16

Festival of Resistance

You don’t know what it is to be killed until you are brutally, abruptly, surprisingly killed—by someone you thought friendly, a comrade—and after that you will know, it hardly needs declaring, nothing at all. You will presently be extinct. Your knowledge shrinks as you watch your life shrink, watch the knife with the blade eight, ten inches long, make its unstoppable way toward you. Ashes to ashes and nothing to nothing.

The knife was at my arm, held by the enemy I’d thought a friend. Why my arm? He only wants to scare me, I was thinking hopefully as I tried to retreat. At the same time I could see the knife headed north toward my neck.

As a child I saw chickens killed that would flap around after their heads were neatly hatcheted off. One managed a circuit of my grandfather’s barn, 360 degrees, coming neatly, amazingly to rest at his feet while he still held the gleaming though stained instrument of its beheading. He laughed. “Will you look at that, Owen? The creature doesn’t know it’s dead.” It was doubtful I’d make it around the barn.

I held the knife back, that is I held the wrist holding the knife, trying to push it away, but this bulging arm against my own, though twice the age of my arm, was pure brawn, muscled and sinewed and bicepped from thousands of jobs of dockwork, from its hefting and hauling, probably from numberless fights in waterfront bars, until my arm was no match for it despite the doubling, trebling, of my strength through fear.

But was it only fear, fear and desperation, I was feeling? Was there not also the sense that at last, like San Francisco itself, this was something real? And was there not the further sense that my enemy, who had earlier been chummy if not my chum, was in some schoolish way making a mistake that, if only one of our teachers were present, she would have quickly rectified? “No, Steve” (which name I’ll temporarily donate to this stevedore), “Owen is your friend, or at least ally, and you remember we had ‘ally’ in vocabulary last week and it meant someone on your side who is joined with you in a common purpose, so please, Steven, let Owen go, and Owen, you let Steve loose too or I’ll have to keep you both in detention after class and send you to the vice principal who is not stingy with his ruler. No fighting on the playground. Now, Steve, right now!”

But there was no time, no playground to be rescued from by the benevolent teacher, because time was about to stop, four, three, two, and I could hear my breaths as I wondered, since they were surely to be my last, if I had ever heard my own breaths before. How did they smell. The trivia of the condemned facing his executioner.

Mossy had said he thought people would like to see a disaster worse than the Depression. New techniques in miniature and special effects would let him show, convincingly, an earthquake as it destroyed block after block of the great metropolis. “Tell me,” he had said, “exactly what people were doing before the quake struck, what their brothers and mothers-in-law were doing, the way the woman next door was pulverized. Give me details, what happened every second of the quake. How did they survive? Even better, how did those who died die? And then the fire. The fire that follows will be the gravy on the roast beef.”

Now I was the beef about to be carved, the disaster worse than the Depression. Except no one would ever know. Mossy would miss the picture I didn’t bring back more than he would me, and Curtt Weigerer would wonder where the rest of his thousand dollars was.

When I arrived in the city, San Francisco not only felt bracing but was also visible to me. I saw through the fog to a place I could understand, or thought I could. Pure and knowable, apparent and transparent—this was the steep-hilled, sea-girt city I entered. One knew where one stood in San Francisco even when the place swam in fog. In Los Angeles, some of the poor and the working class were religious or political freaks, enthusiastically in favor of beating up a labor organizer; some of the rich, on the other hand, were Communists. They may have been the most casual, careless Communists, with butlers, pools, Japanese yard men, may have been cheerfully, hypocritically unaware of the disconnect between their behavior and their ideology, yet they colored themselves Red and called for the abolition of private property, called for the overthrow of the existing structures of state and capital. In San Francisco the poor, the workers, a slice of intelligentsia were where Reds were found if Reds there were at all, and the rich gazed out of the windows of their clubs with horror at any sign of unions. What a relief!

The papers had done interviews on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the quake in 1931, and that’s where I started. At the doughty Call-Bulletin I bumped into a half sober reporter his colleagues called Roughride Reynolds because he’d actually been with Teddy Roosevelt more or less charging up San Juan Hill in the Spanish American War. Ruddy, big-bellied, laughing in every sentence as he swilled his beer. He told me the whole charge was a sham, that the troops had simply walked up an undefended rise and that he, Reynolds, had staged the photograph that ultimately put the first Roosevelt in the White House. After the war he’d come west and landed on the old Evening Bulletin, covering the earthquake when it struck. “Ought-six,” he said, “not one of us thought we’d get out alive. First the quake scared us half to death, then the fire ate up the city.”

I read a few interviews Roughride had done with earthquake survivors for the 1931 series, but he’d lost their addresses. “Fact is, Sonny,” he said to me, “I made up a lot of this, haw haw. Go down into the Tenderloin, or Fisherman’s Wharf, old-timers will talk to you. Making a picture, eh? Better have a gentleman of the Fourth Estate in it. Haw.”

At Hearst’s Examiner, I saw a newsman named Hoover Townsend, a ramrod in pinstripes and a vest. It was hard to imagine him as anything but a banker. I asked what drew him into this line of work. “Someone has to uphold community standards,” he said. His only interviews were with Nob Hill crusties who had their servants tell them what damage the quake and fire were doing.

