The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (167 page)

Jimmy Moran reached for a portobello mushroom, the biggest
one he’d ever seen. He wanted it so much, but just as his hand touched it he heard a growl like an animal’s. A huge and ugly man in overalls and a brown wool stocking cap was coming at him, exactly like a big dog.

Jimmy jumped back, startled, and Casper shoved him hard and shouted, “Get out! Get out!” Jimmy stumbled and fell backward out of the room, panicked. He fell through the plastic sheeting and landed hard on the concrete floor of the warehouse. Casper jumped out of the room after him, laughing and laughing.

Jimmy lay on his back on the cold floor and Casper said, “You’re safe out here, Jimmy boy. Old mushroom man never comes out of there. Christ, what a crazy fucker. Don’t touch the mushrooms, Jimmy. I should’ve told you don’t touch the goddamn mushrooms unless you have permission.”

On the floor, Jimmy tried to sit up, but his back spasmed, so he lay there for some time, willing his back to relax. Casper offered him a hand and Jimmy shook his head to refuse it.

“You okay, friend?” Casper said.

Jimmy nodded.

“Shit, you probably hurt your back. I forgot about your goddamn back. Jesus, I’m sorry.”

Jimmy nodded again.

“That’s a crazy fucker in there,” Casper said, and again offered Jimmy his hand. Jimmy took it this time and very gingerly stood up. Casper parted the plastic strips and said, “Just look in there at that fucker.”

Jimmy shook his head. He found that he was breathing very carefully.

“Come on. You don’t have to go in there. Just look at that huge guy. He won’t touch you if you leave the mushrooms alone. You got to take a good look at that guy.”

Casper continued to insist, so Jimmy finally did poke his
head into the refrigerated mushroom room cautiously. The man in the room was indeed huge, and he stood quietly in the center. He was wearing brown overalls and he had a long brown beard. His feet were placed apart and his hands hung loosely fisted. Jimmy Moran and the mushroom man looked at each other. And while the man did not growl again, and while the man did not make any kind of a move forward, Jimmy Moran withdrew his head very slowly and stepped away from the door. He and Casper walked back to Casper’s booth in the hallway.

Once they were out, Casper said, “The best mushrooms in the whole goddamn market.”

Jimmy sat down on a crate next to Casper’s booth and shut his eyes. His back was stiff. Sitting didn’t help, so he stood again.

“The owner hired that crazy fucker a few months ago,” Casper explained. “The guy used to be a trucker. He’s from somewhere like Texas, or nobody knows where. They’ve got some kind of an arrangement, him and the owners. The guy never leaves the room. I sit here night after night, Jimmy, and I’m telling you, that crazy fucker never leaves the room. Those mushrooms, Jimmy, are honestly the best goddamn mushrooms you will ever see. The owners used to have a problem with people stealing the mushrooms, see.”

“Jesus.”

“No more problems with stealing anymore. I’ll tell you that goddamn much. You plan on stealing these mushrooms, you gotta wrestle the big fella first.”

“You have aspirin?” Jimmy asked.

“No, but I’ll give you a cup of coffee, you pathetic bastard. Now get out of here, Jimmy. Feel better. Good luck on your election, even though I think you’re a crazy bastard for running and I think somebody’s probably going to put a bullet in your neck for you pretty soon. Now take your coffee and get out of
here. Hurry up, or everyone will think I’m giving the stuff away for free. Everyone will think I can’t even run my own goddamn business.”

Jimmy Moran walked slowly through the complicated and connecting parking lots to find his car. He swung his arms as he walked, trying to take the stiffness out of his back. He thought that he probably looked like an idiot doing this, but he didn’t care. As it turned out, he was walking along the back parking lot of the Korean market most of the time anyway, and he didn’t care what Koreans thought of how he looked. The Korean market was huge now. Jimmy Moran thought that someday the Koreans might take over the entire Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market, an idea he wasn’t crazy about in any way. The Koreans worked ridiculous hours and didn’t even have a union. They sold vegetables nobody had ever even heard of.

