fiction
published in Farmer's Market
copyright@paul pekin 2001

 
 
 

JESUS CHRIST WAS A WORKING MAN
by Paul Pekin

I've been working on this story almost twelve years now. It started out as fiction but every time I did it over it became a little less fiction and a little more true. It finally got down to this. It's all true, except the part about the ring. That's fiction, but I left it in.

In every version the story starts the same way, with Sam. Sam was the night supervisor at Bloomgartens Press on North Avenue, the last printing job I ever worked. Sam ran that night shift as if it were his own business, and in a sense it was. He took orders over the telephone, typed bills on the office machine, printed, shipped out, and collected good American dollars from jobs Mr. Bloomgarten never even heard about.
 

Sam had balls. I had a fresh new gap in my front teeth. There was a gap in my mind too, and I was still learning about that. A night earlier, playing chess, I had discovered I could no longer see three moves ahead. Something new to brighten my life

The year was l962. Maybe it wasn't. Time and the thing I'm going to tell you about have played tricks with my memories. For thirty years I've had Cuban missiles, the White Sox sirens, and those vague muffled drums all mixed together. It doesn't matter how often I go to the World Almanac and sort things out. After a few hours, I may as well start over. But it was December, Christmas week, the last night at Bloomgartens where an entire crew was hired each August and let go just before the holidays.

Across the aisle the bindery was already dark. The women had been sent home; I would never see Bobbie again. She was the best of them, a woman slightly older than myself with six children and a fine figure all the same. I liked her. She liked me. I liked us liking each other. Goodbye. It was goodbye to a lot of things that year. I knew I would never again step up to a Kelly press, push the button, inch the cylinder forward, lift the feeder, loosen the tympan with that special little wrench, and make ready a run. I knew would never again stand by the delivery table and watch fresh sheets swoop over that orange and blue flame, never again slide one free and run my hand lightly over the unset ink. After that night I would no longer be a pressman. Already I was something new.

Bloomgartens was a large shop, factory might be a better word, there were at least a dozen Kellys, B's and C's, ancient rattly things, good enough to stamp an advertiser's message on the pre-printed calendars; there were several huge Meihles, one exactly like the one I demolished at the Balta Press; there was an enormous bindery area that stretched on in the darkness and connected with the stock rooms where you could find calendars for years to come stacked up and waiting; there was a foreman's office for Sam--yes, we will get back to him--and a business office which we printers did not enter, and above this office a second floor with our lockers and the washrooms where I sat one night listening to the sirens and wondering if the Russians really were on their way to end all this.

Not a piece of equipment was moving, not even the Kluges and Verticals on which Sam did his job work. Only the union man, seated at the linotype, was still tapping out a few lines. Everyone else had retreated to the locker rooms. I was standing by my press and Sam was coming down the aisle.

"What in the hell do you think you're doing?" I am only guessing at this dialogue. How could I really remember after thirty years? But he did talk that way, blunt and confident, the way I like to hear a man talk.

I was changing the tympan. I was cleaning up. I was leaving things right for the next guy.

"Looks like your friend's gone," he said.

Some people, maybe all people, they see a man make friends with a woman, they want to put a spin on it. I didn't mind. If he wanted to think I'd been making it with a woman like Bobbie, it was okay by me.

"You know she's got six kids?"

"She showed me their pictures." This really was a lie. We'll make it part of the fiction, along with the ring.

"She tell you she's pregnant?"

No, she hadn't mentioned that--or had she? Could I be sure of anything? My memory lay shattered in my skull. What, if any of it, could I trust?

"Go upstairs! What are you waiting for? Jesus Christ himself to tell you it's all right?'

Maybe he didn't say this, the Jesus Christ part, but it fits and I don't want to take it out. And he did have to order me upstairs. I could never feel right hiding from work when I was being paid, not even at Bloomgartens's where that's what you did. I'm an old Catholic school boy. One nun after another pounded right and wrong into me. You don't easily get rid of that.

There were two guys standing on the landing, I'll call them Zickstra and Chavez, names as good as the ones they had. Zickstra was a sad puffy man who came to work in old suit coats with the buttons missing. Lots of guys did that in those days. Chavez was a young guy, very American, claimed he couldn't even speak Spanish. They were at opposite ends of the rail, staring over the empty pressroom. They were thinking about tomorrow. They were thinking about unemployment.

It's a scary feeling, waiting for a job to end, even when you've known for months that it would end and you would be back on the street if you hadn't by then found something new. You begin to feel apart from those who are comfortable and safe; you begin thinking about people in lifeboats and people in the sea, and you begin to wonder how deep that sea can get and what it will be like when you reach the bottom. This wasn't going to happen to me, not again. A year ago I had put together every dime I owned, borrowed a thousand from my sister, rented my house to strangers who would ruin it, packed my wife, kids and possessions into a rented truck, and moved into the back room of a little ma-and-pa variety store that was going to be my future. My own business. Now I was taking extra jobs to meet expenses.

But I wasn't swimming in that sea.

