Girl of My Dreams (33 page)

The next morning I went on hearing about such things as the stampede of cows up Market Street bellowing and wild with fright. “The street opened up in the aftershock,” an elderly man in Union Square told me as I tried to visualize how special effects would handle this, “and swallowed all the cattle into its chasm, all but a baby calf who wandered over to me as I crouched by a swaying building that somehow didn't fall. It was ridiculous but I started petting the calf. A Catholic priest came by and said we had to get the ferry to Oakland, and he led us down to the ferry, the calf following me like I was its mother. Ten thousand people were trying to catch that ferry, and we waited five hours.

“People huddled together here in Union Square,” the old man went on, “as the fire lit up the night sky. One group was praying loud when a crazy man came by and screamed the Lord had sent this to them so they shouldn't pray to him any more. A great roar shook everyone, and it was an eight-story building collapsing like a crushed biscuit. I was walking behind a fellow swinging his lunch pail as he tried to report for work. A cornice from a bank broke off and flattened him. The Army dynamited buildings to deprive the fire of nourishment, whole blocks of buildings. Wagons with horses still harnessed, drivers in their buckboards lay dead in the streets.”

“The unbelievable worst I saw,” a bartender told me on my third day, “was I came on a man trapped in the burning wreckage of a grocery store. Meat was cooking around him, chops and steaks from the butcher's counter barbecuing. The man lay silent, pinned under two huge wooden beams. A rookie cop ran up and got a bunch of us to try to move the beams. We couldn't budge them. The man didn't begin to scream until one of the beams was on fire at his legs. He begged the young cop to shoot him. The cop kept pulling on him while the man pleaded to be shot. No one could move the poor fellow. Finally the policeman asked the man his name and address. The man shouted it out. ‘Phineas Mulford!' he yelled, a name I'll take to my own grave. The rookie took the address, and he crossed himself before he shot the man square in the head. But he couldn't stand what he did, and he ran around the corner and shot himself.”

A woman at Fisherman's Wharf was the first person who let me know what Mike Quin was referring to when he said something else was happening in San Francisco. “What's going on right now, Sonny, in this year of Our Lord 1934, is going to make or break this city. Never you mind God's little hiccup back in Oh Six.” She pointed to a group of men marching picket across the street. They shouted and held signs.

Squat, indefatigable Mike Quin was on me every evening after I finished my day's quotient of survivors. Wanting to know what I'd done, nudging me to do something else while I shut him up with earthquake lore. I was buying the drinks; he probably figured let the skinny make his own mistakes. I might have seen an item in the morning paper, but I was so intent on finding the story Mossy wanted, figuring out his movie, that the occasion in San Francisco, heating up in front of my eyes, had eluded me.

The morning after I saw the marching pickets I let Quin take me down to the Matson docks. The
SS Lurline
was parked there, sleek, shining, a Thoroughbred of the sea. I looked at the
Lurline
, luxury on the waves, wishing I were on it. I saw Pammy's eyebrows, each really the watercolor of an eyebrow, and imagined how she'd look on the deck at sunset. I didn't hear Quin. “Paralyze the docks with their strike,” Quin was telling me, probably for the third time. “The
Lurline
doesn't look as though she'll ever sail to Honolulu again, does she? Not a soul aboard. Then they'll paralyze the city itself, maybe the whole coast. You hear me, Skinny?” He called me that, I knew, not because I was particularly thin but as a way of whittling me down to the size of an apprentice.

Quin would get a kick out of writing my little obit after the stevedore finished me off with six or seven thrusts of his blade. Skinny got in over his head. A featherweight going in against that big lunk Primo Carnera. Who's to blame, the featherweight for being brazen or the Dago for doing what comes naturally? “Ya wanna see us working for pennies like Coolie labor, dontcha?” the huge stevedore yelled at me. “No, no,” I gasped as I ducked away, “I don't, I don't.” He dealt me a clean slice in my leg as I kangaroo hopped away from him. “Lay off, ya big Kraut,” another stevedore yelled, “He's like the rest of us only been to school.” But this guy ran off, and my tormentor wasn't buying. “He's nothin' but a Hearstie is what he is,” he sputtered. He had me against a storefront, and he smelled blood. Facing death, I understood for a tenth of a second how he was right in a way. I might as well work for Hearst since I was a voyeur here, hoping to profit in my own way from the striking longshoremen's grief and pain.

