Mile High (2 page)

In Ireland the Wests had been a Catholic Norman family, originally De l'Ouest, although Paddy had never known the shame of that. They were among the last families to resist Robert Boyle, the first Earl of Cork, in the Cromwellian rebellion. The West castle at Clogleigh was surrounded by artillery, then “all the garrison put to the sword” in 1642. Their lands confiscated, the remnants of the West family settled as tenant farmers in Kilflyn, in Kerry, where they wallowed in the present, deftly freed from the gentilities of the past, until the famine came.

When it came, Paddy's mother was dead (God rest her soul), and the family of nine, opposed to washing, slept and stank in the single room of their father's windowless mud hut, mixing their own rich smell with the smells of the pigs who shared the room and the pile of manure at the door.

The blight came on in '45. The famine began in '46. Dysentery and relapsing fever followed. Thousands roamed the countryside praying for food, eating thistles to stay alive. They began to leak out of their country. First to Liverpool, Glasgow and South Wales, then to Australia, last but most powerfully to the United States, jammed starving and diseased into unseaworthy ships.

A million died at home before Paddy West got away, including three brothers and four sisters. The British at last had begun to issue corn, but the Irish didn't know what it was and most of them couldn't or wouldn't eat it. Paddy filled his pants and a sack with it and made himself eat it after he saw how they cooked it, but on the road from Killarney to Cork he preferred to eat weeds. But he had luck. He came on two drunken English soldiers and in the right place for it, so he clomped them both on the heads with a flat rock and found six shillings in their pockets, all unaware that he had started on his life's work. He ate the corn, cooked or raw, and watched for lonely soldier drunks at night until he earned enough for his Cunard passage—about twenty American dollars' worth. Then he bought steerage space aboard a three-hundred-tonner, although it was known that in the year before, thirty-eight thousand of the fleeing Irish had died at sea or soon thereafter. But he didn't die at all. He found himself on the other side of the Castle Garden immigration shed in New York with eight shillings in his pocket. He walked along South Street, dizzy, looking at the thickets of ships' masts standing against the sky along the quay as far as the eye could see, their jib booms thrusting across the width of the street, almost touching the buildings.

He had thought he had forgotten what the smell of food could be like, what it could do to the belly and all concentration of will. He had survived forty-two days of ocean crossing on only the food he had brought aboard the ship because that would be the only food there was. Now, as he walked and goggled, he could smell oysters and hot clam chowder. It shook him. All his usual indifference to food was replaced by such longing that his hands shook, but one of his great strengths of character was his suspicion. He would not risk getting a short rate for his eight shillings when he turned them into American money. He'd wait until he could be sure he was getting an official rate from a bank or a mercantile counting room. He'd heard plenty about waterfront, big-city crooks aboard the
Marriam Murphy
for forty-two days. He stared the fine food smells down and set out to find a bank, wandering dazedly past pubs and ship's chandlers, boardinghouses and sailors' slop shops, street stands, horses, whores and sailmaker lofts. Someone was playing a piano somewhere.

Paddy West was seventeen years old, tall and strong. Gold had been discovered in California five months before, and the news was emptying the port of seamen as soon as the ships touched the piers. The men only wanted to ship out to California, around the Horn or across the Isthmus, so crimping had become an industrial necessity and overnight there sprang up sophisticated systems for shanghaing sailors. Crimps were the civil equivalent of the naval press gangs which had roamed England in search of naval manpower during the Napoleonic Wars.

Paddy West knew all about crimps. He had crossed next to a man and woman who had lived in Liverpool and had lost three sons to the bastards. On that crossing Paddy had promised himself, writ in vomit, never to go to sea again or set his feet on anything that floated. The man and the woman had been talking about the South End and Lime Street in Liverpool, but he was here now and he could see what was happening, and he knew if he answered any greeting from a warm and friendly stranger he'd find himself on the floor of a foc'sle bound for China.

