Big Man, A Fast Man

by Appel, Benjamin

  Our first stop was a speak. It was my first speak, and I hated spending my good money. I wouldn’t drink a second round. Not me. I said I didn’t live alone the way they did. I had a whole family to think of. That got them sore. Antonoff hollered how he sent money to the old country, and Rearden was supporting a divorced wife and two kids. It was Savela who calmed us all down. He was a joker. He said those drinks were just like cough medicine. One part slag, one part river water, one part alky. Cough medicine and cheaper than a doctor. We had a second round and then we went into a back alley where the women were tapping at the windows.

  Billy, let me interrupt. Do you mind finishing up that stripper party?

  You couldn’t use it. People wear a blindfold in this country. There are no strippers, no whores. Only the little wife waiting at that picture-window ranch house. The important thing about that stripper party was this. That I was whoring with men who made a living out of breaking strikes. To Harry Holmgren it was just another good time but I saw it different. “We paid for that party,” I said on the train back to Cleveland. He argued we hadn’t paid a lousy cent. I asked him where the money came from if not from some union those finks’d licked or sabotaged. Harry got sore. He didn’t curse or yell. When a free-cursing character like that’s quiet, watch yourself, brother. He was sore enough to fire me and I wondered where I’d take my hat. I’d walked out of steel and where could I go? I said, “Harry, ease up. I can still see you dancing around those strippers.” I buttered him up. I had to. Show me the union or the company or any operation where, you don’t have to butter up the man on top. Harry was okay. A good union man, but he liked to live good. There’s nothing wrong with that. What’s good for the rich is good for the working stiff. I’ll have a drink on that. All this crap about labor leaders with their fat expense accounts and Caddys makes me puke.

  Let me tell you a few things. I like to live good myself. That house I got in Georgetown is worth forty thousand bucks. Hell, I’ve worked hard enough. My whole life was work. Never knowing from one day to the next. I’ve been through the mill, through the depression. Take that depression —

  Billy, we could come to that later.

  We’ll come to that now. If you want the story of my career you can’t leave the depression out. The depression made me an organizer. It made the whole labor movement. The fat cats in labor don’t want to remember. But they weren’t always wearing hundred-dollar suits and staying over in hundred-dollar hotel suites like in the joke. I’ve told you about my mother and how hard she worked for our little house. Do you know what a house means to a working woman? What it means to lose it? She didn’t cry when they buried my father. The only time I saw her cry was when we lost our house. When the street-cleaning truck carried our furniture off to the city garage. You ever see your furniture out on the sidewalk? They piled it up, the sheriff’s men. They put her rocker on top of the kitchen table, and in the rocker they put her porcelain cat. That was when she broke down and cried.

  Our family broke up. My sister Nellie moved out to Clairton to live with my sister Millie and her husband. Me and my mother and kid brother moved back into my uncle Lennie’s house. He was out of work but his house was paid off. He hung onto it like a dog a bone. That was what the depression was like. Bones with no meat on it. Nothing to do but hang out on the terrace. Standing around and looking down at the mills. They were like we’d never seen them before. The fire dead in the blasts. Everything was dead. Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago. The whole country was dead. We hung around talking. No depression on talk. Talk and spit what we called depression oysters. Just like a bunch of bums. I quit shaving every day. Blades cost too much. Besides the whiskers kept you warm in the winter. That was the big joke. I called my whiskers face fur. The cops treated us like bums. That’s the worst of a depression. It’s a depression in your heart and lots of fellows became bums. I saw good men turn into dirt. There were even some who lived on their daughters. Six-bit whores laid by old friends of the family like as not. This Wojeski who lived on Union Street, the one who grew onions. He made out like he didn’t know how his daughter Wanda brought home some money. My sister Nellie wanted to go to New York. I had to beg her to stick it out but I couldn’t stop my kid brother. He hopped a freight for sunny Californiay and we never saw him again. That poor kid. Who knows what happened to him? Maybe he wanted to dump the family? Maybe he got knifed in some hobo jungle?

