Table Money

by Jimmy Breslin

  Instead, she moved away from him and turned her back and said she had to take care of the baby.

  They had steak and asparagus for dinner and Owney grabbed the glass and was about to drain it when he realized that the glass held ice water.

  After dinner, they turned on the television, but there was a special on Vietnam and Owney turned the set off without gambling on another channel. Dolores looked at a news magazine, then a fashion magazine. Owney smoked.

  “What time is it?” he said.

  “Eight-fifteen.”

  He closed his eyes and inhaled. The night doesn’t want to move, he thought.

  He got up and went out on the stoop. Dolores followed him. “There’s a movie on at nine,” she said. Owney nodded. The guy three doors down, Bruce Cataldo, came out for a minute. He was a fireman, and Owney didn’t want to talk to him. Cataldo always talked about how the Fire Department didn’t want anybody working a second job as a sandhog. Owney’s sense was that Dolores would get right in the conversation tonight and begin asking why he didn’t take the fire test. Then Emily Schweitzer, Owney and Dolores’s landlady, came out. She had a sweater over her shoulders and carried a small bag of garbage. The proper Glendale housewife keeps such a small garbage can in the kitchen that it must be emptied four and five times a day. The sweater tossed over the shoulders goes with the chore.

  “Now I’m finished,” she said. “I can go back upstairs and have a nice, good mouthful of cold beer. I deserve my beer at the end of the day.”

  “Don’t take too much of it,” Owney said.

  “Oh, you never catch me taking too much cold beer. George and I sit there watching television and I have a nice, good mouthful of cold beer. That’s all. You won’t catch me doing more than taking a mouthful of good cold beer. You care to stop up, have a nice, good mouthful of cold beer?”

  “No, thanks,” Owney said. “We’re going to watch a movie.”

  He walked inside the house and sat down and turned on the television.

  “It isn’t time yet,” Dolores said. “It’s only twenty to nine.”

  Owney grabbed a pack of cigarettes.

  When the movie finally appeared, he couldn’t concentrate. It was still before ten o’clock when he was in bed and Dolores was in the bathroom, scrubbing the make-up from her face. She was humming. Owney thought of the bottles in the refrigerator. Brown and beaded. No good. Then he began thinking of the table by the door in the hog house. At the end of the day, they would be sitting there playing cards and right in the middle of the table, where you had to reach through the card game and nobody ever minded, there would be a square bottle of Jim Beam whiskey. Take what you want.

  That was at the end of the day. Now, he wanted to think of the morning, of the lunch wagon and the woman in the clean white apron reaching into the refrigerator and taking out a can of beer, a can covered with cold dew.

  At midnight, damp, his eyes wide open, he imagined he saw the form of the Holy Ghost at the end of the bed.

  He slipped out of bed and went into the living room and watched the Tonight Show and then an old British movie about a woman who cheated on her husband and kept meeting a man in a train station. At one point, the woman ran out on the platform and was about to jump in front of an express train, but then stopped.

  “Fuck. You should have jumped,” Owney said.

  He thought of the refrigerator, and his body was damp and his mouth dry, but then he made two fists and he stayed in the chair. He watched a half-hour life history of Mussolini and at the end, when Mussolini was hanging by his heels with his broad next to him, Owney’s body jumped and he realized that he had been asleep for a moment. He went back to bed and immediately was asleep. It was only a couple of hours, but it was enough for him to go to work with enough guts to dress and walk directly to the cage without stopping for the beer he so desperately wanted.

  He went for two days and then realized that he could do it no more without something else to do. He and Dolores drove to Jamaica after dinner and Owney enrolled in the school for labor relations that was established for union members, the Delahanty Institute, on Sutphin Boulevard. The school, housed in a red brick building, was first established to prepare young men for the Police and Fire Department exams. The founder, Michael Delahanty, was a New York City bureaucrat who was famous for taking twenty-three civil service exams and finishing in the top two percent each time. Once, at a New Year’s office party in the offices of the city comptroller, the all-male staff brought in a prostitute to entertain in the workmen’s compensation claims section. Delahanty spent the day locked in a tiny office, where he pored over pamphlets pertaining to his next test, for senior chief clerk, grade 17. He refused to open the door when other workers pounded on it and declared that he had to say hello, at least, to the young prostitute. Delahanty remained locked inside with his test booklets. Thereafter, municipal workers said, “Delahanty is so sick that he would rather take a test than have his prick sucked.”

  When he founded the police and fire school, he had a greater effect on the city than all of the city’s colleges. In the 1960s, when competition cut his police and fire business, Delahanty introduced labor relations courses and installed Harry Kellerman, an old publicist for the Transport Workers Union, as dean of labor studies.

  On Owney’s first night in the course, Kellerman appeared with white hair uncombed and shot an arm forward, bent his knees, in the speaking form of the old Communists from the transit unions, and then bellowed to the class: “Letters to the editor! The basic protest of the union man. Whenever you see an antiunion story in a newspaper, sit down and write a letter to the editor. Let no insult go unanswered. We will read and discuss Eugene Debs after you have mastered the letter to the editor.”

