Ralph covert drivin in my car

History Essay And History Paragrphs

There are two parts of this work. For the first part you must familiar with those things, so that you can deal with those. For the second part, you need read the book, and damiliar with the book so that you can write the essay.

The attachments are the resources for this work. The Automobile and American Lif - John Heitmann is for part 1.

Rivethead_ Tales from the Assem - Ben Hamper is for part 2, the essay for part 2 should be around 1000 words.

Portions of this book originally appeared in a different form in The Michigan Voice, The Detroit Free Press

and Mother Jones.

Copyright © 1986, 1987, 1988, 1991 by Ben Hamper All rights reserved.

Warner Books

Hachette Book Group 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

First eBook Edition: July 1992

ISBN: 978-0-446-55403-9

The “Warner Books” name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Book design by H Roberts Cover design by Karen Katz

Cover photograph by James Haefner

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http://www.hachettebookgroup.com
Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FOREWORD

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

EPILOGUE

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PRAISE FOR BEN HAMPER AND RIVETHEAD

“Brutally honest…high-octane irreverent prose…Hamper bares his teeth and howls with glee.”

—Philadelphia Inquirer

“Flint's second Dante…Mr. Hamper's prose flourishes.” —New York Times Book Review

“The auto worker's authentic voice, excesses and all…does what Roger & Me was unable to do—get into the plant and show, in perceptive often side-splitting,

sometimes appalling fashion, what it was like to build trucks for GM.” —Chicago Sun-Times

“Very funny—and smart.” —Newsweek

“An authoritative voice, rarely heard, but with a compelling urgent message about industrial America.”

—Dallas Morning News

“Iconoclastic…irreverent eloquence.…Hamper wields distinctive, entertaining prose like a latter-day Lord Byron with a rivet gun in one hand and a six-pack in the

other.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Shocking, hilarious, unbelievable, hilarious, dismaying, hilarious, frightening and hilarious. You don't know whether to laugh or cry.”

—Milwaukee Journal

“Compelling.…A powerful book that often reads like the biting poetry of Charles Bukowski…Rivethead is far more than one man's musings on life in an auto plant. It

is about class, the working class, and the lives led by the American men and women who manufacture the things we buy.”

—Business Week

“This ‘shoprat’ writes with the pedal to the metal…a keen, floor-level eye for the absurdities of an American industrial giant.”

—Miami Herald

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“Tough and knowing…a powerful writer; his eye misses nothing.” —Christian Science Monitor

“In-your-face invective.…Hamper's writing is strong, lively, and as corrosively funny as a whoopee cushion filled with acid.”

—Fortune

“An auto executive's worst dream—an automotive worker turned writer who puts down what really happens on the assembly line.…A funny yet striking look at

American blue collar life.” —Newark Star Ledger

“Great stuff—wild but driven home solid.” —Roy Blount, Jr.

“An eye-opening, bitterly humorous account of one man's life on the factory floor. …Highly entertaining.…Savagely funny.”

—Grand Rapids Press

“Crude, sophomoric and rough. It's also educational, hilarious and probably 97 percent true.”

—Providence Sunday Journal

“Hamper writes with unrelenting energy.…A voice as powerful as the riveting gun he wielded.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A hell of a book.…Just may be the best insider's view ever written about factory work in America.” —Flint Journal

“Ben Hamper is a modern worker writer, proletarian journalist and one of the best writers I know about.”

—R. J. Smith, Village Voice

“An American original.…A new writing talent has come from the ranks of blue collar.”

—Book Page

“A blue collar Tom Wolfe.…Hamper's book is the best description of who

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American autoworkers were, and what they thought, in the 1980s. People who never thought about where their cars come from will find out—and enjoy doing it.”

—Detroit Free Press

“Right out there on the cutting edge…Hamper is a marvelous writer.” —Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall

“Hamper recounts his experiences with true comic flair. His humor covers the whole gamut of comedy, from sarcasm to farce to the surreal.”

—Philadelphia News

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SHOP RAT THROTTLES THE SENSES: The Rivethead on Rivethead

“Let's talk Rivethead, arguably the greatest book released in our lifetime. I found the book to be an enormously amusing read. I laughed. I cried. I learned. I got naked and performed cartwheels for my repulsed neighbors. Dang, I even got a whack out of Michael Moore's smarmy foreword. What a ham! “My advice is as follows. If you enjoy a book with a savage heart and a powerful sense of prose that throttles instead of coddles, you should immediately spring for about a dozen of the hardcovers. “Rivethead is like nothing else that's gone before. It will surely rankle some and delight others. Corners will spar and controversy will fester in its wake. “No matter. What is important is that this snaking journey through the madness and monotony of assembly labor will provide a keen insight for all who have ever expressed even a marginal curiosity in undistorted blue-collar realism. “I'll even go on record as saying this is the best book I have read this year. I wouldn't lie to you. Furthermore, I COULDN'T lie to you.

