Cold Type

by Harvey Araton

  There were cheers and a mix of obscenities from the mob of drivers behind them.

  “Mr. Colangelo, we have reports of injuries to the non-union drivers…”

  “You mean fuckin’ scabs,” a voice from the rear yelled out.

  Givens winced. An irritated Colangelo turned and lifted a resolute index finger to his lips.

  “What happened last night, those were isolated incidents,” he said. “We can’t control every man. But you’ve got to remember that these union brothers have kids to feed, mortgages to pay. We opened our arms to this billionaire when he sailed into our city on his fancy boat to buy our newspaper. We’ve already sacrificed jobs and made other concessions to make it easier for him. He seems to have already forgotten that.”

  Givens began to pull away, phrase another question. Colangelo leaned forward, almost making contact with the crown of the mike.

  “He wants our jobs, our homes, so now we do what we have to do,” he shouted. “Now…now we close Lee Brady down.”

  The pause for dramatic effect set off the drivers behind Colangelo. It was the perfect segue for Givens to throw it back to the studio. Jamie pointed the remote at the screen and clicked it off. He tossed it over his shoulder onto the bed.

  “I need this right now like a damn root canal,” he mumbled.

  He sat for a spell, sipping more coffee, feeling slightly flush from the effects of the sun-drenched room.

  He headed for the shower and let the warming water drench his hair and soak the unblemished side of his face. He wished he could wash away the echoes of Colangelo’s voice.

  Now we close Lee Brady down.

  As if Colangelo’s face were etched into the shower tile, Jamie said aloud, conviction enhanced by the bass echo chamber: “You think you’re the only one who has a mortgage to pay? Child support? A kid to feed?”

  He thought about the stack of bills sitting on his desk—the cable and electric bills, the credit card on which he would have to make the minimum payment. Again.

  And, he thought, Lord knows what Karyn will call and ask for.

  He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and let his forehead rest against the tile.

  Chapter Four

  Jamie checked his watch and quickened his pace through the newspaper-strewn and otherwise filthy outskirts of Chinatown. It was warm for early November, the sky a cloud-pocked blue. He wore his checkered-colored flannel shirt tied around the waist of his jeans. A light corduroy jacket was draped across his right shoulder. His tangle of nappy brown hair was still wet.

  On frigid days, his habit of procrastinating at home and rushing from the shower to make an appointment would create frozen clumps he feared would snap like small pieces of gnarled, uncooked pasta.

  On the train, Jamie stretched his neck—a chiropractic tic he resorted to when it was sore or he was stressed.

  The musty union hall was already jammed by the time he arrived and hurried through the long narrow corridor. Rows of folding chairs were filled, with standing room scarce along the cracked and vomit green walls. Jamie stationed himself near the entrance for what he hoped would be a convenient exit. At the same time, he scanned the crowd for his cousin so he could make eye contact and his presence might duly be noted.

  He nodded to a sports guy who occasionally dropped by Jamie’s desk to talk NBA hoops—the only sport he seriously followed. One of the police reporters casually scanned the Sun’s front page. Dotty, the nice lady in charge of the morgue, flipped open a mirror to check her makeup.

  Jamie suddenly smelled the odor of nicotine breath in his ear, felt a hand on his back.

  “Strike three, yer out.”

  Without turning, he knew it was Patrick Blaine, the Trib’s senior columnist.

  “You see my cousin?” Jamie said.

  Blaine winced at the discoloration around Jamie’s eye that was visible through his glass frame. Jamie cursed himself for forgetting his shades.

  “You piss someone off at the bar?” he said. “As for John L. Lewis, he’s in the back—with the big boys.”

  Jamie smirked, as if he knew who this Lewis was.

  “What’re you hearing?” Jamie asked.

  “Matter of fact, I talked to Robbins earlier this morning. He told me what happened last night.”

  An unlit cigarette dangled from Blaine’s mouth. He lit it.

  “Fuck the fire codes,” he said. Jamie found himself in the familiar position of admiring the old man’s disdain for rules and political correctness, in no particular order.

