June 10, 2006--Saturday Story: "Bull Gang"--Part One

Bull Gang

Heshy Perlmutter and I were assigned to the Bull Gang. On a construction site it was considered, by the Men, to be the lowest form of life. Reserved for klutzes, misfits, and rummies. Since I did not consider myself to be any of these, I was offended. What’s more, as a College Man who had just finished my sophomore year, I pouted that I was not considered to be skilled enough to be thought of as mechanic material.

Also a rising junior, all things considered, Heshy thought our designation to be appropriate. I didn’t see it that way at all.

For example, of the three other members of the Gang, one guy, Tommy (the Turnip) Annunziata, had a withered arm; another, Louie (the Mountain) Maloney, weighed at least 300 pounds, very little of his bulk visibly the muscle required to move heavy equipment; and Marty (the Parrot) Martinova, who spoke not a word of English, had reputedly never uttered a word of any known language—continuously emitted a sound, a single unrelenting one that was more like a bird’s than anything human.

Then there was the notorious Eddie (the Bull) Ribori, chief of the Bull Gang, who was so thick in solid girth, as compared with Marty Martinova’s rolling blubber, that the “bull” in Bull Gang could easily have been eponymously chosen.

Forget for the moment what Heshy had to say about the situation, he was after all ensconced at Brooklyn College, while I, as an about-to-be Columbia University junior, was certain this was not where I belonged. Admittedly it was only for the summer, but still.

However, as with so much else I would soon discover, Heshy turned out to be right. In retrospect even I have to acknowledge that. We were in truth given an appropriate assignment by Lou Wasserman, the foreman to whom everyone, including Eddie, at least in theory, reported. And thankfully so because my life would have turned out quite differently if I had pulled rank and gotten us assigned to a traditional Tin Knocker mechanics crew. Which I could have arranged since all the mechanics, helpers, and Bull Gang members worked for my Uncle Ralph.

He was what we today would call the CEO of the Apex Sheet Metal Company, a business he inherited from his father, which in his day installed tin ventilator fans in the tenements of the Lower Eastside when indoor toilets were first installed. To family members he was just Uncle Ruby who sat alone all weekend in the library of his mansion on Long Island Sound watching Hopalong Cassidy reruns on TV while sipping a glass of Chivas Regal on the rocks that was perpetually kept filled by his youngest daughter Francine.

But in the world of heating and air conditioning, he was the king since Apex, during the early years of air conditioning, was New York’s largest heating and ventilating contractor. When a new office tower was to be erected in Manhattan, and as a modern building required centralized heating and cooling, they called on Apex to install the complex systems. And along with Apex came Uncle Ralph.

During summers some of Uncle Ralph’s men drifted to jobs in other cities and he always needed some fill-ins to bridge the gap until they returned in the fall to their jobs and wives. And so that summer he asked if I wanted “to work construction.” I leaped at the chance since it seemed an ideal way to stay in shape, which I needed to do since I was an oarsman on the Columbia crew. And I could use the money—the job paid fifteen dollars an hour, time-and-a-half for overtime, a fortune for a summer job.

But, Uncle Ralph said, if I wanted it I needed to bring along another “college kid”—he needed two men for a job in Manhattan, the Tishman Building, a fifty-story tower that was going up on Fifth Avenue. I did my best to recruit my few college friends, but they all were either so physically inept that the thought of using any tool other than a slide rule terrified them or they were from backgrounds so affluent that their parents insisted they not work with their hands but rather hang out at their Long Island country clubs and find someone appropriate to marry.

So I turned to Heshy. His father, Mr. Perly, was the neighborhood glazier and Communist, and this assured that there was very little money available for the Perlmutter children. Everyone had to work if they wanted sneakers. I thus suspected fifteen dollars an hour would sound as alluring to Heshy as it did to me.

He had been my best friend until high school, when we began to go our separate ways—I reaching for a life beyond the neighborhood managed to get into Brooklyn Tech, which I thought would transport me to a different world, while Heshy remained close to home and attended the local high school, Tilden. During our first fourteen years we were always together, our apartments separated by a vacant lot which we attempted to bridge through the use of hand and mirror signals; a rope line that we tied to our beds so that every morning, by tugging on it, we could wake one another to make sure we started the day together; and a rubber hose through which we whispered to each other—amplifying our voices late at night, bedroom to bedroom.