  Kellerman then gave his rules for a letter: refer immediately to the article, say immediately that the article was unjust, and then in two short paragraphs prove that it was wrong by using a fusillade of facts.

  “If you don’t have a fact, then reach into your heart and find one,” Kellerman said. “Don’t worry about a detail being out of line. Truth is what counts. And a labor union is truth. Oh, yes. I do assume that you understand that basic English grammar is to be used.”

  Owney sat alongside a forty-year-old man named Claffey, of Ironworkers Local 40. As Claffey listened to this, his attitude was that of a prisoner hearing the warden explain that as long as they were in a penitentiary, they might as well wear leg irons.

  Riding home on the bus that night, Owney read the Long Island Press and saw nothing against labor. When he got home, he spoke to Dolores about Kellerman’s assignment.

  “We’ll just have to read every paper closely.”

  “I’ll get them on the way home,” he said.

  “I’ll get them,” Dolores said. “Just in case they’ll be gone by the time you start home.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That a candy store owner sends the papers back the next day.”

  She said it with a smile, but a small one. She saw that Owney was irritated even by this, and she said no more.

  The next day, Dolores bought the papers, went over them, and found nothing essentially anti-labor. The day after that, she went up to the big newsstand on Myrtle and Wyckoff and bought the New York City dailies, along with the Wall Street Journal, which upon inspection at the kitchen table carried an article on page twelve with a headline saying: “Fewer Ride New York’s Subways as Union Indifference Rises.” The story blamed maintenance practices in the repair shops as the reason for loss of ridership. Dolores circled it and had it ready for Owney when he came home.

  “So I’ll answer it,” he said.

  “What are you going to say?” Dolores said.

  “That you shouldn’t blame a workingman,” Owney said.

  “That’s no answer.”

  “Then what is?”

  “You can think,” Dolores said. “Why do people you know complain about the subways?”

 
“Only one reason. But you can’t put that in.”

  “I don’t see why you don’t put the truth in,” Dolores said.

  “All right,” Owney said.

  “I know what you mean. So say it. You know more than almost anybody. Put it down.” She left him at the table with a legal pad and pen and went into the living room to watch the news. The news hadn’t been on five minutes, through scenery shots of Paris that included foreign politicians at a meeting, one of those stories that are the heart of network news, that give importance to a travelogue, when Owney called for her. He ripped a sheet off the legal pad and gave it to her.

  “In your story in yesterday’s paper, you said people don’t ride the subways because of union mechanics in Brooklyn. As a member of organized labor in this city, I say that your wrong. If you rode a subway in this city you would see that the true reason is color fear. Every time two blacks get on a subway car, three whites jump off. I could count. That gives the subway car a minus one. So don’t blame a poor union worker for all the trouble out in the world.”

  “The ‘you’re,’ “ Dolores said, reading it.

  “What ‘your’?”

  “Here, you say that ‘your wrong.’ That’s a contraction. You and are. Come on.”

  Her tone changed as she saw desperation ripple through his eyes, which went right to the refrigerator. His hand grabbed for the cigarette pack, even though he had one smoking in the ashtray.

  “Owney, you just wrote it quickly so you could make me laugh. You happened to skip an apostrophe. Take your time. You wrote me beautiful letters from Vietnam. That’s why I married you. Now get going. But go slow.”

  He wrote on the pad for several minutes and then the phone rang.

  “I’ll get it,” she said.

  “No, no, you sit. I’ll get it.”

  “Channel Two right away,” Ralphie Schmidt roared.

  Owney hung up and went into the living room and changed the channel. The picture on the screen was of fighting in Vietnam. Some young kid with an old man’s stare carrying a gun. Now the phone rang again and this time Dolores went to answer it.

  “Yes, Ralphie,” Dolores called out. “Ralphie, don’t do that. I said, Ralphie … Keerist!”

  “What?” Owney said.

  “He shot at his television set. I could hear the noise.”

  Owney grabbed the extension. Ralphie’s voice was raving over the phone.

  “Ralphie.”

  “Yeah, boy!”

  ‘“Did you knock anybody down?”

  “I blew the gook prisoner sky fucking high. I take no prisoners. Did you see him go?”

  “Sure I did,” Owney said.

  “Beauty,” Ralphie said. “I got one problem.”

  “What?”

  “How do I watch The Dating Game tomorrow?”

  Owney immediately turned off the set.

  They hung up and Dolores said, “That’s sick. How can you lead him on like that?”

  “It’s good. Ralphie likes that.”

  Owney was so elated that he had Ralphie crazy that this time he had his hand on the refrigerator door before he realized what he was doing. He licked his lips and sat down and worked hard on his contractions and then he decided that he’d had enough and he put the pad atop the refrigerator.

  “Let me see it,” Dolores said.

  “It isn’t finished yet. I have until Thursday.”

  “I thought the way you were going was all right,” she said.

  “Come on. The three white guys getting off when the spade gets on? I was doing it to make you laugh. That’s all right to talk about.”

  “No, it was taking some license, but it was essentially based on the truth. You certainly were using more of the truth than they were in blaming the maintenance men.”

  “You can’t go around sending in to the newspapers something like that.”

