Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (110 page)

It’s been so busy I’ve never really thought, Oh, I’d love to be this. But I never dreamt of being boss. I tried to influence the drivers to get better conditions for themselves. I participated as one of the leaders of the two biggest teamster strikes in the history of New York—1938 and 1947. In ‘38 we tied up the entire city of New York. We won conditions for the drivers, but I never enjoyed those conditions. Immediately following I was never able to get a job any more.
¹⁰⁰
That’s the way it went, but I don’t regret it. I’m proud of the fact that the drivers got those things. I don’t begrudge ’em. I wish they’d got ’em sooner, that’s all.

Only a few of ‘em enjoy it. That’s the sad part of it. It’s the same in medicine, same in everything. The wealthy, the ruling crowds, they enjoy all the things that workers produce. They’re greedy, they’re just like animals. I’ve seen dogs that they have just filled themselves and they couldn’t eat another bite, but they would not tolerate another animal comin’ near the food. The human animals, too, some of ’em are the same. No matter how much they have, they wouldn’t part with any of it and they wouldn’t let nobody else get it if they could help it.

I’m proud of my sons. They have principles and they have courage. We mustn’t put a stigma around a uniform. A postman delivers mail, and he can be a very kindly man and you have lots of respect for him. So why shouldn’t we respect a policeman or a fireman? But he must be the kind of man that justifies the respect of the people, that’s all.

 

POSTSCRIPT:
“I have a piece of land in New Jersey and now my boys are building their places on it for their children. I run up there on Friday and get the place tidied up. I like farmin’. I like to grow it and I like to eat it better.
(
Laughs.
)
When you get your corn, you never taste corn like that in the store. And you have your big red tomatoes come in and cabbage, and make sauerkraut. In the fall you can tomatoes and you can string beans and you make grape jelly and blackberry jelly. Now I put a pond in and I had fish
put in, and now wild birds come, and ducks and geese and swans and pheasant and all that. Deer come down and they drink out of the pond . . .

“Oh yeah, I work like hell on that. I work harder than I work on my elevator. Of course, you take pride. I go around to the fairs and I make comparisons of my vegetables with the others. I feel mine are just as good. Oh, I love it. I would have liked that—if I had been a boy. But I was city-bred. The children and the grandchildren are going up there and we have a hell of a good time.”
(
Laughs.
)

 

I got assigned to foot patrolman in Bedford-Stuyvesant. I never knew where Bedford-Stuyvesant was. I heard it was a low, poverty-stricken area, and it was a name that people feared. It’s black. Something like Harlem, even worse. Harlem was where colored people actually grew up. But Bedford-Stuyvesant is where colored people migrated from Harlem or from North Carolina. They were a tougher class of people.

Myself and two friends from the neighborhood went there. We packed a lunch because we never really ventured outside the neighborhood. We met that morning about six ’. We had to be in roll call by eight. We got there a quarter after six. We couldn’t believe it was so close. We laughed like hell because this is our neighborhood, more or less. We were like on the outskirts of our precinct. It was only ten minutes from my house.

When we got our orders, everybody said, “Oh wow, forget it.” One guy thought he was going there, we had to chase him up three stories to tell him we’re only kidding. He was ready to turn in his badge. Great fear, that was a danger area.

I was scared. Most people at Bedford-Stuyvesant were unemployed, mostly welfare, and they more or less didn’t care too much for the police. The tour I feared most was four to twelve on a Friday or Saturday night. I’m not a drinker, I never drank, but I’d stop off at a bar over here and have a few beers just to get keyed up enough to put up with the problems we knew we were gonna come up against.

I would argue face to face with these people that I knew had their problems, too. But it’s hard to use selective enforcement with ’em. Then get off at midnight and still feel nervous about it. And go for another few drinks and go home and I’d fall right to sleep. Two or three beers and I would calm down and feel like a husband again with the family at home.

I rode with a colored guy quite a few times. They would put you in a radio car and you’d be working with an old-timer. One of the calls we went on was a baby in convulsions, stopped breathing. The elevator was out of order and we ran up eight flights of stairs. This was a colored baby. It was blue. I had taken the baby from the aunt and my partner and I rushed down the stairs with the mother. In the radio car I gave the baby mouth to mouth resuscitation. The baby had regurgitated and started breathing again. The doctor at the hospital said whatever it was, we had gotten it up.

The sergeant wanted to write it up because of the problem we were having in the area. For a white cop doin’ what I did. But I didn’t want it. I said I would do it for anybody, regardless of black or white. They wrote it up and gave me a citation. The guys from the precinct was kidding me that I was now integrated. The mother had said she was willing to even change the baby’s name to Robert after what I did.

The guy I worked with had more time on the job than I did. When we went on a family dispute, he would do all the talking. I got the impression that they were more aggressive than we were, the people we were tryin’ to settle the dispute with. A husband and wife fight or a boyfriend and a husband. Most of the time you have to separate ’em. “You take the wife into the room and I’ll take the husband into the other room.” I looked up to my partner on the way he settled disputes. It was very quick and he knew what he was doing.

I’ve been shot. The only thing I haven’t been in Bedford-Stuyvesant is stabbed. I’ve been spit at. I’ve been hit with bottles, rocks, bricks, Molotov cocktails, cherry bombs in my eye . . . I’ve gotten in disputes where I’ve had 10-13s called on me. That would be to assist the patrolman on the corner. Called by black people to help me against other black people.

