“Good luck,” I said. “If you hear the term ‘hands are tied,’ you know you've dialed correctly.”
Public Relations listened to the request and told Alex to call back in an hour. I decided that this was a good time to start drinking. We drove to a bar. In one hour, Alex called them back. They insisted they needed more time and to try back in another hour.
“Those idiot paranoids must be tearin’ the place apart looking for my file.” I laughed. “Next time I talk with Owen Beiber, I'll be sure to mention this appalling demonstration of botchery. Goddamnit, heads will roll!”
By the time I had to leave for work, they were still stringing Alex along. He said he'd continue with his attempts on the phone and hopefully see me later inside the plant. “These people must really have it in for you,” he added. “I've had easier times entering federal prisons.”
I arrived at work just as Dougie bellowed out his resounding “ALL ABOARD!” As was custom, Eddie shouted back “SHUT THE FUCK UP, FOOL!” Rituals were rituals. The line began to roll and, just as it did, Gino came over to tell me that he had just received a call from the Personnel office. They had wanted to know what kind of worker I was—company man or misfit, friend or fraud. The boss said he assured them that I was fine GM timber. You couldn't force a fib out of Gino.
Moments later, the phone rang again. This time they wanted to see me down in Personnel on the double. This was not the best of times to be huffin’ beer breath so I crammed a handful of Certs in my mouth. I trekked off hoping this would be the end of it, regardless of the outcome.
No doubt about it, this time I was deep inside the GM digestive tract. I weaved around corners and wandered down hallways that seemed to extend underground for two miles east of the plant. I had to stop and ask directions countless times. The further along I went, the brighter the lighting became, the larger the glass tombs expanded.
I paused for a cigarette and some self-examination. Why, I wondered, had I ever set myself up for this? What had possessed me to get lippy in print when, sooner or later, I had to know that I'd become entangled in my own sarcastic web and be beckoned down a long hallway toward the very core of everything I most wanted to avoid in life? Why couldn't I be like all my other buddies and have normal hobbies like snowmobiles, softball and reefer? Why was it that I wanted to carve out Phil Collins's eyeballs with a linoleum knife? How come I never watched
Michigan Replay
with Bo Schembechler? Why hadn't I become a disc jockey or an ambulance driver like I was supposed to?
They were waiting for me in Personnel. I shook hands with a man in a three-piece suit and he ushered me into his office. I assumed that this man had to be someone extremely important. His desk was easily the size of my dining room.
The questions came. “Precisely, why does this reporter want to enter our facility?” I explained that Alex only wanted to observe my routine and ask my boss and co-workers a few questions.
“Why is it that this man has a particular interest in
you?
” I laid the blue-collar writer junk on him and mentioned that I wrote a column. Thankfully, he was obviously unaware of the Rivethead.
“In this column, do you ever broach the subject of General Motors?”
Uh-oh. I began scratching an imaginary itch. A certain evasiveness was my only hope. “Well, I suppose I've occasionally made small references to the fact that, yes, I'm a factory worker.”
All was silent for a few moments. I could sense a stalemate between the big cheese and little rat. I lit a cigarette, took a long drag, and was alarmed to notice a NO SMOKING sign on the desk. I quickly rubbed out the butt on my work boot as the Personnel chief stared into space.
Finally, he spoke: “You know, we just can't be too careful. We've been burned on stuff like this before.” I nodded like I knew what he meant.
Just when I was beginning to feel all was lost, he stood up and announced a compromise. One of his young assistants was introduced and it was explained that this guy would accompany Alex throughout every portion of his visit. First, the game rules: “My aide will monitor all conversation between your man and any member of management. If at any time an inappropriate question is raised, my man will intercede and terminate the interview. At that point, your man will be escorted promptly from the plant.”
Your man, my man. My man, your man. I felt like I was playin’ Milton Bradley's Stratego.
Alas, Alex made it inside. With his ever-present guide lurking nearby, he looked like a captured fugitive. It was quite hilarious. We exchanged smiles and he went about his interviews.
The grapevine must have been buzzing, for within moments of Alex's arrival none other than Henry Jackson came strolling down the aisle to toss in his worthless two cents. I could see Alex and Jackson holed up in Gino's office. Not surprisingly, Jackson was doing all the talking.
