Tales From the Assembly Line : Books: Ben Hamper despised looking at auto underbellies, so he took up writing. In ‘Rivethead,’ he describes his unhappy life as a GM ‘shop rat.’

You can’t blame Ben Hamper for feeling a little overwhelmed.

In the midst of a publicity tour for his first book, “Rivethead: Tales From the Assembly Line,” he sits at the Manhattan offices of his publisher, Warner Books, smoking cigarettes and mulling over the strange twists and turns of fate that have brought him there.

Five years ago, he was working the rivet line at the General Motors Truck and Bus Plant in his hometown of Flint, Mich. Now, he’s being interviewed on “The Today Show” and National Public Radio, skeptical about his 15 minutes of fame but still hopeful that it will last long enough for Warner Bros. to turn his life story into a film.

That’s pretty heady stuff, especially for a guy who barely made it out of high school, where, Hamper admits, he lived in his “own little universe of chemicals and inhalants,” experimenting with writing only “as a way of attracting large-breasted teen-age women.” Even now, he maintains that “writing is really just a hobby that got out of hand. I sort of fell into it, and, to my surprise, it grew legs and arms and a head and walked off and took me along.”

Hamper’s description may be apocryphal, but it’s not altogether untrue. Victimized by an alcoholic father who disappeared for months at a time and left to mind younger brothers and sisters by a mother who worked two jobs to make ends meet, he was never a good bet to become a literary celebrity. But he was always a likely candidate to end up on the assembly line.

“I’m a thoroughbred,” he says, only half-joking. “The son of a son of a shop rat. If you add it all up, my family’s put in hundreds of years at General Motors. My great-grandfather worked the line, as did both of my grandfathers, a grandmother, three uncles, an aunt, my brother and my sister-in-law. I guess you could say it’s my birthright.”

Despite his bravado, Hamper dreaded the thought of going to work for GM, or any of the automobile manufacturers whose plants dotted the landscape of Flint.

“There were times,” he writes, “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.”

But although he did everything to sidestep his self-proclaimed heritage, it was merely a matter of time. Finally, in 1977, divorced and the father of a young daughter, Hamper gave in to his fate; at age 22, he went to work in the shop.

That probably would have been the end of the story, if it weren’t for the layoffs that began in 1979. During one such period, Hamper “decided to take up (my) old writing hobby” as a way of killing some time. He wrote a record review and mailed it to the Flint Voice, the local alternative paper, which he describes as “a hippie relic patched together by a bunch of moaners desperately tryin’ to reinvent the ‘60s.”

The editor of the Flint Voice was a “longhaired live wire” named Michael Moore, who liked what he saw. He published Hamper’s review and bothered him for more. Hamper sent reviews and features, but Moore wanted a column about factory life, written from an insider’s point of view--something that would pull no punches.

“Mike kept urging me on, and I kept trying to talk him out of it,” Hamper recollects. “I just couldn’t imagine that anybody’d want to know about that stuff.”

But Moore believed that working-class people didn’t need spokesmen, that they could speak for themselves if given the chance.

“I knew there was a lot of talent in Flint,” Moore says, “and Ben was proof of that. But he’d been told for so long that his place was to rivet nuts and bolts that he’d grown to believe it. He needed a great deal of encouragement to do the column. It wasn’t an easy process.”

Easy or not, Hamper ultimately gave in, after an article he wrote about a local tavern landed Moore and him at the wrong end of a libel suit. Writing about his experiences on the line seemed safer. “At least you can’t get sued,” he laughs, “for writing about yourself.”

Even that, however, had its problems. Once he wrote about a co-worker named Polson, whom he charitably described as a “Cro-Mag . . . 245 pounds of snout and gristle.” Polson critiqued the article with his fingers compressing Hamper’s throat like “a concertina.” And when Hamper revealed that he and some co-workers liked to “glaze the mood with a cocktail or two” during working hours, GM brass kept an eye on him as well.

But Hamper didn’t worry about that ; he had more important things to do. For him, the Rivethead columns were nothing less than a way to reassert his dignity, and that of his colleagues, against a system that went out of its way to dehumanize them.

He wrote about Howie Makem, General Motors’ “Quality Cat,” a mascot who patroled the factory, exhorting the workers to give their all for the company. “Howie was an insult,” Hamper fumes, “an affront to our intelligence. What GM was basically saying was, ‘These people are nimwits, they can only relate to a man dressed up as a cat.’ Once that sunk in, you really felt demeaned.”

Then there were the electronic message boards all over the plant. “It was blatant propaganda. They made no bones about it. The boards would flash slogans like ‘Squeezing rivets is fun.’ My feeling was: OK, it’s fun? Then you get down here, and you run the gun.”

Perhaps Hamper’s most outrageous stunt was his public campaign to go bowling with GM Chairman Roger Smith.

“Ludicrous as it sounds, I thought it made a lot of sense,” he says. “I mean, GM was always talking about how much they wanted to have good worker-management relations, and what could be better for that than to have Roger go bowling with an average guy from the line? The media would have been all over us--it would have been a shot in the arm for the whole company’s morale.”

Needless to say, Smith never responded. Instead, he became a “running joke” between Hamper and Moore, “a twin venture, a collaboration of ours” that came to full flower with Moore’s movie “Roger & Me,” in which Hamper appears as a mental patient, talking about GM and playing basketball, showing off his pick and roll.

Although the movie has been criticized for playing fast and loose with the facts, the mental patient bit, at least, was no fabrication. In July, 1986, Hamper began to suffer from debilitating panic attacks, for which he is still being treated. He attributes their onset to the pressure of the line, and to never being able to shut off his mind and simply do his job. Instead, Hamper had to think about it, to figure out what it meant.

Whatever the reason, his shop rat career slammed to a close just as his writing began to attract national attention. Moore had become the editor of Mother Jones, and enlisted the Rivethead as a regular magazine feature. Both the Wall Street Journal and the Village Voice profiled Hamper, the former dubbing him the “Mike Royko of the rivetheads.”

It was a difficult time. Hamper tried to return to work, but the panic would always come back. “I’d wonder what was wrong with me,” he recalls. “Was there such thing as a broken brain? It also scared me that the panic attacks would foul up both my careers. I wouldn’t have the security of my job on the line, and I wouldn’t have anything to write about either.”

About this time, David Black, a New York literary agent, suggested that Hamper turn the Rivethead material into a book. With nothing to lose, Hamper agreed. “I’ve always been one for low self-esteem, but David really helped me out,” he says. “I’d call him whenever I had a problem, and he’d straighten me out. Without him, there’d be no Rivethead.”

Even with Black, it took two years. “Sixty percent of the stuff is new,” claims Hamper, “but to tell the whole story, I had to recycle certain things from the column. I think of the book as something like a ‘best of’ compilation.”

Hamper and Black are discussing a follow-up, a participatory-style collection exploring “the dark underbelly of America.” Meanwhile, Hamper is on his way back to Michigan, where he puts out a small rock ‘n’ roll fanzine and does public-access television with some buddies.

Hamper calls the book a big game: “I’m proud of it, and I did a good job, and I know it’s a good book, but still, it’s sort of preposterous. . . . I didn’t say, ‘Well, I will put in so many years at the plant, and compile enough stuff that I will write a big book that will get published in hardcover.’ . . . It’s just as mystifying to me as it is to the people I worked with. They say they never thought it would come to this.

“Well, me neither.”