“Eventually.”
“Understood. You remember Big Jimmy’s club? That’s his old building.”
“I remember his name but I was never in the club.”
“Famous guy, Jimmy Van Ort, maybe seven feet tall, wore a fedora and a vest with a gold pocket watch and chain, best known black man in Albany. One of his ancestors had been a servant to the Good Patroon. Jimmy bet fifty on a number one morning, around 1936, and hit it. In the afternoon he rolled over his payoff on another number and he hit that. He won like eleven thousand, a fortune in ’36. My father wrote Jimmy’s bet.”
Quinn had heard the story eleven thousand times from George Quinn: how news of Jimmy’s hit spread so quickly George insisted on a bodyguard to deliver the winnings. And there came George through the swinging screen doors of Big Jimmy’s—small stage to the right of the doors with an upright piano and jazz till sunrise, where Cody first played when he came to Albany, and, to the left, a room where a card game went on and on. George carried a suitcase and had his cousin with him, Timmy Ryan, a uniformed cop from the Second Precinct. George put the suitcase on the bar.
“You want to count it, Jimmy?”
“What do you think, Georgie?”
“I think you want to count it.”
“You count it.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
George opened the suitcase on the bar, and he sang:“Put your feet on the barroom shelf,
Open the bottle and help yourself.”
He dumped the cash and counted it for Jimmy just as he’d counted it for Joe Marcello before packing it. After the final dollar Jimmy said, “Take fifty for yourself, Georgie.”
“Fifty?”
“Yowsah, man, fifty. You the fella brought the luck. You the fella bringin’ the loot. Take a hundred.”
“A hundred?”
“Take two hundred.”
“Two hundred,” George said. “A nice round figure. Like one of my old girlfriends.”
“Biggest tip my father ever got,” Quinn said. “With his commission for writing Jimmy’s winning play, plus the tip, he made fourteen hundred bucks—all in one day in 1936, a lousy year for the world, but not for Jimmy or George. Jimmy told his bartender, ‘Give Georgie and his friend a drink. The party starts right now. Free beer at Big Jimmy’s for three days and three nights.’ It was like Mardi Gras, a miracle in The Gut, Big Jimmy’s as a shrine to that great corporal work of mercy—give strong drink to the thirsty. My father ordered a small beer.”
Quinn paused.
“Tremont was around for all that, little kid, eight, nine years old. Big Jimmy was his father. Big dad. Big, big dad.”
“Tremont had something to live up to,” Matt said.
“And he put himself out there. Spiffy duds, like his old man. And gutsy, doing that poll watching.”
“I get a kick out of Tremont,” Matt said. “I first saw him sitting on a pile of timbers with a couple of guys, passing the wine. I had my collar on and he says, ‘How you doin’, Monsignor?’ ‘Hey, I’m a bishop,’ I told him, and he said, ‘Yeah, and I’m a senator.’ ‘Senator,’ I say, ‘you wanna go to a meeting? They’re serving soda and cookies at Better Streets over at the church. Eat enough cookies you get to stay alive to drink another day.’ Story short, he shows up with Mary. She’s sober but just bones.”
Tremont came to the meeting in a pink shirt, red tie, double-breasted tan suitcoat with baggy brown slacks, brown and white wingtips, and a brown, jauntily cocked fedora. The suitcoat had major wine stains and the shoes were all but gone, but Matt saw that Tremont was a dude with ambition. Even the limp that came from a badly healed shrapnel wound he’d turned into a strut.
He was living then in his father’s old house with Mary and Peanut, their seven-year-old, whom Tremont had found naked in a vacant lot when he wasn’t a year old, his mother propped against a wall. “Didn’t even have no diaper,” Tremont said. And the mother told him, “You want that little ol’ thing you can have him.” So Tremont took the infant home to Mary, and Peanut grew up as a mascot for the wino crowd, a wild boy who didn’t function in school; but when Mary got the diarrhea Peanut found money somewhere for her Kaopectate.
