Love, Action, Laughter and Other Sad Tales

  “Sit down, dear, you must be tired,” his mother said.

  “First I’ve got to have a drink,” his father said. His voice carried to the dining room as he disappeared into the den. “Of all the goddamn days, the idiots I have to put up with. An hour ago Larry wants to walk off the picture, the part is only going to make him the biggest thing in Hollywood and the damn fool thinks he’s miscast! Well, just let him try and walk out—I’ll suspend him, I’ll run that ham out of the industry, the ungrateful son of a bitch.”

  Sol Samuels had reappeared with a highball glass in his hand. The jaw that was a favorite target for caricaturists was thrust forward in characteristic defiance.

  “And then Mary comes in weeping those goddamn phony tears and says she doesn’t want Joe on her next picture. Joe is the one director in town who can hold her down and get a performance out of her. But she wants some third-rate punk she can push around. I know my little Mary. I should, I discovered the bitch, so—”

  “Sol, will you please sit down and eat your dinner.”

  “Now, Flo, just let me have one more drink. My nerves are jumping like sand fleas tonight.”

  Chris watched his father disappear again into the den. He got up and went to his father’s place and straightened the poem a fraction of an inch. Then he went back to his seat. His mother smiled at him. His father returned with a refill, paused at his wife’s chair to brush her cheek with a distracted kiss and rustled Chris’s hair as he strode to his place.

  “What the hell is this?” he said, picking up the paper.

  “Sol, Chris has written a poem,” his mother said. “A beau tiful poem, Sol. I had no idea he could do anything like that. He could hardly wait for you to—”

  “All right, now let me read it,” his father said.

  There was a silence. It could not have been a long silence, for it was not a long poem. But it was a terrible silence. His mother kept looking at his father with a motherly smile, a kind of tentative smile, waiting to share with him their mutual pride. Chris kept his eyes on his father’s face, waiting for the praise and the gold piece.

  After a few seconds his father put the poem down, drained his highball glass, and said: “I think it’s lousy.”

  Chris looked at his father, then at his mother, through a glaze of tears.

  “Sol, how could you? His first poem. After all, he’s only nine. And to use such a word. Such a tactless, cruel word. What’s happening to your judgment, Sol? Your—your perspective?”

  Chris heard the fight as if from a great distance through a roar of disappointment.

  “Goddamn it, I believe in being honest about writing, anybody’s writing, even Chrissy’s writing. How the hell will he ever improve if you don’t level with him?”

  “But, Sol, do you really think it makes sense to talk to him as if he were a professional writer on your payroll?”

  Sol Samuels tried, as he often did when his wife had him cornered, to make a joke of it.

  “Look, Flo, I just got finished telling a team of two-thousand-a-week writers their stuff is lousy. I pay Chris only fifty cents a week, so who has a better right to tell him his stuff is lousy?”

  Chris Samuels’s pride was being rubbed into the word the way his pup Bunk had his nose rubbed into the spot on the carpet when he forgot to scratch on the door. His lips began to tremble and the color drained from his face. He hated his father, he hated the studio, he hated the scenarios, he hated the bitch movie stars, he hated the lousiness of lousy. To keep his father from hearing him give in to it, he ran from the table with his hands held over his mouth.

  He held himself in until he was upstairs in his own bedroom with the door slammed behind him. He could still hear the angry voices of his father and mother. What frightened him now was not that his father was cruelly and stupidly wrong, but that he might be cruelly and terribly right.

  THE DOCKS

  OF

  NEW YORK

  The alarm was about to ring when Matt Gillis reached out his bearlike, heavy-muscled arm and shut it off. Habit. Half past six. Summer with the light streaming in around the patched window shades, and winter when half past six was black as midnight. Matt stretched his heavyweight, muscular body and groaned. Habit woke you up at half past six every morning, but habit didn’t make you like it—not on these raw winter mornings when the wind blew in from the sea, whipping along the waterfront with an intensity it seemed to reserve for longshoremen. He shivered in anticipation.

