But for now we’re all comrades. The bosses want the Jews and Italians to fight each other over the scraps, but most of us aren’t buying it. Somehow, we just don’t believe that the answer to all our problems is the unfettered expansion of mass production, which will supposedly raise wages and create a veritable worker’s paradise on earth.
People keep running up to tell us the latest: in a stunning display of popular strength, masses of jobless men and women have taken over the New Jersey State Assembly in Trenton and are holding a mock legislative session in order to demand relief. Thousands of Brooklyn barbers are planning to walk out of their shops if they don’t get a guaranteed wage of twenty-five dollars for a five-day week. And the Building Service Employee Union got a substantial wage increase through an arbitration settlement after Mayor La Guardia personally intervened and averted a strike. Tom Mooney even sent us a note of support from his jail cell in California, and a cheer goes through the crowd when word reaches us that a couple of coal miners in Moose River, Nova Scotia were rescued after being trapped in the mine for ten days, even though they had to “crawl like rats” through a narrow hole the rescue workers chipped in the seam.
This eruption of fervent passions and upraised fists demonstrates our ability to shake the world, or at least a few blocks of the Garment District, and I get elbowed into the street. I take a quick look uptown to make sure I’m not about to get hit by a beer truck, but the cops have blocked off Broadway at Fortieth Street. I don’t know yet if that’s good or bad.
There’s a sudden lull in the sloganeering, and a broadcast of the Dodgers game comes leaking out of one of the storefronts just in time for me to hear Durocher, the Cardinals’ shortstop, get his fourth hit of the game. Damn.
The cops spread out to let a sergeant through with a four-man escort, and the taunts are fairly minor as they come marching down the middle of Broadway right towards me. I try to elbow my way back onto the sidewalk, but the sergeant steps forward and points at me:
“You there: Who are you? What group is this? The cloakmakers’ union?”
“Vey iz mir. The cloakmakers? That bunch of no-goodniks? I belong to the dresspressers Local 60 of the ILGWU and Branch 360 of the Arbeter Ring—I mean, the Workmen’s Circle.”
“Oh, a bunch of Reds, eh? Well, what’s the big idea here? What are you striking for?”
“Generally or specifically?”
One of the cops breaks ranks to come after me with his nightstick, but the sergeant stops him.
“Okay, wise guy,” says the sergeant. “Generally.”
“We are striking for better wages and conditions, and the right to collective bargaining, and and—” I turn to Benny. “Vi zokt men gerekhtikayt oyf English?”
“Justice.”
“And justice.”
“Well, there’s too many of you out here. You can’t block the sidewalk like this.”
This is met with grumbles and catcalls, so the sergeant raises his megaphone and announces: “I have no argument with your right to picket, but you can’t block the sidewalk. I need this crowd reduced to no more than fifty people. Now who are your leaders?”
This starts the inevitable argument between the Socialists and Communists over who should represent the workers. So the sergeant tells his men to select every tenth man and orders the rest of us to disperse. And suddenly there’s a great deal of pushing and shoving and it isn’t long before they start arresting the “troublemakers.” The police thin our ranks to maybe one-third of their former size, and people who didn’t have the guts to cross the picket lines before are walking right up to us and spitting at us and calling us goddamn Reds and sheenies and telling us to go back to Russia. And the radio is telling me that I can have a brand new DeSoto for only $695, which is almost what I make in a year, when a window shatters and a wild animal roar goes up as if a band of marauding Huns were charging up Broadway.
A sick feeling claws at my stomach and I curse the bosses for hiring more hooligans instead of simply negotiating with us.
A volley of brickbats and improvised missiles arcs into the air toward us and, as if we’ve regressed to the Stone Age, instinct takes over for a few seconds as we dodge the bricks thudding to the pavement around us and try to steel ourselves against the onslaught. The thin line of protest signs falls apart like a house of toothpicks as the center collapses and people panic and run for cover, and I feel the impact wave pass through the crowd as the first line of strikebreakers slams into us with their weapons held high like an army of kulaks with scythes advancing toward a field of wheat.
