“Drinkin’ on the Job”

“Drinkin’ on the Job” is a song excerpt that opens Book II by turning intoxication into a communal refrain. Its lines move from public disorder and compromised security to the repeated assertion that everybody is drinking on the job, a comic introduction to a story in which individual dependence and Haven’s collective transformation increasingly overlap.

Placement and Form

The excerpt appears beneath the heading “Tales of Haven,” at the threshold of Book II. It is attributed to the Rainmakers and identified as “Drinkin’ on the Job.” The lyrics arrive before the next quoted song fragment and before the numbered opening of the section’s narrative, so the song functions as an epigraph rather than as dialogue spoken by a character.

Its arrangement is deliberately cumulative. The opening lines invoke a terrorist, the President, and the Secret Service; short statements about bombing, being hit, tight security, and getting lit build a brisk sequence of public alarms. The song then shifts from those political images to a repeated chorus: everybody is drunk, wasted, or stoned, and nothing is going to change. The last line converts that collective condition into the title’s central phrase, making intoxication sound less like an interruption of work than part of its routine.

The Refrain and Its Irony

The song’s repeated “everybody” makes its subject social rather than private. Drinking is not described as one person’s concealed lapse; it becomes a shared condition, voiced in a jaunty register that blurs celebration and dysfunction. The claim that nothing will change gives the chorus its bleak edge: the energy of the repetition suggests momentum, while the words present that momentum as resignation.

The title’s workplace image sharpens the irony. Being drunk while working ordinarily signals impaired responsibility, but the refrain treats it as an accepted fact of collective life. The song thus sets up a contrast between institutions that are supposed to maintain order and people whose judgment is compromised. Its comic compression does not make the danger disappear; instead, it makes disorder sound familiar enough to be sung.

Relation to Gardener’s Relapse

That opening refrain has a particular resonance beside Jim Gardener’s drinking. On June 26, during an off-day in Boston, he woke wanting alcohol. He understood that alcoholism did not admit a safe middle category, although in periods without strong cravings he sometimes persuaded himself that occasional drinking was different from a binge. After Ron Cummings proposed going to the hotel bar, Gardener raised a Jack Daniel’s and told himself he could stop when he chose; he then agreed to get drunk.

The difference between the song’s chorus and Gardener’s experience is revealing. The lyrics make intoxication sound collective and almost carefree, but Gardener’s relapse becomes a private loss of control with a history of grave consequences. The book recalls that his Thanksgiving 1980 binge ended his teaching career and marriage and nearly cost Nora her life. When he later confronts the memory, his depression returns with suicidal thoughts, demonstrating how far the song’s breezy refrain stands from the damage accumulated behind his drinking.

Collective Impairment and Book II

As an opening signal, the song offers a compact frame for the tales that follow: impaired judgment is not confined to one drinker, and the language of everyone being affected anticipates the novel’s broader portrayal of Haven as a community undergoing change. The lyrics do not explain that transformation or identify its cause. Their role is tonal and thematic: they place the reader among familiar claims of public emergency, then turn the focus toward a more ordinary-seeming collapse of responsibility.

That shift makes the refrain more than a joke about drinking. In Gardener’s story, alcohol can obscure his self-knowledge and weaken his ability to act reliably; in the song, intoxication is expressed as a chorus in which no one stands outside the condition. The transition from one man’s rationalization to the image of a whole population drinking at work gives the epigraph its unsettling fit with Book II’s communal perspective.