On the Waterfront (8 page)

In the bar, the same old arguments, the same old bull, the same old aimless talk, the ball games and the fights and which stevedore official was the biggest S.O.B. and whether or not Flat-top Karger would get his old hiring-boss spot back when he got out of the can.

“Come on over, have a shot,” Sonny beckoned.

Terry waved them aside and went on into the backroom. The backroom was just an old, stale rectangle with the boxers and the ballplayers and the horses and a few broads on the wall—art studies—and some pictures of the big shots (from Johnny Friendly up) arm-in-arming one another. There was a touching picture of Johnny right in there with International president Willie Givens, Tom McGovern and the Mayor of Bohegan, snapped on the joyous occasion of the last testimonial dinner for Willie, an annual affair given by the Willie Givens Association, with a list of sponsors featuring everybody of importance from the Mayor and the political bosses to Murder Inc.’s Jerry Benasio, who brought business efficiency to murder. Politicians, shipowners and racketeers, that was the axis on the waterfront. They gave beautiful testimonial dinners. Each year Weeping Willie thanked them with a voice full of tears and whiskey and heartfelt clichés.

The principal piece of furniture in the room was a pool table, which served Johnny Friendly as both a desk and a playground. Pool was his game and though he lost money easily (“It’s only money,” a favorite phrase) he lost this game of skill with great reluctance and would badger the victor until he had evened the score, then play again and again until his superiority was there for all to see. Competitive. Wanting to beat everybody at everything. That’s what had made him so big on the docks.

The television was on in the backroom too and everybody was watching with one eye because the other eye was on Johnny. This was Friday, payday on the pier and the paynight in Friendly’s Bar where the take was cut up among the henchmen who called themselves the union officers. All over the harbor the locals were paying off tonight, on Staten Island, along the East River and out in the Benasio country of Brooklyn, a stack of blue chips for the loyal favorites, a piece of the pilferage and the horse money and the short-gang gimmick (hire sixteen men for the work of twenty-two and pad the payroll with ghosts). All over the harbor it was paynight and the boys had their hands and their tongues out. Johnny Friendly was a big man all week, and could tell Willie Givens what to do and carry out the unwritten, unspoken orders of Tom McGovern, but bigger tonight because now the loot was in the hand and he dealt with realities, was moving around the backroom with the authority and dignity and bad manners of an old-fashioned king.

Jimmy Powers was narrating on the television, building up a guy who shouldn’t have been up there. “He’s being beaten to the punch but he’s always dangerous, he’s got a lethal right hand,” the comment interrupted the fight.

Johnny Friendly laughed. “Lethal shit,” he said. “The kid’s nothing.”

Terry was in the room, just inside the door, in a mood, looking at all of them. Jocko, the big-faced bartender, poked his head in the door.

“Hey, boss, Packy wants another one on the cuff-o.”

Packy was an old longshoreman and ex-con, helpful in a minor way until the sauce got him.

“Give it to ’im,” Johnny waved Jocko out. He was always generous in public and he was nearly so in private. If you were able to accept his way of life without question, he was rather an exemplary character.

Big Mac came up to the pool table with a wad of bills. He didn’t say anything because it was just a routine pay-in, the cut from the shape-up, five days, 850 men paying Big Mac two to five bucks a day for the privilege of being thumbed in over some other guys. Better than ten thousand dollars. Two piers. And Johnny had a third opening up any minute. Big Mac lingered and Johnny knew there was something on his mind. Johnny took him into the cubicle washroom, the inner sanctum for the business that even the Johnny Friendly boys didn’t have to hear. Johnny had a general’s sense of security.

Big Mac, a material witness in a couple of local murders, including the Andy Collins job, a man with a hard jaw encased in the fat of easy living, put his mouth close to Johnny’s ear.

“We got a banana boat comin’ in at B tomorra, the
Maria Cristal
from Panama. I was just wonderin’. Them bananas go bad in a hurry.”

Big Mac looked at Johnny, waiting for the word go. What he meant was a work stoppage. You dream up some labor grievance—the company is using its own men to speed the unloading—any handy gimmick, and then you pull the men off and leave the bananas to rot. In twenty-four hours the banana people—the ones who contracted to buy ’em are the ones who get stuck—are singing yes we have no bananas. Then Big Mac whispers to them he can get the men to call off the strike for a consideration—some bills slipped into an envelope like it was Christmas. They had worked it with tulip bulbs from Holland last spring and shook the Dutch uncles down for 25G in cold cash. There’s a fortune in tulip bulbs and 25G is a small price to get them into America before they rot in the hold.