  That was how it was. It was Roosevelt who stopped it. He was the poor man’s president, don’t kid yourself. After he got in, things began to pick up a little. There was smoke in the stacks again. I remember how my uncle Lennie’s wife cried for joy and my mother with her when they saw the good soot again on the curtains. My uncle went back to work. Then I went back. McKeesport was McKeesport again. But there was a big change. How big it was nobody saw at the time. It was Roosevelt and the New Deal and all kinds of new ideas. The right to work. The dignity of man. There was a new union spirit. Before the depression there was a union in steel if you could call a corpse a union. That was the old AFL Iron and Tin Workers. But now there was something brand new. The idea of one big steel union for the whole industry. Not a bunch of little craft unions. One big union. That was the idea of the CIO. It made big business shiver. One big union. I was all for it. I talked it up with one eye peeled for the company stool pigeons. I talked union everywhere. Behind the freights, in the can. One day when I had the chance I painted JOIN THE UNION on the walls. I remember there was some religious nut who wrote with a pencil. He couldn’t spell, CHRIST IS COMEN, THE UNION IS COMEN. Coming was right. Coming out of the depression, the hungry time, the dirty time. We sang a song somebody made up. Can’t make iron without all three. Coke and ore and limestone-y. Can’t make a union without all three, Three of you and three of me.

  The big union man in McKeesport was Hank Sievert. He was a crane operator at McKeesport Steel where I worked. He was the one who began asking fellows to his house. I’d go there looking over my shoulder to see if I was being followed. Hank got us to signing the men up. Every night after work I knocked on doors. I talked it up to the Croatians on Walnut Street. The colored on Jenny Lind. I went back to Union Street where we used to live and talked it up. “Living on Union,” I said, “you ought to be one hundred percent for the union unless you want to change the name to Company Street.” The stool pigeons spotted me. The super called me into his office. He said he couldn’t understand why a clean-cut American like me was all mixed up with foreign agitators and reds. I said I was no agitator or red. He said, “Lloyd, you’ve been reported as saying that you favor a union for this plant.” I said, “Not me, Mr. Chester.” It was a lie. Only it’s no lie with your job at stake. That night I told my mother and sister what happened but they took it fine. We’d just moved into a little flat of our own and I was the only one working. My mother said I should stick to my guns. Then she looked at me in a strange way like she was seeing my father alive at the kitchen table. And she got to talking of Shenandoah when Johnny Mitchell came there organizing the coal miners back in 1902. She said, “The parades never stopped. And the signs, ‘We are slaves but Mitchell will set us free.’ “ And I got a feeling I’d never had before. That I could be somebody like Johnny Mitchell who I’d heard of all my life. The miners’ hero. That’s who he is. No miner to this day works on Johnny Mitchell Day. It’s a holiday.

  I became one of Hank Sievert’s best organizers. He was a fellow who could’ve been an efficiency expert. Everything was in its slot with Hank. He never stayed up past midnight. We’d sit talking in his house until the cuckoo in the cuckoo clock sang out twelve. That’s when he stopped whatever he had to say and give me some pamphlets or books to read. He’d say, “There’s talk for you by men who don’t need any sleep.” I read everything he gave me and I began to understand things. History and politics. The whole story of who gets what and why. We’d talk it over, what I’d read. One thing I never could understand right, and I don’t to this day. Who makes history? Do men make
it or does history make men? Who made the New Deal? Roosevelt or the times? Hank’s idea was that men made history but I don’t know. Sure, you got to have the men. They’re the sparks that light up the fire. Men like Roosevelt. Like John L. Lewis and his CIO. Like Johnny Mitchell in the old days. But without the suffering in the coal fields Johnny Mitchell’d got nowheres. Without the depression there would’ve been no big steel union and no big strikes. Suffering, that’s the organizer who got ‘em all beat. My career got its start in suffering, in the ideas that suffering brings up.

