Rivethead - Ben Hamper [101]
We gave it up and Bernstein walked with me out to my Camaro. He mentioned that there was always the possibility that a segment could be worked out at a later date. He handed me one of his business cards and told me to stay in touch. I said I would. Both of us were liars. As I drove off around the corner, flung the card in the direction of a couple bag ladies standing on Saginaw Street. May it serve them well, I chuckled to myself.
Alongside the debacle with 60 Minutes, I managed to cross wires with folks from National Public Radio, Random House, Esquire, Embassy Productions, Playboy, Penthouse, Voice of America and U.S. News & World Report. Each of them rang up needin’ a piece of this week's rage—the Autoworker/Journalist. I understood. Having your face displayed on the front page of the Wall Street Journal lent a sudden legitimacy to whatever the hell you were doing. All at once you were pronounced fit for active duty in the phone directories of the Mighty Big. It just happened to be my time. Next week it would be the Fry Cook/Opera Tenor or the Bank Clerk/Porn Stud.
After a few weeks, the phone calls went away. I returned to sleeping past noon, safe in the knowledge that the hounds had picked up a new scent out on the power lines. It was fine with me. After all, I already had my hands full. There were muffler hangers to attach, spring castings to insert, rivets to be mashed. There were clocks to duel and antics to explore.
Idiot labor may not have been much to fall in love with, but it beat the hell out of flailing around on someone's conference line. High wages, low thought requirement, beholden to only those you chose. What the rest of the world wanted was their own problem. Ambition maimed so many of them. I'm sure they had their own reasons for grasping for the next rung, but it all seemed so bothersome and tedious.
In contrast, working the Rivet Line was like being paid to flunk high school the rest of your life. An adolescent time warp in which the duties of the day were just an underlying annoyance. No one really grew up here. No pretensions to being anything other than stunted brats clinging to rusty monkeybars. The popular diversions—Rivet Hockey, Dumpster Ball, intoxication, writing, rock ‘n’ roll—were just reinventions of youth. We were fumbling along in the middle of a long-running cartoon.
Having asserted this, it always came as a personal shock and frustration whenever a core member of our cast slipped away. I felt betrayed and abandoned. The Rivet Line may have been a shithole but, for chrissakes, it was our shithole! I couldn't grasp the flimsy rhetoric of those who became bent on relocation. All I could understand was my obstinate devotion to the setting. Relocation was the equivalent of graduating. It seemed so futile and adult-like.
Jerry and Janice decided to move on. Neither were especially excited to go, but they had fallen victim to that weird undertow that sometimes swirls by in a shoprat's career—one that murmurs deceitful lies, one that maintains that a change of scenery will induce a grand rebirth. Assembly lines being the monotonous hangouts they are, confusion often takes advantage. You can outwit yourself. You can envision things that aren't really there. Persecution preys on pondering minds. Right becomes wrong. Suddenly, one man's sandbox becomes another man's quicksand.
Jerry left first, opting to take his pastel muscle shirts and heat-seeking libido onto the first shift. This left a tremendous gap in our