Rivethead - Ben Hamper [53]
There were other differences. As opposed to Cab Shop, the Rivet Line was a place of relative solitude. Conversation was rare and assembly line hijinks were extinct. This met with my favor since most of the guys surrounding me were seasoned rednecks. They wore the telltale garb: bib overalls, flannel shirts, hunting caps and jackets displaying the logo of our local union. They carried lunch buckets with their precious Chiquita banana stickers plastered all over ‘em. The banana stickers were a dead giveaway. The true redneck treated these decals as if they were Congressional Medals of Honor. If one were to begin peeling off, the owner would scramble about looking for some industrial adhesive to secure the sticker back into place. I hadn't the slightest clue as to what those banana stickers represented. Perfect attendance? Intelligence quotient? Animals slaughtered? They were like the helmets of college football players adorned with team decals awarded for outstanding plays. It seemed silly and useless, but I wasn't gonna chuckle. I was fond of the notion that my teeth stay rooted to my gums.
The only guy I ever spoke with was my line neighbor, Hank. He was an old coot whose voice sounded like gravel being churned against broken glass. He smoked two packs of Chesterfields each shift. It made me uncomfortable to hear him speak. Everything was punctuated with a hack or coughin’ spasm or a lung cookie flung toward the aisle. He'd apologize and light up another.
Hank was a strange one. He kept vacillating between two very dissimilar personalities. One week he'd be the perverted old man. He'd start pesterin’ me about the size of my girlfriend's breasts, croakin’ on and on about the young female anatomy, droolin’ about his own niece, mesmerized in his lecher's roll call of “sweetmeat” and “baby cakes.” If Hank would have left it at that, he'd have hardly qualified as bein’ remotely oddball. Tits and tight cheeks and the relentless pursuit of such were perennial assembly line themes.
What separated Hank was that the very next week he'd transform into this Bible-clutchin’ Jesus comrade. He'd spend all of his idle time extolling the virtues of celibacy and the cleansed soul. He'd approach my work area and ask me in that horrible rasp of his whether I “knew Christ.” I would reply that Christ and I had been cellmates together for several years in Catholic school systems. This seemed to please Hank. He would look around at our co-workers and tell me that the entire bunch of them were headed to hell. On the other hand, I was to be spared. I feigned delight as Hank returned to his bench for another Chesterfield.
Working beside a full-blown schizoid seemed preferable to jawin’ it over with the rednecks. At least Hank wasn't given to the curious worship of banana stickers. I figured Hank's biweekly shuffle between perversity and righteousness was just his wacky formula for covering both sides of the tracks. For all I knew, he may have had a crawlspace lined with “sweetmeat” and a shrine to Jesus in his living room. It hardly mattered. I liked Hank, but I will admit that the day they transferred him back to his old booth-cleaner's job I was just as elated about the switch as he was.
After about four months down on the Rivet Line, I had truly perfected the mental and physical strain of the pinup job. The blisters of the hand and the mind had hardened over, leaving me the absolute master of the puppet show. I developed shortcuts at every turn. I became so proficient at twirlin’ my rivet gun to and fro that the damn thing felt as comfortable as a third arm. I mashed my duties into pitiful redundancy.
The truth was loose: I was the son of a son of a bitch, an ancestral prodigy born to clobber my way through loathsome dungheaps of idiot labor. My genes were cocked and loaded. I was a meteor, a gunslinger, a switchblade boomerang hurled from the pecker driblets of my forefathers’ untainted jalopy seed. I was Al Kaline peggin’ home a beebee from the right field corner. I