Better luck at the Chronicle, where a reporter named Jack Quin sent me to his cousin Mike who had not only done interviews but also published a pamphlet on the earthquake, A Celestial Joke, a bitter screed on the class distinctions present even in a natural disaster. “Oh sure,” Quin told me, shooing his unruly red hair off his freckled Irish face, “everyone pulls together, everyone’s in the same boat, the quake reduces everyone to the same level of horror—for all of an hour, two at most. After that the swells take over. ‘Dora, would you make certain there’s marmalade for the mister’s toast, Bannister will bring round the brougham so Lavinia and myself can survey the destruction downtown. Marquez, do give last night’s leftovers to the Ladies Aid but be back to have supper on the table by eight. We’ll be wanting the lamb shank this evening.’” Poor Jim Bicker—Mossy was right—would have loved this guy.

Mike Quin slipped his voice back out of his impression of a prissy Nob Hill bluenose. “Christ on a crutch but I’d like to have seen some of them go without their damn lamb shank for one bloody evening!”

I told him I wanted to meet waterfront people who had been around since the turn of the century—gamblers, lowlifes, barkeeps, prostitutes. “You’re the boss,” he said, and sent me off to what was left of the old Barbary Coast. Waterfront dives were new to me, but it wasn’t hard to get people talking. “What were you doing at the time of the earthquake?” I’d ask, buying someone a beer or a shot. “About what I’m doing now,” they’d all start, and then the tales would pour.

The Barbary Coast had mostly been destroyed in the earthquake and fire, but the grizzled barflies rebuilt the taverns, opium dens, gambling houses, flophouses, and whorehouses for me as if they were all still around the corner. As I listened I saw the henchmen at the studio as neighborhood enforcers with Mossy as their double-breasted head gangster. Pammy would be a singer in a posh gaming house Mossy had in a shakedown vise until the detectives Nils Maynard and Yeatsman foiled him and his crooked cohorts. I myself was the enterprising reporter who exposed the whole scheme.

A one-legged bartender told me he saw three men trapped on the roof of a burning building. “Must have been two thousand people down in the street, stopping to watch as they ran from the flames a block away. A company of soldiers were trying to keep order. The three men on the roof were screaming for help as the fire climbed closer and the roof began to cave in. The Army captain ordered his sharpshooters to aim at the men on the roof so they wouldn’t burn. Boom. Boom. Boom. The soldiers shot the three men to kingdom come but at least they weren’t roasted alive.”

An old lady with dyed blonde hair rasped that she’d been a madam and her establishment escaped the flames. “No ya wasn’t no madam, Minnie,” one of the workmen brayed at her, “Ya was a workin’ girl in the old Ruby House, ya know ya was.” The woman joined the laughter and went on. “Ordered all my girls,” she said, “to give it away to any cop or fireman. Saving the city, they were, deserved a little relaxation.”

(Pretty quickly it was obvious that oral history is, in practice if not by definition, nostalgic calisthenics, subject to contamination from what happened later as well as the usual discrepancies imposed by nostalgia itself.)

After the first day Mike Quin met me for a drink, excited about what he claimed was a far better story than the earthquake. “It’s happening today right under your nose,” he said. I said I didn’t know what he was talking about. “Nevermind, Skinny, make your goddamn moving picture.”

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.

Outside the hall a day earlier, the afternoon atmosphere along the Embarcadero was of a battlefield where combat had not begun. The police lined up to protect the docks while the strikers marched on the landward side of the street shouting and shaking their picket signs. “It’s not the cops they’re shouting at so much,” Quin said. “It’s the scabs.”

The nonunion workers, the scabs, were returning to work from lunch. Some were thickset football players from the University of California at Berkeley; their coach had told them strikebreaking was a healthy form of spring practice. Some were hoboes who needed any kind of work during the Depression; some had been imported from other cities along the coast, like Los Angeles, where strikebreaking was essentially a profession. A few were blacks whose only chance to work on the docks was as strikebreakers. In the years he himself had spent at sea before becoming a journalist and pamphleteer, Quin noted that the only blacks among the seamen were ones hired as stewards. “But it’ll change if the strike wins,” he said. “The Seamen will stay out in support of the Longshoremen, and both unions will bring Negroes aboard if they won’t work as scabs anymore. But first these owners need to be taught a lesson they won’t forget.”

I never asked Quin if he was a Communist; I assumed it.

As a landlubber, I did ask what was the attraction of the job for seamen. They were routinely mistreated by captains and first mates, underpaid, often robbed and beaten when they went ashore. Aboard ship, they were held almost like prisoners.

“Yes,” Quin said, “and the cruelty at sea is matched by the cruelty of the sea.”

“Then why ship out in the first place?”

“It’s a job when you can get one. And have you ever stood at the railing with spray in your eyes at sunrise, come through a storm that tested every fiber of your body and brain, felt your ship roll under you like it was a woman, breathed with it as it plowed furrows in the fickle currents, or tangoed into a distant port with all that fun and possibility and strangeness ahead of you?”

That shut me up.

In addition to police on foot along the Embarcadero, guarding the docks as though they were working for shipowners, which in a sense they were, other police cruised the waterfront in radio patrol cars, on motorcycles and on horseback. The cavalry were everywhere. Quin pointed to police lookouts on top of the Ferry Building.

“Pressure is mounting, Skinny,” he said.

