picked up Possessed To Skate for the Palatka and Despise You tracks. I hadn’t heard any of the other bands. Charles Bronson started the whole thing off, giving me my first taste of a band I soon considered one of my all-time faves (still do). Mark McCoy’s voice was so high that at first I couldn’t figure out if he was a boy or a girl—the liner notes had to solve that particular mystery for me. I loved the music, though. Blazing speed and blasting drums was always enough to get my interest back then, but Charles Bronson had some really great riffs. And while most of the songs they contributed to the record were joke tracks about skating, the first track was this one, “The Story Of My Life.” I read along with the lyric sheet as Mark and company blazed through the ridiculously short song, amazed that he got all of those words in. I was further amazed at how brilliant and dead on his lyrics were. I could have written that song. I was even the same age that he’d been when he wrote it. He summed up the angst and frustration of the twentysomething working-class existence so well that there was nothing to add.
Twelve years later, at a time in my life when I spend way more time listening to indie rock and 60s garage/psych than anything resembling hardcore, I find myself back in this same position, thinking of this song’s lyrics as I suffer through my days working at a kiosk in a mall for $8 an hour. The job is strictly seasonal, and I’ll be back on unemployment by the time 2010 rolls around. I can’t decide if that’s better or worse than having it permanently. I can tell you one thing, though—my near decade of relative stability and comfort at the bookstore was a complete fluke. Right now, it’s like the last 10 years never happened. I’m back in the same position I was in when I worked at an ice cream store in a mall and made $7.25 an hour. Hell, one of my jobs pays me that same hourly wage now. The idea that the opportunity exists for a working class person in the United States to make a living wage, to be comfortable and get ahead, is a cruel joke. And that joke is the story of my fucking life.
