The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (166 page)

Jimmy Moran walked along the Grafton Brothers docks, carrying on his back a heavy burlap sack filled with the campaign buttons he’d had made up the day before. The buttons said:
DICELLO’S NOT ON OUR SIDE, SO LET’S PUT HIM ON THE OUTSIDE. VOTE FOR JIMMY MORAN, PRESIDENT
. They were
huge buttons, each approximately the diameter of a grapefruit, with black lettering on a yellow background. He moved around the stacks of crates and the vegetable displays and the tractors, and he gave buttons to everybody and talked to everybody. He tried to speak as personally as possible.

He’d say, “Hey, Sammy! Your wife still cooking you those dinners?”

He’d say, “Hey, Len! You still taking all those naps?”

He’d say, “Hey, Sonny! You still work with that other crazy bastard?”

Passing out buttons, shaking hands, passing out buttons, shaking hands, passing out more buttons. Jimmy Moran felt really good. His back wasn’t bothering him at all. He felt rested and capable, and it took him several hours to get through Grafton’s.

He saw his old friend Herb talking to a young porter, and he said, “Hey, Herb! Who’s that, your new boyfriend?”

He saw a porter, not much older than his own son Danny, smoking marijuana behind a melon display, and he said, “Police! You’re under arrest, you dope!”

He saw his old friend Angelo playing cards on the back of a crate with some other guys and he said, “What is this, Angelo, a casino?”

Angelo and the others laughed. Everyone asked after his back and hoped he was feeling better. Jimmy Moran had always been popular at Grafton’s, and everyone was happy to see him back. He used to do a funny trick when he was working in the cucumber cooler there. He’d pretend to be a blind man. He would stare off into space and put his arms straight out and stumble around, bumping into everybody. He’d say, “I’m the blind vegetable man . . . Excuse me, sir, could you tell me where the cucumbers are?”

There was only one guy who never laughed at that trick, and that was a quiet and serious Haitian porter named Hector.
Jimmy got to the point where he would do the blind-vegetable-man trick only if Hector was around, trying to get Hector to laugh even once. Jimmy would stumble over Hector’s feet and feel up Hector’s face, and Hector would just stand there, with his arms crossed, not smiling. Eventually, Jimmy would quit it and say, “What is it with you, Hector? Maybe you’re the one that’s blind.”

“Where’s that Haitian guy Hector?” Jimmy asked his old friend Angelo. Jimmy’s sack of campaign buttons was already half empty. He felt the campaign was going well.

“Hector?” Angelo said. “Hector’s a distributor now.”

“Get out of here! Hector’s a
distributor?
”

“He’s in broccoli.”

“I go away for a few months and Hector’s suddenly a
distributor?
”

Jimmy headed down the Grafton docks to the huge warehouse coolers of broccoli, and, sure enough, there was Hector, in the distributor’s shack. Every individual cooler was as big as a furniture warehouse, so every cooler needed a distributor. The distributor’s job was to handle the charts and lists showing how much produce was in each cooler and how much produce was going out with each order. It was a pretty good job. If you were good at math, of course, it was a lot easier. Jimmy Moran had actually been hired as a carrot distributor for a few months once, but his friends the dockworkers were always joking around with him and distracting him from doing the job right, so that job didn’t work out for Jimmy, and he ended up having to find a porter’s job on the docks again.

Of course, the distributors worked on the docks, too. The only thing was, they got to work in little plywood shacks that looked like ice-fishing houses. The shacks had space heaters to fight the cold, and sometimes even had carpeting on the floor.

Hector was in the shack studying his charts, and there was another guy beside him, eating a hamburger.

“Hector!” Jimmy said. “Look at Señor Hector the distributor!”

Hector shook Jimmy’s hand through the window of the distributor’s shack. Centerfolds of nude black women hung on the wall behind him. Hector wasn’t even wearing a jacket in there, just a thin, cotton button-down shirt. A person could really stay warm in a distributor’s shack.

“How are things?” Jimmy asked.

“Not bad.”

“Who’s your friend?”

“This is Ed. He’s from the office.”

Ed and Jimmy shook hands.

“So, what are you fellas doing over here?” Jimmy asked. “Putting broccoli in small boxes and labeling it twenty-five pounds? What is this, some kind of hoax?”

Hector did not smile. Neither did Ed.

“Listen, Hector, I’m kidding! Listen, I’m running for president of the local.”