  Matt listened to the wind howling through the narrow canyon of Eleventh Street and thought to himself. Another day, another icy-fingered, stinking day. He pushed one foot from under the covers to test the temperature, and then quickly withdrew it into the warmth of the double bed again. Cold. Damn that janitor, Lacey—the one they all called Rudolph because of his perpetually red nose. Never enough heat in the place. Well, the landlord was probably saying, what do they expect for twenty-five a month?

  Matt rolled over heavily, ready for the move into his work clothes. “Matt?” his wife, Franny, murmured, feeling for him drowsily in the dark. “I’ll get up; fix you some coffee.”

  “It’s all right.” His buxom Fran. Matt patted her. Her plump-pretty Irish face was still swollen with sleep. For a moment he remembered her as she had been fifteen years ago: the prettiest kid in the neighborhood—bright, flirty, sky-blue eyes and a pug nose, a little bit of a girl smothered in Matt’s big arms, a child in the arms of a grizzly. Now she was plump all over, something like him on a smaller, softer scale, as if she had had to grow along his lines to keep him company.

  “Matt, you don’t mind me gettin’ fat?” she had whispered to him one night in the wide, metal-frame bed after the kids finally had fallen asleep.

  “Naw, you’re still the best-lookin’ woman in the neighborhood,” Matt had said gallantly.

  “At least you can always find me in the dark,” Fran had giggled. They had got to laughing then, until Fran had to stop him because everything Matt did, he did big—laugh, fight, eat, drink, tell off the mob in the union. Even when he thought he was talking normally he shouted, he bellowed, so when he had chuckled there in the bed, the children—Tom and Mickey and Kate and Johnny and Peggy, the five they had had so far—had stirred in their beds and Fran had said, “Shhh, if the baby wakes up you’ll be walkin’ the floor with her.”

  Matt swung his long legs out of the bed and felt the cold touch of the linoleum. He sat there a moment in his long underwear, thinking—he wasn’t sure of what; the day ahead, the days of his youth, the time his old man came home from the pier with three fingers off his right hand (copper sheeting—cut off at the knuckle nice and clean), and all those years the old man battled for his compensation. It was all the old man could talk about, finally, and got to be a joke—never to Pop, but to Matt and his brothers when they were big enough to support him.

  Big Matt sat there on the edge of the bed rubbing sleep out of his eyes, thinking, thinking, while his wife, warm, sweaty and full in her nightgown, half rose behind him and whispered, “Coffee? Let me get up and make you a cup of coffee.” She wanted to say more; she wanted to say, “Look, Matt honey, I know what it is to go down there to the shape-up when the sun is still climbing up the backs of the buildings. I know what it is for you to stand there with three-four hundred other men and have the hiring boss, Fisheye Moran, look you over like you was so much meat in a butcher shop. I know what it is for you to go to work every morning like you had a job—only you haven’t got a job unless Fisheye, the three-time loser put there by the Village mob, hands you a brass check.” She wanted to say, “Yes, and I know what it is for you to be left standing in the street; I know what you feel when the hiring boss looks through you with those pale blue fisheyes that give him his name.” That’s all today, come back tomorra.

  Matt was on his feet now, a burly bear in his long underwear, stretching and groaning to push himself awake. Fran started to get up, but he put his big hand on her shoulder and pushed her back into the w
arm bed. Well, all right. She was glad to give in. When could a body rest except these precious few minutes in the early morning? “You be careful now, Matt. You be careful. Don’t get in no trouble.”

  Fran knew her Matt, the Irish-thick rebel of Local 474, one of the lionhearted—or foolhardy—handful who dared speak up against the Lippy Keegan mob, which had the longshore local in their pocket, and the loading racket, the lunch-hour gambling, and all the other sidelines that bring in a quick dollar on the docks. Lippy and his goons ran the neighborhood like storm troopers, and longshoremen who knew what was good for them went along with Keegan’s boys and took what they could get. Matt was always trying to get others to back him up, but the fear was too deep. “Matt, I got me wife and kids to think about; leave me alone,” they’d say, and push their thirty cents across the bar for another whiskey.

