The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (165 page)

He heard a sound and set his sketchbook down on the floor. His aunt was talking, and he wondered how long she had been awake. He went into the sitting room, where he turned on a small reading lamp. She was rocking slowly, and he listened for a while to her mumbling.

“Black-eyed Susan,” she said, “Grace, Anna, Marigold, Pansy, Sarah . . .”

She had become smaller with age. In this lighting, however,
with dark blankets over her legs and embroidered pillows around her, she appeared stately if not strong. My grandfather sat at her feet like a child waiting for a story.

“Lady’s slipper, Rosehip, Faith, Zinnia, Cowbell,” she said.

He rested his head on her knee, and she stopped talking. She laid her hand on his head and kept it there, where it trembled with the constant palsy of old age. He began to fall asleep and, in fact, had dozed off when she woke him by saying, “Baby.” He half-opened his eyes without lifting his head, not sure what he had heard.

She repeated the word, again and again, in the same low tone as her strange, rambling lists.

“Baby, baby, baby,” she said, and in his distracted exhaustion, he misunderstood her. He believed that she was saying “Babette,” over and over. Of all the flowers and girls, he thought, it was this rich, painful name that she had finally settled on to repeat and repeat and repeat.

He closed his eyes. Even shut, they ached, as if somehow they had been forced to look on himself in sixty years: elderly and dying, calling to his daughters and his granddaughters, calling them all to him, calling them all Babette.

J
IMMY MORAN
was still very young—barely over forty—when he started having serious back pains. His family doctor told him that he probably needed an operation on a disc, and a second doctor (an expensive specialist) confirmed it. Both doctors agreed that Jimmy would need to take six months off from work. He would need to lie on his back and do absolutely nothing at all for six months, and only then would he have a chance at complete recovery.

“Six months!” Jimmy told the doctors. “I’m in the produce business, buddies! Are you kidding me?”

Six months! He made his doctors an offer of four months, which was still much more time than he could afford to lose. They finally came down to five months, but only grudgingly and with obvious disapproval. Even five months off was ridiculous. He’d never taken as much as a week away from the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market since he’d started working there as a loading porter, in the summer of 1970. Five months! He had a wife to support and so many kids at home that it was almost embarrassing to say the full number. But there was no getting
around any of this. His back was injured and he needed the surgery, so he went ahead with it. And here’s how they survived: his wife, Gina, took extra hours at her job; they emptied their small savings account; his brother Patrick gave them some money. Things were not as bad as they might have been.

As it turned out, Jimmy Moran ended up accomplishing two important things during his time away from the market. First of all, he bought a gorgeous 1956 blue Chrysler sedan, which was in great shape and drove like a luxury ocean liner. Gina didn’t agree with the investment, but they needed another car, and the Chrysler was a lot cheaper than anything new. Besides, he bought it off an old man in Pelham Bay who hadn’t taken the thing out of the garage for decades and had no idea what it was worth. Honestly, the car was a steal. It really was. Jimmy had always wanted a beautiful old car. He’d always felt that he
deserved
a beautiful old car, because he would appreciate it and take good care of it and when he drove around town he would wear a good-looking, old-fashioned kind of brimmed hat, just like his dad used to wear.

His second accomplishment was that he decided to run for president of his union local.

The current president of the Teamsters Local 418 was a guy named Joseph D. DiCello, who had the obvious advantage of being an incumbent
and
an Italian. Most of the union members at the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market were Italian, and if even half the Italians voted for DiCello, Jimmy Moran would get whipped like a bad dog, and he realized that completely. Jimmy, however, still believed that he had a chance to win. Reason being, Joseph D. DiCello was basically an idiot and a corrupted, useless fuck.

DiCello drove a big Bonneville and hadn’t successfully defended a worker’s grievance in six years. He barely even showed up at the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market at all anymore, and
when he did show up, he’d always be sure to bring some prostitute with him, picked up from around the gates outside. A Chinese prostitute, usually. DiCello would ask some tired, overworked porter, “Hey, kid? You like my wife? You like my new wife, kid?”

