Rivethead (10 page)

Franklin never did change his stance. Within a couple of months, GM had him by the balls. His constant fighting combined with his atrocious attendance record had finally dug him a hole so deep that even the union couldn't bail him out. He was fired and they had to bring up three guards to haul him away.

There's probably no tellin’ what he's whalin’ on today, nine years removed from the Jungle. Apartment walls. Cell bars. The skulls of the bewildered. Possibly, there's a typewriter mixed in there somewhere. I hope so. I would hate to think that all of that rattlesnake scrawl died along with the job. What a waste.

After a few weeks I managed to develop a good rapport with another black dude, Robert, the mig-welder who worked right down from me. Having been sequestered in Catholic schools my entire youth and adolescence, I didn't have much of an opportunity to meet many black folk until I hired on with GM. You just didn't find too many bro's hangin’ around the communion rail hummin’ verses of “Holy, Holy, Holy” while awaiting their tongue's worth of Mr. Christ. Just your basic bunch of white hypocrites sheenin’ their souls for another week's worth of fetch and wretch.

While Robert was from Alabama, our stories were much the same. His forefathers, like mine, had drifted into this moron dragnet lookin’ for steady work and a pocketful of beer change.

And like my father and me, Robert liked to drink. Once he'd had a few, he'd start in with hilarious stories of his childhood in the backwoods. He talked about the perverse sexual practices of his cousins and their clumsy endeavors with farm critters, the white trash hookers who'd lay it all out on a haymow while charging the bystanders a buck a pop to watch it go down. It was all very funny and that prick minute hand would buzz by in circles.

We'd often end up discussing our fates as proud American truck builders. We both shared the contention that neither one of us should've ever been forced to attend even one miserable day's worth of formal education. What good was schooling to someone who was just gonna turn screws and shoot sparks the rest of his life? Robert suggested that this time could have been better spent gettin’ high and chasin’ females. I would heartily agree, insisting that
anything
—masturbating, bowling, fishing, blowing up banks—would've been better than the crap all those nuns had crammed down my throat.

If Robert tended to be a pissed-off sulk at times, he had every right to be. He'd been divorced a couple of times and the Friend of the Court was slicin’ him to pieces. They took the child support right out of his check and, on Thursday nights, while everybody would be gettin’ all giddy over the big numbers starin’ back at them from their pay stubs, Robert would be slouched over his workbench tryin’ his damndest to formulate a budget from the remains of his week's earnings.

It was a shame that guys like Robert had to drag their asses through the Jungle nine hours a night, inhaling fire and growing deaf from the din, only to wind up taking home a paycheck that was more in line with what your average zithead from Taco Bell was making. But, like so many shoprats, Robert had mortgaged his soul to the bitch goddesses of whiskey and women, and he paid for it every Thursday night.

Robert introduced me to an old guy known only as Louie who worked at the end of our line in the repair station. Louie had a great little racket goin’ for himself. He peddled half pints of Canadian Club and Black Velvet up and down the line in the Cab Shop area. He charged three bucks a bottle, almost double the store rate, but who was gonna argue. The booze was in the door, you didn't have to wait for it, and Louie delivered right to your bench.

When ordering from Louie, all one had to do was slip the word down the line through a network of fellow workers. You passed on your selection and detailed your location by using the numbers stenciled onto the big iron pillar nearest your job. It was like conjuring up a genie. You'd lay out your money on top of your bench and Louie would come stragglin’ down the aisle just like Mr. Green Jeans with the booze stashed somewhere in his floppy coveralls. What a wonderful little microcosm of American capitalism Louie had goin’ for himself. Just goes to show that there's an endless array of clever ventures one can concoct to assure that one's grandkids are able to afford the sissy college of their choice. All by ourselves, Robert and I probably paid off a couple semesters.

Shoprat alcohol consumption was always a hot debate with those who just didn't understand the way things worked inside a General Motors plant. While not everyone boozed on a daily basis, alcohol was a central part of many of our lives. It was a crutch not unlike the twenty cups of coffee millions of other Americans depend on to whisk them through their workday. We drank our fair share of coffee, but the factory environment seemed to lend itself toward something that was a great deal more potent and rejuvenating.

