Rivethead - Ben Hamper [19]
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