Rivethead (11 page)

Bud had grown weary of the spot-welder's shuffle. In a way, he wasn't anything like the rest of us spark-eaters. He always had his nose buried in some college textbook. He had big plans that spread far beyond the walls of the GM Truck & Bus plant. Bud's master plan was to own and operate his own grocery store. He was only using GM as a temporary means to support his family and pay his tuition.

As the days neared for Bud's departure, I was struck with an immediate fear. What if they were to replace him with a woman? This was known to happen in cases where two guys were observed crunching their jobs together and outfoxing the braintrust who were responsible for splitting up the chores. It wasn't that a woman would be incapable of doing either of the two jobs. It was more that most any given woman would be hard-pressed to combine
both
of the jobs, especially when one of the jobs would require her to navigate a bulky spot-welder that spit fire like the bastard son of Mount Vesuvius. A man was needed. Either that or some steroid-gulpin’ she-goat from the women's Bulgarian gym team.

I pleaded with our foreman to send down a rugged sort. The last thing I needed was a wimp, regardless of sex. I was far too spoiled with the lazy benefits of doubling-up to return to the old nightly up and down, For sanity's sake, the gimmick had to keep rollin’.

The foreman brought down a new hire named Dale. As they came stridin’ down the aisle, I could tell that this guy was the answer to all my prayers. I was about to receive 225 pounds of solid, gullible rookie girth. I immediately took Dale under my wing. Within a week we were glidin’ through our paces. An hour on, an hour off. The gods had been smiling on me.

As for Dale, I had never run up against a more curious journey than the one that had brought him to the hub of Jungleland. He lived way the hell up in Twining, Michigan, a tiny farming village located 115 miles north of Flint. This meant he had to commute 230 miles per day, six days a week, to toil for General Motors. It seemed ridiculous. I didn't put on 230 miles to get to work over an entire summer.

I had only one question for Dale.
“WHY?”

“Well,” Dale said. “Do you have any idea how much a new John Deere with fully synchronized 24-speed PowerSync transmission and built in Hi-Lo will run you nowadays?”

“Um, a bundle?” I suggested.

“You ain't shittin’ it's a bundle. That's what brings me here.”

Dale went on to list all kinds of other mechanical nightmares needed to keep his farm updated. The price tags were astounding. It was all giving me a headache. At this rate, Dale was going to have to pull sixty years of moonlighting at the truck plant in order to pay off his fleet of farmyard bloodsuckers.

Dale also raised pigs. Now there was a combination you didn't run into every day—pig farmer/autoworker. He told me he had to get up at 6:30 in the morning to mess with his pigs. This allowed him about three hours of sleep per night. How in the hell did he do it? Why in the hell did he do it? I asked Dale why he didn't just give up the farm and pig biz, move down-state, and carve out a sweet living as just another rat in the pack. Flint wasn't Oz, but it had to pull rank over a town called Twining.

“Move…HERE?” he groaned. “Move to Flint?”

“Why not,” I answered. “Lots of bars, plenty of women, cable TV, a semipro hockey team, large shopping malls, superb Coney Islands, movie theaters, record stores…um, did I mention lots of bars?”

Dale was more interested in fishing holes and deer trails. He also chided me about the murder rate and whether people had to lock their doors at night.

“Now that's hittin’ below the belt, Dale.”

“I'll stick to Twining,” he said.

Despite our different lifestyles, Dale and I clicked well together. He was much more experimental than Bud had been. Dale shared the same commitment I had to tryin’ anything that would budge that minute hand in our favor. We quickly scrapped the hour on, hour off arrangement and went straight for the summit of the double-up system—a half day on, a half day off. This meant you could actually spend as little as four or five hours in the plant, get paid for the full time, and escape out of the chaos by sunset. What a setup.

This is how it worked: Dale and I would both report to work before the 4:30 horn. We'd spend a half hour preparing all the stock we would need for the evening. At 5:00, I would take over the two jobs while Dale went to sleep in a makeshift cardboard bed behind our bench. Having been up since sunrise, Dale was a very eager candidate for some shuteye. He'd stuff some plugs into his ears, crawl into his bed, and often be sound asleep before I had even finished my first truck.