He was tired. During his four months off, he’d been keeping human hours for the first time in his adult life—asleep during the darkness and awake during the day—and he was not yet readjusted to being up in the middle of the night. It was nearly dawn. It took him almost an hour to get back to where he had parked, under a strong streetlight. His car did look beautiful. He loved his car. On this cloudy and damp night, under this big artificial beam of light, it looked like some kind of a sea animal—watery blue and powerful, with shimmering fins. The taillights looked like reflective decoy eyes.

He had a second sack of campaign buttons in the trunk of his car. His plan was to drive to the north side of the market and hand out buttons at some of the bigger commercial houses over there before everyone left for the day. He drove toward the north, passing the lines and lines of freight trucks all backed up against dark loading docks. The cabs of the trucks were dim and closed. The drivers, mostly Southerners like himself, slept inside on hidden mattresses while the porters loaded the freight.
Men pushed hand trucks loaded with crates and maneuvered along the narrow alleys between the big trucks. Sometimes the men would pause and give Jimmy Moran a thumbs-up gesture for his beautiful car. Sometimes they would come jogging across his path, concentrating on their destination, and he would nearly hit them.

Jimmy came upon a security guard he knew, patrolling a parking lot on foot. Low, thick diesel fumes reached up past the man’s knees, making it look like he was wading in mist. Jimmy stopped to talk. The guard was a friendly Polack from Jimmy’s own neighborhood named Paul Gadomski. Jimmy rolled down his window and Paul leaned against the Chrysler and lit a cigarette.

“What is this, a ’fifty-eight?” Paul asked.

“It’s a ’fifty-six, Pauly.”

“She’s a sweetheart.”

“Thanks. Have a button,” Jimmy said, and handed a campaign button out of the window.

“What’s this? You’re not running against DiCello?”

“I am,” Jimmy said. Christ, he was tired. “And I’d like to think I can count on your vote, Paul.”

“Hell, I’m not voting in your union, Jim. Get serious. I’m no teamster. I’m a cop.”

“
You
get serious, Pauly. You’re no cop, buddy.”

“Same thing.”

“Security guard?”

“Well, I’m damn sure no teamster.”

“I’d sure like it if you’d wear the button anyhow.”

“Hell, Jim. I can’t wear no teamster’s campaign button on my uniform.”

“Well, think it over, Pauly.”

“I’ll bring it home for my kid to play with,” Paul said. He put the button in his jacket pocket.

The two men, alone in a back parking lot, talked about
business. Paul said that when Jimmy was out for back surgery, there was a trucker who got his neck slit one night. Nobody had been arrested for it yet. Jimmy said he hadn’t heard about that. Paul said the corpse had been found underneath some other driver’s truck.
That
driver, some guy who was hauling bananas all the way up from Florida, claimed he didn’t know anything about any murder, so the police let him go. Paul couldn’t believe how gullible the cops were. Paul said the cops didn’t seem too interested in finding out what really happened that night. Jimmy said that it was almost always that way, because the cops were usually mobbed-up and corrupt like everyone else. Paul said he knew for a fact that the murdered guy had hit the Trifecta that very afternoon and had been bragging all night about making something like twenty grand. Paul said there was crazy bullshit all over the market for about a week, what with the cops sealing off areas and asking all the wrong questions. Jimmy said it sounded to him like the murder had been a fight over a parking spot, and he would be suspicious of the banana-truck driver from Florida. Jimmy recalled that the first year he’d ever worked at the market, he’d seen a guy beaten to death with a tire iron over a parking spot dispute. Jimmy had seen lots of parking spot disputes turn violent.

Paul said that it was just a bunch of fucking animals working at this place. Jimmy agreed, and the two men said good night.

Jimmy Moran drove on. He passed a handsome fleet of refrigerated supermarket trucks, loading in at Bennetti & Perke, the major corporate wholesaler that distributed to all the big Eastern seaboard supermarket chains. Jimmy didn’t know who owned Bennetti & Perke, but it was definitely a very, very rich man, who was probably asleep somewhere in a big house right on the ocean.

There was so much fortune being shuffled around every
night here at the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market, it was almost unbelievable. It would be unbelievable and unimaginable to those who had not seen the place at work. The hurricane fences and razor-wire coils and security floodlights gave the market the look of a prison, but it was certainly no prison, as Jimmy and everyone who had ever worked there knew. It was no prison. It was, actually, a
bank
.