Imagine what a shock it must be for the scythes when the wheat fights back! With bare knuckles. With lengths of pipe. With shears and cutting tools.
A gangster breaks through the line and smashes a bottle against an Italian guy’s head, and the poor guy starts bleeding as if he’s been hit by a hunk of shrapnel and falls to the pavement. His pals grab him by the armpits and haul him out of the way, and the gangster finds himself surrounded by a trio of Italian girls beating him with protest signs. Some of the men are rushing around guiding our girls to the relative safety of the buildings when the next wave of hoodlums reaches us.
Benny lobs some loose bits of plumbing equipment at them, then briefly holds them off with a six-inch awl. He cuts a bit of a comical figure thrusting and parrying with that itty-bitty tailor’s awl, but he stands his ground and buys us a few precious seconds before cutting to the rear and leaving the field to us.
I stay close to Gutbeder as he wields a heavy length of steam pipe against a couple of gangsters armed with what sure look like standard-issue Police Department nightsticks. Grossman takes off his vest and offers to fight them bare-knuckled, the lousy scabs.
In a situation like this, I’m more of a blunt instrument kind of guy myself, so I end up swinging a baseball bat at the knobby craniums of smirking men with off-kilter teeth while the cops look on like they’re taking in the game at Ebbets Field. All they need are some peanuts and Cracker Jack. And I bet you they’ll report that they were too busy protecting honest citizens to intervene in the melee.
A ganef in a gray topcoat rushes at me wielding a plumber’s wrench like a two-handed broadsword. I swing the bat at his head and brush him back, but he comes at me again raising the wrench to block a head shot, so I step back and aim for the outside corner and whack him in the shins as hard as I can. He crumples to the sidewalk, and Grossman comes out of nowhere and kicks him in the jaw, knocking him backwards into the gutter.
But another ganef leapfrogs over the body of his fallen crony and crashes into me before I can set up my next swing. He’s got thick brass knuckles on his left hand and it’s all I can do to grab his sleeve with both hands to keep him from breaking every bone in my face. He’s trying to get in a good punch while I cling to the sleeve of his jacket and fortunately it doesn’t occur to him to use his other hand until I hear cloth tearing and his sleeve comes apart in my hands. By some strange reflex we both look at his ruined sleeve, and our eyes meet.
I recognize a face from the old neighborhood.
“Irving Shapiro?” I say. “You’re running with the gangsters—and for what? What’d you spend on this? The cloth isn’t even that good.”
Irving’s eyes go blank for a second, until one of his buddies yells, “C’mon Lefty, let’s blow!”
“So they call you Lefty now, huh, Mr. Big Shot?”
I can see that he’s still trying to figure out where the hell a bunch of small-time operators got the khutspeh to fight back like that.
“We survived pogroms and prison camps in Tsarist Russia, you putz,” says Grossman. “What can America do to us that’s worse than that? Ptui!” He spits on the sidewalk to show what he thinks of the idea.
The strikebreakers and the rest of the bosses’ goons are retreating, and Irving slinks back to whatever hole he crawled out of, where his kind are nurtured like vampire bats on the blood of others.
“We did it!” cries Benny.
The enemy is routed, the strikers are cheering, and I feel the blood of the Maccabees flowing through my veins, urging me to join their rebellion against our idolatrous overlords.
My comrades are making wildly optimistic predictions about how we could smash the rackets in a minute if we could only break their political connections and cut through all those layers of protection, and how we’re going to take on Hitler and Fascism next, then bring the fight home, and that nothing can stop us if we just stay organized.
I spot Abe the old beysmedresh scholar sitting on top of a packing crate, his knees dangling above the fray.
“Is the Lord’s hand too short?” I say, just to show him that he’s not the only one who can quote from the Torah.
