On the Waterfront

by Budd Schulberg

  “So go ahead and conduct it,” Terry said. “Whaddya want from me?”

  “Just a little information,” Glover said pleasantly.

  “I don’t know nuthin’,” Terry said and swung back to the counter.

  “You haven’t heard the questions yet,” Gillette reminded him.

  Terry slowly swung back again until he was facing them, took a good look, meant to be menacing, at the trim, business-like figure of Gillette and turned to his coffee again.

  “The State’s trying to root out labor racketeers,” Glover said.

  “Look, who’s kiddin’ who?” Terry said. “Nobody’s gonna root out nuthin’. That suckin’ Commission is just gonna get itself some headlines and maybe somebody’ll run for Mayor or Governor or something.”

  Chick and Jackie nodded. The waterfront had been investigated by Mayor’s committees and grand juries and roving Senators for years. There had been headlines and more headlines, and when all the smoke had cleared away, there was the waterfront, the same old waterfront. Investigation: that was the dirtiest word in the harbor.

  “We didn’t look you up this morning to ask you your opinion of our work,” Gillette said. Terry had marked him right away as the nasty one. “We came in to ask you a few specific questions.”

  Terry was ready with another smart answer, but Glover was ahead of him, his voice still casual and pleasant:

  “There’s a rumor that you’re one of the last people to see Joey Doyle alive.”

  “You c’n go take your rumors …” Terry started to say.

  “We’re not cops, you understand,” Gillette explained. “We can’t do anything about the Doyle case. But we’d like to find out if there’s any connection between his death and the dock rackets in general.”

  “We’re not even serving you a subpoena,” Glover said. “Simply inviting you to an executive session.”

  “I told you guys—I don’t know nuthin’,” Terry said.

  “All we want to do is ask you a few little things about people you may know,” Gillette added.

  Terry swung his stool the long way around to face Gillette, wheeling as slowly as he could and making this a gesture of insolence.

  “People I may know … you mean eat cheese for ya?”

  “Slow down, boy, slow down,” Gillette said.

  “The nerve of these guys,” Terry said for the benefit of his friends.

  Then he rose from the stool with his fists clenched at his side.

  “You better get outa here, buster.”

  Gillette was shorter than Terry but he had been a judo expert in the Army and he had the physical confidence of a small man who knows he is ready and able. He had judo in front of him and the State behind him.

  “I wouldn’t advise that, Mr. Malloy, unless you want to be booked for assaulting an officer of the law.”

  “Listen, cop,” Terry said, relaxing his hands and having to make up for it with his voice. “I don’t know nuthin’, I didn’ see nuthin’, an’ I aint sayin’ nuthin’. Now why don’t you an’ your girl friend here take off? Go on, blow.”

  “All right,” Gillette said quietly. “We’ll be seeing you again.”

  “Never will be too much soon for me, Shorty,” Terry said.

  Glover dropped his large hand on Terry’s shoulder with a familiarity from which Terry flinched. All his life cops had been the heavies, pinching him for swiping apples and then winking at the real jobs. Only two ways to handle cops, outrun ’em or take care of ’em. His brother Charley never had no trouble with cops.

  “Take it easy, kid,” Glover said. “You have every right not to talk if that’s what you choose to do.”

  “Do me a favor ’n drop dead,” Terry wrapped it up.

  The two intruders turned away. Terry shook his head at them and wolfed his doughnut to show his chums how little he had been affected.

  “How do you like them two gumshoein’ around, takin’ me for a pigeon?”

  Jackie laughed and mimicked them in a falsetto, using a paper napkin for a mock notebook. “Gimme the names. I’ll write ’em down in me little book.”

  Terry laughed, with relief, and punched Jackie’s arm approvingly.

  “One more word ’n I would’ve belted ’em, badge or no badge.”

  “Aah, them politicians is a joke,” Chick said. “When they got nuthin’ better t’ do they pick on the waterfront.”

  “C’mon, choke the coffee down,” Jackie said. “Five minutes the whistle’s gonna blow.”

  “I hear ya sittin’ pretty, Terry,” Chick said. “A steady job in the loft. How’s about fixin’ us up now that you’re a big shot.”

  “The loft boss ’d bounce you the first day,” Terry said as he tossed a dollar on the counter to pay for the three of them. He was trying hard to push those Commission jokers out of his mind. “You gotta have brains for the job I’m gettin’.”

  “Or at least a brother with brains,” Jackie said.

  Actually Jack and Chick, who had known Terry in reform school, stood in well with Big Mac. They were always ready to help things along on the pilferage and they worked steady enough to come out with around four thousand a year, aside from the personal loot. They weren’t part of the regular goon squad like Truck and Sonny but Big Mac could count on them to throw a punch or a brick, when the situation demanded.