As Heshy and I became more technologically proficient, we linked apartments via homemade bell-wire phones, following instructions we found in Popular Mechanics magazine and soldered together radios from used parts, powering them with 12-volt car batteries. These electronic concoctions never managed to pull in a station, though one time we did manage to bring in the fire department when we set my bedroom curtains on fire when all the radio’s tubes exploded.

Heshy perceived me as the “rich” one. Though my father was the owner of a series of failed businesses, he had the appearance of success, which was what counted, since he was tall, well dressed, and born in America, all distinguishing qualities on a street of men who owned just one suit, had accents, and were never more than five-six in height; and my mother was a first grade teacher at the elementary school we both attended as was thus the only "professional" women in the neighborhood. But in spite of the class consciousness that he inherited from his father, the only overt subscriber to the Daily Worker in East Flatbush, Heshy never held our being “rich” against me. In fact, even at that tender age, I suspected he had bigger economic plans for himself as he saw his life unfolding, and was as interested in what he could learn from studying my family’s surfaces as in what he could learn from his father about the Revolution.

In spite of the realization that Heshy and I had begun to drift along different paths, and had seen even less of each other during our initial college years, after being turned down and even laughed at by my roommates, “Construction work? You’ve got to be kidding,” I turned to him as my best bet for the partner I required if I was to be working on Fifth Avenue.

He jumped at the chance—there was the money but also the opportunity to be a card-carrying member of the exploited working class on the Upper East Side; though as I saw it, fifteen dollars an hour didn’t seem all that working-class.

And thus we found ourselves in Eddie Ribori’s meaty hands.

* * *

But before returning to Eddie’s Bull Gang, allow a brief digression about heating and ventilation systems and their construction so that those who might be uninitiated in these arcane matters can acquire some perspective about the world in which Heshy and I were soon to labor.

In the old days, to heat a building there was a coal or oil furnace in the basement, a huge tank of water that the fire in the furnace heated and turned to steam, and a series of pipes that carried that steam to radiators which heated the rooms and offices where they were situated. At that time, to make a home or office cool one simply opened a window. Some would place a fan in that window, which, if you stood right on top of it, would evaporate your perspiration, which everyone who has taken high school physics knows is “a cooling process.”

Then eventually there was air conditioning. If you could afford a window unit, it would help make the fierce Augusts in Brooklyn endurable. Families would cluster around these life savers even more urgently than by the early TVs—life itself was often at stake, which is not to make light of Uncle Milty.

With technology pioneered by the Navy during the Second World War, commercial air conditioning came into its own. To made life at sea bearable for sailors who had to work and sleep below deck where the air itself was rank and superheated, they first brought something resembling fresh air to their stacked bunks via steel ductwork that connected to ventilating fans. This circulated air, made possible by those sheet metal ducts hung to the ceiling, was as essential to winning the war at sea as K Rations were to victory on land.

And then a bit later, when refrigeration systems were attached to the fans and ducts, cooled air could be delivered even to torpedo rooms on submarines. If we had only told the Japs about this secret weapon they would have surrendered even without us having to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In the early 1950s, my Uncle Ralph had the brilliant and profitable insight to adapt this military technology to civilian projects. And the rest is Apex Sheet Metal history.

But even before that felicitous turn of events, I first learned about Uncle Ralph’s contributions to the war effort from his brother, my father. He told stories about how Ruby managed to secure coveted government contracts to install ventilation systems on warships being constructed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. These were not so much stories about how by doing this Uncle Ruby was contributing to the defeat of the Nazis and Nips but how he was managing to keep some of the sheet metal designated for the naval work for his other, non-military civilian business.

At a time when even sugar was being rationed so the men fighting overseas could sweeten their coffee, construction-size sheets of metal and steel, you can only imagine, were not readily found. That is, except on the Black Market.

Without revealing too many family secrets, especially about a good uncle who in later years was generous enough to employ an all-thumbs nephew on a Manhattan building site, suffice it to say that he did very well. So well in fact that even before the War was over, Uncle Ruby and his family of five, from what he was able to provide, with a house full of servants, squeezed into a twelve room house, under a slate roof, on the North Shore of Long Island.

