Rivethead (12 page)
Then there was my old pal Same-O. What a character. Same-O was a living landmark up in the Cab Shop area. He was very old and very tired. I could never understand why he stayed on at the plant. Surely, he had more than enough time in to retire. He was like so many of the old guys—lurchin’ around the aisleways, givin’ an occasional swipe of the broom to some ancient pile of dust, molded to the scenery like trolls to the shadows. It was as if they had nowhere else to go.
There wasn't any mystery as to why everyone called him Same-O. No matter what was said to my old friend, whether it be a simple hello or a request for the correct time, he invariably replied “same old thing.” I'd finish up welding down a wheel well and turn around to find him leanin’ on his broom behind my workbench. His face looked like leather. Before I'd be able to speak, he'd smile at me and mutter “same old thing.” I might comment on the heat or the Detroit Tigers or ask him if he had another Viceroy. No matter. “Same old thing,” he'd offer. I could already make out the script on his gravestone. There would be no mention of birth or death or surname. Only:
SAME OLD THING
. Same-O had it sussed. I often believe he was the only genius I ever encountered at GM Truck & Bus.
Lightnin’ and Same-O. They were our role models. Survivors, lackeys, barons. Real victors. They had trampled the Jungle into mulch. It was all Dale and I really hoped for. To develop a niche, flip down the blinders, and pulverize our job assignments into a meaningless ghost walk through the necessary quarter century and change. No surprises. No speed bumps. No tampering with the existing terms. Obscurity and triumph.
It didn't happen. It turned out that we were just a couple of wistful lunks. From our blurry vision inside the foxhole, we couldn't catch a glimpse of all the shit that was piling up on the corporate horizon. The market downturns, the consumer swoons, the untimely return of another recession. We were as naive as they came. With only two years’ seniority, we hung to this belief that we were glued to our placements for eternity—or thirty years, whichever came first. We wanted to hold on together like some shrewd tag team spiraling through the useless decades. Like Lightnin’ and Same-O and our very own granddaddies.
It didn't happen. Somebody forgot to buy their gleamin’ Suburban. Someone else left their marvelous Blazer to rot away on the showroom floor. The overtime evaporated. The rumors began to fly. The ranks began to thin. What had happened to all those desperate people in New England? Had they finally
seen
a Suburban? Was that all they wanted…a look-see?
Oh, that crazy auto industry. Here today, Twining tomorrow. Hi there, bye now! They handed over my spot-welder to a guy who held higher rank. Dale was gone before I was. They ushered him out on a Thursday night after drumming on the side of his cardboard crypt. I told Dale we would meet up again. I was a very good liar.
It's been over nine years since we danced with a spot-welder or cursed at a clamp. And, right now, we're neither young nor old. Just another couple of middle-aged shoprats, ex or otherwise, clawin’ for coins.
Right now it's a very chilly afternoon in November. It's almost 4:30
P.M
.—the old start time. I'm pecking away on a typewriter inside a pool shed that's been hastily converted into a writer's retreat. I keep fiddlin’ with this jerkoff space heater that's very near death. I have no idea what Dale is up to. Boots full of pigshit, he's probably messin’ with a deadline of his own.
1979
WASN'T THE BEST OF YEARS FOR
F
LINT
. M
Y BELEAGUERED
hometown was like some banged-up middleweight resting its rump on the ropes, covering up its soft belly, hoping only to last out the round. The big paydays, the cool precision, the bully mystique—all of it was being soundly trounced.
Prosperity was no longer the same happy tune. Nineteen eighty was more like a funeral dirge. The nation's highest unemployment rate affixed itself to the home turf and relative newcomers like myself and half of the crew up in Cab Shop became instant driftwood. The rookies of ‘77, those fair-haired recruits of the last real boom era, suddenly looked like a mighty confused bunch spilling out of the doors of the local Michigan Employment Security Commission office. For once Papa GM started to wheeze, every little sib was bound to catch that bug.
