Читать книгу Cold Type - Harvey Araton - Страница 13

Chapter Seven

Morris was dozing when Molly returned from sitting with Becky. His snoring served as a soundtrack to the radio news anchor. Part of the newspaper lay precariously on his lap. The other part had slipped onto the worn lime carpet.

She knew better than to rouse him. If Morris was lights-out before noon, he must have been exhausted from sheer tension. Long ago she had come to realize this was how her husband believed he could not only contain his emotions but also defeat them.

Morris’ mother had taught her to let him be when he was stressed out. The day before they were married, more than forty years now, Morris told his mother he needed a nap at ten in the morning. He didn’t wake up until the morning of the wedding. Molly called a half-dozen times before taking the bus over to the Kramers’ apartment in East Flatbush. She was suddenly panicked at the thought of Morris fleeing Brooklyn to become—she didn’t know—a stowaway on a slow boat to Jerusalem.

“What should I do, Mrs. Kramer?” Molly said.

His Russian immigrant mother, so tiny that her apron sagged well below her knees, smiled and told her that Morris had been sleeping away stress since he was a small child.

“You don’t have to do anything,” Morris’ mother said. “He’ll wake up, God willing, and be happy to marry you.”

As far as Molly was concerned, Morris was still content, if not blissful. In relaxed moments he could admit to her that their marriage could have turned out much, much worse. She took it as his best compliment.

Molly decided to let Morris sleep another few minutes. She dialed Jamie’s apartment. The answering machine picked up after four rings. She hung up without leaving a message.

“Who’re you calling?” Morris asked from the sofa, roused by the dialing.

“Jamie—he’s not home.”

She heard him mumbling.

“You want me to call back and leave a message?” she said, stepping into the living room. Molly was small in height and body type, standing maybe an inch and a half over five feet. If she weighed more than a hundred pounds, that was after her biggest meal. She wore her straight graying hair in a bun. Often she looked like she was smiling because she was squinting—never comfortable wearing the glasses that dangled from her neck on a chain.

“You would think he would call on his own,” Morris said. “You would think he would know what’s at stake here.”

“Why do you think he wouldn’t?”

“Who knows with him?”

Molly shook her head and left the room.

She confided in Becky that she had all but given up on Morris ever forging a closer relationship with Jamie. “I wish I could do something,” she’d say. “But it’s gone on for so long—since Jamie was a boy—and all I ask is that they don’t fight in front of me.”

When Jamie lived at home, Morris’ long work hours and union responsibilities had helped in that respect. But weekends became especially difficult during Jamie’s teenage years. Avoiding one another was next to impossible in a five-room apartment on the second floor of their two-family home—no matter how hard they tried.

Jamie could lock himself in his room for hours, watching basketball games on the black-and-white portable television and reading comic books starring The Amazing Spiderman and other Marvel superheroes. Morris would retreat to the bathroom and sit on the toilet for the better part of an afternoon with his newspapers. Confrontation was still inevitable.

“Dad, I have to go,” Jamie would yell from the hall.

“Damn it, just wait a while, it won’t kill you.”

Jamie would sink to the floor, falling against the wall, rapping his knuckles on the door after every passing minute until Morris emerged, red-faced and mumbling son of a bitch.

Who knows with him? There were times when Morris felt as if he’d been asking that question from the days he schlepped his frail and allergy-afflicted son from one doctor to another.

Jamie never cried, as best Morris could recall, even as other kids wailed all around him. He had narrow brown eyes that at first glance almost looked Asian. The pediatrician called them sleepy but Morris worried because that’s how his son acted most of the time.

When Morris scored seats ten or twelve rows behind home plate at Yankee Stadium, Jamie munched on a hot dog during the first inning and fell asleep in the second. Granted, he was only eight, it was 1970 and the Yankees were lousy. But it was his first ballgame and when they got home, all he could say was, “Baseball stinks. Nothing happens.”

“You think so?” Morris said. “What game do you like?”

“Basketball,” Jamie said. “They jump really high. Walt Frazier is so cool.”

At work that night, Morris recounted the unhappy experience to his brother.

“Can you believe it, Louie?” he said. “I take him to see his first baseball game—Yankee freaking Stadium—and he tells me how he’d rather watch a bunch of schvartzers run around in their underwear.”

“Yeah, Mo, I know,” Lou said. “But Stevie doesn’t like any sports.”

