Rivethead (23 page)
“What is it with us?” I'd gripe to Dave. “We must be the most insignificant dullards on the face of the planet.”
“We're just not part of the hierarchy yet,” Dave reasoned. “We haven't beaten anyone up, we haven't offended anyone's girlfriend, we haven't thrown up on the carpet. There's nothing for them to remember us by.”
I sat and stewed. “Well, how many of these guys in here are published writers and host their own radio shows?”
“Look around you.” Dave laughed. “Do any of these gearheads look like readers of leftist literature or fans of the Butthole Surfers? My advice to you is that you find someone you can handle and pick a fight.”
I surveyed the bar. Nothing but big boys with big thirsts. “All right, once I'm done whuppin’
your
ass, I'll puke in the middle of the bar and ask the first broad I see whether she'd be willing to give birth to my mutant offspring, Rivethead Jr.”
Dave got a chuckle out of that one. That's all we were really here for: cold beer and stale jokes. Last call would always come too early on these nights. They'd boot us out, drunk and invigorated. Dave would go home to hurl kitchen utensils back and forth with his old lady and I'd go home and attack my typewriter like I knew what the fuck I was doing.
Due to his wife's grousing, Dave couldn't always attend the nightly retreats over to Mark's Lounge. I would locate surrogate drinkin’ pals, usually guys I knew from back in my Cab Shop days. It wasn't the same. Even drunk, these guys were way too serious. All they liked to talk about was the factory and financial planning. Most of them had a couple of kids and still had thousands in the bank. I was single and had $235 in my savings account. I had enough money to buy a complete set of tires for my car. I always used that as a barometer for fiscal security.
One night I'm up at Mark's, it's in the vicinity of last call, and I'm all by my sweet lonesome propped up next to the Beer Nuts display at the end of the bar. Some damn fool keeps playin’ “The Heat Is On” by Glenn Frey. I hate Glenn Frey. I hate him and all the rest of the Eagles.
All around me are the sounds of my co-workers yapping it up and tossing ‘em down. Just another night with the shoprats—clutching our paroles, maddened with thirst, looking for any good reason to laugh at ourselves. One thing we don't need is goddamn Glenn Frey advising us on the heat. It's hot, we realize. It's hotter than a cobra's dick. It's all brains afire and radioactive crotches and smoldering flesh piled high at the watering hole. That old factory labor in the midst of July is all you'll ever need to greet the heat. The only thing that gets most of us through is the knowledge that when it's all over there will be several tall cold ones aimed right for the gullet.
I'm about to pack it in when up strolls this tanked palooka whom I recognize as a friend of Dave's. The guy's a complete alkie, the waitresses know his brand by heart. Despite the heat, he is wearing a Mark's Lounge softball jacket. I hate Softball.
“You've gotta tell ‘em about the barbed wire,” he slurs. This guy routinely mistakes me as some kind of champ of the underdogs. He's seen my Rivethead columns and assumes I'm deeply committed to THE CAUSE, whatever that might be. “You've gotta get that in your paper,” he insists. “Tell ‘em about the GODDAMN BARBED WIRE!”
I give a slow nod. “They should know,” I reply. This always seems to make him feel better.
As long as I've known this character, the only topic we've ever discussed is the barbed wire fence that surrounds the GM Truck & Bus plant. It must annoy the hell out of him. Others complain about the overtime or the boredom or the humidity but, with this guy, the conversation never varies. Always and forever, the barbed wire.
“It doesn't make any sense,” he insists. “The barbed wire all faces
in.
The shit's pointed right down our throats. They don't wanna keep others out, they wanna KEEP US IN!”
He's right, of course. And here I always figured that the barbed wire was just so much precautionary neckware strung around the grounds to ward off would-be Empire looters. Just the Company's paranoid way of pissing on its boundaries. Hey, you never know who might drop by and try to pilfer the cookbook.
Silly me. Just one look will tell you that GM designed their security fencing with one guarded eyeball on their own work force. The barbed wire
does
face inward. Maybe they believed that we were all double agents plotting to swap the recipe for our cherished military vehicle to a carload of Russian Intelligence parked on the dark side of the trainyard. The ingredients to Ronnie's new death wagons, even up, for a dozen cases of Stolichnaya 100 proof.
Maybe they all lived in fear that one hot July evening we'd be smitten with road fever and roam our bunions elsewhere. We'd all toss off our gloves, rub axle grease all over our faces, load up our coolers full of car stereos and carburetors, and flee over the West Wall.
