RAMBLE ON: "Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses" by Kathy Mattea

Okay, I’ve been able to make these essays for three months consistently, I’m going to start charging after this one. If you like what you’re reading, please, consider tossing me a couple extra dollars! Thanks all, I appreciate it

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Scoey sees his partner, hard-living action cop McBain, devouring a chili dog and tells him to slow down on the junk food. “Live a little,” McBain responds in his thick European accent, to which Scoey counters that he’s not looking for an early grave, seeing as he’s only a few days away from retirement. Once this last case is solved, he and his wife are going to sail across the world. He shows McBain a picture of them christening their new boat; it’s named “Live 4-Ever.” But as he reaches to retreive the photo, an assassin’s bullet meant for McBain catches Scoey in the chest. He, and his dream of sailing the world with his wife, dies there on the floor. “MENDOZAAAAA,” McBain screams into the air.

That’s a famous scene from the Simpsons episode “Saturdays of Thunder,” aired November 1991, and it’s a parody of a cop movie trope so well-worn that even by ’91 it was basically discredited (The Simpsons also eventually came up with a name for it, “retirony.”) I honestly can’t even remember an instance where it was played straight, but in the decades since that episode I can think of dozens of jokes I’ve heard parodying this cheap play at pathos. A cop dying just a few days before retirement is an idea so beaten into the ground that I’ve never really thought about the emotion it originally captured and where it comes from.

I’m too young for retirement to mean anything for me, and as a freelancer I’m likely to never retire anyway. More importantly, as someone who works from home, the thought of retirement might not ever mean as much to me as someone who actually has to trudge to an actual worksite every morning. My parents are both very near retirement, they talk about it a lot, and to me it sounds like just another phase of life, with its own pleasures and its own challenges. Retirement is also the topic of Kathy Mattea’s 1988 country hit “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses.” I’ve basically always known this song, I grew up on country music and it’s probably among my earliest musical memories. But relistening to it for the first time in years, I think I finally grasp that retirement signifies a happy ending, for the trucker in the song and for McBain’s doomed partner and for anyone who’s pursued the classic version of the American dream. 

“Charlie’s got a gold watch…. Doesn’t seem a whole lot,” sings Mattea. One of the things I really admire about country music is the economy of detail; there’s a wealth of disappointment in that one couplet. These days they don’t even give you the gold watch; no one works long enough anymore in the same company to earn even that empty gesture, but this is 1987 so Charlie worked the same job for thirty years, and he gets the gold watch, the same generic empty token everyone else gets. “But Charlie’s had a good life, and Charlie’s got a good wife.” That’s why you do it, right? The work is ultimately meaningless; it doesn’t matter to anyone but the boss man. What matters is you get a paycheck and you take it home and you build a life for yourself and your family and in your twilight years you know that it was worth it. Charlie’s going home to his wife with a dozen roses and the rest of his life will be a victory lap. He did it. 

I have truckers in my family. Country music likes truckers, especially in the ‘70s, I think as some kind of modern cowboy; out alone on the lonesome highway, free as a bird in the wide open spaces of America. This song, recorded well after the trucker craze had died down, captures what it’s really like, miserable and stressful and most importantly lonely grunt work that no one would do for fun. Charlie’s vision of his happy future is not all that different from his working life, he and his wife will do the retiree thing and RV across America; the difference is his wife will be there. They’ll do it, as the song says, on their own terms, with no bosses to tell them what to do. 

You wouldn’t call this song a protest anthem by any stretch of the imagination; the system as portrayed is working as advertised. This guy worked hard all his life and at the end of his life he gets his reward, a ride-into-the-sunset happy ending and the knowledge that a lifetime of work was well-spent, supporting his family; that’s the American Dream we were sold. And yet when I listen to it I get a real sense of injustice out of it; a life of stolen time, dreams deferred. “They’ll do a lot of catching up a little at a time,” as if they’re old friends rather than husband and wife. I get angry that anyone would have to do this for a living. 

I get the sense that the ‘80s are not considered a great decade for country music. Too many cheesy MOR synths, too much urban-cowboy glitz. I think maybe it had gotten more authentic by the latter half of the decade but even this song has a stiff drum-machine backbeat that’s too clean and doesn’t sound right at all. But Mattea absolutely sells it with a voice wise beyond her ears; I don’t think she had a single other hit that lasted like this one. (Though I grew up with her music, I do not recognize a one of her numerous other hits.) After this disappointing and deeply confused decade in country music, this song reminds me that country music used to be a genre for grown-ass men and women and more than anything I think that’s what it’s lost.