“What are you comparing?” Morris said. “Stevie’s a little genius—his teachers have been telling you that since kindergarten. What the hell does he need to worry about sports for?”

“Yeah, I know, Mo,” Lou said. “Just don’t be too hard…”

“Ah, forget it,” Morris said, waving him off.

Morris and Jamie didn’t bond any better when young Jamie made the occasional excursion with his father to the Trib on a day off, usually when Morris had quick union business. His chest swelled the first time he led the boy by the hand into the cacophony of the old composing room, pulling him through the labyrinth of clattering linotype machines.

“What do you think, Jamie—pretty cool?” Morris said.

Jamie frowned.

Morris had imagined explaining to his son that reporters and editors may have been the glamorous heroes of Hollywood’s version of the newspaper game, the men about town and taverns. But not until these printers clocked in, brown bags dangling at their side, could there be a tangible production, a creation. If Jamie had ever asked what this awesome collection of sights and sound amounted to, Morris would have told him, “This is where we make the paper, son. They don’t make it without us.”

Jamie never seemed to get close enough to the men in the hats made of carefully folded newspaper to hear them say, “So this is little Mo?” The rhythmic clacking of the type set on forty-pound blocks and the shouts of “Watch yer back” by thick-armed men rolling the finished pages on the metal carts made Jamie recoil. He would cup his hands over his ears and crouch against the wall.

“He’s so timid,” Morris complained to Molly. “He has no—you know—oomph.”

“He’s just a little boy, what do you want from him?” she said. “The machines scare him. Let him be.”

Morris eventually gave up trying to connect. He had more urgent matters on his mind those days—the increasingly clear fate of the printers.

It would be years before Jamie stepped into the Trib composing room again. By then, all that had been so intimidating was gone. The energy. The power. The heat. The remains of his father’s once-dominant trade had vanished like some ancient civilization. The need for the human eye and touch to distinguish typeface and size had been replaced by clusters of computers in specialized work areas rendered numbingly docile by the vague hum of climate control.

For the printers, automation was a man-made earthquake. It condemned them to a long, cancerous decline, sustained by the guarantee of lifetime employment negotiated by their union leader, Jackie Ryan, at the dawn of the 70s. The formerly omnipotent Local 11 of the Typographical Union of America—the Ones, as it was known in New York trade circles—could not stand in the way of the technological parade. Ryan knew it. He signed away the craft and they all set out together on the road to virtual irrelevance.

The printers were soon pasting up strips of computer-manufactured copy onto grids they called slicks. Morris dismissed the work as child’s play. “Like the Colorforms we bought for the kids,” he told Lou. “It’s embarrassing.”

“I know, Mo,” Lou said. “But some of the guys like the quiet. And let’s face it, it’s safer.”

“So was the composing room if you knew what the hell you were doing,” Morris grumped.

Eventually, all page-makeup could be done by editors at their terminals. By the 90s, printers were left with nothing to print. They identified and directed pages for editions like transit cops waving traffic through busy intersections.

At the Trib, Morris Kramer remained shop steward and night foreman, but he was no longer concerned with job description—only with the preservation of employment for the men who had earned that much. He’d fought hard for the privilege from the beginning. Having scoffed at his father’s bluster that the goyim who ran the union would always take an Irishman or Italian over a Jew, he feared the old man was right when he tried to break in as a sub and was ignored by the supervisor for nights on end.

He’d report with the other subs and resented being left standing there, reminded of the hapless dockworkers in his favorite movie, On the Waterfront. He dreaded the subway ride home to the third-floor walkup in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. He hated pushing open the door to the first sighting of Molly’s sympathetic face.

“You hungry?” she’d ask.

“Just tired,” he’d say.

Just the same, she would fix him a sandwich or heat up some macaroni and cheese, embellished with a touch of tuna—the way he liked it.

“It’ll work out,” she would say, with the brand of optimism she would later use on her infertile daughter.

The foreman eventually learned Morris’ name, a grimly pronounced “Kram-uh.” He went on to a long proud career, mastering all the main operational facets of the newspaper print shop—linotype operator, proofreader and handman. He attended every union meeting he could, volunteering at headquarters and eventually networking his way onto Jackie Ryan’s slate of trustees.