  “Owney, if you live on Seventy-fourth Street, what are you supposed to call it?”

  He thought about that. “Do you know you’re smarter than I am?”

  “Smart enough to keep you away from there,” she said, pointing to the refrigerator. “Let’s go for a nice walk. Only on streets with all houses. No avenues.”

  Outside, she rang the upstairs bell and asked Emily Schweitzer to watch the baby, and then, holding his hand, she led Owney through a network of streets that had no bars on them.

  As they were walking up 78th Avenue, they saw the brown bus coming from Woodside. Right away, Owney had a vision of the place where the bus began its trip, around the corner and all the way up 80th Street, next to Durow’s, with the side door opening and the gold light from the inside of the bar spilling over the sidewalk.

  “Take a run?” he said.

  “Don’t overdo it. This is just fine.”

  “No, I want to do some running. Come on.”

  He took off and she kept walking. He ran as quickly as he could to the corner and then he went around it, onto 80th Street, and now he heard her yelp.

  “You bastard!”

  He ran down 80th Street, hearing her flat shoes pounding after him. He looked back once and she had the sweater off her shoulders and held in one hand like a baton, and for a girl, a woman, she was flying.

  “Owney.”

  He kept running because he had it figured out. This had to be fun for her, and at the end she would be out of breath and laughing and they could have one nice beer together. He had to get to Durow’s. They had red leather barstools in the gold light. And a helluva guy, the blond German guy with the hair slicked straight back, tending bar. Owney ran for the corner and as he was on the opposite side of the street, under the trees in front of the houses, he decided to stay here and right at the last moment cut across the street and into Durow’s without losing a step.

  He put his head down and he ran and he heard her shout again and he took a look back and saw that she had her head down and her arms pumping. For some reason, the determination took the thirst out of his mouth and he stopped dead and stood laughing as she ran up to him.

  “A child,” she said.

  “I was having fun with you.”

  “You were a little boy running away from his mother. Bastard.” She took his hand. “Home.”

  As he walked with her, he threw one glance to his left and looked at the side door to Durow’s. The gold light came through the curtains stretched over the door. His legs froze.

  Dolores held his hand tighter and at the corner she guided him into a turn and now they were walking up Myrtle Avenue, with a closed bakery and an espresso shop as the best the place could offer. The old Rodgers, a place with an ugly brick front, was in the middle of the next block, but she had him turn onto 79th Street, with its trees and houses on both sides all the way down to the cross street, which was made up of more trees and houses.

  She patted his back. “I’m burping you.”

  The next night, the two sat and worked on the letter, and when he was getting confused and fidgety, she seemed to notice right away.

  “Go in and watch a game on television. I’ll finish it for you.”

  In the morning a feeling of confidence ran through him as he picked up the letter, all done neatly so he could read the parts she had done, most of it, he admitted, and he went in and kissed her on the neck and she smiled in her half sleep.

  He went directly from work to Delahanty’s and sat in the classroom in the late afternoon and copied the letter in his own handwriting. The letter was longer than Kellerman had proposed, but Dolores’s language was tight and connected and he found it too difficult to save any words. In one section; she had written, “The fundamental problem facing the transit system is that each time two blacks step aboard a car, it seems as if three whites leave. This assumption, which might seem to be mere hyperbole, enters the realm of proven fact when the ridership totals are inspected.” She had placed some tone into the subject, but now, late of an afternoon, and with a surprising amount of indecision, he was concerned about using rac
e as a topic. Then he went out to the luncheonette on the corner and found the place empty and the owner cleaning the coffee urns.

  “I can give you a meat loaf sandwich, but I only got Coke to go with it,” he said. “You got me right as I’m closing, as you could see. I can’t stay open past dark.” The owner muttered as he picked up a knife, “These shines.”

  Owney felt this made his letter even more credible, and he went back to the classroom and confidently handed the letter to Kellerman, who was incredulous and overjoyed as he looked at it.

  “There! You’ve got it! You have put your finger not only on the transportation system, but on the entire urban plight. The masses have allowed themselves to be split by the rich. Blacks and whites belong together on the subways. Then they must rush up the subway stairs and together … destroy the rich!” Excitement caused his hands to fumble as he dug through a briefcase and produced an envelope and a stamp, which he handed to Owney. “After class tonight, we shall post this letter immediately!”

  In his lecture that night, Kellerman expounded on his theories of letter writing: anything to the Daily News should be kept to two paragraphs, the first of which was to contain a personal insult to the paper or to the subject of an anti-labor story. A letter to the Times newspaper should begin with a mention of the offending article, a factual presentation and not a personal insult, for Kellerman said that the Times was a Jewish newspaper and the editors were so ego-ridden that they needed to be told that even their obvious misdeeds were intellectually sound. After the class, he walked Owney to the mailbox on the corner of Jamaica Avenue.

  When Owney dropped the letter in the box, the slot door’s metallic sound filled him with the sense of a completed task, and the desire for immediate reward. This he was able to suppress and he was quite pleased with himself for doing so.

  Standing under the el, looking about, Kellerman said, “Let’s get a drink.”

  “I got to get home.”

  “Have one.”