Rivethead (21 page)

“Let me guess.” I laughed. “It's Henry Jackson with leg irons and handcuffs.”

“Stranger than that. It's your neighbors herding off to work. Christ, what a sorry bunch of losers! They should get
real
jobs like ours.”

I looked out the window. “They don't look very happy, do they?”

“They look like they're going to their mother's funeral,” Dave cracked. He opened the window and started hollerin’: “$12.82 an hour! I'm makin’ $12.82 an hour to drink Rivethead booze and listen to Rivethead rock ‘n’ roll!’

“Shit, shut that window. You're gonna have the landlord over here.”

We settled back and kept draining the beers. The heavy euphoria of escaping the shop, gettin’ loaded, listenin’ to jams and knowing we were being paid handsomely to do so was a marvelous thing. Dave was as upbeat and animated as I'd ever seen him. He had found a worn copy of “Open Your Door” by Richard & the Young Lions in a stack of old 45’s and played the song over and over and over. Morning spilled into afternoon.

Finally, I had to break the news to him. “We're all out of beer, rail-pull man.”

Dave fished out a twenty and flung it at me. He started the record over for the umpteenth time and banged away on my coffee table with rubber spatulas operating as drum sticks.

“Hey, what about work?” I shouted. “For all we know, they might have got the line runnin’.”

“Must you always be so negative?” Dave laughed. He was plastered.

Over Dave's drunken objections, we left my apartment and drove back to the plant. We weaved our way in through a side door near the rivet line and looked around. Everyone was gone. The supervisors, the workers, even Henry Jackson. We looked at each other and then our watches.

“Hamper, this is fuckin’ spooky,” Dave whispered. “Where the hell did everyone go?”

Down in the next department, I could see a skilled-trades worker putzing about on some hunk of machinery. I walked down to talk to him. “Excuse me, you wouldn't happen to know where everyone went, would ya?”

The guy looked at me as if I was some sort of alien. A very drunk one at that. “Shit, they were all sent home at ten this morning. Not enough parts, I guess.”

Dave and I headed for the parking lot. “The one fuckin’ day they allow everyone to split early and here we are out there thinkin’ we've pulled the great escape,” Dave moped. “That means from ten o'clock on, we didn't have the edge on anyone. No matter which route I go, I always end up gettin’ rawed.”

“Just part of bein’ a renegade, I suppose.”

Dave ducked into his rusty Vega and rolled down the window. “Very fuckin’ funny,” he said. “Tomorrow, I'm stayin’ put till they release us early.”

“You've cursed us already.” I laughed. “We'll probably have to work overtime now.”

Dave's Vega roared to life and sped off for the north unit exit gate. I stood there for a moment chuckling to myself. A midday hangover was introducing itself to my forehead. I got in my Camaro and drove home. A little while later, my neighbors started arriving home from their jobs. I peered at them through the curtains. They looked neither happy or sad.

A few days later, we were crankin’. The parts to the army vehicles had finally all been located and distributed to their proper spots on the line. Let the war games begin.

The setup called for every seventh truck to be a military job. Management treated these units as if they were gold-studded chariots bound for heaven. If the slightest flaw appeared on one of Uncle Sam's orders, the line would jerk to a halt and a stampede of frazzled bossmen would come racin’ with red carpet tourniquets.

All attention was reserved for Ronnie's death wagons. The rest of the trucks slid by like dispensable lumps of Play-Doh. It wasn't the best time to have a truck on order if your name happened to be John Q. Public. I used to sit there and think that if the American auto industry could ever slow down and capture the relentless effort put forth into one of these sacred army trucks, then the day would soon come when we could send all of those Japanese Quality mongers ducking for cover behind the shadow of a
real
marketplace Godzilla.

After a couple of weeks, it became clearly apparent why management was in such a commotion to spit-polish their darling new product. With much ceremony, it was announced that Roger B. Smith and a flock of Pentagon brass were coming to pay us a visit. It was time to unveil the first load of army trucks and Roger himself wanted to be there in person when one General Ball of the United States Army got all goosefleshed at the headlight's first glare.