When Jimmy Moran was just a young porter, he and his buddies had wasted a lot of time trying to figure out how to skim off some of that fortune. They’d wasted a lot of time trying to imagine how much money was passed around every night at the market. That was a young man’s game, of course. It was the old men who understood there was never a way to steal any real money unless you were already rich.

The summer earlier, Jimmy’s oldest son, Danny, had worked part-time at Grafton Brothers as a porter. Danny had tried in the same lazy way to figure out how much money was contained in the market and how to get his hands on it. Jimmy was aware of this. Danny also wanted to know how to steal it, how to hoist it, how to skim it. On their drive home together in the early morning, Danny would speculate aimlessly about money. Wouldn’t it be fantastic, Danny would say, to skim even one lousy cent off every pound of produce sold at the market in one night? How much money would that be a week? A month? A year? Wouldn’t it even be
fair
to be able to skim a little off the top? Considering how hard porters worked, and for such a shitty pay?

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jimmy would tell his son. “Just forget about it.”

“What about the Korean market?” Danny asked. “All their deals are in cash. You could just mug one of those guys and get a fortune. All those Korean guys are carrying around at least five grand all the time.”

“No, Danny. Nobody carries that kind of cash.”

“Koreans do. Koreans are scared of banks.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That’s what the truckers say.”

“Then you can be damn sure you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Of course it was ridiculous to think about stealing money from anybody here, because a lot of people carried guns and knives. People were always killing each other over
nothing
, just to pass the time. It was ridiculous to think about all the money other people made here. It would give you chest pains, just thinking about it.

Jimmy had meant to park at Bennetti & Perke. He’d thought it was a good place to hand out his second bag of campaign buttons, but now he wasn’t so sure. His back was really bothering him, and he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to carry the heavy sack. For that matter, he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to go back to work as a porter in just two days, as he was scheduled to. How was he supposed to haul crates of fruits and vegetables around? How was he supposed to do that? Honestly, how?

So Jimmy Moran drove on. It was after 5:30
A.M
., and his back was seriously hurting. He circled around Bennetti & Perke and then headed out of the market altogether. He would just go home. He would just forget about campaigning. As he drove, he thought for the first time in ages about his old friend Martin O’Ryan.

From March of 1981 to January of 1982, Jimmy had worked as a buyer on a trial basis for a discount greengrocery chain called Apple Paradise. It was a big opportunity for advancement, and his old friend Martin O’Ryan had gotten him the job. It was quite a promotion, to be taken off the docks and made a buyer.
Buyers got to work in offices up above the actual market, and buyers could really prosper.

Jimmy’s friend Martin O’Ryan had actually been very good at buying. He was a maniac at telephone deals, really fierce at negotiating with truckers, farmers, importers, and distributors for the best price. Martin made a lot of money for Apple Paradise and for himself that year.

“Whaddaya got?!” Martin would shout into the phone. “I need iceberg! . . . Twenty-five dollars? Fuck you, twenty-five dollars! I’ll take it for eighteen! . . . Give me eighteen or I’ll come over and burn down your motherfucking
house!
. . . Give me eighteen or I’ll rip your motherfucking
lungs
out! . . . Give me eighteen or I’ll
blind
you and I’ll personally come to your house myself and I will blind your—okay, I’ll take it for twenty.”

Then Martin would hang up the phone and start with someone else.

Martin O’Ryan and Jimmy Moran were put in the same office, at desks across from each other. They were best friends. Martin was the first friend Jimmy ever made when he came up from Virginia with his mom as a twelve-year-old hillbilly kid. Jimmy and Martin had started off as porters together and joined the union together and been to each other’s weddings. He loved Martin, but he couldn’t concentrate on his own telephone deals with Martin shouting across the room from him. (“Get me that truck of potatoes, you worthless fuck, you worthless, lying cocksucker fuckhole, or I’ll rape you personally
myself!
”)

Martin was the nicest guy in the world, but it was distracting. At the end of the year, Martin got a huge bonus and an official job for the company, and Jimmy did not. It worked out fine, in the end. Jimmy found another job quickly enough, working on the loading docks as a porter again.

Martin was honestly one of the nicest guys in the world, and
Martin and Jimmy loved each other, but they hadn’t seen each other for quite a while.