  “Robbins is back in the conference room, probably on the phone to Colangelo and the other union guys. They’ll come out soon to talk it over with the membership but—forget it—this union will be out on strike in less than an hour with all the others.”

  The way Blaine said it—matter-of-factly, like they were all on the way to some Disney theme park—was unnerving.

  “And I’ll have to head back to the office and cross a picket line for the first time in my life,” he said.

  Jamie looked up, just in time to inhale a cloud of smoke.

  “I’m not one of you anymore,” Blaine said. “I’m under contract. Signed a three-year deal a couple of months before the old broad sold the place to that cocksucker Brady. He owns me now.”

  Blaine took another languorous drag, his eyes narrowing as he sucked the smoke into his lungs.

  “Why’d you do that?” Jamie said.

  Blaine rubbed the thumb of his left hand against his index and middle fingers.

  “Did the column twenty-three years and maybe twice I got something more than the union-scale raise. I think, in the end, Maxine felt bad about that. She knew I wasn’t going anywhere, not at my age. Any kid she hired—like your brilliant cousin, for example—she had to pay market value. So she calls me into her office one night as I’m finishing up a piece. She’s sitting behind her desk, stocking feet propped up, reeking of Dewar’s. She pushes a piece of paper at me and says, ‘Sign this.’

  “I say, ‘What is it?’

  “She says, ‘Just sign or you’re off the goddamned column!’ I sign. She pulls it away and puts it in her drawer.”

  In his next check, Blaine explained, he discovered an extra two-fifty and no standard union dues deduction.

  “So what if you don’t go in?” Jamie said.

  “Contract’s null and I’m void.”

  “You sure we’re going out?”

  “No choice,” Blaine said.

  He scratched a wide landing strip of a nose containing more colored lines than the city transit map.

  “You know what happened last night, how it started?” Blaine said.

  Jamie nodded, in the way he would when bluffing his way through an interview. He understood that Blaine was going to give it to him “Blaine and simple,” as the columnist was fond of describing his writing style. The young Trib reporters considered it corny as Barney and Blaine generally as outdated as the dinosaur. But if anyone had the right to tell them to go fuck themselves with their RAMs and ROMs it was Blaine.

  He was a throwback and damn proud of it. Out of spite, it seemed, he was still tapping out columns on a typewriter and handing the copy to a clerk—Jamie, in fact, not all that long ago—to load into the system.

  Blaine was the kind of shoe leather reporter who seldom emerged from the city’s blue-collar taverns as tipsy as the civil servants he had fleeced of secrets. He still wore a tie every day to the office and an impeccable starched blue shirt with an off-white collar, even as he reeked of tobacco, needed a shave and more than a few nose hairs clipped.

  “The drivers were baited but they fucked up by walking out last night,” Blaine said. His voice was raspy from decades of smoking. The cigarette dangled between his right index and middle fingers.

  Blaine explained that the drivers had played right into Brady’s hands by hitting the street. The drivers walked out, everyone would follow and Brady would proceed to produce the paper with management personnel, wire services an
d assorted flunkies. He would get what he wanted—the unions in the street and the paper on the stands.

  “It’ll be ugly for a few days but he’s banking on what happened with the unions in Ireland and England, especially on Fleet Street with him and Murdoch,” Blaine said. “Even without a contract, Brady couldn’t start changing work rules because he couldn’t know how the feds at the National Labor Relations Board would react. So he kept baiting the drivers, hoping they’d lose their heads.”

  “Which they apparently did,” Jamie said, patting the discoloration around his eye.

