by Bill Bailey
"I was not intending to use the knife," I said.
"You hate us, don't you?" the cop asked. I knew right then and there that the sidewalk was due to spring up and hit us in the face. There was silence as I pondered the predicament. "Well, don't you?" the cop said threateningly.
"I don't know what this is all about," I said. "We would like to continue on our way home."
"Now, isn't that nice. You want to continue on home. How come you're not talking like you were last week on that soapbox? How come? You're talking very quiet. I almost can't hear you. Last week you were shouting your Communist head off, calling the police all sorts of names. Remember? You like calling us names, huh?" He gripped the nightstick in the center and aimed straight at my face. The blow hit me right on the bridge of the nose. I winced, then watched him draw back and strike again. This time the blow caught me on the left side of the jaw. I could feel the jaw crack against the club. My nose was on fire. I could feel blood oozing down around my lips when the third blow struck, this time on the side of the nose. Now the blood really started to flow. Everything seemed to swirl around me, and as much as I wanted to raise my hands to protect my face from more blows, I could not transmit the signal from my brain to my hands. I heard another cop say, "For Christ's sake, hold it. He's got enough." Then another blow struck the side of my head. Another cop protested, "Don't kill him."
"Okay, sonofabitch. If you think you've been worked over now just wait until you get to the station house," said the club-wielding cop.
The wagon arrived and we got in. I was so numb from the blows that I knew that no matter what they would do to me at the station house, it could be no more devastating than what had already been done. As miserable as I felt, I was elated that as hard as he had belted me with that club, I did not fall down or plead with the bastard. It made him the smaller man. There was no way to stop the bleeding; it ran down the front of my pants and into my shoes, and when the wagon pulled in and we walked toward the booking desk, I could feel and hear the squish-squish of blood in my shoes. By now both eyes were closing up and my face was turning blue. It was difficult to breathe through my nose and I couldn't close my mouth against the broken, painful jaw.
When the desk sergeant looked down at me for the first time, he said in a tone bordering on panic, "For God's sake, get this man below and sponge his face." Two station house cops, treating me like a long-lost brother, escorted me to the lower cell block in the basement. For the next 20 minutes they laid sponges on my face, wiping off the blood, stopping the bleeding and trying to bring down the swelling. My companions settled down in one cell together, but I was given a cell to myself. There was no sleep that night as pain engulfed my head, nose and jaw.
I staggered out of my bunk in the morning feeling punch drunk. Now my eyes were really closed; I peered out through little slits. My face felt like someone had run a rasp file across it. Several loose teeth sent throbs of pain through my head. To endure the pain, I focused my thoughts on the great Russian revolutionary heroes who had undergone all sorts of torture by the Czarist police and still triumphed. I would do the same. The more I thought of a revolutionary like Karmal, the less I could feel the pain. A guard opened the door. "Here," he said, handing me a new white shirt. "Put this on; you'll feel better." I was not in the proper frame of mind to think and accepted the shirt, even allowing him to help put it on. My old shirt was stuck to my body with dried blood.
We stood before the judge in a small room devoid of chairs or benches. "So you are the troublemakers?" he said sarcastically, peering down at us from his bench.
"That's them, your honor," said the cop who had wielded the club. "A fine lot of troublemakers they are. Fomenting strikes and trouble on the ships and piers in our city."
"And which of the five of them was about to use the knife?" asked the judge.
"That tall one, sir," replied the cop, pointing at me.
"And these other four? What were they doing?"
"They were sitting down, encouraging the big one," the cop said.
"Very well. The four of you are given a thirty-day suspended sentence. But you," said the judge as he stared me straight in the face, "you seem to be the real troublemaker. Sixty dollars, or thirty days in the Baltimore penitentiary. That's all; clear the room."
The huge Baltimore penitentiary was something new to me. It was bigger than the New York Tombs. Every day at a certain hour the cell block door opened and newly-arriving prisoners walked through it. They were met by a large gathering of prisoners standing in a circle, looking for a friend or a face they knew. I could imagine what Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame, must have felt like with his distorted face. When I walked through the ranks of the prisoners, there were sounds of shock. No one attempted to look me in the eye. My jaw was by now hanging open, and I was gasping for air.
