Big Man, A Fast Man

by Appel, Benjamin

  It was get it while the getting was good. Every Friday I brought our trucks into Manila. Three trucks of black market lumber. We passed through the M.P. checkpoint. Crossed the Pasig River into that wrecked Manila town. The walls knocked down, the staircases leading nowhere. It looked like hell. And way up in the sky the big stars shining. And I felt they were shining for me, I felt that good. We drove up Avenue Rizal and it was shining, too. Like one big electric diamond from all the headlights. Trucks, jeeps, weapon-carriers. The gas that army was burning up was a gag. Every time we got on Rizal, somebody’d say, “There goes the Ninth War Loan.” Yes, sir, get it while the getting was good. That whole town was one big black market. Every second G.I. peddling K rations or stolen medicines or clothing. Something to buy himself a little souvenir or a piece of pom-pom. And me with my sawmill, driving the boys to produce. I was like some bastard foreman in that black market sweatshop. Me, the demon organizer. Another black market bastard. It bothered me a little. Just a little, when I sweated the boys.

  Those black market bucks. Me, I figured I’d take it back. There was my mother and my sisters. Both married, with kids. I’ll tell you something. My mother wouldn’t touch any of that money. They don’t make them like my mother any more. My sisters, well, why not? It was money for their kids, for college. My mother, she was one like Jim Tooker.

  He wrote me regularly. He wrote how the union was bigger than ever, and so was the graft. Get it while the getting’s good. That was about the size of it back home, too. He didn’t begrudge Art and the other bigshots their big cars and fat expense accounts. What worried him was the union funds going into investments in real estate and stocks, and nobody knowing how much was staying in private pockets. What worried him was Art’s new pal. Leo Shafer, the big adviser. And an organizing campaign for the South. You want the dope on the South? You’ll get it. I said before it was dead stuff. Hell, it was about as dead as Lincoln, if you know what I mean.

  Exactly what do you mean?

  The rights of the colored is what I mean. There’s nothing bigger in the whole country. I’ll give you the facts straight. The USTW was strong except in the South. We’d never had a southern federation. Only a couple of locals in Baltimore and New Orleans. Before the war we were too busy organizing all over the country to do much about the South. We had enough headaches without the South. But with the war booming the membership, Jim wanted to get after the South. Art vetoed the idea. Don’t stir up the hillbillies. That was Art’s argument. Let’s win the war first. Rah rah rah. The old patriotism. Harry Holmgren and Roy McHarnish backed Art and Jim went along. But those letters of his, brother. They were dynamite. He said he wasn’t going to be stalled any more. Soon as the war was over he was organizing the South even if he had to do it by himself. Talk of battles. I could see there was going to be a battle of the South. Another God damn Civil War and me in the middle of it.

  I returned to the States late in 1946. That was an eye-opener. To see how rich the country was. It was the war that’d boomed it. Art Kincell had always run a swell office but I didn’t recognize it now. The carpet in the waiting room was so thick you could drop an egg and not break it. And on the walls, those photos. There must have been forty, fifty of them. And in every one there was Art Kincell. With President Truman. With President Roosevelt. With generals and senators. It was just what Jim wrote. A labor shrine dedicated to God, the Son and the Holy Ghost and all of them little old fat Art. His private office, though, had no photos. Only a flag and a bronze shield shining like a bank. The union shield with United Suppliers Terminal Workers in big bronze letters. It was elegant. Art himself was elegant. He was always a good dresser but now he wore a big pearl in the middle of his necktie. He’d changed, put on weight. He was always a fat man but this was an old man’s fat. Puffy and heavy. He was glad to see me. He pounded me on the back and asked all kinds of questions about the war, and then he dropped it like a two-day-old newspaper. He had more important things on his mind. He brought me over to a table in his office. On it was what looked like a model of a Government building. It was the new USTW headquarters. He said, “Billy, we’re building on New Hampshire Avenue near Du Pont Circle. The best neighborhood in town.” And the marble was coming from Italy. He was so damn proud. Like he was bringing it over, that marble, lump by lump, in his own hands. Listening to him, he no longer seemed old. A powerhouse got no age label on it.

