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Authors: Ben Hamper

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Rivethead (6 page)

BOOK: Rivethead
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After the wives dropped off, Glen and I stayed up late talking. He was hell-bent on landing a job at General Motors and stressed all the benefits of working for the hometown team. I sucked on my lousy Columbia and shook my head.

“Have you ever noticed the looks on the faces of those bastards when they get home from work?” I asked Glen. “Fuck the money, I don't need that monster gaze.”

“Well, what the hell are you gonna do when you grow up?” Glen laughed.

“I don't know,” I said. And I truly didn't.

“And you ride me for wantin’ to get into the shop! Shit, you need another beer.”

It was out of our hands anyway. There was a recession going on and the gates to Greaseball Mecca were temporarily padlocked. Job seekers were forced to follow the detour signs to McDonald's or Arby's or Maplebrook Village Apartments, at least until the Arabs let go of our balls and the market began to chug again.

I, for one, could wait.

3

M
Y MARRIAGE TO
J
OANIE WAS QUICKLY BEGINNING TO CRUMBLE
. Between my nightly beer-bombing over at Glen's and our continual teetering on the brink of poverty, my young bride was getting fed up to her eyebrows with life in the comatose lane. We were just two confused kids playing house, flailing at each other with every blunt collision that sudden adulthood generated. High school sweethearts can make for strange bed partners once the reality of the rent and the groceries and the car payments descend on the dollhouse.

As my father-in-law saw it, there was only one antidote to our marital woes: finding me gainful employment. He kept suggesting that I pursue a career at General Motors. We happened to live right in the shadows of the Chevrolet Manufacturing plant, the Chevy Engine plant and the enormous GM Truck & Bus facility. How convenient, he often pointed out. I paid my father-in-law nothing but lip service. I told him the shops weren't hiring. I insisted that there were other things on some invisible horizon awaiting my induction. I spouted and sputtered brave ignorant lies about how a young man should pause and blossom into clever vocations that would surely lie in wait once the haze receded and the clear adult mind began to function.

I was full of shit. I would say anything to turn the subject around from the inevitable. The inevitable being this: I knew in the tenth grade that I would be a shoprat. It was more an understanding of certain truisms found in my hometown than any form of game plan I might have been hatching. In Flint, Michigan, you either balled up your fists and got career motivated the moment the piano quit bangin’ the commencement theme or, more likely, you'd still be left leanin’ when the ancestors arrived to pass along your birthright. Here, kid, fetch.

There were times I was actually drawn to the shops. Occasionally, I would get drunk and park next to one of the factories just in time to watch the fools pile out at quitting time. I hated the looks on their faces. Miserable cretins, one and all. I would sit there with a can of beer in my lap and try to focus on one alternative career goal. There weren't any. All I ever came back to was the inevitable admission that I didn't really want to do
anything.
And around these parts, in the fat choke hold of Papa GM, that was just chickenshit slang for asking “What time does the line start up on Monday?”

I quit my job at the apartment complex. I decided to go into freelance painting, a job where I could at least name my own hours. After eight or nine months of near starvation, I ditched this stupid stratagem. I was no hustler. I needed someone to tell me what to do. Meanwhile, the recession dragged on.

I caught on with a guy who ran a janitorial service. We worked at night cleaning up business colleges, drugstores and attorneys’ offices. I wiped down toilets for the minimum wage. The boss was always hollering at me for missing some wayward pee stain or leaving streaks on some lonesome stretch of linoleum. No wonder I soon gave up this promising career and took to sitting around the apartment drinking beer, playing with my daughter and waiting for my wife to come home from work at her father's bridal store.

The marriage had all but disintegrated by then. Joanie worked and I drank. We rarely even spoke to each other. There wasn't anything to say. She was the breadwinner and I was the louse. The parallel between my behavior and my old man's was something that didn't escape me. Just the thought of it made me want to drive our dilapidated Mustang head-center into the nearest bridge abutment.

Joanie finally kicked me out of our marriage and took custody of our daughter. My life was so screwed-up by then that the idea of working for GM not only lost its repugnance, it took on the frantic allure of a rope tossed to a quicksand victim. I not only surrendered to the inevitable, I began begging for it. General Motors was the only possible panacea to the erosion of my marriage and my own personal bout with suicidal mind fatigue.