I frequently found myself defending this custom with nonfactory acquaintances. They conveniently put the blame for everything square in the laps of those who drank on the job: “NO WONDER the Japanese are moppin’ up the market floor with your asses! NO WONDER my new vehicle farts like a moose full of chickpeas! NO WONDER the rear end of my Chevy Suburban rattles like a Hari Krishna in a cement mixer! NO WONDER they want to phase out all you juicers and replace you with robotics!”

The criticisms came from all sources—friends, neighbors, retirees, relatives, the local media. It was a popular bandwagon full of self-righteous dickheads and know-nothings. The yappin’ hypocrisy that never ceased to amuse: “IT'S THOSE OVERPAID, SPINELESS FACTORY HACKS AND THEIR DEMONIC CRAVING FOR FIREWATER! THEY REPRESENT TOTAL HUMILIATION TO THE GREAT AMERICAN WORK ETHIC! THOSE INGRATES CAN'T BE SATISFIED WITH THEIR GARGANTUAN PAYCHECKS OR THE FACT THAT THEY POSSESS MORE MEDICAL COVERAGE THEN EVEL KNIEVEL COULD PISS AWAY IN A MILLION UNSUCCESSFUL BUS HURDLES! TO TOP IT OFF, THEY'RE ALL CODDLED AND PROTECTED BY A UNION THAT WOULD PROBABLY EMBRACE RICHARD SPECK AS JUST A MISUNDERSTOOD DRIFTER WITH A HARMLESS YEN FOR VODKA AND ROPE TRICKS!”

Oftentimes, the
Flint Journal,
the unofficial GM gazette, would devote large portions of their editorial page to the miserable whines of these blowhards. “I worked in the plant for thirty-six years and never once needed to rely on alcohol…” “I think that it is an outrage that my neighbor, a GM employee, spends half of his shift sitting in a bar…” “The autoworker of today is weak and corrupt and…” Blah, blah, blah.

It's one thing to be harangued by those who have gone before—the forebears, the sit-down strikers, the providers of the torch, my very own grandfather—but to be put through the verbal shredder by townsfolk who've never even
seen
the innards of an auto factory, well, that was a different matter. Their pious deductions always made me squirm.

The total farce of it all is that given our jobs, these same moany denizens would be lined up right next to us at the barstools and beer coolers if they could somehow weasel in the gate. They'd lose that sacred work ethic baloney and clasp on to Louie's coveralls faster than you can say “the mercury reads 118 in the Paint Department tonight.” Keep in mind, the grass is always greener on the other side until it's your turn to jump the fence and chop the shit down.

There is simply no need for apologies. Hell, when you get right down to it, General Motors management doesn't even pay much heed to the drinking habits of its own work force. They realize it would be a massive and futile effort on their part to attempt to stymie a widespread tradition. And moreover, they really don't give a good goddamn who's tippin’ and who isn't just as long as the parts keep flowing by in their assigned locations. Start sending down inferior product and then drinking would become an issue.

Drinking right on the line wasn't something everyone cared for. But plenty did, and the most popular time to go snagging for gusto was the lunch break. As soon as that lunch horn blew, half of the plant put it in gear, sprinting out the door in packs of three or four, each pointed squarely for one of those chilly coolers up at one of the nearby beer emporiums. Talk about havoc. It was like some nightly cross between the start of the Indy 500 and chute-surfin’ out of the fuselage of a burning jet. Engines racing. Tires squealing. Pedestrians somersaulting over car hoods.

I half expected one night to find Marlon Perkins propped in a jeep near the gate narrating this frantic migration: “Notice, friends, the fleet mobility of our subjects. The wide eyes and gaping mouths are timeless clues that another pilgrimage to the watering hole is well under way.”

A half hour is all most workers had. Make no mistake, this small opportunity to bust open the monotony of shop grind helped many guys avoid cracking up, cracking skulls, missing work or mutating into supervisional bullies. A jumbo of beer certainly wasn't gonna save anyone's life, but the odds were it would certainly enhance it. John DeLorean himself proved that factory critters can't triumph above the ordinary on black coffee and Twinkies alone. Hell no. On a clear day you
can
see General Motors and, if you squint a little harder, you can also see a frosty quart of Budweiser just as plain as the cocaine attaché case at the end of the motel bed.

