Inside the bar he found the man who had summoned him. He was dropping quarters into one of the two blackjack slot machines which hung on the far wall beside the pay phone.
“You know something? I don’t think I’ve ever won a damn thing playing these things,” said the lawyer Colangelo knew as Schmoo. The nickname pleased him more than Robert Sharfsein. Schmoo was Colangelo’s link to the wise guys he worked with on the side.
The arrangement, as Schmoo liked to call it, provided his clients with daily bundles of newspapers to distribute and sell on their own. In return, Colangelo could count on a cut that doubled his salary and provided him the money to send his kids to a good Catholic school. He could also occasionally stuff a hundred-dollar bill in the pocket of a needy union brother.
A little trickledown—and it’s not killing anyone, he rationalized.
Colangelo removed his coat, folded it over the back of a chair and sat down. “You’re not winning on that thing,” he said. “In all the years I’ve been coming in here, I’ve seen it pay off once, maybe twice—and no great fortune at that.”
“Well, listen,” Schmoo said. “This isn’t exactly Trump Casino now, is it?”
He flushed one more quarter and gave up. He walked over to the table, his long coat open, letting Colangelo glimpse his expensive blue suit. A red tie with blue dots was draped around his neck, undone. Schmoo’s office was downtown on lower Broadway, and he, much like Colangelo, drank a good deal at Maria’s. It was small. It was private. A subtle transaction could be completed without attracting attention.
“So they steal a few quarters,” Schmoo said. “Who doesn’t?”
Colangelo nodded and lit a cigarette.
Schmoo started to slide into the chair opposite Colangelo but stopped about halfway down. He jerked his thumb in the direction of the vacant bar.
“You want a beer?” he said.
Colangelo held up his left hand.
“Never touch the stuff during a strike.”
Colangelo resented Schmoo’s thirty-something smile that came off to him as smug.
“Then I guess it is incumbent upon you to see that this one doesn’t go on much longer,” Schmoo said. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a Trib, laid it on the table—a transparent reminder the paper was being published and delivered, in spite of the walkout.
Colangelo took a quick drag, inhaling too much, causing him to cough up some congestion.
“I can always smoke myself to death,” he said.
“Not as much fun,” Schmoo said.
“I don’t do this for fun,” Colangelo said.
“Which brings me to why you are here, Gerry,” Schmoo said. “The people upstairs are a little, frankly, concerned. They’re anxious to know how long this might last. I think they’d like to be—you know—reassured.”
Colangelo ran his left hand across his brow, then up through his glistening combed-back hair.
“Listen, we’ve never really had a situation like this where all the unions were out and the paper kept publishing. On the one hand, they’ve got the damn thing out today and the dealers are taking it. On the other, the mooks they got delivering it don’t know the Bronx from Bushwick, they’re late with it all over town and their sales have to be off at least a few hundred thousand.”
“Which means?”
“Don’t know. Right now, I’d say it’s like an election that’s too close to call. Brady thinks he’s made it over the big hurdle by just getting the paper out. But it was probably losing some money before the strike and it must be bleeding by now, with the loss in circulation revenue. We figure that by next week the advertisers will start getting antsy. Some of them will want rebates. The reporters are planning to pressure them and maybe the big stores will decide to walk. When that happens, maybe Brady will be willing to sit down and bargain instead of just walking in with that union-busting redneck lawyer he’s got working for him and throwing his disgraceful offer on the table.”
Schmoo listened, nodding and drumming his fingers on the table. Colangelo resisted the urge to grab one and snap it like a Popsicle stick.
“And what if the drivers he’s got working for him now start figuring out the routes—no disrespect but this isn’t brain surgery—and by next week sales are back up? Then where’s your leverage? What do you do when Brady says, ‘I’m doing almost as well without you as I was with you and I’m paying these idiots half what your people get?’ Then you’ve gambled and lost everything for what, a few work rules that even you would probably admit are out of line for a business that’s losing money?”
“Whoa, it’s not that simple,” Colangelo said. “First of all, Schmoo, do you know what this guy has been proposing? I’ll tell you, he wants to take the manning process completely away from us. He wants the one-time right to examine every driver inside out to decide if that guy should keep his job. Then he wants to scrap the existing pay system, put in a new scale that reduces the hourly wage and have total control over overtime shifts. On top of that, those guys who walked off their posts last Sunday night to help out the disabled kid they fired? They’re all out, no questions asked. Listen, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what this is. The minute we agree to something like that, he lets half our people go and starts hiring every fucking spook or third-world boat person in the tri-state area for sweatshop wages. Then he can make his butt-fucking buddy down at City Hall look like a Democrat because he helped create minority jobs. Meanwhile, Brady saves a bundle. This is not like the other times where we started here and they started there and we’d meet in the middle. This is how they negotiate: the redneck comes in and asks if we have anything new to propose. We say, ‘Yes, certainly do,’ and we lay out a deal that I’d have to say would not exactly taste like cotton fucking candy to my people. Then the redneck says, ‘OK, we have to caucus,’ and off he goes with his flunkies to have a circle jerk in the men’s room. Then we sit around for an hour and a half, and then they send word with a secretary that our offer is unacceptable and that bargaining is adjourned, and they’ll be in touch. That’s the way it went for six freaking months up until Sunday night.”