Quinn and Matt saw Tremont horizontal on the stoop of the house, windows and doors boarded up. Tremont had gotten himself up to the top step but then, with neither the tools nor the strength to pull the boards off the door, he collapsed. He was wearing only his trousers, his shirt, socks and shoes beside him, his coat rolled into a pillow. His legs dangled through the wrought iron railing and a portable radio blared at his ear, Johnny Cash singing about Folsom prison. Rosie, the last whore on Dongan Avenue, wearing her uniform—short skirt and tight sweater—was in a folding chair on the stoop next door, her windows boarded but not her door.
“Back in business, Rosie?” Quinn asked.
“Can’t do business here no more.” She winked at him. “They cut off my water and took down the power line. Gonna knock all the houses down pretty soon.” She winked again. “I just came to get somethin’ and I see Tremont layin’ there and I wonder, anybody gonna help this man? If nobody was I’d of found somebody, but Claudia said somebody’s comin’.”
“Very neighborly, Rosie.”
“I know Tremont thirty years,” she said. “I tended bar for his father. But he’s so sore you can’t even touch him. I tried. He can’t keep his shoes on. I give him my radio and put that coat under his head, but he can’t move. He is a most sorry man.”
“Is that true, Tremont?” Quinn asked as he climbed the steps.
Tremont made a sound in his throat.
“You can’t talk?” Quinn asked.
“Hurts.”
“What happened, you get hit by a car? Somebody beat on you?”
“No . . .” he said slowly, “I got that new-ritis . . . and some of the old-ritis. Pain goes with them ritises. Got the pain all over.”
Tremont’s facial muscles were out of control and Quinn remembered him that way months ago. An emergency room doctor diagnosed it as peripheral neuritis, from acute alcoholism, pain so severe that clothing became a punishment. Tremont stopped drinking and found day work but then the County took away the welfare check for Peanut because of Tremont’s link to Better Streets; and Mary began drinking toward the grave. Tremont told Quinn: “I saw her on the street once and she was kissin’ a friend of mine and I swore I ain’t never gonna talk to that man again.” Then Peanut ran off forever and Mary came home to bleed on the mattress, rising only to drink the dregs.
“Woman,” Tremont said to her, “you’re in the bed.”
“I know, Tremont.”
“You know what that means?”
“I know.”
Tremont kept sober for her wake and the long wait at the bus station for her relatives, who never came. He sat in the house until the caked blood and the odor of rotten food drove him out. He slept in the bus station until the weather changed, or so he told Claudia when he showed up at Better Streets for cookies. But they no longer did cookies.
“You look god-awful, Tremont,” Claudia told him.
“Could be,” he said. “I ain’t seen myself lately.”
“I’ll call somebody, get you into that rehab.”
“Sure,” he said. He walked out of the meeting and the next Claudia heard he was on the stoop.
Matt came up the steps. “Hey, Tremont,” he said. “It’s the Bishop. We’re taking you to the hospital.”
Tremont almost smiled. “Okay, Bish,” he said. “Got the ’ritis. Bottle of wine’d cut the pain. They say I’ll die from the wine, but the pain won’t even let me go get the wine to kill myself.”
“Lift him,” Quinn said.
“He gonna scream,” Rosie said.
“Gotta do it,” Quinn said, and they lifted Tremont by the legs and armpits and Rosie was right, he screamed, and as they carried him down the steps he cried. Rosie opened the car door and they stretched him out on the backseat. Rosie went for his
clothes and put the rolled coat under his head.
“So long, Tree honey,” she said.
Tremont writhed as the car moved, and with every jolt came a yelp, a moan. “Where we goin’?”
“Memorial Hospital,” Quinn said. “Do somethin’ for your pain.”
“I can’t stay there.”
“Yes you can.”
“You don’t know,” Tremont said. “I got a guy after me.”
“What guy?”
“Bad mother.”
“Are you talking drugs?”
“No, man. We go to the hospital you gotta stay with me. He finds out I’m there he’ll be comin’ for me.”
“Who will?”
“Zuki. He was talkin’ guns, shootin’ people.”
“What people?”
“Took me out shootin’. Wanted to see how I do. He heard the army give me those sharpshooter badges. Wanted me to shoot somebody.”