  Matt tried to make as little noise as possible as he went down the creaky stairway. He closed the tenement door behind him and stood a moment in the clammy morning, feeling the weather. He zipped up his windbreaker and pulled his old cap down on his forehead. Then he drew his head down into the heavy collar, threw out his chest, and turned his face into the wind. It was a big, strong-boned, beefy face, with a heavy jaw and a broken nose, a face that had taken plenty. Over the years the Keegan boys had developed a begrudging respect for Matt. They had hit him with everything and he still kept coming on. The gift of getting up—that’s what they called it on the waterfront.

  Matt ducked into the Longdock Bar & Grill on the corner across the street from the pier. It was full of longshoremen grabbing a cup of coffee and maybe some ham and eggs before drifting over to the shape-up. There were men of all sizes and ages, with weatherbeaten faces like Matt’s, many of them with flattened noses, trophies of battles on the docks and in the barrooms; here and there were ex-pugs with big-time memories: the cheers of friends and five hundred dollars for an eight-rounder. Threading through the dock workers was a busy little man whose name was Billy Morgan, though everybody called him J.P. because he was the moneylender for the mob. If you didn’t work, J.P. was happy to lend you a deuce or half a bill, at ten percent a week. If you fell too far behind, J.P. whispered to Fisheye, and Fisheye threw you a couple of days’ work until the loan was paid off. They had you coming and going, the mob. Matt looked at J.P. and turned away.

  Over in the corner were a couple of Lippy’s pistols, Specs Sinclair, a mild-looking, pasty-skinned man who didn’t look like an enforcer but had maybe a dozen stiffs to his credit, and Feets McKenna, a squat muscle man who could rough-and- tumble with the best. Feets was sergeant-at-arms for the local. Specs, for whom signing his name was a lot of writing, was recording secretary. Matt looked straight at them to show he wasn’t backing away, ever. Union officials. Only three-time losers need apply.

  Matt pushed his way into the group at the short-order counter. They were men dressed like himself, in old trousers and flannel shirts, with old caps worn slightly askew in the old-country way. They all knew Matt and respected the way he stood up; but a stand-up guy, as they called him, was nobody you wanted to get close to. Not if you wanted to work and stay in one piece in Lippy Keegan’s sector of the harbor.

  Matt was waiting for his coffee when he felt a fist smash painfully into his side. He winced and started an automatic counter at whoever it was, and then he looked down and grinned. He should have known. It was Runt Nolan, whose hundred ring battles and twenty-five years of brawling on the docks were stamped into his flattened face. But a life of beatings had failed to deaden the twinkle in his eyes. Runt Nolan was always seeing the funny side, even when he was looking down the business end of a triggerboy’s .38. Where other longshoremen turned away in fear from Lippy’s pistoleros, Runt always seemed to take a perverse delight in baiting them. Sometimes they laughed him off and sometimes, if he went on provoking them—and longshoremen were watching to see if Runt could get away with it—they would oblige him with a blackjack or a piece of pipe. Runt had a head like a rock and more lives than a pair of cats, and the stories of his miraculous recoveries from these beatings had become a riverfront legend.

  Once they had left him around the corner in the alley lying face down in his own blood, after enough blows on the noggin to crack the skull of a horse; and an hour later, when everyone figured he was on his way to the morgue, damned if he didn’t stagger back into the Longdock and pound the bar for whiskey. “I should worry what they do to me, I’m on borried time,” Runt Nolan liked to say.

  Runt grinned when he saw Matt rub his side with mock resentment. “Mornin’, Matt me lad, just wanted t’ see if you was in condition.”

  “Don’t be worryin’ about my condition. One more like that and I’ll stand you right on your head.”

  “Come on, you big blowhard, I’m ready for you.” Runt fell into a fierce boxing stance and jabbed his small knuckle-broken left fist into Matt’s face.

  Matt got his coffee and a sinker and sat down at one of the small tables with Runt. Runt was rarely caught eating. He seemed to consider the need for solid food something of a disgrace, a sign of weakness. Whiskey and beer and maybe once a day a corned-beef sandwich—that was Runt’s diet, and in the face of medical science it had kept him wiry and resilient at fifty-five.

  “What kind of a boat we got today?” Matt asked. Runt lived in a two-dollar hotel above the Longdock Bar and he was usually up on his shipping news.

  “Bananas,” Runt said, drawing out the middle vowel in disgust.

