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Chapter Four

Jamie checked his watch and quickened his pace through the newspaper-strewn and otherwise filthy outskirts of Chinatown. It was warm for early November, the sky a cloud-pocked blue. He wore his checkered-colored flannel shirt tied around the waist of his jeans. A light corduroy jacket was draped across his right shoulder. His tangle of nappy brown hair was still wet.

On frigid days, his habit of procrastinating at home and rushing from the shower to make an appointment would create frozen clumps he feared would snap like small pieces of gnarled, uncooked pasta.

On the train, Jamie stretched his neck—a chiropractic tic he resorted to when it was sore or he was stressed.

The musty union hall was already jammed by the time he arrived and hurried through the long narrow corridor. Rows of folding chairs were filled, with standing room scarce along the cracked and vomit green walls. Jamie stationed himself near the entrance for what he hoped would be a convenient exit. At the same time, he scanned the crowd for his cousin so he could make eye contact and his presence might duly be noted.

He nodded to a sports guy who occasionally dropped by Jamie’s desk to talk NBA hoops—the only sport he seriously followed. One of the police reporters casually scanned the Sun’s front page. Dotty, the nice lady in charge of the morgue, flipped open a mirror to check her makeup.

Jamie suddenly smelled the odor of nicotine breath in his ear, felt a hand on his back.

“Strike three, yer out.”

Without turning, he knew it was Patrick Blaine, the Trib’s senior columnist.

“You see my cousin?” Jamie said.

Blaine winced at the discoloration around Jamie’s eye that was visible through his glass frame. Jamie cursed himself for forgetting his shades.

“You piss someone off at the bar?” he said. “As for John L. Lewis, he’s in the back—with the big boys.”

Jamie smirked, as if he knew who this Lewis was.

“What’re you hearing?” Jamie asked.

“Matter of fact, I talked to Robbins earlier this morning. He told me what happened last night.”

An unlit cigarette dangled from Blaine’s mouth. He lit it.

“Fuck the fire codes,” he said. Jamie found himself in the familiar position of admiring the old man’s disdain for rules and political correctness, in no particular order.

“Robbins is back in the conference room, probably on the phone to Colangelo and the other union guys. They’ll come out soon to talk it over with the membership but—forget it—this union will be out on strike in less than an hour with all the others.”

The way Blaine said it—matter-of-factly, like they were all on the way to some Disney theme park—was unnerving.

“And I’ll have to head back to the office and cross a picket line for the first time in my life,” he said.

Jamie looked up, just in time to inhale a cloud of smoke.

“I’m not one of you anymore,” Blaine said. “I’m under contract. Signed a three-year deal a couple of months before the old broad sold the place to that cocksucker Brady. He owns me now.”

Blaine took another languorous drag, his eyes narrowing as he sucked the smoke into his lungs.

“Why’d you do that?” Jamie said.

Blaine rubbed the thumb of his left hand against his index and middle fingers.

“Did the column twenty-three years and maybe twice I got something more than the union-scale raise. I think, in the end, Maxine felt bad about that. She knew I wasn’t going anywhere, not at my age. Any kid she hired—like your brilliant cousin, for example—she had to pay market value. So she calls me into her office one night as I’m finishing up a piece. She’s sitting behind her desk, stocking feet propped up, reeking of Dewar’s. She pushes a piece of paper at me and says, ‘Sign this.’

“I say, ‘What is it?’

“She says, ‘Just sign or you’re off the goddamned column!’ I sign. She pulls it away and puts it in her drawer.”

In his next check, Blaine explained, he discovered an extra two-fifty and no standard union dues deduction.

“So what if you don’t go in?” Jamie said.

“Contract’s null and I’m void.”

“You sure we’re going out?”

“No choice,” Blaine said.

He scratched a wide landing strip of a nose containing more colored lines than the city transit map.

“You know what happened last night, how it started?” Blaine said.

Jamie nodded, in the way he would when bluffing his way through an interview. He understood that Blaine was going to give it to him “Blaine and simple,” as the columnist was fond of describing his writing style. The young Trib reporters considered it corny as Barney and Blaine generally as outdated as the dinosaur. But if anyone had the right to tell them to go fuck themselves with their RAMs and ROMs it was Blaine.

