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of sight too.
    Oh well, what can I say? I'm just sitting here waiting for the next chassis to arrive. I'm tapping my toes to the beat of the Dead Rock Stars. Ten feet to my right, I can hear the trickle of untold billions bein’ sucked outta the corporate coffers through the base of the water fountain behind Dougie's workbench.
    I'm thinking that rock stars, even dead ones, don't come cheap.

1
    I WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD THE FIRST TIME I EVER SET FOOT inside an automobile factory. The occasion was Family Night at the old Fisher Body plant in Flint where my father worked the second shift.
    General Motors provided this yearly intrusion as an opportunity for the kin of the work force to funnel in and view their fathers, husbands, uncles and granddads as they toiled away on the assembly line. If nothing else, this annual peepshow lent a whole world of credence to our father's daily grumble. The assembly line did indeed stink. The noise was very close to intolerable. The heat was one complete bastard. Little wonder the old man's socks always smelled like liverwurst bleached for a week in the desert sun.
    For my mother, it was at least one night out of the year when she could verify the old man's whereabouts. One night a year when she could be reasonably assured that my father wasn't lurchin’ over a pool table at the Patio Lounge or picklin’ his gizzard at any one of a thousand beer joints out of Dort Highway. My father loved his drink. He wasn't nearly as fond of labor.
    On this night, the old man was present. I remember my mother being relieved. If he hadn't been there, it would have been difficult for her to explain to my little brother and me why we had made this exhaustive trek through Satan's playpen just to ogle a bunch of oily strangers and their grinnin’ lineage.
    After a hundred wrong turns and dead ends, we found my old man down on the trim line. His job was to install windshields using this goofy apparatus with large suction cups that resembled an octopus being crucified. A car would nuzzle up to the old man's work area and he would be waiting for it, a cigarette dangling from his lip, his arms wrapped around the windshield contraption as if it might suddenly rebel and bolt off for the ocean. Car, windshield. Car, windshield. Car, windshield. No wonder my father preferred playin’ hopscotch with barmaids. This kind of repetition didn't look like any fun at all.
    And here, all of this time, I had assumed that Dad just built the vehicles all by his lonesome. I always imagined that building adult cars was identical to building cars in model kits. You were given a large box with illustrated directions, a clutter of fenders, wheels and trunk lids, and some hip-high vat of airplane glue. When one was finished, you simply motioned to some boss-type in the aisle: “Hey, bring me another kit and make it a goddamn Corvette this time!”
    We stood there for forty minutes or so, a miniature lifetime, and the pattern never changed. Car, windshield. Car, windshield. Drudgery piled atop drudgery. Cigarette to cigarette. Decades rolling through the rafters, bones turning to dust, stubborn clocks gagging down flesh, another windshield, another cigarette, wars blinking on and off, thunderstorms muttering the alphabet, crows on power lines asleep or dead, that mechanical octopus squirming against nothing, nothing, NOTHINGNESS. I wanted to shout at my father “Do something else!” Do something else or come home with us or flee to the nearest watering hole. DO SOMETHING ELSE! Car, windshield. Car, windshield. Christ, no.
    Thank God that, even at age seven, I knew what I was going to be when I grew up. There wouldn't be any car/windshield cha-cha awaiting me. I was going to be an ambulance driver, the most glamorous calling in the world. I would spend my days zooming from one mangled calamity to the next. I would have full license to poke my face into the great American bucket seat bloodfest. The metallic crunch, the spiderweb of