Benjamin Appel
A BIG MAN,
A FAST MAN
a division of F+W Media, Inc.
For
Louie, the Plumber; Emery Lenz; Brownie, the Grumman Eagle: who taught me something about work — and the Rosskam Studio where I worked on this book.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
The Tapes: 1
The Tapes: 2
The Tapes: 3
The Tapes: 4
The Tapes: 5
The Tapes: 6
Also Available
Copyright
CONFIDENTIAL MEMO 12/5
To: G.D.
From: P.
William Lloyd, president of USTW, called today. Discussed recent bad publicity/ murder of Jim Tooker USTW v.p and “lifelong friend.” I quote. Stated several times that although he’d been officially cleared, general public still thought he had escaped punishment because he was too smart.
“I could run a full-page ad in NY Times,” he said. “But that’s like getting up at a revival meeting and telling everybody what a saint you are and who the hell believes it? Truth doesn’t mean a damn unless you light a publicity bonfire to show it’s there.”
Expresses himself well. A strong articulate personality. In his fifties but with hard clean jaw of a young man. Could be big business just as well as big labor. Another blue-eyed extrovert.
What he wants from our agency is dramatic publicity:
A TV series.
Articles in Satevepost.
An autobiog similar to best-sellers on movie stars/ other glamourites.
I suggested that he talk for the tapes/ in detail. Made first appointment for 1/3. Said that after we had our raw material, it could then be studied/ evaluated/ and ultimately prepared for major media. These remarks irritated him. Said he didn’t want the sugar-coat treatment/ prepared to tell “straight lousy truth.”
Insisted only the truth about his life and career “and I’m no flower garden” would convince public he had nothing to do with Tooker murder. Said he had his differences with Tooker as he had testified at trial. “The man was a Christer but I’ve been as true to my principles as him. Those murder charges were cooked up to smear not only me but the whole labor movement.”
Does he protest too much? Maybe I’m too cynical/ especially about big men. A murderer? Most men could kill under certain stresses. Put them in uniform/ in the wrong bed. The murder of a lifelong friend? Don’t know. Decided not to assign one of our ghosts/ will take assignment myself. I see a life in him/ unlike our usual run of hothouse amoeba.
THE TAPES: 1
Mr. Lloyd, I’m ready with the tape recorder now. I’ll try and keep my questions to a minimum. It may be necessary to interrupt you, especially in the beginning. In the beginning there’s a tendency to be stiff. It usually takes time before the flow is natural. Remember please that this may turn out to be an autobiography so we want detail. Lots of colorful detail. I’m ready now.
This Tooker business began with Art calling me from Miami.
Art Kincell, former president of the USTW?
I like that. Former president; formerly alive, you mean. It must look odd to you. Both of them dead. Art Kincell, my former father-in-law. Jim Tooker, my former old friend. That’s why I’m here. To blow away the smoke, the damn suspicions. This phone call was last February. Why he wanted me to fly down in such a rush he didn’t say. I should drop everything.
Excuse me, Mr. Lloyd. If you can recall what you said, your actual dialogue, it would be useful. Remember we spoke of a dramatic series of articles or TV shows. The public likes dialogue.
Okay, but I want it with the crap skimmed off. Dialogue? When I hung up I remember telling my wife I had to rush down to Miami like some Western Union boy all because her old man’d pressed the button. She got sore. She said there was no pity in me. Should I put her in dialogue, too?
If it comes naturally, Mr. Lloyd.
Call me Bill. Everybody calls me Bill. Big Bill. Billyboy. That’s me. I flew down the next morning. What happened in Miami was in all the papers. I’ll skip it and get to this so-called murder plot which is what the public wants, right?
Mr. Lloyd, Bill. We’re not interested in what the papers had to say. We’re interested in a portrait in depth. Why did your wife say you had no pity in you?
Why? She was his only daughter. That’s why. His only child. When a man gets his age, seventy-four he was then, it’s easy to think he’s another Santa Claus. To forget his real character. Art Kincell did a lot for me but only because I did a lot for him. I don’t go for this speak no evil of the dead. Art was always a bastard. Now he’s a dead bastard. That suicide note of his smearing me could only have been written by a bastard. The guy I’m sorry for is Jim. Hell, this stuff’s no good.
