Rivethead by Ben Hamper Read Free Book Online Page B

Between my nightly beer-bombing over at Glen's and our continual teetering on the brink of poverty, my young bride was getting fed up to her eyebrows with life in the comatose lane. We were just two confused kids playing house, flailing at each other with every blunt collision that sudden adulthood generated. High school sweethearts can make for strange bed partners once the reality of the rent and the groceries and the car payments descend on the dollhouse.
    As my father-in-law saw it, there was only one antidote to our marital woes: finding me gainful employment. He kept suggesting that I pursue a career at General Motors. We happened to live right in the shadows of the Chevrolet Manufacturing plant, the Chevy Engine plant and the enormous GM Truck & Bus facility. How convenient, he often pointed out. I paid my father-in-law nothing but lip service. I told him the shops weren't hiring. I insisted that there were other things on some invisible horizon awaiting my induction. I spouted and sputtered brave ignorant lies about how a young man should pause and blossom into clever vocations that would surely lie in wait once the haze receded and the clear adult mind began to function.
    I was full of shit. I would say anything to turn the subject around from the inevitable. The inevitable being this: I knew in the tenth grade that I would be a shoprat. It was more an understanding of certain truisms found in my hometown than any form of game plan I might have been hatching. In Flint, Michigan, you either balled up your fists and got career motivated the moment the piano quit bangin’ the commencement theme or, more likely, you'd still be left leanin’ when the ancestors arrived to pass along your birthright. Here, kid, fetch.
    There were times I was actually drawn to the shops. Occasionally, I would get drunk and park next to one of the factories just in time to watch the fools pile out at quitting time. I hated the looks on their faces. Miserable cretins, one and all. I would sit there with a can of beer in my lap and try to focus on one alternative career goal. There weren't any. All I ever came back to was the inevitable admission that I didn't really want to do
anything.
And around these parts, in the fat choke hold of Papa GM, that was just chickenshit slang for asking “What time does the line start up on Monday?”
    I quit my job at the apartment complex. I decided to go into freelance painting, a job where I could at least name my own hours. After eight or nine months of near starvation, I ditched this stupid stratagem. I was no hustler. I needed someone to tell me what to do. Meanwhile, the recession dragged on.
    I caught on with a guy who ran a janitorial service. We worked at night cleaning up business colleges, drugstores and attorneys’ offices. I wiped down toilets for the minimum wage. The boss was always hollering at me for missing some wayward pee stain or leaving streaks on some lonesome stretch of linoleum. No wonder I soon gave up this promising career and took to sitting around the apartment drinking beer, playing with my daughter and waiting for my wife to come home from work at her father's bridal store.
    The marriage had all but disintegrated by then. Joanie worked and I drank. We rarely even spoke to each other. There wasn't anything to say. She was the breadwinner and I was the louse. The parallel between my behavior and my old man's was something that didn't escape me. Just the thought of it made me want to drive our dilapidated Mustang head-center into the nearest bridge abutment.
    Joanie finally kicked me out of our marriage and took custody of our daughter. My life was so screwed-up by then that the idea of working for GM not only lost its repugnance, it took on the frantic allure of a rope tossed to a quicksand victim. I not only surrendered to the inevitable, I began begging for it. General Motors was the only possible panacea to the erosion of my marriage and my own personal bout with suicidal