Girl of My Dreams (60 page)

Pammy returned to the long table where we sat with several dockworkers and said Teresa and Race wouldn't be joining us. They'd gotten Teresa's brother Stubby Blackburn to snag the Seals' center fielder, who'd hit three homeruns in the doubleheader, for a fancy dinner at the Fairmont with the two actresses. “‘Let's us little chickens have us a night off,'” Pammy mimicked Race's southern accent when she described the call, “‘me and Teresa, we're gonna fight over Mr. DiMaggio. Y'all win the strike.'”

Mike Quin was impressed to meet Pammy and immediately said, “Ah, now that you're on location maybe we can get a picture going that Skinny here doesn't seem to be able to pull off at your studio.” “Between the two of us,” Pammy corrected Quin, “I doubt we could get a pencil sharpened at Jubilee right now.”

Nick Bordoise's wife, Julia, arrived to pick him up. Her hands were chapped and the color of beets. She saw me noticing them and explained she worked in a laundry. Nick brought her a bowl of chili and sat down with us. Pammy wanted to know if he was a member of the Greek Orthodox Church. Not anymore, he explained. He was a member of the Communist Party because they were fighting for what he believed in. Shyly, possibly trying to win support in a family argument, Julia Bordoise asked Pammy if she thought it was wrong for Nick to be a Communist. “In Russia maybe,” Pammy said, “not in America.”

One of the longshoreman began to strum a guitar and sing, almost to himself at first, “O Susanna.” By the time he was through, the room was listening, and another longshoreman asked Pammy if she'd sing something. I wouldn't believe this except I was there—she had something of her own ready. She didn't know she'd have an accompanist, and she went over to the guitar player and asked him for a couple of chords. While they were working this out, Harry Bridges came up the stairs.

He was thinner than when I'd seen him a month earlier, and haggard, his hawk's nose more prominent, but his eyes were intense and everyone wanted to hear what he had to say. The Industrial Association was so hostile to him that some of their members were trying to have him deported back to Australia. He was polite to Pammy when Mike Quin introduced them, but I couldn't tell if he had any idea who she was. “What's the good word tonight, Harry?” one of the longshoremen asked. “Looks like you're about to have some entertainment, mates,” Bridges said, the last word an Australian
mites
. “There isn't much to tell you, so why don't we have the music first.” He looked grim.

“Can we have harmony?” Pammy asked.

“Eventually,” Bridges said, smiling, “not yet. Right now we sing in unison.”

Pammy pursed her lips, but Quin nodded at her to go ahead. “It's just a strike ditty,” Pammy said, “and please join me the second time through. Okay? Let's sing.”

The guitarist gave her two chords, and then she sang:

When the bosses cut our losses

And be fair,

When the bosses cut our losses

Everywhere,

When the masses beat the classes

And we knock them on their asses,

When the workers take control

We will roll, roll, roll.

When they give back what they stole

We'll be there,

When the workers reach their goal

We will share,

When the workers take control

Then we'll make this country whole,

When the workers take control

We'll be there, there, there.

The second time through, even Harry Bridges joined in with his high, reedy Down Under tones. So did Nick Bordoise in his Greek modulation, though his wife Julia was silent, nodding to herself. The room quieted uncertainly when the singing ended.

Quin asked if we outsiders should leave before Bridges addressed his troops.

“Mates,” Bridges said, “I wish I had something to tell everyone that everyone doesn't already know. Basically, we've made no progress downtown, none at all. The ship owners have the city leaders and other businessmen on their side, nothing new, but now they're bound and determined to open the port of San Francisco by force. Tomorrow.” Bridges sighed. “And they have the force in their pocket. All of it.”

“Where's the federal government in this, where's the president?” The man who asked this, standing with one foot on a bench, looked ready to chew nails.

“You'll like this one, boys. While we're busy closing down shipping here President Roosevelt is on the high seas, on a yacht having himself a holiday.”

Someone said he'd better not try docking in San Francisco. That raised a guffaw.

“Well, the president has a lot of things to think about,” Bridges said, “and the city fathers downtown hate him as much or more than they hate us. The point is, we don't want any violence. They're armed, and they're ready to go for us at any provocation. We're petitioning the powers, we send a message by our very presence along the Embarcadero. The more of us the louder the message, the more signatures on our petition. But anyone who doesn't want to march in the picket line tomorrow, especially anyone with children, I understand. It could get ugly.”

