“Carla, I can tell you that you couldn’t just run back to the office,” Robbins said. He was grinning like the gap-toothed Letterman after another bland monologue joke.
“We had someone over at the building a couple of hours ago. These cards don’t work anymore. They’ve already installed a new security system. In effect, they’ve locked you out too. Since the Trib has taken a position of not wanting to negotiate a new contract with our union, I move that we officially are on strike, as of this morning.”
Jamie couldn’t believe it or didn’t want to believe it.
Half the people in here are reporters—and no one is going to at least ask who the source of this information is? This is such bullshit!
“Let’s show this bastard who we are,” Robbins yelled. He shook his fist and punched the air.
That was the last thing Jamie heard before he was caught in a tide of humanity pressing through the corridor, surging toward the street.
On the way through, to Jamie’s left, he spotted Blaine, pinned against the wall, the proverbial fly. In the midst of another long drag, holding the cigarette high to avoid setting fire to someone’s hair, he caught Jamie’s eye.
Blaine smiled, wickedly. He mouthed the words, “What did I tell you?”
Jamie didn’t respond. He only lamented that Blaine had been right—damn straight this is no fucking democracy. We didn’t even get a show of hands.
Needing no effort to move forward, Jamie felt as if he were floating on a raft, about to go over the falls. He was pushed along until he was out the front door, into the street, meeting the flash of cameras and the glare of television lights.
He recognized some reporters from other media outlets. One spotted him and called out his name. Too late, he was shepherded past and handed a cardboard picket sign by an Alliance member who had clearly been positioned before the meeting was over.
Jamie had a flashback to an awful night when a boy from down the street slept over and his striking father and uncle paraded around the apartment wearing picket signs on their heads with their pants down around their knees.
At least they had an excuse—they were drunk.
Feeling stiff, almost programmed, certainly silly, Jamie slipped the picket sign over his head without looking what was printed on the front. It might have said, “Kick me, I’m Unemployed,” but all he knew was what he felt: This string feels like a damn noose digging into my neck.
His tic got worse. If only he could spin his neck 180 degrees and exorcise himself from this fast-developing nightmare.
Chapter Six
“Molly, has Louie called yet?”
Morris waited ten seconds for an answer that didn’t come. That could only mean his wife was in the back bedroom, on the phone again with their daughter. Their marathon conversations exasperated Morris because Becky lived in the downstairs apartment of their two-family home.
“What’s the big deal?” Molly would say. “If someone calls, it’ll beep and I’ll get off.”
It had been weeks since Becky’s last failed attempt at getting pregnant. That meant another mourning period could commence at any moment, leaving Becky in bed, depressed and refusing to report to her teaching job. Molly’s maternal mission was to talk her back on her feet.
Next to Jamie’s divorce and his living more than an hour from his ex-wife and son, Becky’s unrelenting infertility was the family’s worst source of tension. The most benign baby chatter risked sending her on a tearful trail to a bedroom with her husband Mickey in immediate and reluctant pursuit.
Molly’s prescription for her first-born child seemed to be inexhaustible patience. “Next time,” she would say. “You’ll see.”
Morris sat on the living room sofa, facing the old console he stubbornly refused to part with. The color on its television faded in and out like out-of-town AM radio. The stereo had not been touched since the kids flap-jacked those revolting Rolling Stones albums on it.
The radio was on, set to the all-news station. Morris was dressed in his standard home uniform—boxer shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt covering but in no way hiding his pot belly. He needed a shave and a comb for his thinning gray hair. His calloused bare toes were perched on the wood trim of the glass coffee table.
He had already heard several updates on the Trib story, one every twenty-two minutes, hoping for a new nugget of news.
Next to him on the couch was the New York Sun. Its front page, ignoring the mid-term election, screamed in red banner delight—“CLOSED!!”—of its rival’s sudden shutdown.
Morris only bought the Sun because the other option in town, the Times, was out of the question. He couldn’t handle the microscopic print and the constipated writing. So he indulged the Trib’s tabloid competition, read it for its excellent coverage of baseball, the only sport he followed.
Even now, confronted with his own work stoppage, he was fuming over the baseball strike that had forced the cancellation of the World Series—and just when it looked as if his beloved Yankees were making a run. Morris’ head told him the players were spoiled and overpaid. His union heart could not root for an owner.
Molly called out to him from the bedroom to pick up the telephone in the kitchen.
“It’s your brother,” she said.
Morris rushed to the phone. “Louie, where are you?” he said.
“Kelly’s,” Lou said.
“What’s going on down there?”
“Cops are everywhere. There’s barricades and broken glass from the trucks all over the street in front of the docks. I haven’t heard from Stevie yet but someone said that the Alliance and some of the other unions were meeting today to decide what to do.”
Louie was breathing hard, talking a mile a minute. When Louis Kramer was troubled, independent thoughts crashed into each other like bumper cars. It was that way since they were kids, two grades apart, walking home from school in East New York.
Lou was the talkative one, forever pestering his older brother with questions that followed no narrative pattern. Do you think I could take that kid who cursed me out in gym? Why do you like the Yankees and not the Dodgers when we live in Brooklyn? What should I tell mom about that D, the one I got in History?