  I got my start, if you want to call it that, in the big steel strike in McKeesport. When Hank said we were ready to strike I jumped up out of my chair. I was that excited. We were sitting in the parlor of his house. There were just the three of us. The leaders. Hank and Walt Marik and me. I was that excited I yelled out loud. They looked at me like I was nuts. Especially this Walt Marik who never liked me. He was a chipper. He operated a pneumatic to chip off the seams on the billets. Like a billet himself. Solid, no imagination. They looked at me and I said, “For Chrissake, ain’t this what we’ve been dreaming about?” Hank, he smiled but this other meatball yacked, “Don’t be such a firebrand.” Hank said, “He’s young, Walt.” God damn right I was young. I was about one day old in that parlor. Hank pulled out a sheet of paper. A drawing of the plant. It had marks on it for the different mills and shops. On that piece of paper was McKeesport Steel Incorporated. The whole damn plant behind its steel-wire fence. And me and Hank and Walt were going to strike it. If I had that piece of paper now I’d frame it. It was my diploma.

  The next day I reported for work as usual. We were striking the plant at eleven P.M. At the end of the three-to-eleven shift. My shift. What a day that was. What a day. Those blasts never seemed bigger. Everything was bigger. And me wondering how Hank and Walt and me were pulling it off. Me, one single fellow backed up by a bunch of guys blowing hot and cold. Some saying, “Let’s negotiate some more.” Some saying, “It’s now or never.” Christ, what a feeling to know how much one single guy could do. I cached my bucket and reported for work. The time went like the time always goes on the blast gang. Heat and sweat and work, and in four hours it was tapping time. That’s when the soup cooked in the blast is drained. So it can harden into pig iron. The blast gang boss hollered for me to tap her. I picked up the drill. Shoved the point into the plug. It chewed in deeper and deeper. That plug’s fireclay. In and in, it went like it always did but that night it was different. In it went and the fire shot out. The molten iron shot out, slow and heavy first like it was alive, pouring into the trough. That’s when you feel the thrill. When the iron’s like a little stream, before it shoots out like a Niagara Falls. And wham, it shot. It came. That’s the thrill, roaring and lighting up every shadow. That’s the tapper’s thrill. Christ, it’s like you’re getting into some dame. Some virgin dame big as a mountain with a shoot in her hotter than the fires of hell. That night I felt it bigger than ever for that night it was the company getting screwed.

  When the shift ended at eleven I yelled, “We’re out on strike.” I let the whole God damn plant, the whole God damn world hear me. The blast boss cursed me for a sonuvabitch. I cursed him back. “Strike,” I yelled, “spread the word.” My boys beat it off to the other blasts but I had to stand there. That was my post. That’s where the strike committee men found me. That’s where I established contact with Hank. That was where I heard that plant coming to a halt. The job of shutting down the strip mill was Walt’s job. But the strike committee men run up to me and said they didn’t know where he was. They said the strip mill was being picketed by foremen and cops. That was a twister, reverse English. Company pickets keeping out the strikers. I couldn’t sit it out. A strike’s like a battle. You’ve got to move with the situation no matter what. Me and a couple strike committee men chased the hell off to the strip mill.

  Out in the yard they were fighting. I saw them in the light of a locomotive. Guys swinging clubs and hollering. Somebody screaming behind the flat cars. The sky it was big and dotted with stars, and somebody screaming. It gave me a jump I’ll never forget. All those stars so peaceful like pieces of molten iron. Up ahead in front of the strip mill, I saw the strikers bunched up, hollering bastards and scabs at the pickets. There was a double line of pickets. The cops with guns, the foremen with clubs. “Where’s Walt Marik?” I asked but nobody knew. It was like a madhouse, all that hollering bastards and scabs. I pushed through the strikers and called out the name of the plant super and that started the hollering all over again. I had to shut them up but they wouldn’t shut up. I had to put a wet blanket on them and when I did I hollered for the plant super again. “Mr. Halloway,” I said, “this plant’s on strike. Let the men in that strip mill out.” He said, “They have a right to stay on their jobs.” He hated me. It was in his voice. The hate and the authority. And I hated him, too. But for once, by God, I had as much authority as any God damn plant super. What happened next was the lights went out. They went out in the strip mill. They went out everywhere. It was so sudden I couldn’t say a thing for a second. Why that strip mill was nothing but a long black wall. The strikers hollering fit to murder now. They were that mad. I made them shut up and I told that Halloway off. “You been preaching safety laws,” I said, “and here you turn off the lights.” He yelled back and asked me who I was. “If you dare give me your right name?” he said. I said, “You don’t have to dare me. I’m Billy Lloyd speaking for the union.”

