Pilgrims
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they had been forced to look on himself in sixty years: elderly
and dying, calling to his daughters and his granddaughters,
calling them all to him, calling them all Babette.
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Vegetable Market
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Jimmy moran was still very young — barely over forty —
when he started having serious back pains. His family doc-
tor told him that he probably needed an operation on a disc,
and a second doctor (an expensive specialist) confirmed it. Both
doctors agreed that Jimmy would need to take six months off
from work. He would need to lie on his back and do absolutely
nothing at all for six months, and only then would he have a
chance at complete recovery.
“Six months!” Jimmy told the doctors. “I’m in the produce
business, buddies! Are you kidding me?”
Six months! He made his doctors an offer of four months,
which was still much more time than he could afford to lose.
They finally came down to five months, but only grudgingly
and with obvious disapproval. Even five months off was ridicu-
lous. He’d never taken as much as a week away from the Bronx
Terminal Vegetable Market since he’d started working there as a
loading porter, in the summer of 1970. Five months! He had a
wife to support and so many kids at home that it was almost
embarrassing to say the full number. But there was no getting
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around any of this. His back was injured and he needed the
surgery, so he went ahead with it. And here’s how they survived:
his wife, Gina, took extra hours at her job; they emptied their
small savings account; his brother Patrick gave them some
money. Things were not as bad as they might have been.
As it turned out, Jimmy Moran ended up accomplishing two
important things during his time away from the market. First of
all, he bought a gorgeous 1956 blue Chrysler sedan, which was
in great shape and drove like a luxury ocean liner. Gina didn’t
agree with the investment, but they needed another car, and
the Chrysler was a lot cheaper than anything new. Besides, he
bought it off an old man in Pelham Bay who hadn’t taken the
thing out of the garage for decades and had no idea what it was
worth. Honestly, the car was a steal. It really was. Jimmy had
always wanted a beautiful old car. He’d always felt that he
deserved a beautiful old car, because he would appreciate it and take good care of it and when he drove around town he would
wear a good-looking, old-fashioned kind of brimmed hat, just
like his dad used to wear.
His second accomplishment was that he decided to run for
president of his union local.
The current president of the Teamsters Local 418 was a guy
named Joseph D. DiCello, who had the obvious advantage of
being an incumbent and an Italian. Most of the union members
at the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market were Italian, and if
even half the Italians voted for DiCello, Jimmy Moran would
get whipped like a bad dog, and he realized that completely.
Jimmy, however, still believed that he had a chance to win.
Reason being, Joseph D. DiCello was basically an idiot and a
corrupted, useless fuck.
DiCello drove a big Bonneville and hadn’t successfully de-
fended a worker’s grievance in six years. He barely even showed
up at the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market at all anymore, and
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when he did show up, he’d always be sure to bring some prosti-
tute with him, picked up from around the gates outside. A
Chinese prostitute, usually. DiCello would ask some tired, over-
worked porter, “Hey, kid? You like my wife? You like my new
wife, kid?”
And the porter, naturally, would say something like “Sure,
boss.”
Then DiCello would laugh at the poor guy, and even the
Chinese prostitute would laugh at the poor guy. Therefore, and
for numerous other reasons, people were basically getting sick
of Joseph D. DiCello.
Jimmy Moran, on the other hand, was a well-liked person.
The few Irish workers left at the market would vote for him out
of instinct, and Jimmy got along with most of the Italians just
fine. Why, he’d even married an Italian. His own kids were half
Italian. He had no problems with Italians. He had no problems
with the Portuguese, either, and did not think in any way that
they were thieves by nature. He also had no problems with the
blacks (unlike that sick bigot DiCello), and he was actually
quite popular with the Hispanics. Jimmy had held many differ-
ent jobs over the years at the market, but he’d recently been
hired once again as a loading porter, which meant that he
worked mostly with Dominicans and Puerto Ricans. Who were
all very decent and fun-loving individuals, as far as Jimmy Mo-
ran could see.
When it came to the Mexican vote, this would also be no
problem. The older Mexicans would remember that, years and
years ago, Jimmy Moran had worked at the typically Mexi-
can job of handling and packaging peppers. (And not those
sweet Italian bell peppers, either, but pitiless Spanish peppers
— jalapeños, poblanos, cayennes, chilies, Jamaican hots —
fierce peppers that only Mexicans usually handled, because if a
person didn’t know what he was doing, he could really get hurt.
When a person got the oil from one of those peppers in his eye,
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it honestly felt just like getting punched in the eye.) Although pepper-handling was easy on the back, it was no job for a white
man, and Jimmy had quit doing it years and years ago. But he
still got along fine with all the older Mexicans, and with most of
the younger ones, too.