Jimmy slid two of his campaign buttons over to Hector. “There’s one button for each of you,” he said.

Hector read his button aloud with his funny accent: “
DICELLO’S NOT ON OUR SIDE, SO LET’S PUT HIM ON THE OUTSIDE. VOTE FOR JIMMY MORAN, PRESIDENT
.”

“You running against
DiCello?
” said the guy from the office named Ed.

“That’s right.”

Ed stared at Jimmy Moran for a long, long while. He chewed his hamburger in no particular hurry, swallowed, and said finally, “What are you trying to do?”

“What’s that?”

“Seriously. What are you trying to do? Get yourself killed?”

“Oh, come on now.”

“What do want? You want to wake up in the trunk of a car? Seriously.”

Jimmy Moran looked at Hector and shrugged comically. Hector didn’t smile, and Ed kept talking.

“What do you want?” he said. “You want to have your legs cut off?”

“I’m not afraid of Joey DiCello,” Jimmy said. “And I sure hope you two old boys aren’t afraid of him.”

“I sure the fuck am afraid of him,” Ed said.

“Joey DiCello has no reason to pick on a good guy like me. What do you think—he’ll kill me and leave all my kids with no dad? Forget about it.”

Ed slid the campaign button back through the window to Jimmy. “You can keep your button, friend.”

“Vote for me, and things will really change around here.”

Hector still said nothing, but Ed asked, “You got a wife?”

“Yes, I do.”

“You hate her so much you want to make her a widow? Seriously. Is that it?”

“Well, I’m not fighting with y’all about it,” Jimmy said. “I don’t fight with people who don’t know what’s good for them.”

Jimmy threw his sack of campaign buttons up over his shoulder and walked on down the docks.

“We vote for DiCello here!” Hector called after him. “We’re not stupid!”

“The hell with you, then!” Jimmy called back cheerfully.

Then Jimmy Moran stole a few beautiful Haitian mangos from a fruit display and dropped them into his jacket pocket. Jimmy had learned from Hispanics that Haitian mangos are the best for eating by hand, because their flesh is not stringy. Grafton’s didn’t usually have good fruit, but these were exceptional, gorgeous mangos, with minty green skins just turning a soft banana yellow. There were guys who had worked in the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market for years and never tasted a fresh vegetable or fruit in their lives. It was sad, really. These were guys who would
all die of heart attacks at fifty because they ate beef and bacon every day instead of the fruits and vegetables that were all over the place. Consider Hector’s friend Ed, for example, sitting in front of a warehouse full of broccoli, eating
hamburgers
. A heart attack waiting to happen.

Jimmy Moran, on the other hand, ate everything, because he was in love with vegetables. His mother had always raised beautiful vegetables, and he would eat anything. He used to work as a crate stacker in a big cooler full of fresh herbs, and he would even eat parsley in bunches. He ate radishes and cauliflowers like they were apples. He would even take a small artichoke, peel off the tough outer leaves, and eat the rest of the artichoke whole and raw. He ate more vegetables than a hippie. People thought he was crazy.

On this night, he walked out of Grafton Brothers, eating Haitian mangos the Puerto Rican way. First, he massaged and squeezed the mango with his thumbs until the flesh was soft and pulpy beneath the skin. He worked the fruit with his thumbs until it had the consistency of jelly. Then he bit a small hole in the top and sucked out the insides. Sweet like coconut. Foreign-tasting, but nice.

In the next hours, Jimmy Moran campaigned through the wholesale houses of Dulrooney’s, Evangelisti & Sons, DeRosa Importers, and E & M Wholesalers. He introduced himself to all the workers and made small talk with them. He talked to one poor fool who’d just spent his whole life’s savings on a greyhound dog, and to another guy whose teenage daughter had cancer, and to a lucky son of a gun who was going on vacation to Bermuda. He talked to a whole lot of guys who told him he must be crazy to run for president against a mobbed-up animal like Joseph D. DiCello.

As he walked, he ate a handful of baby zucchini he’d stolen off a display at Evangelisti & Sons. Each zucchini was no
longer than his littlest finger and tenderly flavorful in the sort of salty way that a big squash would never be. These were delicious raw, and the only kind of squash that didn’t need any dip or sauce to have a flavor. Baby zucchinis were rare for the season, and expensive. He’d filled his pockets over at Evangelisti & Sons. A delicacy. He ate through them like they were peanuts.

