On the Waterfront.

A novel.

by Budd Schulberg.

For Father Phil Carey, still on the beat; the late Father John Corridan, "the waterfront priest"; and his banty disciple, Arthur Browne, irrepressible "Brownie," who led me to and guided me along the waterfront through many days and nights. And for Tony Mike, Tommy Bull, Timmy, Pete, Joey, and countless others-men on the docks who gave me a hand. And for the hundreds of martyred longshoremen who should not have died in vain.

1987.

Introduction by Budd Schulberg.

ALTHOUGH THE FILM "ON The Waterfront" is now part of motion picture lore, the background of this novel is less familiar. This was no "novelization," that bastard word for a bastard byproduct of Hollywood success. Reviewers, actually invoking Zola and Dreiser in their praise of the work, were surprised that after all the kudos the film had received, there was still so much more to say than a ninety-minute movie-even one of the best of them-could possibly suggest.

Truth was, I had taken a rather unorthodox approach to the writing of the screenplay, applying not a month or two, but years of my life to absorbing everything I could about the New York waterfront, becoming an habituee of the westside Manhattan and Jersey bars that were unofficial headquarters, or homes away from home, for waterfront racketeers and Irish and Italian "insoigents" alike, drinking beer and talking into the night with longshore families in the cluttered kitchens of their $26.50 per month railroad flats, interviewing longshore-union leaders and getting to know the fearless and outspoken labor priests from St. Xavier's in New York's Hell's Kitchen who gave me an insight into Catholic social action I had never had before. While I had read about the French working class priests, and the Central and South American clergy who related their devotion to Christ to the peasant (or peon) resistance movements, I had not realized that just a few blocks west of comfortable watering holes like Sardi's, there were men in cassocks and turned-around collars who were just as defiant in their stand against greed, oppression, and corruption as their brother priests in more exotic parts of the world.

I became fascinated with a particular "waterfront priest," Father John Corridan, a rangy, ruddy, fast-talking, chain-smoking, tough-minded, sometimes profane Kerryman, a welcome antidote to the stereotyped Barry Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby "Fah-ther" so dear to Hollywood hearts. Days into nights, I listened intently to Father John, whose speech was a unique blend of Hell's Kitchen, baseball slang, an encyclopaedic grasp of waterfront economics, and an attack on man's inhumanity to man based on the teachings of Christ as brought up to date in the Papal Encyclicals on the reconstruction of the social order.

Long before I was ready to write either a novel or a film, Father Corridan and his rebel disciples in the mob-controlled International Longshoreman's Association had begun to obsess me. I wrote a long piece for The Saturday Evening Post, "Father John Knows The Score," and even broke into the Catholic left-liberal magazine Commonweal, with a short essay on this maverick priest's application of Catholic social ethics to the meat-grinder of men the New York waterfront had become.

The research took a dramatic turn. One of Father John's most devoted disciples was little Arthur Browne, proud of the fact that he was one of the stand-up "insoigents" in the Chelsea local run by the fat cats and their "pistoleros." With his flattened nose, his cocky laugh, and his stringpiece vocabulary, Brownie reminded me of those tough little bantam-weights who used to delight the New York boxing fans.

Brownie promised to take me in hand and "walk me through the waterfront," but first we had to work up a cover story. Even in the bars friendly to the "insoigents," his pals would wonder what he was doing with an obvious outsider. They would think "reporter" or "cop" and in either case Brownie (and I) would be in jeopardy. Since I knew boxing and co-managed a fighter, and since longshoremen are avid fight fans, Brownie would tell the curious that we had met at Stillman's Gym, fallen into conversation about fighters and had simply drifted over to the West Side to quench our "thoist." "I'll point out the various characters and shoot the breeze and you just listen 'n' drink your beer."

It worked fine. We drank boilermakers, Brownie got a group talking, I listened and made mental notes as to how I could work the dialogue into the script. One night we worked our way from bar to bar until we were opposite Pier 18. A saturnine man in a gray suit was at the bar and somehow, on my fifth boilermaker, I forgot my usual role and asked the stranger what he did. Brownie grabbed me, and the next thing I knew we were running down the street toward our "home block."

"Jesus, Mary, 'n' Joseph, you wanna get us both killed? Y'know who that guy was? Another Albert A. He's topped more people 'n Cockeye Dunn. I'm gonna tell Father John you're fired! We need a smarter resoicher."

Then he gave that undefeated laugh of his. The "cowboys" had flattened his nose, thrown him through a skylight, and even into the river, unconscious. "Lucky it was winter and the cold water revived me." I lived with this sawed-off Lazarus and his wife Anne in their cold-water flat. I sat at the kitchen table and wrote down lines I could never make up: "Ya know what we gotta get rid of-the highocracy! Wait'll I see that bum again-I'll top 'im off lovely." And for revenge: "I'll take it out of their skulls!"

Father John (and his more prudent but equally dedicated superior, the still active Father Phil Carey) enlisted me as a journalistic ally in their efforts to prepare the men for a crucial National Labor Relations Board vote that might have thrown the "Pistol Local," the Anastasias, and the rest of them out of office in favor of honest rank-and-file leadership. I wrote articles for The New York Times Magazine that helped convince St. Xavier's and the rebel movement that I was not a Hollywood opportunist looking to cash in on their "story," but a writer devoted to their cause.

When my film script was thrown back in my face (and Elia Kazan's) by Hollywood's leading moguls, I took refuge in the thought that I had such an overabundance of material that I could develop the same material as a novel.

Even when the film had been launched successfully, I had thought so much about its potential as a novel that I simply could not resist taking a year out of my life to get it down. Having attended all the hearings of the State Crime Commission (on waterfront crime), until scrapbooks and notebooks bulged-even with that Oscar perched on the mantelpiece-I could not overcome the conviction that my job as chronicler of waterfront people and waterfront tensions was far from completed.

