Cold Type

by Harvey Araton

  “Poor guys?” Lou said. “They’re scabs—just goddamn scabs.”

  “Oh yeah? Then what’s all the nigger shit about on the television?”

  Lou again looked over at Morris, who started to say something but settled for waving a hand in the direction of Jamie.

  “Louie please, you’re not getting anywhere with him,” Morris said. “How’s he going to have any loyalty to his union when he doesn’t even care about his own flesh and blood.”

  “Morris, don’t start with that…” Molly said.

  “What I cared about was the truth, and that’s what my story was about,” Jamie said.

  Morris put down his knife and fork and spit a piece of chicken off his lips.

  “No, I’ll tell you what the truth is.” He pointed a finger across the table. “The truth is that you cared more about that story than your own son and the woman who gave birth to him. You’d still rather be in the projects, playing ball and fucking around with colored girls.”

  “Morris, please…” Molly said.

  Becky stiffened. Mickey rolled his eyes.

  “Colored girls?” Jamie said. “How 1950s of you. Why don’t you just get it over with and use the N word too?”

  “Morris, you’re getting everyone upset. You’ll get Becky…”

  “It’s all right, Ma,” Becky said. She leaned a shoulder into Mickey.

  “No, Ma,” Jamie said. “He wants to still bring up that I missed Aaron being born—fine, I did. I’m not proud of that. But maybe I was only doing what he taught me. Business first. Isn’t that right, Dad? Union this, union that. The almighty Jackie Ryan called, it didn’t matter what else was going on. What did you ever come to? One basketball game I ever played in, one school function? I guess it was nice of you to at least make an appearance at the bar mitzvah. You got up and made a big speech telling everyone you hoped they had a good time, but you had to leave early on an urgent union matter. Your own son’s bar mitzvah. You’re a good one to talk.”

  “At least I lived under the same roof as you, didn’t I? I paid the bills. I didn’t walk out. I didn’t leave you and your sister and go live by myself. Your mother has a grandson she hardly ever sees. She cries herself to sleep about it…”

  “Morris, please!”

  “And meanwhile we have to pray every day for your sister to have a baby. Why you have one and she lost hers…”

  “Daddy!” Becky screamed. Too late, Becky burst into tears, bolted from the chair, around to the hall and slammed the bedroom door shut. Molly took off after her, followed by Mickey, glaring back at them.

  “Way to go, both of you,” he said.

  “You had to bring Aaron into this,” Jamie said. “We were having a discussion about the strike, a simple discussion.”

  Jamie stared at his father, waiting, almost hoping for more. But Morris sat back in his chair. He played with his fork, squished a boiled potato.

  “Let me just say…” Lou started to chime in to calm things down. But Morris glared at him. “OK, fine,” Lou said and shut up.

  Jamie wanted to say more, but anger had set up a roadblock between his brain and his mouth. His father had, as always, rendered him speechless with his seething, unyielding silence. Judgment had once more been passed with no allowance for appeal.

  Morris pushed himself away from the table. He grabbed a newspaper from the counter and headed for his sanctuary, the bathroom. Lou continued eating with a pained look.

  Jamie let awkward moments pass as if awaiting his own execution. Finally he stood and walked stiffly into the living room. He grabbed his jacket from the couch. He left, pausing for several seconds outside the front door. No one was coming to coax him back in. The only candidates were his mother, who was busy with Becky, and his uncle, who probably wanted to wring his neck for inferring that Steven was a grandstanding prima donna.

  He was still seething as he switched lanes to pass a bus on Ocean Avenue. He pushed hard on the gearshift into fifth and was about to pump the accelerator to make the light at Church Avenue. But it turned yellow and so did Jamie. He hit the brake. His tires screeched. In his rear view mirror, Jamie saw the driver behind him gesturing and giving him the finger.

  Jamie knew the guy had every right to be pissed, but he was in no mood for remorse. “Sue me, you have to wait a minute at the light,” he said. Then he talked to the rearview mirror as if his father’s face was in it.