“It's the only book I've read this year.” —from Ben Hamper's review in the Flint Journal

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For Barbara, Bernadette and Jan

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to acknowledge the support and fellowship of various friends and colleagues who warrant mention for their kind assistance. Among them: Sam Goodhue, Janice Buchanan, Judy King, Jim McDonald, Robert Beach, Amy Lindman, David and Phyllis Stites, Kathy Warbelow, Charles Fancher, Alex Kotlowitz, Robert Dubreuil, Dennis Duso, Terry Ostrander, Rau Kilaru, Lenice Gregory, Dennis Fuller, Mark's Lounge, Devin Donnelly, Paul Lethbridge, Marisa Adamo, Pat Elhaje, Alex Chilton, Jack and Bixby, Glen Lash, Cathy Burlingame and Sonya Hamper. Particular thanks to David Black for his persistent optimism, to Charlie Conrad for his understanding and guidance, and to Michael Moore, who provided so much belief, a place to hide and a space to grow.

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Although the tales you are about to read are, to the best of my recollection, true, the names of several individuals have been changed to preserve the anonymity of the innocent and to protect the guilty.

—B.H.

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FOREWORD

by Michael Moore

MY RELATIONSHIP WITH BEN HAMPER HAS RESULTED IN MY BEing fired from my job, sued for libel, losing a potential friendship with my hero Bruce Springsteen, and now forced into writing this damn foreword so I can keep my favorite ball cap. Which is actually Hamper's favorite ball cap, but now that half the world has seen it on my head in Roger & Me, and, possession being so many tenths of the law, we decided to settle this with my keeping the hat if I wrote this foreword.

Let me back up for a second… I first heard of Ben Hamper shortly after John Lennon was murdered. A

columnist in the Flint Journal, the daily rag in our hometown of Flint, Michigan, wrote that the country was actually better off with Lennon dead, considering all of the rebellion he caused. If it wasn't for Lennon and the Beatles, she exhorted, our generation would have turned out more respectable people who held such jobs as engineers or lawyers. So this guy named Hamper sent a letter to the Flint Journal saying, “I make my living turning bolts in the factory. Being a devoted Lennon fan, I'm suddenly discouraged to realize that, had I avoided this scoundrel's music, I could have been a real success in some lofty vocation.”

I thought about trying to find this “Ben Hamper” to see if he would like to write for my alternative biweekly newspaper, the Flint Voice. But that idea got shoved aside, and it was another six months before an unsolicited record review from Ben arrived in the mail with a note attached saying I could run this if I wanted to. This one-paragraph review was so wonderfully sick that I immediately called him up to discuss further writing assignments.

After a few more reviews for the Flint Voice, it was clear from his writing that there was more inside him that needed to come out. I asked him to consider writing a column about life in the shop—or any other subject of his choosing. So in addition to reports from the General Motors assembly line, he covered the local Elvis impersonators, faith healers and greasy spoons. It was right about then I should have pulled the reins in on this guy, but he was upsetting so many people, I just couldn't stop him.

Then one week, Hamper wrote about a bar he frequented where there were so many fistfights, he suggested a smart dentist should open an office next door to the joint. “What the place lacked in ambience,” he wrote, “it made up for in ambulance.” Well, the bar soon closed and the owner sued me, claiming that Hamper's remarks had ruined his business. Fortunately, the judge had been my Boy

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Scout advisor and firmly believed, with God as his witness, that I could do no wrong, and dismissed the suit.

Hamper's “Impressions of a Rivethead” column became the most widely read page in the Flint Voice and, when the paper became the Michigan Voice, his popularity soared. The Wall Street Journal ran a front page story on him, Harper's magazine reprinted one of his pieces and some shoe company wanted him to endorse their industrial boots (Ben knows boots). Meanwhile, he would take off work in the middle of his night shift at GM, come over to the Voice office, and try to get the staff to stop working and join him in his various vices. I remember one particular night watching him engage the staff in a game of lawn darts inside the building, using a poster of GM chairman Roger Smith as the target. I guess that was our version of the new journalism.

Finally, after nearly ten years of publishing the Voice, I was asked by a liberal millionaire to move to San Francisco and become the editor of Mother Jones magazine. The owner liked the “working class reality” of the Michigan Voice and wanted to put some of that into Mother Jones. It had once been the country's premier muckraking magazine, but now it was a soft, touchy-feely periodical that had lost over 80,000 subscribers. So, when I arrived in California on my mission to save the magazine, one of the first writers I commissioned was Ben Hamper. He wrote a hilarious piece I titled “I, Rivethead,” and I made it the cover story of my first issue. I then told him that he could continue his “Rivethead” column in each issue of the magazine. I even sent him on a promotional tour.

Well, never trust a millionaire when he tells you he wants that “working class reality” in his magazine. As my third issue was being readied for publication, the owner came into my office and, waving a copy of Hamper's latest column, asked me if I really intended on printing this smut. Yes, I said. Bye-bye, he replied. The next day I was in the unemployment line.

I went back home to Flint, where Ben tried to cheer me up by letting me watch his collection of Charles Manson interviews. On his shelf, I spotted a ball cap that, I felt, summed up my life at that moment. On the front of the cap was a giant lake trout with the words “I'm Out for Trout.” I asked Ben if I could borrow it and he said sure, but he wanted it back soon.

