Rivethead (25 page)

“What the hell was THAT?” Mark cried.

Introductions seemed in order, yet how did one go about telling a traumatized bystander that the large CAT he'd just seen strolling near his job was the living messiah of the masses and the secret to a Quality work plan all wrapped into one blur of fur? My guess was you didn't even try.

“That was a big cat, Mark. He must be lookin’ for that mouse we've been seein’ around here lately.”

Mark asked for a cigarette. I had never seen him smoke before. “Oh,” he said.

After that sighting, I saw Howie on a few more occasions. The news appeared to be bad. For one thing, Howie looked absolutely terrible. He seemed to have fallen prey to some dreadful disease. One night, I actually saw Howie propped up in a fork truck, waving his feeble paw back and forth, apparently too weak to complete his rounds on foot. I screamed “Howie!” and that gigantic noggin of his tilted toward me, a hideous mask of pain. It hit me right there at my workbench: My God, I think Howie's dying!

How true it all appeared. Just another giant struggling valiantly against the gravedigger's spade. Death didn't give a shit. Death never paused for John Wayne. It chewed on him like a warm Swanson dinner. Howie, nine lives and all, was not immune. All our heroes died.

Just about the time we were preparing weepy eulogies for the ultimate passing of Howie Makem, he came firm’ out of the chute again. What the fuck was GM up to? Howie was more alive and antimated than ever. It was all too much. Even I, possibly Howie's greatest fan, began to cool in my affection for our schizophrenic mascot. We didn't want drama, we needed something to laugh at.

A severe Howie Makem backlash developed. Instead of the customary cheering that greeted Howie, he was now bein’ heckled unmercifully. Whenever he appeared in the vicinity of the Rivet Line, he did so at grave personal risk. We would load up on rivets and toss them at his generous skull.

A horrible realization began to bother me. After a Howie sighting, I'd lean back on my bench and think to myself: SOMEONE is in that head. SOMEONE whose wife and kids lie sound asleep in another part of town while the stars shine down and the trucks pile up and Daddy haunts the halls in his kitty costume. SOMEONE who was forced to go through twelve worthless years of the American Education System only to wind up jerry-riggin’ the same old acid flashback night after night. There should be exemptions made for men who aspire to do nothing more than dress up like huge house pets in the middle of factories.

Another thought began to occur to me. If Howie Makem was allowed to roam the plant as the spiritual ambassador of the Quality Concept, why wasn't equal time being provided a likewise embodied representative of GM's FOREMOST preoccupation—the Quantity Concept? An elusive second self that would lurk among the shadows and pounce upon any worker who dared cause any kind of stoppage in production.

I decided I might like the role. What the hell, the job would allow for plenty of maneuverability and I could work at my own pace. It turned out that Janice had a friend who worked over in the audit area. Through information passed on by this friend, I learned that this was the privy location of Howie Makem's costume. I was doubly excited to hear from Jan's source that Howie actually had a SPARE head stashed away somewhere in the audit room. It was my resolute intention to swipe the spare cat head, paint the eyes a violent red, attach large fangs to its overbite, and carve the word QUOTA on its forehead.

With this accomplished, I, the Quantity Cat, would set out to terrorize all those who were responsible for assembly line downtime. How many times had I heard the woesome lament: “For each minute the line is down, the Company loses another $10,000.” I would fix all that. I would call myself Howie Rakem, Quantity Cat. Howie Rakem would ambush workers at stoplights. Park next to them at drive-ins. Claw their bedroom windows during the sex act. Hiss at them in booths at Mark's Lounge. No man would dare shortchange the coffers knowing that Howie Rakem was on the prowl. To reward my gallant service, I would finally be allowed to go bowling with Chairman Roger.

Sadly, I must report that it never worked out. It wasn't due to a lack of effort. Countless times I made it as far as the very closet where Howie stored his heads, but the goddamn thing was always padlocked. According to Jan's source, this was due to the fact that a few months back some vandals had made off with Howie's legs and torso. All the Quality people were left with was a couple of disembodied cat heads. This helped explain Howie's frequent bouts of absenteeism.