As we marched on toward freedom, the bullhorns would blare: “WARNING! WE COMMAND YOU RIVETERS TO HALT!” (The shriek of gunfire over a backdrop of Glenn Frey music.) “REPEAT! THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING! HALT IMMEDIATELY OR NO MORE MICROWAVE POPCORN FOR SIX MONTHS!”
Maybe there's nothing to it at all. Maybe some construction boss just hung the blueprint for the security fencing upside down. An honest mistake. Then again, maybe GM just strung up all that confounding barbed wire to give us Midnight Plow-boys something to chaw on in between the beer nuts and the swizzle sticks: the long wait for death and the heat to go off.
T
HE BIG CONTRACT WITH THE
P
ENTAGON, COMBINED WITH THE
sudden rebound in truck sales, enabled more shoprats to be recalled from indefinite layoff. Consequently, the Rivet Line began an overdue blood transfusion. We embraced new workers from closed factories in Saginaw, Bay City and Lansing. Off went the disgruntled rednecks in quest of lighter workloads. In came the greenies to swallow up the vacancies. You could feel the atmosphere of the department recharging.
The new guys fit in well. Jerry, Herman, Dickie, Tony, Hogjaw, Willie—an easygoin’ bunch who worked hard, partied hard and weren't opposed to mixing the two together. We were all around the same age—mid-twenties, single, unshackled. The only surprise to this new group was the inclusion of a female, a very unfamiliar species in our area.
Of course, we'd seen this happen before. The results were always the same: an honest attempt, a few hours of overmatched jousting with the rivet guns, a huddle with the foreman and a quick reassignment. Why they even bothered movin’ women to the Rivet Line is beyond me. The success rate was abysmal. I think they just liked to keep the ladies guessin’, taunting them with hectic visions of brute labor. GM was big on useless gut checks.
It turned out that the new female was to be replacing the guy next to me. The idea suited me fine. God knows I was sick to death of this idiot. His name was Kirk, a nice enough sort, but I had grown terribly weary of his nightly blabber. All he ever talked about was how much he hated his ex-wife and how much he loved bow hunting. Several times I was tempted to ask him why he didn't just combine his two obsessions and be done with it.
Henry Jackson ushered my new neighbor over to her job. He went through the obligatory demonstration of splintering a board between the pinch cycle of the rivet gun. “Darlin’, that could have just as easily been your hand,” he smiled. My neighbor wasn't smiling. She looked downright terrified. This made Jackson grin all the wider.
“That could also have been a bully's neck,” I heard myself mutter.
“You say something, Rivethead?” Henry Jackson demanded. In the background, I could see my new neighbor stifling a laugh. It felt good to have momentarily broken the tension.
“Just mumblin’ to myself, Henry.”
Jackson whirled around to resume his confab. After a few more minutes of bosshead oratory, he took off down the aisle. Somewhere in a distant alcove of the plant, there were more greenies to intimidate. More nerves to unsettle. More useless machismo to dump down the gills of the unsteady and vulnerable.
Kirk began the slow process of breaking in his replacement. His job wasn't all that tough, but it did involve a dangerous procedure—the buildup of the military cross members. Affixing the skid plate to the cross member called for plenty of caution. As with everything else that went onto these military trucks, the skid plate was double the normal thickness. It had extremely sharp edges that jutted out from the cross member at an awkward angle. One slip, one momentary loss of grip, and the skid plate could carve your arm to the bone or, if dropped, swipe off a couple toes.
The new female wasted little time pullin’ up her sleeves. By lunchtime, she had already mastered assembling the cross members. She was also doing an impressive job of hefting the finished product onto the frames and bolting them down. However, she wasn't having nearly the success with the riveting portion of the job. She'd grab the gun, wrestle with it, sway with it, curse at it and invariably slice the rivet. Exasperated, she'd throw up her hands and grumble.
I could sense that a visit from Dr. Rivethead was in order. I let her mangle a few more rivets before wandering over and introducing myself.
“My name's Ben. For better or worse, I am the local guru regarding the defiant nature of the rivet gun.”
This brought a smile. “My name's Janice and, for better or worse, I'm a total klutz.”
“Believe me, so is everyone when they first get ahold of one of these guns.”