That night Quin took me to a workers’ meeting in Dreamland Auditorium. Four or five thousand Longshoremen, Teamsters and Seamen were packed in, many with their families. Curious San Franciscans also showed up, some no doubt hoping to see a fight, many interested in the strike that was paralyzing their city. A stout Teamster told me they called the hall Dreamland because it was used for boxing matches, and many of the fighters left the building unconscious. He horselaughed.

The great cavern of Dreamland could have been a studio sound stage with seats. The various unions—most had already joined the strike, some hadn’t—were convened as if for a pep rally before a big game. Mike Quin said it was much more. It was the outpouring of a century of frustration, of overwork and underpayment, of earlier strikes that had failed, of a kind of barbarism where human beings were treated as beasts of burden. “The working men,” he said, “have now come together to claim their own.”

Most of the huge crowd were not sitting but milling, greeting friends, shouting encouragement. Quin mingled. Small groups were singing labor songs. Nick Bordoise, the cook in the Longshoremen’s headquarters, was passing out sandwiches. He sang a Greek accented “Solidarity Forever”: “You can’t fooling me I’m stuck to the union.” In some parts of the auditorium there were arguments—whether the unions should all make common cause or hold to their separate crafts, whether a union shop was a necessity, whether Communists were helpful or bad for the labor movement, whether union members with families could hold out as long as single men.

A bell sounded, the chiming kind used to signal the start of a prize fight. Lights dimmed and a spotlight coned the stage, where a microphone stood. As I looked for a seat I spotted a tall elderly lady, a white-haired woman in a long, rather foreign dress buttoned to her neck. She held her chin high as though she were under some kind of siege and needed to keep all her dignity about her for the sake of some principle. Peering at her, I was shocked to see Yancey Ballard escorting her, deferring to her. What the hell was Yeatsman doing here? Who was the old lady? Mike Quin reappeared as the bell was rung several more times, and we wedged ourselves into seats next to two large union men. “The Longshoremen’s national leader, Joe Ryan, is here,” Quin said, “and he’s sent around a deal to the local committees that he’s negotiated by himself.”

“Boys, gentlemen, and ladies,” said a man in a business suit who had stepped to the microphone at the center of the stage, “I bring you greetings from the president of the United States.” This received conditional applause, some boos. In back of me someone said that if Roosevelt was on their side the best thing he could do was stay out of their way. The man on the stage introduced himself as Edward McGrady, the Assistant Secretary of Labor. “This strike,” McGrady said, “can be settled as all issues are, through compromise, and you men can be back at work with pay raises if you just won’t let the radicals and frankly the Red element control what you’re doing.” This was greeted by a shout from the rear of the auditorium: “No one controls what we’re doing but us!” Cheers. “All right,” McGrady continued, “what I mean is President Roosevelt, the most pro-labor president in our history, fully supports your right to collective bargaining, but he believes the continuation of the strike can only hurt everyone out here on the Coast, all the working people and honest businessmen alike. So it’s time to go back.”

This line of reasoning was going nowhere. The general sentiment was, We’ve been pushed around enough. Chants erupted: “Support the strike! Support the strike!”

A gaunt man of perhaps eighty shuffled to the microphone to respectful applause. “The old man of the sea,” Quin said. “Andrew Furuseth has worked for seamen’s rights since the last century, believes labor is holy and wages are like divine grace.”

“The anger of early days,” Andrew Furuseth said, “the denial of our rights has led us to where we are. But the owners now offer us most of what we want. We can settle this far better when you’re back at work.” A few clapped; everyone else was silent. No one would boo someone regarded as a union saint, but they wouldn’t do his bidding either. “To work,” Furuseth went on, “is to pray. Your labor is your sacred possession. I want to say to our brothers who are former seamen come ashore to start your families and become longshoremen, it is time after three weeks to return to our tasks. As sons of God everything we want can be achieved, can be settled, and can be settled by arbitration.”

As Furuseth ambled off to far less applause than greeted his entrance, Quin told me arbitration would not win the one point longshoremen care most about, the union shop. “Old Andy’s day is done, and at this point he merely clutters up the scene.”

The strikers wanted their pep rally and were being told to end their strike. The next two speakers came to the stage together—Mike Casey, San Francisco’s International Brotherhood of Teamsters leader, and Joe Ryan, International Longshoremen’s head, whom Quin told me had made his own deal with the dock owners. Casey, who had once been so tough he was known as Bloody Mike, tried to shoo his men back to work and was met with boos. He left quickly.

The dignified elderly woman with Yeatsman as her escort rose from her seat several rows behind Quin and me and began making her measured way to the front. She leaned on her cane as well as on the arm of a young woman I recognized with disbelief. It was Comfort O’Hollie from Jubilee. Yeatsman cleared the aisle in front of them.

Joe Ryan strutted to the microphone. He had risen from poverty, but Quin told me he was now more comfortable with politicians, racketeers and even business leaders than with his own longshoremen. He was wearing a double-breasted suit, splashy cufflinks, a diamond stickpin in his ostentatiously handpainted tie, and a huge ruby ring on his pinkie. “You men have made your point,” Ryan began, “You’ve made it loud and clear, as your brothers have up and down the Coast. I salute you.”

