It Ain’t Right

She was in a grease pit under the conveyored cars that rolled by, bopping slightly to radio music as she worked.

The guys topside watched admiringly because she was a nice looking woman with a startling decolletage, and there was an appealing quality to the way she moved.

They teased her with a hand-done sign for everyone to see that said, “Beware of tigeress (sic) in the pit.” I have no idea the kind of work she was doing under the cars. Something with an automatic bolt-tightener, I’d guess. It doesn’t matter.

Everyone was having a good time. The lady was proud of her looks, the guys proud of the lady and passersby amused by the idea of this supple cat-woman in a pit.

What an odd contradiction of grief and whimsy. In a matter of days, the big automobile plant would be closed and 2,500 people would be out of work, but they could still have a ball.

It was like dancing in an open grave.

I’m talking about the 45-year-old General Motors assembly plant in Van Nuys. There was an open house the other day for friends, family members and retirees to say goodby to a way of life.

My son-in-law is one of those who will be without a job come September. He was working that day. So was everyone else.

But all too soon the whole place, more than 2 million square feet, will go silent. There’ll be a hole in the Valley larger than hell.

*

It was over 100 degrees the day of the open house, and if there’s air conditioning inside that big warehouse of a factory, I sure didn’t feel it.

A hot, heavy smell of motor oil hit me in the face about three steps through the door, and it lingered in the air all during the time I wandered through the steamy vastness.

What hit me too was the tangle of machinery and car parts, coiled wires, switches, tubes, chains, belts and pulleys as far as the eye could see, like a scene from inside the guts of that space ship in “Alien.”

The plant was relatively quiet at first because everyone was on a lunch break, but they came back and the controlled calamity began.

It was a sudden din, as though the noise had been confined in a box and the lid ripped off, allowing pent-up bedlam to come crashing out.

There was no buildup. The switches went on and the work began. Things clanged and banged and slammed, and welding torches sent huge showers of sparks into the air, like fireworks for a dying livelihood.

Conveyor belts jerked to life with a hissss of steam, and fire walls and fenders, hanging likes sides of beef on meat hooks, moved slowly toward their destinations.

Almost simultaneously with the sound and movement, rock and rap music from dueling radios clashed in the oily air, creating yet a second level of dissonance that became a surreal Salvador Dali world translated abruptly into sound.

*

“I can’t imagine working in this noise,” I said to a welder.

“I can’t imagine working anyplace else,” he replied, lifting his protective face hood and adding, “but I guess I’m going to have to.”

“It ain’t right,” an electrician said, taking a break near a soft drink machine. “The work’s going to Canada, Mexico and the South because GM can get it done cheaper. All they think about’s the bottom line. Jesus, I’ve been here 28 years.” He shook his head and said it again. “It ain’t right.”

Through the plant, the car parts coalesced and began to assume familiar shapes, the Camaros and Pontiac Firebirds emerging from the tangle of parts and machinery, brilliant blues and reds and greens, moving slowly on belts like rides at an amusement park.

“The parts have got to be right,” a foreman said. “They can’t be crooked or else. . . .” He gestured with his hands to indicate what would happen if a chassis didn’t fit perfectly on to a car body. “These things don’t just come out of a Cracker Jack box.”

In some ways, it was like a wake. Millwright Brian Cox said they ought to call it a closed house, not an open house. “It’s a burial,” he said, “not a celebration.”

Dennis Dalrymple, back after a 25-foot fall that kept him in bed for four months, joked, “I got an 8.5 for the dive but zero for the landing.” He’s thinking about going back to school to learn screenwriting.

They’re all thinking of something else now, they’ve got to, and I can’t help them there.

But I can at least acknowledge they’re good people who’ve done their jobs with pride and humor, and what’s happening indeed ain’t right.

But it’s in the past now and there’s nothing more to say except someone turn out the lights and put out the tigeress.

The party’s over.