The only guy I ever spoke with was my line neighbor, Hank. He was an old coot whose voice sounded like gravel being churned against broken glass. He smoked two packs of Chesterfields each shift. It made me uncomfortable to hear him speak. Everything was punctuated with a hack or coughin’ spasm or a lung cookie flung toward the aisle. He'd apologize and light up another.
Hank was a strange one. He kept vacillating between two very dissimilar personalities. One week he'd be the perverted old man. He'd start pesterin’ me about the size of my girlfriend's breasts, croakin’ on and on about the young female anatomy, droolin’ about his own niece, mesmerized in his lecher's roll call of “sweetmeat” and “baby cakes.” If Hank would have left it at that, he'd have hardly qualified as bein’ remotely oddball. Tits and tight cheeks and the relentless pursuit of such were perennial assembly line themes.
What separated Hank was that the very next week he'd transform into this Bible-clutchin’ Jesus comrade. He'd spend all of his idle time extolling the virtues of celibacy and the cleansed soul. He'd approach my work area and ask me in that horrible rasp of his whether I “knew Christ.” I would reply that Christ and I had been cellmates together for several years in Catholic school systems. This seemed to please Hank. He would look around at our co-workers and tell me that the entire bunch of them were headed to hell. On the other hand, I was to be spared. I feigned delight as Hank returned to his bench for another Chesterfield.
Working beside a full-blown schizoid seemed preferable to jawin’ it over with the rednecks. At least Hank wasn't given to the curious worship of banana stickers. I figured Hank's biweekly shuffle between perversity and righteousness was just his wacky formula for covering both sides of the tracks. For all I knew, he may have had a crawlspace lined with “sweetmeat” and a shrine to Jesus in his living room. It hardly mattered. I liked Hank, but I will admit that the day they transferred him back to his old booth-cleaner's job I was just as elated about the switch as he was.
After about four months down on the Rivet Line, I had truly perfected the mental and physical strain of the pinup job. The blisters of the hand and the mind had hardened over, leaving me the absolute master of the puppet show. I developed shortcuts at every turn. I became so proficient at twirlin’ my rivet gun to and fro that the damn thing felt as comfortable as a third arm. I mashed my duties into pitiful redundancy.
The truth was loose: I was the son of a son of a bitch, an ancestral prodigy born to clobber my way through loathsome dungheaps of idiot labor. My genes were cocked and loaded. I was a meteor, a gunslinger, a switchblade boomerang hurled from the pecker driblets of my forefathers’ untainted jalopy seed. I was Al Kaline peggin’ home a beebee from the right field corner. I was Picasso applyin’ the final masterstroke to his frenzied
Guernica.
I was Wilson Pickett stompin’ up the stairway of the Midnight Hour. I was one blazin’ tomahawk of m-fuggin’ eel snot. Graceful and indomitable. Methodical and brain-dead. The quintessential shoprat. The Rivethead.
However, my ascension into this new sense of dominance didn't rid me of the age-old plight that came to haunt every screw jockey: what the fuck do you do to kill the clock? There were ways of handling nimwit supervisors and banana sticker rednecks and lopsided rails. But the clock was a whole different mammal altogether. It sucked on you as you awaited the next job. It ridiculed you each time you'd take a peek. The more irritated you became, the slower it moved. The slower it moved, the more you thought. Thinking was a very slow death at times.
Desperation led me to all the usual dreary tactics used to fight back the clock. Boring excursions like racing to the water fountain and back, chain-smoking, feeding Chee-tos to mice, skeet shooting Milk Duds with rubber bands, punting washers into the rafters high above the train depot, spitting contests. Any method was viable just as long as it was able to evaporate one more stubborn minute.
I did have one favorite method of beatin’ the clock. What I would do was to pretend my job was an Olympic event. I would become both television narrator and participant. It would go something like this:
“We've come to the end of another long day for the American squad. So far, the Japanese have totally dominated each event, sweeping the gold and silver in every category. Any final hopes the Americans might have of winning a gold medal rest solely on the shoulders of Ben Hamper, an assembler out of the GM Truck & Bus facility in Flint, Michigan.