I'd work the jobs from 5:00 until 9:24, the official Suburban/Blazer Line lunch period. When the line stopped, I'd give Dale's cardboard coffin a good kick and rouse him from his sweaty dreams of compression ratios and pork products. It was time for the handoff. I would give my ID badge to Dale so that he could punch me out at quitting time. This was the riskiest part of the operation. If a supervisor or security guard managed to spot a worker punchin’ out two badges, his ass was dead. Next to stealing and sabotage, this act was the most severe crime you could pull. Immediate dismissal was the result. I had seen it happen to a couple of careless workers and they were promptly put to the curb. No, this was not a solid career move; however, it had to be done to assure that the early escapee would get paid a full shift's worth.

As risky as it was, you really had to be a complete idiot to get caught ringin’ out two badges. All it took was common sense to do the job proper. The first rule was that you
never
used the same time clock for both badges. Since there were a dozen time clocks to choose from this wasn't difficult. You moved up to the first time clock, took a look around, always making sure you punched out your partner's badge first. This done, you quickly stashed his badge down the front of your pants. Then you moved on to another clock and punched yourself out. This way even if a guard caught you ringin’ out a second badge, at least that badge would be your own. If questioned as to why you were seen punching out twice, you became very upset, insisting that the first clock had malfunctioned, a frequent aggravation. If the guard persisted and asked to see what you slid down your pants, you really became livid, accusing him of a shameless come-on. Then, you hauled ass.

I have some wonderful memories of sittin’ on a barstool on a Friday night at the Limberlost Bar in Houghton Lake, Michigan—130 miles north of the truck plant—nursin’ on my third beer while lookin’ up between the antlers at the clock as it turned over to 2:00
A.M
. At that precise moment—130 miles to the south—Dale would slide my General Motors ID badge through one of the twelve time clocks.

Perfecting this kind of immaculate trickery called for complete reliability in one's partner. You had to be sure that the quality of the jobs remained faultless. You had to make extra certain to avoid any type of injury. You had to refrain from all drinking. With your partner not around to intervene, you couldn't risk having to piss out a load of beer.

Over the weeks and months to come, Dale and I accelerated our routine. We got the operation down so well that we could actually do both jobs and still have time to stand around. Unfortunately, this didn't escape the eye of our General Foreman, who was already having a difficult time swallowing our system. Doubling-up was one thing. But to double-up while working and still have time to browse the paper or kibitz with fellow linemates just didn't wash. We were being watched. We knew it and we should have slowed it down to make it appear more difficult than it really was. But we didn't. We'd simply become too damn cocky.

Not surprisingly, Dale and I arrived at our jobs one afternoon to find a swarm of bossmen grouped around our bench. There was our supervisor, the General Foreman, the Repair Foreman and a couple other big players milling about. They had a large box of some kind of stock piece I didn't recognize. They also had a strange, tiny air gun that they were passin’ around.

The picture was dreadfully clear. The bastards were adding work to our jobs. The Repair Foreman grabbed the tiny air gun and a piece of the foreign stock and bent way beneath the belly of the truck cab. Zzzzzzz-zing! He reached for another. Zzzzzzz-zing! Then another. Then another. Then one more. With every squeal of that runt gun, I felt a bit more nauseous.

Dale and I slouched down at the picnic table. Bob-A-Lou came to express his condolences. “They've been over there for a half hour fiddling with those new parts,” he said. “Tough luck, guys.”

“What
are
those goddamn things, anyway?” I groaned.

Robert shrugged. “Hey, you had to see it comin’. They've been hawkin’ you like naked pussy for the past month.”

Dale finally spoke up. “Screw ‘em. We'll get around it somehow. We'll just have to crank it up a gear.”

The bossmen motioned for Dale and me to come over. They explained how it would be. We would read the schedule taped to the front of each cab and this would inform us as to whether a certain truck called for air-conditioning clamps. There would be no set pattern that we could rely on. Sometimes the clamps would be required on three consecutive trucks. Other times they might fall on every fourth truck. This kind of suspense was just what the bossmen were hoping would break up our system.

Attaching the air-conditioning clamps was a pain in the ass. It wasn't a strenuous chore, it was more of an exasperation. You couldn't see the holes you were supposed to be screwing into. You had to feel around and, once you found them, you had to balance the air gun perfectly still so that the screw and clamp didn't vibrate off the miniature tip of the gun. If you missed your mark, everything would fly apart and you would be forced to start all over.