The next day, Roger Smith announced he was laying off another 10,000 workers in Flint. Buoyed by this development, I decided to make a film in which I would try to get Smith to come to Flint so he could see what happens to the people he throws out on the street. During the first day of shooting, I happened to wear Hamper's “Out for Trout” hat while on camera. To maintain coinsistency in the filming during the following days, I had to keep wearing that damned hat. That ball cap soon became the symbol for the film, and Hamper was not to have it on his balding head again.

As Roger & Me neared completion, I wanted to get permission from Bruce

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Springsteen to use his song “My Hometown” in the movie. I went to New York to meet with Springsteen's friend and biographer Dave Marsh to solicit his help. Instead, Marsh took me to task for once running a column by Hamper which poked fun at the Boss for being a multimillionaire while singing songs about working in a factory. Although I pleaded with Marsh that I despised everything that Hamper ever stood for, he stated “You were irresponsible for running such a thing. Ben Hamper is my ideological enemy.” He showed me the door, thus ending any chance of hanging with the guys at the Stone Pony. (Warner Bros., the distributor of Roger & Me, and the largest media conglomerate in the world—but apparently no one's “ideological enemy”—later got permission from Springsteen for the song.)

Through his appearance in Roger & Me, Ben became known throughout the world as “that guy in the mental clinic playing basketball and singing the Beach Boys song.” More than one person, he tells me, has stopped him on the street to comment on his pick and roll, his vocal range and the “Hinckley-like glint in his eye.” With one memorable movie part under his belt, he still had not been widely recognized for the literary talent he and the nuns always knew he had, so he holed up in his backyard shed and began to write this book to set the record straight.

What has resulted on these pages, I believe, is a masterpiece of writing which paints a darkly humorous account of working class life in America. It establishes Ben as an important voice of the nineties, one which I'm sure we will hear from again and again. At the very least, it should confirm his place in publishing history as the first author to write a major book while under medical supervision—and the influence of eleven different miracle drugs. (I can hear the Regis intro now: “Please welcome author/outpatient…Ben Hamper!”) And no matter what happens, Hamper still holds the free-throw record both at the mental clinic and at my house.

Of course, to read what he has to say on these pages, you may wonder who the real crazy ones are. This insane system known as the assembly line is designed to deny individuality and eliminate self-worth. Do you ever wonder who built the car you drive? Do you think about the personal toll it extracts from those individuals who spend the best years of their lives in a hot, dirty, boring, dehumanizing factory? Out there in the rust belt…the heartbeat of America…well, they're paid so well, you know, for their “unskilled” labor. Hell, they should feel lucky they even have a job! In this book, Ben Hamper tells what a lucky guy he is.

Ben and I both grew up in Flint, Michigan, the sons of factory workers. We were never supposed to get out, and you were never supposed to hear our voices. It all comes down to a matter of class, of knowing our place, and a place like Flint, Michigan, doesn't really exist in the minds of the media or decision makers. Even the country's liberals are at a loss when it comes to thinking about the Ben Hampers. They speak often, as they should, of the ills of our society, but rarely do

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they mention class, that growing distinction between rich and poor, between those who sweat for their money and those who inherit it or legally steal it. Do they ever give one iota of thought to what the person who rivets their rocker panels is going through. Rocker panels, you say? Huh? Exactly.

Ben and I were both determined when we left high school not to go on the assembly line. So I started my own paper and Ben made up poems while painting houses. Unfortunately, he decided one day that no one was going to see any glimmer of creativity in him, so he gave up and went into the shop. I too had similar feelings yet, after getting hired at Buick, I just didn't have the guts to go through with it and called in sick my first day of work. I never did walk through those gates. I am glad that Ben and I finally ran into each other and, in our own ways, held on to that belief that we were not invisible people with inaudible voices simply because our fathers ate out of a lunch bucket and shopped at K mart.

Both of us finally got our chance. But I still have the ball cap.

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PROLOGUE

DEAD ROCK STARS ARE SINGIN’ FOR ME AND THE BOYS ON THE Rivet Line tonight. Hendrix. Morrison. Zeppelin. The Dead Rock Star catalogue churnin’ outta Hogjaw's homemade boom box. There's Joplin and Brian Jones and plenty of Lynyrd Skynyrd. Dead Rock Stars full of malice and sweet confusion. Tonight and every night they bawl. The Dead Rock Stars yowling at us as we kick out the quota.

We're all here. Department 07, Blazer/Suburban Line—factory outpost FF-15 stenciled in black spray paint on the big iron girder behind Dougie's workbench. We're building expensive trucks for the General Motors Corp. We've come back once again to tussle with our parts and to hear the Dead Rock Stars harmonize above the industrial din.

The music of the Dead Rock Stars bursts from a ledge on Dougie's workbench —our hideaway for Hogjaw's stereo. Just before the start of every shift, Dougie goes through the complicated ritual of threading the cords and speaker wires from the stereo down a hollow leg in his workbench and into the plug at the base of the water fountain behind his job. The camouflage must be perfect. It is against company policy to use a General Motors electrical outlet as a source to summon up Dead Rock Stars. Only battery-powered radios are allowed.