I found the rest of the crew in the locker room, playing radios, sleeping on those narrow benches, reading magazines, people I would never see again. The moonlighters had their poker game, laughing, joking, raising the pot--what did they care? They all had good day time jobs. Bloomgartens was just an extra buck to them. One guy in particular, I will always remember, had never touched a printing press in his life, just lied on the application and got his buddies to show him which buttons to push. Ten years it took me learn the Kelly, ten minutes it took him.

They had poor Goodman in the suckers seat. There are some guys who never get it into their heads that you do not play cards with people who wink at each other. But this Goodman was a loser, a married man who shamelessly carried copies of the naked calendar girls into the washroom stalls every chance he got. Most of us would rather not have been seen doing that.

Behind the lockers, Ragoni was working sums on a scrap of paper. Ragoni had been a pressman at R.A. Samuel almost thirty years, four color process work. Now he was figuring how to get by on compensation. "I had good years," he would say. "I almost made it."

I sat down with him. He was sixty. He was a man I respected.

Times change, the world changes with them, and there's not so much a person can do. Now that I'm sixty myself, it doesn't take much imagination to guess how it eventually turned out for my friend. When you're young, part of you actually believes certain things will stay the same way forever. When you finally get there, you know it isn't so.

One of the radios went to the news and we heard the president's name. Kennedy's name. This was in the days before anybody knew he chased naked women through the white house. People who were Catholic were proud of Kennedy. I remember my father saying, "No Catholic will ever be president." Suddenly one was.

"There's a man," Ragoni said. "God bless that man."

"Oh yeah?" I said. "I kept looking for the missiles."

"They never would have fired them. Do you know why? Because they don't believe in God. What good is it dying for your country if you got no place to go?"

My tongue slipped into that fresh new gap in my teeth, willful, determined, acting on its own.

The room was hot, steam banged in the pipes, and the windows were covered with a dense wet film that shut out the night. Ragoni dug out his scrap of paper and began studying it again.

"So now you'll work in your store," he said.

"I'm doing that already."

"Okay. But you got something of your own. People always going to want groceries."

"No, no, no groceries." You couldn't get this across to people. My store handled candy, newspapers, magazines, toys, novelties; I had stuff hanging on cards, fake bloody thumbs, sneezing powder, and x-ray telescopes that are supposed to see through women's clothes.

Ragoni looked at my mouth. Last night my wife had cut the stitches from my lip with her fingernail scissors, but it was still raw and tender where the tooth had pushed through. "I thought you said you did that with a pop bottle."

"Yeah. We got soda. But no groceries."

"I still don't see how you broke up your mouth on a pop bottle."

Nor could I.

It had all been very mysterious and hazy, carrying a case of empty bottles into the back room, suddenly floating down Gregory Street, through Central Park where swings creak against a forgotten sky, where teeter totters are painted green and you can roll down a long soft hill, down and down and down, rolling, rolling, rolling until you get to that grand easy feeling that runs warm from the fingers to the toes and you never want to wake up and you try to burrow deeper in and shut out the impatient clicking of a coin against the glass counter top, a customer, a customer for his Sunday paper, and just like that, on the dirty back room linoleum with the taste of blood in my mouth, I awoke to a new life.

"Maybe I tripped," I said. "Maybe I had a heart attack."

"No! You're too young for a heart attack!"

How could I describe the thing? A bolt of secret lightning had passed through my brain, forever altering the landscape. I had felt nothing. The pain, yes, my tongue found the broken tooth, still attached to its roots as if by a hinge; make no mistake, I felt that, but nothing else, no emotion, not even regret that my mouth had been spoiled, not even irritation that customers should tap their coins while I lay there, unable to rise. None of it seemed real.

"It's good you took a week off," he said. "But too bad about the paycheck."

Not so bad as he thought. I'd promised Sam not to talk about our deal. Certainly not to a straight honorable man like Ragoni, a good Catholic who attended mass and took communion and quietly walked away whenever the talk turned to sex. For six weeks he had been printing black panties and bras over the nude calendar girls so they could be legally mailed as samples. Not once had he cracked a smile. That's the kind of a man he was.

Now Brankovitch came around the lockers. "Okay, storekeeper," he said to me. "I got the board all set up." My chess partner was a big man with fat crawling out of his collar and sleeves, and a broad joyless smile covering his face. The smile was in memory of last night's victory.

It was eleven o'clock. The poker game was winding down. The moonlighters had the clean easy grins of winners. They would cash their last checks, spend every dime on Christmas, and never worry about tomorrow.

Sam had come upstairs and was talking to Bob and Rocco and the union man, all regulars who had real jobs here and would now move back to the day shift. When they saw Brankovitch they started up. "Where's Junior? What's he gonna do now that his nigger girl is gone?"

Brankovitch straddled his fat legs over the bench and faced the chess board. It was his brother they were talking about.

I opened with the king's pawn, an opening I had learned from a book. "You suppose that little shine's got him all wore out?" Rocco said.

"Don't knock it," Sam said. "Not until you try it. Some of them shines ain't bad at all."

Brankovitch spoke, his voice tight and bitter. 'I oughta kick that kid's ass."