  “Come on, girls, let’s get over there,” Terry said, falling into his rolling, boxer-walk as he led them out.

  The cold at the river’s edge ate into their bones, the late November cold that blows off the river into the weathered faces of longshoremen. Now they were gathering at the pier entrance to wait for the summoning whistle of the hiring boss.

  The great harbor of the world’s most modern metropolis still hired its dockmen in the same haphazard way as in the days of the sailing ships when a transatlantic schooner would drop anchor off South Street and a chief would whistle for loiterers and hangers-on to leave their grog shops and pick up a good Yankee dollar or two for a four-hour turn as a human pack-horse unloading the coffee and tobacco and hemp that was making this upstart city of half a million people the greatest trading center in the world. London and Liverpool and San Francisco had long since put away as a museum relic the hiring whistle, but here in Bohegan and all around the harbor the century-old whistle still called the willing hands, called them not to work, but to offer themselves for work while the hiring boss looked them over and made his choices. In the clipper days he combed through them to separate the able workers from the rummies. Now he looked them over for signs of compliance. There were subtle devices an outsider scarcely would notice, a match over the left ear signaling willingness to kick back a couple of dollars on the job or a tiny American flag pinned to a windbreaker lapel identifying the wearer as a member in good standing of the kick-back club. This was the silent language of harbor corruption.

  The men first to arrive at the Hudson-American pier operated by Tom McGovern’s Interstate Stevedore Company had started a fire in a rusted metal barrel left there as a primitive heater for the frost-bitten dockers. Even through their thick gloves and heavy shoes the cold penetrated their fingers and toes, and they shifted weight from foot to foot and worked their fingers over the fire to fight off the numbness. From November until March it was chilling, thankless work, and half-frozen fingers and icy decks multiplied the accidents. And in the summer heat the bottom of the hold was airless and the hatch gangs felt as if they were being steamed alive. But the up-and-down fall tackle and the cargo sling knew no season. In January sleet or in sweating, bare-waisted July, you swung your hook, loaded that pallet. The pier superintendent has a bug up his rump this morning. He’s yelling for twenty-five tons an hour! Let the bum load it hisself if he’s in sech a fuggin’ hurry.

  The men around the fire-barrel blew little clouds of cold breath into the air and exchanged small-talk about how lousy the fight was the night before. They were careful not to mention anything too serious because the pier entrance was all e
ars, with’ the Friendly boys, Sonny and Truck and Gilly and Specs and Barney and the rest of them, wandering around on the Earie. And since the shape-up pitted every man against his neighbor one never knew when a fellow you trusted would go running to Big Mac or Specs Flavin, who held the title of shop steward, in return for the favor of regular work. Regular work—a chance to pull down your seventy-five, eighty a week every week so the money coming in balanced the money going out—that was the quest, the hope, the muffled cry of every one of the three or four hundred who offered himself to Big Mac’s cynical double-o. A guaranteed minimum wage for every qualified longshoreman—that had been one of Joey Doyle’s pet ideas as opposed to the surplus labor pool encouraged by the shipping companies and exploited by labor-racket boys like Johnny Friendly and Charley Malloy. Job security, that’s what Joey had called it, instead of larcenous hiring bosses throwing jobs out into the crowd every morning like fish to hungry seals.

  When Pop and his three cronies came up to one of the fire barrels they had an almost imperceptible but singular effect on the men already gathered there. These men felt they should say something to comfort Pop, but the words stuck to their tongues. Subconsciously they drew away a few inches as if Pop was death itself and the mere brushing of his windbreaker could be fatal. A killing on the docks always left the men edgy and withdrawn, sometimes for months. Even a year later the tensions would still be there. There was the time five years ago when Andy Collins was ready to take over as assistant hiring boss and was shot dead right in the office of 447. “Elbows” Sweeney, who did the job for Johnny Friendly, had taken off for Florida and was seen at Hialeah every day betting in the money that Johnny sent him to keep him happy. Andy Collins had been a popular man who had done a lot for Catholic Youth in the parish. Everybody knew it was Sweeney. Every bar in Bohegan could tell you the story. Plenty of longshoremen in 447 hated Johnny Friendly and Charley the Gent for the Collins job. But what was a fellow gonna do? This was the only work you knew and this was the only place to get it. If you moved over to some other pier and another set-up, you’d have to start all over again as an outsider picking up the crumbs. And it was just as rough across the river on the midtown piers, or over in Port Newark, as it was here in Bohegan. You get the psychology? So with Pop here, the men felt deeply and at the same time had to be careful not to show their feelings. Conflicting waves of emotion met in them like a riptide and made them dangerous below the surface.

