Dubbed the next Hunter Thompson by filmmaker Michael (Roger & Me) Moore, Hamper explores both the comedic and tragic elements of an autoworker's life. Lured by money, he and his coworkers spent the best years of their lives performing numbingly boring tasks and sometimes using drugs, alcohol and frat-house pranks as antidotes. Hamper's account of their not-so-quiet desperation has won praise from critics, including Newsweek, which called Rivethead "Funny, foul-mouthed, yet touching."
A fourth-generation factory worker, the 35-year-old Hamper had originally planned not to follow his family into the factory. Although a mediocre student, he had shown some flair for poetry in high school and dreamed of escaping Flint on the back of his talent—anything to avoid what he calls the "monster gaze" of the workers who stumbled out of the truck plant when the whistle blew. Instead, his girlfriend became pregnant, and marriage and a baby girl ended his college hopes. Unsettled by his drinking and his meager earnings as a housepainter, the marriage dissolved, and Hamper saw the factory as his only option. On July 9, 1977, he became a "shoprat."
Ironically, Hamper liked the work. "I loved rivets," he says. "I was not that good at anything, but I felt I was the world's most talented riveter." And his workplace seemed screwy enough to keep him alert: As he tells it, colleagues passed out from alcohol, hallucinated from LSD and napped on the job. At one point, he says, a coworker begged him to slash his hand with a razor so that he might get a break. "Working the rivet line was like a private club for bachelor miscreants," says Hamper, whose job included securing muffler hangers to the undersides of Chevy Suburbans. "We played our rock-and-roll tapes...we drank and invented our silly diversions. Every day we attempted anything to cleave through the crawl of the clock."
Not surprisingly, GM takes exception to Hamper's account. "It's one man's interpretation of what goes on in the life of an assembly plant," says GM spokesman John Mueller. "This interpretation is not shared by most employees, who are hardworking and take great pride in working for GM." (Mueller admits, however, that the drinking "exists.")
By 1981, Hamper found himself jotting down incidents and snippets of conversation—essentially writing his book between rivets. Using a red wax pencil and tags ripped from supply stocks, he would scribble sentence fragments for 45 seconds, rivet for 45 seconds and scribble for 45 seconds more. Eventually he switched to a notebook, and at the end of the shift he would sit at a typewriter borrowed from his mother and turn the fragments into prose.
By that time, he was already writing professionally. Michael Moore was then editor of the Flint Voice, an alternative paper, and when Hamper submitted an unsolicited music review, Moore saw the spark of talent. "He stood out because of the humor and sadness in his writing," says Moore. "I laughed while I was reading it and felt kind of sad when was done." Soon, Hamper had a column and began to build a following. The Wall Street Journal did a piece about him, as did Harper's and Esquire.
Personally, life was also improving for Hamper. In 1986 he met and a year later married Jan Stites, a nursery-school teacher, and cut back on his drinking. They bought a house near Flint, and in a cabana next to the vinyl pool, Hamper put a desk and began writing in earnest. But everything was not as idyllic as it seemed: While at work in 1986, he suffered a panic attack. "I had this overwhelming feeling of dread," he says, "like I was going to die." Despite medication and periodic stays as a day patient at a mental-health clinic, his spells continued. Lasting from a few seconds to almost an hour, they made it impossible for Hamper to remain on the assembly line, and in April 1988 he left the line for good. The attacks plague him still, but come less frequently; their cause, he says, remains unknown.
These days, Hamper visits both his psychiatrist and psychologist, swims in his pool and pounds away on his typewriter. The $20,000 advance from Rivethead, as well as $100,000 for movie rights, has given him time before he has to settle on a new topic. Still, he worries he might go dry: "What am I going to write about? There's not a hell of a lot happening in my poolshed."
Strangely, the line still calls to Hamper—and not solely for literary purposes. When he last visited GM, Hamper sought out the man who replaced him and asked if he could fire a couple of rivets. "Man, it felt good," he says. "Smack them rivets into place and get them hangers on. And I handed [the rivet gun] back to him, knowing that I'd never do that again. The Rivethead is dead. I'll pass the baton on to someone else, and he can be 'Screwhead' or 'Welderhead' or 'Paintboothhead.' I'm sure somebody out there would do a damn fine job."
JOHN TAYMAN
JULIE GREENWALT in Flint
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- Julie Greenwalt.
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