Girl of My Dreams (61 page)

Just then the telephone rang. A longshoreman still upstairs choked out a hello as he answered. A moment later he said, “Fuck you!” and slammed down the receiver. “Son of a bitch wanted to know if we were ready to surrender,” he said.

I remembered there were stairs up as well as down, and I led my charges—all of us choking and coughing—to the roof. On the sidewalks below we saw pandemonium. Teresa said, “This is not happening.”

“Believe your eyes,” Pammy said. “This is what war is. It's to be expected.”

Down on the street events shifted, collapsed their normal sequence, each scene partitioning itself into a splinter of time. Along the Embarcadero strikers try to put another car across the railroad tracks. The undersea monsters in their gas masks charge with canisters and drive them off. Even their horses are fitted with outsized goggles to protect them from their riders' tear gas; the horses look like sea creatures too, enslaved ones. Canisters wing through the air, land, emit their white puffs of gas. Union men wipe their eyes, cough, vomit up their lunches. Screams, low boom of gas guns. The police advance along the Embarcadero and the streets that meet it. The splinter that defines the day: a squad car, with slow deliberation as though it has its own will, turns off the Embarcadero onto Mission Street. It travels one block. At the corner of Steuart, directly below us, the car halts. Two men climb out, one in uniform, one not. The plainclothesman draws a pistol, while the uniformed officer brings a riot gun up to his shoulder. They aim first at the southwest corner and fire into the file of strikers, then turn to each of the northern corners. They swivel to the southeast corner, still firing. They climb back into the squad car and drive away. Next to me, Race begins to scream.

On the sidewalk below us a man has pitched over and is coughing up blood. He stops moving. Other strikers have fallen and are bleeding. “Oh my God!” we hear shouted from the street. What Race sees before the rest of us is Nick Bordoise. She has one hand over her mouth, stopping her scream, and points to Nick with the other. He is down, shot, writhing as blood spills from his chest. He tries to rise, falls back, and gets up again. He leans against a shop window, smearing his blood on it. Race says, “I'm going to that poor boy,” and starts to run for the stairs. Pammy and I grab her. We see Nick hold his side as he drags himself away from the union headquarters, up Mission Street. He heads, as he had with his wife less than twenty-four hours ago, for home. He staggers perhaps fifty yards up the block before he sinks to the sidewalk and is still.

It is over.

Calm descended as fast as, moments earlier, the clamor of combat had resounded.

The police, ordered back down to the Embarcadero, withdrew. Screaming squad car sirens went away, replaced by the howling of ambulance sirens. We walked downstairs to the union hall where we'd had Nick's salami sandwiches—when? Three quarters of an hour earlier? Fifteen minutes? A large emergency room was being set up, men lying on the floor or splayed out on the picnic tables. Pammy bustled about, knowing what to do as if she were in her old nurse's uniform at the front in France. She showed the rest of us how to make tourniquets and delicately wash wounds.

Race insisted on going to the street, and I went with her. Nick Bordoise lay where he had fallen. “He's gone, isn't he?” Race said. “I think so,” I said, remembering the Los Angeles morgue, a comic scene, almost a wax museum, compared to this rude nightmare. I saw Nick as a baby in his mother's arms on Crete, as a boy in a cap running toward a stream, at a steamship railing with his parents, his face beneath a chef's hat in the kitchen of a fancy restaurant, serving us dinner last night, lunch today, now crumpled like a rag at our feet. The former Nick Bordoise. An ambulance pulled up, loaded him in, and drove off. “God damn hell,” said a striker next to us whose arm had been twisted out of its socket by two policemen, “Hitler is more alive in San Francisco than Berlin.” We helped him back to the ILA hall.

When we returned upstairs to what was now a field hospital, we pitched in as well as we could. Pammy, with her war experience, seemed to be in authority, not precisely bossing anyone but suggesting firmly that this man ought to lie still, that one should try to stand, another should see if he could move his leg, a fourth needed his wound washed again to stave off infection. Recalling her experience at the blood bank in France, she said she thought a few of the men would need transfusions. Men who had taken gas in their eyes couldn't see properly. One man wouldn't stop screaming; a mounted policeman had jumped down from his horse after the man was knocked down, then had clubbed his leg so many times it appeared to be a hundred shards of bone when Pammy got his pants off. Several men had their heads lacerated from being clubbed, one with a compound fracture of his skull.