At 4
A.M
., he reached the bottom of his sack of campaign buttons. He was at a small, brand-new specialty gourmet house called Bella Foods, a place known to be very exclusive, which sold to the best restaurants in New York. He didn’t think he would know anybody there at all, until he saw his old friend Casper Denni. They talked for a while about Jimmy’s campaign and about their families. Casper also had a whole bunch of kids and an Italian wife. Casper had also been a porter for many years.

“Now, what happened? You had some kind of accident, I heard?” Casper said.

“The whole town’s talkin’,” Jimmy said. “Back surgery, buddy. What are you, a distributor now or something?”

Casper was sitting in a neat little white-painted booth, drinking a cup of coffee.

“No way,” Casper said. “I got me a little business, selling coffee and replacement wheels for hand trucks.”

“What?” Jimmy laughed.

“I’m serious, Jimmy. It’s great.”

“Get out of here.”

“Check it out. Here’s the idea. There are how many hand trucks at the market?”

“Hundreds. Millions.”

“Thousands, Jimmy. Thousands. And every one of them a cheap piece of shit, as everybody knows. But every porter needs a hand truck, right? Because how many crates can one man carry alone?”

“Get out of here, Casper.”

“One crate, right? Even a big monster like you, in your prime, you could only carry two crates, right? But with a hand truck, you can carry—what?—ten crates? Twelve crates, maybe? A hand truck is a very important tool, Mr. Moran, for the economic success of the individual.”

“Excuse me, Casper? Excuse me, buddy, but who are you talking to here?”

“So, Mr. Moran, it’s the middle of the night and your shitty hand truck pops a wheel. What do you do?”

“Find some other fool’s hand truck and steal it.”

“And get your head beat in? That’s the old-fashioned way. Now you can just come to me. For five dollars, I sell you a new wheel. You give me another five dollars for a deposit on a hammer and wrench, which you get back when I get the tools back. Then I sell you a ten-cent cup of coffee for a buck, and I make six bucks out of the deal, and you have your hand truck fixed.”

“Who would do that?”

“Everybody, Jimmy. Everybody comes to me now.”

“In the last four months this happened?”

“I’m telling you, Jimmy. It’s great. Tax-free. No union.”

“You’re something else, Casper. I tell you. You’re really something else.”

“You get to be old fucks like us, you need a new idea.”

“I got an idea,” Jimmy said, laughing. “I got a new idea. You make me your partner, buddy.”

Casper laughed, too, and punched Jimmy in the arm.

“Listen,” he said, “you ever work around this outfit before?”

“Around this place? No.”

“You ever seen the mushroom man?”

“Casper,” Jimmy said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, buddy.”

“You never saw the mushroom man? Oh, that’s great. Oh, you gotta check this out, Jimmy. I can’t believe you never heard
about this guy. You want crazy? You want to see crazy? You just gotta check this guy out.”

Casper came out from his neat little booth and led Jimmy into a huge refrigerated cooler warehouse.

“You’re gonna love this guy, Jimmy.”

They walked back to the end of the warehouse, and Casper stopped at a wide doorway, covered with the thick strips of plastic that keep temperatures even. A small refrigerated room. Casper pulled back a few of the plastic strips and stepped inside. He waved Jimmy to follow him, grinning like it would be a bordello in there.

Once inside, Jimmy Moran was faced with simply the finest mushroom produce he had ever seen in his life.

“Look at this booty, Jimmy,” said Casper. “Have a look at this produce.”

The crates were piled neatly, no higher than five to a stack, and the top crate of each stack was open for display. Right by the door was an open crate of snowy white button mushrooms, bigger than plums. There were crates of glossy shitake mushrooms, crates of shiny yellow straw mushrooms, and fresh porcini mushrooms that looked valuable enough to serve at God’s table. Jimmy saw crates of portobellos as fleshy and thick as sirloin fillets. He saw a crate of wild black mushrooms, tiny and feathery like gills. He saw a crate of the kind of woody mushrooms his mother used to call toadstools, and also a crate of mushrooms that looked exactly like cauliflower heads. There were morels in the shapes and shades of coral. He saw a crate full of the tan, shelf-shaped mushrooms that grow out of rotting tree stumps. There were crates filled with Chinese mushrooms he could not name and other crates were filled with red- and blue-spotted mushrooms that may have been poisonous. The entire room smelled like damp manure, like the soil in a root cellar under a barn.