Exile on Bridge Street (28 page)

“Business brings us togetha,” Vaccarelli says with half-lowered eyes like some prof ligate salesman. “And Cat'olicism, too, right?”

But Dinny is not buying, and every once in a while he looks over to me, the sense of obligation and restraint on his face. Looks at me as if he'd rather be down by the docks working in the wind and the weather by the belly of a steamship. Fighting off others.

“Things is changin',” Vaccarelli says happily. “Glad to see all o' us can come togetha wit' our similarities instead o' our diff'rences. We got big plans, right? Lotta money to be made an' ya know what? We'll hit soon. Hit 'em ha'd. Shut t'ings down in the New York Ha'bor. Then they'll listen to you'n me, won't they? Won't they?”

Dinny nods.

When we leave and head south, I look to Dinny, “Are we going to be all right, Dinny?”

He smiles cautiously, then looks over to me, “You'll be all right, especially when we get ya ma an' sisters over here.”

On the corner of Barrow and Hudson, as we are entering Mr. Lynch's saloon, a man with a great jowly beard surrounded by five other men are together walking out.

“Hello, sir,” Dinny takes off his cap to the man, who grumpily looks up.

“What can I do fer ye?” says the old man.

“This is William Garrihy,” Dinny introduces me. “He's a Clareman.”

“Well, that's no surprise,” says the man.

“We're here to make our donation, from Brooklyn.”

“Well,” the man stammers, looks around at us all. “We do appreciate it. We're in it together though, aren't we?”

Then he walks off with his men and in we go where Mr. Lynch comes from behind the bar to greet Dinny with a big handshake. Mr. Lynch is so tall that he almost meets The Swede in height, who grimaces every time he has to shake someone's hand.

“How are ye, bhoy?” Mr. Lynch says to me. “I see ye got yer wits back.”

“I'm fine,” I say. “I have another letter for my mother.”

“Well lemme have'r, bhoy and we'll send 'er right off then. Good seein' ye, man,” he says to Dinny, avoiding his name. “Heard about Tanner.”

Dinny shrugs.

“Ye saw the man as he was leaving?” Mr. Lynch says, pointing toward the door.

“Yes,” Dinny said.

“The bhoy get to meet 'em?”

“Yeah, he did.”

“Who was that man?” I ask.

“Well, bhoy,” Mr. Lynch booms, then bends down for a whisper. “None other than John Devoy in the flesh. Old-time Fenian and head o' Clan na Gael himself!”

“The legend himself?” I say, looking out the window.

“Yer fadder ever speak o' the man, did he?” Mr. Lynch asks.

“As if he were alongside Brigid, Columba, and the Twelve Apostles,” I say quickly.

Mr. Lynch laughs and crosses himself jovially, his wife Honora and young boy James smiling from the doorway adjacent the bar.

CHAPTER 24

Dinosaurs and Fire

W
INTER
, 1917–1918

I
DIDN
'
T
KNOW
IT
,
BUT
THE
long shadows that brought in the autumn of 1917 were to be an omen. A sign to us before a great calamity, like a terrible mist seen coming over a mountain bringing famine on the crops, disease. Again we were attacked by an abstract force that can't be challenged. Can't be beaten back or outmaneuvered. The winter that followed would last a year and a half, or so it seemed. I'd been so excited by those shadows when they first came, but had no idea the change they brought would have such devastating ways about it.

October and November of 1917 quickly bring below-freezing weather, and the cobalt skies shake out sugar snows of powdered ice shimmering down to our lowly Brooklyn. Beat McGarry and other old timers pull up memories of the blizzard of 1888 and all the children lost to it. The winds that yank south off the water and into Bridge Street knock hats off heads, careening and tumbling uphill past Plymouth and Water Streets. The icy, aching belly of the great Manhattan Bridge above us groaning to its ore in the stinging air.

Everything is in short supply and we can't blame anything but the war and the winter, which aren't really enemies we can take on. Although we can't fix our anger upon any one group for the shortages, we can see that the invisible hand of the owning classes suddenly becomes protective of its own survival. Food prices since the war began went up, but nowhere near as high as they've gone recently. The price of fruit has doubled and vegetables are almost completely absent from the grocers' shelves. Chicken is so expensive, rich folk in Crown Heights and other wealthy neighborhoods have it shipped directly to their homes, undermining the market. Flour is in short supply too—a staple for cheap bread. But the government is able to buy up large supplies at regular prices as they're first in line, and with that right they send great amounts of it to Europe to feed that insatiable war machine.

The worst of it is coal. Absent from many New York City rooms altogether as it hasn't been absent since before the turn of the century. When in December a ship was accidentally rammed by a tugboat, 40,000 tons of it was given to the East River to have. Much of that coal, however, was bound for the Navy Yard behind its great wall, guarded by armed soldiers with bayonets round the clock.