“Shoot who?”
Tremont didn’t answer.
“Who is this Zuki? He have another name?”
“No.”
“Is he black?”
“Brown.”
“Who’d he want you to shoot?”
“Talked about a landlord owns bad houses.”
“Shoot a landlord for his bad houses?”
“That’s what he say. Then he say the landlord’s gonna kill Claudia’cause she makes trouble for everybody.”
“He name this landlord?”
“Never said no names. But killin’ Claudia, that wasn’t real.”
“Who was real?”
“Can’t say.”
“You gotta say, Tremont.”
“He’ll come after me. He say this is important, and if I goof out he’ll find me, and I won’t like what happens.”
“We’ll get you protection.”
“From who, the cops? Cops’ll put me in jail forever. All Zuki’s gotta say is I was gonna shoot a politician.”
“You were?”
“That’s what he was talkin’. I told him I needed money to eat and he give me a few and said he’d see me in the mornin’. But I drank two days on that money and I ain’t seen Zuki since. When I got the pain I went to the house to lay down but I couldn’t get inside.”
“Who was the politician?”
“Can’t say.”
“This is crazy, Tremont. You can’t keep this secret if you want protection. Who was it?”
Tremont said nothing.
“Was it Bobby Kennedy? He was coming to Albany next week but they shot him last night in Los Angeles.”
“They shot Bobby? Who did?”
“Some guy nobody knows.”
“I wouldn’t shoot Bobby Kennedy.”
“Who would you shoot?”
“Wouldn’t shoot nobody.”
“Tremont, who was it?”
Tremont said nothing.
“Tremont.”
“Zuki talkin’ about the Mayor.”
“The Mayor? Alex Fitzgibbon?”
“Yeah.” Tremont was moaning.
“Where did you meet this Zuki?”
“He came into the Brothers and talked to Roy. I was there. He say ‘Let’s go have a drink,’ and I said why not and we went down to Dorsey’s.”
“Who is he? What does he do?”
“He say he’s in college.”
“Which college?”
“Didn’t say.”
“Does Roy know about shooting the Mayor?”
“Roy don’t know none of it.”
“How do you know that?”
“Zuki said nobody knows. Nobody. Him and me the only ones know. And now you-all.”
“Zuki say why he wanted to shoot the Mayor?”
“Called him a fascist fuckhead dictator. Said he’s no good.”
“You think the Mayor’s no good?”
“He ain’t done much for me, but that ain’t a reason to shoot him.”
“How’d you leave it when he gave you the money?”
“I said I’d eat somethin’ and meet him in the mornin’ at Chloe’s Diner. But I drank two days, maybe three, and then you come and got me.”
“How come Zuki didn’t go to the house to see you?”
“Zuki don’t know nothin’ about me and that house.”
“Who do you think Zuki’s working for?”
“I dunno, but he’s a bad ass.”
“What kind of gun was it?”
“AR-15 What they had in Vietnam. I never shot one of those.”
“Zuki say where you’d be when you shot the Mayor?”
“On a hill out in the mountains. Every day the Mayor goes out to see the old political boss, Patsy McCall. Sit up on that hill you got a clear shot when he gets outa the car.”
“Zuki would take you out there?”
“He talked about it.”
“What about the getaway?
“A car waitin’. Go down the other side of the mountain before anybody know where the shot came from.”
“Did you buy that?”
“You get down to the bottom of that mountain they be waitin’ for you with the Third Army.”
“But you didn’t say that to Zuki.”
“Just took the gun and said I’d see him tomorrow.”
“Where’s the gun now?”
“In a locker down at the bus station, in a black bag.”
“A black bag.”
“Yeah. Ain’t that how it goes?”
“That’s how it goes.”
“Where’s the key to the locker?”
“In my pocket.”
Tremont heard about Roy through Quinn’s story in 1965 of his one-man picket line. Roy had come to the Laborers Union every morning for six weeks but never got a day’s work from Carmine Fiore, who ran the shapeup. On the morning that a white stranger showed up and was hired, Roy painted his sign: CARMINE FIORE IS A RACIST, and walked with it.
