June 17, 2006--Saturday Story: "Bull Gang"--Part Two

Part One (posted below on June 10th) found Heshy and the soon-to-be-named Lloyd struggling to survive as members of the Bull Gang, relegated to long days of unloading trucks delivering sheet metal duct work to the fifty-storey Tishman Building under construction on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The pay is good for a summer job, the boys are between their second and third years of college; and by working together, these formerly inseparable friends, were reunited after going somewhat different ways after having grown up on the streets and vacant lots of East Flatbush in Brooklyn. The Bull Gang is led by the notorious Eddie Ribori who, with his band of misfits looking on gleefully, on their first day on the job assigned derisive nicknames to our heroes—Heshy became Big Dick, for indelicate reasons, while his partner, for obvious reasons, was baptized Joe College. We find them then at the end of Part One being warned by Eddie that “construction sites are very dangerous places” and unless their work improves they may experience that danger first hand.

In Part Two, which follows, we . . .

______________________

“Now let’s get to work,” Eddie bellowed, signally the fun was finally over, “and you two, Joe College and Big Dick, there’s a truck waiting by the hoist for you to unload. And make it quick. The driver has half a load for us and then he has to take the rest to another job downtown.”

“But what about the fan?” I somehow managed to stammer at Eddie Ribori’s back as he and his band of three had tuned toward the elevator that would take them up to the twentieth floor.

Eddie Ribori wheeled to glare at me. “I told you two that there’s a truck in the street that needs unloading. Let’s see if you can get that done before the end of the week or one of you slices off a thumb. So make sure you keep at least one stuffed in your ears at all times.”

And again to gales of derisive laughter Eddie and his men marched off, leaving us on our own, with our new names, to deal with the truck. Which as promised was waiting on 54th Street by the construction hoist, a makeshift-looking elevator structure of metal piping, wire, wood beams, and slats that rose the full height of the building and was used by Bull Gangs and laborers to hoist from the street cinder blocks and mortar, coils of electrical cable, wall boards, pipes, kegs of iced beer (it was hot after all!), and in our case sections of sheet metal ducts that had been fabricated in Apex’s shop in Long Island City and which now needed to be off-loaded from Uncle Ralph’s truck and delivered to the seventeenth floor where a gang of his Tin Knockers awaited their arrival so they could assemble them, screwing them together, seven-foot section to seven-foot section, until they were joined into long lines of ducts that they would then hang, affixed to steel rods that had been inserted into the underside of the poured concrete eighteenth floor, the floor above, and where, when installed, they would wait, hidden from view and awareness, behind finished and buffed dropped ceilings, the eventual arrival of typists and file clerks who would be cooled by the silent rush of air through hot summer Augusts and made toasty by heated air during the depths of Decembers.

The Apex truck was double-parked and causing such an early-morning nightmare for the coagulating cross-town traffic that its driver, Stewie Slotman, when we finally arrived, was already in such a state of agitation that his entire body was shaking as if he had just emerged from a long season of shock therapy. He was so roiled by the commotion in the street that he had lost his battle with what we subsequently realized were nervous tics. They moved in waves from his feet to his head and, for him, were so seismic that he could not make himself understood, except though strings of twitches in his face, where they were most expressive. This was also how he earned his nickname, Twitch.

It was clear from his condition, if we wanted to get the truck unloaded before he required resuscitation that we had better jump up onto it and get started.

There would be no instructions, no orientation about how to unload a truck. Nothing of the kind I had received about how to use the equipment in the chem lab at college. It was simply, “Get the fuck up there. I can’t wait all day for you faggots to get going. I’ve got Steam Fitters waiting to use this friggin hoist in an hour.” Just this from Vito (the Provolone) Provenzano, the hoist operator, who we later learned required twenty dollars cash to allow Apex or All City Electric to use his equipment even though Uncle Ralph and his contractor colleagues had to pay $100 an hour, on the books, for its use. Lou Wasserman slipped the Provolone the former; Apex’s comptroller the latter. It all worked very well.

