Anybody who has ever worked any sort of factory job can fully relate to these tales of the sheer insanity brought to bear bucking brother timeclock. Avoiding the long stares of middle management while maintaining a few raw shreds of humanity and very little dignity. In any wage-slave situation the employer (in this case General Motors,) becomes the inhuman taskmaster riding hard herd on the lumpenprole slubberdegullions manning the floor. "US" and "THEM" is established from the beginning, and the freakish anecdotes follow.
Stories such as these are just a little bit too strange to be fiction. Hamper's charging, kinetic style comes off as a lunchbucket hybrid of Hunter S. Thompson and Lester Bangs, muckraking by default and ploughing a viciously truthful swath through the absurdity of corporate policy. The long slide of seemingly endless shifts busting frame rivets for "the man" does the rest, providing a scarifying and hilarious insight to what goes down behind closed doors at the factory.
If you want to know where things come from and who makes them, then this is like a rubber chicken across the face. Slap! Wake up and feel lucky that the production line doesn't run through your bedroom every night, like bad work tends to do. What "Dilbert" does for white collar work, Hamper does tenfold for the real working American.
Long hours and repetitive motion seem to enhance a person's qualities, both good and bad, and the hidden faces of your co-workers start to manifest. Friendships are bonded faster than by blood, and enemies are made and maintained effortlessly. It is the easiest thing to lose your mental moorings, and once that sickly spiral starts, it is tempting to just throw your arms up and take the rough ride to nervous exhaustion.
The factory, and the microcosm within, become all-consuming, and the worker's world narrows to several fine sharp points: work, and everything that happens there; sleep, and how much can be gotten away with without it; alcohol, and any reality-eraser available to numb the shifts to a throbbing ache. Paranoia colors all personal interaction a dull grey. Man moves one step closer to the flaming Moloch-mouth of the machine.
Quiet desperation? In this case more like noisy dissolution. Short tethers come to abrupt ends and knives are pulled; fingers, as well as minds are lost, and the long, slow days until the next blissful layoff tick by with malicious patience. Sneering dibbuk-face on the time-clock glaring, daring you to look it in the eye and watch it creep slowly by, dying with the mocking tick-tock of the second hand, signaling the inevitable advance of age.
The "I don't give a damn" attitude turns out to be your shaky last legs. The challenge of an unexamined life burns a hole in the battered, dog-eared notebook in which you jot your silly thoughts. All your co-workers become nightmarish caricatures in the ongoing true horror novel integrating behind the rheumy eyes of the night shift.
Having worked for years in the fishing industry, Ben Hamper's gonzo fables of assembly-line production hit home for me in a very visceral fashion. I've known these people, had these conversations, been driven gorilla-balls by the relentless nightly parade of loud'n'dead rock stars (Steve Miller, and the odious Don McLean in particular,) and completely relate to the tenuous nature of sanity "on the line."
All blue-collar assembly work is essentially the same, I gather, but it takes a sharp eye and an even edgier sense of humor to cull the true-to-life craziness from the situation and fully realize it on the printed page. Ben Hamper is as sharp as they come on this account, and it doesn't surprise me that his writing career began stringing for Michael Moore's underground lefty-rag, The Flint Voice, covering wrestling matches and rock concerts.
Hamper tag-teams writing from the heart and gut, and his observations are etched in acid. It is hard to call his work 'satire' because it is far too honest and unpretentious for that. I say, at the risk of sounding trite, that it's funny because it's true, or at least mostly so. Hamper hedges his bets somewhat in the retelling of his several nervous breakdowns, going for gonzo transformation psychedelia instead of any painful personal revelation, but who can blame him, eh? Some things are better left in the secret diary or the privacy of one's head, and the job just swallows that sensitivity at an alarming rate. Food for the big beast.
This is an important work, the United Auto Worker's "The Jungle," with Ben Hamper as a slovenly Upton Sinclair for our time. All those shrewdly populist multimillionaires who sing gold record songs about the sorry plight of the poor workin' man don't know what the hell they're talking about, because put a shoprat in their shoes and it's a never-go-back situation.
There is nothing romantic about the assembly line, unless you consider heat and noise and numbness part of the romance; courting insanity part of the lover's whirling, silly-hat dance. Spark scalds, smashed knuckles and a dead heart make a smashingly alluring trio. The lure of the life of high adventure to your average man of steel!
Best that can be hoped for is a few ugly can-beers in the fridge and the great grey dead spot of the product line blocking all peripheral vision. Looking down a long tunnel with a short pension gleaming dully at the end of it. The big grail, the workingman's ark of the covenant; a place to rest, and to continue to avoid deep thought to the lower middle-class grave.
Fact is, most of these guys die within a year of retirement; burned out completely, physically and mentally. Expiring from stroke in their backyard; singing their eyebrows on the metal of the barbecue grill in the bargain, fat housewife waddling towards the nearest phone to dial 9-1-1. Knowing in her heart that it's just too late.
Lookin' for a way out? Go-nowhere, do-nothing job dragging your heels to hell ? Is life a sleazy, exhausting exercise in futility and despair ? Buy this book, it's a terrific read, and it lets a little light in on the line.
You are not alone! If I'm allowed to go on as Bambi-eyed bogus as I'd like to be, the book will be avoided like chicken pox for all the wrong reasons. As depressing as funny can be, and believe it, that's a ringing endorsement.
©1997 Nathaniel-M. Naske
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