“It's been ugly for months, Harry,” said the man with the foot on the bench. “We'll all be there in the morning.”

We left with Nick and Julia Bordoise. Downstairs, I asked if we could give them a ride in our taxi. I think Julia was about to tell us that would be very nice, but Nick said no, they lived nearby, and they headed up Mission Street.

At the hotel things were awkward. It was still early, but we both fumbled for anything to talk about. “What do you think is going to happen tomorrow?” “I wish I could tell you.” Pammy said Millie was waiting at home for her call, the perfect excuse to get away from me. I said I hoped Teresa and Race were having a good evening. “I've heard ballplayers are as bad as actors when it comes to mischief,” she said.

The telegram was under my door. YOU'RE ALL BEING FOOLISH STOP I WON'T SPEAK TO HER BUT YOU CAN STOP REMEMBER THAT EVEN WHEN THE DANCE IS OVER ITS NOT HARD TO TELL THE WALLFLOWERS FROM THOSE WHO WALTZED STOP WISE UP AZ

31

Bloody Thursday

Thursday, July 5. I saw dark skies, no rain. The sun started to rise, then seemed to change its mind; not the usual fog but a deep gray washed the city. Two men in suits—pleasant looking fellows who could have been second leads in a Jubilee picture—were conversing in the lobby. “This strike isn't between management and labor,” one said. “It's between American principles and un-American radicalism. We've reached a crisis.”

“It's that simple,” the other said, gesturing with his briefcase. “Yesterday, for the first time in fifty years, not a single vessel sailed into the port of San Francisco. Any cargo waiting to be loaded is rotting on the docks.”

“Paper says the Archbishop wants to mediate and asks for more time.”

“Too much time and money are already down the drain. Time's up, Your Grace.”

Mike Quin, his eyes as red as his hair from attending strike committee meetings all night and perhaps from what he'd lubricated himself with, greeted us with the same words the two men in suits had agreed on. “We've reached a crisis,” Quin said as he marched into the lobby to take us to the waterfront. It was just after seven. Pammy had her hair in a bun and wore a no-nonsense shift, buttoned from its hem to her neck. Quin explained to the three actresses, as a warning, that this was the day the shipowners vowed to open the port by force. The unions all vowed to keep the port closed.

The streets feeding the Embarcadero were already full of police and pickets. The police patrolled the dockside while the strikers moved along the land side, two armies, but only one was armed. Across from the Ferry Building, longshoremen paraded two abreast, with the American flag in front and the ILA flag carried behind it.

Four trucks, driven by strikebreakers, rumbled ominously down the Embarcadero. They drew shouts about scabs and finks. No one made a move to block the trucks. Vendors went around with candy, gum, cigarettes. A young boy made a dash from the lines of pickets across the Embarcadero to where the police were, ducking past them and leaping into the arms of a woman. Hundreds more strikers arrived on buses.

“The Longshoremen aren't alone here,” Quin told us. “Seamen and Teamsters, the Sailors' Union, Marine Firemen, Oilers, Watertenders and Wipers, Marine Cooks and Stewards have struck, then the Ferrymen's Union, the Masters, Mates and Pilots and the Marine Engineers—all of them are out. The other side blames it all on Bridges.”

As the clock on the Ferry Building chimed eight—apparently a planned signal—the police charged the picket line, breaking its ranks, driving strikers up the streets that led away from the Embarcadero. The police were using clubs and tear gas. Led by Quin, we retreated up Rincon Hill with the strikers, who shouted at us to get out of the way. We did. Teresa yelled we were crazy to come here. Pammy said no, it's good to see what America's face looks like today. Escape was impossible anyway.

We ducked into the same Chinese laundry where I'd been weeks earlier on my first trip. The proprietor, Wun Chew, recognized me as the stupid fellow he'd sheltered before. Obligingly, Wun Chew took us upstairs. His family spoke no English, and we joined them watching out the windows. “This is not real,” Teresa said, bowing as Mrs. Wun Chew poured tea for us. Down below was fighting, shouting, then a lull.