However, being laid off from General Motors wasn't the worst thing a shoprat could run up against. On the plus side, you obviously weren't required to work. That in itself was a remarkable new pleasure. No longer did you have to bend or lift or stoop or strain or pick at the burn scabs on your skull. No more clipboard kaisers playin’ rent-a-God. No more smoke and soot and fumes and sonic puree. No more minute hands circling like vultures over dead prey. No more propaganda and cafeteria poison and post-shift demolition derbies.
As for the downside, you no longer had real job security. That was not good. No longer could you just nuzzle up to your birthright. No more hefty wages for idiot labor. No more…um…let me think a minute. There must have been
something
else. Hmmmm. Oh yeah, no more stupid shit to commit to memory just in case some curious publishing firm decided to risk handing you a book contract. I guess that about covers it.
So, as you can see, being laid off wasn't such a terrible dilemma. The good far outweighed the bad. There was no reason to get…hey…HOLD IT! Jesus, where's my brain? I totally blanked on the biggest, baddest, meanest minus of ‘em all: THE UNEMPLOYMENT LINE! Just the sound of that phrase makes me wanna fling lunch.
A little history of my life's main phobia is in order here. I'm prone to being the nervous sort when required to stand in line. For me, the ultimate tension in life is to be stuck in a supermarket jampile waiting to buy my goods while surrounded by throngs of housewives sifting through the
Midnight Star
for grainy pics of Tom Selleck's buttocks. Help!
Many is the time I felt I was going to go stark raving shit-brained wacko. I wince at this vision of a twitching lunatic someday pole-vaulting the counter, smashing through the store-front glass, and streaking off into the horizon with a horde of suburbanite ghouls nipping at his Air Hampers with ferocious demands to “HAVE A NICE DAY!” Make it stop! No more dimwit skull sessions about Sparky Anderson and the weather. No more lilting mutilations of Jim Croce's “Time in a Bottle.” No more insanity, grief, terror, disgrace and coward's luck.
I've heard that in some states the unemployed simply receive their checks via the mail. Not so in Michigan. Never mind all the time and money they could save with this solution. Never mind all the mayhem and chaos they could prevent with just a stamp and an envelope. Nope, that would make too much sense. It would also deprive them of their sick fascination of seeing you shake, quake and quiver as they dragged their dead asses around in circles.
Realizing this, my old advice to all you panicky types out there is to do EVERYTHING within your power to hang on to your job. Heap your employer with phony plaudits, offer to baby-sit his kids, gulp amphetamines and perform the work load of ten mules. If you have to, get down and smooch his dusty wingtips anew with sheen. In your spare time go to church, pray to Allah, pray to Buddha, plead with Zeus, beg of Jah, implore the graces of whatever deity landed the ‘69 Mets a pennant to keep your nervous butt in the fold and out of places like the Michigan Employment Security Commission (MESC) logjam of human languish. No, this is not the spot to be if you get clammy in a crowd.
First off, the MESC has no windows. Once you pop through the doors, it's like entering a holding tank for sodden sumo wrestlers. You're required to check in at the front desk where a little old lady will put a red check next to your appointment time and ask you if you have any paperwork to turn in. Always, absolutely
always,
answer no or you will be detained for a period long enough to qualify for having your face reprinted on the side of a milk carton. Paperwork makes these people freeze on contact. If you have paperwork to hand in, wait until you've got your check passed on to you and then broach the subject as if it were some dumb, accidental oversight. Don't worry if they get upset. These tyrants were born pissed off.
After your card has been checked at the front desk, you will be instructed to fall in line. Being a shoprat, the most popular of jobless hacks, I always had my choice of lines 6 through 12. Without fail I always managed to select the wrong one. My method of choosing a line hardly bordered on the scientific. I would simply give a deep glance into the eyes of the assorted claims people and somehow try to determine which one felt like drivin’ herd. Sometimes I'd try the stiff old man. Sometimes the pretty young woman. Sometimes the evil lady who looked like Agnes Moorehead ripped from the grave. The strategy, if one could call it that, never worked. I always ended up in a linoleum tar pit.