Scattered applause. But it was provisional; essentially the union members were applauding Ryan for applauding his longshoremen. “I’m here to announce very excellent news,” Ryan went on. “I’ve arrived at an agreement with the major industrialists here. We have the best offer we can get, and it will bring better offers in every new contract.”

“It won’t bring us a union shop!” a man shouted from behind Quin and me.

“High time to get the Bolshies off our backs!” Ryan shouted right back. “And high time for San Francisco to lead everyone on the Coast back to work!”

“You’re leading us straight to Hell, Joe!” from another corner of the auditorium.

“I’ve negotiated fair terms,” Ryan tried again, but this was met with guffaws.

A beefy man next to Quin said, “I’ve been to fixed fights here before. This is nothing new for Dreamland.”

Joe Ryan, a famous labor leader unused to opposition, made one more try, but he was angry at his own rank and file. “Now listen to me, all of you, I was on the Chelsea docks in Noo Yawk loading pig iron before most of you were born. I’ve fought for fair deals all my life, and this is the fairest deal I’ve ever made—it’s a gentleman’s agreement, raises for every dockworker, no scabs, no overtime without extra pay, no more kickbacks at the shape up … ”

And that was as far as Joe Ryan could go. At the phrase “shape up,” which meant continued control of hiring on the docks by straw bosses working for the owners, Dreamland exploded in a thunder of boos and nos and catcalls.

A longshoreman with an eyepatch, a former brawling seaman known as Pirate Larsen, ran to the stage and hurled himself onto it. “It’s unanimous, King Joe!” he shouted. “You’re a fink yourself and you’re trying to make finks of all of us! No to your shape up, no to the owners, and no to making separate sweetheart deals up and down the coast with any owner who pays for your next holiday in Europe!” Cheers.

“And I say,” Ryan bawled, “no to your radicals and no to the Communist line!”

“The only line I follow is the picket line, King Joe!” To the accompaniment of wild cheers, Ryan evaporated from the stage, taking a seat in the front row. Boxing had returned to Dreamland, and Pirate Larsen knocked out Joe Ryan in one round.

Comfort O’Hollie was now helping the old lady up the steps of the stage while Yeatsman waited below. Had he come along as Hibernophile and chaperone for Comfort, or were he and Comfort … ? I didn’t dare finish my own thought. “Is this a union meeting or a vaudeville show?” I asked Quin. “You might call it a resistance festival,” Quin said.

Pirate Larsen was speaking again, and there seemed to be a program for the evening’s events after all. “Before we turn the proceedings over to the man who’s really representing us in the strike,” Larsen said, “meet a true worker’s hero, heroine rather, the courageous woman who not only stood on the barricades in Dublin against the might of the British Empire, who fought alongside the Irish Revolutionary Army after her brave son was martyred in the cause of Irish liberty, but who also happens to be the aunt of our own working-class martyr, Tom Mooney. Say hello to Patricia Mooney O’Hollie, best known as Grandmother O’Hollie!”

Accompanying her grandmother, Comfort O’Hollie was paying her debt to the father she’d never known, who had been ambushed by the British in 1916. “What do the Irish have to do with this?” I asked Mike Quin. “Your guess equals mine,” he said. “I’d heard an old Irish firebrand came down from Vancouver to plead with the governor for her nephew’s release, but I didn’t know she’d be in the hall tonight.” On the stage, Pirate Larsen had taken the arm of Grandmother O’Hollie. Tom Mooney was a radical who had been arrested in San Francisco almost twenty years earlier when a bomb went off, killing ten people, during a World War Preparedness Day parade. Although the district attorney’s case against him was based on perjury and the jury was tainted, Mooney was sentenced to death, which was later commuted to life imprisonment. His name became a rallying cry for the Left. Union members often chanted “Free Tom Mooney,” and that was what they did now as Grandmother O’Hollie hobbled on her cane to the microphone.

She was brief. “The greetings I bring you from my nephew Tom are clear,” Grandmother O’Hollie said, her brogue quavering but stronger with each syllable. “Make the owners hear you, make them listen to your needs, never you mind the social theories, stick to the real problems the strike has to solve. And no matter what anyone tells you, stay out until your just needs are met. So says Tom Mooney from his prison cell!”

This was easy for everyone to applaud because her dismissal of social theories was a signal not to pay attention to Communist proselytizing.

“I promise you as sure as I stand here,” she went on, “to continue the struggle wherever working people are oppressed to the appointed end of my days.” Grandmother O’Hollie paused as more chants of “Free Tom Mooney” filled the hall. For a moment she looked to be swallowed by her memories, but then she held up her hand for silence. “When this too short earthly span is over,” she said, her Irish voice rising now, “and others have taken up the causes we’ve all lived for and a few have died for and more of us will have to die for, when my hour comes round I promise to pass out leaflets on the number of hours a day Saint Peter can require wings to be worn while I organize the angels!” The cheering started, but this time she held up her cane and shook the hall to silence. “To those who think I’ll be traveling the other direction, send word to the Devil he’ll have his hands full and more with Grandmother O’Hollie! God bless this strike!”

She was performing for the very ovation she now received. I preferred her no-nonsense granddaughter, which was why I was suddenly so jealous of Yeatsman as he disappeared out of the auditorium with Comfort and her grandmother. But Mrs. O’Hollie had neatly caught the sentiments of the Dreamland crowd, many of whom had been brought up on Communion wafers with the certain promises and threats of an afterlife.