And the porter, naturally, would say something like “Sure, boss.”

Then DiCello would laugh at the poor guy, and even the Chinese prostitute would laugh at the poor guy. Therefore, and for numerous other reasons, people were basically getting sick of Joseph D. DiCello.

Jimmy Moran, on the other hand, was a well-liked person. The few Irish workers left at the market would vote for him out of instinct, and Jimmy got along with most of the Italians just fine. Why, he’d even married an Italian. His own kids were half Italian. He had no problems with Italians. He had no problems with the Portuguese, either, and did not think in any way that they were thieves by nature. He also had no problems with the blacks (unlike that sick bigot DiCello), and he was actually quite popular with the Hispanics. Jimmy had held many different jobs over the years at the market, but he’d recently been hired once again as a loading porter, which meant that he worked mostly with Dominicans and Puerto Ricans. Who were all very decent and fun-loving individuals, as far as Jimmy Moran could see.

When it came to the Mexican vote, this would also be no problem. The older Mexicans would remember that, years and years ago, Jimmy Moran had worked at the typically Mexican job of handling and packaging peppers. (And not those sweet Italian bell peppers, either, but pitiless Spanish peppers—jalapeños, poblanos, cayennes, chilies, Jamaican hots—fierce peppers that only Mexicans usually handled, because if a person didn’t know what he was doing, he could really get hurt. When a person got the oil from one of those peppers in his eye,
it honestly felt just like getting
punched
in the eye.) Although pepper-handling was easy on the back, it was no job for a white man, and Jimmy had quit doing it years and years ago. But he still got along fine with all the older Mexicans, and with most of the younger ones, too.

As for the Koreans, Jimmy had no experience with them. Neither did anybody else, though, so it really didn’t matter. It wasn’t like Joseph D. DiCello was best friend to the Koreans or anything. The Koreans were strange people, and you could just forget about the Koreans. The Koreans had their own market within the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market, and they only sold to each other. They talked to each other in Korean, and besides, they weren’t even in the union.

There was another thing that Jimmy Moran had in his favor. He was actually a true union man, and not some phony local gangster’s kid like DiCello. He wasn’t even from the city. He was born in Virginia, and his people were real coal-mining people and honest-to-Christ workingmen. Back in Virginia, when Jimmy was only ten years old, he’d watched his grandfather overturn a company coal truck and empty a shotgun into the engine block during a workers’ strike. His uncle was murdered by company detectives, his other uncle died of black lung, his ancestors organized against U.S. Steel, and Jimmy Moran was a true workingman in a way that an affluent cheat like Joseph D. DiCello, for instance, could never be true in a thousand corrupted lifetimes.

Jimmy Moran gave his potential candidacy one evening’s thought. This was four months into his recovery from back surgery. He considered all the advantages and disadvantages of staging a campaign, which would be his first. Gina wouldn’t be nuts about the idea, but Jimmy’s back didn’t hurt anymore, he was the owner of a beautiful 1956 Chrysler, and he felt really, really capable. He couldn’t think of any reason that he—with his good labor background, his decent personality, and all the
different jobs he’d held at the market over the years—should not be the president of the union.

Yes, he gave his candidacy that one evening’s thought, and when he woke up the next morning, he was decided. Convicted, even. It was a great feeling. It was like waking up in love.

And so Jimmy Moran returned to the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market after only four months of recovery. His plan was to campaign for a few nights, and then come back to work officially. He arrived well after midnight, as the delivery trucks were pulling in to load up. When he came through the entrance gate, he stopped to talk with Bahiz, the Arab woman who checked identification cards. She was a fairly attractive woman, so everybody flirted with her. Also, she was the only woman who worked at the entire market, or at least as far as Jimmy Moran had ever noticed in nearly twenty-five years.