  “This union bullshit is your goddamned life, not mine. I didn’t ask for it. I don’t need it. I don’t want any part of it.”

  The light turned green.

  “That’s right, you heard me,” Jamie said. The offended driver behind him hit the horn. “And fuck you too,” Jamie yelled. He drove through the intersection and continued his imaginary conversation until he was almost to Brooklyn Heights. He took a deep breath and realized how absurd it was to shout at no one.

  He was almost home anyway, driving along the Brooklyn waterfront, the downtown Manhattan skyline he always found beautifully haunting and calming in twilight.

  He got off the highway at Atlantic Avenue and turned left onto Hicks. He slowed on the narrow cobblestone street, turning right at a stop sign, nearly clipping a car parked in the crosswalk. He pulled into a spot a few inches too close to a hydrant. It was the best he was going to do at this time of evening. He figured the odds of getting a ticket were about fifty percent. He didn’t care. He slammed the door so hard that the heads of a couple walking arm-in-arm on the other side of the street turned to stare. Jamie didn’t look up, didn’t care, preoccupied as he was with Morris’ main claim to compassion: he’d slept under the same roof as his children.

  “Good for you,” Jamie mumbled. He wondered if his father thought he deserved a medal, a token of appreciation, like some commemorative union trinket for lasting fifty years on the job.

  Day Three: Wednesday, November 9, 1994

  Chapter Sixteen

  Movement on the picket line outside the Trib had ground to a halt. A blustery wind blew off the river and a chilly noontime realization had set in. The paper had again made it to welcoming newsstands and into the hands of grateful commuters largely indifferent to the strikers’ plight.

  Through the window of the vending machines outside the building, their slots gummed up or glued, the headline “54” dominated the Trib front page. That was the number of seats the Republicans had seized from Democrats in routing them from control of the House of Representatives. Further mocking the vanquished party was the sub-head: Dem’s the breaks.

  Morris and Lou Kramer were the only picketing printers out early that day, taking up slack for the others—not surprising that so many were still in bed, given the collective lifetimes they had spent working deep into the night and sleeping in.

  While eavesdropping on one of the young reporters nearby, Morris heard him whine, “Every day it gets out is another nail in our coffin.” Lou wandered away toward Steven and a frail blonde who melted into a long black coat under a fur collar. Behind them stood a strapping black man, balancing a television mini-cam on his left shoulder while savoring the last bites of a candy bar. He dropped the wrapper to the ground and watched it blow away into the street.

  All around, the strikers were red-faced, huddling to stay warm within the wooden blue police barricades. They stuffed hands into their pockets and sipped coffee from Styrofoam cups. They took long drags on cigarettes. The rumble of cars on the elevated roadway across the street forced them to shout to be heard. When the occasional passing motorist palmed a horn in support, the heads of the strikers turned. A few raised their arms in synchronized salute.

  A sympathizer had surfaced from the city’s teachers’ union, promising that no self-respecting educator and supporter of organized labor would so much as look at a Trib front page as long as the rank-and-file stayed out. She shook Steven’s hand and half kidded that the teachers were behind the Alliance despite what he had written about their lack of enthusiasm for summer-school hours.

&
nbsp; Steven playfully changed the subject. “Have you met my father, Lou Kramer?” he said. “And this is Debbie Givens of NY1 News.”

  “Okay, I get it. I won’t bring the summer school piece up again,” the teachers’ rep said, with a schoolgirl giggle. “I guess people are down, with the paper getting out and all.”

  Steven hunched his shoulders and shook his head. “Like I was telling Debbie on her show last night, it’s early. We’re just getting started. We’re contacting advertisers, trying to get them to pull out. Our people are talking to the big newsstands about not taking the paper.”

  “Talk,” Lou said. “Used to be that all you had to do was look a few of them in the eye, maybe torch a bundle of papers. They wouldn’t touch it.”

  Steven wrapped an arm around his father’s shoulder.