In contrast, the overgrown pixie with the hook nose who now took the stage had neither an air of elegance nor an aura of destiny about him. Looking haggard, he wore a dark cardigan sweater over an open-collared shirt. “I’m Harry Bridges of the Strike Committee, International Longshoreman’s Association Local 38–79,” he said prosaically. All the others had been opening acts; though he was only beginning to be well-known, Bridges was the main event. Lean and a little bent even in his early thirties, he was a former Australian seaman who jumped ship in San Francisco to become a longshoreman. Bridges had taken over the strike strategy when the union leadership had essentially backed away from the men on the picket lines. Applause for Bridges was enthusiastic but stopped quickly when he began to speak again without even holding up his hand. “Bridges represents labor,” Quin said, “but he’s all business.”

“Dollar an hour for us longshoremen,” Bridges said in his Down Under accent, “dollar and a half when we work over thirty hours a week, a hiring hall we control and no more company union. Goodbye to the straw bosses and their wretched kickbacks. We don’t think that’ll bring down the republic. We’re the refuse and the rejects, we dockmen and seamen, let’s see them refuse and reject these entirely reasonable demands.”

Dreamland was silent, attentive.

“To those of you who may be tempted either by empty cupboards or the owners’ paltry offers,” Bridges resumed, “I tell you this. You can separate a dog from its leash but not from its hunger. Now we’ve slipped the leash, but until we find enough to feed our families we have to keep hunting and barking.”

“That’s it, Harry,” a few shouted as Bridges warmed to his task.

“The history of maritime labor in San Francisco is a tale of heroism and injustice,” he said. “We’ve been beaten, shanghaied, drugged, shot, stabbed, kicked, swindled, and exploited. We’re controlled by men who brag they want our blood spilled. This afternoon the owner of the American Hawaiian Steamship Company said, ‘We can cure this best by bloodshed. We have to have bloodshed to stop the strike.’ What’s our answer?” Bridges was cascaded by boos and curses.

“Our relationship with men like that,” Bridges spoke calmly into the microphone, “is not one of employer and employee, is it? It’s one of master and slave. You know it, they know it. The Embarcadero itself is known as a slave market. Yet you’ve heard the gentleman from Washington say don’t strike. That’s the Labor Department which is supposed to look out for our interests, and they’re saying put your tails between your legs and go back on those docks so you can be treated like scum, go back on those ships where you’re nothing but deck slime. Do you want to go back under those conditions?”

A chorus of nos boomed through Dreamland.

“Our president, Mr. Roosevelt, offers us hope, then he snatches it away. It’s all right to organize, his people tell us, but don’t you dare strike. It’s all right to chew but you’re not allowed to have teeth. Well, strike we have and strike we must.”

Bridges was interrupted by chants of “Strike, strike, strike!”

“Now then, Mr. Ryan,” Bridges said looking down at the national union’s leader who was still sitting in front after being booed off the stage, “you call your sweetheart deal with the shipowners a gentleman’s agreement. But Mr. Ryan, why didn’t you consult the Strike Committee or the membership at large before making an agreement in our names, finding out what we all think”—and Bridges swept his hand over the hall—“instead of signing an agreement over all our heads?”

Now Joe Ryan shouted up from the auditorium, “You’re acting for the Bolsheviks! You don’t want the strike settled!”

“Oh,” Bridges said, “well then, may I ask everyone here, are the Communists leading this strike, are they telling you what to do?”

Nos again rocketed around the auditorium.

“Who’s leading this strike anyway?” Bridges lofted his words.

“We are! The longshoremen! The seamen! The teamsters!” The cries came from every corner of Dreamland. “We are! We are!”

Joe Ryan, trying to hold on to some semblance of his leadership, shouted up one more time. “All right, men! I didn’t know there was so much unity.”

At this Ryan was called every insulting name in the vocabularies of several languages. “No backroom sweetheart deal,” Bridges said. “Any agreement anyone makes in your name comes back to you, not to Joe Ryan, not to me, not to the Strike Committee, but to you, the rank and file and sinew and muscle of the unions. We’ll go back, all right, we’ll go back when you tell us and vote to accept an agreement, not a half-minute before. I make a motion that the salaried union officials be severed from the negotiations and you put the strike settlement in the hands of the Strike Committee, which will consult you—or I’m not standing here in front of you—always and on every detail before agreeing to anything.” Several dozen longshoremen and seamen seconded the motion. “All in favor,” Bridges said, “Say aye!” He was drowned in ayes.

In the morning Quin had me on the docks early. Some of the pickets were wearing their Sunday best, suits and ties and fedoras, as they marched along the Embarcadero. Others, the younger ones, wore striped jerseys and T-shirts. Mounted police separated the pickets from the piers across the street. A number of strikers hoisted signs: FULL RECOGNITION was block-printed on one, with others urging SUPPORT THE ILA, DON’T SCAB, LONGSHOREMEN AND SEAMEN STAND TOGETHER. The festive mood was sustained for the time being, with Army veterans singing “Mademoiselle from Armentières.” The rhythm suited the march as it had all those years before in France. I didn’t see Harry Bridges, but he could have been anywhere on the Embarcadero. Hinky, dinky, parley-voo bounced off brick walls across from the docks.