I found that far more was involved than extending a one hundred and twenty five-page screenplay to a four hundred-page novel. The difference between a novel and a film is more qualitative than quantative. Film is an art of high points. It should embrace five or six sequences, each one mounting to a climax that moves the action onward to its final crescendo.

The novel is an art of high, middle and low points, and while I believe its form must never be overlooked, it's the sort of form you lock the front door against, knowing full well it will climb through one of the back-windows thoughtfully left open for it. The film does best when it concentrates on a single character. It tells the Informer superbly. It tends to lose itself in the ramifications of War and Peace. It has no time for what I call the essential digressions-the "digression" of complicated, contradictory character; the "digression" of social background. The film must go from significant episode to more significant episode in a constantly mounting pattern. It's an exciting form. But it pays a price for this excitement. It cannot wander as life wanders, or pause as life always pauses, to contemplate the incidental or the unexpected. The film has a relentless form. Once you set it up it becomes your master, demanding and rather terrifying. It has its own tight logic, and once you stray from that straight and narrow path the tension slackens, the air is let out of the balloon.

The film was focused on Terry Malloy, a half-vicious hoodlum caught between the waterfront mob and the groping, anxious beginnings of a conscience. His brothers are to be found on New York's troubled West Side, or along Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal, or in the corrupt political-machine towns on the Jersey shore. Elia Kazan and Marlon Brando did sensitive and brilliant things with this character, and I had written his dialogue carefully, with an ear to my wanderings along the riverfront. But the restricting form of He said-She said allowed no time to relate Terry to his background, to explore his mind with its groping efforts to shake off its sloth-to catch him off-guard, so to speak. More important, the film's concentration on a single dominating character, brought close to the camera-eye, made it esthetically inconvenient, if not impossible, to set Terry's story in its social and historical perspective. In the novel Terry is a single strand in a rope of intertwining fibers, suggesting the knotted complexities of the world of the waterfront that loops around New York, a lawless frontier still almost unknown to the metropolitan citizenry.

In the early 50's when I was researching the waterfront, I knew that the wholesale crimes of the harbor were not to be explained merely by the prominence of certain gentlemen from Sing Sing and Dannemora in positions of authority on the docks. The shipping companies and the stevedore management had accepted-in some cases encouraged-the thugs for years, and in many cases city politicians were nothing less than partners of the longshore union racketeers. It was this unhealthy axis that made it so difficult to bring any real democratic reform to the graft-ridden docks. I even discussed with my film collaborators scenes that would dramatize this civic blight. Those scenes were not eliminated through any cowardice or fear of censorship, as some critics have suggested. No, it was another tyrant, the ninety-minute feature form, that lopped off their heads.

But the novel is both an X-ray and a wide-angle lens, the ideal medium for self-appraisal and the development of social themes. The novel isn't a straight piece of string. It's a ball of twine. In the novel, I found my opportunity to put Terry Malloy in proper focus. It only required retelling his story from another point of view, and with a different end in mind. I mean this literally and figuratively. Terry's decision, even his fate, became subordinated to the anxious balance and the fate of the waterfront as a whole. This demanded an entirely different ending, as well as fuller development of characters who were secondary figures in the film. So Father Barry, the "waterfront priest," is brought to stage center, is allowed to share the action with Terry and to dominate the thinking of the book. As a curate in a poor parish he must take grave chances if he is to follow Christ his way. How could he reach difficult decisions except by interior monologues? The film had no time for this sort of thing. The novel has not only time but the obligation to examine this with great care. This searching becomes, in fact, the stuff of the novel, and the violent action line of Terry Malloy is now seen for what it is, one of the many moral crises in the spiritual and social development of Father Barry.

In the great novels Moby Dick, War and Peace, The Red and The Black we see how the action and the ideas are able to flow together with no violence from one to the other. There you have the glory of the novel, the reason why, in this age of supercommunication, we should never foresake it. I am not so vain as to claim membership in that great company for Waterfront, but in that tradition-from Stendahl to Steinbeck-I was able to work veins impossible to mine in dramatic art. It was not only that, having gained a great deal of knowledge and indignation from men on the docks, I was able to speak out in a way not feasible on film. I was able also to speak-in, to search the interior drama in the heart and mind of a church militant who dares apply the insights of his Savior to the dark and godless alleyways of the waterfront. I was able to follow him into an Irish tenement wake, to take him for a solitary, mind-troubled walk along the river, where he can measure his religious convictions against the spiritually bankrupt atmosphere of a typical waterfront neighborhood. I can listen in on his private prayers as he kneels sleepless on the cold floor of his cell-like room in the rectory, and I can end not with a dramatic close-up of Marlon Brando, but with the deeper truth of inconclusiveness as this priest stands at night on the edge of the Hudson weighing the martyrdom of Terry Malloy and thinking bitterly of the millions on millions in the great city who do not care, "Having eyes, they see not."

Maybe what I am trying to say is that a film must act, a book has time to think and wonder. There is the essential difference.

The film mounted to a battle royal between conscience-troubled Terry Malloy (Brando) and his old patron, dock boss Johnny Friendly (Lee Cobb), ending with Father Barry (Karl Maiden) urging the battered, now redeemed Terry to lead the intimidated dockers into the pier, thereby breaking the hold of the "Pistol Local." Even though Johnny screams from behind them, "I'll be back-and I'll remember every last one of yuz!" his dialogue was lost in the sweeping, upbeat power of the camera.

The novel gave me a second chance to put my waterfront experience in perspective, with Terry finding his Calvary in a Jersey swamp, and Father Barry facing exile to a "safer" parish, where his rebellious spirit may be more prudently contained.