After a couple of days of this new arrangement, I was ready to surrender. Just when I thought I'd drilled in all five clamps securely, one of them would go clanking off and land on the ramp track. I'd start cussin’ my brains out and stompin’ around like a madman.

Thankfully, Dale was there to calm me down. Mechanical plights and misbehaving gizmos were hobbies for him. He began teaching me a new stance that would give me much better accuracy with the air gun. I practiced and practiced. Dale wouldn't allow me to give up, assuring me that we'd be right back in business within a week.

And that unconcerned, soothsayin’ pig farmer was right. Through determination, perspiration, acceleration and pure spite, we swallowed up the air-conditioning clamps into our routine and were back doubling-up within a week. We made for a helluva team. The neurotic, scam-happy city kid and the bullheaded, work-junkie farm boy.

Our return to glory didn't escape the notice of our supervisors. They'd pause while passing our jobs and ogle us a while. They had been so convinced that the additional work would halt our schemin’ ways. They'd called our bluff and been beaten.

As exasperated as they probably felt, they knew there was nothing they could really do to stop us. We showed up for work each and every day. We ran nothing but 100 percent defect-free quality. We kept our workplace spotless, provided you overlooked Dale's ugly slick of chewing tobacco juice. GM was very big on bottom lines and the bottom line as it pertained to Dale and me was that we were exemplary shoprats.

The months sailed by. The bossmen left us to our own devices. The opportunity to cleave through the monotony of assembly line labor by combining our two jobs was something neither Dale nor I ever took for granted. We were dumbshit-lucky and we knew it. If the Plant Manager himself had shown up with a contract binding the two of us to stick to our Jungle ruts for the duration of our thirty years, we'd probably have scrawled our names, dates of birth and Social Security numbers on it in warm blood.

With two years down and twenty-eight to go, Dale and I were more than satisfied with our lot in the corporate web. We reasoned that we would grow old together on our job combo. We envisioned ourselves becoming potbellied old farts, docile and harmless, staying our course toward that gold watch and wonderful pension plan. Proud old bucks stompin’ on Father Time Clock.

We wanted nothing more than to follow in the footsteps of Cab Shop legends like Lightnin’ and Same-O. Here were two old-timers who'd been around so long that they probably could remember when there was no GM Truck & Bus plant on Van Slyke Road—only an Indian settlement or a trading post. When a worker had reached this amount of seniority, not much was expected of him performance-wise. They just shuffled through the motions and GM stuck a paycheck in their pocket every Thursday night.

Lightnin’ was a real study. No one had the faintest clue as to what his job assignment might be. The popular theory was that it had something to do with the men's room located in the stairwell leading up to the Cab Shop. That was the only place you ever caught a glimpse of Lightnin’. He'd be leanin’ up against a wall near the last urinal, sound asleep on his feet.

It didn't make any sense. There were a million hideaways a man could find to lie down and take a snooze—the cushion room, the tool crib, the locker room, the cafeterias, the picnic tables, the stock pallets, the back seat of a defective Blazer. Why Lightnin’ chose to sleep leanin’ against the men's room wall remained one of the great mysteries of Cab Shop. He wasn't an old queer or anything like that. Hell, he wasn't even conscious.

Bob-A-Lou was the resident speculator when it came to the topic of Lightnin’. It was his theory that Lightnin’ was a custodian assigned to clean this specific men's room way back when. Bob-A-Lou believed that through the ugly crawl of years, Lightnin’ had slowly dissolved all memory of his actual calling, perhaps his entire identity. However, he never forgot for a moment his assigned battle station. Bob-A-Lou theorized that Lightnin’ was like one of those confused old Japanese soldiers you occasionally heard about still holed-up on the Kiribati Islands thinkin’ the war was still wagin’.

Who really knew? When the horn blew to begin each shift, Lightnin’ took up his silent vigil as the fossilized overseer of the LL-16 stairwell men's room. When it got crowded in there on break, you sometimes had to give old Lightnin’ a little nudge in order to find some elbow room at the pisser. It was neither funny nor sad. It was something that went on and on and, after a while, he was another piece of the milieu.