Rivethead (14 page)

The inevitable finally took place. One Monday afternoon after Ronny and I had filled up our conveyor line, I went over to chat with Bob-A-Lou at his welder's job. He just sorta nodded at me and flipped down his welder's visor. After he'd shot his welds, he took off his visor and sat down next to me. He was completely silent. Something had to be wrong.

“Everything all right?” I asked.

“You know Karen, the gal I'm always talkin’ to down in the cafeteria?”

“Sure, the pretty one,” I replied. “Something wrong with her?”

Bob-A-Lou shook his head. “No, she's feeling fine. In fact, she's feeling so fine that she was able to go bowling last Saturday night out at North Lanes after she told me she'd be out of town over the weekend for her aunt's funeral.”

Bob-A-Lou went on to relate this long story about how he and his cousin had decided to go bowl a few frames the previous Saturday evening. While heading up to buy another Pepsi, pure Bob-A-Lou, he was shocked to spot the cashier queen a few lanes over smoochin’ and gropin’ all over this Surfer Joe look-alike. She even waved at Bob-A-Lou. His heart had been ripped apart ever since.

Then Bob-A-Lou paused. I was sure I could see it building up in his face. A cuss word! It was as if after years and years of polite constipation he was gonna finally let it loose. A limo-length volley of vulgarity along the lines of “goddamn whore-face shitball!” or “useless lyin’ skag bait cunt.” He was way overdue. There would be no better occasion. Let it rip!

“The dumb trollop,” Bob-A-Lou hissed. Huh?

I stood there wanting to say it for him: BITCH! I wanted to say a lot of things. I wanted to tell him that there was much more to getting yourself laid than being an honest Joe. That crap rarely counted for anything when it came pork time. I wanted to tell him about all the bar scum right across the street who were having their peckers nibbled nightly and that the only jump they had on him was that they were complete selfish assholes who didn't give a shit about anything other than biceps and booze and tattoos and emptyin’ their testes into the first shallow flooze who stumbled into their double vision.

There was hope, I wanted to tell him. There was always hope, but he was just gonna have to quit actin’ like such a swell fuckin’ pilgrim. He needed to ditch the crew cut. Act like a jerk. Develop a substance abuse problem. The girlies would come fallin’ out of the trees.

Cynical or not, it was true. The shoprats I knew who did the most business with the ladies were utter cretins. Drunks, druggies, bullies and ten-time losers. Bob-A-Lou had more class than any roomful of them put together. But class rarely won the ass. The majority of these women wanted reclamation projects. Lost souls that they could clamp on to like precious martyrs. A guy void of defects mustered no challenge. Send in the cruds.

After the debacle with the cashier queen, Bob-A-Lou vowed to take his pursuit overseas. I thought he was shittin’ me. He wasn't. He developed this hot pen pal relationship with some woman over in the Philippines. He flew over to marry her over our Christmas break. When he returned, he proudly displayed his wedding band to the entire Jungle. I felt happy for Bob-A-Lou. He was his old self again. Maybe now he could move out of his mother's house.

Meanwhile, my own personal marriage to the General Motors Corporation wasn't faring as well. Just like some wishy-washy broad who couldn't make up her mind, I was about to be sent packing on another indefinite layoff. Hello Reaganomics, goodbye occupation.

It was rather upsetting. Not so much the layoff part—I'd danced that dance and found it very compatible with my underachiever lifestyle. What rankled me about being laid off again was the knowledge that another pussy job was about to go slidin’ through my fingers. My gravy setup with Ronny would be irretrievable just like my original scam with Dale had been. There was no way of knowing where I might end up and what kind of horrid rat maze would await me once everything settled back into place and the consumers started gettin’ horny again.

During my second extended layoff, I spent most of my time drinking. My usual hangout was the Rusty Nail—a large, dimly lit tavern nestled downtown among the vacant storefronts, and plywood palaces that effectively defined the flagging overall condition of Flint in general, and GM in particular. My brother's girlfriend, Jackie, managed the bar and we had full run of the place.