After Alex managed to escape the brilliant ejaculations of Henry Jackson, he made his way over to my job for observations in riveting. With no member of management in the immediate vicinity, his guide gave us some breathing room, standing out in the aisle like some rigid Aryan lawn jockey. I used this opportunity to ask Alex what Jackson had been dumping on him.
“He was very insistent that you were all his boys,” Alex stated. “He expressed a certain fondness for you, claiming he was a big admirer of your writing talent.”
“That bastard's a lyin’ ass. He hates my fuckin’ guts! I hope you don't print a word he told you. Henry's about as corrupt and insane as they come around here.”
Just then a guy named Joe, the department's resident dopehead moron, came buttin’ in. Alex took him aside and began interviewing him regarding my blue-collar writing expertise. I shook my head and returned to my job. If Joe had read anything in his life, it was probably only the price tag on a coke spoon or a joke on a cocktail napkin. Jesus, this was beginning to suck.
“Well, what did Dopey have to say?” I asked Alex on his return. “Keep in mind that he has never read a single word I've written.”
“He told me you were right on, that your columns were right on, and that the thing he liked best about them was that they were—”
“Right on?” I moaned.
“Actually, he used the word heavy.”
I suggested to Alex that he interview some riveters who actually read my stuff. I pointed out Janice, Terry and Dick. He went to them and began jotting down insights. I hoped he was getting what he was after. Chicago was an awfully long way to come for “right on” and “heavy.”
A few weeks later, Alex Kotlowitz's article about blue-collar writers appeared on the front page of the
Wall Street Journal.
The piece used the Rivethead as its main subject; however there was also mention of a few other scribes of labor—a longshoreman from San Francisco, an assembly worker from Ohio, some poor bastard who worked in a pickle factory—men who I assumed were just as bored as I was. In cases such as these, literature was just an accident waiting to happen.
In the center of the page was a truly demonic-lookin’ sketch of the Rivethead. I looked like a drugged land turtle or a droopy mongoloid. My head came to a sharp point. Even my girlfriend Amy was shocked. “Truly hideous,” she remarked. “You look like a Korean version of Dick Nixon.”
“What's done is done,” I replied. “It is time to begin looting the paper boxes. I will need a copy for every man, woman and child on the Rivetline. Also, several copies for my ancestors and a few more for future propaganda purposes.”
Amy and I spent the early morning ransacking every
Wall Street Journal
box within the city limits. She'd swerve up to a machine, I'd bail out, slap in the coins, and snatch up a handful of copies. “Drive on,” I ordered. “After today, all this international coverboy shit will rapidly dissipate into wasted nostalgia. Only one man per day gets his face on the cover of the
Wall Street Journal
and today that wretched face belongs to me.”
When we were done, I thanked Amy for her part in our petty larceny spree and lugged the newspapers into my apartment. Once inside, I grabbed a couple Buds from the fridge and sat down to make a thorough scan of the article. I found myself fascinated by the remarks of the longshoreman. He described in detail how he would have to protect all these loads of hides from armies of maggots by scooping steer manure onto the center of the skin before it was folded and tied. There was a brief passage from his writings, very good stuff, where he described the stench connected with his occupation. “People actually flee from you,” the longshoreman wrote. Jesus Christ, and I thought bangin’ rivets was a bleak gig. At least the only manure I had to deal with was what flowed forth from Henry Jackson's mouth or the messages on the neon propaganda board.
Reading on, I came across a disturbing part of the article. “The vast public has not seemed very interested in reading about work,” noted a New York University expert on the blue-collar trend. “Work is not considered a hot literary topic.”
Though I felt angered, I was hardly surprised. After all, who had time to wade through the murky pathos of an average Joe like the longshoreman when the best-seller list was clogged with
real
revelations of the here and now. Momentous dispatches like “Oaf Surfin’ with Belushi's Lukewarm Corpse” or “I Slept with Shemp Howard.” The “vast public”
wanted
to know about turds and maggots, but only the name-brand variety who hid behind ghost writers in the display windows of the local book mart.