Or did it? Now I was really confused. Just because Howie no longer had a body, what was preventing him from putting on the head and performing his rounds in jeans or coveralls? The way I had it figured, as long as you had a head, you had a Howie. Right? RIGHT?

Nope. Janice explained: “The Quality people feel that the workers won't be able to relate to Howie without the full presentation. In other words, without the paws and tail and the fur—”

“STOP!” I injected hysterically. “Let me guess. You're about to tell me that without the paws and tail and the fur…THE WORKERS WON'T BELIEVE THAT HOWIE IS AN ACTUAL…um…CAT! Don't lie. That's what you were about to say, wasn't it?”

Janice began to shake with laughter. She had a rough time gettin’ it out. “Exactly!” she howled at last.

It was all so silly. I brought home over $400 a week for accomplishing nothing. When everything went just right, I had absolutely no recollection of what had transpired moments before. If all went according to plan, I would be eligible for a tidy retirement plan in the year 2007.

The Quality people had no need to worry. For the life of me, I would believe
anything.

“MANDRELL SISTER ORDERS A SUBURBAN!” the headline announced. I had in my hand a fresh copy of our in-plant propaganda sheet, the
Truckin’ Tribune.
It was September 19, 1985, and I was relaxing at the picnic table near my job, waiting for the line to start rolling.

I continued with the article. I wasn't sure why, but I found the topic mesmerizing. “Today, Flint Truck Assembly will produce a Suburban for well-known singer and performer Louise Mandrell. The unit is loaded, has four-wheel drive and is black and silver with gray inserts. The order originated in Scottsville, Ky.”

I put the paper down and sat there for a moment. Louise Mandrell. Today. Suburban. A warm sensation streamed through me. I picked up the
Tribune
and read the article several more times. I was becoming infatuated with the entire concept. A clear vision of lovely Louise plowing right through the Kentucky dusk, her hair unfurled, her bronzed legs stretched full, goosin’ that big black chariot through a bend in the brush where the critters all leapt in the glow of her ramblin’ fog lights. It was pretty damn romantic.

Carefully, I sliced the article from the
Tribune
with my box-cutter knife. As I was doing so, Doug was taking a seat at the end of the table to mark his production schedule for the day. I scooted over. Information this urgent had to be shared.

“Dougie, have you seen today's issue of
Pravda?
” I asked. He shook his head and continued marking his manifest. It was never a polite idea to interrupt a linemate as he was totaling up his schedule. This kind of outside interference could cause omissions and oversights that would show up in errors later in the job operation. Schedule-marking was a solemn, all-absorbing event.

Big shit. I flung the article down in the middle of Doug's manifest. “You
must
read this, right
now!
” I insisted.

Dougie picked up my clipping and read it through. He didn't appear to be much amused. After all, this was a Friday afternoon and no one really thawed out until about lunch break when the horn would blow and we'd gallop off to the liquor store.

“Didn't she get mashed in a car wreck?” Dougie replied while returning to his schedule.

I moaned. “Naw, you're thinkin’ of her sister, Barbara, the gloomy blonde. Louise is the frisky one. The brunette. The sister who does all those White Rain hair spray commercials.”

“Doesn't she play the fiddle?” Dougie mused. Now we were gettin’ somewhere.

“You better believe it,” I yelled.

“So what about her?”

“WHAT ABOUT HER? Is that all you've got to say? Jesus, Doug, you just read the article. You must realize the significance here. Today we will be building a truck for a goddamn celebrity. Someone we can attach a face to.”

“Sorry, I still don't get it. Fill me in later, I've got to finish marking my schedule.”

“The hell with your schedule,” I exclaimed while shoving off.

Soon, the line began to roll and we moved to our stations. In between jobs, I raced up and down the line apprising my co-workers of the impending approach of the Mandrell Sister Suburban. I dangled my clipping in front of their faces in hopes that it would generate for them the same type of enthusiasm I was delighting in.

Their reactions varied. While some appeared marginally enthused, the majority merely shrugged and peered back at me as if I'd finally teetered over the brink. Alas, my reputation as one who was given to occasional flights of madness, gibberish, delirium and amphetamine prattle had preceded me.

