Exile on Bridge Street (7 page)

“Nothing.”

“Good.”

“What do you think Dinny'll do to me?” I ask again.

“Let's go.”

CHAPTER 4

Faction Fight

U
NDER
THE
ECHOES
OF
THE
M
ANHATTAN
Bridge sits the Dock Loaders' Club at 25 Bridge Street. It is there among the factories on the water where tug-pulled freight-lighters with many train cars on floating docks connect to the freight rails dug into the Plymouth and Jay Street cobblestoned streets, the tracks curving through sidewalks and entering buildings through red-bricked archways. Below the reverberations of great bridges and among factories and smokestacks and industrial rail tracks along the waterfront is where we call home, the east-end of Irishtown in the exact same windswept neighborhood our ancestors landed a generation or two earlier.

The events of April 1916 both in Brooklyn and back home in Ireland give me to thinking the world a violent place where the poor are ignored, put to use in labor, or reviled for their plaints. Made to fight amongst themselves for the right to charge tribute like some underground, unknown struggle. As a great writer once said, in the enormous posterior of the cities of my day there were garbage piles where its hated poor brawl each other for a place in life in the lowest of hierarchies, like underneath the bridges in Brooklyn.

Upstairs at the Dock Loaders' Club, the young men of The White Hand are divvying up the day's tribute given them by laborers and ship captains and warehouse and pier house supers. Dividing the spoils for owning sway in the ignored and lawless waterfront.

Downstairs through the front entrance I am forced in by Tanner Smith and see sitting at the end of the bar closest to the door is Bill Lovett of Red Hook, who turns round with a mug in his hand and looks straight into my eyes with Frankie Byrne at his side. Gibney The Lark and Big Dick Morissey, both of the Baltic Terminal, are there, as well as “Cute” Charlie “Red” Donnelly of the Navy Yard, their backs and necks wide over the mahogany trough like beasts of burden watering themselves up.

There among the gruff men is the beautiful, golden-haired Mickey Kane. Leaning against the bar with a charismatic smile and perfect skin along with Lovett and Byrne, Mickey has the look of a chosen one. Tall and broad-shouldered with thick hands and powerful thighs, his being Dinny Meehan's cousin got him elevated in status quicker than the rest of us. Although he had always been known as “the fair scrapper,” Dinny made Lovett take him in as a regular down in Red Hook and, without anyone questioning it, Mickey provides Dinny with updates on Bill's comings and goings down at the furthest point from 25 Bridge Street and the southern-most territory of The White Hand.

In the bar where faces are only lit by the slow wick-flame in paraffin wax, there is a wash of names that come flooding through me as I see them. Picture them in my mind as I look back and search through the old memories in me. This story is about people. So many of them. So many stories I can't bear to exclude any. But looked at from afar it's easier to see them all. As a whole. Our struggle has always been ours to own. Ours to hide, even. They are a wash of names and faces that bubble up here and there, out of the foamy ocean chop of memory and story. Unrecognizable but for the desperate gasping for air before again the waves wash over them, awash in time. The Atlantic suck between Ireland and New York enveloping the remembrances of them to tragedy's isolation. The tragedy of shame proscribing these names and faces by their deaths at sea and the class from which a death at sea or a tenement childhood in Brooklyn castes them. But to look at them from afar, as I wish you to do now, they're easier to see. And even though they come from modest stock and of the lowliest peoples, from “the blood of serfs,” as it's been described, these men that raised me called themselves kings. The kings of Kings County. And so it is as kings their monikers describe them, such as “The King of the Pan Dance,” Dan “Dance” Gillen, whose blood was mixed together, African and Irish, and “The Craps King of Ballyhoo,” Chisel MaGuire in his old dusty top hat and coattails like some mid-nineteenth century immigrant. Even Dinny Meehan himself was called “king of a bunch o' low-breedin' diddicoys,” by old William Brosnan. So many of them ran with us though, like Frankie Byrne and his followers. And the old storyteller Beat McGarry who talks too much and sits next to the silent drunkard Ragtime Howard. Not to be forgetting the Minister of Education himself, who doubles as the Dock Loaders' Club bartender, Paddy Keenan. Then there's the hangers-on like the bony Needles Ferry, mumbling Johnny Mullen, the half-Italian “Dago Tom” Montague, best friends Eddie Hughes and Freddie Cuneen, the Simpson brothers, the mental case Garry Barry and his lone crony James Cleary, Happy Maloney, the limping Gimpy Kafferty, and Fred Honeybeck. Most are there, but Mick Gilligan is not, since he's dead by now, shot in the back of the head by young Richie Lonergan. Nor is the secretive dockboss of the Atlantic Terminal, Harry Reynolds, present, as he'd already beat the place upon receiving his take from the divvy, as usual.