“So now you just sit back and wait?”
“Frankly, I don’t know what else we can do unless we start taking out a few news dealers. But the Mayor’s got the cops on alert, even though every one of them I see tells me they hate this shit. We go violent now, the arrests, fines and lawsuits start flying. We don’t have the money to pay our people strike benefits much less the legal costs and bail if someone gets busted. Unless our friends want to start bankrolling us…”
“That’s not happening, Gerry. They’ve already got enough problems on the legal front without getting involved in that. Look, I understand you’re not in a good spot here. But you’ve also got to understand why our friends are so concerned. What do they get from your guys, about fifteen thousand papers a day?”
“Give or take,” Colangelo said.
“So they take their bundles and distribute them with their people and get about—what?”
“Look, Schmoo, stop with the prosecution, this isn’t a courtroom. You know what the numbers are.”
“That’s right, Gerry, and you do too. You’re out less than one week and our friends are already down more than twenty-five grand. This thing goes on through a few more weeks and they miss a couple of Sundays at a buck a pop? That figure starts getting up near a hundred fifty thou. Now, no one’s saying you got to go back today or tomorrow. It’s not like anybody’s going broke if you’re out six weeks. But nobody wants to risk losing the franchise. This is a nice little four-to-five million-a-year business at stake here. Nice piece of change for them, a decent living for you. Is it worth risking everything you’ve built over this? I know that guys are going to lose their jobs. That happens. It’s happening in every industry. But our friends want you to know they’ll throw something back in to help out with some buyout money. For a nice, peaceful ending to this thing, they are willing to do a little somethi
ng. No one’s going to have to walk away empty handed.”
Colangelo took a long drag of his cigarette and turned his face away from Schmoo’s to exhale.
“I accept one of Brady’s offers the way he’s got it worded, and he could lay off more than half my people,” he said. “They’d lynch me.”
Schmoo wrapped one end of the undone tie around his neck, and, bug-eyed, pretended to gag. Colangelo stared at him with a poker face and wanted to throw the stiff right hand that helped him win twenty of his twenty-four amateur fights way back when.
“You think you’re going to be responsible for putting these guys out of work but let me show you something,” Schmoo said. He reached into the pocket lining of his suit jacket and pulled out a crisply folded newspaper clipping.
“Check this out.”
Schmoo unfurled the story and laid it out on the table for Colangelo, jabbing an index finger on the first paragraph.
“They ran this last week on the business page of the Times. I read this shit. You really should too. You’re the one running a newspaper union.”
Colangelo checked his shirt pocket for his reading glasses, and realized he’d left them in the car back at the Trib. He hunched over the clipping, squinting:
The internet’s World Wide Web—that great repository of data—has yet to become the great market many have predicted it will be. But right now a number of innovative service-oriented companies are using the Web not to make money but to save some. Not nickels and dimes either, but possibly millions.
For companies ranging from overnight package deliveries to banks, the Web is the place to offer technology-savvy customers a new convenience: automated customer service. In the process, these companies are finding that a Web Site is a lot cheaper than operating customer phone banks.
Colangelo looked up at the lawyer, baffled.
“OK, sounds good. Banking by computer. We already got cash machines. So in the not-too-distant future, we’ll do—what?—order a new box of checks from home instead of making a call?”
Schmoo shook his head, as if he were pointing a gun across the table, about to make Colangelo plead for his life.
“Banks. Companies. The ability to reduce payroll and expenses by running their businesses electronically.”
“So what?”
“Newspapers, Gerry. You don’t get it? If customer service goes onto the computer, on this internet they keep saying is going to revolutionize everything, then why can’t they put the newspaper on it too?”
“Schmoo, I never even heard of this internet until a couple of months ago and I don’t know what the hell you are talking about. People paying their subscription bills by computer? What the hell does that have to do with what we’re doing, with getting this bastard Brady to give us a fair shake?”
“It has everything to do with you, Gerry. Everything. I’d bet a year’s salary they’re already planning to make the same shit you deliver every day available on the computer. Because sooner or later, probably sooner with the way the technology is going, these people will figure out how much cheaper it will be to not have to cut down trees and pay for the newsprint or run printing presses or finance a fleet of trucks and drivers to produce a newspaper that can be delivered right into the home with the press of a button.”
Colangelo tapped his foot and took a deep breath, going out of his way to appear unmoved.
“What are you going to do, take a computer on the A train?” Colangelo said. “Onto the crapper?”
The Fordham-educated lawyer shook his head at the contented smile across the table. He was almost convinced that Colangelo was utterly incapable of grasping what separated man from beast—an awareness of mortality.
“Let me put it this way,” Schmoo said. “Ten, fifteen years ago, how many papers did the Trib sell on an average weekday? A million-something?”
“In that neighborhood, yeah.”