Word had gotten out rather fast that the cops had beaten me up, and that I was no thief, but a radical. The guards in the prison took a sympathetic view toward me. At the dining room table, the rule was that whether you liked it or not, all food on your plate had to be eaten. Many prisoners stuffed their shirts with bread or other food they couldn't eat, then dumped it later. My plate was full of stew. I was sitting on the aisle seat, the guard only inches from me. I made several attempts to eat, but I concluded that it was less painful to risk more time in the slammer than to eat. I looked at the guard, waiting for a negative response. He saw the rough time I was having. He nodded his head that it was okay for me to leave the food on my plate, but I could remove the bread by stuffing it in my shirt.
I asked the guard if I could see the doctor. The doctor was a nasty bastard. The first thing he did was admonish me for wearing a button that read, "Striker." "Do you think that's all there is to life, striking?" I couldn't answer, but made a grunting sound. He sat me down in a chair, then, grabbing my chin, he quickly pushed the jaw upward. As steeled as I tried to be, the pain was overwhelming and I let out a terrible moan.
"Now it pains you, huh? Well, you should have thought about that before you went around striking. Here are some aspirins. The dentist will be in next week. You can see him."
Late that afternoon I was bailed out. My companions had visited a West Coast ship, one of the Weyerhauser Line. They told about my arrest and how urgent it was to get $60. The crew dug into their pockets. I was bailed out.
For weeks after the incident, I did not come across the cop who worked me over, though he was constantly on my mind. I had devised dozens of ways of doing away with him. But if my luck ran true to form, the creep would most likely die peacefully in bed at a ripe old age.
Things were quiet now in Baltimore. My jaw had healed. A sympathetic dentist worked on my loose teeth. With the exception of finding it hard to inhale through my nose, I started to feel okay. I got permission form the Party to move back to New York.
There was some talk of training me to take over a section of the Brooklyn waterfront as Party section organizer. Brooklyn handled a lot of the port of New York's shipping and was a heavy concentration point for longshoremen. For a few weeks I worked with the district organizer, following him to meetings and sitting in on conferences that seemed to go on day and night. I found myself seeing less of the waterfront and more of meeting rooms and postal workers or shirtmakers or newspaper peddlers, hearing their problems and possible solutions. It was all worthwhile, but darn it, I was a seaman. I felt homesick for the sight of a ship's mast. I was unhappy with my present assignment and I knew I would be a lot sadder if I were to be shackled to working in the job they had planned for me. In addition, there was talk about a pending West Coast maritime strike.
I took off one day and visited the Seamen's Defense Committee, the storefront headquarters of the permanent committee that was to prepare for the next East Coast strike. A West Coast ship had arrived in Jersey City and needed some men. They called and asked specifically for West Coast seamen who might be on the beach. It came at an ideal time. I took one of the jobs and headed fo
r Jersey City and the President Garfield of the Dollar Steamship Line.
Chapter XVII: All Kinds of Solidarity on a Dollar Line Ship
The President Garfield was on the final stretch of a `round the world voyage. She had left San Francisco two months earlier. We were to head for San Francisco, the end of the voyage. A new, spirited breed of men were on this ship men who had gone through the San Francisco General Strike. They were seasoned fighters who held the shipowners in absolute contempt, never forgetting the men who had been beaten or even shot dead in the '34 strike. They were tough, hard-drinking men with a strong sense of loyalty to each other.
We set sail for Havana with some 250 passengers. The most unique feature of this ship was its skipper. His name was Gregory Cullen. An old master mariner, he hated unions and, above all, men from the fo'c's'le. In the tropics he wore the typical gentleman's gear as he paraded around the deck or bridge: white shorts, knee-high stockings, a Pith helmet and swagger stick. Mussolini was his hero and his closest friend was the Italian Fascist Count Ciano. Whenever Cullen was in the Mediterranean and met an Italian naval vessel, he ordered his sailors to race back and aft and stand by the American flag on the stern. As soon as both vessels came abreast of each other, the mate was to give a few short blasts of the whistle, a signal to the sailors aft to lower and raise the American flag while he stood at attention on the bridge, extending his arm in a Mussolini-fascist salute.