It was birthright time, goddamnit. Though the recession was still hovering over the city, I didn't let it detour me. I began getting up at 5:00
A.M
. and hustling over to the factories. Right on the entrance gate to the personnel office was a sign that read
NO APPLICATIONS
. Undaunted, I would stride forward. Don't play games with me, GM. My name is Hamper. Surely you remember that loyal, long-suffering clan. Just show me to my setup and everything will be fine.

The personnel people didn't see it that way. They asked if I had noticed the sign. I said I had. Then they asked if I could read. I said yes. Then they asked me to vacate the plant grounds immediately. It wasn't the type of red carpet treatment I felt entitled to, being the son-of-a-son-of-a-son-of-a-shoprat. So much for ancestral privilege.

My father-in-law started passing me these tips on what office to go to and whose name to mention. He must have been gettin’ some bogus info because every time I followed his instructions I received nothing more than blank bewilderment.

I was also following up tips from an old German lady I had done some painting for. She had worked for GM for thirty-some years. She claimed to know everybody. In the end, her information was no better than my father-in-law's. I struck out repeatedly, becoming more embarrassed with every desperate rejection.

The so-called tips dried up. It was just as well. I was beginning to feel ridiculous haunting personnel offices on every goofball's whim. It had gotten to the point that when the white-collars saw me grabbing the door handle to the Personnel office, they would all line up abreast and start shakin’ their heads emphatically as if they had infective lice digging at their scalps.
No applications.
Zero. Void. Confute, rebut, deny.

Months went by. Joanie and I separated. I moved into my mother's basement where I slept all day and caroused all night on the biweekly unemployment funds I had earned after my stint as the inept janitor. I still clung to the belief that the marriage could be salvaged if I could only hitch up with the screw train and bring home some of that sweet GM loot. Screw my old man and his forewarnings. Screw the nuns and their lesson plans. Screw the guidance counselor's bulging file cabinet. Screw the ambulance drivers and disc jockeys and midnight janitors. Screw me and screw you. I wanted to be a shoprat, true and blue.

The recession of the mid-seventies began to lift. Car sales were beginning to rise. Truck sales were booming. Relatives were once again able to start funneling those sacred applications out the door to their street-walkin’ kin. My good friend Denny got one off a cousin. My buddy Mike picked one up from his father. Half of the idiots I hung out with in high school were layin’ claim to General Motors work applications. I was glad for them. Still, I wondered when, if ever, my precious birthright would be forked my way.

Finally, my father-in-law came through. Some distant aunt on my wife's side of the family worked as a nurse in the Truck Plant hospital. I was sent over to her house to fetch the elusive ap. There it was on the dining room table—the paperwork drivel at the end of the rainbow. I jotted all the shit down, fibbing on the section that asked had I ever taken drugs, handed it back to Aunt Nurse and skipped out the door like a man who had just wormed his neck from the noose. Maybe there would be another noose with my name on it on the other side of this application, but I didn't care at all. Suddenly, the sky was full of dollar bills and pay stubs the size of blimps.

Denny got called in for his physical. Paydirt! GM only scheduled you for a physical when they intended to put you right to work. He called me up and we talked about the rapture of capitalism—the bankrolls, the new cars, the best booze, the choicest drugs, new stereos and new digs. This was in April, two months after his application had been filed. Figuring that two months was the standard waiting period, I assumed that I would be getting my phone call any day.

Nope. While Denny was already completing his ninety days service in the Truck Plant (the minimum amount of service required to secure your job at GM), I was still sweating it out in my mom's basement, jumping every time the phone rang. What the hell was it that was making them stall?

Just to make sure that my application hadn't been incinerated or used for butt-wad, I called the Personnel office every Monday morning. The voice on the other end always put me on hold for a lengthy period and then returned to tell me that my application was still treading ink in their paper lagoon. I hadn't even worked a day yet for General Motors and already I didn't trust these shills.