“Look around you,” says Abe, gesturing toward the bank on the northeast corner of Thirty-Sixth Street, its indestructible Greek columns dwarfed by the brown brick canyon rising twenty stories on all sides from the street below. Rows and rows of identical windows stare down at us. And yet, just above our heads, our own building is sparingly decorated with carvings of interweaving pomegranate vines, an ancient Jewish symbol of plenty.
“Where do you see the Lord’s handiwork?” Abe says. “Look at this place, this goldene medineh, where they have learned to share a few crumbs from the table with the middle class, and—poof!—there goes any hope of you building your socialist state. People will never fight for socialism when they can be bought off with movies, cheap suits—”
The blast of a car horn makes him jump. Traffic is moving in the streets again, their headlights coming to life as the sky darkens. Somebody’s car radio is playing a smooth foxtrot that makes me think of elegant ladies gliding around the floor in clothing we made.
I help my comrades straighten things up and stow our weapons for the night. They’ve been following the news on the storefront radio, and the news isn’t all good. It sounds like the Ethiopian freedom fighters will have to abandon the capital city to the advancing Italian forces. So the Fascists are on the march and it’s up to us to stop them.
Benny wants to check the afternoon papers, but the first newsboy coming down the block is hawking the Evening Journal, a farkakteh Hearst paper that we wouldn’t be caught dead with. He spots another newsie and has to settle for the World-Telegram, and flips through it looking for coverage of the strike. Even Abe comes over and joins our little circle, craning his neck for a better look.
“Hey, maybe this is why there weren’t more cops going after us in the street today,” says Benny, pointing to an article. “It says the police were too busy escorting a couple of busloads of Nazi officers and naval cadets on a sightseeing tour of the city.” Including a trip to the Barnum & Bailey circus, which happens to be in town this week. We gather around, unable to believe what we’re reading.
“It says they needed the escort to protect them from protesters.”
Abe lets out a sound that’s halfway between a curse and a throat clearing, and sinks to the curb as if his legs just can’t take the strain anymore.
I try to put this news in the most positive light: “Which means that our turnout would have been much bigger—a lot of our people were probably over on Fifth Avenue telling those Nazi bastards where to go.”
Abe shakes his head at me. “And you say I believe in fairy tales … “
I’m thinking, the struggle to build a just society is no fairy tale—the ILGWU is the fastest-growing union in the country—but instead I just help him to his feet and bid him good day and watch him hobble away. Abe comes from the world of dybbuks and Kabbalah and superstition, and they don’t have much use for his kind in an era that demands social realism. What other option do we have in this strange new land, where everything is for sale—even the soul of a troubled kid like Irving Shapiro?
I say my goodbyes, slap a few backs, and join the crush of humanity heading for the BMT to Brooklyn. A few stragglers on the corners are still talking politics, and a group of Italian machinists are all excited because the Yankees are going to start a kid named DiMaggio in left field. The Yankees notched their fifth straight win, but the Dodgers lost. Dizzy Dean and the Gashouse Gang shut them out, 12-0, and they dropped to last place. I guess some victories are harder to come by than others. But it’s too early to call right now and there are still plenty of games left in the season.
Gold Diggers of 1977
(Ten Claims that Won Our Hearts)
Michael Moorcock
For Glen Matlock,
Siouxsie, Nik Turner
and everyone else who was never reduced to this …
INTRODUCTION: ADDING TO THE LEGEND
Gold Diggers of 1977 was originally written and published in about two weeks to coincide with the release of The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, a reasonably competent film featuring the Sex Pistols, a rock and roll band which revived a number of fashions in the late seventies, rode high (though maybe not very happily) on a variety of publicity stunts (most of which were banal and most of which, of course, worked) and eventually broke up. A fairly typical set of recriminations and antagonisms between band-members, management, record-companies, culminated in a miserable tragedy in Greenwich Village, New York, when Sid Vicious, accused of knifing his girlfriend to death in The Chelsea Hotel, died of a drug overdose.
A great deal of sentimental publicity followed Sid’s death—as it seems to follow the death of any rock figure—and another young martyr was added to contemporary popular mythology.