Heshy and I, on the other hand, didn’t. While attempting to hop up onto the truck bed with the ease and grace of someone who had been doing it for twenty years, Heshy slammed a leg into the rear of the truck with such force that he was thrust back into the street where he fell under the wheels of a rampaging taxi which had just finished crawling toward the corner where we were and was in a such frenzy to at last make it across Fifth Avenue that, if he hadn’t managed to swerve, that Monday would have been Heshy’s first and last day on the job.

With considerable embarrassment, accompanied by shrieks of pleasure from the very amused Provolone, Heshy picked himself up from the pavement and managed to scramble up onto the truck to join me with the help of a boost from the equally convulsed Twitch, a leg up which he had already administered to me, so that now both of us were in place and ready to unload the ducts that were standing on-end as if in columns.

Twitch had lashed them with ropes to the truck body so they would not come crashing down as he bumped his way from the shop in Queens to Manhattan. But when I finally managed to untangl the rope, with the unforgotten skills I had acquired while a Boy Scout, which Twitch had secured with no less than a dozen improvised knots, when I then with visible pride turned to be acknowledged by Heshy and maybe even Provolone for my achievement, the entire bundle of ducts came crashing down on me, with one of them slicing into my left thumb. This sent blood spurting and Twitch racing as if in a seizure to get the first aid kit from the cab of the truck, something he regularly needed to do for new Bull Gang members since the ends of sheet metal ducts were as sharp and raw as scalpels and show-off klutzes like me were always self-amputating body parts their first week on the job.

Fortunately, my cut, though deep, closed quickly under the butterfly bandage that Twitch applied, and I still had both thumbs.

I thought then that maybe we had in fact been offered a little orientation from Eddie Ribori—from then on, though I didn’t keep at least one thumb in my ear, I did get a good pair of work gloves and kept my eyes more on the ducts than Twitch or Vito Provolone. It was just get the friggin ducts onto the hoist and move on to the next thing.

* * *

We spent the entire first month pretty much doing nothing other than unloading trucks which were arriving with fuller loads and, after our first week, twice a day since the pace of work had picked up—the Tishmans’ wanted to have their building completed and occupied ahead of the original schedule to take advantage of the increasing demand for office space. The city was booming while I was floundering. It wasn’t as if I kept slicing off my fingers—I had solved that problem with the gloves and by keeping a lookout for duct avalanches--it was more that I was feeling frustrated that we were still mired in the routine work of unloading trucks and schlepping ducts to the hoist. I had not forgotten about the true work of the Bull Gang—it was all about moving those mammoth fans. I wanted to put my hands on them.

True, Eddie and his three senior crew members were so occupied with those blowers, now working up on the fortieth floor, also the result of the Tishmans’ accelerated schedule, that they left us more or less alone, except in the mornings, having just the time then, at the shanty before work started, to shoot us a few zingers—The Man-Mountain, “Hey Joe College, read any good books lately?” He paused to set up the punch line. “I mean the ones without the pictures!” Even our defender Lou Wasserman liked that one and couldn’t help chuckling. The Turnip, “Say Big Dick, I hear you sit on the back of the truck all day trying to look down girls’ dresses.” He would then turn to the Parrot knowing he would really like what was coming, “or is it the dresses not the tits you’re interested in?” That in fact was always the Parrot’s favorite and send him into bursts of high-pitched whistles.

The Bull, Eddie Ribori surprisingly joined the ribaldry only occasionally. If I thought he was capable of such an emotion, I would have said he seemed sad, even depressed. But not depressed enough to deter him one morning from savaging us before all the assembled mechanics. “Everyone here is busting their chops to get this fuckin job done. Even working ten, twelve hours overtime every week. In this heat. Their kids are home from school and the guys come home dragging their tails so tired they can’t play with them or take them to a ball game or nothing. And what do I hear from that Ginny Provolone? That you guys are either sitting on your asses or taking so long to hoist a load that the mechanics up on the twenty-third, twenty-fourth floors have to sit around waiting for the tin to get to them so they can get the job done and get home to their people. No one’s complaining about the overtime money. Everyone likes a little Sweet Time; but unless you clean up your act, I don’t care, Mr. College, if Uncle Ralpie Boy is your rabbi. As I told you once, and I don’t intend to tell you again, if you get my drift, construction is a very dangerous place to work.”