As the showoff date edged closer, the honchos at the Truck Plant began tumbling around like rivets with their heads whacked off. The panicky pace of the past couple weeks accelerated into one big tremblefest. It was increasingly obvious that if these trucks somehow turned out to be puke-colored lemons, there was going to be one vast necktie party and old Roger B. himself would be the one operating the rope concession.

As for myself and the rest of my co-workers, we were overjoyed about the prospect of Rog's visit. I went out and had a personalized T-shirt made up for the occasion. In big block letters it read: ROGER, LET'S GO BOWLING! I had been on this crusade to commit ten pins with Roger Smith for nearly three years, and I had written several pieces on my quest for the
Flint Voice.
I figured he owed it to me. In turn, I owed it to all of my proud shoprat ancestors. After all, for almost seventy-five years running, the name Hamper and the words General Motors were damn near synonymous.

It was time for some recognition from those blockheads. All I was asking was ten frames of bowling with my boss. How damn American could one get? I reasoned that there were enticements in it for GM as well. We were forever hearing how management and the work force needed to develop more sturdy bonds. Here was their perfect opportunity to put their headpin where their mouth was. We could bring in the networks and press. The entire media would gobble it up. The walls of mistrust would tumble. They'd slap a photo of Smith and me on the cover of
Time.
Jesus, what a vast public relations coup dangled just beyond the yonder three-ten spare!

When the big day arrived, I was pumped. So were all my linemates. Even Dave had dropped his usual scowl and was behavin’ giddy. Within a few hours, our big gray barn would throw open its doors for THE MAN. The air was positively electric. History was in the making.

Then, around 9:30, a very strange thing happened. Our foreman came strolling down the line informing us we were being sent home at 10:00. We all stood at our jobs wonderin’ if our chains were bein’ jerked. They couldn't send us home now. The fuckin’ MAN was on his way.

I cornered our foreman as he traced his way back up the line. “Let me get this straight,” I said. “Management is sending us home in a half hour? Smith won't even BE HERE by then!”

“That's right.” He grinned. “By the way, nice T-shirt.”

“What's the problem? Did Cab Shop break down again? Are we out of parts?”

“No problems. They've just decided to give you people the rest of the day off.”

The rest of the day off? TODAY? No problems? Something reeked big-time. Impromptu generosity wasn't a part of their nature. And then it dawned on me: the bastards didn't want us around when Smitty showed. They wanted the factory rat-free! No unseemly peons pollutin’ the promenade.

I was infuriated. We deserved to be on hand. We were the ones who built all the trucks. It was our labor, our stinkin’ elbow grease, our drudged midwifery that plunked out the product. Those trucks didn't just show up droopin’ out of a stork's jawbone. How could they ignore the human element of the project? What was an assembly line without assemblers?

Just before I left for the day, I propped up a sign that faced out into the aisle next to my job. Chances were some bosshead would remove it, but what the hell. It read:
SORRY TO HAVE MISSED YOU, KISS MY ASS. SINCERELY, THE RIVET-HEAD.
It was always the thought that mattered most.

When the opportunity came, I wasted no time transferring back to the night shift. It felt good to be home. The evenings once again crawled by indistinguishable from each other and every Thursday Roger Smith would send me a lumpy paycheck as proof of what a good boy I'd been. The money was fine, but I still clung to my dream of bowling with Smith. I would never give up.

It was during this period, somewhere in early ‘83, that the
Flint Voice
expanded statewide, resurfacing as the
Michigan Voice.
I still didn't know how Mike was ever able to pull it off. Here he was up to his eyeballs in debt and his remedy was to expand. Love him or hate him (there was no in between in Flint), you couldn't help but marvel at Moore's tenacious resolve to keep his publication suckin’ air.

Along with the expansion of the
Voice
came sweeping changes. The paper became more political than ever. The boot was given to several longtime staff members, many of whom were close friends of Moore's dating back to high school. New columnists were introduced, intellectual sorts and heavy hitters. Syndicated hotshots were marched in like hired guns. To my total surprise, “Revenge of the Rivethead” survived the facelift. My editor knew that the core of the readership were blue-collars, so I remained on board as a representative of the average lunk. Besides, by this point in time, I was generating more fan/hate mail than the rest of the staff put together. I bought my first typewriter and droned on.