The music press, feeding on its own fictions, characteristically compounded the myth while at the same time appearing to deny it. Like all mass-circulation periodicals, they first inflate someone to larger-than-life proportions and then attempt, often by the cheapest kind of mockery, to deflate the idols they have helped create. Their ugly criticisms of Elvis Presley just before he died were matched in intensity only by the exaggerated tributes following his death. People seem to need heroes desperately and resent any signs of ordinary humanity in them—to the point, on occasions, of assassinating them if they refuse to conform or respond to the dreams of their loonier fans.
When Virgin asked me to write a book to go with the film I agreed (after I’d watched the film) because it fitted in with one of my own obsessions (see for instance “A Dead Singer”) and because I’d always seen Irene Handl as Mrs Cornelius. The third reason was that “Anarchy in the UK” introduced a lot of people to the idea of anarchism and presumably led at least a few to Kropotkin and other anarchist theorists whose work is gaining increasing attention. For me, Nestor Makhno is the spirit of romantic, active anarchism, and although he might have been a trifle naïve in some of his hopes, I have a considerable soft spot for him. He, too, died young, of consumption, in poverty and some despair, in Paris in 1936. This story is as much dedicated to his memory as it is to the memory of Sid Vicious and all those others who have, in one way or another, been destroyed by their own simple dreams.
Ingleton
Yorkshire
June 1982
CLAIM ONE: MAGGIE ALL SET FOR VICTORY
Designed by Huber & Pirsson, The Chelsea Hotel was opened in 1884 as one of the City’s earliest cooperative apartment houses. It became a hotel about 1905. The florid cast iron balconies were made by the firm of J. B. & J. M. Cornell. Artists and writers who have lived here include Arthur B. Davies, James T. Farrell, Robert Flaherty, O. Henry, John Sloan, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Wolfe and Sid Vicious.
—Plaque, The Chelsea Hotel, NY.
“Well, it’s not what I bloody corl a picture.” Mrs Cornelius waded across the foyer on old, flat feet and lowered her tray of Lyons Maids and Kia-Oras to the counter. “I mean, in my day it was love an’ adventure an’ that, wannit.”
Lifting a crazed eye from behind the hotdog warmer Sergeant Alvarez opened his disturbed mouth.
“Who … ?” he began. But his attention was already wandering.
“Now it’s all vomit an’ screwin’,” she continued. “I wouldn’t mind if it was Clark Gable doin’ it. An’
there’s no bloody adventure, Sarge. Wot you grinnin’ at?”
“Who?”
“Oh, shut up, you pore littel bugger. It’s that Mrs Vicious I feel sorry for.”
“Killed … ?” said Sergeant Alvarez.
“Too right.” Mrs C. heaved her tray around. “Oh, well. Back into the effin’ fray.”
As Time Goes By
On the screen an old robber, desperately clinging to the last vestiges of publicity (which he confused with dignity) pretended to play a guitar and wondered about the money. Something in his eyes showed that he really knew his credibility in South London was going down the drain.
“Then who the hell did get any satisfaction out of it?” Mo Collier felt about in his crotch for the popcorn he’d dropped.
“You got a complaint?” Maggy’s voice was muffled.
Mo sighed. “Now’s a fine time to start asking.”
Robbers cavorted on beaches. Robbers limbered up. Robbers made publishing deals and wondered why their victims went crazy.
Mo looked away front the screen. He sniffed. “There’s sulphate in the air-conditioning.”
“Is jussa keepa way,” said Maggy.
“What?”
She raised her head again, impatiently. “It’s just to keep you awake.”
“Oh.”
The popcorn was running out.
A kilted figure came on screen and began to rationalise his own and others’ despair. It was called hindsight.
“I think I’d better try to see what happened to it.” Mo hated political movies.
“What? The money?”
“Call it that, if you like. Unless you have a plot, see, you can’t have the paranoia.”
Maggy rested her head on his thigh. “I don’t think it is sulphate. It’s something else.” She tasted the air. “Is this an EMI cinema?”
Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! Page 14