As appropriate and effective as was our ending for the film the closing chapter of the novel afforded me the opportunity I had been waiting for, to relate the waterfront struggle to the struggle for social justice that had divided the Catholic Church for centuries, as it will continue to into the twenty-first century. "If you say nothing and do nothing, you will escape criticism," Father Barry remembers a wise Cardinal's warning as he prepares, in reluctant obedience, to leave his waterfront parish.

Film may be the language of the new generation-and a rich, rewarding language it is. But may this novel be a reminder of the special values of fiction: texture, introspection, complexity.

-Brookside, 1987.

One.

ACROSS THE HUDSON RIVER from the grubby harbor town of Bohegan little squares of light were coming on all over the seaport metropolis. The massive verticals of the skyline were softening into a continuous range of man-made mountains. Soon the dusk would darken into night, as night had closed in over the river some eighteen million times since this region was first split wide by the glacial mass cutting down from the north.

In the cities clustered around the harbor were men crowded together in the subways, men going home from work. But the workday on the river had no end. Directly across from Bohegan, on the old North River, as the Dutch once called it and longshoremen still call it, Pier 80 was alive with movement, like a city of ants, and with the same kind of chaotic order, thousands of passengers and friends, shouting, whispering, embracing, waving handkerchiefs in the ritual of leavetaking. For three hundred years the weeping and the panic and the laughter and the hope and the chancing of sea journeys through the Narrows from the great landlocked harbor of the Upper Bay. Mid-river there was more ordered confusion as the old-fashioned ferries, the tugs, the coastal freighters, the coal barges, a sweeping Queen and a solid Dutch three-stacker called, needled, warned and miraculously avoided each other.

Along one of the Bohegan docks a Portuguese freighter bound for Lisbon was working under lights, the winches humming and growling, and the longshoremen, fifty- and sixty-year-old Irishmen and Italians proudly able to keep up with the younger men, the thirty-year-olds out of World War II with wide shoulders and muscular arms and paunches not as big from beer as they were going to be after twenty years of bellying up to the bar after the shift or while waiting-the interminable waiting for work. Here in Bohegan-when they weren't short-ganged-they worked in teams of twenty-two, eight in the hold, eight on the dock, four on the deck, along with a couple of high-low drivers, and they knew each other's rhythms and ways like fellow-members of a football team. They worked at a regular, easy, knowing pace, making the most dangerous work in America-more fatalities than even the mines-look safe and casual. Steel girders seemed to be flying out of control as they swung out from the dock and over the forward hatches: an inch or two here and there and they'd slice off the top of a man's head like cheese, and if you don't get your feet out of the way in split-second time as the girders quickly lower onto the deck, it's good-bye toes. There's more than one longshoreman who can count his number of toes without using all his fingers, and more than one a little short on fingers too. It's all in a day's work. No wonder you see some of them cross themselves like miners or bullfighters as they climb down into the hatch.

Loading and unloading is an art and a fever. The dock boss is on you all the time. Unload, load and turn 'er around. The faster she puts a cargo down and picks up another, well, that's where the money is. Do a three-day job in two and there's your profit. Legitimate profit, that is. Oh, there's plenty of the other kind for the mob who's got the local and the Bohegan piers in its pocket. More ways to skin this fat cat than you ordinary citizens would ever dream. You take sixteen billion dollars' worth of cargo moving in and out all over the harbor every year and if the boys siphon off maybe sixty million of it in pilferage, shakedowns, kickbacks, bribes, short-gangs, numbers, trumped-up loading fees and a dozen other smart operations, why, who cares-the shipping companies? Not so you could notice it. The longshoremen? Most of them are happy or anyway willing just to keep working. The city fathers? That's a joke on the waterfront. The people, the public, you'n'me? All we do is pay the tab, the extra six or seven per cent passed on to the consumer because the greatest harbor of the greatest city of the greatest country in the world is run like a private grab-bag.

The harbor of New York makes the city of New York and the city of New York is the capital of America, no matter what our civics teachers say. Eight billion dollars of world trade makes this the heart-in-commerce of the Western world. Oh, you simple Hendrik Hudson in your simple little ship, the original wrong-way Corrigan looking for India along the palisades of Jersey, look at your harbor now!

There goes a truckload of coffee. Coffee's scarce these days. A checker routes it off to a warehouse, only not the one it was intended for. The trucker has a receipt to turn in, and who's to find out for at least six months it's a fake receipt? Thirty thousand dollars' worth of coffee. As easy as that. Nothing small on the waterfront. Not with that sixteen billion moving in and out. Now who'll miss one little truckload of coffee? Or by the time some eager beaver does, it's so long back that all he can do is pass it on to his supervisor who passes it on to the superintendent who passes it along two or three more echelons till it reaches a vice president who passes it on to the insurance company. Just tack it on to the cost, it's part of the business, all part of the game. Nobody really feels it except the consumer, you'n'me, and we're too dumb to complain.

There goes a sightseeing boat on its tourist-spiel circumnavigation of Manhattan. Now we're passing the famous luxury lines of the West Side, some of the two hundred ocean-going piers along this tremendous 750-mile shoreline from Brooklyn to Bohegan. There's the Liberte, she came in last night with Bernard Baruch aboard, and the Mayor back from another vacation, and Miss America of 1955, yes, sir, folks, more celebrities arriving and departing every fifty minutes twenty-four hours a day three hundred and sixty-five days a year than ever before in the history of the world. There goes the Andrea Doria, the new Italian dreamboat, one of the 10,000 ships a year coming in and going out, one every fifty minutes around the clock, year in year out. And just look around you at the traffic, why, we've got three thousand tugs and barges and lighters and railroad-car floats and ferries and floating cranes and pleasure craft, even canoes and kids on rafts in the middle of all this great going and coming as if they were Tom Sawyers on the Mississippi. Only Mark Twain never saw anything like this, I tell ya Mark would've flipped his wig if he had ever turned his side-wheeler into the harbor of New York.

