A Prayer for the City (29 page)

On Monday, October 5, there loomed a new deadline, this one set by the unions: a strike deadline of 12:01
A.M.
Tuesday, October 6, if there was no settlement.

Negotiations between the two sides went on all day Monday and deep into the night, but movement was still painfully slow. Hours would pass, and a few meager sentences of contract language would pass between the two sides. Then hours would pass again. During the marathon session, which had actually begun the day before, on Sunday, Cohen watched as the Vikings made a remarkable comeback against the Bears. While members of the media scurried about the Holiday Inn Midtown to capture what they believed to be a tense and taut drama, city negotiators played hearts
or caught up on magazines they hadn’t been able to get to at home or read
The Long Goodbye
by Raymond Chandler or bonded together as if at a bad frat party without girls, kegs, or stale potato chips. What the city proposed was rejected by the unions. What the unions proposed was rejected by the city.

“I’m inclined to think they don’t know what the hell they’re doing,” said Joe Torsella about the unions, and like others, he was leaning more and more to the view that there would still be a strike.

The mayor himself vacillated. Early Monday morning his mood was good, and with typical optimism, he still thought there was a fifty-fifty chance of a settlement. But as the hours ticked by and the updates from Cohen, while not entirely grim, also indicated that no real progress was being made on the remaining issues, he began to prepare for the worst and take steps to place the city on alert. A flyer had been circulated among city employees, telling them to congregate that night for a rally at Veterans Stadium, where the Eagles were playing the Dallas Cowboys on
Monday Night Football
, and to the mayor that only meant trouble. He met with Deputy Police Commissioner Seamon and told him to have police at all electrical and communication receptacles in the area of the stadium to guard against sabotage, as well as a dozen tow trucks in the area to be ready to counter any union attempt to play havoc with the traffic. “They should have the right to demonstrate,” said Rendell of the union workers, “but it should not be anywhere near ingresses or egresses. The last thing we want is anything near a bloodbath.”

“Any possibility of a settlement?” asked Seamon.

“Yeah, there’s a possibility, but it’s the kind of thing that won’t happen until a minute before the deadline. There’s all sorts of possibilities for violence before then.”

Questions were also raised about the accessibility of City Hall to various groups that had scheduled events in the Reception Room. A German American group had conveyed word that it was coming on Tuesday regardless of what was going on outside in terms of protests and picketers, but an Italian American group had no plans to be anywhere near the building—a chain of events that the mayor found utterly predictable.

“If they’re Germans, I would take them
seriously
,” said Rendell. “The Italians canceled, proving once again that they’re lovers, not fighters.”

Several hours later, in the afternoon, Cohen returned once again from the bargaining war room at the Holiday Inn and had little new to report. A press conference had been scheduled for 5:00
P.M.
, and as the two were
going over what Rendell should say, Cohen was handed a walkie-talkie by Sergeant Buchanico, presumably to use once the strike was on. He looked at it with total puzzlement, as if it were a foreign object, and Rendell immediately understood the source of Cohen’s apprehension. “Don’t you know Jews don’t know how to work instruments like that,” consoled the mayor. “It’s impossible. It’s not in our background.”

The sound of the clock atop the City Hall tower struck 5:00 as Rendell paced back and forth in his office by himself. He was taking deep breaths as he mouthed aloud what he would say at the press conference, making sure to remember Cohen’s admonitions about not saying anything about the status of the negotiations (it was so hard to remember
everything
David told him to do sometimes), pacing behind the desk, then back and forth across the Oriental carpet, then to the edge of the round table—no jokes, no temper tantrums, no asides, just the grim reality that a strike, a goddamn strike, was about to hit the city.

Rendell, Cohen, and press secretary Feeley left the mayor’s office and walked down the hall to the press conference, wing-tipped gunfighters in their dark suits. “There is a possibility that as of midnight tonight there will be a strike,” said the mayor with both hands on the podium at the front of the Reception Room. He was calm and somber, reflecting not simply the tenuousness of the situation but also a genuine sadness about who would lose the most and suffer the most. “What we’re fighting for here are the poorest ten or fifteen percent, because they simply have no alternative. Those who have the money to leave Philadelphia will.” And then, like virtually everyone else in the city, he could do nothing else but wait.