Mike Quin and I made a brief reconnoiter into the streets around the waterfront. The clashes were less chaotic and more tactical than those I'd seen weeks earlier. At first the police were simply trying to drive the pickets away from the waterfront, not to overwhelm them. The strikers had immobilized the railroad tracks that serviced the docks by parking cars across them. Trucks were harder to stop and some got through to the docks. Up from the Embarcadero, a few fires had started on a hillside covered with dry grass. Quin said these were caused by tear gas shells, but the strikers were also trying to slow the march of policemen up the hill and might have ignited the grass. The fire trucks that rolled up turned their hoses on both the flames and the picketing union members.

I had just rejoined my group at Wun Chew's when we heard firing downstairs. Looking out the window, we saw pickets vomiting. Along with tear gas the police were now using nausea gas. When we looked down the street we saw several fallen and wretching strikers. We could see a few blocks in either direction, and the fighting seemed to be resolving itself not into a single battle but a dozen skirmishes. Charging in their gas masks, the police hurling the canisters looked like undersea monsters. Other police had riot guns and wooden cudgels they used to club strikers to the ground.

“Who actually is doing the rioting,” Pammy said, and it was not a question.

A combination of gas and gunfire drove the weaponless strikers and their sympathizers well up Rincon Hill away from the waterfront and the Embarcadero. The Wun Chew family—five children and their mother upstairs—had stopped looking out the window, apparently having decided that the city had gone mad and was no longer worth their attention. They accepted us as friendly intruders; the kids went on with their playing, the mother with her cooking, offering us tasty little pot stickers. At noon the action on the street stopped and everyone seemed to break for lunch.

Mike Quin fetched us as if he were picking us up from school. “Armies of extras from one of your movie lots,” he said, “couldn't observe their lunch hour with more precision.” Leading us to union headquarters, he told us the spectators on Rincon Hill outnumbered both strikers and police. “They're like the people who went out from Washington to watch the First Battle of Bull Run,” he said. He was sure he spotted some other people up from Hollywood for the festivities. Maybe Frederic March, he thought.

I asked why the strikers weren't armed at least with bricks and stones, or the horse-foiling marbles they'd had when I'd seen them on my first trip. Quin said their whole plan had been to avoid combat now, to resist the owners peacefully. “But I'm disgusted that San Francisco cops,” he said, “who come from the same neighborhoods as the workers, even the same families, would turn on men who ought to be their comrades.”

“That's their role,” Pammy said. “Follow orders, the role they've memorized.”

“I guess so,” Quin said, “but it's against their interests.”

“In this Depression,” Teresa said, “their interest is to feed their families.”

“Lucky to have a job keeping the peace is probably how they feel,” Race said.

“They're not peacekeepers today,” Quin said. “They might as well be the shipowners' hired army to break the union, and when the National Guard gets here, the state and property owners will be identical. It's a lesson plan older than Caesar.”

Nick Bordoise greeted us at the ILA hall, oddly cheery, ready to serve lunch. “Welcome to the International Longshoremen's Association
deluxe table d'hôte
,” he said, putting out salami sandwiches and apple cider. The slender Greek was going back to his restaurant the following week. “I won't forget my comrades here,” he said, “but I have to sling what you say a better grade of hash, make some moolah. Remember Napoleon declares an army marches on its stomach so
kali orexi, pedhia
, eat up, my hearties.” Nick's English was correct enough, but it could veer off a few decades, as if he'd learned the language from Jack London.

Seated on benches at big picnic tables, union members were downcast, looking at their sandwiches as if to find solace in them or the paper plates. It didn't seem possible to maintain a picket line in the face of gunfire and gas, and it was fruitless to try. At least inside their headquarters they were safe in what had been observed as a neutral zone.

That last certainty disappeared just after one o'clock when, lunch break over, the police assaulted the ILA union hall itself. They didn't bother to come up the stairs but shot gas canisters through the windows. Most of the union members, coughing and with their eyes tearing, poured down the stairs into the street. Quin dashed out with them. Pammy and Teresa and Race and I covered our faces with napkins and handkerchiefs. Nick Bordoise threw us dish towels he'd soaked in water, which gave us more protection. Nick put one over his own face and chased down the stairs.
“Bastardi!”
he shouted. “The bastards can't do this!
Christe! Christe!
The workers are rising, equality is on the march!” What he said sounded so European. They may have been Nick's final words.