A couple years earlier, farmers had been invited down to the city to sell their goods directly to the people, cutting out the grocers' profit. These markets were wildly popular in Irishtown and harkened back to the old days. But in the winter of 1917 and early 1918, it is too cold for traveling from upstate and there isn't enough yield anyhow. In any case, bankers and the powerful use this as an example that the market itself must fix pricing issues, which is their official way of excluding the needy. As often happens, since the beginning of time, it's the poorest and the hungriest and the coldest suffer the most when the resources dry up. And the enemies of the owning class too, which is most certainly the gangs that live by their own codes along the neighborhoods abutted by piers and docks.

When a newspaper boy in the neighborhood has to have the tip of his nose cut off due to standing outside too long, everyone in our neighborhood demands to know what is going to be done about the lack of coal and food. Over many months, the weakest of us succumb to the elements. Newborns are born to malnourished mothers and soon enough they both perish in their freezing beds. The old, too, found dead and stiff in their heatless rooms. And when the government and the rich turn their backs to the poor, the poor turn to the likes of Dinny Meehan.

But as is always the case, there is great danger in assuming the role of helping the poor and needy. One morning at the The Lark and Big Dick's terminal at the end of Baltic Street, Dinny and Vincent and Lumpy walk through the labor line picking men when three shots are sent into the air. Again Dinny has survived an attempt on him. With nothing more than a flesh wound through his underarm and back, Dinny never seeks medical attention whatsoever. The two men that shot at him are dragged away and it is thought they are starkers hired by the New York Dock Company or a shipping company or something, but that is not the case. It is found the two would-be murderers had been recently paroled from Sing Sing and knew Pickles Leighton. Sometime later one of the men is found in a lot between buildings on York Street dead three days at least and stuck to the grass with grub worms and maggots and larva inching out from his eyeballs and the open wound in his neck. I never heard what happened to the other.

With a lack of food and warmth, people become more and more desperate. For an entire month Harry Reynolds is held in the Poplar Street Jail after he was fingered for stabbing a man in the kidney at the Atlantic Terminal. The man was unaware of how things were run on the Brooklyn docks and assumed he could take control of the laborers on his own, charge them tribute for his own gain. After getting poked with a shiv, the man was given directions to the Long Island College Hospital a few blocks away by a group of laughing longshoremen. It was there he told Brosnan and Culkin that it was Reynolds did it, but by the time the hearing comes around the man has disappeared. Or been disappeared by something. Dead Reilly just shrugging toward the magistrate as twenty of us sit in the court gallery sneering with moue mouths in the dim light and woody pews of law.

One morning after getting the signal from the Chelsea Hotel where King Joe of the ILA resides, Dinny tells us that we aren't going to work in Brooklyn today and instead, we're going to the waterfront to make sure no one works at all. For three days we stand around with our smoking breath and talk to ship captains and crew, trying to keep warm by barrel and bonfires. When a group of scabs supported by the police, among other brutes, show up on the waterfront to work, it's our job to run them off with cudgels and pipes. This is a job we are very good at, of course, and within twenty minutes over one hundred men are dispersed, clutching their heads and elbows in pain.

“Is it almost over?” I remember a captain asking us about the strike.

“One dollar an' twenny cents raise per hour, and it'll all be over,” Dinny says, repeating the slogan of the ILA as if he only half-believes it.

Within the week an agreement is made and every longshoreman in Brooklyn and those we struck with in Manhattan and New Jersey get their raise. The production of war materials is just too important and although Wolcott and the Waterfront Assembly got involved, even they knew it was not their day. Even in their minds, the American war industry needs to continue unabated and the port of New York being of such great importance in supplying it, concessions have to be made to the workers. World economic power is shifting from the old world to the new world, with every bomb paid for by England and France's coffers happily pocketed by American industry. But Wolcott and the Waterfront Assembly would not forget what we'd done. The Anglo-American ascendency would never forgive it either.

With the victory, the International Longshoremen's Association has officially claimed leadership of New York's port union, and the communist wobblies are put aside. The ship owners lost. T. V. O'Connor, president of the ILA, and King Joe, who runs New York City, are household names now, whether you think them heroes of the working man, or seditious anti-American exploiters of war. Board members of the Waterfront Assembly and the editorial pages are filled with opinions about the waterfront strike and the Irish longshoremen “that'd be happier if Germany won the war against England.” But only the most liberal of people ever associate the strike with the destitution of the poor, as it would only conjure up “support for the red factions.”

In reality, none of us know much about the revolution in Russia at all, but the rich certainly do. And they use it to create an ever-greater divide between them and us. Rich and poor. They see it as a challenge to their way of life and everywhere around them they point to signs of their being overthrown by the communist savages. Even though we are not communists, and have no capability of overthrowing the rich, they press their fears upon us in the newspapers. All the while King Joe constantly berates and speaks out against communism; no matter, he's painted with a sweeping brush as “a socialist red at heart,” by none other than Jonathan G. Wolcott, who is given lots of space in the newspapers for his ideas.