A photographer arrived to take pictures of the wounded. He focused especially on a group of six men in a corner of the hall, four of whom had their heads swathed in white cloth, with blood still flowing from under the bandages. The other two had cut legs bleeding abundantly and one of these had his arm in a sling. I didn't recall any of us tending to this group; they seemed simply to have materialized as the photographer did. Race went over to them and asked if she could help, then quickly ran back to where the rest of us were. “They smell like hamburgers over there,” she said, “and when I got real close to them I saw it was because they're all made up.” I asked what she meant. “I mean,” she said, “that's ketchup drooling out of their bandaged heads. Things aren't bad enough, these guys have to put on makeup?”

“That's a few Red radicals, not longshoremen,” said a voice from the floor. I looked down and saw the older man we'd talked to on the picket line the day before. His gray hair was matted with his own blood, which oozed from a crack in his skull. “They're on our side, but they want to look hurt more than be hurt,” the man said, wincing as Pammy sponged water onto his head. “Never mind them.”

We didn't. Pammy went right on showing us how to make the injured and wounded more comfortable, propping up a head here, putting a broken leg onto a pillow there, applying a tourniquet above the gash in a man's leg that was spouting blood. Three doctors arrived, carrying bags and flanked by nurses. They were strike sympathizers. One of them did a double take when he saw Pammy, then went right to work on a man lying on the floor bleeding from his abdomen. It was time for us to leave.

On the Embarcadero, where taxis cruised as they would after any performance, a newsboy was already hawking an extra edition and shouting, “Read all about it—pickets murdered! Bloody Thursday! Slaughter on the waterfront!”

32

Finalement

Rumors met us at the hotel. Twelve people had been killed including four cops. No. Twenty had died, seven of them in a two-car crash as they raced to escape the war-torn city. No. The police are killing every picketer they can find. It's a massacre. A message from Mike Quin said he wouldn't be seeing us since he was writing an account of the day for the longshoremen's newspaper. The desk clerk said he assumed we'd be leaving San Francisco immediately and asked if we wanted our bill.

“You should leave town, Miss Millevoix,” a bankerly looking man said to Pammy in the Fairmont's lobby. “This will only be the beginning. A lot more of these radicals have to get their heads broken before the wretches know who's boss.”

“Thank you,” Pammy said, trying to stay out of trouble.

“For your own good, Miss M,” the pin-striped man pursued. “The only way to solve this is by bloodshed. Violence is the language they understand. I'd turn machine guns on these lowlifes and mow them down like wheat.”

“That does sound extreme,” Pammy said, still holding herself in check, but she ventured a little further. “Don't you think, sir, that the dockmen and the seamen and the others have a right to organize for better pay?”

The man puffed himself up and threw out his chin, fingering the gold watch chain draped across his girth. He may have stepped out of a cartoon labeled Big Capital. “You're not one of those Hollywood bleeding hearts, are you?” he asked. “You look much too sensible. No, Miss Millevoix, if I'm hiring someone I hire him for what he'll work for, not for what he and his cronies can extort from me by banding together into a so-called union that is in reality nothing more than a conspiracy against honest businessmen and private property. It's my property, my business, and I'll decide how often, how long, when and where a man I hire will work. When the gang of them strike and picket my property, that's an instrument of violence itself, completely un-American. It's pure Bolshevism. Not on these shores, thank you very much.”

We made our way into the bar. One of the bartender's brothers was a longshoreman and the other was a policeman. He'd been on the phone with both, and he gave us the definitive word. Only two people had died—the unlucky Nick Bordoise and a longshoreman named Howard Sperry. Other longshoremen had been seriously wounded, but no policemen were badly hurt. Over a hundred union members had been taken to hospitals, but most of the wounded had straggled to their homes for fear of being arrested if they went to a hospital. “It's a miracle more weren't killed,” the bartender said.