The President Garfield had a large number of Chinese in the stewards' department. The Dollar Line had a policy of using Asians on their passenger ships and operated a special school in Shanghai to recruit and train hundreds of Chinese men for company vessels around the world. The average pay for these men was $15 a month, which they received when they were paid off in Shanghai. The "Number One Boy" received a little more, because his job was to keep his brethren in line during the voyage. Since the Chinese were characterized as "indentured slaves" and had been used by the Dollar Line as scabs in the 1934 strike, the West Coast unions were waging a campaign to get them off the ships and replaced with union men. Their days were numbered.
Because they needed money for shore leave in foreign ports, they were forced to engage in rackets. In some ports where beer, booze or wine was cheap, they pooled their resources to buy up as much as they could. After the ship cleared port and the crew hankered for a taste of something alcoholic to get them on an even keel, the Chinese sold their stock to the crew at quadruple the original price.
Havana, a city of dire poverty, a sailor's port of cheap booze, open to every conceivable vice, was our last stopover before entering the Panama Canal. Young kids followed foreigners ashore in this humid city around in droves: "Hey, mister, you want to sleep with my sister, huh? Hey, señor, you want a virgin, cheap?" Havana was like a city under marshal law; soldiers with rifles and fixed bayonets were on every street. Still, it was the last good place for a sailor to "let go" before reaching the more restrictive atmosphere of the West Coast. And "let go" we did, returning to the ship either staggering, singing or being carried. While the sailors reveled in merriment, the Chinese crew members were buying as much beer and rum as their pool of resources allowed.
We cast off late at night and set course for the Panama Canal. The next morning the crew staggered out of their drunken stupors looking or begging for a drink, and as usual the Chinese crew members ran back and forth between their quarters back aft to their more prosperous but hung-over ship mates, their arms full of bottles. Usually, under such circumstances, the crew would be back to normal by the end of the day. But in this instance something went haywire, and the crew members continued to buy, drink and remain intoxicated while carrying out their duties haphazardly.
Captain Cullen convened a conference of officers, then made a decision that the booze supply had to be put out of commission. At ten the next morning, the captain, chief mate, chief steward, chief engineer and ship's doctor proceeded aft with three sailors who had managed to stay sober. Without warning they entered the Chinese crew quarters, opened lockers and dumped through the portholes hundreds of bottles of beer and rum. Far off in the distance one could see the bobbing bottles sway back and forth on a smooth Caribbean Sea.
This may have helped to sober up the crew, but it also helped to foment mutiny among the Chinese. That evening almost every Chinese crew member assembled at a meeting back aft. We could hear them shouting and orating, but we could only guess what they were talking about. They were furious about being ripped off. Their little side business was wiped out. Their investment was gone. Their sacred territory, their quarters, had been violated by the raid of the officers. They were furious and wanted revenge. They talked of a strike in Panama.
One of them was sent to talk with us. He posed the question: "If the Chinese crew members were to strike in Panama, would the rest of the crew offer some support?" Our answer was immediate and absolute, "Yes." We would do everything possible to support them.
We too had looked upon the invasion of officers into the Chinese crew quarters and the ransacking of their personal belongings as outright discrimination, an insult. It could be only rectified by an apology and restitution of their property. Word was quickly passed to prepare for action in Panama.
As we drew closer to the Canal, the officers got wind of impending action and commenced to dicker with the Chinese. First they threatened them with harsh action once they reached Shanghai, perhaps never allowing them to sail again. This had no effect on the Chinese, since they were aware that their days on Dollar Line Ships were numbered because of union pressure. A few hours before entering the first lock of the Canal, all the officers agreed to chip in and compensate the crew for their loss. The Chinese were elated and the action in Panama was called off.