We didn't know it at the time, but what we were really fighting for was the creation of a middle class. Or at least that's what it mostly turned out to be. A semblance of security, food, and warmth, instead of dependence on an untouchable, invisible, plutocratic elite above. Our battling to reach the middle and have security is something to this very day that I am so very proud of. Yet again, though, our fight is not appreciated in textbooks and the court of general opinion, as hardly anyone associates the unions and their courageous battle against power as fighting the good fight.

I didn't even know The Swede could read, but there he is right in front of me, sitting at the window ledge by Dinny's desk with a newspaper covering his face.

“People start believin' this shit the more they hear it,” The Swede says aloud, reading a quote from a ship owner, a board member of Wolcott's Waterfront Assembly. “Listen to this . . . ‘Those unions and the gangs that support them in the New York ports are going to go the way of the dinosaurs. I'll make sure of it. You can't hold the country hostage when we're at war with evil. Are those boys supporters of the Central Powers or just plain Bolsheviks? Take your pick.'”

Dinny listens, then asks which company that ship owner is from.

“Everybody's readin' this shit,” The Swede says.

That night, over at the Fulton Ferry Landing, Cinders Connolly, and a few others board a ship with three barrels of gasoline. We pull up heavy hawsers from the mooring bollards and throw them into the water, where a tug drags it out to the center of the East River as it slowly catches ablaze for all to see, cargo included.

“Look how beautyful it is,” Cinders says, fire in his eyes. With the Brooklyn Bridge towers to the right and stretching toward the great city skyline in the background, and with the frigid city folk attracted to fire like flies to light, the blaze is there for all to witness. Like an old portrait, the ship twists in the water from its internal injuries and tilts sideways as embers crackle in the night and vaporize with a serpent's hiss into smoke when enveloped by the water. Turning and turning portside into death and left as soot and cinders floating downriver. When gone, and again the brumal night takes its place dark and humming in the distance, and the smell of fire-burned winter all round us, we turn back into our neighborhoods. But for as long as we rule the waterfront, never again do we read a quote like that from a ship owner, no.

It is a bitter holiday season that year, and Harry and I spend much of Christmas day on the second floor below my future room, patching up the gaping hole in the flooring. The Burke family lives below me, and the father is a small fellow named Thomas, maybe twenty-five years of age.

“Not been a thing in that fireplace all winter,” he says, looking up to Harry standing on a wooden ladder as I hand him slabs of wood to repair the ceiling above, which is also my floor. “Except for the dining table an' chairs, that is.”

I look round their kitchen and remember the table the eldest child used to sit at, though it's now missing. The child is stricken with some sort of debilitation and sits now in the lone chair in the parlor while all the others stand.

“Do you think he's gonna raise the rent?” Burke asks. “Fix somethin' in here and that's what they do.”

“He raises it, we'll talk wit' 'em,” Harry says.

“He'll raise it all right.”

“Yeah? What's the landlord's name?”

“You don' know it?”

Harry looks down to me, but I shrug.

“Nah.”

“Vandeleurs, but I've never seen 'em. He lives somewhere else—Connecticut, I think. Two big guys show up on the first o' the month, inspect the place, and take the rent. When they see that ceiling . . .” Burke trails off.

“You workin'?” Harry asks without looking down to him.

“I can do anythin' asked,” Burke says, reeling off his experience as if he were in an interview.

“I was just wonderin',” Harry says.

“Well, if you have any inroads, I'd appreciate it. Can't find steady work in any place,” Burke says.

Harry looks down toward the parlor where the boy stares and groans, his mother speaking to him in warm, sweet tones even as we can see her cold breath in the room. But he does not respond like a normal boy. He stares into the distance and smacks his lips while his mother rubs her hand up and down his arms to keep the cold off him. She kisses him and holds his head, then looks toward Harry and I.

“Come down to the Atlantic Terminal tomorrow, 5 a.m., we'll see if ya can work.”

Burke smiles, and sure enough he shows thirty minutes early next morn with a big grin on him. A few days later I run some messages to the Atlantic Terminal.

“Hello, neighbor,” Burke says to me, hand extended.

“Hello.”

“I wanted to thank you for the opportunity—best thing that's happened to us in a long time.”

“Well it's Harry that you should thank.”

He smiles and back to work he goes in the tightness of the freezing weather.

Having descended on the city as if a blessing to our enemy, the constant cold wears us down. Into the bones and joints of our hips and shoulders, as if turning us to glass on the inside while they, looking down from above, sit in their warmth and watch us slowly deteriorate by the forces they see as being sent by god to teach us a lesson. A calamity which Wolcott and all those landowners and executives in Brooklyn of the Waterfront Assembly have every capability of mitigating, but instead we get their wrath. The wrath of them is, of course, as always, to ignore the suffering. Ignore. The harshness being a callous disregard for humanity. Overlooking the needy. Rejecting not by overt action, but by evasion. Forgetfulness, even. That is their wrath. The deliberate dragging of feet in assistance, if assistance is given at all. Creating a vacuum between help given and help received by a great and extensive bureaucratic blockade. And although we all know that the pitiful assistance offered to us cannot help even a small amount of people, it is still considered assistance and therefore frees up the owning classes from a thorough criticism of true neglect.