Rivethead - Ben Hamper [111]
A woman from the Detroit Free Press called. She was aware of the demise of the Voice and wanted to know if I'd be interested in ladling out my factory grunt for their Sunday magazine. I told her about my upcoming move to Mother Jones. She then asked if she could run a variety of my old Michigan Voice pieces and reprint any further Mother Jones articles. I inquired about payment for such and the numbers she responded with seemed remarkably generous. Be my guest, I told her. Welcome to the Rivethead's sensational bar tab rummage sale.
Soon after, another woman phoned. It was the lady I'd talked to a few months earlier from Esquire magazine. She was calling to inform me that I had been selected to appear in Esquire's 1986 Register, “a compendium of the nation's brightest young minds and high achievers under age forty.” She offered her congratulations and said that a photographer would be arriving in Flint within the next few weeks to get some pictures. Either I was improving or it was a sluggish year for phenoms.
I called Dave Steel. “Prepare yourself,” I cautioned. “The Rivethead has just been selected as one of this country's brightest young minds by Esquire magazine. I think it only fair to warn you that this bizarre turn of events conclusively indicates that the ruination of Western Civilization is now in full swing.”
“I would have to agree,” Dave replied. “The moral fiber of this land is in deep jeopardy.”
Things on the Rivet Line were also runnin’ wacky. In the span of ten days, two workers had been bitten badly by their rivet guns. One guy lost his ring finger and the other one had broken all the bones in his right hand. Neither worker was ever to return.
As for the guy who smashed his hand, the aftermath was both sad and ridiculous. Within ten minutes of the mishap, Henry Jackson was over at the scene of the accident rantin’ his fat ass off to all within ear shot about how he was gonna put this individual on notice for “careless workmanship in the job place.” Even those of us who were used to Jackson's ill nature were dumbfounded. Here a man had just been permanently maimed and Henry's only concern was to see that the guy would be promptly penalized. There were some things you saw and heard inside a factory that made you bristle. There were some things you saw and heard inside a factory that made you want to throttle a prick by his neck until your wrists snapped.
Crazy, crazy, crazy. There was the night I was up in Cab Shop visiting Bob-A-Lou. We were just shootin’ the shit when a fight broke out down the line. Like everyone else, we dropped what we were doing and headed for the action. It ended as we got there. The two combatants were already bein’ separated. That's when we noticed the blood. It was streaming out of the one guy's neck like he'd opened a faucet. He'd been slashed badly and the fella who'd sliced him stood there, bug-eyed and sweatin’, breathin’ very hard with the blade danglin’ at his side: mad at the world, mad at the machines, mad at the walls, mad in the head. He looked around at us, then went bolting away through the snaking lines of the Trim Shop area. As long as I live, I'll never forget the vision of him sprinting in the distance like a panicked gazelle, insane and desperate, disappearing like a phantom into the industrial underbrush.
Bob-A-Lou told me later that the two of them were back to work, side by side, gettin’ along just fine. The victim had gotten his neck stitched up and the other guy had received two weeks off plus probation. It seemed more than odd. Was there any other workplace in the world where you could have a go at killing someone and be back at your job within fourteen days as if you had simply made a minor error in judgment? I doubted it. Imagine if this scenario had taken place at IBM or Sears. The cops would have been everywhere, the TV stations would have descended and the knife wielder would've been lookin’ at a minimum of five to ten in the state pokey for attempted murder. But this was GM. The Sign of Excellence.