  Blaine ignored him and kept talking. “That guy they fired last night? Young polish guy, long name I can’t even pronounce. He’s been working half shifts for two years since he hit a pole with his truck in a snowstorm in the suburbs. The kid’s in a coma for almost a week, then he wakes up and he’s not all there. Not incapacitated, still able to work, just not quite the same. So they let him stay on half a day, drive a short route. Then suddenly Brady’s guy is telling him he’s got to drive a full shift. He freaks out, says he can’t because of his condition. They give him a full truck anyway. He refuses to get in, they fire the poor fuck, escort him out of the plant. A dozen guys follow to see what’s going on. That’s it—they’ve left their posts without authorization. They’re fired too. All hell breaks loose. The drivers are out in the street, carrying on. Here come the scabs, on cue. The whole thing was organized by the strike-busting lawyer from out of town that Brady has had negotiating for him. The Mayor went along with the police protection because Brady helped put a Republican in a Democrat’s town in office. And now you’re all here, taking a strike vote.”

  “Yeah,” Jamie said, “but you know a lot of city room guys don’t see this as their fight. They know there are no jobs out there. Papers are cutting back—if not closing. I’m not so sure we vote to go out in sympathy.”

  Blaine laughed—too derisively, Jamie thought.

  “Listen, kiddo, sympathy has nothing to do with this—and neither does right and wrong. It’s only about power and leverage, about which jobs are more essential in putting out the damn paper. That’s the drivers, not us. They got wire copy to replace us with—or I should say you. There are guys working in subway booths who think they can do what we do—tell a story and put their name on top of it. So the drivers are steering this ship. And when I say strike vote, I don’t mean like this is some fucking democracy. This union isn’t run by everyone in here. It’s run by them.”

  He jerked a thumb in the direction of the union chiefs, making their way to the front. They were led by Sandy Robbins, president of the Alliance—the union representing the Trib’s editorial and advertising employees. Right with them was Jamie’s cousin, beaming as if he were standing in front of the Pulitzer committee.

  “If they want the Alliance out with the other unions, then the Alliance is going out,” Blaine said.

  “So what are you doing here?”

  Blaine pulled a notepad from his back pocket and held it up like a school-bus pass.

  “I’m the local guy, remember?” he said. “I don’t do Hillary health care, unless she’s got some sick aunt holed up in White Plains. I don’t do Contracts with America, unless it’s a mob hit ordered by one of the New York families.”

  For once, Blaine looked and sounded more sad than cynical.

  “Whatever happens here, it’s a story,” he said. “And I’ll probably be the only one with a staff byline in tomorrow’s paper.”

  He laughed. Mainly, it seemed, at himself.

  “So be thankful that you’re on the side going out,” he said.

  Chapter Five

  Sandy Robbins was a roundish, smallish incongruity, unimposing except for a commanding baritone voice. Gray wisps above his ears and a few loose strands spared him total baldness. His oval-shaped face was embellished by a bushy mustache. His stubby arms and barrel chest made him look like the image of a small prehistoric creature in a children’s book.

  The more benevolent likeness was Danny DeVito.

  His tough talk never seemed to find its way into any new contract. The annual 1.5 percent raises he negotiated for the Trib’s editorial union—officially known as the Alliance of Editorial and Advertising Workers—drew collective sighs. He’d been called a weasel by disgruntled rank-and-filers for so many years that even he had to grudgingly answer to the handle Wheezy. Robbins maintained it dated to his days on the Trib’s advertising team when allergies could set him off on an extended sneezing seizure.

  The truth was that most Alliance members understood the newspaper business was not thriving. Robbins would defend his work with heartfelt speeches at union meetings. “You have to understand that the most profitable papers are in cities that are only able to sustain one,” he had said when Jamie attended a recent meeting—for the first and only time. “This is the country’s most competitive market. The Trib is struggling. It was losing money for years with Maxine.”

  Maxine Hancock was the matriarchal owner who had generally played by contract rules, even as she pinched pennies to keep her losses from getting out of hand. But this was the first contract showdown with Brady, whose anti-labor reputation preceded him. Every Trib union had been on edge.

  “Sandy, explain one thing,” a voice called out from the back of the room. It was Paul Shapiro, the Trib’s Albany bureau chief. Shapiro lived in the woods between Saratoga and the state capital and looked the part. His dark wavy hair was worn shaggily long. His Smith Brothers beard needed serious grooming. An avid hunter and outdoorsman, Shapiro liked to chide his downstate colleagues as liberal gun control wimps and brag to them that he had the paper’s best assignment. When Jamie’s copy boy and clerk duties included answering phones, Shapiro would call in and ask, “How’s life in the cesspool?”