At the river's edge on the Bohegan side where the ancient Hudson-American piers extended 300 yards into the great harbor, the water was brackish and thinly carpeted with bits of splintered wood, half-capsized beer bottles, oil slick, dead fish and an occasional contraceptive tossed away after some random joy. Midstream the river was deep and magnificent, but here at the edge it was a watery dump. On water-worn stilts over the shallow water, in the shadow of a great ocean liner at Pier B and an Egyptian freighter at Pier C, was a two-room boathouse that had belonged to the Bohegan Yacht Club in some distant, more elegant past. For years now Bohegan had been a working town, a waterfront commerce town and-it figures-a two-bit politician's town. The sportsmen with their narrow white ducks and their nautical caps had moved on to watering places where the river had not yet gone flat and sour as spoiled wine, and where there was ample room to turn a ketch.

Now the Bohegan Yacht Club was inhabited by sportsmen of another stripe. A sign over the door read Longshoremen's Local 447. Everyone knew what 447 stood for in Bohegan. Johnny Friendly. And everyone knew what Johnny Friendly stood for. Likewise Johnny Friendly. Johnny Friendly was president of the local, and vice-president, secretary, treasurer and delegate, for that matter, though he had some of his boys filling those slots. More than that he was a vice-president of the Longshoremen's District Council. More than that he was the way you got and kept a job in this section of the waterfront, the only way, except for some special-favor guys sent down from the Mayor's office. And then even more than that, Johnny Friendly had a better than nodding acquaintance with Tom McGovern, a man whose power was so great that his name was only a whisper on the waterfront. Mr. Big they called him in the press and in the bars, some fearing libel from his battery of Wall Street lawyers, others simply fearing for their lives and limbs. Mr. Big, Big Tom to his remarkable spectrum of friends, was a dear friend of the Mayor's, not just the joker pushed into the Bohegan City Hall by the Johnny Friendly votes, the Hudson-American and InterState (McGovern) Stevedore Company, but the Mayor of the big town itself, alongside which Hoboken, Weehawken, Bohegan, Port Newark and the rest of them were like the rich little mines around the Mother Lode. Tom McGovern was a big, self-made, selfful man, and while Johnny Friendly had these Bohegan piers in his pocket and was frequently described as doing very lovely, Tom McGovern had a whole brace of Johnny Friendlys from Brooklyn to Bohegan, north of Hoboken on the Jersey shore.

Johnny Friendly had the build of a two-hundred-year-old oak cut off a few inches short of six feet. He was big in the shoulders and he had strong arms and legs from his longshoremen days. He was what they call a black Irishman, with eyes like black marbles ten for a nickel, thinning hair that he worried about losing, a jaw that could shove forward at you when he wanted to bull you down. He had the kind of build the tough ones have when they've made a bundle or two and like their Heiniken beers and the five-dollar steaks garnished with fat fried onions and the oversized baked potatoes fondly embracing those little lakes of butter. There was a coating of fat over Johnny's muscles that didn't conceal their existence or the potential violence they represented.

Johnny Friendly was never alone, except when he slept. He moved with his boys and they were as much a part of him as the hundred legs of a centipede. The men around him-"on the muscle for Johnny Friendly" is the way they were usually described-were picked for three qualities; that is, they had to have two of the three. "I want 'em rough or brainy plus loyal." Actually Johnny Friendly, whose Christian name was Matthew J. Skelly, combined these three qualities and three more in addition: ruthlessness, ambition and benevolence. This last had a streak of softness, almost of effeminacy about it. No one dared voice it, dared even notice it in fact, but Johnny Friendly had a way of squeezing and patting your shoulder while he talked to you, if he liked you. And he took very strong, sudden, and, from his point of view, perceptive likes and dislikes. He wasn't merely good to his mother, though he did try to take that bewildered lady to church every Sunday. A fed-up longshoreman's wife could come to John Friendly with the familiar story of her old man's drinking up the week's pay on his way home from the docks and there I am with the five kids and nothing in the icebox. Then Johnny would see to it that the money went right from the company pay office into the house. A king in pre-constitutional days never had more power than Johnny Friendly, McGovern's fief, had along the docks and deep into Bohegan. And many a king written up in the history books had less feeling for his subjects. Johnny Friendly would go way out for them, way out. Not just Christmas baskets, though he did that too, usually through the Cleveland Democratic Club on Dock Street that he controlled. He was always good for fifties and C-notes peeled off the fat roll, and a pat on the back, and a gravelly voiced, "Aah, tha's all right, I understand ferget it!" A real big man around Bohegan, Johnny Friendly. A hundred per cent when he's for you. Zero when he's not.

Right now Johnny Friendly's emotional state was pushing zero. His patience, of which he liked to think he had a great store, was all used up. That Doyle kid. That fresh-nosed little son-of-a-bitchin' Doyle kid. Troublemaker. It seemed to run in the family. The uncle, Eddie, used to go around with petitions and stuff like that way back when the local was just getting started. Johnny had been a kid himself then. They had fixed Eddie Doyle's wagon and roughed up Joey's old man a little bit. Old man Doyle's leg always stiffened up in the wintertime from where the bullet was. At least he seemed to have learned his lesson.