With that ominous warning hanging in the dusty air, and to complete silence, in single file like a wounded platoon, Ribori lead his men to the elevator and back up to fan room on the fortieth floor.

Heshy and I were made nervous enough by Eddie’s threat and took it so seriously that we struggled furiously all morning with a full load of ducts to get them off the truck and onto the hoist in, for us, record time. We had images of Tin Knockers sitting on their asses all over the building site talking about how our laziness and incompetence was leading to an increase in the divorce rate of sheet metal workers all over the city and causing their kids to turn to drugs since their dad’s never had time any more to take them to a ball game at Yankee Stadium.

The Provolone, though, appeared to be dragging his feet even more than unusual that morning, busting our chops if there were too many ducts piled on top of each other on his hoist--the twenty dollars cash extorted by him for each truckload was supposed to help him not notice these “safety violations.” It was as if word of what Ribori had threatened had filtered down to him and thus if he could help slow things down enough so that we wouldn’t be able to get the ducts up to the men so they could get home in time to have dinner with their kids, then maybe he would be witness to just how dangerous a construction site might be for two wise-ass college boys. That would break up the monotony of his day.

But in spite of Provolone’s best attempts to hold us back, with the extra rush of adrenaline shot through our systems by Ribori’s threat, we did manage to get the load to the men before lunch and thus felt we had dodged a bullet, perhaps literally, at least for the morning.

So over lunch, which was a gulped-down pepper-and-egg hero and a can of Ballantine, I counted the number of work days remaining before the start of the fall semester. Unfortunately, though I counted three times to be sure, there were still twenty-eight very long and dangerous days to go. I couldn’t quit—forget the money, I would never again be able to face my Uncle or father if I wimped out. And there was no way I could tell Uncle Ruby about what Ribori had said. That would be worse. I needed to find a way to stick it out while not getting killed.

We made it through the next two hours and then later that day, during the afternoon break, when all the men were gathered in the street beside the hoist where the coffee wagon was set up, just as I caught myself again counting days, thinking that maybe I had missed a holiday, no such luck, Joe Muri the mechanic from our neighborhood came to squat beside the moping and exhausted Heshy and me. Joe Muri, who had told Eddie Ribori about Heshy’s nickname. Something that was still so rankling Heshy that he turned his back to him when Muri sat down.

“I hear you guys are having a few difficulties,” Joe had never spoken to us before either on the job or back in Brooklyn. He had been a semi-pro football player before tearing up his knees and becoming a Tin Knocker, and on our block the status of both was such that there was no way that he would acknowledge much less speak to losers such as the two of us. Also, as one of the few Italians in our decidedly Jewish neighborhood, he held those of our persuasion in thinly-disguised contempt. Nothing personal, or even especially bigoted, but that’s just the way it was. So it was to say the least unusual, perhaps unprecedented that he would approach the likes of Heshy and me.

“Looking at me now,” and he looked at himself as he sent a wave of flexing muscles across his body—from his bulging tri- and biceps to his astonishing pecs and on down to his famous Six Pack, “I know you will not believe this but when I was in your shoes, an apprentice mechanic just beginning, I made a mistake during my first week, also working trucks, that cost my partner an eye.” Heshy, not believing his ears, this confession of fallibility, turned back toward Joe. “I know, you think I’m making this up, but trust me this is a true story. I almost quit. Me, Joe Muri, offensive guard for the Brooklyn Mavericks thought about quitting. I, who once played a whole half on a broken ankle. Believe it. I gave it serious thought.” Heshy looked at him skeptically, as if he doubted Muri’s capacity to give anything serious thought. We Jews, also, didn’t think very highly of the Italians.