When a work crew of strikebreakers was herded onto one of the docks, a striker in a jersey yelled, “Let’s stop them!” Policemen reined their horses closer to the marchers. The younger pickets looked ready for anything, but an older fellow in a dark suit and bowler yelled back, “No! If they don’t start nothin’ we won’t either.” The work crew was allowed to pass, not without glaring and grumbling, strikers and strikebreakers swearing at each other. Mounted police looked menacing, but I wasn’t sure how effective they’d be if the pickets managed to get between the horses and the docks. The sentiment percolating through the strikers’ ranks was they’d missed doing something brave and declarative when they let the strikebreakers through to the dock. “Closing this port,” one of the younger pickets shouted, “means closing the port! I say let’s block the docks!” An older man answered, “Mates, the time has come. We block the docks.” Then the yell went up, “BLOCK THE DOCKS!”

Surely there must have been plans for this, but what it looked like was spontaneous energy bursting into a strategy, rippling through the striking longshoremen like a single blow to a line of balls that causes all the others to vibrate. Very quickly, columns of picketers all along the Embarcadero were shouting for the docks to be closed off. The chant became a roar. “BLOCK THE DOCKS! BLOCK THE DOCKS!”

As if this were a signal, which it may well have been, hundreds more strikers poured out of side streets, especially from Mission Street in the direction of union headquarters, onto the Embarcadero. The police themselves were now reinforced by squad cars and paddy wagons that dumped out scores, maybe hundreds, of police on foot, most carrying billy clubs. The Embarcadero became a turbulent sea of human agitation.

Mike Quin pulled out a camera and began taking pictures. “Quite a party, isn’t it?” he said. I was too frightened to say anything except, “Do you think we’re safe?” To which Quin replied, “Don’t worry, Skinny, you’re not on one side or the other, are you? Stay on your fence and enjoy the fun.” I didn’t feel like I was on the fence.

A policeman climbed on top of a squad car with a bullhorn. “Clear the lanes to the docks!” he yelled to both pickets and police. “This is private property, you strikers know that. We can allow a peaceful march, but there will be no disruption of private property!”

A picket yelled, “Protecting the big guys like always, eh, Captain?”

The police captain answered through his bullhorn. “We’re protecting private property, same as if your home is broken into and you want us catching the burglar.”

This brought derisive laughter from the strikers. They yelled back that the cops would never come to their homes anyway, only to the nabobs on Nob Hill.

A yellow schoolbus pulled up to a pier about a hundred yards from where Quin and I stood. He said we ought to move closer, and we trotted along the sidewalk. At that moment a few dozen more mounted police cantered down Folsom Street onto the Embarcadero. A squadron of bruisers, young bruisers, came off the bus and made for the docks. “It’s the football team again,” Quin said, “come over from the U of Cal to scab.” It looked like there were about fifty of them. A striker shouted to them they should have brought their shoulder pads and helmets. A wedge of policemen formed to run interference for the football players as they tried to get onto a pier. Strikers closed in, enveloping the wedge, and more policemen hemmed in the strikers.

The captain balancing on the roof of the squad car bullhorned for the strikers to disperse immediately. The strikers yelled back they were going nowhere until the football players headed back to their classrooms. Concentric circles had now formed: the football team surrounded by police who were surrounded by strikers who were surrounded by mounted police who had an entire circle of pickets around them. “You want a moving picture, Skinny?” Quin said. “Wouldn’t Busby Berkeley like to see this from overhead?”

The only direction the strikers would let the rich boys—as they called the players—go was toward their bus. “This is your final warning!” the captain shouted. Some players looked longingly toward their schoolbus; others were ready to fight. A striker yelled, “Don’t send a boy to do a man’s work!”

The football players were impatient, or panicked, or both. The dance began, but it was more a danse macabre than anything Busby Berkeley staged. The players stampeded through the police circle formed to protect them and rushed toward the dock, but no one was running interference for them anymore. A few broken field runners actually did make it past the pickets, but the longshoremen stopped most of them and were shoving them toward their bus. Players and strikers got into fist fights, and I saw teeth spat out, pounded eyes that were going to turn purple, bloodied noses. The battle cry was from all three sides because the police were now engaged as well as the strikers and football players. The shouts back and forth, the billy clubs and fists, reminded me of clanging swords and cannon balls in sequences pitting pirates against merchant sailors, with the British Navy steaming in to enforce order along the Spanish Main.

When most of the football players had been terrified back onto their bus, the mounted police charged the strikers with tear gas canisters. Similar skirmishes were going on up and down the Embaracadero as police, strikers, and strikebreakers all joined in small battles. To get away from the fumes, Quin and I retreated up Mission Street with handkerchiefs over our faces. The occasion became legible when I stopped seeing it as a movie scene and began to be very scared. Hundreds of strikers were all around Quin and me, but those coming behind us up Mission, running to get away from the tear gas, were less scared than mad. New pickets appeared from union headquarters at the corner of Mission and Steuart, many wielding broom handles while a few had baseball bats.

In the midst of this melee, Nick Bordoise, the union’s cook, was handing out sandwiches to strikers as they came off the Embarcadero, like a waterboy at a football game, running onto the field during a time-out. Nick had slung a huge sack over his shoulder and was hauling out sandwiches to give passing strikers as they came up Mission Street. His calmness made it easier for a policeman to arrest him. “What for?” this incongruous Gunga Din asked. “Aiding an illegal strike,” the policeman said, and jerked Nick toward a squad car. Fortunately for the Greek cook with his immigration problems, the policeman was distracted by a violent attack across the street, and Bordoise ran to the safety of the union headquarters.