The distance from the dock in Panama to the city was about two miles. Orders were posted on the gangway that sailing time was six that evening. That didn't allow us much time for shore leave. We could only grab a cab, speed uptown, have a few beers at one of the bars and get back to the ship. I joined one of the many cab loads of men hell-bent on getting away from the ship for a few hours.
It was either quinine-loaded rice beer or the hot weather or a combination of beer, rum, coke and weather that almost screwed me up. An hour before the ship was to sail, I saw the last cab of men take off amid shouts to get me back on board. Somehow the cooling beer and the comforting shade from the stifling heat of the city brought me back to the bar; I figured I had plenty of time to grab a cab and return to the ship.
My pockets were now empty. I had no wallet, no passport; I had nothing but the clothes on my back. I was in sandals, without socks. It seemed like hours since the last cab of men departed for the ship. Well, if I was to leave with the ship, I had better get back and aboard. I tried to talk a cab driver into taking me back. "No dinero, no transporte," he said calmly as he drove off without me.
The hell with them, I thought. I'll walk. I headed down the palm-lined highway toward the shipping area. In my mind I kept repeating the old refrain, "Time and tide wait for no man." Over and over it went in my mind as I increased my unsteady pace toward my ship's home. I became convinced as I slowly started to sober up that the ship had long ago departed for Los Angeles. All right, so be it. I would get to the pier and curl up and go to sleep. Maybe I'd wake with a clear head in the morning and report to the consulate that I had been left behind.
Passenger ships carrying U.S. mail don't dilly-dally. If they say the departure time is six, the chances are better than good that she'll be easing away from the dock at six. You could set your watch by it. With my head tilted down, I staggered into the vast open area of the pier, convinced that I would find myself alone. Now to find a comfortable spot to lie down and sleep off my disappointment. When I raised my head I was blinded by the bright lights of the ship. There she was, secured to the dock, the way I had left her. Passengers were lined up against the dock, staring down at me. I heard someone say, "That must be him now." Then everyone seemed to start talking a
t once as I worked my way toward the gangway. I could make out several officers up on the wing of the bridge, looking down at me as if they were counting my steps.
It was the voice of Gregory Cullen I heard shouting, "We can hoist the red flag now. Orders from Moscow. The number one commissar is aboard. We can sail now. Goddamn it. Who the hell is running this ship?"
I awoke the next morning feeling hung over. The air in the quarters was stifling. The hum of the engines and their vibrations on the deck were evidence that we were far out to sea. With a splitting headache, I strolled out of my hot, stifling room to the open deck to get a breath of fresh air. Some crew members were stretched out on the after deck taking a sunbath. Others were sitting around talking or reading. I spied my working partner sitting alone reading and enjoying the hot sun on his bare back. He stopped reading as I sat down beside him. "Feeling hung over?" he asked.
"Sorta. Head feels heavy. This hot sun should help."
"Lots of guys are mad at you, you know."
"Why? I carry my end."
"It's not because of your work, but what happened yesterday in Panama. You could have screwed things up pretty bad, you know."
"Why? Just because I had a few more drinks than I could handle? Why should the guys be pissed off at me?"
"You could have missed the ship. It's a good thing the guys like you, otherwise they would have sailed without you."
"You mean they're mad at me because they had to wait a few more minutes for me?"
"No; that's not it. Don't you know the whole story of what happened yesterday?"
"No," I said, surprised that there even was a story.
"Well, when the last cab came back to the ship, it was about ten minutes before sailing time and the gangway was to be hauled aboard. "Footpad" John said you had refused to get into the cab. We figured you would be back within a few minutes before sailing time. We were fortunate the way things worked out. It was low tide and the main deck was flush with the dock. We were on the dock, just sitting around, when word came around that all the passengers were aboard as well as the mail. The bridge had called for the sailors to stand by to let go. Then we knew you wouldn't make it. So about ten of us stepped across the deck to the dock and just stood there. Cullen shouted from the bridge to get back aboard or he would sail without us. Then 15 more guys joined us. Cullen sent the mate down to find out what was going on. We told him that one of our men was en route to the ship and we didn't want to sail without him. A deal was made with the mate, and he got the captain's agreement for us to send out three men in a cab to locate you and bring you back.