  I felt dizzy taking it all in and wondering when he’d bring up my job. But he took me on a tour of the offices. Instead of one floor like before the war, there were three. Everything was slick, different. New faces everywhere. Lawyers, researchers, experts on trade prospects, welfare fund administrators. It was an institution. That was when I met Edy, my wife, for the first time. Only I didn’t know it then. She was in her middle twenties then and tall as her father. She had his greenish eyes and his nose but on her it was pretty. I didn’t give her a second thought but out in the corridor, Art, he was the proud father. He said she had graduated from Barnard. He said, “If Kathryn Lewis can work for John L. and the coal miners, no reason why my daughter can’t make a career in labor, too.”

  Career, that’s the great all-American word. Isn’t it? Well, when we returned to Art’s office I couldn’t keep it in any longer. I said it’d be great working for him again. He smiled. He was all smiles. His pearl pin smiling, the whole world smiling. “Billy,” he said, “you always got along swell with Harry. What do you say to going back to Cleveland?” That hit me like I’d lost my sergeant’s stripes. But I put on the old smile, too. “Art,” I said, “I was hoping to work for you but whatever you say goes.” That night I phoned Jim in New York. When we got through with the big hellos and when we’d see each other again, I gave him the Cleveland business. He explained that Art didn’t need me any more. He had this Shafer. The big adviser, the private pipeline to Congress. And who but Shafer had assembled the real estate for Art’s palace of labor? That’s what Jim called it. He was bitter. He said it was harmony between labor and management these days. And Shafer was Mr. Harmony himself. Then he said something that almost knocked me off my chair. He said, “Cleveland’s just the place for an old-time organizer who might be thinking the South should be organized.” — “Jim,” I said, “you going ahead with that?” — “Damn right,” he said, “I’m forcing a showdown at the convention this fall. Win, lose or draw, I’m going ahead.”

  I didn’t sleep that night. That I was on Jim’s side goes without saying. But I saw how I could stay out of Cleveland. I saw how I could pull a fast one, if you want to call it that. The next day at Art’s office I mentioned my phone talk with Jim. I said that Jim sure’d filled my ear about his plan to organize the South. Art just sat there like the big heap of meat he was. Looking at me and waiting. I let him wait. I sounded off about Manila and how the Negro troops and the whites’d fought over women and whiskey. I kept it up for a couple minutes until he got irritated and asked me what the damn point was. By God, I gave him the damnedest snow job you ever saw. How those Negro soldiers’d be going back to those southern states, wanting their rights and the crackers not standing for it. How I was the kind of guy who if they could breathe, signed ‘em up, but the time wasn’t ripe to organize the South. Art didn’t say a word. Just listening. I said I couldn’t forget who had built the union up from twenty thousand members to one of the biggest. And that was nobody but Art Kincell, and it was done through teamwork, and teamwork was the only thing whether in the Army or the union. Then I tossed the biggest trump I had. I said, “In my opinion Jim Tooker shouldn’t bring up this southern issue at the convention. We don’t want a knockout dragout fight.”

  He bit. He wanted to know how Jim Tooker could be stopped. When I left his office I had my first assignment. A Washington and not a Cleveland assignment. To change Jim’s ideas on the South, if possible. Don’t think for a second I was Art’s man. I was just using that fat bastard. Playing the power game that fat bastard thought he’d invented. There are fast ones and fa
st ones, if you know what I mean. That weekend I took the Congressional to New York to see Jim. One thing I was sure of as God is my witness. Jim wasn’t getting hurt through me. I looked out of the window at the farms and towns and hot-dog signs and I was dizzy. Everything was going too God damn fast. There I was bound for New York when I was still half in Manila with the G.I.’s crowding Rizal, smoking big cigars, yelling and arguing with the sidewalk pimps. I looked around me at all the clean people on that clean train and the smell of Manila was still in my nose. That’s a smell I’ll never forget. Seawater and gasoline. Dust, frying smells, and the smell of filth. All mixed together like a cocktail. I felt like I’d dropped down out of the sky like some guy in a parachute. It was just going too fast. In Baltimore when the train stopped and I looked out at the colored people on the platform, what I saw were the colored G.I.s with the Filipino lavenderias who did their washing. The colored G.Ls smiling their lump-of-sugar smiles. I thought of this southern organizing campaign Jim Tooker had his heart set on. And I thought of the time when I lived in McKeesport and was organizing the colored steelworkers on Jenny Lind Street. I thought how I was for a southern campaign as much as Jim. I’m for the colored man getting his rights in the labor movement. I’d signed them up in a dozen steel towns, and all over the Middle West when I was with Harry Holmgren. To me the colored man and the white man were brothers in the union. And that’s no Labor Day crap. My record speaks for itself.

