Rivethead (26 page)

Talk about a confused bunch of riveters—we had no idea whether this was some kind of big bro Orwellian brain-dunk or just some lowly office puke's idea of a nimble-witted gibe. Whatever it was, we were not especially amused.

Just for a moment, let's imagine that you worked for the sewage department. One day you walk into work to discover that the boss has erected a giant neon sign right next to your job that insists
SHOVELING TURDS IS FUN
! Or, let's pretend you're a shoe clerk. You arrive at your workplace to find a huge billboard that pours forth the adage
SMELLING FEET IS RAPTURE
! How would you react to such derisive lunacy? You couldn't accept this as normal. Not in a billion years. C'mon, c'mon. WHAT WOULD YOU DO?

Well, I know what I did. I cut myself up a chunk of cardboard, took a big red felt marker and etched down the letters
CKED
. I then crammed a wad of tape on the back of it, stood atop the workers’ picnic table and slapped those four letters over the
N
in the word
FUN.
I hustled back to my job and turned around to gaze at my handiwork. Oh yes, this was much better:
SQUEEZING RIVETS IS FUCKED
! I was such a stickler for accuracy. My proud correction remained up there for about three hours until Gino, fearing the wrath of overlords, ripped it down amidst a chorus of heavy booing. It was all right. Gino was cool. Any other foreman would have torn it down immediately and reprimanded me for some muddled violation of Company policy.

This whole incident with the new message board disturbed us. We wondered exactly who was in charge of this vile effrontery. Were these the same deplorable loons, the same demented pimps of propaganda that had shamelessly spermatized the Howie Makem saga? Did these fuckers really believe that squeezin’ rivets was “fun”? If so, why weren't they all down here having the time of their lives? They'd have gotten no protest out of us: “Here you be, Jenkins, another dozen rivets to squeeze! Head ‘em out! More fun than a whore with three tongues!”

I had several definitions of fun. Riveting was nowhere on the list. Taking in a Tiger game from the right field overhang was fun. Listening to Angry Samoans records while gettin’ sloshed was fun. The episode of
Bewitched
where Endora hexed Dick York with elephant ears was fun. Dozing past noon with the phone off the hook was fun. Having sex in a Subaru was difficult—however, that was fun too. Squeezing rivets was
not
fun. It paid the rent and put Fritos in our kids’ bellies, but there was no way you could classify it as fun. Not yesterday, not today, not tomorrow.

It made us wonder just what our precious union's involvement was with this brain-rapin’ contraption. They were coinvestors in the purchase of all these message boards. Weren't they obliged to be on our side? How could they sit idly by and allow GM to glut the screens with hysterical lies? Since we paid their goddamn salaries, you would think they'd have some balky mulehead assigned to monitor the mucus. A representative of the workin’ Joe who would step in and tell GM: “Hey, you chuckleheads. If you dare beam ‘Squeezing Rivets Is Fun!’ ever again, we reserve the right to broadcast ‘Squeezing the Plant Manager's Balls Is a Hoot!’

I believe the thing that grated us most about the giant message board is that it never once supplied us with anything we didn't already know or couldn't have cared less about. The possibilities for useful data were certainly there. For instance, why couldn't they flash the nightly lottery number? Several of us had money ridin’ with Frankie, our in-plant numbers runner. Why couldn't they post updates on scores from the Tiger and Piston games? What could be more harmless and righteously American than lettin’ us check in on our local sports heros? Why couldn't they run silent footage of the Three Stooges or Tom & Jerry cartoons? No lyin’, we'd have settled for home movies of Roger Smith's valet sortin’ through his sock drawer.

All we got was the same daily bullshit. I had a creepy suspicion that the message board was slowly driving us daft, especially Eddie. His job was situated just such that the messages were staring him right in the face. Several times I caught him glowering at the board as if he were on the verge of goin’ bughouse.

Eddie and I began firing rivets at the screen. We'd rear back like Seaver and Gooden, throwing our arms out in a desperate attempt to shut down the madness. It was useless. The damn message board must have been made out of Kryptonite. Once in a great while, Eddie would peg it hard enough to make one or two of the words temporarily disappear. Everyone would begin to applaud when, suddenly, the letters would heal up and reappear.