It was during these early years that my old friend Denny and I spent our lunch breaks together. With a double-up arrangement not much different from mine, Denny was able to tag along as we indulged in every shoprat's dream scam: the Double Lunch. With our jobs securely covered by co-workers, we could slide out and overlap the two lunch periods designated for the two separate truck lines. Instead of a half hour for lunch, we now had a sprawling hour and twelve minutes to get lost. It was wonderful what you could avoid accomplishing with that extra forty-two minutes off.

One particular double lunch from that period has always stood out. The plant was really roasting that night with the kind of corraled heat that often rendered the overhead fans useless and forced a horde of dehydrated reeking shoprats to line up at the drinking fountain and gulp down salt tablets.

On that night, Denny came to my job with an invitation to slug down a few at lunch. Though nothing in the world sounded better than cold beer, I knew we would have to be careful. The beer was always a godsend goin’ down, but you had to watch out for the fatigue factor it brought on when the heat was high. If you overdid it you ran the risk of drowsing out during the second half of the shift. By night's end you'd be totally gassed and ornery enough to punch out your own grandmother.

But the offer was just too appealing. “I like beer,” I said. “Beer tastes good.”

At the convenience store we stood in line behind three attractive young ladies. They were purchasing diet pop and wine coolers. I remember thinking that they must be part of some very special breed, a sorority of angels who simply forbade themselves to perspire. They giggled and fussed with their perfect hair—all the while glaring at us with their terrible animal eyes.

We smiled back at them. It was all so hopeless. We couldn't help our appearance. We didn't normally smell this way. It was the $12.82 an hour and the benefits package and the opportunity to swill a cold one in between breaks in the madness that doomed us to trudge into convenience stores lookin’ like Spam patties in wet suits. Our grandfathers had taken this route. Our fathers were right behind them. Now it was our turn to be thirsty, rank and every bit as unlucky.

We took our quarts of Mickey's Malt Liquor and headed for the back of the employees’ lot. It was always wise to park in a section far, far removed from the roving eye of the surveillance cameras. Otherwise, the guards might scope you down as you tipped that cold chalice to your lips and decide to wheel out and give you some shit. This rarely happened, but it was a nuisance all the same. There would be ID requests. There would be boring lectures. Sometimes there might even be a slow shuffle down to the Labor Relations office.

Denny and I drank, mostly in silence, while a Lesley Gore Greatest Hits tape poured out of the dash of my Camaro. We were beginning to feel human, the beer workin’ its magic, the edge dissolving, the shoprat's humble version of the multiple martini lunch. We sat there staring off into the smokestacks with the weight of the world gradually sliding through the floorboard. The guards and the bossmen were absolute madmen. How could anything that felt so good be a punishable offense? Our screws were all in place. Our welds were shining brightly. It was all working out. What could be the problem?

We both loved Lesley Gore and, on this most humid of nights, Les was really lettin’ us have it: “California Nights,” “I Don't Wanna Be a Loser,” “That's the Way Boys Are”—her complete arsenal. We slurped faster and faster on our malt liquor jumbos. At that precise moment, there was very little doubt that we had everyone in the galaxy squarely beaten.

We were on a roll. We raced back to the convenience store, this time purchasing two forty-ouncers of Mickey's Malt. We hit on the beer and sang along with Lesley and laughed at our great fortune. We looked like trash, we smelled like death, we had no idea who was winning the wars or the rat race or the relentless struggle to get on top. It was all so very meaningless. Someone would be declared the victor and the rest of the world would roll over and begin to plot tomorrow's lousy comeback.

“I've gotta admit,” Denny laughed, “it doesn't get much better than this. The whole world is on fire and here we are parked in the shadow of this mausoleum drinkin’ the coldest beer on the planet. With Lesley Fucking Gore! No one else on the face of this earth is doing this! NO ONE!”

“I wonder what Lesley Gore is doin’ right this minute,” I mused. “I wonder what Al Kaline and Roger Smith and Sister Edward Irene are up to—right NOW! Right this very second. I feel sorry for their asses!” We laughed until our sides ached.

Nine fifty-four returned to the assembly line. Denny and I hustled back in to relieve our partners. In the nights to come we were never really able to recapture whatever it was that led to that precious double lunch we spent with Lesley Gore. After a while, we simply quit tryin’. Perhaps we were just crazy from the heat. It was known to happen. Whatever the cause, we always remembered the night we had you and you and the rest of the world thoroughly dicked for seventy-two minutes.