  Jim was the same old skinny guy. But there was something different about him, too. Just as there was about Art. I don’t know how to put it except that he was like some religious bug. He said so himself. How the war and the murder of innocents, the Nazi concentration camps, the A-Bomb, the whole God damn mess had made him a Christian. And there I was, listening to him with Art Kincell on my head. What I did was come straight out with it. I said, “Jim, Art’s changed his mind about Cleveland for me.” God damn it, he was so innocent he said, “It’s seeing you, Billy. It’s your personality.” I had to laugh. I said, “Art thinks I’m the personality to change your mind about raising hell at the convention.” And you know what Jim said? I’ll remember it all my life. It proves a lot of things. What he said was this, “It’s a good thing one real labor man is down there in that crew of yes-men.”

  Back in Washington I reported Jim was stubborn but not too stubborn. That held Art but I knew it wouldn’t hold him forever. To him I was a salesman. A salesman has to produce. I began digging around, looking for I don’t know what. Then I found it. One little statistic. The membership figures of the three federations. There were three hundred thousand members in the Midwest. This was in 1946. And close to a quarter of a million in Jim’s federation. And only seventy-four thousand in the Far West. I went to Art with the figures. They were no secret. What I had was a twist on them. A gimmick. “Art,” I said, “we’ve got something Jim’ll buy. Let’s build the Far West before we tackle the South.” I didn’t have to say more. Build your weak spots before you hit the tough ones. That’s elementary trade unionism. I didn’t have to say another thing. But for good measure I poked a finger into Art’s soft spot. His wallet. You see, half the membership dues goes into the international treasury. Half to the federations. You divide four bucks a month dues and multiply by six hundred and twenty-four thousand. That’s dough. I said, “Roy and his lousy seventy-four thousand membership. What’s he been doing in the war? Working for management?” Art went for it hook, line and sinker. But it had to be handled careful. The federations are autonomous, like I’ve said. Roy had to be sold on a membership drive for his federation. What Art did was arrange a meeting with Roy and Harry down in Tiajuana. And here’s where Shafer comes in.

  Shafer owned a house in Tiajuana for entertaining visiting firemen. That’s why Tiajuana. Nothing like combining business and pleasure. All the way to Tiajuana, Art had two things on his mind. Jim Tooker who he cursed for a diehard bastard who didn’t know the Roosevelt days were over. And pleasure. Which was what you could expect from an old man with not much left in his cap pistol. When I thought how I was going to be a guest of Shafer’s, I didn’t feel so good. Everything was going too fast. Why, only a couple months ago I’d been wearing suntans in Manila, reading Jim’s letters what a bastard Shafer was.

  We passed through customs and rolled down the midway with all those night spots. The Ritz, the Stork Club, Tio Pepe. Sailors were in from San Diego and lone wolves sneaked down for a tear. The whole honky-tonk smell of that town got me down. Because for my money it was Shafer’s town, and Shafer’s good time. His house was out beyond the adobe houses of the poor Mexicans. Behind a wall with an iron gate, and an iron rooster for a knocker. We went inside and the servant said to wait. Art made himself right at home. He showed me the furniture. All antiques. All dark old stuff. Expensive. There were paintings, too. Old religious paintings. Jesus Christ on the cross. Saints being gouged and stabbed and tortured. It wasn’t what I expected a house of Shafer’s to be like, and when he came in, I told him just that. He laughed and said nearly all his guests expected a California ranch bungalow. He said, “After all, this town is a southern suburb of Los Angeles.” He talked fast like a big-city man but he had the twang of the bean belt. He comes from Lawrence, Mass. To look at him, he wasn’t much. Another guy in a clipped mustache, but he had authority. He was somebody. It was in his eyes and mouth, the way he walked.

  Dinner that night was just the three of us. Roy and Harry weren’t due for a couple days. That was how Art had arranged it. Business could wait while we enjoyed ourselves. There was the Agua Caliente racetrack and the greyhounds after the horses. The bullfights. And last but not least but most, the women. By the time we drove back to town, to this Club Mexicali, I was tight. But not so tight I couldn’t see Shafer had the key to that town. We had a reserved table on the dance floor where the wiggling hips went by so close you could smell the perfume. Yes, it was going to be a ball. I could see that. Put an s on it. Art, he acted like a kid. It was disgusting.

