Rivethead - Ben Hamper [75]
“HE SHIT HIS PANTS?”
“Bull's-eye,” Gino yukked. “Just remember, you pried it outta me.”
I was devastated. For months, I had been praising the stoic gallantry of the steering gear man in the pages of the Michigan Voice. The way I saw it, he was one hundred times the hero that any headline-mulchin’ fraud on the cover of Time or People feigned to be. The world was only a bloated bedpan full of shams and leeches wallowing in petty victories that, when sheared down and hung in front of a dyin’ twilight, didn't come close to approaching the regal triumph of the steering gear man. Fuck the Donald Trumps and the Ross Perots. The closest thing I ever saw to an authentic American champ for the masses was a sweaty piece of ground chuck in a Black Sabbath T-shirt who strode upon Hades’ own loading dock, night after hopeless night, as invincible in his death web as he was invisible to the rest of the feeble globe.
Now he was gone and the myth had been destroyed. The steering gear man proved to be as fallible as the next joker. The boss had to suspend him for intoxication in the workplace. I could live with that. But turdin’ in his skivvies? I had to draw the line somewhere. Heroes couldn't go around crappin’ themselves. Even the astronauts found a proper way to dump it.
On his return, the steering gear man hopped over to the vacant spring job next to me. I continued to refer to him as the steering gear man in all my columns. He'd rode that bull a long time without ever complaining. That was a conquest that would never be tainted.
The steering gear man's name was Doug. He had very yellow teeth and a tattoo of a rodent on his arm. Above the tattoo, the word “shoprat” was inscribed. It looked like a homemade job, most likely accomplished with a hot coat hanger at the tail end of some ferocious bender. In the summer, when things really broiled, it shined on brightly, but maybe that was just due to infection.
The switch to an easier job seemed to bring Doug out of his shell. He would chat on and on with me as if he were tryin’ to make up for all those silent evenings he'd spent luggin’ around steering gears. Happy jabber flowed forth. This, I found, wasn't necessarily a good thing.
One afternoon as we were startin’ to roll my ex-hero came to me speaking about beards. I mentioned that I never wore a beard because they always made me look like some goofy leprechaun. In response, Doug complained that his beard didn't grow well on his left cheek area. He pointed it out and, sure enough, there was a definite barren patch.
“I know why it's not growing there,” he said. I tried to appear puzzled. In fact, I was. “It's cuz when I was a kid in school, I always leaned on my desk like this.” He then demonstrated by adopting the thinker's pose, propping his face up with his left fist. “I think sittin’ like that all day long, for all those years, pushed all the hair back into my face for good.”
I nodded and grabbed another muffler hanger. “Makes perfect sense to me,” I lied.
There were those in the immediate vicinity of my job, including Doug, who began to express curiosity as to what I was scribblin’ in my notebook every night. I wasn't about to come clean. I had no idea of how they might react if they were to find out I was dissecting their drab little lives for column fodder in a muckraking leftist monthly with a circulation of 60,000 readers. There was the distinct possibility that they wouldn't take kindly to my in-house voyeurism. The few who were aware of my column seemed to really enjoy it. That was fine, but I politely asked them to keep it to themselves. For the time being, anonymity seemed the safest route.
It all ran smoothly until the fateful day that I allowed my editor to talk me into writing a piece about deer hunting, the most sanctified of blue-collar brood rituals. I tried to tell my editor that I knew nothing of this redneck amusement. He persisted and I gave in as usual.
The resultant article was nothing more