If the “vast public” weren't entirely satiated by the trendy grief of others, they merely got a hold on their own. How many gold-diggin’ knotheads had spun the web of the ever-popular self-help book? Everyone but the Hillside Strangler and my mailman, that's who! Face it, the plain truth is that most Americans feel left off the bus if they can't hitch up their rattled psyches to some fashionable new malady bein’ bandied about on Phil and Oprah. The longshoreman or the guy from the pickle factory were survivors and survival didn't play very well within a nation drenched to its Valium-gobblin’ core with luckless visions of self-hate and unendurable dejection.
Kotlowitz finished up his story by referring to me as “the Mike Royko of the rivetheads.” Given a choice, I'd have preferred “the Mark Twain of Mark's Lounge” or “the Johnny Holmes of the second-floor cushion room.” Mike Royko? Shit, they buried his grunt in the middle of the editorial page. Not many shoprats bothered with that portion of the paper.
It was time to retreat back to bed. The Rivet Line would be beckoning soon enough and I had to be properly rested. I was almost asleep when the phone started ringing. It rang and rang. Whoever was on the other end wasn't giving up. I stumbled to the kitchen and grabbed the receiver.
“Yes,” I said.
“Is that you, Hamper?” a voice shouted.
“Yes,” I repeated.
It turned out to be some guy I had gone to high school with. Matt somebody. I hadn't spoken a word with this individual in over a dozen years. In fact, we never talked way back then. We had never even liked each other. Hell, I hated the bastard's guts and he'd hated mine.
“Is there something I can do for you?” I asked.
Matthew somebody explained that he was a stockbroker nowadays living in San Francisco. He was calling me to express his dumbfounded shock at seeing my swollen face staring back at him from his morning's
Wall Street Journal.
“Christ, I thought my eyes were playin’ tricks on me,” he said. “What the hell would Benny Hamper's face be doin’ on the cover of
Wall Street.
I thought maybe you rolled a bank or something.
I always hated people who called me Benny. “I understand,” I replied. “I have to go to back to bed now. Nice chatting.”
I never did get back to sleep. Every time I got close to noddin’ off, the phone would ring. A Flint television station suggested an interview. A lady representing a film production company in Los Angeles called. A book agent buzzed in. A few more jerks from high school called. I couldn't understand it. Since we seemed to be having an impromptu class reunion on my phone, where were all the cheerleaders? Coverboy or not, those sluts still hated my ass.
In a startling gesture, my old man called me from Florida. Some bar patron had shown him the article. The old man was already in the bag. He mentioned that he was proud of me and asked if I really looked that ugly. He also had words of advice: “You better watch your ass, son. Those big boys have no sense of humor. Just look what they did with Hoffa.”
I assured my father that what I was up to would hardly incite either the union or GM to want to do me bodily harm. I was only writing a column for an underground newspaper.
“Don't be too sure,” my old man countered. “They've got the muscle to shut you down. Do you own a piece, son?”
“
A piece?
As in
gun?
”
“Well, I ain't’ referrin’ to no piece of ass!” My old man hadn't changed a lick. The more he drank, the more he indulged himself in flights of old-school machismo.
“I've gotta get ready for work now, Dad.”
“Just remember to watch out for those bastards.”
“Will do,” I replied.
I was almost out the door when the phone rang again. It was my editor calling from the
Michigan Voice.
“Listen,” Mike said, “some producer from
60 Minutes
just called out here for you. He said he wanted to talk with you and that you should get in touch with him immediately.”
I scribbled down the number, grabbed a can of beer and began dialing.
“Sixty Minutes,”
a voice answered.
“Um, my name is Hamper. I was told you were trying to reach me.”
“Oh yes, Ben. My name's Joel Bernstein. I enjoyed the article about you in this morning's
Wall Street Journal.
It sounded like something we might be interested in pursuing for the show. If it's all right with you, I'd like to fly into Flint next Tuesday so we can get together. How does Tuesday work out on your end, Ben?”
I paused and took a large swallow of beer. I looked over at the calendar. Tuesday was blank. Friday was blank. March was blank. September was blank. Every day of the year was blank. “I think Tuesday would work out fine,” I answered.