Originally Hogjaw complied with this rule. It wasn't easy. Due to the enormous power demand of his radio creation, the Jaw was forced to lug a car battery into work with him every shift. You would see him strainin’ his way through the parking lot every afternoon, a lunch bucket curled under one arm and his trusty Delco Weatherbeater hoisted on top of his other shoulder. Trailing behind him would be a couple of riveters with their arms locked around the speaker boxes—pallbearers bringin’ around the tombs of the Dead Rock Stars.

This went on for a month or so before the security guards decided to halt the parade. Car batteries were declared illegal. Apparently the guards had concluded that it was a mighty dangerous precedent to allow workers to enter the plant premises with the batteries of their automobiles stashed on their shoulders. After all, whose heads would be in the vise if one of these sonic blasters pulled an overload up on the assembly line and spewed a load of battery acid into the eyes and ears of the screw brigade? Dead Rock Stars? Dead Shoprats? Not on my goddamn beat.

As for the popularity of Dead Rock Stars on the Rivet Line, I've settled upon this private theory. The music of the Dead Rock Stars is redundant and completely predictable. We've heard their songs a million times over. In this way, the music of the Dead Rock Stars infinitely mirrors the drudgery of our assembly jobs. Since assembly labor is only a basic extension of high school humdrum, it only stands to

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reason that the same wearied hepsters who used to dodge economics class for a smoke in the boys’ room would later in life become fossilized to the hibernatin’ soundtracks of their own implacable youth. Let the eggheads in economics have David Byrne and Laurie Anderson. The rivetheads be needin’ their “Purple Haze” and “Free Bird” just like tomorrow needs today.

It's mob rule, and the mob demands Dead Rock Stars in their choir loft. Of course this arrangement provides for a fair amount of bitching from linemates in our area who hold no sacred allegiance to the songs of the rockin’ deceased.

For example, there's Dick, the left-side rear spring man. He works directly across from Dougie, travelin’ a nightly path that requires him to take the maximum dose of Dead Rock Star thud. It's nothing unusual to spot Dick takin’ a deep drag from one of his ever-present Winstons while gazin’ head-on into the boom box with this buggered glint in his eye and this twisted grimace on his face that almost pleads aloud for some kind of transistor malfunction, tweeter meltdown or any other variety of holy intervention.

Eddie and Jehan prefer rap music. On occasion, Jehan brings in his own battery- powered blaster and engages in this furious battle-of-the-blare with Hogjaw's almighty boom box. The Kings of Rap vs. The Dead Rock Stars vs. The Steady Clang of Industry. It makes for quite the raucous stew—sorta like pluggin’ your head into the butt end of a Concorde during acceleration mode.

Management's stance on all of this usually boils down to a simple matter of see no evil, hear no evil. If the guy in the tie can't actually see the visible evidence of how you're wastin’ millions of corporate dollars, he's most often inclined to let the music flow. It keeps him off the hook. He doesn't have to play killjoy. He can dummy up and pretend that all those guitar solos he hears screechin’ through the middle of the night are only happy by-products of a contented work force. His boss will love him, his wife will love him, his men will like him and the Company will somehow stagger on. Industry on the march. Bravo!

But even in victory, there's often a price to pay. Let us not forget that General Motors has already informed the work force that there won't be any profit sharing to spread around this year. Too much waste. Too many buyouts. Too few pennies. And I imagine those damn utility bills are way out of sight too.

Oh well, what can I say? I'm just sitting here waiting for the next chassis to arrive. I'm tapping my toes to the beat of the Dead Rock Stars. Ten feet to my right, I can hear the trickle of untold billions bein’ sucked outta the corporate coffers through the base of the water fountain behind Dougie's workbench.

I'm thinking that rock stars, even dead ones, don't come cheap.

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1

I WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD THE FIRST TIME I EVER SET FOOT inside an automobile factory. The occasion was Family Night at the old Fisher Body plant in Flint where my father worked the second shift.

General Motors provided this yearly intrusion as an opportunity for the kin of the work force to funnel in and view their fathers, husbands, uncles and granddads as they toiled away on the assembly line. If nothing else, this annual peepshow lent a whole world of credence to our father's daily grumble. The assembly line did indeed stink. The noise was very close to intolerable. The heat was one complete bastard. Little wonder the old man's socks always smelled like liverwurst bleached for a week in the desert sun.

For my mother, it was at least one night out of the year when she could verify the old man's whereabouts. One night a year when she could be reasonably assured that my father wasn't lurchin’ over a pool table at the Patio Lounge or picklin’ his gizzard at any one of a thousand beer joints out of Dort Highway. My father loved his drink. He wasn't nearly as fond of labor.

On this night, the old man was present. I remember my mother being relieved. If he hadn't been there, it would have been difficult for her to explain to my little brother and me why we had made this exhaustive trek through Satan's playpen just to ogle a bunch of oily strangers and their grinnin’ lineage.

After a hundred wrong turns and dead ends, we found my old man down on the trim line. His job was to install windshields using this goofy apparatus with large suction cups that resembled an octopus being crucified. A car would nuzzle up to the old man's work area and he would be waiting for it, a cigarette dangling from his lip, his arms wrapped around the windshield contraption as if it might suddenly rebel and bolt off for the ocean. Car, windshield. Car, windshield. Car, windshield. No wonder my father preferred playin’ hopscotch with barmaids. This kind of repetition didn't look like any fun at all.