And his talented wife, Aunt Lola was able to secure the services of Mr. Le Maurice, at the time America’s best known interior designer (decidedly not “decorator”) with whom she created the first in-home living-room museum complete with velvet rope across its entrance so that the various nieces and nephews who descended upon them on weekends would be held back from entering that fashionably sunken room and sitting on and thereby crushing the down pillows so fluffed and swollen on their Louis Quinze chairs that they looked more ready to give birth than comfort.

* * *

“If I’m gonna have to baby-sit you two for three months,” Eddie Ribori growled at Heshy and me, “you’ll need names like the other guys have.” He flapped one of his massive arms at them and they gathered in a circle like a conclave of the afflicted. We trembled in fear because though we had been on the job for less than half an hour we had already been warned by foreman Lou Wasserman not “to cross him” because a building under construction can be “a very dangerous place, if you know what I mean by very” and don’t “expect your Uncle Ralph, or me,” he was quick to add, “to protect you here,” since Eddie “as a union man hates bosses.”

It was 7:30, a half hour before the work day would begin. In the plywood shanty where the men changed into their construction clothes, Heshy and I, attempting to be invisible, had already pulled on our new steel-toed boots and were ready to join the rest of the Bull Gang. I knew from my uncle that a ten-ton fan was to be delivered that morning and suspected that would be the Bull Gang’s assignment for the day—to get it in place in the eighth floor fan room. So for whatever reason Eddie Ribori was gathering his crew around him, I was eager for it to be over so we could get our hands on that giant fan. I already knew, again from Uncle Ruby, that moving these fans required more skill than anything else a Bull Gang was called upon to do, and I wanted to get right into that kind of action.

When Eddie’s three henchmen were all in place at his side, he began the mock baptism to their ribald laughter and whistles. Pointing at me while his men shuffled and smirked, “You’re the easy one—‘Joe College’ fits you like a new rubber. So that’s what I name you, Joe College.” The Parrot shrieked as if he had just been given a fresh cuttle bone.

“That Greek fag you’re studying in college.” He turned to Louie the Mountain as if for colleagueship, “What’s his name, Arcamedia?” Louie nodded his massive head, “Who bragged he could move the earth if he could place his pry-bar where he wanted to and had one long enough? What he called a lever. Well, with this here pry-bar of mine,” which he clutched at his side like a towering battle staff and though the summer never relinquished, “and these three pipe rollers here,” each eight feet long which he had leaning against the shanty, “with just these I’ll show you how to move a fan that weighs ten, fifteen tons into a space with just inches to spare on either side. Just with you two bums and those three rejects over there.”

He next gestured toward Heshy, not turning to acknowledge him, “And your pal over there, the other college boy, I gather from one of the Tin Knockers, Joe Muri, who lives by you guys that he already has a name from the neighborhood, though I can’t imagine how he deserves it from the looks of him,” he was nodding and winking at his crew, signaling to them to listen up because they would really like this one. “They say you have some three-piece set on you, some special e-quip-ment, right pal?”

While giving special emphasis to the three syllables, he poked Heshy in his thin chest with such force that he stumbled backwards. But before crashing into the half-fabricated wall, Eddie caught hold of him by his belt buckle; and, with astonishing strength, lifting him off the ground, confirmed the name Heshy’s friends back in East Flatbush had given him years ago in acknowledgement of his early development—“Big Dick will do here too,” Eddie proclaimed, contemptuously looking down at the crunched belt, “that is until we get a chance to check it out.”

He then let go of Heshy, who collapsed in a heap on the newly-poured concrete floor. Roaring at his own wit, he turned to face his raucous band and received their applause. “And after we give it a good look, if we can find it, then I think we’ll have something more appropriate to call the Dick.”

From all this excitement, it looked as if the Turnip’s inert arm was set aquiver. Certainly, the Mountain seemed ready to erupt; and if the Parrot could have flown as well as he screeched he would have flapped up to alight on the open steel framework, thirty floors above where the naming ceremony had concluded.

To be continued . . . .