However, not this time. I was clean. I was in complete control. I understood completely the whence and the wherefores. I understood that Louise Mandrell was having a General Motors four-wheel Suburban built today. It was to be loaded. It was to be black and silver. These were inescapable truths. I couldn't help it if it was a Mandrell Sister as opposed to someone who would have been more shoprat vogue—someone like Merle Haggard, Richard Petty or Traci Lords. At least it was SOMEBODY!

The basis for all this mania was simple. For nearly a decade I had toiled away for the GM Truck & Bus plant. In all this time never, but never, had I encountered one human soul who had either purchased, ordered, leased or even hot-wired a General Motors Suburban. Every night the frames would roll by—thirty-eight jobs to the hour—and it would mystify the hell outta me as to where all these beasts were headed.

My Rivet Line pals were just as confused. We would often look up from our jobs in the middle of another shift and ask “Who buys all these things?” Obviously, someone had to be doin’ it and we were tremendously grateful to them. We had mouths to feed and bar tabs to resolve. Still, it often seemed like the trucks we were assembling just vanished out the door—thousands of them, millions of them—lurching into some enormous black hole out by the train tracks and barbed wire fences. What a peculiar way to turn a profit.

Enter Louise Mandrell. She was
real.
On any given day, you could see her cavorting across American television with a canister of goop aimed squarely at her stylish mass of tresses. She lived, she breathed, she sawed an angry fiddle. No longer could there be any denial. What we had here was an actual entity who was able to confirm for us that what we were doing every night resulted in some kind of tangible cause and aftereffect.

There still remained one bitter disappointment. Our plant newspaper hadn't revealed any information as to which job was to be the Mandrell Suburban. I made a couple of futile attempts to wangle the job number out of the management boys but, to no great surprise, was met with an assortment of lame utterances like “I have no idea” and the old standby “Hamper, just do your job.”

Another factor working against me in my pursuit to identify the Mandrell Suburban was my work area itself. The Rivet Line was just an ongoing series of clone-like black frames. Each one was a duplicate of the one that went before with the exception of the occasional army vehicle. I doubted rather strongly Louise was gonna get her claws on one of those. The information that the Mandrell Suburban would be black and silver, that it would have gray inserts, that it would come loaded, was totally useless to all of us on the Rivet Line. Everything that went our way was identical.

It still turned out to be a better than average shift. At random intervals through the night, I would holler down the line to my co-workers:
“This
one could be it. Let's give it the rivet!” Dougie would whip into a frantic air-fiddle solo, the Polish Sex God would start making humping motions, Janice and I would genuflect and we'd give it our best. Above us, the clock would swirl by. Another day, another diversion.

Not all diversions were of an amusing nature. I recall one that really gave us fits. GM and the union got together and installed these mammoth electronic message boards in various locations around the plant. They only sprung for about a dozen of these boards and, wouldn't you just know it, with all the available acreage around the factory, they just had to point one of these bastards right at me. It hung about five feet above the picnic table directly across the aisle from my job.

The messages they would flash ranged from corny propaganda (green neon bulb depictions of Howie Makem's face uttering shit like Q
UALITY IS THE
B
ACKBONE OF
G
OOD
W
ORKMANSHIP
!) to motivational pep squawk (A W
INNER
N
EVER
Q
UITS
& A Q
UITTER
N
EVER
W
INS
!) to brain-jarring ruminations (S
AFETY
I
S
S
AFE
). The board also flooded us with birthday salutes, religious passages, antidrug adages, audit scores, limericks and the occasional abstract gibberish. (One night the board kept flashing the phrase H
APPINESS
I
S
H
ORSES
alongside a rather grotesque-lookin’ rendering of a horse head. If I had any idea what it meant, I'd gladly pass it on.)

I remember the first day the message board went into operation. For the entire shift, it beamed out one single message. They never erased it. We kept waiting for another phrase to come along and replace it. No such luck. The message blazed on brightly like some eternal credo meant to hog-tie our bewildered psyches. The message? Hold on to your hardhats, sages. The message being thrust upon us in enormous block lettering read:
SQUEEZING RIVETS IS FUN
! Trust me. Even the fuckin’ exclamation point was their own.