For years now he had gone along with the set-up, content to pick up his two three days and his forty fifty dollars a week. Always ready with a buck for the collection which went in (and quickly out of) 447's welfare fund. Once in a while when some crumb forced a meeting of the local, Pop Doyle had the good sense to stay away. Pop was all right. Johnny Friendly didn't mind him. But this wet-behind-the-ears pink-faced kid of his. Two years in the Navy and he comes out a regular sea lawyer: The constitution of the local calls for bi-monthly meetings. How do you like that, in the small print he finds bi-monthly. The kid has the nerve to actually go read the constitution. That's the kind we can do without around here. Very nicely. Give me the guys who can't read anything but a Racing Form and go get their load on after work. Peaceable citizens, that's what we want around here. Well, we gave them their meeting. We called it on twenty-four-hours' notice after posting it on the bulletin board here in the office. Sure the notice was on a scrap of paper one inch high but the constitution doesn't say what kind of notice; it just says adequate notice must be given. I gave them their adequate. Only about fifty showed up. Fifty out of a possible fifteen hundred. And half of them was ours. You know, especially loyal members of 447. We all got elected for four more years. This Joey Doyle put up a squawk and Truck whose neck is as wide as some men's shoulders, Truck had to take him outside and quiet him down. He's a tough monkey, Joey Doyle. Doesn't look it, but he's there with the moxie and this trade-union bug has got him bad. Like his Uncle Eddie before him he's hard to discourage. And then comes the clincher. The Governor's got a bunch of stiffs he calls the State Crime Commission. A bunch of stuffed-shirt hypocrites who probably sponged it up good when they needed it. Now they get headlines about investigating waterfront crime. The Governor did plenty favors for Tom McGovern in his time, but it's an election year and the Governor wants to score. First that clown Kefauver and then these jokers want to get in on the act. Well, of course, it's for laughs. Who's going to go blabbing to that bunch of striped-pants bums? Only we start hearing things about Joey Doyle. He's been seen going in and out of the Court House where they sit around jacking off or whatever they do. I'm patient. On the District Council, ask anyone, they'll tell you I'm one of the saner heads. I don't go off half-cocked like my old pal Cockeye Hearn, God've mercy on his soul. You don't see me going around giving it to them in broad daylight just because I don't like the part in their hair. Cockeye down there in the Village had his good points and his partner Wally (Slicker) McGhee is still as quick a trick as you ever want to meet, but you have to be pretty stupid to blow somebody off the waterfront and wind up on the wrong end of the switch. Anyway, before I move Joey out of my way with muscle I look to con him out of my way with some soft soap. For that I've got Charley Malloy. Charley aint called the Gent for nothing. He's got a lot better education than the rest of us got. He did two years in Fordham, believe it or no. And the reason he was bounced wasn't because he wasn't smart enough. He was a little too smart. Charley's got brains to burn. He got caught selling examination answers, that's all. Charley was always smart. Would've been a helluva lawyer. He can talk up a breeze like That matter to which you have reference to which and stuff like that. So I sent my trouble-shooter to my trouble-maker. Charley talks sense. He says he likes Joey and wants to help him, which he does. There might even be a place in the set-up for a bright kid like Joey. We don't hold grudges. I've taken in plenty guys who started in bucking me. It shows they got spirit. I can use spirit. But when Charley wastes his best arguments and comes back with no dice and the scuttlebutt has the Doyle punk blowing his nose for the Crime Commission, which no respectable longshoreman would be caught dead in their company, what am I supposed to do, hang a medal on him? I worked too hard for what I got to frig around with a cheese-eater. Know what I mean?

So Johnny and Charley, a waterfront idea of suavity and culture, worked up a little plan. Its virtue lay in its simplicity. No telltale firearms, not even the usual splash in the river. In the office on the creaky floating dock on the river's edge, Johnny went over the plans with Charley and Sonny and Specs, who were providing the muscle. Johnny wasn't like a lot of the Irish mob, hit 'em first and think afterwards. He had been raised with a lot of Italians and he liked to do his jobs a little more in the Sicilian manner. A certain finesse. If you didn't think there was an art to these things look at his friend Danny D. who lived in the big house on the Jersey heights. Danny D. had tradition behind him, generations of disciplined viciousness. It was in his heritage to be secretive and thorough and merciless and never to go back on his word. Johnny admired Danny D.

"Okay, Matooze," he said to Charley, "go get the kid brother, put 'im to work." Matooze was Johnny's name for anybody he liked. Nobody knew where it came from or what it meant. All you had to know was you were in pretty good shape if he called you Matooze. But if he called you Shlagoom, then you better look out. Then you ship out or go to Baltimore or something. Charley had seen many a bum turn sickly white at the sound of that dark invention of a word shlagoom. Johnny followed Charley up the gangplank to the shore with his arm on his shoulder.

"You got enough padding in there for a football team," he said to Charley approvingly. Charley was a very natty dresser. He had his overcoats made to order. He wore a camel's hair that was really a beaut. It looked like it must have come off a very upper-class camel. And it fitted Charley a lot better than it ever fitted the camel. Johnny Friendly, he'd buy a hundred-and-fifty-dollar tailor-made suit and after twenty minutes it'd start to hang baggy on him like it was ready made. It had something to do with the bulk of his figure. Charley was on his way to a round belly too, from too much sitting around and the big bills he ran up at Cavanagh's and Shor's, and he was softer than Johnny, having always lived off his wits while Johnny started up the hard way and smartened up as he went along. But Charley's clothes hung creased and neat on him, another reason for having picked up the affectionate billing Charley the Gent.

"Okay, Matooze," Johnny said again. "I'll be over at the joint." That was the Friendly Bar, a little farther up River Street. Johnny's brother-in-law Leo ran it for him. There was as much business done there as in the union office itself. The horse play and the numbers and a lot of the kickback and of course the loan sharking, that all went on in the bar. The back room was Johnny's second home. He kept an apartment, but he only went there to sleep or jump a broad. He wasn't much for home. He saw his mother had a nice home and he helped his two sisters get places of their own, put their husbands on as dues collectors and shylocks so they could make an easy living. But Johnny was raised in the streets and in the bars, and that's where he felt at home even if he wasn't much of a drinking man. Labatt's Pale India Ale was his pleasure. He wanted to stay in this business and he had seen a lot of tough monkeys drink themselves down the drain.

