On the Waterfront (3 page)

Right now Johnny Friendly’s emotional state was pushing zero. His patience, of which he liked to think he had a great store, was all used up. That Doyle kid. That fresh-nosed little son-of-a-bitchin’ Doyle kid. Troublemaker. It seemed to run in the family. The uncle, Eddie, used to go around with petitions and stuff like that way back when the local was just getting started. Johnny had been a kid himself then. They had fixed Eddie Doyle’s wagon and roughed up Joey’s old man a little bit. Old man Doyle’s leg always stiffened up in the wintertime from where the bullet was. At least he seemed to have learned his lesson.

For years now he had gone along with the set-up, content to pick up his two three days and his forty fifty dollars a week. Always ready with a buck for the collection which went in (and quickly out of) 447’s welfare fund. Once in a while when some crumb forced a meeting of the local, Pop Doyle had the good sense to stay away. Pop was all right. Johnny Friendly didn’t mind him. But this wet-behind-the-ears pink-faced kid of his. Two years in the Navy and he comes out a regular sea lawyer: The constitution of the local calls for bi-monthly meetings. How do you like that, in the small print he finds bi-monthly. The kid has the nerve to actually go read the constitution. That’s the kind we can do without around here. Very nicely. Give me the guys who can’t read anything but a Racing Form and go get their load on after work. Peaceable citizens, that’s what we want around here. Well, we gave them their meeting. We called it on twenty-four-hours’ notice after posting it on the bulletin board here in the office. Sure the notice was on a scrap of paper one inch high but the constitution doesn’t say what kind of notice; it just says adequate notice must be given. I gave them their adequate. Only about fifty showed up. Fifty out of a possible fifteen hundred. And half of them was ours. You know, especially loyal members of 447. We all got elected for four more years. This Joey Doyle put up a squawk and Truck whose neck is as wide as some men’s shoulders, Truck had to take him outside and quiet him down. He’s a tough monkey, Joey Doyle. Doesn’t look it, but he’s there with the moxie and this trade-union bug has got him bad. Like his Uncle Eddie before him he’s hard to discourage. And then comes the clincher. The Governor’s got a bunch of stiffs he calls the State Crime Commission. A bunch of stuffed-shirt hypocrites who probably sponged it up good when they needed it. Now they get headlines about investigating waterfront crime. The Governor did plenty favors for Tom McGovern in his time, but it’s an election year and the Governor wants to score. First that clown Kefauver and then these jokers want to get in on the act. Well, of course, it’s for laughs. Who’s going to go blabbing to that bunch of striped-pants bums? Only we start hearing things about Joey Doyle. He’s been seen going in and out of the Court House where they sit around jacking off or whatever they do. I’m patient. On the District Council, ask anyone, they’ll tell you I’m one of the saner heads. I don’t go off half-cocked like my old pal Cockeye Hearn, God’ve mercy on his soul. You don’t see me going around giving it to them in broad daylight just because I don’t like the part in their hair. Cockeye down there in the Village had his good points and his partner Wally (Slicker) McGhee is still as quick a trick as you ever want to meet, but you have to be pretty stupid to blow somebody off the waterfront and wind up on the wrong end of the switch. Anyway, before I move Joey out of my way with muscle I look to con him out of my way with some soft soap. For that I’ve got Charley Malloy. Charley aint called the Gent for nothing. He’s got a lot better education than the rest of us got. He did two years in Fordham, believe it or no. And the reason he was bounced wasn’t because he wasn’t smart enough. He was a little too smart. Charley’s got brains to burn. He got caught selling examination answers, that’s all. Charley was always smart. Would’ve been a helluva lawyer. He can talk up a breeze like
That matter to which you have reference to which
and stuff like that. So I sent my trouble-shooter to my trouble-maker. Charley talks sense. He says he likes Joey and wants to help him, which he does. There might even be a place in the set-up for a bright kid like Joey. We don’t hold grudges. I’ve taken in plenty guys who started in bucking me. It shows they got spirit. I can use spirit. But when Charley wastes his best arguments and comes back with no dice and the scuttlebutt has the Doyle punk blowing his nose for the Crime Commission, which no respectable longshoreman would be caught dead in their company, what am I supposed to do, hang a medal on him? I worked too hard for what I got to frig around with a cheese-eater. Know what I mean?