“Bahiz!” he said. “Who let you out of the harem?”

“Oh, Jeez. Jimmy’s back,” she said. She was chewing gum.

“‘Jimmy’s back!’” Jimmy repeated. “‘Jimmy’s
back!
’ Hey, don’t say anything about Jimmy’s
back
, sweetheart. You should say, ‘Jimmy Moran has
returned
.’ Jesus, I don’t want to talk about Jimmy’s
back
. You like my new car?”

“Very nice.”

“Guess what year it is.”

“I don’t know.”

“Just give it a guess.”

“I don’t know. Nineteen sixty-eight?”

“Are you kidding me?”

“What is it, ’sixty-six? How should I know?”

“Bahiz! It’s a ’fifty-six! It’s a ’fifty-six, Bahiz!”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Use your eyeballs for once, Bahiz.”

“How should I know? I can barely see it.”

“The ladies love it, sweetheart. I’ll take you for a drive sometime.
You never would’ve refused me all these years if I was driving a car this nice. Isn’t that right, Bahiz?”

“Oh, Jimmy. Just go to hell.”

“You got a dirty mouth, Bahiz. Listen. How about some figs?”

Sometimes Bahiz had the greatest figs with her. The dried figs that were widely available at the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market were mostly mission figs, from California. And after eating Bahiz’s figs, Jimmy Moran was certainly never going to eat any dried California mission figs again. Some of the better houses at the market carried imported Spanish figs, which were pretty nice, but they were expensive. Also, Spanish figs were kept packaged in plastic-wrapped crates, so it was almost impossible to steal just a handful for free sampling.

Bahiz, however, sometimes had the most incredible Israeli figs, and she would always give a few to Jimmy. Bahiz’s mother shipped the figs to her by air mail all the way from the Middle East, which was very expensive but worth it. It was a well-known fact that, throughout all of the entire history of mankind, Israeli figs have always been considered the most valuable figs in the world. Israeli figs taste like granulated honey. They have skins like thin caramels.

But Bahiz didn’t have any figs that night.

“Forget about you, Bahiz,” Jimmy Moran said. “You worthless old bat.”

“I hope somebody hits your dumb-ass car!” she said, and they both smiled at each other and waved good-bye.

Jimmy parked his car in front of Grafton Brothers, which was his most recent employer, one of the biggest wholesale houses in the market and a good place to start his campaign. Grafton Brothers was a very profitable house, and here was why: Salvi and John Grafton bought overripe produce with no shelf life for the lowest, giveaway prices. Then they hired porters to pick
through the produce—most of which was rotten—toss out the rotten stuff, and repack the rest of it. Grafton’s could triple its investment on a cheap shipment of vegetables while still underselling the rest of the market. It was practically a hoax.

Salvi and John Grafton might have gotten to be rich men this way, with big horse-racing farms down in Florida, but their wholesale empire still smelled like compost from all the ripe food they threw out, and there were more rats at Grafton’s than at any other house in the market. Grafton’s produce was garbage.

There were specialty houses at the market that took produce very seriously and sold only beautiful fruits and vegetables. There was a Russian Jew in the north docks who flew endive in every day from a small family farm in the middle of Belgium, and that was the finest endive in the
world
. There was a Filipino who sold blackberries in February for five dollars a pint
wholesale
, and buyers were happy to pay, because the blackberries were fantastic and it was worth it. Grafton’s was not such a house.

Jimmy Moran had worked for Grafton’s off and on over twenty-five years as a porter, a driver, a vegetable sorter, and in practically every other kind of job. The only thing was, he’d never been able to get any kind of desk job inside the barracks of Grafton’s offices. Office jobs at the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market were always a little harder to come by. There was a lot of competition and a lot of pressure, and it helped, apparently, to be good at math. In any case, Grafton Brothers had hundreds of dock employees, and Jimmy knew nearly all of them.