The timing of the
Voice
expansion jibed perfectly with my new gig on the Rivet Line. My job was such a breeze that I had plenty of free time to write in between my duties. I developed a pattern where I could race through my job in thirty seconds and shoot back to my bench for a luxurious minute and a half of observation and composition. It was like working two jobs at once, neither of which demanded much effort. The best part was that the clock moved by quickly.

What a great scam to be able to sit there, night after night, as much a man of letters as just another weary errand boy. The Rivethead flourished, a peeping Tom buried in pitchblende. I began peering deeply into the malignant drudgery that entombed those who surrounded me. Their monotonous travail was like ballet for the dead. Something so remarkably unremarkable that I sometimes wondered if I was actually witnessing anything that even qualified as living.

For instance, I could spend an entire shift wondering to myself just what it was that was going through the mind of the poor soul across from me on the steering gear job. He was a young rehire, doomed beyond his own recognition by a job that all the rivet vets referred to as “the end of the line.” The setup was a thorough ball-buster, an eight-hour mule train of uphill grind.

The nights rolled on. I'd lean across from the guy and watch the sweat pour off his chin. And, somewhere in this factory town, I could see his wife curled up on a sofa bed awaiting the return of her reclaimed assembly man. It wasn't hard to visualize just how she might shudder when the door flew open each night and in trudged this chewed-up mutation of a football star who, once upon a time, looked awful drooly pastin’ petals on the prom float, but now, staring back at her from the other side of the meat grinder, resembled nothing more than a heap of defeat with limbs attached. Dreams died fast around here and, more time than not, there simply wasn't sufficient time to hunt down a decent headstone. One day lured, the next day skewered.

I became obsessed with the steering gear man. He seemed so stoic, so reconciled to the brutish misfortune that defined his routine. I wondered what he thought all night long. I wondered if he ever thought about the fact that only fifteen feet away sat a lazy owlhead perched up on three boxes of unopened rivets—yawning, chain-smoking, doodlin’ in his stupid notepad—while he was flirtin’ with hernial blowout and draggin’ it back and forth like Quasimodo Doe.

The steering gear man never asked about this nor anything else. He just kept bustin’ it. I really didn't understand it. The apportionment of duty in the plant was so inconsistent that you would have half of the work force breaking their backs and chugging the work load while the other half were off playing cards, sifting through boxscores and plumpin’ down their idle fannies. It gnawed the shit out of some guys and who could blame ‘em for bitchin’.

The steering gear man never spoke up. Not for a while, at least. Then, ever so slowly, his resolute facade began to fade. He had found a confidant. It wasn't me. It wasn't anyone. The steering gear man found the bottle.

He chose his spots at first. A few cocktails at lunch, a couple slugs during a line stop. I would lean over to put in my spring casting and the heavy aroma of bad whiskey would hover between us. The booze made the steering gear man sweat more than ever. I'd sneak a peek as he spun in his screws and the poor bastard would be drippin’ like a faucet. He'd be hummin’ to himself and I wanted for all the world to believe he was happy. If anyone deserved a shot at happiness, drunk-induced or otherwise, it was the steering gear man.

The drinking began to escalate quickly. Oftentimes, he would arrive at work already packin’ a snootful. He began to talk. Not with me, not with any of the other workers, not with the guy who delivered his stock—only to himself. There began a running dialogue that sputtered beneath the din, private confabs and secret asides, a drunken litany of some damn shit that I could never untangle.

The mutterings driveled on as the weeks limped off to the grave. And, layer by pickled layer, the steering gear man began to unravel. He no longer seemed the impervious soldier, the tragic hero of my yellow notebook. It became a regular routine for him to show up for work completely trashed. On these occasions, he somehow managed to stagger out the shift operating on nothing more than ingrained reflex.

Before long, he was gettin’ so plastered that we all had to chip in to keep him from falling too far behind. The spring man would tighten down his screws for him while Randy, the leftside muffler hanger man, and I would take turns hittin’ his rivets at the front of the frame. These rivets at the front of the frame were right at groin level. The way the steering gear man kept leanin’ into the frame for balance scared the shit out of Randy and me. We were afraid he was gonna rivet his dick off leanin’ in like that. Vasectomy via rivet gun surely would've been the most painful way of shuttin’ down the old baby wand imaginable.