He moved warily and got his first job as a fish-market porter on the very day he landed. He became a citizen of the United States on the second day. They paid him twenty-five cents to take the oath along with sixteen other men, all of them crouched and huddled sideways to be able to lay but one fingertip on the Bible to swear allegiance. There just weren't enough Bibles to go around. The witnesses who that day swore they had known every one of the applicants for eight years or longer, all those years spent in the City of New York, had good, steady work out of it, but the Tammany judges in the State Supreme Court were often hoarse swearing them all in. All the new citizens had to promise to vote the straight Tammany ticket of course. It was a thrill to be a new American, and he was never to forget that. Still and all, he spoke to none of his fellow indoctrinates. Paddy West wouldn't talk to anyone except his employer because any man on the street might be a crimp.

The two flourishing crimping organizations were those of Fernando Wood, a U.S. congressman, and Ma “the Casker” Steinet. She was called the Casker because if something slipped and a shanghaied man died on her hands she'd stuff him into a cask and send him off to sea that way, collecting her fee nevertheless. Fernando Wood owned a tobacco shop in Pearl Street, then he acquired seven sailing vessels while trading with a pack of cards, and so entered the shipping trade. When his crews began to desert in order to make their way west to California he immediately began his eventually extensive crimping business as a sideline. Meanwhile, forging ahead in city politics, he rose to be chairman of the Tammany Young Men's Committee, then won the Democratic Congressional nomination in 1840. In Congress, Wood crusaded for Navy drydocks and for full pay for overseas consuls. And despite complete indifference on all sides, he encouraged a nut professor to string wires from the Wood Congressional committee rooms to corresponding rooms on the other side of Capitol Hill, and thus Professor Morse's amazing telegraph was demonstrated publicly for the first time.

Congressman Wood was skillful with guns, knives, clubs, fists and pokers—widely admired. In 1848, when 212,000 immigrants arrived in New York, including 117,000 Irishmen, Wood, who was always dreaming and planning for Tammany Hall, organized the Instant Citizenship Committee that had so flattered Paddy. While Wood went well on his way to becoming mayor he was also establishing himself as one of the two top crimps. He did indeed become mayor in 1854, and moved instantly to attack municipal problems by banning the driving of cattle through downtown streets, by putting the police into uniforms against their will, and before settling down with his and Tammany's ideas of the real business of being mayor, established the seven hundred and seventy-six-acre Central Park in Manhattan at a projected cost of three million dollars.

Fearing Wood's crimps—because he truly admired Fernando Wood—Paddy moved out of his waterfront boardinghouse and walked north almost three miles every night to a farmhouse where he could lock himself in. He avoided the Irish shantytown along the old Bloomingdale Road just farther north because the crimps were drawn to it like flies to a jam pot. At the fish market, if any jolly smiler spoke to him and invited him off for a drink Paddy would ignore the man. Because of the crimps, he refused to drink for the rest of his life, from the day he set foot in America. If the same jolly stranger spoke to him twice Paddy would stop what he was doing and stare the man down. If it happened a third time he would hit the man with a short piece of lead pipe he kept in his trousers, because crimps are brutal men, then sell the man to Ma Steinet, getting five dollars. After three of Wood's men went down under Paddy's pipe and disappeared he thought they had crossed him off as a seafaring prospect, but his employer told him that he had been called uptown and told to fire Paddy or lose his license. That was that. Mr. Wood was very offended. When the
Hilda M. Hess
, the Antarctic whaler that was lying out in the upper bay, was loaded and ready to leave port, Mr. Wood had said that Paddy would be on it.

“What'll I do?” Paddy asked.

“Get inland. Go to Pennsylvania.”

“I can't.”

“Why not?”

“I'm goin' inta politics here.”

“Over Mr. Wood's cold body, you are.”

“I'm young. I'll wait. I ain't goin' ta wait until I go vomitin' around the world in a whaling ship.”

Paddy never returned to the farmhouse. He knew Wood's crimps would be waiting for him along that dark road. He went straight to Ma Steinet, an evil-smelling old woman but Wood's competitor.

“Wood's crimps are after me.”

“You're not the first.”

“He got me outta me job.”

“Go find a priest. Why tell me?”

“I want a job. But not on no ship.”