  “The drivers walk out after everyone agrees that's the last thing we should do because the climate isn’t very good for a strike and no one wants to be out with the holidays coming up,” Shapiro said. “What I want to know is, are we talking about going out because they went out, or because we’ve reached an impasse in our own negotiations and think Brady won’t negotiate a fair contract with us?”

  Robbins legitimized the question by nodding vigorously.

  “Paulie, I know what you’re getting at, but let me say this. We have been without a contract now for six months and have had talks with Brady’s lawyer for nine. We’ve gotten nowhere on any of the pertinent issues. They did make one offer, as you know. It was so regressive on job security and guaranteed work hours that the negotiating committee was compelled to unanimously reject it.

  “Now it’s true that we said we would stay on the job for as long as it took to get a deal done. But we learn what’s in store for us by the negotiations that take place before us. And we learn by the provocation that management is engaged in now that unless we show them it doesn’t work, that’s what we’ll be facing down the road. We don’t see the drivers as having gone out. We see them as locked out. Gerry Colangelo told me this morning that the first thing he did when he got to the plant last night was to propose that the matter of the driver who works the half day go to arbitration. Management said no. Then he proposed that the men who left their post be allowed back in. Management said no. That’s a dozen men fired for no other reason than being worried about a colleague.”

  “Yeah, but that’s them, not us,” a guy Jamie recognized from Sunday Arts yelled from a seat in the middle of the room. He was a short, slender man in a tweed sports jacket, with thinning dark hair and plastic white frames that were too large for his narrow face.

  “They’re the ones who Brady says are getting paid for shifts they don’t even work, and you know that’s true. They’re the ones Brady’s after, and they’re also the ones who run into the street as soon as something doesn’t go their way. They don’t represent our values as journalists. They’re a closed union shop, almost all white. Why do we even want to risk everything for those assholes?”

  The room wa
s stunned into momentary silence, followed by murmurs that quickly increased in quantity and volume into a collective expression of anti-driver sentiment. Someone yelled, “If we walk out, we’re committing professional suicide.” Another voice from somewhere on the side wall near Jamie groused, “This is all a goddamn setup.”

  Jamie could feel a surge of passion from those who wanted no part of this. He, too, wanted to shed his veneer of neutrality, leap on top of this surge of politically incorrect passion, ride it right out the door and back to work. But he kept his opinion to himself.

  From the row right in front of the original voice of dissent rose a shrill, “What the…?”

  Carla Delgado wheeled in her seat, turning to stare down Sunday Arts.

  “Let me tell you something, those assholes saved your pitiful ass four years ago. They supported you and everyone else in here when Maxine wanted to make all of us pay through the nose for our health insurance. Am I right?”

  Sunday Arts frowned but obediently shook his head.

  Carla, fueled by her access to expense accounts, wasn’t about to let the ingrate off the hook.

  “And who the hell are you, Henry, to accuse people of stealing? I see the crap you run by every goddamned week. When was the last time you paid for dinner? How’d you like me to run back to the office right now and bring over a copy of that crap you turned in last year, a week in Bermuda doing some bullshit—what was it?—weekend getaways to fuck your bitch from the art museum?”

  “Art museum?” someone along the wall snorted. “She looks like she’s from The Museum of Natural History.”

  Carla sat back down, crossed her legs, pulled her black skirt closer to her knees and crossed her arms. The room grew quiet. The protest seemed successfully squelched by the office manager and Jamie’s emergency nurse.

  Jamie thought, Damn, she is some piece of work. A good thing I kept my mouth shut.

  Up in the front, he noticed Steven edging his way forward, placing something in Robbins’ hand while whispering in his ear. Robbins delightedly held up a security pass that buzzed employees into the Trib building during nighttime hours when there was no one manning the front desk in the lobby.