Could I get you some coffee or a drink perhaps?
A drink. You got everything here.
What do you drink?
Rye. Canadian rye if you’ve got it and turn off the recorder.
CONFIDENTIAL MEMO 1/3
To: G.D.
From: P.
William Billyboy’s first tape a dog. “The strong articulate personality” froze up on me. Seemed overcome by the fact that his father-in-law/ Jim Tooker both dead. Was he pretending? If so, why? Was I the thirteenth man on the jury? Plead guilty to being an amateur dick again as I was last year with glamour gal Jeanette.
I tried to get him to continue/ no success. Finally suggested that he come back next day and begin with earliest memories of childhood. He saw through this like a pane of glass to coin a painful cliché. Said, “You want to balance the conniving with when we were young Maggie. Young and innocent. I was that all right when I was a kid.”
Maybe he’s one of these extroverted introverts? Will have a bottle of Canadian rye on hand/ whiskey the truth-detector. Our research staff still digging into Billyboy’s past. Another rags-to-union-riches saga. The boy who became president of the United Suppliers Terminal Workers. 800,000 members/ industrial power/ political power. The USTW treasury/ financial power.
THE TAPES: 2
Bill, I’m ready.
So am I. I’ve been thinking how it was. I was brought up in Shenandoah. That’s the hard coal country. My father was a miner but when I was a little kid I had a different idea. As long as I could remember there was a big black man. He’d come home every night and change into a white man. My mother would scrub his shoulders, the coal dust run off in rivers. Scrub his shoulders, her tongue going a mile a minute. She was always full of complaints because she wanted him to leave the mine like her brother Lennie done. She’d call him a hundred names and he sweet as milk. Ask her what there was for supper. He always asked her that. “Sweepings from the street,” she’d say. Things like that because she was worn to death with the worry of it. She was a coal miner’s wife and Irish besides. My father was a Welshman. He was a sweet man even when he was drunk. Never a bad word to her.
What did he say?
What did he say? “God save me from a woman’s mouth.” That was one of his favorites and she’d fly back to leave God out of it. She said, “It’s God’s own truth what they say about miners. Weak in the head and strong in the back.” That was one of her favorites. She was always after him to leave the mine. When I got bigger I used to ask her why. She’d come into the place I slept. It was the pantry off the kitchen. She’d sit down on my bed and stroke my head, her voice soft and gentle. Her hand, soft, gentle, too. Except for her ring. Her wedding ring. She was a left-hander, my mother. I’d say, “Mama, why do you want Papa to go away?” And she’d say, “Because I see the birds flying again and you go to sleep and some day I’ll tell you why this town’s
no place for a human being.”
I was the oldest. There were four of us kids. Me, then Millie, and Nellie and Tommie. I was her big helper. When the mine closed down and the meat walked off the table we’d go up the mountain road and pick huckleberries like the Polish women. This is funny maybe. Once I asked her if we were slobs. That’s what some of the Irish and Welsh called the Poles. They picked berries in the lean time, they grew cabbage, they were different. My mother said I shouldn’t call them slobs. They were Slavs. She said, “They’re as good union men as anybody else.” My mother hated the mines but she was solid for the union. Back in those days in a town like Shenandoah, there was the union and there was the company. They were like two different countries.
When the wind howled over the ridges in the winter, my mother said it was the devil of a company blowing up a spot of hellfire for some poor fool of a miner. She could go on and on. How she was the wife of a miner and the daughter of miners. “It’s in the blood and the blood gets spilt,” she said. Her brother Billy, the one I was named for, was killed in the mine. Her brother George was a broken back. Only her brother Lennie had moved away to be a steelworker in McKeesport. She had four brothers but she didn’t talk much about Robbie who was a miner right in our town. My father always teased her about Robbie when she got going on the killed Billy and George the broken back, and Lennie the smart one. “Sure there’s Robbie,” she said and my father, he’d burst out laughing and tell me, “Your mother wants to forgot about Robbie.” — “Why, Papa?” I asked him. “Your mother likes to paint the kettle black.” — “Why, Papa?”