After we left the Matson docks Quin had taken me around the Embarcadero to the dockworkers' headquarters a few blocks from where the foundation was being laid for the bridge to Oakland. Alleys and small streets chopped into the Embarcadero all along the waterfront. This was where the Barbary Coast had once darkened and enlivened the neighborhood before the earthquake and fire destroyed much of it.

Quin was introducing me to the city he had a lover's quarrel with. “Six hundred thousand of us here, Skinny,” he said, “fifty percent white collar, fifty percent laborers. Blessed with harbors and panoramas. From the heights you look out over blue waters to the rolling Marin hills and the mountain peaks beyond. At night the cities across the Bay—Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda—sparkle with a million lights, and if a moon makes its appearance the waters present a level meadow of silver. A young Italian, big, broad-shouldered, graceful, echoes the elegance of the city. Center fielder for the Seals, boy from Fisherman's Wharf swings his bat like an eagle spreading its wings.

“Through the heart of San Francisco cleaves the wide Market Street,” Quin said, “backbone of the city. The groove down the center of Market holds the cable for cable cars and we call it the slot. If you're north of the slot, you're prosperous, at least a merchant. South of the slot you're a laborer, you're in the Irish stronghold, you're a Catholic. If you have a little store you're paying protection to the Muldoon brothers, as sorry an excuse for Irishmen as ever disgraced the shamrock. The Muldoons run half the cops and three quarters of the whorehouses of which there are well over a hundred. More tentacles than an octopus, more poisonous than a nest of rattlesnakes.

“The residential sections reach out from Market Street over all the hills of the city—here are the Italians, over there the Chinese, down there the Negroes, up there the swells, each district as sharply defined and controlled as an autonomous republic. But the key to everything in San Francisco is the little knot of shipowners and dock owners, often the same people of course.”

“Why is one small group,” I asked, “the key to so much else?”

Quin patrolled his subject like a cop on the beat he knew better than anyone else. Which didn't prevent him from additional roles as a teacher and a preacher. “Because, Skinny,” he said, “cargo is the word that drives this town. Before we're anything we're a seaport. Most of us, one way or another, get our income from the transactions that surround the movement of cargoes. Insurance companies, banks, real estate brokers, wholesale firms, shops, hospitals, schools, restaurants, theaters, hotels—all exist for the service or entertainment of a community devoted to the constant flow of boxes, barrels, bales, the tonnage that feeds or clothes or houses distant populations and brings back raw materials and cash. Yet the men who lay hands on this cargo and keep the living pulse of the community beating basically derive no share in its returns. And the seamen who bring in the cargo, whose hazardous work is the cornerstone of the city's prosperity, are looked down on as one of the lowest forms of existence. The straw bosses do the hiring, and they belong to the owners. A longshoreman gets up before dawn, trudges dock to dock. Often he finds no job at all and when he does he has to pay a piece to the straw bosses, which keeps the longshoremen in competition with each other and drives wages down. Company unions, sure, but no organization workers can call their own. Corruption rules the system, and the owners, who seldom even lay eyes on the cargo, much less lift it, rule the corruption. That's our city, and that's what the strike is about.”

I said I could see why the longshoremen and the seamen had their backs up.

“Nothing makes a capitalist madder,” Quin said, “than the existence of something he can't buy with his money, confuse with his lies, or scare with his threats.”

Conditions on the waterfront had turned the stevedores into dry leaves awaiting a spark to ignite them. The spark was both desperation and hope, the desperation brought about by the Depression, and the faint hope sent from FDR's Washington that it was permissible for working people to organize themselves. Once lighted, the flames were fanned by the Reds, who saw every strike as a small revolution that could lead to a large one. In Quin's opinion, the Reds were useful catalysts, not causes, in the strike.

“Young Skinny,” Quin said, though he looked no more than a few hard-living years older than I was, “San Francisco is shaking more now than it did during the Quake.” As he led me around the Embarcadero we passed pickets at most of the docks. Quin shouted encouragement to them. “Twice as many longshoremen as there are jobs on the waterfront,” Quin told me. I said that was pretty much the situation among writers in Hollywood. “There you go,” he said, and I knew he wasn't taking me seriously. “You got a union?” he asked. Maybe he was taking me seriously a little bit. “Yes,” I said. “Well no. We're trying to have one.” “Get going,” he said.