  For a second there was hell to pay. The hotheads wanted to break up that picket line which was what Halloway wanted. So he could call in the troops. I shut up the hotheads. “Halloway,” I said to that plant super, “you’re fighting a losing fight and be damned to you with your strip mill.” I left some strike committee men to see there was no rushing the picket line. Then I went back to my post. Hank had left word I should look into the cafeteria. Off I went. The cafeteria workers had locked themselves in and wouldn’t budge. They wouldn’t come out. I tried kidding them. “What’s there to eat with the plant on strike? Stool pigeon on toast?” That got a laugh so I kept it up. How stool pigeon on toast was so full of bones and feathers it’d give you the shits. That got them. A laugh sometimes is as good as a punch in the eye. I tried it. The gags, I mean. I was making progress when I had to tear off to the tinhouse where the girls were locked in.

  The lights were all out there. Except for two lights in the windows above the loading platform. The entrance was so dark you couldn’t see a soul. Just feel them. Just a bunch of shapes stepping on each other’s feet. I cleared them out. It was dumb what we were doing, without a light. You wouldn’t believe it but nobody had a flash. I cleared that hollering mob out and went in with a lit match. Down at the end, four or five strikers were kicking and pounding at a door where the girls were. They were cursing, some of them laughing like a New Year party. Singing out, “Cmon you nooky, cmon out.” Things like that. I shut them up but it was so dark, only the matches, they couldn’t see me. They said, “Who the hell are you?” I told them and that sobered them up. They were so wild because the girls’d locked themselves in the ladies’ toilet. I knocked at that door and got no answer. I said it was their strike and they should support it. Then I got an answer. From some guy behind that door. He said, “These girls don’t want to strike.” I said, “What you doing in there?” He answered he was protecting the girls. That tickled my boys. Don’t forget where those girls were. “Protecting ‘em with what?” the boys yelled, laughing. “Your three-incher?” Things like that. I had to shut them up all over again. Then I told the guy in there, the foreman he was, to let those girls out. “You’re going to be arrested for white slaving,” I said. I cracked a bunch of jokes and the girls inside began to laugh. I would’ve had them out in another minute. The trouble was the hotheads outside. One of the strike committee men yanked me out in time.

  Those hotheads, those jerks, had climbed up to the loading platform. Little light guys, they’d got up on the shoulders of
the big guys so they could tap at the windows. That’s what happens when there are women. Yelling, “You can’t take a pee, girls. We’re watching you.” Things like that. The cops were coming, too. The foreman had phoned them. Nothing like saving the honor of the women folk. Not one of those boys would’ve put a finger on any of those girls. Maybe a goose, what’s a goose. Go tell that to the cops. There were two of them coming and the jerks began to yell, “Get the cops.” The cops stopped and pulled out their guns. You could see the guns in one hand, the flashes in the other. The flashes shining white light. The guns mean and nasty and black. It froze that mob in its tracks. I went forward slow and careful. I had to push myself. My heart was going that fast. I said, “Put those guns away.” I said, “There won’t be no trouble.” No sooner did I open my mouth than all those jerks got the courage to rush up behind me, hollering, “Get the cop bastards.” I swung around, my back to those guns. Not seeing them but feeling them. I said, “Nobody’s getting those cops unless they get me first.” They only hollered louder. Real ugly. I thought I’d lost control so I yelled as loud as I could. “Boys, what’s eating you tonight? You want cop meat?” I said, “You need lots of catsup for cop meat and the cafeteria’s closed.” I kept talking like that. Like it was all a joke and not an ugly situation. Their blood all hot because of the darkness, no lights anywhere, and the girls in the can.