Morris would listen until he’d had enough. Then he would hold up one hand like a stop sign. “Don’t worry about it, Louie, OK?”
Lou hated to admit it, but as long as Morris was around, he felt calmer, safer, better.
“Mo, listen, I’m a little concerned here,” he said. His hushed voice meant he was using the pay phone near the bathrooms at Kelly’s Pub, a few feet from the back room table that for years had been unofficially reserved for Trib printers.
Morris didn’t respond. Lou kept talking.
“Some of the guys are here. Red, Tommy Isola, couple of others. The word going around is that Brady’s a maniac, swearing up and down that he’s not going to let the unions shut the paper. Tommy’s heard that they’ve got a shitload of scabs to drive the trucks, even more after what happened last night.”
“Lou, just because he says he wants to put out the paper doesn’t mean he puts it out,” Morris said. “He didn’t put it out last night, did he?”
“Yeah, but they’re saying the cops are going to make sure the trucks get out tonight, that the Mayor won’t let them turn the other cheek and let the drivers do—well, you know, what they do. As long as Brady keeps the paper open, whether it gets out or not, we’re in a bind, with the lifetime job guarantee thing.”
“So…”
“So a couple guys are saying that we might have to…”
“Who said that?”
“Naw, forget who. It’s just…”
“No way.”
“Yeah, but…”
“You hear me, Lou? No friggin way do we cross anybody’s picket line!”
Lou took a deep breath. “Mo, I’m not telling you that I think we should cross.”
“Good, Louie, because you know me well enough to know I’m not going to do that.�
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“I know, Mo. I know. But I’m just telling you that these guys are wondering what’ll happen with our deal if we don’t. Some of the guys want to meet this afternoon. You should get down here, soon as you can because they’re pushing me for answers and I keep telling them, ‘Talk to Mo.’ They’re not going to listen to what I say like they do with you, you know what I’m saying?”
“I do, Louie.”
Lou waited for his brother to offer something more. Uncomfortable moments passed.
“Louie, don’t worry,” Morris said.
“OK, Mo,” Lou said. “But please come, OK?”
Morris hung up the phone and returned to his seat on the couch. He picked up the Sun again but his mind wandered far from the sports page. He would never admit this to his brother, but this time Morris Kramer was worried.
Chapter Seven
Morris was dozing when Molly returned from sitting with Becky. His snoring served as a soundtrack to the radio news anchor. Part of the newspaper lay precariously on his lap. The other part had slipped onto the worn lime carpet.
She knew better than to rouse him. If Morris was lights-out before noon, he must have been exhausted from sheer tension. Long ago she had come to realize this was how her husband believed he could not only contain his emotions but also defeat them.
Morris’ mother had taught her to let him be when he was stressed out. The day before they were married, more than forty years now, Morris told his mother he needed a nap at ten in the morning. He didn’t wake up until the morning of the wedding. Molly called a half-dozen times before taking the bus over to the Kramers’ apartment in East Flatbush. She was suddenly panicked at the thought of Morris fleeing Brooklyn to become—she didn’t know—a stowaway on a slow boat to Jerusalem.
“What should I do, Mrs. Kramer?” Molly said.
His Russian immigrant mother, so tiny that her apron sagged well below her knees, smiled and told her that Morris had been sleeping away stress since he was a small child.
“You don’t have to do anything,” Morris’ mother said. “He’ll wake up, God willing, and be happy to marry you.”
As far as Molly was concerned, Morris was still content, if not blissful. In relaxed moments he could admit to her that their marriage could have turned out much, much worse. She took it as his best compliment.
Molly decided to let Morris sleep another few minutes. She dialed Jamie’s apartment. The answering machine picked up after four rings. She hung up without leaving a message.
“Who’re you calling?” Morris asked from the sofa, roused by the dialing.
“Jamie—he’s not home.”
She heard him mumbling.
“You want me to call back and leave a message?” she said, stepping into the living room. Molly was small in height and body type, standing maybe an inch and a half over five feet. If she weighed more than a hundred pounds, that was after her biggest meal. She wore her straight graying hair in a bun. Often she looked like she was smiling because she was squinting—never comfortable wearing the glasses that dangled from her neck on a chain.
“You would think he would call on his own,” Morris said. “You would think he would know what’s at stake here.”
“Why do you think he wouldn’t?”
“Who knows with him?”
Molly shook her head and left the room.
She confided in Becky that she had all but given up on Morris ever forging a closer relationship with Jamie. “I wish I could do something,” she’d say. “But it’s gone on for so long—since Jamie was a boy—and all I ask is that they don’t fight in front of me.”
When Jamie lived at home, Morris’ long work hours and union responsibilities had helped in that respect. But weekends became especially difficult during Jamie’s teenage years. Avoiding one another was next to impossible in a five-room apartment on the second floor of their two-family home—no matter how hard they tried.
Jamie could lock himself in his room for hours, watching basketball games on the black-and-white portable television and reading comic books starring The Amazing Spiderman and other Marvel superheroes. Morris would retreat to the bathroom and sit on the toilet for the better part of an afternoon with his newspapers. Confrontation was still inevitable.