  “The Mayor owes the publisher his firstborn for getting him elected,” he said. “And he’s got the cops—good union people themselves—practically working for management. So it’s time for Plan B. We’ve got to unite labor all around the city. The other papers are not going to go after City Hall. They’re rooting for us to get our asses kicked so they can do the same thing to their own unions when their contracts are up.”

  “The Mayor,” Lou said, ruefully.

  He excused himself and went back to Morris, who was still standing beside the Trib boxes. He had picked up a copy of the Times that had been set on the ground by one of the reporters. Morris opened it to the Trib strike story. It was on page four of the Metro section, below the fold.

  STRIKERS SHADOW BOXES, TRIB LANDS PUNCHES

  The headline sat over a story that stopped just short of declaring Leland Brady the winner of the fight by an early TKO.

  Random samplings of the city’s newsstands confirm that Trib sales were sharply curtailed on its first day of publishing during the strike and many vending machines were reported to have been tampered with. But the publisher Leland F. Brady was said to be jubilant over the newspaper’s ability to produce roughly half the normal run of seven-hundred-fifty thousand, with a skeleton staff of management employees manning presses and other union positions. Maxwell Brady, the executive editor and the publisher’s son, said more management staffing from Brady-owned newspapers in Ireland, Great Britain and Canada would be available by the end of the week. Union sources said its leaders were irritated by what they viewed as City Hall’s favorable treatment of Mr. Brady, an ardent supporter of the Mayor.

  Morris refolded the paper and jammed it into the armpit of his jacket. “What’s Stevie saying this morning?” he said, as Lou blew into his left hand.

  Louis Kramer’s stubble of gray around his chin accentuated the darkened circles under his eyes. The tallest Kramer no longer elicited the praise he had once received for his lean youthful look. In the years following his wife’s departure, he ate too little, smoked too much, slept like an octogenarian. His thick dark hair had surrendered to gray. He retired unceremoniously from his one-time passion, schoolyard handball.

  “I left a message for him last night and asked him to call Jamie—see if he could, you know, talk some sense into him.”

  “I’m not talking about Jamie,” Morris snapped. “I meant, what does Steve think about the other unions, about what they’re going to try to do next?”

  “He says the Alliance will go after the advertisers and they’ll meet with the newsstand people—try to talk them into not taking the paper,” said Lou.

  Another honking car puttered by. This time, a window rolled down and out floated a thumb pointing south. After a prompt rebuttal of obscenities, the hand turned upside, thumb to middle finger.

  “Yeah, you too, asshole,” Lou said, waving in disgust. “Mo, remember the last big one, what was it, 78?” he said. “The drivers broke a few windows, glued a few locks, threatened a couple of dealers, and that was it. I don’t understand this. I know they keep saying that Brady’s got the Mayor protecting him, but how can the cops guard every newsstand and deli in New York?”

  “They can’t,” Morris said. “But didn’t you hear Brady on the news the other day? He said he would personally cover damages done to anyone selling the paper. Then the Mayor’s going around saying the city will arrest and fine anyone who destroys property. They start fining people, it won’t be chump change. Who has the money these days to deal with that? It’s up to the unions to find another way.”

  “Have you called Colangelo?” Lou said.

  Morris nodded grimly.

  “Called, left a message,” he said.

  “And?”

  “That was the other day, after Brady sent us the letter. Haven’t heard a word.”

  “Damn,” Lou murmured.

  At the far corner of the building, several drivers milled about rather than picket the loading docks on the sunless side of the plant. They wore windbreakers and baseball caps. They drank coffee, smoked cigarettes and mostly ignored their fellow strikers.

  “I overheard one of them say that some of the scabs Brady has got driving the trucks are the homeless,” Lou said. “Bums—you believe that? This guy is saying he got in one guy’s face last night as he was walking past the line, with the cops right there, and he says, ‘You think you’re working one day after we settle? That they won’t put you right back out on the damn street?’ He said the scab looked at him and said, `Motherfucker, I lives in the damn street!’ The scab was laughing, like the whole thing is a complete goddamn joke.”

  Morris stared at the ground, shook his head.