“And now it’s what—seven hundred thousand?”
“Give or take.”
“So where do you think all those readers went? They died? They all moved to Florida? They started watching Headline News? How come nobody, especially their kids, automatically replaced them? Isn’t that the way it always worked? Maybe you think it’s fucking ridiculous to sit here now and predict that an electronic newspaper might be the future. That someday people will prefer to read off a computer screen what today they hold in their hand. But let me tell you something. My kid, he’s in second grade. All he does is look at screens and punch buttons. He watches television with seventy-five different channels to choose from. He has video games with shit on it that I couldn’t dream of when I was his age, playing All-Star Baseball with those numbered cards and the needle you flicked to spin. He’s going to grow up with all of this and more to come, sitting in front of a screen and learning from it, and that’s what he’ll know. That’s what he’ll be comfortable with. Do you know what I’m saying?”
Lips pursed, stomach knotted, Colangelo said nothing.
“You are all dead men, Gerry. Dead men driving. You guys…the pressmen…the printers have been dying off for years. I can’t tell you when, but it’s possible that in the next fifteen-to-twenty, you’ll be no better off than the printers are now. Sure, they’ll keep publishing the paper because not everyone can afford a computer and the baby boomers grew up before all this shit and they won’t be able to imagine not buying it on the commute in from Scarsdale. But don’t kid yourself, the world is changing and today’s kids are being conditioned to think that all they need to do to get what they want is to move their fingers. These kids don’t think, Oh, I like the feel of paper in my hands. By the time my kid is in college, the newspaper will be a boring piece of worthless crap to him. Everything he does will be audio-visual. If what I read is true—and it’s not like I’m reading this shit in the National Enquirer—when my kid is in high school he’ll be jerking off in his bedroom while making eyes at some little cutie in California. And by the time these kids grow up computers will be part of everything they do and you’ll be lucky to have a quarter of the readers you have now.”
Schmoo paused again, as if he were Perry Mason badgering a witness into thinking the whole court was on to him and he might as well come clean.
“Gerry, you ultimately can’t win this war. You know that. Or let me put it this way: You should know that. And you are absolutely crazy to personally stand up and take a bullet for some outdated principle and a bunch of guys who are going into the street soon, one way or another. You’ve got to survive as best you can, for however long the gravy train rolls. Get the best deal for however many of these people as you can. Our friends don’t care about who’s right and wrong. They just want this over soon. And like I said, they’ll even help you a bit by tossing a few bucks to anyone going overboard.”
“I don’t get it, why?”
“Because they like the deal they have with you. It’s good for them and it’s good for you. And they don’t like the sound of permanent replacement workers. They don’t want to see these scabs wind up with taking every last job and then the whole arrangement is done and they have to start over. What I’m saying is they don’t like change.”
“What if I can’t sell it to my guys?” Colangelo said.
“Then maybe you have to make a change. Then maybe our friends do make a deal with these scabs and you all wind up getting fucked.”
Colangelo looked at the table, at the crumpled Times clipping. He had noticed the word internet appeared to be in every paragraph.
Schmoo stood up and folded his coat over his arm.
“And then you’ll have lost the best gig you’re ever going to have.”
Like the master of the universe he believed himself to be, the lawyer strutted all the way to the front door, pushed through it without looking back. In his most sober monotone, he said: “Think about that for a couple of days and get back to me.”
The door closed. Colangelo was motionless, transfixed by the swirling dust particles in the sun
-lit center of the room. He rose slowly and walked robotically around the bar with the cheap wood paneling. He pulled a mug from behind the counter, positioned it under the spout and poured himself a draft.
“The hell with it,” he said, the moratorium officially relaxed.
Chapter Eighteen
Steven had been watching out for Jamie all morning. He spotted him right away, marching in the direction of Morris.
Jesus, he’s actually going through with this.
He excused himself from the flirtatious teacher’s union rep and hurried across the street where Debbie Givens and her cameraman were perched in the back of a white car with its hatchback open. Her legs weren’t long enough to reach the ground.
“I think you’re on,” Steven said. Givens nodded enthusiastically. The cameraman wiped a smudge of chocolate from the corner of his mouth and stood up while ducking his head under the raised hatch to gather his equipment.
Givens followed Steven back across the street, in the direction of his father, uncle and cousin.
“Listen,” Steven said, wheeling around and placing an arm on her shoulder. He moved in close enough to whisper in her ear. He could almost taste her makeup.
“No questions, just video, like we agreed.”
“All I need are pictures and a little sound,” she said, nodding. “We dub in the rest.”
“Deal,” said Steven. “And we’re on for tonight?”
Givens edged even closer, so that her spray-tamed hair tickled his nose.
“Tonight,” she said with a wink. “And maybe tomorrow morning if you’re up for it.”
She walked off without turning back, leaving him to his anticipation. He followed her in the direction of the developing story.
The sight of a television cameraman hustling toward the three Kramer men had piqued the interest of other strikers as well. A small crowd began to form around Jamie, Morris and Lou, though keeping its distance.
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