As Janice looked on, I began to demonstrate the proper riveting technique. I passed on all relevant advice. To wit: Resist the urge to arm wrestle the gun. The gun will pin you every time. Do not yank the gun. The gun will cooperate better with a nudge. Wait until the rivet is aligned. If you strike too early, the rivet will wind up creased or double-headed. Become a passenger. Let the gun do all the work. Be patient. Glide instead of lurch. Close cover before striking. Induce vomiting. You can lead a rivet gun to water, but you can't make it surf. Blah, blah, blah…
By the end of the shift, Janice was gettin’ the feel for it. Her ratio of bull's-eyes to beheadings was running ten to one in her favor. Not a bad average for a greenie. It would come. It always did if you just relaxed. All one really had to do was get over the fact that he or she was navigatin’ a stubborn hunk of cast iron that packed up to 17,000 pounds of pressure per square inch and wasn't awfully picky about its menu. It would just as soon devour Mozart's fingertips as a boxful of rivets.
Janice thanked me for my bit of tutelage. Then she paused. “So you're the Rivethead guy,” she said. “I've heard about your columns. My girlfriends think you're a riot.”
“Basically, I'm just a peeping Tom. It helps keep the clock moving.”
“I can see how that might be handy around here.” Janice laughed. “I'll see you tomorrow.”
“I'll be here.”
The arrival of Janice turned out to be a real blessing. She was intelligent, warm and witty. She was also just as twisted and desperate as the rest of us when it came to engaging in the assorted hijinks we used to bludgeon the ruthless minute hand. We quickly became comrades in the battle to destroy the monotony. Mainly, I would babble, she would laugh. We were fond of discussing our fates.
“Monkeys could be doing this,” Jan observed and gazed around at the crew. It was a little sad. “I guess they already are,” she surmised.
It wasn't easy for a woman on the Rivet Line. They were under constant siege by legions of moronic suitors. Almost every guy down there perceived himself as some kind of rodent Romeo. A woman working in the midst of so many men was looked upon as willing prey. Personality, looks, marital status hardly mattered. If it had tits and ass and jiggled along, it was fair game. Being that she was young and attractive, Jan was swarmed nightly. She deflected them nicely, defusing their advances with talk about her husband and snapshots of her little boy. Sooner or later, the vultures would hang it up and drag their libidos toward the next shapely bottom.
There was also another dreary side to this situation with women on the line. Due to the fact that Janice and I spent so much time together goofin’ off, it was commonly accepted that we must be involved in some gooey love affair. Whenever Janice and I would slide out at lunch to race up to McDonald's, we'd arrive back to a chorus of oooohs and ahhhhs. The consensus was that we were fleeing at every given opportunity to find someplace to hump ourselves silly.
It pissed me off. Not that I really cared what others were dreamin’ up. It just bothered me that it was impossible to be close friends with a female in the factory without a bunch of dick-for-brains assuming that sex was the only bond. Maybe they were all jealous. Maybe they were confused as to why the new gal on the block would choose such a bland gigolo. Regardless, I could have done without their lousy assumptions.
We'd get over to the bar after work and it would start up. How large are her tits? Is she a screamer? Does she prefer it on top? Is her old man suspicious? When can we expect an in-depth article on the proper method of jumpin’ factory snatch?
Yuk, yuk, yuk. I'd sit there and drain my Budweisers, smiling wearily. At least it beat talking about foremen and financial planning. When I'd tire of the conversation, I would simply agree with everything that was being said.
“Yep, you boys are right. If I don't slow this thing down, my dick's gonna fall off. But, at least I'm gettin’ a female. It must be rough on you other guys having to make it with each other every night out in the parking lot. Come to think of it,
that
would make for an interesting article: ‘NOT HAVING ENOUGH WANTON WOMEN TO GO AROUND, MY SEX-STARVED LINEMATES WERE FORCED INTO A SHAMELESS HOMO JAMBOREE—GOBBLIN’ EACH OTHER UP, STROKIN’ EACH OTHER'S MULES, TWEETIN’ LIKE TURTLEDOVES—SO OUTRAGEOUSLY CORRUPTED BY THEIR OWN LUST FOR SUMMER SAUSAGE THAT THEY PLOWED OVER ONE ANOTHER IN A VILE FEEDING FRENZY FOR ANY OLD CHUNK OF GENITALIA THAT SPRUNG FROM THE SHADOWS OF THEIR FOGGED-OVER FAG WAGONS.’”
Before long, we'd be back to talkin’ about the usual stuff. Why doesn't Jack Morris just keep his yap shut and pitch the fuckin’ ball? How come Michelob makes you fart so much? Why don't they kill the bastard who keeps playin’ that Glenn Frey song? Why won't Roger Smith go bowling with us?