“Dad, I have to go,” Jamie would yell from the hall.
“Damn it, just wait a while, it won’t kill you.”
Jamie would sink to the floor, falling against the wall, rapping his knuckles on the door after every passing minute until Morris emerged, red-faced and mumbling son of a bitch.
Who knows with him? There were times when Morris felt as if he’d been asking that question from the days he schlepped his frail and allergy-afflicted son from one doctor to another.
Jamie never cried, as best Morris could recall, even as other kids wailed all around him. He had narrow brown eyes that at first glance almost looked Asian. The pediatrician called them sleepy but Morris worried because that’s how his son acted most of the time.
When Morris scored seats ten or twelve rows behind home plate at Yankee Stadium, Jamie munched on a hot dog during the first inning and fell asleep in the second. Granted, he was only eight, it was 1970 and the Yankees were lousy. But it was his first ballgame and when they got home, all he could say was, “Baseball stinks. Nothing happens.”
“You think so?” Morris said. “What game do you like?”
“Basketball,” Jamie said. “They jump really high. Walt Frazier is so cool.”
At work that night, Morris recounted the unhappy experience to his brother.
“Can you believe it, Louie?” he said. “I take him to see his first baseball game—Yankee freaking Stadium—and he tells me how he’d rather watch a bunch of schvartzers run around in their underwear.”
“Yeah, Mo, I know,” Lou said. “But Stevie doesn’t like any sports.”
“What are you comparing?” Morris said. “Stevie’s a little genius—his teachers have been telling you that since kindergarten. What the hell does he need to worry about sports for?”
“Yeah, I know, Mo,” Lou said. “Just don’t be too hard…”
“Ah, forget it,” Morris said, waving him off.
Morris and Jamie didn’t bond any better when young Jamie made the occasional excursion with his father to the Trib on a day off, usually when Morris had quick union business. His chest swelled the first time he led the boy by the hand into the cacophony of the old composing room, pulling him through the labyrinth of clattering linotype machines.
“What do you think, Jamie—pretty cool?” Morris said.
Jamie frowned.
Morris had imagined explaining to his son that reporters and editors may have been the glamorous heroes of Hollywood’s version of the newspaper game, the men about town and taverns. But not until these printers clocked in, brown bags dangling at their side, could there be a tangible production, a creation. If Jamie had ever asked what this awesome collection of sights and sound amounted to, Morris would have told him, “This is where we make the paper, son. They don’t make it without us.”
Jamie never seemed to get close enough to the men in the hats made of carefully folded newspaper to hear them say, “So this is little Mo?” The rhythmic clacking of the type set on forty-pound blocks and the shouts of “Watch yer back” by thick-armed men rolling the finished pages on the metal carts made Jamie recoil. He would cup his hands over his ears and crouch against the wall.
“He’s so timid,” Morris complained to Molly. “He has no—you know—oomph.”
“He’s just a little boy, what do you want from him?” she said. “The machines scare him. Let him be.”
Morris eventually gave up trying to connect. He had more urgent matters on his mind those days—the increasingly clear fate of the printers.
It would be years before Jamie stepped into the Trib composing room again. By then, all that had been so intimidating was gone. The energy. The power. The heat. The remains of his father’s once-dominant tr
ade had vanished like some ancient civilization. The need for the human eye and touch to distinguish typeface and size had been replaced by clusters of computers in specialized work areas rendered numbingly docile by the vague hum of climate control.
For the printers, automation was a man-made earthquake. It condemned them to a long, cancerous decline, sustained by the guarantee of lifetime employment negotiated by their union leader, Jackie Ryan, at the dawn of the 70s. The formerly omnipotent Local 11 of the Typographical Union of America—the Ones, as it was known in New York trade circles—could not stand in the way of the technological parade. Ryan knew it. He signed away the craft and they all set out together on the road to virtual irrelevance.
The printers were soon pasting up strips of computer-manufactured copy onto grids they called slicks. Morris dismissed the work as child’s play. “Like the Colorforms we bought for the kids,” he told Lou. “It’s embarrassing.”
“I know, Mo,” Lou said. “But some of the guys like the quiet. And let’s face it, it’s safer.”
“So was the composing room if you knew what the hell you were doing,” Morris grumped.
Eventually, all page-makeup could be done by editors at their terminals. By the 90s, printers were left with nothing to print. They identified and directed pages for editions like transit cops waving traffic through busy intersections.
At the Trib, Morris Kramer remained shop steward and night foreman, but he was no longer concerned with job description—only with the preservation of employment for the men who had earned that much. He’d fought hard for the privilege from the beginning. Having scoffed at his father’s bluster that the goyim who ran the union would always take an Irishman or Italian over a Jew, he feared the old man was right when he tried to break in as a sub and was ignored by the supervisor for nights on end.
He’d report with the other subs and resented being left standing there, reminded of the hapless dockworkers in his favorite movie, On the Waterfront. He dreaded the subway ride home to the third-floor walkup in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. He hated pushing open the door to the first sighting of Molly’s sympathetic face.
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