"Ah, what's a little bindery girl before Christmas? Even Pete here, even he's been looking them over." Pete, that was me, a nickname I keep picking up and losing as I make my way through life.

Brankovitch followed my opening, pawn for pawn, knight for knight, bishop for bishop; when I castled, he castled.

"Sure you can stand the excitement?" Sam asked.

They were all grinning, all except Brankovitch. I should have been able to beat him.

Somebody brought out a bottle of Jim Beam and broke the seal. All over the room bottles and cans appeared. Somebody started a song.

"Good night ladies, good night gentlemen, good night Mr. Bloomgartens, we'll see you all next year."

Mr. Bloomgarten. This was the first job I'd ever had where I'd never even met the boss. For all I knew he could have been dead or made of wax. The men told stories, how his bookkeeper turned him in to the IRS and collected the reward, after which Mr. Bloomgarten took half and made the guy vice-president. They talked about the pressman who thought it unfair that bindery girls got fifteen minute coffee breaks and not the men. Sam and the others sent him into the office to lay out his complaints like a man. According to the story, Mr. Bloomgarten listened politely for a minute or two. Then he picked up the phone and called payroll. "Good luck, young man," said Mr. Bloomgarten, "on your next job."

"Check." Brankovitch exhaled his pent up breath.

The board was a jumble of red and black squares populated by incomprehensible plastic figures. "I resign," I said.

"You got to play it out."

Then old Zickstra came up wearing a look of unnatural glee. "Branky," he whispered. "Your brother's down there."

Brankovitch set his unhappy jaw and studied the board. "Come on, Branky! Come and see this. He's got that shine with him!"

The rest of us stampeded for the landing. Below, in the shop, was little Brankovitch, short, wiry, almost as dark as the girl he was embracing. Black or white, she was nothing special with her big lips and greasy straightened hair. The kid looked up and gave us all the finger.

There was another girl with them, darker, slimmer, and in a certain way quite pretty. I had never seen her before, and neither had Sam who, with both elbows on the rail, shook his head half in tolerance, half in disgust. Junior and his girl melted into the shadows and she stood alone, looking up with a beckoning smile. She was no bindery worker. Goodman thundered down the stairway.

Sam chuckled. "There's another one likes dark meat."

Ragoni was the last to reach the landing, his face grim, his back straight as a poker. "I don't believe in that," he said. "When I was a young man that wasn't done." The moonlighter who had learned to run a Kelly press in a single afternoon scoffed at this. "Go on! Why do you think they call it the oldest profession?"

"He's telling you right," Sam said. "In the old country, people would throw stones."

Then Goodman was back, panting. "Quick. Somebody let me have ten bucks. I'll pay back soon as I get my check."

Sam began to laugh. "Hear that, Pete? Ten bucks and you can have yourself that little shine." My tongue was at it again, measuring that space where my front tooth had been. Ragoni slapped me on the back. "Not Pete. He's got better things to do with his life."

Goodman appealed to me. "Ten dollars! I'll give you back fifteen soon as we're paid!"

"Where you going to cash a check at one in the morning?"

"Look! I give you my ring for security!"

He twisted off a large silver ring with some kind of a green stone in it. When I saw the metal was sterling I opened my wallet.

He thundered back down the stairs and led the girl into the stockroom where tons of calendars, already printed waited for the next year. Sam spat over the rail. "He'd better be punching out with the rest of us. I don't want to go looking."

I could feel Ragoni's disapproval. "You shouldn't have done that," he said.

"Why not? It's a good ring. If he doesn't pay me back, I can sell it in my store."

"I'm not talking about a ring. You know what I'm talking about."

The men drifted back into the locker room and soon we were hearing their laughter again. Ragoni touched my shoulder one last time and followed them. I was alone on the landing with Sam. Below, the shop was silent, not a whisper in any of its shadowy corners.

"I like that old man," Sam said.

"Me too."

"They don't come like that much these days."

"No. How could they?"

At the foot of the stairs, the time clock rolled loudly over another minute. "Let's do it," Sam said. "Before the others start lining up."

I followed him into the office. He had his own desk and it was covered with job orders that might have surprised Mr. Bloomgarten. He slid open a drawer and pulled out my checks. There was one for this week and another for the week I had stayed home. "Okay," he said. "The deal was fifty-fifty. I punch your card, we spilt the check. I figure it to $87.50. Let's make it even--$85.00."

I opened my wallet. "Can't beat it."

"Hey. We're all working men."

After that I got my coat and sat on the steps listening to the time clock roll toward Christmas. For some reason I began thinking of all those calendars in the storeroom; there had to be something profound in the presence of all that future time. Try as I might, I could not get a hard thought on it. Then Sam came out of the office and saw me. "You don't have to stay. Go home and rest yourself."

I could hear them laughing and singing in the locker room. Bottles were going round and the year was counting down. We shook hands and I took a last look at the pressroom, resisting an urge to walk the full aisle and touch my machine one last time. When it's over, it's over. You turn your back on it and move.

So it's all true, except for the part with the ring. I would never have given him ten bucks for that ring. It wasn't even worth five.

the end