On the phone with Cohen a couple of hours later, he told him to convey a message to Sutton “to settle this fucking thing,” particularly after hearing that a mere 150 union protesters had showed up at Veterans Stadium even though the game was on national television. “If that’s the best they can do, they should settle.” He sat down to watch the game on the set in the console in the middle of the office while doing paperwork, proclaiming with gusto and enthusiasm “This baby is over!” when the Eagles forged ahead to a quick 7–0 lead, only to proclaim “Oops, that changes the whole complexion” minutes later, when the Dallas Cowboys’ Michael Irvin broke off a long gain on a reception. He then went out to the game, sitting in the first row of the mayor’s box with a plate piled high with chicken wings and macaroni salad that was immaculate by the time he left to return to the office forty-five minutes later. In moments of stress and anxiousness, the mayor liked nothing better than to eat and eat mightily—spaghetti,
popcorn, vats of ice cream. He wasn’t at that precipice when he left the game, but on his way back he called directory assistance for the number of the White Castle on South Broad, to make sure it was still open. The connection wasn’t great, and the operator hung up on him, making clear that in the eyes of the phone company it didn’t really matter whether you were the mayor or a major felon, but he got to White Castle anyway and ordered a ten-pack to go as a kind of reserve measure.

A half hour later, back in his office watching the game, he had eaten six of the burgers and was yelling “We get the ball! We get the ball!” as the Eagles recovered a Dallas fumble. Fifteen minutes later, at 11:15
P.M.
, forty-five minutes before the strike deadline and now eating a pear, he attempted to reach Cohen on his beeper. When Cohen didn’t respond right away, he thought something might be going on, a glimmer of hope. But he was wrong. The strike had started.

At five minutes past midnight, Rendell watched on television as the Channel 6 news showed union protesters shouting “Rendell, go to hell!” in a unison so wobbly and thin that Rendell himself laughed. At the same time Cohen was calling: Sutton wanted to talk.

At 12:15
A.M.
, while Rendell held an impromptu press conference as a ruse to occupy the media, Sutton and Street quietly slipped into his office. The mayor and Cohen arrived fifteen minutes later, and the four men sat at the round table in the office. By prior agreement, Rendell played the good cop and Cohen the bad one, which had the effect of making the mayor’s assurances to Sutton all the more holy and sacrosanct. When Rendell said he was willing to soften some of the language on management-rights issues, Cohen balked, but Rendell, as if on cue, quietly overruled him anyway. When it came to the issue of contracting out labor, the mayor promised not “to jam it down people’s throats.” He gave the same assurances on layoffs. But although he was willing to give some ground in these and other areas, he did not back down or waver on his basic contentions that the city must have the right to manage its workforce and that the unions must be held to some standard of accountability. “I’m not going to fuck you, I’m not going to lie to you,” he told Sutton, but “you gotta give us the right to manage.”

There was no yelling or histrionics during the meeting. Sutton, a decent and reasonable man, spent much of the time listening, and when he spoke, he was so quiet and self-effacing that he sounded like he was in church, whispering delicately to get someone’s attention halfway down the pew. He had walked into the meeting looking frail and furtive, his crane-like
features almost crumpled. When he left, at 2:20
A.M.
, he didn’t look much better. He was in an almost impossible situation, with the sway of public opinion, so masterfully shaped by Rendell, overwhelmingly against the unions.