Charley the Gent, in that dry, quiet way he had, said see ya Johnny, and then turned toward the row of tenements one block in from the river. It was a cool autumn evening and Charley liked the way the odds and ends of laundry fluttered on the lines. There was a maze of colored shirts and long underwear and panties and diapers and kids' stuff. The poverty of the waterfront hung out for all to see, denims that had been washed hundreds of times, and pajamas scarred with darning patches and the dresses of little girls that had long since washed out their colors. The poverty of the waterfront hung out for all to see. But poverty comes in bright colors too, here and there a yellow towel, a red wool shirt, a pair of green-checked socks, the life of the poor, respectable, drunken, hard-working, lazy, cocky, defeated, well-connected, forsaken waterfront poor hung row on row across the steep canyons between the tenements. Charley looked up at the crowded clothesline and thought of all those wives doing all that washing, every day clothes piling up full of sweat and coffee dust and the sweepings of children with dirty streets for playgrounds and the soilings of infants, dirty clothes to soap and soak and rinse and hang out and pull in and iron and fold so they'd be ready to be dirtied again.

Suckers, Charley thought, for that was the form of his social thinking, suckers to take it day in and day out, but that's the way it had to be, or at least the way it was. At the top of the heap the real bigs like Tom McGovern, in the middle guys like mayors and D.A.'s and judges and Willie Givens, the International president who sneezed every time Tom McGovern stood in a draft. A step below them the local movers like Johnny F., then the lieutenants such as himself, then the goons and the sharks, the small operators, below them the body of regulars, the longshoremen and checkers and truckers who played ball, who helped to work the pilferage trick, and finally on the bottom below the bottom, the men who shaped up without an in, who took their chances, kicked back when they got too hungry to hold out any longer, lived mostly on loan-shark money they had to pay back at ten per cent a week and got a piece of that $2.34 an hour only when a ship was calling for fifteen gangs and everybody was thumbed in to work except the worst of the bottle babies, the dead beats and the rebels.

Charley reached the entrance to the tenement he was headed for, a narrow, four-story building that had been thrown up sixty years earlier in a hasty effort to accommodate the influx when the new (now archaic) piers were built and bigtime shipping came to Bohegan. It was growing darker but a lot of kids were hollering up a stickball game in the street. On the stoop some of the older ones were idly watching. Old man Doyle was there, with a can of beer in his hand, more tired from the heavy work of the day than he'd admit, and with him, almost like a human appendage, was Runty Nolan, a jockey-sized, little gnome of a man barely five feet tall, with a face that had been hammered out of its original cast for thirty years of talking back. Not a young, up-to-date, Navy-wise, modern-trade-union-minded oppositionist like Joey Doyle but an incorrigible gadfly, a born needier, a party of one who fought Johnny Friendly in his own thick Irish way, by laughing at him, stinging him with humorous darts that were sharply defiant without quite provoking retaliation. Runty Nolan was like an old Navy man, perennially a seaman third, who knew by the book exactly how far he could push his Chief without risking court martial. A charter member of 447, in the days when Tom McGovern and Willie Givens were young dockwallopers working in the same gang, Runty in 1955 was exactly where he had been in 1915, a kind of self-appointed court jester of the docks, but too proud to serve a king, who accepted his beatings as part of a great joke he was playing on McGovern and Givens. "Those bums I knew 'em when they was glad to steal a chop off'n a meat truck," he'd laugh, reading in the papers that McGovern had been appointed chairman of some kind of new port committee, or that Givens had just been voted twenty-five thousand a year for life plus expenses. "I wouldn't pay the bum twenty-five cents," he'd make a point of telling a Johnny Friendly supernumerary, knowing how the stooge would growl back at him for abusing the exalted president of the International Longshoremen's Union.

Runty as usual had a comfortable load on, and Pop Doyle was enjoying his beer quietly, also as usual, a man whose gentle face was lined and hardened with the hard years, slightly stooped in the shoulders and back from thirty years of bending over the coffee bags and the heavy boxes, dreaming a long time ago of a better deal for the men on the docks, talking now and then on the third or fourth beer of Gompers and the stillborn hope of an honest-to-God union in the port, but tired now, his sweet wife under the ground and something of his manhood and nerve buried with her, content to sit on the stoop and let the beer make a cool river in his throat and chuckle at Runty Nolan's sly barbs and jokes.

"Well, if it aint Brother Malloy," Runty spoke up with the irrepressible laugh in his voice that years of heavy blows had failed to silence. Runty always made a point of calling every one of the Friendly boys "Brother" and it never failed to raise a laugh or a smile from the men, Runty Nolan's own, ingenuous way of making clear for all to hear just what he thought of Friendly's type of union brotherhood.

"Hello, boys," Charley said affably. He couldn't stand Runty Nolan, a soused-up wiseacre always looking for trouble and getting by with murder because he was small and somewhat comical. And Charley wasn't made any happier at the sight of Pop. There was a quiet passive resistance to Pop that could be a little unnerving if you were a sensitive man. The trouble with me, Charley was thinking, I let this stuff get me. Eight years I'm with Johnny now and I still let it get me. I should be over in City Hall where I could get the loot with a lot less of the dirty work. Just go around kissing babies, of various ages, and pocketing mine. Some day. Some day, maybe he'd make Commissioner. Maybe even Police Commissioner. Like Friendly's old chauffeur from the bootleg days, Donnelly. Donnelly was Commissioner of Public Safety now and doing very lovely. That was the way it went in Bohegan. Across the river in the big town it was a lot more complicated. A D.A. might enjoy the hospitality of Tom McGovern and go easy on the waterfront but he wasn't an out and out goniff like Donnelly. Over here in Bohegan you had a chance. Charley looked at the old man, Doyle, whose son was the job Charley had been assigned to. Pop Doyle, Charley thought, how much hard work and grief was indelibly written into that sad Irish kisser. And now more grief. And Charley the Gent, a soft sensitive type except for an ineradicable stain of larceny in his heart, had to be its messenger.