“Hamper will be competing in the Freestyle Rivet Squash. Though he's considered a long shot at best, you will see in this recent interview that Hamper believes he's capable of pulling off the upset.
“Ben, the word around camp is that you lack experience. Sources point to the fact that you've only been riveting a short while. How do you respond to this line of criticism?”
“[Bleep] ‘em! Maybe I don't know apples from oranges, but I can assure you I know my way around a rivet gun. You can toss that inexperience tag right in the crapper.”
“In light of their domination in these games, would it be fair to assume that you harbor a personal vendetta against the Japanese contingent?”
“Strictly pride, Mr. McKay. I represent the United States of America. I stand for all that is sacred among Americans: The automobile. Hot dogs. Baseball. Disneyland. Trash bag murders. As for the Japanese, I own their butts. I'm Nagasaki and Godzilla and the
Enola Gay
all wrapped into one powder keg. I'm gonna send them all back to fritterin’ with transistor radios and toaster ovens.”
At this point in my fantasy, I would stalk around my job psyching myself. I'd begin flexing my arms and jogging in place. I'd hiss and growl. I'd slowly pull on my gloves while staring down my imaginary foe. The crowd would be in absolute pandemonium—Yankee Doodle banshees sensing the kill. I would return to the narration:
“The time Hamper will have to beat is 24.46 seconds, the new world's record set only moments ago by Koy Dung of Japan. Hamper certainly appears undaunted. He's even taking time out to taunt his Japanese rival. It remains to be seen whether this confident young riveter from Michigan can back up such cocky behavior.
“The American signals that he is ready. We now await the whistle. It sounds and Hamper is off. Immediately, he's got the rail flipped and is attaching the muffler hangers. He grabs for his rivet gun and…OH MY…would you take a look at this! All we can see is one frantic blur. Hamper swings in the second rivet gun and begins his attack on the final leg. He twists, he pivots, he unleashes the gun. This very well might be…YES…YES! 22.19 seconds! Hamper has done it! A new world's record. AMERICA WINS THE GOLD! AMERICA WINS THE GOLD!
“Total bedlam has broken loose. Throngs of Americans have broken through the barriers and are now lifting Hamper high upon their shoulders. We can see an exuberant Roger Smith, the Chairman of General Motors, attempting to squeeze his way through the mass of celebrants. Smith has now reached the gold medalist and is extending his hand. This had to be a very special moment for Hamper. In a span of mere seconds, he has sprung from absolute obscurity to a position of corporate eminence. Roger Smith is now embracing Hamper. What an emotional moment! Smith is openly weeping as the jubilant riveter pats him on the head. This outpouring of mirth shall last forever in the annals of Olympic glory.”
Actually, it only lasted until the next set of rails arrived. The roar of the crowd was quickly replaced by the roar of the machines. Jim McKay scurried back into my wealthy imagination. Roger Smith was nowhere to be seen. The cheering faded away and, with it, a few more minutes off the clock. That, in itself, was victory enough.
After nearly a year on the Rivet Line, a period of almost total isolation, I finally met someone who was neither a redneck, a pervert, an ass-sucker or a religious fanatic. His name was David Steel and he worked the gas tank bracket job across the line and three jobs down. Little did I know then how closely entwined our destinies would become within the digestive tract of our General Motors tenure.
It started with a feature article I had written for the
Flint Voice.
I was especially excited about this piece because it was the first thing I'd written to be displayed on the
Voice
cover. Usually I got buried toward the back in between some dyke manifesto and an ad for a new health food eatery.
The article was entitled “Rock is Dead,” a personal tirade I had written condemning the state of the airwaves over at the local FM radio crotch-rock mothership. I was still resisting my editor's constant plea to write something regarding my brain-dead enshrinement as a shoprat. The entire concept made me yawn. I stuck to rambling on about obscure rock music.
I decided to use my cover story as a means of introducing myself to David Steel. One night during a breakdown on the line, I hopped over the track and handed Dave a copy of the
Voice
to examine. He glanced at the headline and seemed enthused by the topic. The line began to roll again and I hopped back over the track to return to my pinup duties.