And here, all of this time, I had assumed that Dad just built the vehicles all by his lonesome. I always imagined that building adult cars was identical to building cars in model kits. You were given a large box with illustrated directions, a clutter of fenders, wheels and trunk lids, and some hip-high vat of airplane glue. When one was finished, you simply motioned to some boss-type in the aisle: “Hey, bring me another kit and make it a goddamn Corvette this time!”

We stood there for forty minutes or so, a miniature lifetime, and the pattern never changed. Car, windshield. Car, windshield. Drudgery piled atop drudgery. Cigarette to cigarette. Decades rolling through the rafters, bones turning to dust,

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stubborn clocks gagging down flesh, another windshield, another cigarette, wars blinking on and off, thunderstorms muttering the alphabet, crows on power lines asleep or dead, that mechanical octopus squirming against nothing, nothing, NOTHINGNESS. I wanted to shout at my father “Do something else!” Do something else or come home with us or flee to the nearest watering hole. DO SOMETHING ELSE! Car, windshield. Car, windshield. Christ, no.

Thank God that, even at age seven, I knew what I was going to be when I grew up. There wouldn't be any car/windshield cha-cha awaiting me. I was going to be an ambulance driver, the most glamorous calling in the world. I would spend my days zooming from one mangled calamity to the next. I would have full license to poke my face into the great American bucket seat bloodfest. The metallic crunch, the spiderweb of cracked glass (no doubt installed by my zombied father), the stupid eyeballs of the ripped and ravaged, the blood and guts of the accordion carnage. Ah, yes. To engage the sweet wail of the sirens. To scoop teeth from out of the dashboard. That would be the life. Everything my mother insisted we avoid when we passed a wreck. “Boys, don't look out the window,” she would tremble. I always looked. I had to look.

My mind was set. Someday I'd be an ambulance driver. I would eat at McDonald's every night. I would buy a house right across the street from Tiger Stadium. My old man was nuts. Car, windshield, car, windshield: what kind of idiot occupation was that?

As far as I remember, we never returned for another Family Night. It was just as well, for in all likelihood, we'd never have spotted my father. He had this habitual lean for the nearest exit. As soon as my grandmother lined him up for another job, he'd disappear into an eternal crawl for the coldest mug of beer in town. He took turns being a car salesman, a milkman, a construction worker, a railroad hand, a house painter, a mechanic and a landscaper. Each time the suds would devour his sense of duty, he'd get canned or simply quit, and back he'd come to his lumpy retreat on the living room sofa. My grandmother would be less than pleased.

Frequently mixed in with these dashed occupations were the inevitable sojourns back to the assembly line. It was not the least bit uncommon for a man to be fired at one factory on a Friday and be given the red carpet treatment at another automotive facility across town on Monday. If this is Tuesday, this must be Buick. If this is Thursday, how ‘bout AC Spark Plug. During the sixties there were ten or so factories in Flint workin’ three shifts per day and in this kind of boomtown climate even the beggars could afford to be choosers. “Sign here, Mr. Beerbreath. So glad to have you collapse on our doorstep.”

I can't recall how many times my old man spun through the revolving doors of General Motors. However, around the house, we could always sense when Dad was cleaving through the factory rut. He would enter the house with this bulldog grimace. He'd gobble his meal, arise, put on one of his Arnie Palmer golf sweaters

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and whisk off for a troll through publand. Often, he wouldn't return for days. Then, suddenly one morning, there he'd be—reekin’ of Pabst and pepperoni, passed out in a fetal position on the sofa, wearin’ the same cool duds he left home in.

Not surprisingly, this led to a fair amount of friction between my mother and father. I could hear them early in the morning, their ferocious bitching driftin’ through the heater vent up and into the bedroom I shared with three of my brothers.

It didn't take a marriage counselor or referee to sift to the bottom of these parental showdowns. Propped up in my bunk, I could easily discern the irrationality of my old man's barbs and the meek desperation of my mother's rebuttals. My father insisted that my mother was yanking the family against him. “You're turnin’ the whole bunch of them into goddamn mama's boys!” the old man would rant. “Every one of them acts like I'm some kind of villain.”

Meanwhile, my mother would score with a hefty uppercut of fact. “Don't blame me, Bernard. Maybe if you hung around the house more than two nights a month the kids might get to know you.” My old man abhorred the truth. It was like some horrible, foreign diction that ripped at his core. The car payment was truth. The telephone bill was truth. The six sleeping children, plus the one sitting bolt upright in his bed, were truth. Worst of all, the cars and windshield were truth.

Cars, windshields. Cars, fenders. Cars, whatever. The ongoing shuffle of the shoprat. It wasn't as if this profession was a plague that appeared out of nowhere to ensnare my old man. Quite the opposite was true. His daddy was a shoprat. His daddy's daddy was a shoprat. Perhaps his daddy's daddy's daddy would have been a shoprat if only Hank Ford would have dreamed this shit up a little sooner.

My old man's mother had been a shoprat. The same with Uncle Jack and Uncle Gene and Uncle Clarence. Ditto dear old Aunt Laura. My mother's dad had been a shoprat. (If you're wondering what happened to my mother's mother and her sense of duty—well, Christ, somebody had to stay home and pack this clan a lunch.)