Looking back, I think the Rusty Nail days were some of the best times of my life. I was surrounded by my best friends, most of them shoprats in limbo. I was once again getting paid to do absolutely nothing. I felt detached and secure in this cocoon of nightly buffoonery. There was no reason to feel guilty. I had a job, they just didn't need me at the moment. I'd be back whenever the signal was given. Until then, I had found a handy place of refuge, possibly the last little fortress I'd ever be able to reside in before such puerile forays would be branded as stupefied adolescence or repeating the path of my father.

Jackie allowed me to take over complete control of the Rusty Nail jukebox. A well-stocked jukebox was essential to the atmosphere of any decent bar. I ditched all the top-forty flotsam and hackneyed standards. I loaded up on spazz-out masterpieces by the likes of Arthur Conley, the Troggs, the Mutants, Aretha, Black Flag and the Bobby Fuller Four. For us, the marvelous segue from Dino, Desi & Billy's “I'm a Fool” plowin’ headlong into the spite and rancor of the Sex Pistols’ “Holidays in the Sun” was beer-drenched ecstasy. Even the geezers and bag ladies got up and pranced.

It didn't take long before the twerps at the local college leeched on to our Shindig Mecca. The local art fag community soon followed. The bar was quickly overrun with the kind of clientele we most wanted to avoid. Before long, the Rusty Nail was doomed. Jackie started booking these prissy New Wave bands to come in and play almost nightly. God, it was putrid. These cheezy bastards wore these skinny little ties and spewed out lousy cover versions of the hitmakers of the day. It was more than we could bear. The place was now nothing more than a preppie playpen for the terminally dull.

We surrendered and moved our nightly reveling back to the house I shared with Bob. We danced, we drank, we threw up, we threw down, we broke up every piece of furniture and basically behaved like a bunch of raving lunatics. Women would drop by and scoot right back out the door. We didn't care. All of us were too loaded to get it up anyway. The Flint police got in the habit of dropping by. Occasionally, they'd take a few of us with them. Every cent we had went toward alcohol, cocaine and new records.

Drinking all night was fine, but I needed something to fill up the afternoons. That was one of the problems with unemployment. So often it wove itself into unenjoyment, sentencing you to a vague sprawl where the days all lumped together in one faceless herd. Working was almost preferable. Almost.

It was truly difficult to understand. I had hired in during such a boom era that the overtime alone would have provided enough income to survive on. Yet here I was four short years later assembling nothing but a crop of serious sloth and one mighty pickled liver. I guess it was that old inverse spiral motion where I had peaked in my rookie season and was now hurtling through the galaxy toward that warm plate of mystery stew on some lonesome mission room floor. At times I felt like standing out front of GM Headquarters and hollerin’ through a bullhorn: “Attention! Enough with the fickle bullshit! Are we gonna build trucks or keep playin’ hide-the-birthright? Hello! HELLO!”

Layin’ back is a fine reward when you're employed. However, layin’ back tends to wear thin when it itself becomes your job. Gettin’ loaded, readin’ magazines, staring at the television becomes a rut rather than any form of relaxation. It's like a kid nearing the end of summer. He might really hate school, but he begins to get awful antsy after three months of tossin’ a ball back and forth and ridin’ his bicycle halfway to hell and back. When every day is Saturday, Saturday is suddenly no big deal.

In an effort to find something to do while waiting out GM's dawdling, I decided to take up my old writing hobby. Each afternoon I'd plunk myself down in front of my mom's old Underwood typewriter and stare out the kitchen window ready to hatch some enormous tome that never came calling. I pecked away at everything from love poems to hate mail to haikus about spring. It all reeked and I knew it, but I banged away for lack of anything else to do.

This went on for a while until I stumbled onto an underground newspaper floating around town called the
Flint Voice.
I used to pick up a copy now and then up at the local liquor store. It was obvious that this rag was just some hippie relic patched together by a bunch of moaners desperately tryin’ to reinvent the sixties. They took themselves way too serious and none of them had any real flair for knockin’ out the printed word.

“In Times Such as These, We Need a Voice,” their cover motto hurrumphed. This statement wasn't totally unfounded. Flint was falling apart at the seams—economically, politically, racially. The major's office was a bunch of liars and cheats, the city's prosecuting attorney was up on charges of embezzlement and the police force were in the midst of their thunderous off-Broadway production of
Danny Get Your Gun.
In the late seventies and early eighties more people per capita were killed by police officers in Flint than in any other city in the country. Twenty-five percent of all gun-related deaths were done by cops. The boys were shootin’ from the hip, askin’ questions later and your odds were lookin’ especially lousy if you happened to be sportin’ an Afro. In times such as these we not only needed a “Voice,” we could have used a few thousand bulletproof vests.