  Only Luke Tucker, a big Negro extra-man, came over and openly expressed his sympathies. There was a wall between the races that worked the docks; the Irish and Italians—the Micks and the Guineas—were clannish and held to their own. And of course the “niggers” on the bottom were the lepers of the port. But Luke was, in the opinion of Runty and the rest of them, a proud, two-fisted, independent nigger who was honey-easy to get along with until you tried to push his face in the race thing. He was the acknowledged leader of the Negro minority that picked up the odd hatch jobs and the extra-gang work that was left at the bottom of the work barrel. As such, Luke had gained a certain status in the eyes of Big Mac who hated shines like poison but needed the black boys as extra men. Luke had come out of the Alabama share-crop country as a fourteen-year-old kid running away from home. “I jest hopped me a choo-choo and sayed, ‘No’th here I comes,’ ” Luke had told the boys. Luke had done a little cheap-circuit wrestling and a little time for some vague crimes associated with strong, wandering, penniless boys who had never learned a trade. When he drifted to the docks he found a double-kickback system for the colored. They not only kicked back five bucks to the hiring boss, double the head-tax of their white fellow workers, but an extra dollar or two to the Negro gang-boss who rounded them up. Luke was able to lick the colored straw boss, a slickster called Hotstuff, and could have moved in on the dollar-racket and made himself fifty to seventy-five a week. But Luke had said, “If I gotta rob the poor t’ get rich, I’d ruther stay poor.” He was a rebel without quite knowing he was one. He came up to Pop now and slapped him on the back roughly, forever underestimating his wrestler-strength, and he said right out, “Ah feel bad about Joey. It aint a right way.”

  “Thanks, Luke,” Pop said. He knew in the Missal what they said about everybody bein’ brothers, but it was askin’ a lot for a Kerry man to brother-up to a garlic-smellin’ guinea or some big buck yellow-streakin’ nigger. Just the same Luke was half accepted, like Max the Jew, an old orthodox winchman, the only Yiddle workman Pop had ever heard of outside of the garment workers who rolled it up for Dubinsky.

  “I took up a little collection among the brethren,” Luke said, meaning the two dozen Negro casuals who shaped up for extra work.

  “Tell ’em thanks for me, Luke,” Pop said and took the money, though he didn’t want to. “I’ll give it to Father Donoghue to say Masses for Joey.”

  “Looks like we all see a little change today,” Luke said, nodding toward the South-American freighter that had just docked. “Bananas.”

  Bananas meant hand labor, carrying the heavy stalks on your shoulders. Thousands of stalks, a whole deep hatch full of bananas. This was old-fashioned unloading with hundreds of men moving in and out of the hatch doors like streams of ants.

  “Bananers,” Runty said. “I got a poimanent groove in m’ shoulder from too many years of bananers. I wish I had as much money as I hate them bananers.”

  “As long as it pays off at two-thirty-four an hour, I’d carry manure,” Luke said cheerfully.

  “For shit you should get double-time, like ammo,” Jimmy Sharkey said. “Falls under the provision of ’noxious cargo.’ ”

  “A lot Johnny Friendly cares what we carry,” Moose shouted. “Lookit that caustic acid. That’s noxious in every other port. Down in the hold it makes yer eyes water and ya feel like you wanna puke. But good old Interstate pays you the regular rate.”

  “Thanks to Johnny Friendly and Charley the Gent, those great labor leaders,” Runty Nolan laughed. “Charley’s really lookin’ out fer our interests on the Negotiatin’ Committee.” He drew his finger across his neck and the others chuckled.

  Sonny, who was in on a pass because he was a brother-in-law of Specs Flavin, the hardware man, always kept an eye on this bunch and now he came over smelling trouble.

  “Hey, better watch that talk. Whattid you say?”

  “I was jus’ sayin’ how thankful we should be to Johnny Friendly fer bein’ such a pisser of a labor leader ’n doin’ so much t’ improve our conditions,” Runty laid it on thick, grinning up at the big, stupid-faced Sonny Rodell.

  “Don’t get wise now,” Sonny warned.

  “Wise,” Runty ho-hoed at him. “If I was wise I wouldn’t be no longshoreman fer forty-years an’ poorer now than when I started. Hell no, I’d be gettin’ my six hundred a month from the International, wind-baggin’ with Willie Givens, our esteemed president.”

  “Whaddya mean, steamed?” Sonny demanded. “Ya better not shoot ya mouth off about Willie Givens.”