A second-story window opened suddenly and a massive woman placed her formidable, fat arms on the window sill. Her loud, slightly nasal voice was not to be denied, even by the high-pitched babel of the street. Not even the screeching whistle of a ferry sweeping into the Bohegan slip could prevail over Mrs. McLaverty. "Michael, Michael, next time I call you it's gonna be with a strap!"

A kid in the street turned his freckles, coated in stickball sweat, toward the offending window. "Aw Ma, the game aint over. Gimme ten more minutes."

Careful not to let his resplendent camel's hair coat touch the dirty door or the walls of the tenement hallway, Charley entered the dim entrance to the railroad flats. It was one of those buildings that makes a local mockery of the city's pretensions of modernity. Only some back-of-the-hand understanding between the landlord and a legman for the housing commissioner could have saved this building from condemnation fifteen years earlier. The walls along the stairway were cracked and stained and scribbled with the random observations, protests and greetings of a long succession of occupants, forming a sort of archeological strata of primitive tenement communication. The preparation of at least half a dozen different meals in this four-story beehive created a warm, sweet and sour hallway aroma that Charley was always to associate with the life he had hustled his way out of. And the confusion of sounds, the bedlam, always a baby crying, and some bigger kid clobbering a smaller one, fighting back and bawling at the same time, and the distracted mother threatening to smack 'em both and a married couple hollering at each other in a loud, continuous debate of inconclusive affirmatives and negatives, the staccato gunfire of a radio melodrama and the Murphys who got on like lovers in their middle age of all things invariably laughing together and someone playing Frankie Laine at the top of his and the loudspeaker's voice, "This cheating heart ... depends on you-hoo ..."

It was raucous and unprivate and unsanitary and un a lot of things, but one thing you had to say for it, it was living. It was no insignificant part of the mystery of from what power and to what purpose the human community endures.

Charley Malloy tried to keep his mind from wandering off into one of the dark chambers of this mystery. With somewhat the detached manner of an insurance agent checking up on an injured client, he heavily climbed the stairs, pausing on the third landing, a little annoyed with himself for being so out of breath. He ought to pick up his handball again. This was no shape for a man of thirty-five. Maybe it was time to go on a diet. The doctor said he was twenty-five pounds overweight. This whole country is overweight. They got it too good. Except for dead beats like Pop Doyle. There wasn't an extra half-pound of flesh on Pop Doyle. The best part of Pop Doyle had run off in sweat and soaked through into the floor of the hatch. Like an insurance agent, Charley Malloy plodded up the last stairway to the roof. Only in this case the accident hadn't happened yet.

Two.

IT WAS POSSIBLE TO walk along the rooftops of the tenements all the way from Dock Street to Ferry Street, though this was no simple straightaway but a variety of different levels with a three-story building often tucked between a couple of fours and even those of equal stories unequal in height so that a block-long stretch of adjoining rooftops was like a great theatrical stage of multiple levels. In recent years these rooftops had sprouted television aerials in such abundance that to walk among them was to wander through a forest of steel branches. And between the aerials there were more clothes lines, and on almost every roof at least one pigeon coop, for pigeon racing was still a favorite sport in Bohegan, offering as it did a chance to extend yourself above and beyond the brick and mortar confines of the slum. Up into the unencumbered sky your flock of Belgian beauties soared, and if there was dirt and sweat and monotony in the daily life of the neighborhood, at least here on the roof you could reach up through your birds into a freer, cleaner world.

At the top of the stairs leading from the fourth floor onto the roof Charley stood a moment, watching his younger brother at the edge of the roof with a long pole in his hand. At the end of the pole, like a makeshift flag of surrender, was an eight-inch strip from an old sheet, designed to frighten the birds into staying aloft for their training exercise. Around and around they flew in a great fluttering circle, some thirty of them, not arranged behind their leader in any pattern of formation like ducks or squadrons of men, but spread out in a natural cluster.

Charley stood a moment, watching his brother Terry enjoying the sight of them, as he enjoyed this ritual two or three times a day, the birds winging out over the river and then swinging around in a quarter-mile arc to cast their fifty-mile-an-hour shadows over the tenement buildings, over the bars and the shabby seamen's hotels and the slummy streets, the pigeons unaware of the people below and the people aware of the pigeons mostly as the subject of a hoary scatalogical joke. But to Terry Malloy they were a favorite and endlessly satisfying sight. "Look at 'em, the bums!" he'd think to himself reverently, the th thickening to a d when he actually spoke, "my birds, the best fuggin flock o' homers in the neighborhood."

Pigeons, Charley was thinking, kid stuff. Why doesn't he grow up? He's twenty-eight years old already. Maybe he caught one too many in the head when he was the Pride o' Bohegan. Some pride! Look at him, the best prospect turned out of Bohegan since Truck Amon caved in to Joe Louis on Joe's Bum-of-the-Month Tour. Well, at least Truck is earning his keep on the muscle for Johnny Friendly, but what about this kid here, a grown man already who never quite grew up, with his thickened nose and his slightly puffed eyes from too much leather, a good-looking kid except for the nose and the scar tissue, always looking to Charley like a father because their real father forgot he was a father and drifted off into some skidrow heaven and was neither dead nor alive so far as Charley and Terry were concerned. All they ever got from him was the name, Malloy. Charley had to hustle and use his head. And he looked out for the kid, Terry, when he could. Only how much could you do for a kid like this, flapping his silly pole at a bunch of silly birds? And a couple of neighborhood kids in bluejeans and basketball jackets with block letters spelling out "Golden Warriors" on their backs, a brace of reform-school candidates called Billy Conley and Jo-Jo Delaney, helping Terry with the birds and looking up to him as if he were something big and not just Terry Malloy, an ex-pug who had had it for a little while and now was only accepted by the big men in the neighborhood because he had the good fortune to be the brother of Charley the Gent.