The police were hurling tear gas canisters as they advanced up Mission Street. Strikers with broom handles and bats stood in front of the rest of us. They hit the canisters back at the police as though they were batting baseballs. This had an immediate effect since most of the police were not wearing gas masks. A cheer went up from the strikers as they saw policemen choking on their own poison. Yet the police kept coming.

Several blocks up the hill from the Embarcadero, the strikers made a stand at a vacant lot, an abandoned construction site filled with loose bricks. The captain with the bullhorn, now on foot, apparently identified with Teddy Roosevelt and began yelling, “Charge!” at his men. The police were met with a shower of bricks. One hit the bullhorn and temporarily silenced the police captain, but he was quickly up again yelling, “Use your weapons!” Most of the police didn’t seem to like this order because they fired into the air, but at the sound of gunfire I was scared again and talked Quin into coming inside a Chinese dry cleaners. An obliging proprietor named Wun Chew allowed us to go upstairs where his family lived. We watched the action while Wun Chew’s wife and children stared at us, then giggled.

The police captain was running back down to the Embarcadero, which made his men pause in their own march up Mission Street. The strikers cheered what they saw as a retreat. They began to advance back down the street, throwing bricks and shielding themselves from billy clubs with garbage can tops. “Like boys playing,” Quin said, “just boys. Both sides, boys.” Several police were knocked down. Wun Chew ran upstairs to hide with us when gunfire raked the street. “This not your country,” he said as he knelt beside Quin and me, “this not my country, this country belong to crazy.”

At the bottom of the street the captain now ordered his cavalry into action. The mounted police trotted in formation up Mission Street toward the dockworkers making their stand. “Jesus living Christ!” yelled a striker who saw the mounted brigade advancing up the street. “Aren’t all of us Americans?” The captain, who was not on a horse himself, fired a short-barreled shotgun at the man, who fell in the street. Two friends helped him to the sidewalk, where he slumped against a shop window.

Several dozen strikers apparently anticipated the cavalry charge, because their tactic now took the kind of ingenuity that can’t be spontaneous. Some reached into their pockets while others stuck their hands into a sack being passed around. In the next instant the strikers were throwing handfuls of marbles down Mission Street at the horses. The lead horses began to slip on the marbles. Once the front line stumbled, the horses in back of them panicked. They literally turned tail and galloped back down Mission Street.

The strikers whooped like cowboys. But it was all over very quickly after that. Sirens shrieked and squad cars closed in on the vacant lot from all directions, each filled with police firing wildly. Strikers ran for their lives.

“Barbarian bastards,” Quin said furiously. “The Third Reich has come to San Francisco.”

I didn’t say anything to contradict him, and by now I was wholeheartedly on the union’s side, though it did seem to me the pickets had transformed themselves into an army ready to fight. Maybe the massiveness of the forces arrayed against them demanded that. I felt sorry for the horses. As for the police using firearms, it didn’t appear to me they were aiming to kill so much as to scare the pickets into retreat.

“Pretty fair motion picture here, wouldn’t you say, Skinny?” Quin had recovered a little from his anger.

“They don’t make movies about labor strife,” I said. “Too political.”

“Then they’re bigger idiots than I thought.”

Violence itself was so far from what I knew that before I’d become frightened it had indeed been a movie to me, like a clamorous dream where I felt present but not really engaged or endangered, almost in the posture of an anthropologist. Here are the oppressors and their helpers, here are the aggrieved and their sympathizers: see police battle strikers while you hold on to your detachment and safety as participant/observer. Mostly observer. You will report your findings, as Margaret Mead did, to Franz Boas at the Museum of Natural History. You’re in a little danger but not much, especially after you and Quin perch upstairs with the Chinese family, who are also participant/observers with better detachment credentials. When the squad cars drove away and the wounded strikers were loaded into paddy wagons, Wun Chew led us downstairs.

All this could be reported to Dr. Pogo, my Franz Boas who wished me well on my field study among the natives; he could analyze it as a dream. I wasn’t entirely sure the battle had an existence outside my imagination of it.

Dreamland Auditorium the night before had been more real. I’d been to contentious studio meetings as well as gatherings where the writers were trying to form a guild. Yancey Ballard, before he ever heard of Grandmother O’Hollie, had helped form the first Screen Writers Guild. I understood meetings. Violence was something else. I’d never seen any violence at all outside of movies. Yet this had happened and I could even read about it in tomorrow’s papers. When I thought I had a tomorrow. Before the fracas with the stevedore that was shortly to end my life. My killing: my erasure: hardly worth an oratorio but perhaps a little fugue from Mike Quin.

I was trying to grasp the novelty of violence when Quin said he was off to write about what we’d witnessed, and he’d see me later. Foolishly, I decided to go over to the union hall to see how the members were doing after their pitched battle.

So many longshoremen were milling around the entrance I didn’t go upstairs. The acrid tear gas had not yet completely blown away. It was still early afternoon, but outside union headquarters it felt as though the battle had raged all day long. One man was unscuffed and wore a spotless suit with a well-blocked fedora. He was across the street from most of the strikers. They looked so upset I didn’t want to bother them. Since the unscuffed man looked like what I thought of as respectable, I went up to him and asked how the men were holding up. The innocent, ignorant mistake that costs a life.