  “Those guys over there, we need to keep an eye on them too,” he said. “They don’t operate the way the rest of the unions do. Twenty-five years ago, I remember them coming in to see us one day saying they had had it with management stalling on this and that and wanted to go out and would we go out with them? You know what Jackie told them? ‘You have the most corrupt, undemocratic and disloyal union in the city. You refuse to join the council of union leaders and now you’re asking me to put my people out?’ I thought Jackie was going to tell them to get the fuck out of his face, but I’ll tell you something about that guy. He could lose it like anyone but when it came to tactics, he had more common sense than all the rest of these guys put together. He said, ‘OK, tell you what. We’ll give you three days to posture, make some noise, then three days of a slowdown, then another three days of a shutdown. Beyond that, I can’t help you, so do what you have to do but understand there’s a limit.’ The point was, he knew there was nothing gained by telling them to take a hike. No point in pissing them or anybody off if you don’t have to. There’s no union in this business that can survive by itself forever. He’d say: ‘I know we’ve got management by the balls right now. Tomorrow, who knows? You don’t have the other guys owing you, sooner or later you’ll wind up taking it in the you-know-where when you’re not looking.’ Jackie lived by that. You try to never cross someone else’s line, no matter how bleak it looks. Because the only thing that counts is muscle. Not violence but muscle, the ability to keep everyone together when things get tough. Because once this union goes one way and another union goes the other way, it’s good for management, divide and conquer.”

  Morris paused, resuming in a more hushed tone.

  “Those guys over there should realize—I say should, Louie, not that they do—that if this is the point where scab drivers can get the paper out, they’re no better off than we are. We’re all in this together until we figure out a way to hit this guy. And I know that we’re taking the biggest risk with the lifetime guarantees. I know the guys are scared because they think this time there might be no way back in.”

  Lou nodded and figured this might be the perfect opportunity to mention that Sean Cox had woken him at the crack of dawn, sobbing like a baby on the phone. The doctor had found a lump in his wife’s breast. The battery of tests was completed. The verdict was in: double mastectomy followed by weeks of chemotherapy. He was worried sick that he was going to lose his health insurance benefits if he stayed out.

  “Mo, speak
ing of this, I’ve been meaning to…” But Morris, more in monologue than conversation, cut him off.

  “I just feel it in my bones that going in would be the wrong thing, the easy way out. They get us in there and they know we’re alone and this SOB Brady would smell fear. He doesn’t need us. He knows that. I still think we’re better off out here, sticking with what we know.”

  When his brother had finished, Lou intended to try to raise the Sean Cox situation again. But from around the corner he was facing he saw trouble advancing. It was Jamie—eyes narrowed, face taut.

  “Mo, uh…”

  He tugged at Morris’ elbow and motioned for him to turn and face the more impending crisis. Too late. Jamie was upon them.

  He smiled at his uncle. He looked down at his shoes and finally up at Morris.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d be here, but it’s just as well,” Jamie said. “I already told Steven this morning, but I’d rather you hear this from me.”

  His eyes returned to the shoes, which seemed dangerously close to his father’s. He stepped back a half-step, inhaled cold air.

  “I’m going back to work,” he said. “I’m going in.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The room was shrouded in gloom, its windows painted over a fire-engine red. The lone evidence of sun appeared through a spot where paint had peeled away. The half-dozen tables were stark, save the few empty beer bottles and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts. Eight bar stools sat unfilled.

  Gerard Colangelo pushed open the front door to the storefront establishment known as Maria’s. It was a few minutes after nine in the morning. Even the unlicensed joints in town couldn’t stay open round the clock.

  Colangelo had been huddling with a half-dozen of his drivers outside the Trib plant when a guy in a leather jacket, cigarette dangling from his lips, pulled over in a black Lincoln Town Car, rolled down the window and handed him a note. Colangelo finished chitchatting, slapped a few backs, shook a few hands and excused himself. He walked briskly along South Street under the highway, turning right up the narrow cobblestone side street near the trendy Seaport shopping district.