 

 

Fifty to seventy-five percent of our calls are for oxygen. I had people that were pronounced DOA by a doctor—dead on arrival. We have resuscitated them. I had brought him back. The man had lived for eight hours after I had brought him back. The doctor was flabbergasted. He had written letters on it and thought we were the greatest rescue team in New York City. We give oxygen until the arrival of the ambulance. Most of the time we beat the ambulance.

We set up a net for jumpers. We caught a person jumping from twenty-three stories in Manhattan. It musta looked like a postage stamp to him. We caught a girl from a high school four stories high. If it saves one life, it’s worth it, this net.

A young man was out on a ledge on a six-story building. He was a mental patient. We try to get a close friend to talk to him, a girl friend, a priest, a guy from the old baseball team . . . Then you start talkin’ to him. You talk to him as long as you can. A lot of times they kid and laugh with you—until you get too close. Then they’ll tell you, “Stop right where you are or I’ll jump.” You try to be his friend. Sometimes you take off the police shirt to make him believe you’re just a citizen. A lot of people don’t like the uniform.

You straddle the wall. You use a Morrissey belt, tie it around with a line your partner holds. Sometimes you jump from a ledge and come right up in front of the jumper to trap him. But a lot of times they’ll jump if they spot you. You try to be as cautious as possible. It’s a life . . .

Sometimes you have eleven jobs in one night. I had to shoot a vicious dog in the street. The kids would curse me for doin’ it. The dog was foaming at the mouth and snapping at everybody. We come behind him and put three bullets in his head. You want to get the kids outa there. He sees the cop shooting a dog, he’s not gonna like the cop.

We get some terrible collisions. The cars are absolutely like accordions. The first week we had a head-on collision on a parkway. I was just passing by when it happened and we jumped out. There were parents in there and a girl and a boy about six years old. I carried the girl out. She had no face. Then we carried out the parents. The father had lived until we jacked him out and he had collapsed. The whole family was DOA. It happens twenty-four hours a day. If emergency’s gonna be like this, I’d rather go back to Bedford-Stuyvesant.

The next day I read in the papers they were both boys, but had mod haircuts. You look across the breakfast table and see your son. My wife plenty times asked me, “How can you do that? How can you go under a train with a person that’s severed the legs off, come home and eat breakfast, and feel . . . ?” That’s what I’m waiting for: when I can go home and not feel anything for my family. See, I have to feel.

A patrolman will call you for a guy that’s DOA for a month. He hanged himself. I’m cuttin’ him down. You’re dancing to get out of the way of the maggots. I caught myself dancing in the middle of the livingroom, trying to get a ring off a DOA for a month, while the maggots are jumping all over my pants. I just put the damn pants on, brand-new, dry cleaned. I go back to the precinct and still itch and jump in the shower.

And to go under a train and the guy sealed his body to the wheel because of the heat from the third rail. And you know you’re gonna drop him into the bag. A sixteen-year-old kid gets his hand caught in a meat grinder. His hand was comin’ out in front. And he asks us not to tell his mother. A surgeon pukes on the job and tells you to do it.

One time we had a guy trapped between the platform and the train. His body was below, his head was above. He was talking to the doctor. He had a couple of kids home. In order to get him out we had to use a Z-bar, to jack the train away from the platform. The doctor said, “The minute you jack this train away from the platform, he’s gonna go.” He was talkin’ and smokin’ with us for about fifteen minutes. The minute we jacked, he was gone. (Snaps fingers.) I couldn’t believe I could snuff out life, just like that. We just jacked this thing away and his life. And to give him a cigarette before it happened was even worse.

While you’re en route to the job, to build yourself up, you say, This is part of the job that has to be done. Somebody’s gotta do it. After this, there couldn’t be nothing worse. No other job’s gonna be as bad as this one. And another job comes up worse. Eventually you get used to what you’re doin’.

Homicides are bad. I seen the medical examiner put his finger into seventeen knife wounds. I was holding the porto-light so he could see where his finger was going. Knuckle deep. And telling me, “It’s hit the bone, the bullet here, the knife wound through the neck.” I figure I’ve seen too much. Jeez, this is not for me. You wouldn’t believe it. Maybe I don’t believe it. Maybe it didn’t hit me yet.

I’m afraid that after seein’ so much of this I can come home and hear my kid in pain and not feel for him. So far it hasn’t happened. I hope to God it never happens. I hope to God I always feel. When my grandmother passed away a couple of months ago, I didn’t feel anything. I wonder, gee, is it happening to me?

One time a guy had shot up a cop in the hospital and threw the cop down the stairs and his wheel chair on top of him. He escaped with a bullet in him. He held up a tenement in Brownsville. They called us down at three’ in the morning, with bullet-proof vests and shotguns. I said to myself, This is something out of the movies. The captain had a blackboard. There’s eight of us and he gave each of us a job: “Two cover the back yard, you three cover the front, you three will have to secure the roof.”

This guy wasn’t gonna be taken alive. Frank and me will be the assault team to secure the roof. We’re loaded with shotguns and we’re gonna sneak in there. We met at four o‘clock in the morning. We’re goin’ up the back stairs. On the first stairway there was a German shepherd dog outside the doorway. The dog cowered in the corner, thank God. We went up three more stories. We secured the roof.

We could hear them assaulting in each apartment, trying to flush this guy out. He fled to the fire escape. As he was comin’ up, we told him to freeze, Tony, it was all over. He started to go back down. We radioed team one in the back yard. We heard shots. The rooftops had actually lit up. The assault man had fired twenty-seven bullets into this guy and he recovered. He’s still standing trial from what I heard. This was one of the jobs I felt, when I was goin’ up the stairs, should I give my wife a call? I felt like I had to call her.