“So what happened?” Eager now to find out, we leaned closer so as not to miss a word. “I’ll tell you what happened. There was this guy, I think your uncle would still remember him, at the time, and I’m talking ten, fifteen years ago, the only one of you co-religionists on the job, this fellow Solly Shapiro, I think they called him the Weasel he was so smart and slippery, well Solly took me under his wing and showed me a few things and the next thing you know I was a full-fledged mechanic, even a crew leader.”

I was puzzled, wondering why he was even talking to us at all much less telling us these things about himself—this neighborhood legend who was reputed to have been shot in the stomach once but not wounded because the bullet couldn’t penetrate his rock-hard solar plexus and had thus that day earned, not been given, but earned the nickname Superman. “I’ll tell you why I’m telling you these things,” it was as if he had read my mind—even in that he had Man-of-Steel powers, “It’s because one time Lloyd,” he even knew my name! “after I was injured and down and out and feeling sorry for myself,” he peered at me; were there tears inconceivably forming in his eyes, “It was during that time when your father and his Uncle Herman owned that parking garage in Park Slope, remember that, well he took me on and gave me a job just when I needed it more than anything. I’ll never forget him for that. And then later, when I was all healed up, your father, without me asking him, talked to his bother about helping me get into the Tin Knocker’s union.” I had not known any of that.

“So now I’m going to return the favor and help you out. And him too,” he said, tossing a gesture in Heshy’s direction. He had regained his composure and was Joe Muri again. “I’m going to show you a few tricks about how to get a truck unloaded and the stuff up to the guys in time for them to get the job done. And I guarantee you that this’ll also get that clown Ribori off your back.”

And he did. After work that day he took Heshy and me to a workers bar back in Brooklyn and gave us the orientation that we had craved that first day.

He told us that as an old Bull Gang guy he had been observing how we worked. Our problem, he said over his second beer, was that we were working separately, as individuals and not as a team. He put his arm around my shoulder. It was so dense with bands of muscle that I almost collapsed under its weight. “The one thing I learned from being on the Mavericks is that no matter how good you might be what really matters is how you play together as a team. I know, you’re thinking right now, ‘Big deal. To tell us such obvious bullshit he sat us down in this ginmill.’ Well, you may think you know that but, from what I seen of you, you sure aren’t putting it into practice. You’re working like you don’t even know each other.” And during the next half hour he critiqued our truck and hoist techniques and gave us a dozen pointers about how to work as a team.

After Joe paid and left, thinking further about what Joe had had to say about our shortcomings and what he told us was required to do the job well, I had to admit that I should have perceived on my own that what had seemed such a simple, even menial job was actually quite complex and to be successful not only required coordinated effort but also considerable thought. Having seen myself as existing in a higher plain being than the other men, analytical thought, was not something I had assumed working on a Bull Gang required. In my mind it had simply been about fifteen-dollar-an-hour schlepping. Heshy, enigmatically, simply smiled at me when I made this confession. I needed another beer.

The next morning we began to implement Joe’s suggestions. One involved my no longer working on my own up on the truck disentangling the ducts and then one by one tossing or pulling them to the open end where Heshy, standing on the street, waited for them before walking them to the hoist where he, by himself, would stack them. Now we both jumped up onto the truck and did the disentangling together; and then, after having pulled aside enough to constitute a full hoist-load, hopped off and together carried the ducts, three at a time to where Provolone stood, no longer smirking since even he had to acknowledge that we were working together like a real crew. And since we carried the ducts to the hoist also as a team of two, by selecting which to bring we could pick three--a large one which we carried between us, and two smaller ones which we each could carry with our free arms. Three for the price of two!

We were feeling quite proud of ourselves as it was clear as immediately as lunch beak that day that by working as Joe had taught us we had increased our production so that even Provolone was off our backs. And by the end of the day, when we returned to the shanty to change into street clothes, for the first time since we had begun, now a month ago, Eddie Ribori and his men ignored us. Which we took to be a good sign.

* * *

Most evenings after work I was so exhausted from laboring in the boiling air, it was turning out to be the hottest, most humid summer on record, I devoured a quick dinner (“He’s still a growing boy,” my father would proclaim), watched a ball game on TV, and fell asleep on the sofa before the fifth inning.