The
Flint Voice
was the brainchild and squawkin’ brat of a long-haired live wire named Michael Moore. I was familiar with the guy. So was anyone in Flint who had one eye half open. Moore was constantly hurling himself into the midst of some trenchant uproar. You would see him on television, hear him raisin’ hell on the radio, read about him causin’ a ruckus down at a meeting of the City Council.

The underground paper biz was not the easiest boat to float, especially when half the town looked upon you as nothing more than a communist blowhard. In order to get his paper off the ground, Moor went delving for funds. Rather than appealing to the listless townsfolk, he attempted a crazier stunt. He latched on to an international recording artist and persuaded him to headline a steady stream of
Flint Voice
benefit concerts.

The recording star was the late Harry Chapin whose string of hits included “Taxi” and “Cat's in the Cradle.” Moore managed to weasel himself backstage at the Chapin concert in nearby Lansing. After the show was over, Moore went to Chapin's dressing room and knocked on the door. No response. Moore kept a knockin’. Finally, a security guard began hauling Moore away. The resulting fracas caused Chapin to open the door to check things out. That's when Michael Moore put his silver tongue into gear. Intrigued by his notions, Chapin invited the persistent hippie into his dressing room.

Moore must have delivered some kind of impassioned oracle for, soon enough, Chapin became a regular fixture around Flint. He performed no less than eleven benefit concerts for the
Flint Voice.
The total take from these concerts was in the half-million-dollar range. Moore took the money and bought a big old house in the neighboring community of Burton. He bought a typesetting computer, layout equipment, telephones, copy machines. He hired ad men, secretaries and found himself a printer. Michael Moore and
Flint Voice
were on their way.

Meanwhile, it was Harry at the auditorium. Harry at the luncheon club. Harry at the union hall. Harry in your living room. Harry runnin’ upstairs to use your can. Everyone was wild about Harry and so on and so forth. Chapin's appearances never failed to turn out the natives. He adopted Flint as his second home. If there was ever such a thing as a godsend, the
Flint Voice
had Harry Chapin as the living definition.

Anyways, one afternoon after the game shows had faded and the beer was kickin’ in nicely, I decided to write up a record review and send it off to the
Voice.
They had a music section in the paper that was as bland and retro as a faded Nehru. I typed up a review of an album by a band called Shoes and tossed it in the mail.

A couple days later, Moore called me and asked if I would come out to the
Voice
to meet with him. Apparently, he had enjoyed the record review. Either that or he just wanted to know whether my basement would be available over the weekend to host one of Harry's gigs. No matter, just the prospect of gettin’ off my sofa for a few hours, for any damn reason, had me feelin’ mighty chipper. It was July 15, 1981.

The next afternoon I drained a couple beers and headed off for the
Flint Voice
office. I kept thinking maybe I was on to something. Something that might provide a buffer against the increasing humdrum of unemployment. Something that might distract me from the terrible lagoons in Richard Dawson's eyes. Something. Any damn thing.

I was about two miles away from the
Flint Voice
when the guy on the radio let it fly: “Popular musician and songwriter Harry Chapin was killed today when his small car collided with…” I pulled into the first convenience store I saw, bought a twelve-pack, and drove back home.

Eventually, I had my meeting with Michael Moore. We hit it off well. He was in no way the jaded hippie leftover I had come to envision. Moore shared my twisted sense of humor and, underneath his cocky veneer, he was just as mixed-up and insecure as I was. The only major difference between us was that he was loaded with drive, where I was just prone to bein’ loaded. Moore put me on the staff as a music critic. It was the only thing I knew much about besides shoprats.

Without the generous benefit money raised by Harry Chapin, the
Flint Voice
soon began tilting toward debt. It was a strange period. Moore would insist that the
Voice
staff have a meeting once a month. Rarely would much be accomplished. Moore would stand up in the middle of someone's living room, plead for financing schemes, outline a new subscription drive and collapse on the couch while everyone turned their attention to their bawlin’ infants or some pukish-lookin’ asparagus dip one of the veggies was passin’ around.