“Okay, ask ten G,” Johnny said. “But be sure you don’t pull the men out without a good reason. Be sure it looks legit. So I c’n bull the press how we’re fighting for the rights of our men.”

“I got ya, boss,” Big Mac said. “I don’t think we’ll have no trouble. That banana outfit aint got no guts.”

They came back into the big room and the television fight was still on. “Solari’s hanging on,” Jimmy Powers was saying. “Riley had him hurt, but he can’t seem to finish him off. Only thirty seconds now. Solari has him tied up, the referee can hardly get them apart. They’re both pretty tired boys.”

“Aah, turn it off,” Johnny said. “Them clowns can’t fight. There’s nobody tough any more.”

He said it in a roar, looking around to challenge everybody, and the goons and the runners and the pier bosses and the shylocks and the gambling concessionaires and the stooges with big titles all nodded. Terry was standing there by the door, not coming in or throwing a few friendly hooks at his chums as he usually did. Johnny saw him and grinned.

“There he is! You could of licked ’em both with one hand tied behind ya.” He put his thick arms around Terry’s chest and lifted him off the ground with affection. Then he fell into a favorite gag, cowering as if afraid he was about to be felled by a terrible punch. “Don’t hit me. Don’t hit me now! “ Usually Terry was glad to go along with the gag, pleased at all this attention from the big man of the neighborhood. But this time he hung limp in Johnny’s arms and he didn’t feint at him and fall into the byplay as he had been in the habit of doing.

Johnny lost interest in the kid. After all, he was around mostly for laughs and as a little pay-off on the oldtime boxing skills, and he looked around for one of his shylocks, keeping in his mind all the transactions and aware that one of the loan sharks had yet to turn in his yield for the week.

“Where’s Morgan? Where’s that big banker of mine?”

Morgan, a waterfront Uriah Heep, who looked like something dredged up out of the foul waters of the slip, came forward. He was on his feet but he seemed to be crawling.

“Right here, Mr. Friendly.”

“Well ‘J.P.,’ how’s business?” Johnny said.

“I’m havin’ trouble with Kelly again, boss,” “J.P.” recited his complaint with reproachful side glances at Big Mac. “He won’t take no loans and Big Mac keeps putting him to work anyway.”

“I got to put him to work. He’s my wife’s nephew,” Big Mac insisted.

“But he won’t take no loans.” “J.P.” was bold when Johnny was here to keep Big Mac off him.

“I got to give him work. You know my wife. She’d murder me.”

Johnny Friendly laughed. “That’s why I stay single.”

Big Mac glared at “J.P.” He liked to run the pier a little bit the way he, Big Mac, felt like running it and he was sick and tired of this little wormy “J.P.” always running home to Johnny with his tattle-tales. “J.P.” reached into his crumpled gray suit for a worn wallet and took out a wad of bills. “Here’s the interest on the week, boss. Six-thirty-two.” “J.P.’s” take would be twenty per cent, around $125, nice pay for just nosing around into other people’s troubles.

Johnny handed the roll to Charley Malloy. “Here, count it. Countin’ makes me sleepy.”

Johnny liked to have his people checking up on one another. It was one of his ways.

Skins DeLacey, a checker on Pier B, a sharp-looking, dressy kid with a knack for not working, and a reputation for stealing from himself just to keep in practice, came in and presented himself to Johnny.

“Howja make out with the sheet tin?” Johnny asked softly.

“Lovely,” Skins said. “I wrote a lovely receipt if I do say so myself.”

“Stow the receipt. I’ll take the cash,” Johnny said.

Skins had the wad. “Forty-five bills.”

Johnny looked around for Terry. Terry was standing there glum, trying to think. He wanted to say something, but he didn’t know what to say, much less how to say it. He felt funny, like being down on the canvas without feeling any pain and yet unable to get up. That had happened to him the time McBride had knocked him out in Newark. His head was clear and he could hear the count and he felt he could get up and fight, but there was something cut off between his head and his legs and he was still down on his hands and knees at the count of ten.

“Here, Terry, you count this,” Johnny handed him Skins fistful of cash.

“Aw, Johnny …” Terry started to say.

“Go ahead,” Johnny ordered. “It’s good for you. Develops your mind.”

“What mind?” Big Mac dead-panned it.

Terry turned on him, relieved to find a target. “You’re not so funny tonight, fat man.”

Big Mac bellied up to Terry, ready with his hands. The kid was nothing, as far as he was concerned. Charley was smart and useful but he could see no point to Terry.

