Rivethead - Ben Hamper [73]
It was during this period, somewhere in early ‘83, that the Flint Voice expanded statewide, resurfacing as the Michigan Voice. I still didn't know how Mike was ever able to pull it off. Here he was up to his eyeballs in debt and his remedy was to expand. Love him or hate him (there was no in between in Flint), you couldn't help but marvel at Moore's tenacious resolve to keep his publication suckin’ air.
Along with the expansion of the Voice came sweeping changes. The paper became more political than ever. The boot was given to several longtime staff members, many of whom were close friends of Moore's dating back to high school. New columnists were introduced, intellectual sorts and heavy hitters. Syndicated hotshots were marched in like hired guns. To my total surprise, “Revenge of the Rivethead” survived the facelift. My editor knew that the core of the readership were blue-collars, so I remained on board as a representative of the average lunk. Besides, by this point in time, I was generating more fan/hate mail than the rest of the staff put together. I bought my first typewriter and droned on.
The timing of the Voice expansion jibed perfectly with my new gig on the Rivet Line. My job was such a breeze that I had plenty of free time to write in between my duties. I developed a pattern where I could race through my job in thirty seconds and shoot back to my bench for a luxurious minute and a half of observation and composition. It was like working two jobs at once, neither of which demanded much effort. The best part was that the clock moved by quickly.
What a great scam to be able to sit there, night after night, as much a man of letters as just another weary errand boy. The Rivethead flourished, a peeping Tom buried in pitchblende. I began peering deeply into the malignant drudgery that entombed those who surrounded me. Their monotonous travail was like ballet for the dead. Something so remarkably unremarkable that I sometimes wondered if I was actually witnessing anything that even qualified as living.
For instance, I could spend an entire shift wondering to myself just what it was that was going through the mind of the poor soul across from me on the steering gear job. He was a young rehire, doomed beyond his own recognition by a job that all the rivet vets referred to as “the end of the line.” The setup was a thorough ball-buster, an eight-hour mule train of uphill grind.
The nights rolled on. I'd lean across from the guy and watch the sweat pour off his chin. And, somewhere in this factory town, I could see his wife curled up on a sofa bed awaiting the return of her reclaimed assembly man. It wasn't hard to visualize just how she might shudder when the door flew open each night and in trudged this chewed-up mutation of a football star who, once upon a time, looked awful drooly pastin’ petals on the prom float, but now, staring back at her from the other side of the meat grinder, resembled nothing more than a heap of defeat with limbs attached. Dreams died fast around here and, more time than not, there simply wasn't sufficient time to hunt down a decent headstone. One day lured, the next day skewered.
I became obsessed with the steering gear man. He seemed so stoic, so reconciled to the brutish misfortune that defined his routine. I wondered what he thought all night long. I wondered if he ever thought about the fact that only fifteen feet away sat a lazy owlhead perched up on three boxes of unopened rivets—yawning, chain-smoking, doodlin’ in his stupid notepad—while he was flirtin’ with hernial blowout and draggin’ it back and forth like Quasimodo Doe.
The steering gear man never asked about this nor anything else. He just kept bustin’ it. I really didn't understand it. The apportionment of duty in the plant was so inconsistent that you would have half of the work force