Rivethead (4 page)
Our neighborhood was strictly blue-collar and predominantly Catholic. The men lumbered back and forth to the factories while their wives raised large families, packed lunch buckets and marched the kids off to the nuns.
My family was no exception. From the very beginning, I was raised a good Catholic boy. Catholic church, Catholic school, Catholic home, Catholic drone. I was baptized, confirmed, anointed and tattooed with ashes all in the hope that one day I might have a spot reserved for me on that glorious flotilla up to the heavens.
No matter how tight the budget was at home, my mother always managed to scrape up the necessary funds to provide for our Catholic education. It was never intended that I grow up to be anything other than a good Catholic man—a steady churchgoer with a steady factory income, a station wagon parked under the elms and a wife with an automatic door on her womb.
St. Luke's Elementary provided a very capable boot camp environment for those who would later deposit themselves in the rigid bustle of factory life. The education-through-intimidation technique favored there was not unlike the jarhead gang mentality of the General Motors floorlords. Our fathers’ overseers were brutes with clipboards, sideburns and tangled rhetoric. Our overseers, the sisters of St. Luke's, were brutes with clipboards, sideburns and tangled rosaries.
A pattern was developing. During the seventh and eighth grades at St. Luke's, the nuns divided the students into groups according to intelligence and behavior. There were three groups: the obedient eggheads, the bland robots of mediocrity and, my group, the who-gives-a-shit-hey-have-you-heard-the-new-Cream-album-yet-yup-my-daddy's-a-stinkin’-shoprat-too clan.
Being a proud underachiever of the latter grouping, I was relieved of much of the pressure to succeed in life and was left with my drowsy peers to clog up the classroom while we awaited our almost certain fate as future factory nimwits. Not much was expected of us and we went out of our way to ensure that was how it would remain. Consequently, the nuns cut us a great deal of slack figuring that for every Einstein and Aristotle flipped out of the cookie cutter there had to be a couple mental dwarves available to assemble a life's procession of Buicks and Impalas for those on the road to high places.
Of course this method of reasoning didn't exactly jibe with our parents’ outlook on destiny. At report card time, our folks would raise all kinds of hell while cringing over our grades. I suppose it only makes sense that every mom and pop wants more for their tuition dollar than a series of lazy failures guaranteed to pave the lane right into the turd dump of the assembly line. You could achieve that predestination at any public school and save the family till a lootful.
My folks were no exception. My mother would gaze at my report card and the color would leave her face. It was like a slap to the head—a horrible betrayal on my part considering the long hours of work she had put in to assure her son a fine Catholic education.
“An E in Math, a D in History and Science, a D– IN RELIGION?” my mother would howl. “How could any child who attends mass SIX days a week possibly do so poorly in Religion?”
I would make a pathetic attempt to switch to the highlights. “Look, Mom, I did raise my Self-Conduct mark from a D to a C–. And I did receive passing grades in Music and Gym.”
“Music and Gym? MUSIC AND GYM! Just what is that supposed to tell me? That you have a secure future singing the national anthem at basketball games? Just wait until your father takes a look at this mess.”
I could wait. If there was one thing I detested, it was my old man preachin’ to me about my shortcomings as a model Catholic youth. It was such a bad joke. What the hell qualified him to criticize anything I did? I felt that he should reserve his critiques for matters that more closely coincided with his niche in life. Education? Shit. He should have stuck to advising me on the proper methods of wife cheating and check forging and navigating a car with triple vision. And what about the studied art of smoking an entire Winston without ever removing it from your mouth or the precious knack of impersonating a morgue stiff for forty-eight consecutive hours on the living room sofa. This was the kind of heavy data no nun could ever pass along.
I was my father's seed. Technically, I guess that was reason enough for him to meddle with my grade situation.
“You think you're hot shit, don't you, son?” my father would begin. I would shrug nervously. “You think you've got a pretty soft thing going for yourself. Am I right?” I would shake my head slowly.
“Well, the way I see it, you ain't nothin’ but a bad actor. You may be snowin’ your mother, but I can smell your game a mile away. You wanna play wiseass with me and I'll knock you down a few pegs. Anytime you feel like you can take the old man, I'll be right here. Anytime you wanna wear the pants in the family, you just let me know. I'll be more than willing to put my foot right up your ass. Understand, son?”
