Genuine GM Parts : RIVETHEAD: Tales From the Assembly Line <i> By Ben Hamper</i> , <i> (Warner Books: $19.95; 256 pp.) </i>

Flint, Michigan. Vehicle City. Greaseball Mecca. A town that spawned thudrockers Grand Funk Railroad, game-show geek Bob Eubanks and a hobby shop called General Motors. A town whose collective bowling average is four times higher than its inhabitants’ IQ. And a town where “Rivethead” Ben Hamper spent 10 years toiling away as a riveter on an assembly line, collecting the tales that ring this death knell for the industrial age.

Although Hamper, in his perpetually self-effacing manner, is loathe to assume any personal responsibility for the downfall of an age of man, he’s happy to be among those who point it out. As he replied when Esquire named him one of this country’s brightest young minds: “I think it only fair to warn you that this bizarre turn of events conclusively indicates that the ruination of Western Civilization is now in full swing.”

Then again, Hamper’s selection for the bright-young-mind honor might indicate precisely the opposite: that for one inspired moment a culture is looking away from its Hollywood-hyped, blow-dried celebrities with their extruded causes and packaged concerns to a new kind of hero from the trenches. My faith lies here. America still knows a fresh voice when she hears one, and here’s one that is not only worth listening to but a pleasure besides.

“Rivethead” may well do for industrial grunts what Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” did for the truly insane--give them some respect. Or at least some attention.

GM wanted the salt of the earth, dung-heavers, flunkies and leeches--men who would grunt the day away devoid of self-betterment, numbed-out cyborgs willing to swap cerebellum loaf for patio furniture. But sometimes, GM got people like Ben Hamper. Not content to just grunt the day away, these folks conjure up ways to escape from a working-class industrial town where the only road seems to lead into the benevolent clutches of General Motors.

With eerie candor, Hamper recounts his early years in a dysfunctional and semi-abusive factory family. His early promise as a student melts away to the allure of adolescent drugs and drinking. Inevitably, we see him led through the gates of General Motors’ Truck and Bus Plant in Flint, Mich. There, as he describes it, he fell under the command of mean-spirited foremen--self-important little men directed by a management policy that appears to be a cross between Disneyland and Auschwitz.

Hamper points a hysterically funny finger at the inane morale-boosting schemes concocted by an aloof and condescending management. One bizarre campaign was led by a giant cat, Howie Makem, a “quality control mascot” who tours the plant sporadically to boost the spirits of the troops. In another campaign “Quality Drinking Glasses” were issued to workers who achieved optimum quality standards. After all, when someone works hard all day in a smoky chamber full of sludge, noise, cigar butts, psychos, manic-depressives, grease pits, banana stickers, venom and gigantic stalking kitty cats, why not give the guy his own glass--you can bet he’ll soon be needin’ a drink.

Hamper writes with the easy vernacular of the Midwest tempered by an unforgiving wit, and an anger that seethes throughout his work. He weaves poetic descriptions into manic tirades without hesitation or apology. On witnessing a knifing in the plant by a crazed co-worker: “I’ll never forget the vision of him sprinting in the distance like a panicked gazelle, insane and desperate, disappearing like a phantom into the industrial underbrush.” Admiring the way a new trainee clutched a rivet gun: “He choked its neck like a dead flamingo. It was all so beautiful. The guy was a plow-horse. After all those years in the foundry, the cross members and rivet guns must have seemed like birdies and badminton.”

Hamper uses such unlikely metaphors to color every passage with the Angst and hopelessness that he felt and lived in the shops. Driven to panic attacks and eventually forced to retire from the shops himself, Rivethead treats his co-workers with an even amount of respect and pity--a pity he still seems to hold for himself in the end.

While Hamper’s often ungraceful prose can make for excruciating reading at times, it all lends to the intended effect. Like listening to your drunk cousin insult the family at your grandmother’s birthday party, all you really want to do is leave. But what you want to get out of is not Hamper’s book but his life, and the lives of his friends. And you want them out of their lives.

This is where “Rivethead” earns its wages. It is a clear and unimpeachable testimony to the grim existences of those who build our cars for us. More important, it points to the rotting core of a type of industry that has seen the peak of its usefulness, an industry that must now direct itself to brighter and more humane endeavors--as, I’m glad to see, Ben Hamper has.