  Sonny was one of the hand-picked delegates to the Longshoremen’s Convention, at a hundred bucks a day expenses, and he was annually impressed with the heights of oratory to which Willie Givens laboriously ascended.

  “Anyway,” Sonny concluded, “it aint Willie Givens or Johnny’s fault ya drink all your money away. Now ya watch yerself now.” He walked away with the air of a prep-school housemaster.

  “Big bum,” Runty muttered when Sonny was out of earshot. “If it wasn’t for Specs and his cannon, he’d be beggin’ handouts at the back o’ saloons.” His friends, who looked to him as their own dockside Durante, got a good laugh out of that.

  Mutt Murphy came over and warmed himself by the fire. He never expected to work, but he almost always gathered with the others for the shape-up, drawn here either by sheer habit or foggy-minded sociability.

  “Mornin’, Pop,” he mumbled. He was wearing a torn suitcoat picked up from a local mission and he looked as if he should have been chilled to the bone; his lips and hands were
blue, but he seemed unaware of the cold. “God bless ya, ya Joey was a saint.” He crossed himself elaborately and began to shout in his harsh, croaking voice,

  “Joey died fer us an’ Jee—sus’ll save us …”

  Truck Amon, whose two hundred and twenty pounds were pushed into five feet eight inches, and whose neck had the muscular thickness of a prize boar’s, came waddling over to grunt at Mutt, “C’mon, knock it off.” He shoved the one-armed drifter away from the pier entrance. “They’re gettin’ ready to blow the whistle. You’re a pimple on the ass o’ progress. Disappear.” Truck’s thick face pushed together in a grin of self-amusement. He was continually amazed at the comic sayings that popped into his head. His latest filled him with good feeling and he reached into his pocket and flipped a quarter to Mutt. “Here, go drink ya breakfast,” he said, and his fat, muscular tub of a body shook with mirth.

  Captain Schlegel, popularly called “Schnorkel,” an ex-German submariner who bossed the pier for Interstate, had just given Big Mac the cargo breakdown on the Maria Cristal: two loft gangs, six regular gangs and two hundred extra banana carriers. Captain Schlegel gave Big Mac a box full of metal tabs covering the number of jobs to be filled. There was bad blood between the pier boss and Big Mac because the German was a discipline-minded Prussian recruited by Tom McGovern when Schlegel settled in Bohegan after his sub was held there at the end of the First World War. Schlegel didn’t like Big Mac’s sloppy ways and the fact that he held his job because of his prison record and his influence with the mob and not through any particular loading skill. There was an art to loading, both as to speed and placement, and Schlegel was generally respected as a master at it, even though he was commonly regarded as an inhuman sonofabitch. It had been Captain Schlegel who had said arrogantly to the press, “I have no special love for gangsters, but I can tell you one thing, you need a strong arm around here to keep in line the kind of working force we’ve got to deal with on the docks.” Captain Schlegel, on orders from Interstate, slipped a Christmas envelope to Johnny Friendly every Christmas, as well as to Charley the Gent and their subordinates, because Interstate was grateful for their co-operation. Oh, sure they shook you down once in a while, but it was quicker and cheaper to pay ten thousand on the line than to deal with the complicated demands of a genuine union. With a shop steward like Specs Flavin you didn’t have to worry about the little everyday breaches of the contract that could run company savings into hundreds of thousands. Sure, if you had to have unions, Captain Schlegel preferred Johnny Friendly’s kind to the real thing. Just the same he loathed having to deal with a “getrunkener dumbkopf ” like Big Mac McGown. Right now, for instance, Big Mac was still sweating off the effects of the load he always took on Friday evenings. It was only when he was on one that he referred to Captain Schlegel as “You Heinie bastard.” Captain Bateson, Captain Schlegel’s superior in Interstate, and Mr. McGovern could call the former U-boat officer a Heinie bastard because their position entitled them to this or any privilege. But Big Mac was just a vulgar red-neck who would have been an ordinary longshoreman if he hadn’t risen to power as a henchman of Johnny Friendly. Captain Schlegel despised him, especially since he had no choice but to tolerate him as part of the Friendly set-up on the piers of Bohegan serviced by Interstate. In theory a hiring boss was an employee of Interstate and subject to Captain Schlegel’s approval. In practice he was given the nod by Johnny Friendly. If Big Mac wasn’t acceptable, Johnny could pull his men out and shut down the pier. Captain Schlegel had a horror of that as he tried to push his pier to the highest yearly tonnage rate on the Jersey shore. So he only reddened and pushed his lips together when Big Mac gave him “Heinie bastard.”