That was me. A little kid always asking why. Why did the streets in Shenandoah all go up and down? I had to know. My teacher said Shenandoah was in the mountains. The Allegheny mountains. I had to know why they’d put it there. She explained how the coal was under the school, under the houses, everywhere. I remember that like it was yesterday. I went home and asked my father why there was coal under our house. My mother, I can see her now, tapping her head, and saying, “Under the house and inside the house. Thick inside the head of the man of the house.” That was my mother.
My father was a sweet man but he liked to drink. They drank hard in those days before the war. I’m talking of the first war. They were in a war themselves, every day they went down the shaft. They never knew if they’d see the sky again. My father used to drink at Dilsey’s and me I had to bring him home. I’d run down the street, all dark in the winter, the fog wrapping up the stars. But the windows in the houses shining soft and cozy and the lights of the mine buildings peeking far far away. The fog and the lights. That was Shenandoah. And the noises at night. The machinery in the breakers. That’s where the coal’s broken and cleaned. Rumbling like sleepy big dogs. The wheels of the coal trains screeching like screech owls. Those foggy nights scared me but I loved them or maybe I only love them now, looking back. Dilsey’s would be all bright inside. And up at the bar all those miners, a bunch of black men but not one colored man among them. Up at the bar and singing away. Some of those songs you couldn’t print.
Like what, for example, Billy?
Take this one. Twenty years I worked with pick and drill. Twenty years I worked my prick and jill. I haven’t got a single dollar in the bank. But I’ve got ten sons to give God thanks.
They were men, those miners. They had to drink to forget the big black woman down in the mines always waiting to grab them. I mean the black coal woman, McClurg was always talking about. He was a queer one. To listen to him you’d think there were all kinds of haunts down in the mines. He worked in the Turtle Corners mine where my father worked. I was afraid of my father when he was drunk but more afraid of my mother. Sometimes, not often, he’d slap at me for a pest. Holler I was the son of an Irish woman, a blue-nosed Orangewoman, and he should’ve married a Papist. One night, a night I’ll never forget, he just looked at me sad out of his black face and said to his pals, “Boys, the woman’s turned my oldest son against me.” They didn’t give a damn, singing, and drunk as lords. My father asked me if I remembered. “What, Papa?” I said and he shouted for the whole world to hear. “Mining’s a man’s work.” And this McClurg he walked over to a deer head hanging on the wall of that saloon and spoke to it like it was alive. “You God damn company spy,” he said and grabbed my father and said for him not to be afraid but to speak up for the black ass miners. Something like that.
My father put his arm around my shoulders and said mining was a man’s work and not to let my mother tell me different. I promised him everything only he should come home. But he kept on shouting how he was his own boss down in the mine. Firing his own shots, placing his own timbers to keep the earth from mashing him like a worm. And this McClurg grabbed his crotch and yelled, “Long as my ballocks don’t get mashed.” Aw, you can’t print that. Miners’ talk. Workingman’s talk.
Please continue and don’t worry what we can print.
It takes men to mine coal. They were always talking mine. It was their lives. How the bed of coal might be flat as a table or standing up on one end. With a man working on his knees or laying on his back. And this McClurg always getting his ballocks into it somehow. “Laying on your back like laying with a woman. The biggest blackest woman in the world but don’t let her wind her black legs about you, boys, or you’re a dead winder.” I remember that. I used to tell it to the kids at school.
Getting my father home from Dilsey’s was a job. When we got home my mother never let him into her clean bed. “Sleep on the floor like the dirty drunk pig out of Wales you are.” And my father grinning foolish at her, eating his cold supper foolish. When he was snoring away on the floor, she’d go for me. “Billy, you’re not going down into the mine if I have to cut off your good right arm myself.” She frightened me the things she said, and those eyes on her. The blue of the Irish. And fierce, and when she was mad her nose was fierce, too. There was an old miner they called Pat the Poet and I heard him say that kind of nose was the hawk of Ireland. A thin curvy kind of nose. Could be Jewish. I look like her. Same eyes and nose. But I grew up big and heavy like my father. I’ve got his black hair. Black as the God damn coal that was his whole life.