  “Bananas!” Matt groaned. Bananas meant plenty of shoulder work, toting the heavy stalks out of the hold. A banana carrier was nothing less than a human pack mule. There was only one good thing about bananas: The men who worked steady could afford to lay off bananas, and so there was always a need for extra hands. The docker who had no in with the hiring boss, and even the fellow who was on the outs with the Keegan mob, stood a chance of picking up a day on bananas.

  By the time Matt and Runt reached the pier, ten minutes before the 7:30 whistle, there were already a couple of hundred men on hand, warming themselves around fires in metal barrels and shifting their feet to keep the numbness away. Some of them were hard-working men with families, professional longshoremen whose Ireland-born fathers had moved cargo before them. And some of them were only a peg above the bum, casuals who drifted in for a day now and then to keep themselves in drinking money. Some of them were big men with powerful chests, large, raw-faced men who looked like throwbacks to the days of bare-knuckle fights-to-a-finish. Some of them were surprisingly slight, wizen-faced men in cast-off clothing, the human flotsam of the waterfront.

  Fisheye came out of the pier, flanked by a couple of the boys, “Flash” Gordon and “Blackie” McCook. There were about three hundred longshoremen waiting for jobs now. Obediently they formed themselves into a large horseshoe so Fisheye could look them over. Meat in a butcher shop. The men Fisheye wanted were the ones who worked. You kicked back part of your day’s pay to Fisheye or did favors for Lippy if you wanted to work regular. You didn’t have to have a record, but a couple of years in a respectable pen didn’t do you any harm.

  “I need two hundred banana carriers.” Fisheye’s hoarse voice seemed to take its pitch from the foghorns that barked along the Hudson. Jobs for two hundred men at a coveted $2.27 an hour. The three, maybe four hundred men eyed one another in listless rivalry. “You—and you—Pete—OK, Slim …” Fisheye was screening the men with a cold, hard look. Nearly twenty years ago a broken-down dock-worker had gone across the street from the shape-up. “No work?” the bartender had said, perfunctorily, and the old man had answered, “Nah, he just looked right through me with those fuckin’ fisheyes of his.” Fisheye—it had made the bartender laugh, and the name had stuck.

  Anger felt cold and uncomfortable in Matt’s stomach as he watched Fisheye pass out those precious tabs. He didn’t mind seeing the older men go in, the ones he had shaped with for years, especially family men like himself. What gave him that hateful, icy feeling in hi
s belly was seeing the young kids go in ahead of him, new-generation hoodlums like the fresh-faced Skelly kid who boasted of the little muscle jobs he did for Lippy and the boys as his way of paying off for steady work. Young Skelly had big ideas, they said around the bar. One of these days he might be crowding Lippy himself. That’s how it went down here. “Peaches” Maloney had been Number One—until Lippy dumped him into the gutter outside the Longdock. Matt had seen them come and go. And all the time he had stood up proud and hard while lesser men got the work tabs and the gravy.

  Fisheye almost had his two hundred men now. He put his hand on Runt Nolan’s shoulder. “All right, you little sawed-off rat, go on in. But remember I’m doin’ ya a favor. One word out of line and I’ll bounce ya off the ship.”

  Runt tightened his hands into fists, wanting to stand up and speak his mind. But a day was a day and he hadn’t worked steady enough lately to keep himself in beers. He looked over at Matt with a helpless defiance and went on into the pier.

  Matt waited, thinking about Fran and the kids. And he waited, thinking at Fisheye: It ain’t right, it ain’t right, a bum like you havin’ all this power. He couldn’t keep it out of his face. Fisheye flushed and glared back at him and picked men all around Matt to round out his two hundred. He shoved Matt’s face in it by coming toward him as if he were going to pick him and then reaching over his shoulder for Will Murphy, a toothless old sauce-hound whom Matt could outwork five for one. There never had been enough caution in Matt, and now he felt himself trembling with anger. He was grabbing Fisheye before he had time to think it out, holding the startled boss by the thick lapels of his windbreaker.

  “Listen to me, you fatheaded bum. If you don’t put me on today I’ll break you in two. I got kids to feed. You hear me, Fisheye?”

  Fisheye pulled himself away and looked around for help. Blackie and young Skelly moved in.