Charley came up behind Terry and spoke softly, but the unexpected presence startled the kid-as most people still called him-and he pivoted quickly.

"Oh, Charley, I didn' hear ya come up."

He lowered his pole and the leader of his flock, a firm-looking blue-checker full of its importance, circled in for a landing on the roof of the coop, all the others following him smoothly.

"I'm gettin' 'em ready for the Washington race," Terry said. "I come in twelfth last time. Number one in the neighborhood. I made myself a coupla hundred bucks from the pool."

"He'd a-come in eleventh or maybe tenth if Swifty had gone right inta the coop so we could punch the band in the clock," Billy put in.

"That's his one bad habit," Terry said, as if reluctant to admit any fault in his prize.

Charley looked at the birds, bored. "Kids, vamoose," he told the two Warriors. "I want to talk private with Terry."

The boys withdrew with the sullen obedience of soldiers. The prestige of Charley the Gent in this neighborhood was something like that of a general's aide. The day would come when these kids would want commissions in the only organization with a future on the banks of Bohegan.

"Good kids," Terry said as they scampered off. They made him feel good. Asking him about them Garden fights. The night he took DeLucca out with a big left hook. The Brooklyn wallios thought they had something in Vinnie DeLucca until that night Terry tagged him with a left hand. Terry liked it for the kids to ask him about DeLucca. Or when they came to him for pointers on how to handle the Blue Devils. Good kids.

"Punks," Charley said. "The kids around here get dumber every year. It's a disgrace."

Then seeing Terry look at him uncomprehendingly-with a certain patient lack of expression he always assumed when Charley got too far ahead of him in the think department-the older brother came to the point of his visit: "They"-which could be anybody from Johnny Friendly down-wanted to talk to Joey Doyle. But Joey had been playing it cute. Ever since his trips to the Crime Commission, when he spotted Sonny tailing him, he had never gone out at night except with two or three young, tough longshoremen for protection. Johnny wanted to get Joey alone. It was highly important they should talk to him. Before Joey went and did something very foolish. Now Charley had an idea. That's what he was expected to have, ideas. He glanced over at the pigeons. A number of them had flown into the coop and were fussing and cooing in their elaborate ritual of settling down for the night.

Joey Doyle raised pigeons too. For years there had been a friendly rivalry between him and Terry. A friendly piracy. There was the old trick of tying a piece of ribbon to your homer's leg. A pigeon is incorrigibly curious. Sometimes a bird from a strange or rival loft would follow that ribbon right into your own coop. Terry had picked up some nice birds that way. Army birds and prize stuff off their course. In every long-distance race hundreds of birds were lost. Sometimes they followed others home. Terry had mentioned this to Charley once and Charley hadn't paid much attention as he always thought this pigeon business of Terry's was a kid's waste of time. One of the things helping to keep him small. Twenty-eight years old and no regular job and nothing going for him on the docks where the livin' was easy if you just worked one or two little angles. There was no excuse, simply no excuse for not making four or five bills a week. A little initiative, that's all. Charley wasn't a driver, a congenital go-after-it like Johnny Friendly. But thank God he wasn't a drifter, a fringer like his poor slob of a kid brother, too slow to come in out of the rain, or even to know if it was raining half the time. Had it been the punching that did it? It was hard to tell. Terry had racked up before those little blood trickles washed away his reason and his reflexes. Maybe it had something to do with the old lady dying. Charley was sixteen then, Terry only nine. He had taken it pretty hard. For a couple of years he hadn't talked very much. The doctors had some fancy word for that. Something inside of you feels so cheated and mean you just don't respond to nothin'.

It was the boxing that had brought Terry out a little. Right away he was better at it than the other kids and it gave him a position. Everybody needs a position. There goes Terry Malloy, he's the boxer-that's position. Some little thing you do, or are, in particular. Up at the dump they stuck him in, it was called Saint Joe's Home, he could lick the big boys of fifteen when he was only eleven. It gave him something to hang onto. It still did, a little bit, the way he shifted his shoulders when he walked and the way he carried his hands and the way he felt inside and the little wake of admiration he still left behind him as he heel-and-toed along River Street-"There goes Terry Malloy. Useta be a pretty good fighter."

"-I figured maybe if you call up to him you got one of his pigeons, you could get him to come up on the roof so a couple of the boys could have a little talk with him," Charley was saying.

Terry frowned. He had a little more work to do banding some squabs and cleaning up around the coop and then he had figured to drop in and shoot a little pool with Chick and Jackie, then wander over to Friendly's, have a few beers and watch the fight on TV. One trouble with Charley and Johnny's business was they were always working. Day and night there was something to take care of. That's the trouble when you get too big. Always something or someone to look out for.

"-now you sure you got it straight?" Charley was saying.

"Yeah, yeah, okay, okay," Terry said. "It sounds kinda corny, but ..."

"Yours not to reason why," Charley recited.

"Huh? What's that?"

"Poetry. Kipling I think it is."

"You and your double talk," Terry said, proud of Charley's brains and knowledge. "No kiddin', Charley, when they put you together they stuck in an extra tongue."

"And a good thing," Charley said. "Since I always had to talk for the two of us." He tapped Terry twice, fondly, on the shoulder in semi-conscious imitation of John Friendly. "Now get on it. And don't goof it up. It's important to Johnny, highly important. Tell 'im you'll meet him on the roof and then cut over to the joint. I'll be waiting for you."

"Okay, okay," Terry said heavily. He was like a boy whose father tells him to go help his mother with the dishes in the kitchen. He felt lazy and the chore was dull, but how do you stand off a thing like that?

Charley took a last look around as he headed for the steep stairway leading down from the roof. "Jesus it's filthy up here," he said.

"Whatta you want the Waldorf Astoria Roof Garden?" Terry said.