Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! (19 page)

This eruption of fervent passions and upraised fists demonstrates our ability to shake the world, or at least a few blocks of the Garment District, and I get elbowed into the street. I take a quick look uptown to make sure I'm not about to get hit by a beer truck, but the cops have blocked off Broadway at Fortieth Street. I don't know yet if that's good or bad.

There's a sudden lull in the sloganeering, and a broadcast of the Dodgers game comes leaking out of one of the storefronts just in time for me to hear Durocher, the Cardinals' shortstop, get his fourth hit of the game. Damn.

The cops spread out to let a sergeant through with a four-man escort, and the taunts are fairly minor as they come marching down the middle of Broadway right towards me. I try to elbow my way back onto the sidewalk, but the sergeant steps forward and points at me:

“You there: Who are you? What group is this? The cloakmakers' union?”

“
Vey iz mir.
The
cloakmakers?
That bunch of no-goodniks? I belong to the dresspressers Local 60 of the ILGWU and Branch 360 of the
Arbeter Ring
—I mean, the Workmen's Circle.”

“Oh, a bunch of Reds, eh? Well, what's the big idea here? What are you striking for?”

“Generally or specifically?”

One of the cops breaks ranks to come after me with his nightstick, but the sergeant stops him.

“Okay, wise guy,” says the sergeant. “Generally.”

“We are striking for better wages and conditions, and the right to collective bargaining, and and—” I turn to Benny.
“Vi zokt men gerekhtikayt oyf English?”

“Justice.”

“And justice.”

“Well, there's too many of you out here. You can't block the sidewalk like this.”

This is met with grumbles and catcalls, so the sergeant raises his megaphone and announces: “I have no argument with your right to picket, but you can't block the sidewalk. I need this crowd reduced to no more than fifty people. Now who are your leaders?”

This starts the inevitable argument between the Socialists and Communists over who should represent the workers. So the sergeant tells his men to select every tenth man and orders the rest of us to disperse. And suddenly there's a great deal of pushing and shoving and it isn't long before they start arresting the “troublemakers.” The police thin our ranks to maybe one-third of their former size, and people who didn't have the guts to cross the picket lines before are walking right up to us and spitting at us and calling us goddamn Reds and sheenies and telling us to go back to Russia. And the radio is telling me that I can have a brand new DeSoto for only $695, which is almost what I make in a year, when a window shatters and a wild animal roar goes up as if a band of marauding Huns were charging up Broadway.

A sick feeling claws at my stomach and I curse the bosses for hiring more hooligans instead of simply negotiating with us.

A volley of brickbats and improvised missiles arcs into the air toward us and, as if we've regressed to the Stone Age, instinct takes over for a few seconds as we dodge the bricks thudding to the pavement around us and try to steel ourselves against the onslaught. The thin line of protest signs falls apart like a house of toothpicks as the center collapses and people panic and run for cover, and I feel the impact wave pass through the crowd as the first line of strikebreakers slams into us with their weapons held high like an army of
kulaks
with scythes advancing toward a field of wheat.

Imagine what a shock it must be for the scythes when the wheat fights back! With bare knuckles. With lengths of pipe. With shears and cutting tools.

A gangster breaks through the line and smashes a bottle against an Italian guy's head, and the poor guy starts bleeding as if he's been hit by a hunk of shrapnel and falls to the pavement. His pals grab him by the armpits and haul him out of the way, and the gangster finds himself surrounded by a trio of Italian girls beating him with protest signs. Some of the men are rushing around guiding our girls to the relative safety of the buildings when the next wave of hoodlums reaches us.

Benny lobs some loose bits of plumbing equipment at them, then briefly holds them off with a six-inch awl. He cuts a bit of a comical figure thrusting and parrying with that itty-bitty tailor's awl, but he stands his ground and buys us a few precious seconds before cutting to the rear and leaving the field to us.

I stay close to Gutbeder as he wields a heavy length of steam pipe against a couple of gangsters armed with what sure look like standard-issue Police Department nightsticks. Grossman takes off his vest and offers to fight them bare-knuckled, the lousy scabs.

In a situation like this, I'm more of a blunt instrument kind of guy myself, so I end up swinging a baseball bat at the knobby craniums of smirking men with off-kilter teeth while the cops look on like they're taking in the game at Ebbets Field. All they need are some peanuts and Cracker Jack. And I bet you they'll report that they were too busy protecting honest citizens to intervene in the melee.

A
ganef
in a gray topcoat rushes at me wielding a plumber's wrench like a two-handed broadsword. I swing the bat at his head and brush him back, but he comes at me again raising the wrench to block a head shot, so I step back and aim for the outside corner and whack him in the shins as hard as I can. He crumples to the sidewalk, and Grossman comes out of nowhere and kicks him in the jaw, knocking him backwards into the gutter.