Tanner pushes the back of my shoulder while the men look upon me gravely. As we pass I see Petey Behan and the other Lonergan boys sitting around a small table with half-drunk beers on it, eyeballs at the corners of heads staring daggers at me.

“How go it, Tanner?” the pavee fighter Tommy Tuohey says quickly while manning his post guarding the stairwell.

Tanner nods, then whispers to Tuohey, who runs upstairs, knocks, grunts something when the door opens, comes back downstairs, and throws a thumb over his shoulder to us. “G'on up.”

Vincent Maher opens the door, the grip of a .38 protruding from his belt, tight trousers clearly displaying his phallus lying to a side. A gallous dresser, Vincent is. Vest unbuttoned, belt unbuckled. Skinny and handsome and full-haired and ready, he comes out to the hallway with Tanner and myself and closes the door behind him.

“Listen, kid,” Vincent says. “I'm gonna give ya the terms. Listen. Shit's serious, a'right?”

“All right.”

“It's four months t'day McGowan is killed up in Sing Sing. We all know Lovett ordered it and Pickles Leighton got the screws to do it from the inside. We all know Lovett was behind it. Ain' no secret there. We might've won t'ings down here in Brooklyn, but on the inside we lost. Pickles is still up there now recruitin' guys in Sing Sing and when they get out, we don' even know who they are, got it?” Vincent says to me, wiping his nose with a knuckle in the dark stairwell, a lone small window running light over his shoulder as he speaks. “A man close to Dinny's heart, was McGowan, ya know? Damn close. It was a hard war we won before you even landed here. I don't blame it if ya don't appreciate it all the way, but I'm here to tell ya it was a struggle to get where we are now. I myself went to war right alongside McGowan when I was your age . . . your age! And the man was a fookin' soldier through to the heart of 'em. But lemme tell ya somethin', Dinny an' McGowan went way back. On the streets together, no help from nobody. So Dinny . . . he's been thinkin' a lot about McGowan t'day. About how close they was, them two. And you. You too. Dinny started gettin' close wit' ya, so when he heard ya lam'd it to Manhatt'n on ya own? On this day o' days? Naturally, he's got a bit o' the mopes. Lookin' back on his ol' friend. Who he went to battle wit'? McGowan? Then this? Understand?”

“I do.”

“Good, here's what I want ya to do. I want ya to shut ya hole when ya walk in there an' listen. Just listen's all. Can ya do that?”

“I can.”

“Thanks again, Tanner,” Vincent says, quickly moving the conversation toward him. “Ya hangin' out a bit?”

“For a while, yeah.”

“Right, ya heard anythin' about Thos Carmody, the ILA feller?” Vincent winks.

“Heard he's missin',” Tanner says. “Real shame.”

“Let's go,” Vincent says, pointing in my face. “An' you. Just keep it shut, you.”

As I pass through the door Vincent tightens his belt. But even back then I knew the face he had when violence was on the wing, and true enough, it was not there. I was safe.

In the office, the gang's chubby, idiot savant accountant Lumpy Gilchrist is slumping over his little desk in the corner, a cast of envelopes scattered about him and a broken pencil in his hand, unaware of my entrance entirely. The Fulton Ferry Landing and Jay Street Terminal dockboss Cinders Connolly, who I shared a cell with, has turned round from his chair across Dinny's desk and looks at me lamentably. Dinny Meehan too is looking at me, a parting in his mane just left of the center separates two broad clumps of dark brown hair, shorn over the ears tight. Not surprised somehow, his face is almost smiling with agility and reserve like a lion panting or a king of some sunken, nameless and ageless practice that has for so long been ignored that it almost never existed, if not for his sitting atop its throne right here in front of me, the crowned head of lowly laborers in King's County itself. Eyes alert more than anyone I've met, then or now, bright and guarded and knowing and being of a culture older than ours. Older than my own father's, or his father even. Stones for eyes, a green and pale fuchsite shine, translucent as if they aren't there at all. But staring at me. Noticing everything. Seeing all. Over his thick shoulders are the industrial, open-shuttered windows and the New York skyline with the two bridges crossing over the East River. He is staring at me from his desk and with the expanse of the city behind him too. I look away. Unable to hold his stare, I look over his shoulder again where he is perched to overlook the docks and bridges. Then look back at him again with his thick jaw revealing within its hard curve over the neck and his piercing stare a purity of law, for which he violently oversees, violently defends. A law that is as rare today as it is ancient and logical and respectful of free men. I know his ways because he had already explained them to me, yet I ignored them. Took them for granted.