  This was the first time I’d ever been out with Art Kincell on a party. I hadn’t been a part of his personal life when I was his assistant before the war. There was an old pal of his. A lush by name of McQuade who used to take care of that. The dames you order like ham sandwiches from the delicatessen. Now it was Shafer. All he talked about were the club girls like he owned them. How they were either Mexicans or Cubans. You could see who was supplying that drool Art with his farewell bangs. Shafer ordered tortillas and barbecued beef. I wasn’t hungry but Art with forty-two inches of belly to support could always eat. The lights got bright and the mamba fiends left the floor and the dancers came out. Six of them in black net pants. Pasties over their breasts. The band began to play and they danced. Six pieces with six big frozen smiles. Shafer knew them all by name. I didn’t give him the satisfaction of coming out with it. It was him who asked me, “You want a woman, Billy?” I said, “I always want a woman.” What surprised me was when he said I didn’t have to wait. Damned if he didn’t get up, me after him. We went down to a wing of that club where there were no tables or guests. At the end there were a dozen booths draped with pink heavy cloth. You could hear the whispering and laughing behind those pink drapes. “Wait in here,” Shafer said to me and I waited. It was quiet except for the whispering all around me. The whole crowd gone, the music gone. Only those lovebirds close by like laughing rats in the walls. Who should I think of but those strippers in Detroit at that fink party. I don’t need no Freud. This was a party like that party. With a fink supplying the tail. Only this piece of tail was Mexican. She said when she came in, “How is my sweetheart from Texas?” She was a short dame, dumpy almost. But when she moved she was somebody else. A dancer who knew how to handle herself. She was in my arms before I knew what was happening, and she had a tongue on her like a snake’s. Later, without Art —

  Billy, I must interrupt please. Nearly all the women you have talked about have been women of that type. Don’t frown. Do you want to be written up as a whoremas
ter?

  Nothing wrong with that.

  For an actor but not for a labor leader.

  Okay, you win. For your information and the information of the great American public who hate to stay home in bed with their wife, there were three women I ever gave a damn about. No, four, counting my wife. The first two were back in McKeesport. Barbara Natonoski, she was more of a puppy love. Then I met Olga Vanka who I wanted to marry but nothing came of that either.

  Please, Billy, a few more details.

  Everything has to have a spot of romance. Okay, I met Olga when I was organizing. Over at her old man’s house on Walnut Street. He was a heater, John Vanka. I came to talk union and I stayed for tea. There wasn’t an empty seat. There were so many in that family. Nine children besides the parents. All of them bright and smart, the old lady complaining she couldn’t keep them in shoes. She didn’t care about the summers, it was the winters. Olga was wearing a pretty pair of red shoes and her old lady saw me look at them. She said I remember, “Olga keeps herself. She works in the five and dime.” Anyway I came back. I began taking Olga to the movies Saturday nights. After — but this you can’t use. It’s not pure and sweet but it’s life. I’d go to the whorehouse with Antonoff my whorehouse pal. He couldn’t see Olga. To Antonoff, all good girls were poison. I couldn’t explain to that guy how good it was talking to a girl who wasn’t a whore or a jazzbaby trying to spend all my money. Me and Olga, we’d sit around the ice cream parlor talking. What didn’t I tell her? All about Shenandoah and my father killed in the mine. She was a good listener but she kidded me, too. Once when I said we’d met through a fluke, she said, “It was fated. You’re Welsh and Irish, Billy. And I’m Slovenian and Austrian-Jewish. That’s the melting pot or is it fate?” She was smart. She even knew her weak points. She said she was a chatterbox. Had to be in her family in self-defense or you never were heard. Once when I said, here I was asking questions like when I was a kid, because of the depression and the suffering, she said, “The full dinner pail has no tongue.” That was a saying she got from her old man. She was a sweet girl and before I knew it I was talking serious. One night I said, “Olga, I think I love you.” — “Thinking’s not enough,” she said. “You’ve got to act as well as think, Billy.” That was Olga. She used to write me when I was in the field. She sent me a necktie for my birthday. But nothing came of it. Aw, let’s get back to my career.