So Johnny and Charley, a waterfront idea of suavity and culture, worked up a little plan. Its virtue lay in its simplicity. No telltale firearms, not even the usual splash in the river. In the office on the creaky floating dock on the river’s edge, Johnny went over the plans with Charley and Sonny and Specs, who were providing the muscle. Johnny wasn’t like a lot of the Irish mob, hit ’em first and think afterwards. He had been raised with a lot of Italians and he liked to do his jobs a little more in the Sicilian manner. A certain finesse. If you didn’t think there was an art to these things look at his friend Danny D. who lived in the big house on the Jersey heights. Danny D. had tradition behind him, generations of disciplined viciousness. It was in his heritage to be secretive and thorough and merciless and never to go back on his word. Johnny admired Danny D.

“Okay, Matooze,” he said to Charley, “go get the kid brother, put ’im to work.” Matooze was Johnny’s name for anybody he liked. Nobody knew where it came from or what it meant. All you had to know was you were in pretty good shape if he called you Matooze. But if he called you Shlagoom, then you better look out. Then you ship out or go to Baltimore or something. Charley had seen many a bum turn sickly white at the sound of that dark invention of a word
shlagoom.
Johnny followed Charley up the gangplank to the shore with his arm on his shoulder.

“You got enough padding in there for a football team,” he said to Charley approvingly. Charley was a very natty dresser. He had his overcoats made to order. He wore a camel’s hair that was really a beaut. It looked like it must have come off a very upper-class camel. And it fitted Charley a lot better than it ever fitted the camel. Johnny Friendly, he’d buy a hundred-and-fifty-dollar tailor-made suit and after twenty minutes it’d start to hang baggy on him like it was ready made. It had something to do with the bulk of his figure. Charley was on his way to a round belly too, from too much sitting around and the big bills he ran up at Cavanagh’s and Shor’s, and he was softer than Johnny, having always lived off his wits while Johnny started up the hard way and smartened up as he went along. But Charley’s clothes hung creased and neat on him, another reason for having picked up the affectionate billing Charley the Gent.

“Okay, Matooze,” Johnny said again. “I’ll be over at the joint.” That was the Friendly Bar, a little farther up River Street. Johnny’s brother-in-law Leo ran it for him. There was as much business done there as in the union office itself. The horse play and the numbers and a lot of the kickback and of course the loan sharking, that all went on in the bar. The back room was Johnny’s second home. He kept an apartment, but he only went there to sleep or jump a broad. He wasn’t much for home. He saw his mother had a nice home and he helped his two sisters get places of their own, put their husbands on as dues collectors and shylocks so they could make an easy living. But Johnny was raised in the streets and in the bars, and that’s where he felt at home even if he wasn’t much of a drinking man. Labatt’s Pale India Ale was his pleasure. He wanted to stay in this business and he had seen a lot of tough monkeys drink themselves down the drain.

Charley the Gent, in that dry, quiet way he had, said see ya Johnny, and then turned toward the row of tenements one block in from the river. It was a cool autumn evening and Charley liked the way the odds and ends of laundry fluttered on the lines. There was a maze of colored shirts and long underwear and panties and diapers and kids’ stuff. The poverty of the waterfront hung out for all to see, denims that had been washed hundreds of times, and pajamas scarred with darning patches and the dresses of little girls that had long since washed out their colors. The poverty of the waterfront hung out for all to see. But poverty comes in bright colors too, here and there a yellow towel, a red wool shirt, a pair of green-checked socks, the life of the poor, respectable, drunken, hard-working, lazy, cocky, defeated, well-connected, forsaken waterfront poor hung row on row across the steep canyons between the tenements. Charley looked up at the crowded clothesline and thought of all those wives doing all that washing, every day clothes piling up full of sweat and coffee dust and the sweepings of children with dirty streets for playgrounds and the soilings of infants, dirty clothes to soap and soak and rinse and hang out and pull in and iron and fold so they’d be ready to be dirtied again.

Suckers, Charley thought, for that was the form of his social thinking, suckers to take it day in and day out, but that’s the way it had to be, or at least the way it was. At the top of the heap the real bigs like Tom McGovern, in the middle guys like mayors and D.A.’s and judges and Willie Givens, the International president who sneezed every time Tom McGovern stood in a draft. A step below them the local movers like Johnny F., then the lieutenants such as himself, then the goons and the sharks, the small operators, below them the body of regulars, the longshoremen and checkers and truckers who played ball, who helped to work the pilferage trick, and finally on the bottom below the bottom, the men who shaped up without an
in,
who took their chances, kicked back when they got too hungry to hold out any longer, lived mostly on loan-shark money they had to pay back at ten per cent a week and got a piece of that $2.34 an hour only when a ship was calling for fifteen gangs and everybody was thumbed in to work except the worst of the bottle babies, the dead beats and the rebels.