He was a throwback and damn proud of it. Out of spite, it seemed, he was still tapping out columns on a typewriter and handing the copy to a clerk—Jamie, in fact, not all that long ago—to load into the system.

Blaine was the kind of shoe leather reporter who seldom emerged from the city’s blue-collar taverns as tipsy as the civil servants he had fleeced of secrets. He still wore a tie every day to the office and an impeccable starched blue shirt with an off-white collar, even as he reeked of tobacco, needed a shave and more than a few nose hairs clipped.

“The drivers were baited but they fucked up by walking out last night,” Blaine said. His voice was raspy from decades of smoking. The cigarette dangled between his right index and middle fingers.

Blaine explained that the drivers had played right into Brady’s hands by hitting the street. The drivers walked out, everyone would follow and Brady would proceed to produce the paper with management personnel, wire services and assorted flunkies. He would get what he wanted—the unions in the street and the paper on the stands.

“It’ll be ugly for a few days but he’s banking on what happened with the unions in Ireland and England, especially on Fleet Street with him and Murdoch,” Blaine said. “Even without a contract, Brady couldn’t start changing work rules because he couldn’t know how the feds at the National Labor Relations Board would react. So he kept baiting the drivers, hoping they’d lose their heads.”

“Which they apparently did,” Jamie said, patting the discoloration around his eye.

Blaine ignored him and kept talking. “That guy they fired last night? Young polish guy, long name I can’t even pronounce. He’s been working half shifts for two years since he hit a pole with his truck in a snowstorm in the suburbs. The kid’s in a coma for almost a week, then he wakes up and he’s not all there. Not incapacitated, still able to work, just not quite the same. So they let him stay on half a day, drive a short route. Then suddenly Brady’s guy is telling him he’s got to drive a full shift. He freaks out, says he can’t because of his condition. They give him a full truck anyway. He refuses to get in, they fire the poor fuck, escort him out of the plant. A dozen guys follow to see what’s going on. That’s it—they’ve left their posts without authorization. They’re fired too. All hell breaks loose. The drivers are out in the street, carrying on. Here come the scabs, on cue. The whole thing was organized by the strike-busting lawyer from out of town that Brady has had negotiating for him. The Mayor went along with the police protection because Brady helped put a Republican in a Democrat’s town in office. And now you’re all here, taking a strike vote.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said, “but you know a lot of city room guys don’t see this as their fight. They know there are no jobs out there. Papers are cutting back—if not closing. I’m not so sure we vote to go out in sympathy.”

Blaine laughed—too derisively, Jamie thought.

“Listen, kiddo, sympathy has nothing to do with this—and neither does right and wrong. It’s only about power and leverage, about which jobs are more essential in putting out the damn paper. That’s the drivers, not us. They got wire copy to replace us with—or I should say you. There are guys working in subway booths who think they can do what we do—tell a story and put their name on top of it. So the drivers are steering this ship. And when I say strike vote, I don’t mean like this is some fucking democracy. This union isn’t run by everyone in here. It’s run by them.”

He jerked a thumb in the direction of the union chiefs, making their way to the front. They were led by Sandy Robbins, president of the Alliance—the union representing the Trib’s editorial and advertising employees. Right with them was Jamie’s cousin, beaming as if he were standing in front of the Pulitzer committee.

“If they want the Alliance out with the other unions, then the Alliance is going out,” Blaine said.

“So what are you doing here?”

Blaine pulled a notepad from his back pocket and held it up like a school-bus pass.

“I’m the local guy, remember?” he said. “I don’t do Hillary health care, unless she’s got some sick aunt holed up in White Plains. I don’t do Contracts with America, unless it’s a mob hit ordered by one of the New York families.”

For once, Blaine looked and sounded more sad than cynical.

“Whatever happens here, it’s a story,” he said. “And I’ll probably be the only one with a staff byline in tomorrow’s paper.”

He laughed. Mainly, it seemed, at himself.

“So be thankful that you’re on the side going out,” he said.