Rivethead - Ben Hamper [38]
Our return to glory didn't escape the notice of our supervisors. They'd pause while passing our jobs and ogle us a while. They had been so convinced that the additional work would halt our schemin’ ways. They'd called our bluff and been beaten.
As exasperated as they probably felt, they knew there was nothing they could really do to stop us. We showed up for work each and every day. We ran nothing but 100 percent defect-free quality. We kept our workplace spotless, provided you overlooked Dale's ugly slick of chewing tobacco juice. GM was very big on bottom lines and the bottom line as it pertained to Dale and me was that we were exemplary shoprats.
The months sailed by. The bossmen left us to our own devices. The opportunity to cleave through the monotony of assembly line labor by combining our two jobs was something neither Dale nor I ever took for granted. We were dumbshit-lucky and we knew it. If the Plant Manager himself had shown up with a contract binding the two of us to stick to our Jungle ruts for the duration of our thirty years, we'd probably have scrawled our names, dates of birth and Social Security numbers on it in warm blood.
With two years down and twenty-eight to go, Dale and I were more than satisfied with our lot in the corporate web. We reasoned that we would grow old together on our job combo. We envisioned ourselves becoming potbellied old farts, docile and harmless, staying our course toward that gold watch and wonderful pension plan. Proud old bucks stompin’ on Father Time Clock.
We wanted nothing more than to follow in the footsteps of Cab Shop legends like Lightnin’ and Same-O. Here were two old-timers who'd been around so long that they probably could remember when there was no GM Truck & Bus plant on Van Slyke Road—only an Indian settlement or a trading post. When a worker had reached this amount of seniority, not much was expected of him performance-wise. They just shuffled through the motions and GM stuck a paycheck in their pocket every Thursday night.
Lightnin’ was a real study. No one had the faintest clue as to what his job assignment might be. The popular theory was that it had something to do with the men's room located in the stairwell leading up to the Cab Shop. That was the only place you ever caught a glimpse of Lightnin’. He'd be leanin’ up against a wall near the last urinal, sound asleep on his feet.
It didn't make any sense. There were a million hideaways a man could find to lie down and take a snooze—the cushion room, the tool crib, the locker room, the cafeterias, the picnic tables, the stock pallets, the back seat of a defective Blazer. Why Lightnin’ chose to sleep leanin’ against the men's room wall remained one of the great mysteries of Cab Shop. He wasn't an old queer or anything like that. Hell, he wasn't even conscious.
Bob-A-Lou was the resident speculator when it came to the topic of Lightnin’. It was his theory that Lightnin’ was a custodian assigned to clean this specific men's room way back when. Bob-A-Lou believed that through the ugly crawl of years, Lightnin’ had slowly dissolved all memory of his actual calling, perhaps his entire identity. However, he never forgot for a moment his assigned battle station. Bob-A-Lou theorized that Lightnin’ was like one of those confused old Japanese soldiers you occasionally heard about still holed-up on the Kiribati Islands thinkin’ the war was still wagin’.
Who really knew? When the horn blew to begin each shift, Lightnin’ took up his silent vigil as the fossilized overseer of the LL-16 stairwell men's room. When it got crowded in there on break, you sometimes had to give old Lightnin’ a little nudge in order to find some elbow room at the pisser. It was neither funny nor sad. It was something that went on and on and, after a while, he was another piece of the milieu.
Then there was my old pal Same-O. What a character. Same-O was a living landmark