Quinn interviewed Roy as he picketed and when the Times Union story came out the next day four black men joined Roy’s picket line and Tremont was the first of the four. Twenty more joined the day after that, including Baron Roland, who taught the history course Roy was taking at Albany City College. The unofficial title of Roland’s course was “Social Justice, an Oxymoron.” Roy and his fellow picketers were all so full of fire and grievance that Roland suggested they organize to face down racism. The strength to do this, he assured them, would grow out of their collective anger, and more would join them, for black power was in the air. Within two months the Brothers existed three-dozen strong, picketing unions and city hall, speaking at churches, joining peace marches, giving slum tours to the press and the clergy, and, in the spirit of Claudia Johnson, dumping cockroaches on the desks of slumlords.
The Brothers took on the aura of the Black Panthers, America’s badass militants. They disavowed Panther talk of killing white cops, but they loved Malcolm more than Martin, and when Malcolm came to town they sat with him in the gallery of the Senate chamber. When Stokely came he visited the Brothers’ storefront and said riots in Newark and Detroit were an unavoidable movement toward urban guerrilla war. Roy Mason, who spoke cogently and without rant as coordinator of the Brothers, clarified the group’s position. “No, we’re not Stokely, and we don’t advocate violence. But we don’t advocate nonviolence either.”
Tremont spent less time with the Brothers and more time going with his wife to meetings of Better Streets. As Election Day 1967 approached, the Brothers accumulated enough signatures to put one of their own, Ben Jones, on the Liberal Party ticket for alderman of the Third Ward. They announced plans to picket polling places to urge blacks not to sell their vote. Roy tried to register as a poll watcher in the Third Ward but it had already been assigned to Tremont Van Ort of Better Streets. “I’ll help him out,” said Roy.
Roy was alone on the corner of Westerlo and Green streets at 5:45 on the clear, twenty-four-degree morning of Election Day when Quinn and Matt Daugherty arrived in Quinn’s car. Cardboard si
gns with POLLING PLACE had been nailed to telephone poles on the block, and one was pasted onto the window of Tony Romildo’s storefront clubroom, where old-timers who couldn’t speak English gathered to drink coffee and grappa. Store lights were on and men were moving a table. One man saw the group outside and came out. He was a white-haired pudge with a facial flush and razor nicks.
“You people here to vote?”
“We’re waiting for a friend,” Matt said.
“Tremont Van Ort,” Roy said. “He’s your poll watcher today.”
“You’re all waiting for a poll watcher?”
“I’m from the Times Union,” Quinn said. “I’m doing an all-day story on the election.”
“We don’t need any poll watchers. What are you gonna watch, people pullin’ the lever?”
“That’s it,” Roy said. “See it’s done the way it’s supposed to be.”
Another man came to the door.
“They’re poll watchers,” the first said.
“Listen,” said the second, “I’m a Republican and I been livin’ in this ward forty years and I never saw anything down here that wasn’t legit.”
“I run this district,” the first said. “Anything funny I’d hear of it. Nothing at all. Nothing.”
“Then it’ll probably be a nice, quiet day,” Roy said.
“Here comes Tremont,” Matt said.
The two politicians watched Tremont approach with his game-legged strut. Gloria was with him, carrying two paper bags, and Tremont wore the new white shirt and blue tie Claudia bought for his big day at the polls.
“You’re the poll watcher?” the first man asked Tremont.
“Yes, sir,” Tremont said.
“Go home. There’s nothing to watch.”
“I got credentials to give to the man in charge.”
“That’s me,” the man said. “Fred Malloy, president of this ward.”
“Can we go inside?” Gloria asked. She pulled open the clubroom door and set the bags on an empty table. Quinn followed and asked her, “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”
“School? You think I’d miss this for school? Show him your credentials, Tremont.” Tremont handed his accreditation to Malloy and Gloria said, “Here’s his list of duties from the attorney general. Check that the voting machine counter is set at zero, check the voting machine curtains. There’s more.” She offered the paper to Malloy, who didn’t take it.