“Yes,” I would mumble enraged and full of regrets. If only I were eight inches taller and had a reckless set of balls. I could envision myself springing from the interrogation seat and sucker-punching my old man right in the chops. “Here, sweet father of mine, take this busted lip as a loving token of my esteemed adulation and let this punt to the rib cage serve as a loving reminder that your eldest son worships the ground you piss on.”
But back to reality or, at least, my father's version of such. “Now, son, you must realize that your mother and I have worked very hard to see that you receive some proper schooling. All this report card tells me is that you don't give a good goddamn one way or the other. You keep this shit up and you'll be just like half the other morons in this city who end up spinnin’ their wheels and suckin’ some heavy ass down at Chevrolet or over at Buick. You can clown it up now, but you'll be laughin’ out of the other side of your mouth once the blisters appear and some bastard starts leanin’ over your shoulder with another bumper to fasten down.”
I heard this speech often during my formative years. I came to refer to it as my old man's “State of the Hometown” address. Do as I say, not as I did, kid. My friends received similar pronouncements from their fathers. The factories weren't looking for a few good men. They were dragging the lagoon for optionless bumpkins with brats to feed and livers to bathe. An educated man might hang on for a while, but was apt to flee at any given whistle. That wasn't any good for corporate continuity. GM wanted the salt of the earth, dung-heavers, flunkies and leeches—men who would grunt the day away void of self-betterment, numbed-out cyborgs willing to swap cerebellum loaf for patio furniture, a second jalopy and a tragic carpet ride deboarding curbside in front of some pseudo-Tudor dollhouse on the outskirts of town.
Which is to say that being a factory worker in Flint, Michigan, wasn't something purposely passed on from generation to generation. To grow up believing that you were brought into this world to follow in your daddy's footsteps, just another chip-off-the-old-shoprat, was to engage in the lowest possible form of negativism. Working the line for GM was something fathers did so that their offspring wouldn't have to.
In the case of my ancestry, we had been blessed with this ongoing cycle of martyrs. Men who toiled tirelessly in an effort to provide their sons and daughters with a better way of living. Unfortunately, at the same time, our family was also cursed by a steady flow of uninspired descendants who scoffed at alternative opportunity and merely hung around waitin’ for the baton to be passed from crab claw to puppy paw.
By deftly flunking my way through St. Luke's Junior High, I was already exhibiting symptoms of one who was pointing squarely to the loading dock of the nearest General Motors outpost. Even my father was accurate with his diagnosis. Another Hamper banging at the gate of idiot industry with a ten-foot scowl and a forehead fresh for stampin’. I could practically hear my great-grandfather yelpin’ from his crypt: “Not another one! Hey, don't any of you pricks wanna become lawyers or somethin’? Huh? HUH?” Silent decades drifted by choking on indecision. “Well, piss on ya, I'm going back to sleep. Car, windshield. Car, fuel pump. Car, ignition switch. Car, zzzzzz…”
F
LINT,
M
ICHIGAN.
T
HE
V
EHICLE
C
ITY.
G
REASEBALL
M
ECCA.
The birthplace of thud-rockers Grand Funk Railroad, game show geek Bob Eubanks and a hobby shop called General Motors. A town where every infant twirls a set of channel locks in place of a rattle. A town whose collective bowling average is four times higher than the IQ of its inhabitants. A town that genuflects in front of used-car lots and scratches its butt with the jagged peaks of the automotive sales chart. A town where having a car up on blocks anywhere on your property bestows upon you a privileged sense of royalty. Beer Belly Valhalla. Cog Butcher of the world. Gravy on your french fries.
Flint, Michigan. Detroit as seen backwards through a telescope. The callus on the palm of the state shaped like a welder's mitt. A town where 66.5 percent of the working citizenship are in some way, shape or form linked to the shit-encrusted underbelly of a French buggy racer named Chevrolet and a floppy-eared Scotchman named Buick. A town where 23.5 percent of the population pimp everything from Elvis on velvet to horse tranquilizers to Halo Burgers to NRA bumper stickers. A town where the remaining 10 percent sit back and watch it all go by—sellin’ their blood, rollin’ convenience stores, puffin’ no-brand cigarettes while cursin’ their wives and kids and neighbors and the flies sneakin’ through the screens and the piss-warm quarts of Red White & Blue and the Skylark parked out back with the busted tranny.