It ate at Eddie. At times, he seemed to be hypnotized to the board during which he would engage in absurd conversation. I still recall the night he motioned me over to answer a question. His eyes were pinned to the center of the green neon. “Ben, what's the difference between No Lead Gas and Unleaded Gas?”

“Are you serious, Eddie?” I chuckled.

“Could you just tell me the FUCKIN’ DIFFERENCE!” Eddie shouted. He was serious.

“Well, I always assumed that the two were just the same.”

“Then how come my car runs better on the goddamn No Lead?”

I had no idea. I slid back to my job and hit a few rivets. It wasn't any fun.

One of the guys from the plant called me up one morning. It was just after 11:00
A.M
. and I was still tryin’ to snooze off a hangover.

“Get outta bed and switch on Channel 5,” the voice demanded. “Your damn bowling buddy is holding a press conference. They broke right in on
Hour Magazine!
”

“Why?” I mumbled.

My informer wasn't sure. Something to do with plant closings and little pink slips fluttering down on the heads of the working class. There had been rumors of such. I went in and turned on the television.

It was him all right. Roger B. Smith, my elusive bowling foe, GM's resident reducing plan guru. Perhaps the only fella in the entire Western Hemisphere to possess eight million freckles and yet absolutely no sense of humor whatsoever. He looked like Howdy Doody presiding over a hangin’ party—a fiendish combination of power, dread, panic and too much rouge.

Evidently, I had tuned in just after Rog had revealed his roll call of plants headed for extermination. The walking papers having been served, it was now time for the heavy Q & A. The media swarmed in on The Boss, a great sea of gnats luggin’ minicams and mic cables. The ultimate American game show squirming to life with 30,000 potential urchins lined up behind Door Number One.

I sat there in my underwear wondering if I would be among them. I wondered what else I could possibly do for a living. I had no training, no skills, no degrees, no connections. I drank too much to fit into most occupations and I wasn't ambitious enough to have a shot at the rest. Above all, I didn't like poking my head into society. People bothered me. That was the best part of my factory job: never really having to relate to anyone or anything other than the awkward-lookin’ rivet apparatus that hung from the rafters next to my job. We understood each other. We got along just fine.

While I was reflecting on all of this, Roger was doing his best to explain everything to the media. It was very apparent that as far as public speakers went, Smith rated far down the dais, say, right behind a garden hoe or a doorknob. I could sympathize a bit. I'd be a nervous wreck too if I had his lousy job. Shredding people's livelihoods to bits before it was time for lunch had to jangle one's nerves.

What I found most alarming was that Smitty appeared totally confused with the subject matter itself. Specifics like when, where, who, WHY? Jesus, spit it out, boss. Your ass is covered. You ain't one of the gang bein’ upchucked curbside.

Befuddled, Smith began to deflect most of the questions over to his sidekick, GM President Jim McDonald. Now here was a guy who ate decimals and divisors for breakfast, lunch and dinner. A real chatterbox in banker's blue. Jimbo babbled on in the kinda cool-daddy corporate jumble-thump that plain old numbskulls like you and me and the owl in the tree could never hope to untangle. If he was clarifying anything, it still managed to sail about ten feet over my head. (I remember a year or so later, during GM's angry brawl with EDS, it suddenly dawned on me why these stiffs ached so bad in their urge to rid themselves of Ross Perot. It had nothing to do with his loud criticisms or his uppity swagger or even his beguiling hickoid funkiness. Pure and simple, THAT SON-OF-A-BITCHIN’ BILLIONAIRE DARED SPEAK PLAIN OLD ENGLISH! Show that goofball the gate!)

I went into the kitchen and opened a can of beer. On the way back, I overheard what had to be the unquestioned highlight of the entire press conference.

A reporter in the back of the room leaned forward and, quoting Smith, hollered: “How can the elimination of 30,000 jobs IMPROVE job security?” Hey, this hack was on the beam. Even the Rivethead hadn't caught how hopelessly inane this statement had been. Remaining completely stone-faced, Roger Smith glanced at the reporter and reasoned: “For those who are left, their jobs will become that much more secure.” Ouch.

That cinched it. The guy in charge of the largest corporation in America had a brain the size of a fuckin’ lima bean. Not that he was lyin’. It only figured that
anytime
you were able to dispose of 30,000 workers you were going to be able to provide a more secure base for “those who are left.” What had me rockin’ in my recliner was Smith's casual infusion of flat-out genocide as a harmless means of streamlining the roster. He launched this verbal septic log so nonchalantly, one was left with the distinct impression that Smith actually believed that what he was saying would send a soothin’ gush of relief through the rattled wits of the blue-collars. Man, some guys had balls large enough to use on a demolition crane.