Right from the outset, when the call went out for shoprats, my ancestors responded in almost Pavlovian compliance. The family tree practically listed right over on its side with eager men and women grasping for that great automotive dream.

My great-grandfather got the wheel rollin’. In 1910, he began his twenty-year tenure down on Industrial Avenue piecing together mobilized buggies. This was a period right after the invention of the gas-powered engine and long before the introduction of freeway sniping. My great-grandfather would have hung in there longer, but he bumped heads in the thirties with something called the Depression.

My grandfather hired on in 1930. He rode out the turbulence of the Depression and worked as a skilled tradesman for thirty-two years at Buick. He had no plans to retire, but the cancer took him down at age fifty-two. He died one week to the day after he cashed his first pension check.

My other grandfather hitched his way from Springfield, Illinois, to the Vehicle

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City in 1925. He put in forty years, from Babe Ruth to the Beatles, as an inspector at the Chevrolet Engine plant. He always claimed that the only reason he retired was his disdain for the new breed of autoworkers in the sixties. He referred to them as “candy-asses.” I assumed he was remarking about some inedible new brand of chocolate bar.

During the war, my grandmother helped build machine guns at the AC Spark Plug factory. She later switched over to working on aircraft out on Dort Highway. To this day, my grandmother still helps me change the oil in my Camaro.

My Aunt Laura and her husband Jack put in a combined sixty-five years at the AC plant and the Buick Foundry. Uncle Jack was well known for his lust for overtime, often volunteering to work double shifts and sixteen-hour days. This may provide a valuable clue as to why they never had any children.

For sheer longevity, my Uncle Clarence outdistanced everyone in the family tree. From 1919 till 1964, an amazing span of forty-five years, he answered the whistle over at the Buick Engine plant.

Forty-five years! That's longer than the life expectancy of over two-thirds of the world's population. Forty-five years! Shit, just imagine—from a cradle down in Dixie to his hunched-over demise on the potty—Elvis Presley never even lived that long. Forty-five years! After all of that, what do they give you for a retirement gift? A grandfather clock? An iron lung? A bronzed calendar the size of a Yugo?

With a heritage like that you'd think my old man would have had enough grit and grind floatin’ through his gene pool to practically assure his pod development as a full-bloomin’ archetype of the species. A purebred shoprat, begotten from sperms that jingle, jangle, jingle to the jungle strains of Greaseball Mecca. The fair-haired boy in the rhinestone coveralls. Spawn of labor. Self-winding fetus with the umbilical lasso looped around the blue-collared neckbone of Mr. Goodwrench.

Apparently, the old man wasn't much for heritage. He tumbled out of the family tree, urinated on it and never looked back. For him, General Motors was nothing more than a recurring nuisance, an occasional pit stop where he could tidy up his bankroll before troopin’ out on another aimless binge.

It was unfortunate that my father couldn't combine his love for beer and his dependence on pocket money into one workable formula. After all, he wasn't the only palooka in the family who tipped toward the tapper. The majority of my ancestors were heavy drinkers. Excluding my grandmother, all of them imbibed frequently as hard-laborin’ shoprats are wont to do.

My mother's dad was especially skilled at juggling work and play. Monday morning through Friday afternoon he was the consummate provider. Straight home from work, dinner, the evening news and immediately into bed at 7:00 P.M. He arose each weekday at 3:30 A.M., fixed himself some black coffee, turned on the kitchen radio, smoked a handful of Lucky Strikes and waited to leave for work at a quarter to five. This regimen never varied one iota in the forty years he worked for

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GM. Come the quittin’ whistle on Friday afternoon, a colossal metamorphosis took

place. So long, shoprat. Hello, hooligan. As my mother tells it, they never caught more than a staggerin’ glimpse of my grandfather on any given weekend. He occasionally dropped in for a quick supper whereupon he would substitute the dinner hour for an excuse to denounce my grandma's cooking, castigate the children and generously mutter “goddamn-it-alls” for the benefit of the rest of the defective universe.

My grandfather surely could be an ornery bastard, but it should be thusly noted that he was always there to answer the bell. He had a wife and three kids to house and feed. He turned the trick daily. He may have had a passionate lust for booze, but it never interfered with his job at General Motors. When he retired, he was a very wealthy man. Devotion, responsibility and duty to the Corporation. The bottle was never far away, but it always rode shotgun.

Seeing as how my old man constructed this formula completely ass-backwards, the entire burden of support fell solely into my mother's lap. While the old man was off baby-sitting barstools, it was left up to my mom to raise and provide for eight kids.

Throughout my youth, my mother worked two jobs a day. Nine to five, she was a medical secretary at a doctor's office. She walked the two miles to work each day because we were too broke to afford a car. By night, she worked as a medical records transcriber, pounding the dictaphone machine for Hurley Hospital in the tiny, makeshift office in the corner of the living room.

It was unfortunate for my old man that my mother was such a strict and loyal Catholic. Consequently, my mother wasn't allowed to practice the pill and the baby faucet was allowed to leak on unabated. The final tally showed five boys and three girls of which I was the eldest. Eight was indeed enough. In fact, eight was plainly too goddamn many. Every time the stork paid a visit, he left a new bundle of joy for my mother and a fresh load in the chamber of the gun pointed at my old man's skull.