“Just like half the other morons…” my old man had warned. He was certainly more wise than most of my friends’ fathers. They questioned nothing. They accepted their birthrights and strode sheep-like into the vast head-fuck of the factories. My old man was at least honest with himself. He realized a ball vise when he saw one. It didn't matter that he was a five-star drunk with the cumulative ambition of an eggplant. The old man held on to a chunk of his soul, concealing it from the fangs of lamebrain labor, accomplishing a small piece of everything while doing absolutely nothing. In Flint, Michigan, that was an achievement in itself.
My old man was determined to make sure that I, Bernard Egan Hamper III, his pipsqueak namesake, the eldest of his five sons, wouldn't follow the feed line into General Motors. When I was at St. Luke's, he tore at my ass relentlessly. When it came time for high school, he often threatened to ship me off to a military academy. My mom furiously opposed this solution. Her suggestion was that I enter the seminary. Fortunately, both of these horrid plots were laid to ruin due to lack of funds.
I entered St. Michael's High School with a more determined outlook on things. I was pretty sure that I didn't want any part of General Motors and I didn't profess any great yearning to become a world-class drunkard. Beyond that, I knew very little. Mike and I still clung loosely to our private visions of becoming hotshot radio personalities. We had an ever-escalating fondness for the female breast and in order to collect heavily on the mammo-meter we had to achieve some kind of cool notoriety. We figured just about any radio hack worth his beans was bound to be holdin’ fort with big-busted Donovan mamas and bra-free Beatle booty.
Spurred on by parental badgering and fueled with the heady octane of boobs galore, I pulled off an amazing stunt my freshman year at St. Mike's. I wound up making the honor roll! Apparently, my leftover cronies from St. Luke's found this development hard to grasp, for on the list saluting the honor students that hung on the bulletin board in the school lobby someone had scrawled the words “How?” and “Why?” next to my name. I didn't have a ready answer. What could I say? “I owe it all to the persistence of my drunken pa and a hormonal yen for watermelon teats?”
Before my sophomore year, they closed down St. Michael's. Shit, I thought, right when I was gatherin’ a groove. The diocese decided that the small parish high schools were a thing of the past. In other words, resorting to the norms of Catholicism, they had fond a more lucrative method of bleeding coin out of the flock.
Ground was broken on the northern border of Flint and construction began on this enormous structure that would consolidate all of the area's Catholic high schools. Say good night to St. Mike, St. Matt, St. Agnes, St. John, St. Mary and to those southside swine, Holy Redeemer. What was wrong with them Redeemers, anyway? Couldn't they find a saint to lift a name from? Seein’ as how they annually mopped ass on the football field, possibly St. Joseph of Namath would have been appropriate.
The braintrust at the diocese ran into the same predicament when they settled on the name for the new high school we were all about to attend. They called it Luke Powers High. Hmmm, Luke Powers. I must have skipped right past that guy during Bible Study. Surely, there had to be more saints out there without earthly monuments celebrating their good deeds. Luke Powers? It sounded like a cowpoke from an old episode of
The Big Valley
or the name of some pockmarked pump jockey down at the corner Sunoco.
During the tenth grade of Powers, I was able to bluff my way onto the honor roll once more. It wasn't so much attributable to any sense of goal-setting on my part, I just had nothing else to do but hit the books as I baby-sat my younger brothers and sisters night in and night out. My mother was now working the second shift at McLaren Hospital. My father was quickly becoming an endangered species at home. That left me in charge of six kids to cook for, delegate chores for, clean crappy diapers for, officiate rumbles for and to safely stow in bed and bunk. When all grew peaceful, I would flip open the books.
Powers was significantly different from the small parish schools I had attended at St. Luke's and St. Mike's. My classmates weren't middle-class kids. These were not the sons and daughters of the assembly line. Most of the new blood at Powers hailed from wealthy families. Some of them weren't even Catholic. Their parents just deposited them here as a means of avoiding the turbulence of schoolin’ down with white trash and blackies and hoodlums and druggies and things that go bump near the water fountain. None of them possessed any shoprat heritage nor were any likely to spend a lifetime affixing trunk lids to the ass ends of Buicks.