I look away again, then look back up and nod to the tall, tow-haired man on his right, The Swede, whose arms are folded angrily. The Swede he is called, but is not Swedish at all but looks the part of one. He refuses to acknowledge my nodding toward him and instead cynically looks down to me.

Staring at me as well, Cinders Connolly stands away from the chair he was occupying. Walking from it without being asked and looking at me too, grimly.

“Don' go,” Dinny directs him while looking at myself, then nods for me to sit.

I do, gently.

Dinny tightens his tie although it is already flush on the collar, his hands large and muscular over the tiny knot and thin tie. He looks at me in a slightly pained squint. But just as he is about to speak, he stops. Stares. Watching me. Looking into me.

He is in the center of the room, Dinny Meehan. The center of all our lives. Surrounded like a mystical deity by men with the ability to do terrible things to others who threaten their leader. Lying about his very existence to outsiders in order to conceal him within the code. Inside our silence. Protecting our secrets from those who want us downed.

“Who's Dinny Meehan?” is the answer when someone asks about him. “Never heard o' the man. He live around here?”

Surrounding him, they do. Bad men, such as Tommy Tuohey guarding the stairwell downstairs, a man with a large build but handy with his fists due to his being bred from day one for gypsy boxing along the country boreens of Ireland. And Vincent Maher who guards the door to the second floor and who has no moral issue in both separating the virginity from a young female with his blood-filled cock as he does removing the life from a male with his snub-nosed, single-action revolver. And The Swede too, always at Dinny's right side by the window, a man freakishly tall and ugly and horse-faced, furiously paranoid and whose fist is as large as most men's faces and who has been known to punch the life out of people with a single looping and crushing swing, such as a Calabrian that stood up to him named Giovanni Buttacavoli, chronicled by the newspapers and word of mouth.

The three bodyguards stand watch around him while his dockbosses enforce his tribute along the waterfront docks, as has been done since their fathers and grandfathers arrived seventy years earlier. Dinny Meehan at the center. Nameless and faceless, if you ask about him. Yet seemingly always there at the center of our arrival and rule over Brooklyn longshore labor. He being our nous, embodying our intellect and knowledge, both a guide and creator even. A man whose reputation stands so far above the rest of us that some argue, such as Beat McGarry, that he is more than just a leader of labormen, but a man who saved Irishtown and the old ways from the waves of time and change that crashed across New York at the same moment he surged to power like sparse light from darkness, a countercurrent.

Staring at me, Dinny Meehan does. And even though he is protected by many, he is not fragile by any means. Looking at him is to feel it, and I can see that he is by far the fiercest fighter of them all. Wide-set eyes, muscular brows, broad jawline and shoulders with small ears and a tree-trunk neck—that of a mauling dog. Ever since he'd taken power on the docks in 1913, he has been challenged one on one to some fifty or sixty fights and still now, undefeated. Perfect. All knockouts, and with only cement or cobblestones or pier planks to catch his flaccid victims. Russian, Italian, Polish, Black, or Jew. Irish even. The biggest, rowdiest fighters Brooklyn could muster from any reach. Not one even lasting a full minute before Dinny comes to the inside of them, blasting through their bodies and eventually up through the face and jaw, the odds so much in his favor that no bets are even taken any longer. Staring at me. Through me, with his green-stoned eyes from his desk and me there, long and skinny and young and unknowing, I open my mouth.

“I just want to know about my family.”

“Little fuck,” Vincent mumbles. “I told ya to shut it.”