I wasn't home the day they finally did call. It was a Saturday afternoon and I was planted on a barstool up at Jack Gilbert's Wayside Inn. I didn't expect to get called in on a weekend, so I left the house with no instructions to where anyone could reach me. My little brother, a real wiseacre, told them that I could be reached at any number of North Flint area bars. I'm sure this tickled them pink.

Fortunately, I had given GM my in-laws’ number as a backup and my sister-in-law came racing into the Wayside where I was in the process of getting shit-faced with her boyfriend Rick.

“Ben. BEN! GM just called you! They want you to come to work.”

“Shit,” I hollered, “it's about time those bastards rang me. On a weekend, no less. That gives me and the old Ricker here time to do some much-deserved celebrating. Did they mention what time they need me on Monday?”

“No, no, no! They want you to work TODAY! They said to be there at four and to wear some work boots if possible.”

“TODAY? Saturday? It is Saturday, isn't it? Four o'clock? WORK BOOTS?”

“Four o'clock,” my sister-in-law repeated. “Work boots if possible.”

This was some heavy shit. To be called in during the middle of the weekend smelled like an emergency. GM was now in the midst of one of their all-time boom-boom quota years, so I supposed reinforcements were needed on Saturdays, Sundays, Salad days—any time was the right time. This also marked the first time I ever remembered being asked out on a Saturday night by a corporation.

“I better move out,” I told Rick. “Mustn't keep Papa Jimmy waitin’.”

“Wear something sexy, ratboy,” Rick laughed. “And don't forget to write.”

I hustled home. I didn't have any work boots, so I just threw on a pair of old Converse hightops along with a T-shirt and a pair of filthy jeans. My head was reciting all the advice my distant aunt had filled me with: Keep you guard out for troublemakers. Don't be coerced into drinking. Be on time. Do everything you're told, try to do extra, don't engage in horseplay, address your supervisor as “sir.” Check, check, check.

Before we were to begin working, the group I was hiring in with was instructed to meet for a physical examination in the plant hospital. We were a sluggish-looking crew. There were about twenty of us all together—each person chain-smoking and staring at the floor, waiting in silence to be pronounced fit for active drudgery. We resembled some awkward casting call for the next Maynard G. Krebs. I had a strong hunch that there wasn't a marketable skill among us.

A doctor came out and directed us into a single-file line. The urine test was up first. We were each handed a small vial and told to line up for the restroom.

The guy standing in front of me kept looking over his shoulder at me. When it was his turn to enter the can, he spun around and asked if it would be all right if I donated a little of my urine for his vial. He seemed to be very stressed. This was long before drug testing was ever common in the workplace. I wondered what the big deal was.

“I just can't get it to flow right now,” the guy claimed. Apparently, the fear was that the Company might look down upon any prospective serf who was incapable of bringing forth the pee when it mattered most. No piss, no job, ingrate!

I didn't care much for the idea of passing around my piss with a total stranger. It didn't seem like a solid career move. Besides, for all either of us knew, I might be holding on to a bad batch. I had a long, painful bout with hepatitis when I was twelve. My formative years were spent wolfing down a wide variety of menacing chemicals. I drank like a sieve. I had an ulcer that ate at me like a cordless drill. Hell, who'd wanna take a crapshoot on the chance that any of that might come floating to the surface of their corporate dossier?

Evidently, this guy. He returned from the John and, true to his work, the vial he held before me was completely empty. “C'mon,” he said. “Just a squirt. I'll
pay
you for it.”

Christ, that did it. “Gimme the thing,” I groaned. It probably wasn't the most noble act of giving one had ever made on behalf of a needy Union brother but, somehow, it sure seemed like it at the time.

We were almost through with our urine samples when a member of our group, a late arrival, walked into the hospital and began to speak with our overseer. I sensed that the guy was in deep shit. He kept apologizing over and over—something to do with getting messed up in traffic and being detained. Judging by his performance, I doubted he was lying.

It didn't matter. The man with the clipboard wasn't buying a single word. He stood there shaking his head from one side to the other—just another weasel in a short-sleeve shirt, deputized to protect the status quo. He did his job well.

BOOK: Rivethead
2.75Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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