It seemed with each new addition to our family, my father slid further and further away from accountability. He liked children, he just didn't have the space for a clan of his own. It was like the cars and the windshield. The equation never balanced out. The undertow of all this repetition was a riddle he could never hope to untangle.

By the age of ten, I realized that my old man was not soon to be confused with Ward Cleaver. I was hip to all his ploys and well aware of his flair for bullshit. His boozin’ never particularly bothered me. I figured if my father wanted to go get plowed, it was his decision.

What bothered me was my old man's insistence on fabricating dreadful, transparent lies. We both knew what he was up to so why not just ‘fess up and admit the obvious.

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I surely would have respected him more if he'd only come up to me on those occasions of rabid thirst and said “Look, son. I feel like some kind of suffocatin’ beast. The world is knockin’ me around something awful and it's only fuckin’ proper that I find a bar at once. I want to get smashed. I want to play footsies with the locals. I want to sing like Dean Martin. I want to drink until they start clickin’ the lights off and on and then I wanna weave home and collapse into bed with the weight of the world slidin’ off the sheets. You may not understand any of this now, but someday you'll have a world of your own to contend with.”

My friends were always amused with my old man's approach to the duties of fatherhood. Most of their fathers were dedicated shoprats, shackled to some factory titty like hornets to honey. Their fathers wouldn't miss a day's work if their spinal cords were severed. Obedience to the Corporation. An honest day's pay for an honest day's toil. Car, bumper. Car, door latch. Car, dipstick.

For them, my father was the mold breaker—the curious renegade who dared to scrunch himself up in fetal bliss, smack dab in the middle of the workday, snoozin’ off the effects of another nocturnal creepy-crawl.

After school, we would tiptoe past him, snickering back and forth at the behemoth in full slumber. You had to be very cautious. To awaken the old man from his beer coma would earn you an immediate pass to have your head dislodged. Sometimes, just for laughs, I'd get as close as I possibly dared and jut my middle finger right in his face. The poor bastard was like some dormant circus geek and he never even knew it.

Of course, my friends preferred to catch my old man in his glorious prime. This usually occurred whenever I'd have a friend over for the night. My old man would weave in while we were watchin’ some late-night horror flick and immediately take over the entertainment. After a full night of drinkin’, there was nothing’ my old man enjoyed more than a captive audience for his sloshed bar chatter. Even if he was playin’ to a crowd comprised of two sleep-starved ten-year-olds.

There were the stories about how he broke said pool stick over said chiseler's head and how the babes he hung with had chests the size of pony kegs (“They'd be through with you boys before you ever got it unzipped,” he'd chuckle) and how he knew Tiger great Denny McLain on a first-name basis and how Denny better watch his shit cuz these mob pricks were no one to try and slip a change-up by and how he was rapin’ the local bookies with his expertise at pickin’ the over and under.

It went on and on. Typically, he would conclude these drunken seminars with horrible denunciations of the black race. My old man was a master of deflecting his own guilt onto anyone other than himself. The blacks were his favorite dumping ground. He would blame them for everything. He'd make all these demented assertions about how Hitler was stopped too early because once he ditched all the Jews, he was gonna wipe out the niggers. Fine fodder for festerin’ ten-year-old minds. We preferred hearin’ about large breasts and the woes of Denny McLain.

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Despite the racial garbage, my friends all agreed that my old man's beer blather beat the shit out of listenin’ to their fathers whine about what was on television and how the lawn needed trimmin’. Their fathers were as robotic in their home life as they were about their factory jobs. It was as if the shop had hollowed them out and replaced their intestines with circuit breakers. Car, tailpipe. Food, pork chop. Car, brake pad. Rent, Friday. Car, hubcap. Life, toothpaste.

Mike Gellately's father was a good example. Almost every evening after dinner I headed over to Mike's house. He would greet me at the side door and we'd trail through the kitchen on our way up to his bedroom.

Without fail, Mr. Gellately would be propped at the kitchen table—a six-pack of Blue Ribbon at his right elbow, an overloaded ashtray at his left. He would be staring straight ahead at the kitchen sink and his faithful radio would be stationed in front of him, forever tuned in to the Detroit Tigers or Red Wings. Sip, puff, belch. Occasionally, he would startle the homestead my muttering a random “shit” or “fuck.” That would be the extent of his nightly vocabulary.

Neither Mike nor I understood the first thing about our fathers. They were like the living dead. Their patterns differed—Mike's old man held a job most of the time, my old man was on some kind of less-paying treadmill—but their ruts were terribly predictable. We grew to hate our fathers.

By the time I approached teenhood, I no longer wanted to be an ambulance driver. I didn't know what the hell I wanted to be. Mike always suggested that we become disc jockeys. I never argued. A disc jockey would certainly lead a glamorous life. Anything had to be better than the cadaver shuffle the factories were peddlin’ our fathers.

Even the neighborhood we lived in was a by-product of General Motors. During the boom years of the twenties, houses had to be constructed in order to keep up with the influx of factory workers arriving from the South to find jobs. General Motors built their own little suburb on the north side of Flint. In keeping with their repetitive nature, all the houses were duplicates.