At 2:50
A.M.
, Sutton called the mayor on behalf of District Council 47 and asked for a $5.7-million lump-sum payment. The mayor agreed to it. At 4:00
A.M.
, after fielding one more update call, Rendell made a little nest for himself in the middle of the Oriental carpet with some pillows that had been brought from home. He slept on and off until 7:00
A.M.
, when Cohen called with that schoolmarmish voice he sometimes got when he sensed that the mayor, contrary to Cohen’s specific instructions, had said more to the media during the course of the night than Cohen felt wise or appropriate. Rendell took a shower and put on a new white shirt, which one of his staffers crinkled a bit so it would look suitably rumpled, and purposely did not shave to add to the effect that he described as “not quite cinema verité.” He removed the little nest of pillows that he had slept on, but then he put it back, knowing that reporters would undoubtedly want to see it for their inevitable reconstructions.

By 8:00
A.M.
, the board of District Council 33 was meeting to accept or reject the proposed contract. “The longer this goes on, the more worried I become,” Rendell said a half hour later. But he was still in a good mood, still fantasizing about the tone he would use at the press conference announcing a contract settlement and how, regardless of the impulse, he would not gloat. But as minute after minute and then hour after hour ticked by, he became increasingly agitated. “Eleven fucking o’clock,” he muttered from his office, and then he yelled at no one in particular, “Let’s get it on!”

At noon, he received word from Cohen that the union bargaining agents were going crazy over the layoff and contracting-out provisions. “If they vote this down, there is no more negotiation!” he told Cohen. “We have bent over backward—bent over backward.”

Five minutes later he received word that the union was balking at the potential use of prison parolees to perform city labor and at changes in the disability provisions that would cut down on the ability of workers to double-dip. “The only thing disability hurts is the fucking slackers,” he yelled over the phone. “There is no decent worker that has anything to worry about.”

Seven minutes later he spoke with Cohen again.
“Let’s do the fucking
thing, let’s do it! Let’s get on with the strike, and let’s see what happens! That’s life! That’s life in the big city!”

Eight minutes later he received reports that an elderly man had been pushed to the pavement and injured by pickets outside City Hall while police at the scene had done nothing. In the Cabinet Room, he watched a tape of the incident supplied to him by one of the local television stations, and he expressed his reaction to a police inspector.
“I want them fired! Terrific performance by the Philadelphia Police Department! I want everybody who was out there fired! Did the Philadelphia Police take a dive because of the unions? This is fucking unbelievable! Is this America we are in? This is not supposed to happen to citizens of Philadelphia! We all pick our noses instead of being at the site! What the fuck are we doing? How the fuck did they not see that? I want them down here in forty-five minutes! This is a despicable performance by the Philadelphia PD! God fucking Christ!”

He said he wanted to see the top echelons of the police department as soon as possible. They arrived sheepishly in his office with the circumspection of cat burglars, hoping and praying not to be noticed, and sat for the most part in utter silence as the mayor paced behind his desk in a blind and teetering rage that went far beyond the diagnosis of wig out, approaching something otherworldly.

“These guys don’t do a bloody fucking thing! They don’t do shit, and I want them fired! I want them fired so the message gets out that no one in the police department takes a dive!”

One of the police officials tried to explain that no one had witnessed the incident.

“Oh wonderful, oh wonderful! What were they doing? Were they involved in street theater? Were they feeding the homeless? What the fuck were they doing? Fire them!”

Another police official tried once again to explain the circumstances of the situation.

Rendell took his chair and slammed it into the desk with all his might. And then, for the first time since learning of the incident, his voice lowered to a decibel level that if not quite reasonable, was somewhere close to it. And suddenly his mood changed, from livid to almost beseeching. “Maybe the city isn’t worth saving? Is there anybody else out there who cares but me? Is there anybody else? Am I just spitting into the wind? I don’t like having people call me names and dumping garbage on my lawn. If this is what my police officers do, why don’t I just fold?”

An hour later, at 2:30
P.M.
, he sat quietly at the desk of one of his secretaries in the outer office, spent and exhausted, still dwelling on the incident with the police, still waiting for a moment that seemed destined never to come, when he received word of something surreal. At first, when Kevin Feeley told him, he didn’t believe it, so he did what he always did when he needed certification.

“Is it true?” he asked Cohen over the phone, sounding both incredulous and slightly dazed, as if the whole thing were some prank.