I must’ve been eight or nine when he talked to me real serious how he was in the mines at my age. A breaker boy picking the slate out of the coal. He went over to the scuttle and picked up a black shiny lump of coal. He called it beautiful coal. He said, “It burns like a candle and no smoke to it.” And my mother jeering, “Beautiful coal, is it? It’s the black death of our lives.” And me, when I was in bed, wondering. Which was worse? Black death or white death? Wondering how many colors death had? I was a dreamy kind of kid, always reading books. The mines, the shafts rising up like they were towers of the kings in the books. I’d get it all mixed up in my head. The company was the bad king with the black death waiting. Always waiting at his side like the knight in black armor. Aw, I need a drink. Canadian rye, the best foreigner there ever was.
It was bound to happen. I was at school that day when I heard the alarm. The death whistle, my mother called it. The work whistles in the morning, they said, “Come to work, come to work.” My father would get up from the table, take his bucket in his hand. His hand all scrubbed clean and white that’d be black as the ace of spades by night. I was at school and that alarm said, “There’ll be men on stretchers. There’ll be coffins in the churches.” That’s what it always said. My teacher, Miss Flaherty, tried to keep us in class. In the younger classes they could do it but we were kids of eleven. I jumped to my feet and she told me to sit down. She was as frightened as any of us. A little old spinster. I ran out. Everybody was running. The women ran out of their houses with their babies. The old miners sitting quiet, smoking their corncobs on the porches. They were there, too. The cars slowed down on Centre Street, afraid to hit the kids running. That whole town stopped dead. The storekeepers in their doorways, the hotel people in front of Ferguson’s Hotel, the banking people in front of the bank. That day it was my father’s
mine. Turtle Corners. I heard the news somehow. Turtle Corners. Not Locust Gap or Raven Run or Mahanoy City or the mines over beyond Bear Ridge. Turtle Corners, the alarm was saying. Your father, it was saying.
The keep-out ropes were stretched around the shaft. All the people pressing against the ropes. Cars pulling up. The rescue squads piling out. My mother was there with my brother Tommie holding to her hand. She saw me and that was when I cried. I couldn’t keep the tears back any more. “Don’t you bawl,” she said. “Or you’ll get your brother bawling.” I wiped the tears away. Christ, where did she get the guts? Where did all those women get the guts? She put her hand in her skirt and gave my brother a lump of sugar. He started licking it, unmindful of all the excitement. Innocent like a colt in the field. There were eight men trapped in that mine. I heard my father’s name. John Lloyd, the people whispered. I heard them. Some of the people were praying. Low and quiet. No louder than candlelight. It was a church at those ropes. The praying and the asking for God’s mercy. And the breath of death over everybody. The black breath of that thing in the black armor that’d come for all those eight men, and for my own father, that sweet man.
My mother took my hand. I couldn’t help it. The tears came. Everything was so different, the breaker building all blinky-eyed. Then I saw my uncle Robbie who worked in Locust Gap. My mother saw him, too. She said, “Your uncle Robbie’s waiting to go down.” The cage came up the shaft. First, you could see the lift cable and then the chains. I watched and watched and prayed for my father to be in the cage. Talk of wishes coming true. He was there, my father. His skin white and not covered with coal dust. But the only man in that cage was the operator. The rescue squad with my uncle Robbie hurried to the cage. I couldn’t stand still no more. I ducked under the ropes and ran over to my uncle Robbie. He looked at me, his face all black with dust. And maybe I was crazy, but it was like my father locking at me. Christ, I kept bringing him up out of the earth. “Billy, go back,” my uncle said but I wouldn’t. “I can dig,” I said, “take me with you.” He tried to get me to go but I held on to him. Then he lifted me up in his arms and called to my mother standing there tall and straight without a tear, her face a stone. “Robbie,” she said, “let him dig for his father. Let him dig for Mr. Wright.” Mr. Wright, that was the mine super. I forgot to say he’d tried to get me to go back, too. My uncle tried to get me to listen but I kept yelling I could dig. “My mother said so,” I yelled.
Big Man, A Fast Man Page 1