She stared at him unpleasantly.

“I use me eyes,” Paddy said, earnest and unsmiling. “I'm a good crimp. Put me on as a runner.” The runners were rowed out to meet the incoming ships, as far out in the harbor as they could get to, to board them with grapnels, then go into the foc'sles with booze and even go aloft with the crew to help them stow the muslin. They'd tell the sailors anything to get them to jump the ship when it docked, then to move them, drunk and helpless, into the boss crimp's boardinghouse.

“You'd fall outta the rowboat,” Ma said, but she admired the way he never smiled but just jutted his fat lips outward and stared through her with hard eyes to some distant objective. She could feel the coldness of him, strong enough to put out a fire. “All right. You can be the drayman,” she told him. Drayman was low man in the crimping trade. When the runners got the seamen ashore the draymen moved their gear to the boarding-house, then after Ma had signed them on an outgoing ticket, the drayman carted the doped, drunk and sometimes dead bodies back to the wharves, now stripped of their money and their gear.

Paddy took the job. He got a dose of pox his second night in one of Ma's boardinghouses and never touched a street whore again for the rest of his life. Ma paid him room and board and three dollars a week and Fernando Wood forgot about him. Good luck continued. Young Bill Tweed, leader of the Cherry Hill gang, had founded the Americus Vespucci Volunteer Fire Company. Because of Paddy's strength he won himself the right to wear one of Bill Tweed's red shirts and became a star member of the Americus Engine Company Number Six, known all over the city as the Big Six, champions for outracing and outmaneuvering any volunteer fire company in Manhattan; fighting it out with fists at the water hydrant if the race was close. It was thrilling to see them race against the Eight Company down Broadway, the great red-shirted men teamed like horses to drag the engine—its box brightly emblazoned with the head of a snarling Bengal tiger—with Big Bill Tweed jogging beside them and blowing his silver trumpet, while fire buffs and children tumbled and ran all around them. Their fame spread far beyond the city. When Millard Fillmore became president they were presented to him at the White House. The Number Six Company did a lot for Paddy West.

Paddy didn't drink or whore and now he gave up smoking because it cut his wind. He was the industry's model crimp. He could bring in more sailors with a stern stare than another crimp could with a bottle of booze. If any woman in any of the three saloons the Casker owned ever spoke to him, Paddy would knock her down. Soon all the top whores on the waterfront came to show him doglike devotion. He organized the best of them in his own little band and took over the organization of their sales and promotion. But he spoke to them only through his helper, Jiggs Tobin, a Roscommon man who was saving to buy his own horse and hack.

Working for Ma, running the girls and cashing bets on the Big Six weren't the only sources of income for young Paddy. He taught himself to be an accomplished pickpocket, no mean feat for a farm boy with hands like a cow's udders. Ma Steinet would watch him watching the runners roll the drunk sailors and then get drunk themselves. She'd admire the way Paddy would walk among them, lifting the money out of their pockets. In that way he was an honest thief. He never stole from strangers or the sober. She was pleased with his steady ambition and the no-nonsense, teetotal way about him. She jumped him over the ranks of runners into the first vacancy as boardinghouse master when he was only twenty-two years old—six feet, two inches tall, one hundred and ninety pounds, without a smile or a frown, but never stupid-looking for any of that.

Until a crew was ordered by a shipping company, the Casker's boarders were housed warmly and fed well for two dollars a week from each man. She ran saloons in each doss and specialized in seafaring men. Whatever it was she offered, it was so right for sailors that even though men knew they had been shanghaied before from one of Casker Steinet's places, most of them returned again and again.

The boardinghouse Paddy ran was close to the river and had a trapdoor for lowering the drugged men into small boats to be run out to the big ships that waited impatiently for their crews in the harbor. For supplying crews Ma got the advance notes issued by the shipping companies against two or three months' pay for each man she dropped aboard. The runners got five dollars a head per man, the boardinghouse master got 10 percent of Ma's estimated gross, which was about 2 percent of true earnings, but Ma never objected to Paddy running the whores or picking the runners' pockets.