But on the weekends, I would take the subway to the City to be with Sigrid. Heshy remained in the neighborhood to help out in his father’s store—Perly’s Glass Works, he was a glazier—and to see his voluptuous girlfriend, Rochelle, one of the Siegel Twins, who lived around the corner. She was someone Heshy had had his eyes and hands on since elementary school.

Sigrid was a year ahead of me at Barnard, studying Existential Philosophy, and had a job working with her professor assisting him with a paper he was preparing to be delivered in French at a conference in the fall, in Fontainebleau, on Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (L’Etre et le Neant). Something about how consciousness is transcendent. She did not need the five dollars an hour he was paying her—she had all the money she required for her apartment on West End Avenue; her twice-weekly riding lessons in Central Park; her British Racing Green MG; her devotion to fine wines, exclusively French; and her much-celebrated dinner parties, soirees, for which she did all the cooking and featured, at the end, her famous Chocolate Bavarian, which she served in a dark mountain in her great-grandmother’s silver tureen.

The money arrived discreetly each month from Düsseldorf, transferred to her personal banker on Madison Avenue by her widowed mother, who carefully nurtured the family fortune which, Sigrid hinted, was largely derived from ancestral lands. Though Sigrid may not have needed his money, Professor Evan Anthony needed her to translate his academic English since, she told me privately, he barely “had” French because, like me, he was from Brooklyn and originally had a name that had as little to do with an Evan and even less an Anthony than my newly acquired ability to pronounce Long Island as two separate words.

I met the Baroness Sigrid von Hauptmann after my roommate Jerry Tuba ended his torrid affair with her and disappeared. She had remembered me as Jerry’s friend when she found me one afternoon in the Columbia Music Library, struggling haplessly with the score to one of Beethoven’s late quartets. Without Jerry to guide me I was pretty much lost.

A cappuccino (she took me too her cafe) quickly led to dinner (she picked the restaurant, Le Cote Basque); chose the wines (a lovely Sancerre Sec to begin followed by a properly aged Puligny Montrachet); paid for the two of us (les escargots et entrecots were both tres cher); took me to her apartment (with the sweeping views Jerry had languidly described); which in turn, before that glorious first day was over, led to her taking me into her arms, her bed, and to erotic places I had up to that time only imagined during endless adolescent nights of self-administered release.

Throughout that year with Sigrid, she seemed more interested in my, to her, exotic life than in any of my ideas or interests, much less anything I was capable of doing for her or to her in what she referred to as her “chambers.” As we lay together, smoking Galoise, in what was now my moonlight, not the moonlight of Jerry’s stories about his nights with Sigrid, she would ask me, “Lloyd,” my name never sounded so luscious as when Sigrid rolled it out in two syllables, “when Ll-oyd vil you take me to see your Brooklyn. You always promise but then, my sweetie, you never do. You are teasing me, no? I want to see that baseball field where the Dodgers play and Coney Island where I want to ride on the roller coaster. I never did that as a girl in Germany, it was so terrible there. And I want to see your house and meet your friends. Not your Columbia friends. They are such boys. I want especially to meet that Heshy, is that his name, the one about whom you tell such funny stories. Did you really, in your school, have a class in how to shower? That is so amusing.” She, all of her, as she lay against me, quivered with laughter.

* * *

And so we picked a weekend for her visit. Though she pressed me to use her MG, even generously saying I could drive it, I preferred to take my father’s car into the city to get Sigrid. It was respectable enough, a two-year old 1957 yellow, black-topped Chevrolet convertible. And I thought Sigrid would be all right about being seen in it with me, even with the top down. I was, as might be expected, nervous about bringing her into my world since I was interested in getting as far away from it as Manhattan and Columbia would allow. But she was so eager, so casually calm about what might be awaiting her, and I was so giddy from infatuation, that I put aside my doubts and, after picking her up, drove us proudly back over the Brooklyn Bridge, with the Baroness by my side, with the Brooklyn wind whipping her incredible, blonde German hair.

This was to be quite a different day than those on the Bull Gang.

To be continued . . . .