Johnny moved between them, and put his arm around Terry. “Back up, Mac, I like the kid. Remember the night he took Faralla at St. Nick’s? We won a bundle.” He dug a grateful fist into Terry’s still-boxer-toughened side. “Real tough. A big try.”

The blow and the talk and the headache Terry came in with threw him off his count. “I gotta start over,” he said.

Johnny laughed and slapped him on the back. “Skip it, Einstein. How come you never got no education, like your brother Charley?”

Charley looked particularly scholarly with his glasses on. He read a lot. He was proud of having finished
From Here to Eternity.
He liked books he thought were true to life.

Big Mac nodded toward Terry, out to get his goat. “The oney arithmetic he ever loined was hearin’ the referee count up to ten.”

It got some laughs and Terry was ready to bury a fisted right hand in Big Mac’s paunch. Johnny didn’t like roughhouse in the back room. This was a business room and Johnny never looked for unnecessary trouble. He had smoothed out a good deal with prosperity and Charley had helped to dress up the operation. Legitimatize it, Charley called it. He represented the local on the District Council and could sound more like an upright trade unionist than Reuther himself. Now Johnny pulled Terry away, blocking him off with his squat, authoritative body and asking his brain-man:

“What gives with our boy, Charley? He aint himself tonight.”

“It’s the Joey Doyle thing,” Charley spoke softly. “You know how he is. Things like that. He exaggerates them. Too much Marquis of Queensbury.”

Johnny pulled the kid toward him with hard-jaw affection.

“Listen, Terry boy, I’m a soft touch too. Ask any rummy on the dock if I’m not good for a fin anytime they put the arm on me. But my old lady raised us kids on a stinkin’ city pension. When I was sixteen I had to beg for work in the hold. I didn’t work my way up out of there for nuthin’.”

Terry knew the story. Johnny liked to recite it when he was feeling mellow and sometimes he struck back with it as an argument for doing whatever it was he wanted to do.

“I know, Johnny, I know,” Terry said, wishing he hadn’t opened this can of peas.

“Takin’ over this local, you know it took a little doin’,” Johnny went on with the self-righteous dramatics that always colored the old story. “Some pretty tough fellas were in the way.” Violently, he raised his head, stretching his bull neck taut to show the long, ragged, celebrated scar. “They left me
this
to remember them by.”

Charley nodded. “He was holding his throat to keep the blood in and still he chased them out into the street. Fisheye thought it was a dead man coming after him.”

Terry had been a kid when it happened. Fisheye Hennessy and Turkey Smith had the Bohegan piers in those days and Johnny had worked up to hatch boss. He was taking plenty and building up a following. Then one day he just walked into the office of the local, the little joint on the wharf, and when Fisheye came in he threw him out, into the scummy water of the slip, for all to see. “I’m the new president of Local 447,” he explained. That’s how union officers won elections on the waterfront. A few days later Hennessy came into the Friendly Bar (the Shamrock it was called in those days), and offered to shake hands with Johnny, but the hand had a knife palmed in it and in a flash Johnny’s neck was wide open like a jack-o’-lantern mouth. Ten days later the water-logged, fish-mutilated remains of Hennessy were brought to the surface with grappling hooks. Johnny was brought in as a material witness, along with Specs Flavin. But no one could be found to testify as an eye-witness, so they were released in a few days. Turkey Smith was found in the Jersey marsh about a year later. He had been eaten away by lime and looked more like an anthropological discovery than a recently departed member of the human race.

Terry knew the old story, chapter and verse. The rapid and thorough way Johnny Friendly had come to power on the docks of Bohegan had a mythical hold on the local imagination. As did the promptness with which President Willie Givens and the bunch of lushes he called his District Council recognized and embraced the new slate of officers for 447. Of course Willie Givens, the Communion breakfast star, old Weeping Willie, professed to blissful ignorance when anyone so much as suggested that his Bohegan local was manned by the wrongest bunch of trade unionists this side of Dannemora. It wasn’t his job to inquire too closely into the doings of the locals. He was a champion of local autonomy. As long as the locals paid their per capita to Willie and the International, Willie was all for their independence. With his twenty-five thousand annual and his unlimited expense account and his special fund for fighting subversives and his welfare fund and his gratuities from the shipping companies (Merry Christmas, Willie!) he could drink to his heart’s content and his liver’s distress at the Fleetwood Country Club with his good friend Tom McGovern while the Johnny Friendlys did the dirty work.
Takin’ over the local took a little doin’.
Terry knew the whole story, chapter and verse.