For those who are left. That sounded awful damn grim for, a solution that was intended to come off as some form of reassurance. It was entirely possible that Roger Smith had missed his calling in life. He could have been our ambassador to Ethiopia: “A food shortage, you say? Nooo problem. Simply exterminate a vast portion of your population, stack ‘em out of view where they won't upset anyone's appetite and, PRESTO!, vittles aplenty for THOSE WHO ARE LEFT.”

I swear, somedays it just doesn't pay to get outta bed. As it turned out, one of the ten targeted plants for elimination was Flint Truck & Bus. The plan was to close down Line One, the Pickup Line, and move it down south to a new facility in Pontiac, Michigan. Tastes great, less workers! New robots, less filling! The end result would mean the eventual slashing of 3,500 jobs at our plant.

This disclosure tended to fall in step with GM's stubborn desire to keep its work force forever herding southward. Consider this scenario: at least half of the guys around me on the Rivet Line were refugees from closed plants in Saginaw or Bay City. They had to drive south forty or fifty miles a day to barely hang on in Flint. Now, from the information I was receiving, in order to retain my job I would have to sign some transfer sheet and steer my nose fifty miles to the south to the plant they were constructing in Pontiac. The people in Pontiac were probably headed for the plant in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The folks in Fort Wayne were no doubt being packed off for new jobs at the factory in Shreveport, Louisiana. Meanwhile, these Cajuns were being prepared to duck under the border and tinker for a while in Mexico. Notice a trend here? Precisely! Sooner or later, we were all gonna scrape our heads playin’ limbo with the Equator.

And I bet it wouldn't end there. Nope, GM would have us all down there by the mid-nineties and the robots would be working out just fine. They'd have some massive burial pit ready and, before any of us could whip off a letter back home, we'd all be fifty feet under some godforsaken desert, laid out elbow to elbow with absolutely no recall rights to anywhere but the bottom of a dusty plaque hangin’ over the middle urinal inside Mark's Lounge.

One thing was for certain. I had absolutely zero interest in signing up to work at this newfangled gulag in Pontiac. I felt by doing so I'd be bailing out on my ancestral destiny as the last in a long line of kin who had spent their entire earning years in the factories of Flint. If they were bringing down the curtain, so be it. I simply felt I had to be there when it ended.

Naturally, Dave Steel thought I was nuts. “Forget this town,” he told me. “GM is movin’ us south and anyone who chooses to remain behind will be freezin’ their ass off waitin’ in line for food stamps and government cheese.”

Tony, our repairman on the Rivet Line, was of the same opinion. He talked constantly about the supposed benefits of transferring to Pontiac. Tony: “With our seniority, we should be able to land gravy jobs. I hear the place is supposed to be climate-controlled. On top of everything else, they won't even have a Rivet Line down there!”

Hold on a second. No Rivet Line? Jesus Christ, what kind of alien broomshack were they building down in Ponti-yuk? NO RIVET LINE? No Rivetheads? No Rivetettes? Don't tell me those damn robotics had finally eaten away at the one and only profession I'd ever been able to nurture, conquer and dominate? It was like tellin’ a pollywog there was no such thing as frogs.

To hell with resettling. I'd been at GM long enough to grow accustomed to their habit of hollerin’ “Earthquake!” at every little speed bump on the road. It only made perfect sense that if General Motors was offering me a rubber raft in one hand, chances were way more than likely that they had to be packin’ a harpoon in their other paw. I would call their bluff and stay put. Go ahead and bring on that World Van you've been whisperin’ about. I know you frauds are hidin’ something up your sleeves. I won't be takin in. Furthermore, I won't be taken away.

The day arrived when we were scheduled to accept or refuse our transfers to the upcoming plant in Pontiac. Group by group, they called us down to the small conference room adjacent to the workers’ cafeteria. I walked down with Tony and Kirk, who were heatedly debating which was the better option. I found myself beginning to flit from one line of thinking to the next. The plain truth was that I was a complete wuss at decision making. Maybe that was one of the reasons I chose to become a shoprat in the first place. GM always made your decisions for you.