As for the Koreans, Jimmy had no experience with them.
Neither did anybody else, though, so it really didn’t matter. It
wasn’t like Joseph D. DiCello was best friend to the Koreans or
anything. The Koreans were strange people, and you could just
forget about the Koreans. The Koreans had their own market
within the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market, and they only
sold to each other. They talked to each other in Korean, and
besides, they weren’t even in the union.
There was another thing that Jimmy Moran had in his favor.
He was actually a true union man, and not some phony local
gangster’s kid like DiCello. He wasn’t even from the city. He
was born in Virginia, and his people were real coal-mining
people and honest-to-Christ workingmen. Back in Virginia,
when Jimmy was only ten years old, he’d watched his grandfa-
ther overturn a company coal truck and empty a shotgun into
the engine block during a workers’ strike. His uncle was mur-
dered by company detectives, his other uncle died of black lung,
his ancestors organized against U.S. Steel, and Jimmy Moran
<
br /> was a true workingman in a way that an affluent cheat like
Joseph D. DiCello, for instance, could never be true in a thou-
sand corrupted lifetimes.
Jimmy Moran gave his potential candidacy one evening’s
thought. This was four months into his recovery from back
surgery. He considered all the advantages and disadvantages of
staging a campaign, which would be his first. Gina wouldn’t be
nuts about the idea, but Jimmy’s back didn’t hurt anymore, he
was the owner of a beautiful 1956 Chrysler, and he felt really,
really capable. He couldn’t think of any reason that he — with
his good labor background, his decent personality, and all the
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different jobs he’d held at the market over the years — should
not be the president of the union.
Yes, he gave his candidacy that one evening’s thought, and
when he woke up the next morning, he was decided. Convicted,
even. It was a great feeling. It was like waking up in love.
And so Jimmy Moran returned to the Bronx Terminal Vegeta-
ble Market after only four months of recovery. His plan was
to campaign for a few nights, and then come back to work
officially. He arrived well after midnight, as the delivery trucks
were pulling in to load up. When he came through the entrance
gate, he stopped to talk with Bahiz, the Arab woman who
checked identification cards. She was a fairly attractive woman,
so everybody flirted with her. Also, she was the only woman
who worked at the entire market, or at least as far as Jimmy
Moran had ever noticed in nearly twenty-five years.
“Bahiz!” he said. “Who let you out of the harem?”
“Oh, Jeez. Jimmy’s back,” she said. She was chewing gum.
“‘Jimmy’s back!’” Jimmy repeated. “‘Jimmy’s back! ’ Hey, don’t say anything about Jimmy’s back, sweetheart. You should say,
‘Jimmy Moran has returned. ’ Jesus, I don’t want to talk about Jimmy’s back. You like my new car?”
“Very nice.”
“Guess what year it is.”
“I don’t know.”
“Just give it a guess.”
“I don’t know. Nineteen sixty-eight?”
“Are you kidding me?”
“What is it, ’sixty-six? How should I know?”
“Bahiz! It’s a ’fifty-six! It’s a ’fifty-six, Bahiz!”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Use your eyeballs for once, Bahiz.”
“How should I know? I can barely see it.”
“The ladies love it, sweetheart. I’ll take you for a drive some -
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time. You never would’ve refused me all these years if I was
driving a car this nice. Isn’t that right, Bahiz?”
“Oh, Jimmy. Just go to hell.”
“You got a dirty mouth, Bahiz. Listen. How about some
figs?”
Sometimes Bahiz had the greatest figs with her. The dried
figs that were widely available at the Bronx Terminal Vegetable
Market were mostly mission figs, from California. And after
eating Bahiz’s figs, Jimmy Moran was certainly never going to
eat any dried California mission figs again. Some of the better
houses at the market carried imported Spanish figs, which were
pretty nice, but they were expensive. Also, Spanish figs were
kept packaged in plastic-wrapped crates, so it was almost im-
possible to steal just a handful for free sampling.
Bahiz, however, sometimes had the most incredible Israeli
figs, and she would always give a few to Jimmy. Bahiz’s mother
shipped the figs to her by air mail all the way from the Middle
East, which was very expensive but worth it. It was a well-
known fact that, throughout all of the entire history of man-
kind, Israeli figs have always been considered the most valuable
figs in the world. Israeli figs taste like granulated honey. They
have skins like thin caramels.
But Bahiz didn’t have any figs that night.
“Forget about you, Bahiz,” Jimmy Moran said. “You worth-
less old bat.”