It was late May. The longshoremen's strike had begun a few weeks earlier, essentially with the workers themselves—Quin called them the good old rank and file—defying their own leaders, who were afraid of the owners and didn't want to rock, literally, the boats in San Francisco harbor. “Fellows bringing home only fifteen, twenty a week,” Quin said, “want maybe a buck an hour. That and a union shop with a union dispatcher. No more straw bosses. That's the part drives the owners crazy.”

Upstairs in the International Longshoreman's Association headquarters just off the Embarcadero, Quin introduced me to men waiting to go on picket lines. Tough-looking guys, eating sandwiches in a single bite, soup in a swallow. Peopling the place with actors, I thought Victor McLaglen or Wally Beery would have been at home. Two men named Cromartie and Widdelstaedt, two sides of beef, each looked as though he could grapple an ox to the ground or perhaps just throw one into the hold of a ship. “Hey Nickie, me and the Crow could use six, seven more sammitches,” Widdelstaedt yelled to the back of the room. In a minute a composed, slender fellow came forward with two bowls of soup. “Soup!” Widdelstaedt barked. “Did I say soup? Crow, did I say soup, we don't need no more fuckin' soup, we'll have to piss all afternoon, I said sammitches.”

“Sorry boys,” the slender fellow said, “I've already served you more than the Strike committee says. Everyone gets one, two at the most, you guys each had four.” He turned to Quin and me. “Mike, you want their soup? And your pal?”

I was introduced to the cook, Nick Bordoise, as he handed me a steaming bowl of potato soup with carrots, onions, and chunks of brisket in it. Bordoise wasn't in the ILA but in the cooks' union, and he'd had a recent appendectomy that kept him off his regular job in a downtown restaurant. He was from Crete and had been to sea as a cook on a freighter; he was helping the ILA while he recuperated. He was marked by his Greek accent and his outspoken sympathies. His name, Quin told me, had been Counderakis, but he changed it to his wife's name to keep out of range of the immigration authorities. Bordoise looked vulnerable, and Quin asked him how he was after his surgery. “Still redder than your hair, Mike,” Bordoise said quietly. “The Reds are for what I'm for, workers' rights and we own the fruits of our labors.
Kali orexi.
Eat up.”

Bordoise spoke like someone being recorded, yet he had a sweetness in his voice I didn't hear among the barrel-chested stevedores.

“Don't need fuckin' Communists,” Widdelstaedt said. “Yer as bad as the finks.”

“The Reds are supportin' us,” another longshoreman said. “More than I can say for the papers, the cops, the damn city government. Did ya see the
Examiner
?”

I actually had seen the
Examiner
the day before. Hearst's paper said Moscow was using the waterfront strike to seize San Francisco as a colonial possession.

“You know I feed you good, right?” Bordoise said and was answered with a small cheer. “Okay then, but five million Americans are swallowing poison every day, not with their mouths but their eyes. The five million readers of Hearst papers.”

The union members banged their tables and said Nick should be an honorary member of the ILA. Widdelstaedt said any union member reading a Hearst paper should be beat up good, an ominous threat I didn't sufficiently recognize.

Bordoise was a gentle fellow, a little like the younger scenic designers at Jubilee, the designers who hadn't yet become prima donnas. Whenever I was in the ILA hall, Bordoise was as eager to give the longshoremen a satisfying meal as fancier chefs are to know how a patron likes their bouillabaisse or veal Marengo. The others, even the toughs like Widdelstaedt and Cromartie, also struck me as honest guys trying to do a job and be paid fairly for it. At the moment I fancied myself more like a stevedore than a studio hack, more at home in the union hall than at Jubilee where I was trying to worm my way into acceptance. What a fool I was, I suddenly thought the following day as my attacker slashed the air with his knife and lunged at me when I'd temporarily broken his hold. I felt accepted up there in the union hall, yet I was only being measured. In a moment he had me pinned against a parked car. Here came the blade again.