Our neighborhood was strictly blue-collar and predominantly Catholic. The men lumbered back and forth to the factories while their wives raised large families, packed lunch buckets and marched the kids off to the nuns.

My family was no exception. From the very beginning, I was raised a good Catholic boy. Catholic church, Catholic school, Catholic home, Catholic drone. I was baptized, confirmed, anointed and tattooed with ashes all in the hope that one day I might have a spot reserved for me on that glorious flotilla up to the heavens.

No matter how tight the budget was at home, my mother always managed to scrape up the necessary funds to provide for our Catholic education. It was never intended that I grow up to be anything other than a good Catholic man—a steady churchgoer with a steady factory income, a station wagon parked under the elms and a wife with an automatic door on her womb.

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St. Luke's Elementary provided a very capable boot camp environment for those who would later deposit themselves in the rigid bustle of factory life. The education-through-intimidation technique favored there was not unlike the jarhead gang mentality of the General Motors floorlords. Our fathers’ overseers were brutes with clipboards, sideburns and tangled rhetoric. Our overseers, the sisters of St. Luke's, were brutes with clipboards, sideburns and tangled rosaries.

A pattern was developing. During the seventh and eighth grades at St. Luke's, the nuns divided the students into groups according to intelligence and behavior. There were three groups: the obedient eggheads, the bland robots of mediocrity and, my group, the who-gives-a-shit-hey-have-you-heard-the-new-Cream-album-yet-yup- my-daddy's-a-stinkin’-shoprat-too clan.

Being a proud underachiever of the latter grouping, I was relieved of much of the pressure to succeed in life and was left with my drowsy peers to clog up the classroom while we awaited our almost certain fate as future factory nimwits. Not much was expected of us and we went out of our way to ensure that was how it would remain. Consequently, the nuns cut us a great deal of slack figuring that for every Einstein and Aristotle flipped out of the cookie cutter there had to be a couple mental dwarves available to assemble a life's procession of Buicks and Impalas for those on the road to high places.

Of course this method of reasoning didn't exactly jibe with our parents’ outlook on destiny. At report card time, our folks would raise all kinds of hell while cringing over our grades. I suppose it only makes sense that every mom and pop wants more for their tuition dollar than a series of lazy failures guaranteed to pave the lane right into the turd dump of the assembly line. You could achieve that predestination at any public school and save the family till a lootful.

My folks were no exception. My mother would gaze at my report card and the color would leave her face. It was like a slap to the head—a horrible betrayal on my part considering the long hours of work she had put in to assure her son a fine Catholic education.

“An E in Math, a D in History and Science, a D– IN RELIGION?” my mother would howl. “How could any child who attends mass SIX days a week possibly do so poorly in Religion?”

I would make a pathetic attempt to switch to the highlights. “Look, Mom, I did raise my Self-Conduct mark from a D to a C–. And I did receive passing grades in Music and Gym.”

“Music and Gym? MUSIC AND GYM! Just what is that supposed to tell me? That you have a secure future singing the national anthem at basketball games? Just wait until your father takes a look at this mess.”

I could wait. If there was one thing I detested, it was my old man preachin’ to me about my shortcomings as a model Catholic youth. It was such a bad joke. What the hell qualified him to criticize anything I did? I felt that he should reserve his

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critiques for matters that more closely coincided with his niche in life. Education? Shit. He should have stuck to advising me on the proper methods of wife cheating and check forging and navigating a car with triple vision. And what about the studied art of smoking an entire Winston without ever removing it from your mouth or the precious knack of impersonating a morgue stiff for forty-eight consecutive hours on the living room sofa. This was the kind of heavy data no nun could ever pass along.

I was my father's seed. Technically, I guess that was reason enough for him to meddle with my grade situation.

“You think you're hot shit, don't you, son?” my father would begin. I would shrug nervously. “You think you've got a pretty soft thing going for yourself. Am I right?” I would shake my head slowly.

“Well, the way I see it, you ain't nothin’ but a bad actor. You may be snowin’ your mother, but I can smell your game a mile away. You wanna play wiseass with me and I'll knock you down a few pegs. Anytime you feel like you can take the old man, I'll be right here. Anytime you wanna wear the pants in the family, you just let me know. I'll be more than willing to put my foot right up your ass. Understand, son?”

“Yes,” I would mumble enraged and full of regrets. If only I were eight inches taller and had a reckless set of balls. I could envision myself springing from the interrogation seat and sucker-punching my old man right in the chops. “Here, sweet father of mine, take this busted lip as a loving token of my esteemed adulation and let this punt to the rib cage serve as a loving reminder that your eldest son worships the ground you piss on.”

But back to reality or, at least, my father's version of such. “Now, son, you must realize that your mother and I have worked very hard to see that you receive some proper schooling. All this report card tells me is that you don't give a good goddamn one way or the other. You keep this shit up and you'll be just like half the other morons in this city who end up spinnin’ their wheels and suckin’ some heavy ass down at Chevrolet or over at Buick. You can clown it up now, but you'll be laughin’ out of the other side of your mouth once the blisters appear and some bastard starts leanin’ over your shoulder with another bumper to fasten down.”