Though we had never spoken, Steel had always intrigued me. Like myself, he was a total loner. He kept to himself and shuffled back and forth every night with this glum-lookin’ scowl. What impressed me most about him was that, for reasons unknown, he appeared to be the personal whipping boy of Henry Jackson, the supervisional brute of the entire Frame Line. Jackson was forever storming down the line and jumping into his shit about something I could never quite overhear. Steel just ignored him. Occasionally, he'd flip Jackson the bird and all hell would break loose. I figured any enemy of Henry Jackson should be a friend of mine.
At the end of the shift that night, Dave motioned to me as we fled for the time clocks. He said he agreed with my assessment on the horrible condition of modern radio, comparing it to the monotonous humdrum of the assembly line. Then, he paused.
“Do you like to drink?” he asked.
“More than most,” I said.
“Perhaps we should go get drunk.”
“That seems like a sensible idea.”
In the weeks and months to come, Dave and I formed our own two-man clique. It was strange how many things we had in common. We both had experienced bumpy childhoods. We both had been drughead outcasts in high school. We both had gotten married far too young. We both held a serious contempt for the majority of the human race. We hated our jobs and our bosses and our union reps. We hated Miss America and sunlight and Christmas. We were discontented and bored.
Like me, Dave came from a fertile background of shoprats. His grandfolks and parents had been lifers at GM. We joked about this constantly—how factory servitude was something so predestined within our genes that we had probably both lain in our mother's wombs practicing assembly maneuvers. (“Bernard, I can feel the baby kicking. No, wait—he's RIVETING!”) We referred to ourselves as thoroughbreds.
It did come as a surprise when Dave told me he had gone to college. He had spent five years at Michigan State majoring in telecommunications. This didn't jibe at all with the usual route of a GM thoroughbred. Dave explained that he was just biding time, takin’ a few years off to fool around before scrounging back home for that old familiar birthright.
“I always knew I'd end up here,” Dave confessed. “I wanted to be a nobody.”
“Well, you sure chose the right place.” I laughed.
“Exactly,” Dave continued. “I figure if you have to work, you may as well do something so lame and uneventful that you're not even required to think. I hate this job, but I hate it less than anything that would require daily human contact.”
And herein lay my real attraction to David Steel. I had finally met someone who was ultimately more cynical and sulky than I was. This was not an easy order. There seemed to be no end to Dave's miserable yen for pessimism and self-pity. He was the total opposite of my old friend Bob-A-Lou. For instance, if you were to ask Bob whether a glass of water on the counter was half full or half empty, he would most certainly reply with the former. If you were to pose the same question to Dave, he'd probably reply “bone dry and covered with leeches.”
Dave became my vicarious martyr. His rampant gloom and constant self-abasement made me feel comparatively blessed. Anytime I needed a quick fix of cheer, all I had to do was hook up with Dave for a while. It was like being cellmates on death row with Woody Allen.
We spent our lunch breaks together out in Dave's old Vega. We'd share a little whiskey, peering straight ahead at the barbed wire and the moonlight and the gulls pecking away on discarded chicken bones. I remember one night something occurred to me that I'd always been curious about. It was time to approach Dave for an answer.
“What is it with you and Henry Jackson? Why is he always reamin’ your ass?”
Dave took a slug off the bottle. “That fuckin’ gorilla hates me.”
“What'd you do? Spill tranny fluid all over one of his Italian suits?”
“Worse than that. I was born.”
“Knowing Henry, I suppose that would be grounds enough.”
“I used to work for him when I hired in. From day one, we've been at it. He hates me because he realizes I'm far more intelligent than him. But, then again, so is a lug wrench.”
“He reminds me of Muhammad Ali.”
Dave shook his head. “You're way off. Henry Jackson is the Idi Amin of the Western Hemisphere. God, I hate that prick. He's always whinin’ that I have an attitude problem.”
“Dave Steel…an attitude problem?” I laughed.
“Hey, fuck you. My supposed attitude problem could be quickly remedied if only a stock crate fell over and flattened his fat ass. That would improve my attitude immensely.”
We got in a few more weeks before the layoffs came calling again. Having spent a year on the pinup job, I was never so grateful to be handed another pink slip. My team spirit was lacking. I needed a seat on the curb to shove the stuffing back under my scalp. Dave was even more elated than I was. He was like some kind of foamin’ mongrel strangling to get off the leash.