“My lawyer,” Ryan called him. Morris took it more as praise than an anti-Semitic slur. Morris had, in fact, been in the room two decades earlier—though it seemed like two lifetimes ago—when the automation agreement was reached.

Ryan promised Morris that not one of the printers would lose his job before they were ready to retire. “You’re owed that much if you’ve risked losing a finger or a foot working one of those damned machines,” he said.

Now these were Morris’ men. They needed him to make sure that Leland Brady—an outsider with no understanding or sentiment of the sacrifices they’d made—honored Ryan’s pledge.

“I’m taking a shower and then I’m going down to see the guys,” Morris told Molly.

“You want me to give Jamie a message when he calls?”

“If he calls.”

“Morris, you know I don’t like to hear that,” she said.

Ninety minutes later, Morris climbed the steps from the subway onto Fulton Street. He headed through the mid-afternoon crowd, down toward the maze of city housing projects that stood like eight-story sentinels guarding the undeveloped waterfront. He couldn’t remember seeing a bigger law enforcement presence at a strike scene. Police cars were everywhere.

He hurried around to the back of the building and crossed the street into a bar, nodding to the owner Kelly Murphy. He went directly to the back, caught his brother’s eye and settled into the open seat that Tommy Isola pulled away from the table for him.

“Guys,” Morris said.

“Mo, this just came for you,” Louie said.

Lou pushed a white envelope across the table.

“Brady’s son brought it down and left it with Kelly about an hour ago,” Louie said. “She told him we were back here, but the prick just told her to give it to us.”

“You kidding?” Red Duggan said. “There’s no way that jerk-off dares come back here.”

The back room of Kelly’s was the printers’ lair. As a makeshift union hall, it had its charms and benefits. Free rent and an occasional burger were among them. Kelly Murphy, daughter of a one-time Trib printer, made her real money off the buffalo-chicken-wing-eating editorial and advertising staff which stayed in front. She’d decorated that area in the popular sports bar motif. A new TV satellite dish beamed sports games from all over the country. But the back end she left alone, a jumble of bare walls and splintered wood tables with no coverings. Trib printers had the back of the bar to themselves, clubhouse of the lost boys.

Morris tore open the envelope and pulled out a letter on Trib stationary, addressed to him. He read loud enough for everyone—including Kelly twenty feet away at the bar—to hear.

Dear Mr. Kramer:

As you are well aware, the Trib is currently experiencing an unfortunate stoppage by its unionized workforce. As you also know, the strike was precipitated by employees following routine disciplinary measures taken by the Trib in response to work place intransigence, in accordance with specified conditions in past labor contracts.

Despite the strike, and whatever support the United Deliverers Association may draw in its conflict with the Trib, the newspaper’s parent company, Atlantic News Corp., has determined that it will continue to publish, without delay, and therefore expects all management employees and those still under personal or organized labor contract to report for work. Failure to do so WITHIN A REASONABLE TIME FRAME will result in the termination of existing agreements and the possible dismissal of said employees.

Sincerely,

Leland F. Brady, Publisher

Morris jammed the letter back into the envelope, ripping it in the process. The others at the table, waiting for his response, said nothing. A cute freckled waitress brought a menu for Morris and asked if anyone needed a drink. Lou pushed his empty bottle toward the edge of the table.

“Another Bud, thanks,” he said.

Lou avoided his brother’s eyes and checked his watch. His foot tapped a steady beat against the floor.

“By the way, anyone heard from Sean Cox?” he said. “He left a message on my machine, said he was coming down. He needed to see us about something.”

Nobody answered. They were anxiously waiting on Morris.

“Guys, I think this is just a formality,” he said, lifting the envelope a couple of inches and setting it down. “They have to cover themselves legally. On the one hand, they say we should report to work. Then they say within a reasonable time frame—but what the hell does that mean? They know we’re not going to cross a picket line. They’re expecting this thing to be settled by the end of the week.”

“Maybe we should have a lawyer look at it,” Red said.

“Why do that?” Morris said, reaching for the menu. “It would be a waste of money we don’t have. Brady’s bluffing.”

There was an uncomfortable silence before Lou said, “Mo’s right. The scumbag is bluffing.”

The others nodded and glanced nervously around the table. Not another word was spoken until the waitress returned with Lou’s beer. She asked Morris what he’d like to order, but he didn’t answer. He continued to stare at his menu which he was holding upside down.