“I hope somebody hits your dumb-ass car!” she said, and they
both smiled at each other and waved good-bye.
Jimmy parked his car in front of Grafton Brothers, which was
his most recent employer, one of the biggest wholesale houses in
the market and a good place to start his campaign. Grafton
Brothers was a very profitable house, and here was why: Salvi
and John Grafton bought overripe produce with no shelf life for
the lowest, giveaway prices. Then they hired porters to pick
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through the produce — most of which was rotten — toss out
the rotten stuff, and repack the rest of it. Grafton’s could triple
its investment on a cheap shipment of vegetables while still
underselling the rest of the market. It was practically a hoax.
Salvi and John Grafton might have gotten to be rich men this
way, with big horse-racing farms down in Florida, but their
wholesale empire still smelled like compost from all the ripe
food they threw out, and there were more rats at Grafton’s than
at any other house in the market. Grafton’s produce was gar-
bage.
There were specialty houses at the market that took produce
very seriously and sold only beautiful fruits and vegetables.
There was a Russian Jew in the north docks who flew endive in
every day from a small family farm in the middle of Belgium,
and that was the finest endive in the world. There was a Filipino who sold blackberries in February for five dollars a pint wholesale, and buyers were happy to pay, because the blackberries were fantastic and it was worth it. Grafton’s was not such a
house.
Jimmy Moran had worked for Grafton’s off and on over
twenty-five years as a porter, a driver, a vegetable sorter, and in
practically every other kind of job. The only thing was, he’d
never been able to get any kind of desk job inside the barracks
of Grafton’s offices. Office jobs at the Bronx Terminal Vegetable
Market were always a little harder to come by. There was a lot of
competition and a lot of pressure, and it helped, apparently, to
be good at math. In any case, Grafton Brothers had hundreds of
dock employees, and Jimmy knew nearly all of them.
Jimmy Moran walked along the Grafton Brothers docks, carry-
ing on his back a heavy burlap sack filled with the campaign
buttons he’d had made up the day before. The buttons said:
dicello’s not on our side, so let’s put him on the
outside. vote for jimmy moran, president. They were
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huge buttons, each approximately the diameter of a grapefruit,
with black lettering on a yellow background. He moved around
the stacks of crates and the vegetable displays and the tractors,
and he gave buttons to everybody and talked to everybody. He
tried to speak as personally as possible.
He’d say, “Hey, Sammy! Your wife still cooking you those
dinners?”
He’d say, “H
ey, Len! You still taking all those naps?”
He’d say, “Hey, Sonny! You still work with that other crazy
bastard?”
Passing out buttons, shaking hands, passing out buttons,
shaking hands, passing out more buttons. Jimmy Moran felt
really good. His back wasn’t bothering him at all. He felt rested
and capable, and it took him several hours to get through
Grafton’s.
He saw his old friend Herb talking to a young porter, and he
said, “Hey, Herb! Who’s that, your new boyfriend?”
He saw a porter, not much older than his own son Danny,
smoking marijuana behind a melon display, and he said, “Police!
You’re under arrest, you dope!”
He saw his old friend Angelo playing cards on the back of a
crate with some other guys and he said, “What is this, Angelo, a
casino?”
Angelo and the others laughed. Everyone asked after his
back and hoped he was feeling better. Jimmy Moran had always
been popular at Grafton’s, and everyone was happy to see him
back. He used to do a funny trick when he was working in the
cucumber cooler there. He’d pretend to be a blind man. He
would stare off into space and put his arms straight out and
stumble around, bumping into everybody. He’d say, “I’m the
blind vegetable man . . . Excuse me, sir, could you tell me where
the cucumbers are?”
There was only one guy who never laughed at that trick, and
that was a quiet and serious Haitian porter named Hector.
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Jimmy got to the point where he would do the blind-vegetable-
man trick only if Hector was around, trying to get Hector to
laugh even once. Jimmy would stumble over Hector’s feet and
feel up Hector’s face, and Hector would just stand there, with
his arms crossed, not smiling. Eventually, Jimmy would quit it
and say, “What is it with you, Hector? Maybe you’re the one
that’s blind.”
“Where’s that Haitian guy Hector?” Jimmy asked his old
friend Angelo. Jimmy’s sack of campaign buttons was already
half empty. He felt the campaign was going well.
“Hector?” Angelo said. “Hector’s a distributor now.”
“Get out of here! Hector’s a distributor? ”
“He’s in broccoli.”
“I go away for a few months and Hector’s suddenly a dis-
tributor? ”
Jimmy headed down the Grafton docks to the huge ware-