Race and Teresa found us in the bar and said they were leaving. They thought all of us should get back to Los Angeles as fast as possible. “Anything we can learn to help us organize in Hollywood,” Teresa said, “we've already learned.” “In spades,” Race said. At that moment a messenger came for Pammy. He handed her a note. “We'll be having a memorial on Monday for our fallen comrades,” the note read, “and we'd be honored by your presence. Will you stand with us? Perhaps a visit to the wounded over the weekend.” The note was signed, “Bridges of the Strike Committee.”

“Will you give Pammy some time to think about this?” I asked Teresa and Race.

“I don't need any time,” Pammy said. “I'll stand with the longshoremen.”

Teresa and Race were taking the night train to Los Angeles. “Y'all got her into this,” Race told me. “Now y'all better bodyguard her like she was the Queen of Sheba.”

“You don't have to stay,” Pammy said.

That hurt my feelings, but I quickly said, “Nothing for me to do at the studio.”

Teresa, sensing I had just hurt Pammy's feelings in return, said, “Owen, is that as gallant as you can be to my best friend? Pammy darling, I don't think you should stay. This city is the most dangerous place on the continent.”

Pammy laughed for the first time all day. “Don't worry, girls, Owen will be my chaperone and my life preserver.”

We had dinner in the hotel after Teresa and Race left, not talking much, not eating much. I suppose we were in shock. The conversation, if it can be called that, was artificial. “Will you have another glass of wine?” “No, thank you.” “Dessert?” “No.”

In the bar before Teresa and Race had left, all four of us had already shuddered at the horror we'd witnessed, already compared our afternoon certainties that we would be engulfed and unable to escape, already pitied those who didn't escape, especially the tender, fervent Nick Bordoise, already sworn at the brutality of the police and the powers who sent them, already asked what were we doing at this luxury hotel while the strikers were wondering if they'd even have enough to eat for the next week, already vowed to donate to the strike fund, already debated how to use in Hollywood what we saw here. Now, alone with Pammy, my energy searched for an outlet and could find none.

She was uneasy too. She missed Millie yet she didn't want Costanza to bring Millie up to a San Francisco in such upheaval. Weighing every word, praying for dinner to be over, I said staying in the city could hurt her in Hollywood where they hated Reds, particularly—I couldn't say Mossy's name—the, ah, studio heads. “That's the last goddamned thing I care about,” she said.

Mercifully, the check arrived. We went to our separate rooms. She had a suite on the twelfth floor, I was in a single on the third.

I remembered I hadn't asked her what time she wanted to get started in the morning. What did I mean by get started anyway? It wasn't as if my services as an emissary to the strike were any longer needed. It was only Thursday night and we had nothing to do until the memorial service Harry Bridges had asked her to stay for on Monday. She'd visit the wounded as he asked, some combination of Florence Nightingale and Lady Bountiful. So we'd each go our separate ways in the morning? I'll just call her room, I said to my brash self, and offer her the same kind of tour Mike Quin had given me on my earlier trip, the highs and lows of a great, majestic, elegant, corrupt, decadent city now in turmoil, kind of a fairy princess with syphilis.

Her line was busy. I read the papers about the strike. Almost all the stories were favorable to the group of businessmen calling themselves the Industrial Association, and unfavorable to the longshoremen, the seamen, and to a lesser degree the teamsters. Like the paperboy on the Embarcadero, the press was already calling this Bloody Thursday. “Blood ran red in the streets of San Francisco,” the
Chronicle
reporter began, calling this “the darkest day this city has known since the Earthquake of 1906 … a Gettysburg in the miniature. WAR IN SAN FRANCISCO!”

Fifteen hundred National Guard soldiers dispatched by the governor were patrolling the city, with five thousand more on the way. The commanding officer of the 250
^th
Coast Artillery announced the occupation of the waterfront and issued a warning: “In view of the fact that we are equipped with rifles, bayonets, automatic rifles and machine guns, which are all high-powered weapons, the Embarcadero will not be a safe place for persons whose reasons for being there are not sufficient to run the risk of serious injury.” The commander was quoted as saying his troops would show no mercy and he warned his own men that if any of them fired into the air instead of shooting to kill they would be court-martialed. Leafing through the paper, I thought, So the rebellion is over and the powerful have, no surprise, won. It was Jubilee Pictures writ large.