Charley reached the entrance to the tenement he was headed for, a narrow, four-story building that had been thrown up sixty years earlier in a hasty effort to accommodate the influx when the new (now archaic) piers were built and bigtime shipping came to Bohegan. It was growing darker but a lot of kids were hollering up a stickball game in the street. On the stoop some of the older ones were idly watching. Old man Doyle was there, with a can of beer in his hand, more tired from the heavy work of the day than he’d admit, and with him, almost like a human appendage, was Runty Nolan, a jockey-sized, little gnome of a man barely five feet tall, with a face that had been hammered out of its original cast for thirty years of talking back. Not a young, up-to-date, Navy-wise, modern-trade-union-minded oppositionist like Joey Doyle but an incorrigible gadfly, a born needier, a party of one who fought Johnny Friendly in his own thick Irish way, by laughing at him, stinging him with humorous darts that were sharply defiant without quite provoking retaliation. Runty Nolan was like an old Navy man, perennially a seaman third, who knew by the book exactly how far he could push his Chief without risking court martial. A charter member of 447, in the days when Tom McGovern and Willie Givens were young dockwallopers working in the same gang, Runty in 1955 was exactly where he had been in 1915, a kind of self-appointed court jester of the docks, but too proud to serve a king, who accepted his beatings as part of a great joke he was playing on McGovern and Givens. “Those bums I knew ’em when they was glad to steal a chop off’n a meat truck,” he’d laugh, reading in the papers that McGovern had been appointed chairman of some kind of new port committee, or that Givens had just been voted twenty-five thousand a year for life plus expenses. “I wouldn’t pay the bum twenty-five cents,” he’d make a point of telling a Johnny Friendly supernumerary, knowing how the stooge would growl back at him for abusing the exalted president of the International Longshoremen’s Union.

Runty as usual had a comfortable load on, and Pop Doyle was enjoying his beer quietly, also as usual, a man whose gentle face was lined and hardened with the hard years, slightly stooped in the shoulders and back from thirty years of bending over the coffee bags and the heavy boxes, dreaming a long time ago of a better deal for the men on the docks, talking now and then on the third or fourth beer of Gompers and the stillborn hope of an honest-to-God union in the port, but tired now, his sweet wife under the ground and something of his manhood and nerve buried with her, content to sit on the stoop and let the beer make a cool river in his throat and chuckle at Runty Nolan’s sly barbs and jokes.

“Well, if it aint Brother Malloy,” Runty spoke up with the irrepressible laugh in his voice that years of heavy blows had failed to silence. Runty always made a point of calling every one of the Friendly boys “Brother” and it never failed to raise a laugh or a smile from the men, Runty Nolan’s own, ingenuous way of making clear for all to hear just what he thought of Friendly’s type of union brotherhood.

“Hello, boys,” Charley said affably. He couldn’t stand Runty Nolan, a soused-up wiseacre always looking for trouble and getting by with murder because he was small and somewhat comical. And Charley wasn’t made any happier at the sight of Pop. There was a quiet passive resistance to Pop that could be a little unnerving if you were a sensitive man. The trouble with me, Charley was thinking, I let this stuff get me. Eight years I’m with Johnny now and I still let it get me. I should be over in City Hall where I could get the loot with a lot less of the dirty work. Just go around kissing babies, of various ages, and pocketing mine. Some day. Some day, maybe he’d make Commissioner. Maybe even Police Commissioner. Like Friendly’s old chauffeur from the bootleg days, Donnelly. Donnelly was Commissioner of Public Safety now and doing very lovely. That was the way it went in Bohegan. Across the river in the big town it was a lot more complicated. A D.A. might enjoy the hospitality of Tom McGovern and go easy on the waterfront but he wasn’t an out and out goniff like Donnelly. Over here in Bohegan you had a chance. Charley looked at the old man, Doyle, whose son was the job Charley had been assigned to. Pop Doyle, Charley thought, how much hard work and grief was indelibly written into that sad Irish kisser. And now more grief. And Charley the Gent, a soft sensitive type except for an ineradicable stain of larceny in his heart, had to be its messenger.