“No damage to them they didn’t bring on themselves,” he said, which shocked me because I’d thought he was a union man himself or at least a sympathizer. “No one hurt bad,” he added, “more’s the pity.” He scrawled a few words on a piece of paper and asked who I was. “Well, just a bystander,” I said. “You ought to go bystand yourself somewhere else,” he said. Then he disappeared. I crossed back over to the union side and saw Widdelstaedt and Cromartie, the two men Quin and I had talked to the day before in the union hall. Widdelstaedt had only a small cut on his forehead, but Cromartie could barely stand, a rivulet of blood came from his nose, and one of his eyes was swollen shut.

I was about to ask if I could help when Widdelstaedt swung backhanded at me and knocked me down. I was more amazed than hurt. “You’re with the cop snoop,” he accused, “and I saw you upstairs in headquarters yesterday, spying on us.”

“No, no,” I said, getting up, “I was just asking how you guys are. Today was awful. I saw a lot of it with Mike Quin.”

“Quin, hah! He can be a dupe too. That guy across the street was a dick, and you were giving him info.” He knocked me down again.

“No, I wasn’t,” I said as I brushed myself off. How foolish to try to reason with someone in a rage. The stevedore—it was Widdelstaedt but I’d forgotten his name in my fright—came at me and I saw a knife flash out of his pocket. He backed me against a car. Pinned there, I saw my death in his dim bloodshot eyes. He raised the knife and I caught his arm, but he was far stronger. I ducked. I ran. He caught me. That’s when he sliced my leg. I hopped away. He lumbered after me as the men at the union hall laughed at both of us, no doubt their first laugh of the day. I turned a corner and saw a narrow alley. I’d lose him in there. But he followed me down the alley. It led nowhere, a dead end. I jumped for a fire escape ladder but couldn’t quite reach it. Several garbage cans were lined up, and I wanted to stand on one to reach the ladder, but their tops were all gone, used as shields, I supposed, by the union men. Nothing to stand on: the story of my life.

Steve was upon me. The hulking Widdelstaedt. He lunged and gashed my arm. He was in the power of his anger, and once he had dealt me the slice in my leg, his anger became hunger. The very blood running down my pantleg and spilling on the ground enhanced his lust—like a shark, like Ajax—for my extinction.

Every discovery at twenty-four is intense and fragile. By sight, by habit, by experience, new things become known, fresh material is fed into the psychic oven to be baked until risen to the level of wisdom. Now I’d never have that. Here he came, knife pointing at my eyes.

He trapped me against a brick wall under the fire escape ladder. Raised his arm to deliver the death blow. I grabbed his wrist and kicked him in the knee, which made him yelp but that was all it did. His eyes were full of a bright dullness. I was the target of the rock bottom truths in this man’s life. Not only his eyes but his whole face was an accumulation of logical, everlasting, conclusive hopelessness. He had identified the enemy, and I was it. I saw his point: privilege versus penury. I wanted to live anyway. When I couldn’t hold his wrist any longer I squirmed away. He moved nimbly for a big man and quickly had me against another wall.

Four, three, two, one, and it would be over. He lunged, I darted. Each time he missed he backed right up so I couldn’t dash for the alley’s open end. I was wearing down, and he was playing with me, dog and cat, cat and mouse, bird and worm. He didn’t mind if it took him five minutes or half an hour to carve me; he knew he had me trapped against the literally dead end alley and the garbage cans. I’d be his revenge for every deprivation he’d endured in four decades or so, the stand-in for all the forces ranged against him. My tongue was sour felt. I heard rapid breathing and a cry of Help! Someone yelled Help again. I barely recognized the cries as my own. The giant stevedore was measuring me now as I backed into a garbage can. He took his time. Two frozen images: my mother gleamed up behind him, Mossy was a ghost behind her. I looked at the garbage can—Christ! Why hadn’t I thought of this before. All my training had been to clean up messes, not make them. I was almost too tidy to save my own skin.

What would Dr. Pogo think—this raced through me again. The abbreviated childhood I’d moaned over was about to become a far more abbreviated adulthood.

But here was my life preserver, the garbage can. Faster than I’d ever moved, I upended the can, jumped on its bottom and reached the fire escape. Banana peels and coffee grounds and fish bones and a cat corpse scattered in the alley. As soon as I’d climbed to the second floor I pulled the ladder up, though it didn’t make much difference. Widdelstaedt wasn’t interested in the effort. He stood beneath the fire escape bellowing and threatening while I climbed up one more story and found an open window, disappearing from his attention.

I ran for the hotel, home base in this hide and seek contest of unequals. It might have been ten blocks away or thirty, but I was there before I knew where I’d been. My jacket was soaked with my exerted, scared, determined, panicked but finally preserved sweat.

Quin was waiting in the lobby, wondering what had happened to me. He told me many strikers were in the hospital, many in jail, and thanked a whimsical god no one was killed. He looked at my leg, bloody, gashed. I was panting too hard to make much headway in my story when he said, “Movie Mogul, why don’t you get your eager but inconsequential ass out of this town before your luck runs dry.”