A friend of mine always insisted that the MESC had made a widespread effort to stock its ranks full of people with fetishes for dominance. He may have been right. So many of their employees seemed to delight in having you grovel, squirm and plead total ignorance to their cascade of bureaucratic muddle. They acted as if you had laid yourself off, that you had no intention of ever lifting another finger, that you were in a frantic rush to get back poolside to your bevy of naked stewardesses, that you hated this country and wanted to use their money to buy explosives to lob at the governor's motorcade.
Wading through their standard, hypnotic probes, I was always tempted to liven things up:
MESC: “Have you received any income during the past two weeks?”
Answer: “Yes, I was paid $10,000 to carry out a hit on a United States senator.”
MESC: “Are you receiving any other benefits from any other state?”
Answer: “Yes, I am currently on a retainer fee from the State of Maryland as a procurer of young male prostitutes.”
MESC: “Have you been able and available for work the past two weeks?”
Answer: “No, I've been too busy selling PCP to third graders up at the corner arcade.”
Occasionally, you'd see people get really irked over a development with their claim. On one memorable visit I recall the desk people dropping this big, ugly bombshell stating that due to some new hitch in the law, the extended benefits program was being cut and that many of these jobless folks had run the old money meter dry. Believe me, this message was not received with much jubilation, as proven by one enraged castoff who—being of sound strength, if not entirely sound mind—saw fit to retreat to the MESC Personnel parking lot and play Zorro on the office workers’ radials with his switchblade. He was eventually captured and thrown in jail where I guess he pretty much accomplished his objective—the State was still gonna be footin’ his meal ticket.
Above all, the thing you wanted to avoid when visiting the unemployment office was to be detained in the section of seats over by the side wall. This is where they would send you if you developed a complication with your claim, if you needed to file for a new claim, if you acted unappreciative or if you had gone to the bathroom in your pants. If you were instructed to have a seat in this dreadful limbo it was advisable that you have your mail delivery halted and prepare to wait, wait, wait. I was very fortunate, having been able to avoid this section. What they did with these people was not apparent. Sporadically, some figurehead would poke his head out from beyond the partition and summon one of the waiting multitudes to follow him.
Never, but never, did I ever witness people reappear once they'd been ushered into the back chambers of the MESC. At first I thought these folks were merely ducking out a side exit, but casual research into this possibility showed me that THERE WAS NO SIDE EXIT.
I assumed that this was how it must end. A silent trudge down a narrow hall, led by a cranky claims executioner with cold eyes and blue lips. Finally having your benefits exhausted, you were a total nonentity. No one missed you. No one could see you. You disappeared from the unemployment statistics. You no longer existed.
A miniature Auschwitz had been assembled far behind the clicking of the cashier's keys, far removed from the lazy shuffle of the fresh claimant's feet, off in back where you now only waited for the pellets to drop and the air to get red.
Oh, I guess it could have been worse. You could have been burned to death in a Pinto. You could have been snagged in a plane prop. You could have been fatally trampled at a Paul Anka concert. You could have had to go out and find a job.
That was the funny part. A job? Most of us already had jobs. We worked for the goddamn General Motors Corporation. We were shoprats stuck in a holding pattern. This was all temporary, a fluke of the trade. Soon enough those showrooms would start bustling. Phones would begin to ring and we'd all straggle back to our callings. It was just one of the quirky fates that went along with being just another cog in such a mammoth flywheel.
With this understood, it was such a joke when the folks over at the MESC announced that you were now expected to make the rounds looking for an alternative occupation. Instead of just pickin’ up your biweekly check, the claims people insisted that you must take along four sets of job applications to be filled out and returned upon your next visit. It was ignorant, but you had to play along in order to keep receiving your money.
This new requirement was a real grin. For instance, on the day before I was to go pick up my check at the MESC, I would reach for the yellow pages and randomly select some of the most bizarre places of business I could find. On a given week I may have “applied” for work at a taxidermy shop, a porno theater, a limousine service and a funeral home. They had a spot on the job form where you were required to write in the name of the individual you had spoken with. I'd call up the business and ask whoever answered the owner's name. I'd jot it down and hang up. The form also had a line asking “Outcome of Job Interview.” I put down phrases like “enormously unqualified,” “lacking sufficient training” and “a stalemate of mutual disgust.”