But another
ganef
leapfrogs over the body of his fallen crony and crashes into me before I can set up my next swing. He's got thick brass knuckles on his left hand and it's all I can do to grab his sleeve with both hands to keep him from breaking every bone in my face. He's trying to get in a good punch while I cling to the sleeve of his jacket and fortunately it doesn't occur to him to use his other hand until I hear cloth tearing and his sleeve comes apart in my hands. By some strange reflex we both look at his ruined sleeve, and our eyes meet.

I recognize a face from the old neighborhood.

“Irving Shapiro?” I say. “You're running with the gangsters—and for what? What'd you spend on this? The cloth isn't even that good.”

Irving's eyes go blank for a second, until one of his buddies yells, “C'mon Lefty, let's blow!”

“So they call you Lefty now, huh, Mr. Big Shot?”

I can see that he's still trying to figure out where the hell a bunch of small-time operators got the
khutspeh
to fight back like that.

“We survived pogroms and prison camps in Tsarist Russia, you
putz,”
says Grossman. “What can America do to us that's worse than that?
Ptui!”
He spits on the sidewalk to show what he thinks of the idea.

The strikebreakers and the rest of the bosses' goons are retreating, and Irving slinks back to whatever hole he crawled out of, where his kind are nurtured like vampire bats on the blood of others.

“We did it!” cries Benny.

The enemy is routed, the strikers are cheering, and I feel the blood of the Maccabees flowing through my veins, urging me to join their rebellion against our idolatrous overlords.

My comrades are making wildly optimistic predictions about how we could smash the rackets in a minute if we could only break their political connections and cut through all those layers of protection, and how we're going to take on Hitler and Fascism next, then bring the fight home, and that
nothing
can stop us if we just stay organized.

I spot Abe the old
beysmedresh
scholar sitting on top of a packing crate, his knees dangling above the fray.

“Is the Lord's hand too short?” I say, just to show him that he's not the only one who can quote from the Torah.

“Look around you,” says Abe, gesturing toward the bank on the northeast corner of Thirty-Sixth Street, its indestructible Greek columns dwarfed by the brown brick canyon rising twenty stories on all sides from the street below. Rows and rows of identical windows stare down at us. And yet, just above our heads, our own building is sparingly decorated with carvings of interweaving pomegranate vines, an ancient Jewish symbol of plenty.

“Where do you see the Lord's handiwork?” Abe says. “Look at this place, this
goldene medineh,
where they have learned to share a few crumbs from the table with the middle class, and—poof!—there goes any hope of you building your socialist state. People will never fight for socialism when they can be bought off with movies, cheap suits—”

The blast of a car horn makes him jump. Traffic is moving in the streets again, their headlights coming to life as the sky darkens. Somebody's car radio is playing a smooth foxtrot that makes me think of elegant ladies gliding around the floor in clothing we made.

I help my comrades straighten things up and stow our weapons for the night. They've been following the news on the storefront radio, and the news isn't all good. It sounds like the Ethiopian freedom fighters will have to abandon the capital city to the advancing Italian forces. So the Fascists are on the march and it's up to us to stop them.

Benny wants to check the afternoon papers, but the first newsboy coming down the block is hawking the
Evening Journal,
a
farkakteh
Hearst paper that we wouldn't be caught dead with. He spots another newsie and has to settle for the
World-Telegram,
and flips through it looking for coverage of the strike. Even Abe comes over and joins our little circle, craning his neck for a better look.

“Hey, maybe this is why there weren't more cops going after us in the street today,” says Benny, pointing to an article. “It says the police were too busy escorting a couple of busloads of Nazi officers and naval cadets on a sightseeing tour of the city.” Including a trip to the Barnum & Bailey circus, which happens to be in town this week. We gather around, unable to believe what we're reading.

“It says they needed the escort to protect them from protesters.”

Abe lets out a sound that's halfway between a curse and a throat clearing, and sinks to the curb as if his legs just can't take the strain anymore.

I try to put this news in the most positive light: “Which means that our turnout would have been much bigger—a lot of our people were probably over on Fifth Avenue telling those Nazi bastards where to go.”

Abe shakes his head at me. “And you say
I
believe in fairy tales … “

I'm thinking,
the struggle to build a just society is no fairy tale—the
ILGWU is the fastest-growing union in the country—but instead I just help him to his feet and bid him good day and watch him hobble away. Abe comes from the world of
dybbuks
and Kabbalah and superstition, and they don't have much use for his kind in an era that demands social realism. What other option do we have in this strange new land, where everything is for sale—even the soul of a troubled kid like Irving Shapiro?

I say my goodbyes, slap a few backs, and join the crush of humanity heading for the BMT to Brooklyn. A few stragglers on the corners are still talking politics, and a group of Italian machinists are all excited because the Yankees are going to start a kid named DiMaggio in left field. The Yankees notched their fifth straight win, but the Dodgers lost. Dizzy Dean and the Gashouse Gang shut them out, 12-0, and they dropped to last place. I guess some victories are harder to come by than others. But it's too early to call right now and there are still plenty of games left in the season.

Michael Moorcock

For Glen Matlock,
Siouxsie, Nik Turner
and everyone else who was never reduced to this …