Free On the Waterfront by Budd Schulberg Page A

furniture in the room was a pool table, which served Johnny Friendly as both a desk and a playground. Pool was his game and though he lost money easily (“It’s only money,” a favorite phrase) he lost this game of skill with great reluctance and would badger the victor until he had evened the score, then play again and again until his superiority was there for all to see. Competitive. Wanting to beat everybody at everything. That’s what had made him so big on the docks.
    The television was on in the backroom too and everybody was watching with one eye because the other eye was on Johnny. This was Friday, payday on the pier and the paynight in Friendly’s Bar where the take was cut up among the henchmen who called themselves the union officers. All over the harbor the locals were paying off tonight, on Staten Island, along the East River and out in the Benasio country of Brooklyn, a stack of blue chips for the loyal favorites, a piece of the pilferage and the horse money and the short-gang gimmick (hire sixteen men for the work of twenty-two and pad the payroll with ghosts). All over the harbor it was paynight and the boys had their hands and their tongues out. Johnny Friendly was a big man all week, and could tell Willie Givens what to do and carry out the unwritten, unspoken orders of Tom McGovern, but bigger tonight because now the loot was in the hand and he dealt with realities, was moving around the backroom with the authority and dignity and bad manners of an old-fashioned king.
    Jimmy Powers was narrating on the television, building up a guy who shouldn’t have been up there. “He’s being beaten to the punch but he’s always dangerous, he’s got a lethal right hand,” the comment interrupted the fight.
    Johnny Friendly laughed. “Lethal shit,” he said. “The kid’s nothing.”
    Terry was in the room, just inside the door, in a mood, looking at all of them. Jocko, the big-faced bartender, poked his head in the door.
    “Hey, boss, Packy wants another one on the cuff-o.”
    Packy was an old longshoreman and ex-con, helpful in a minor way until the sauce got him.
    “Give it to ’im,” Johnny waved Jocko out. He was always generous in public and he was nearly so in private. If you were able to accept his way of life without question, he was rather an exemplary character.
    Big Mac came up to the pool table with a wad of bills. He didn’t say anything because it was just a routine pay-in, the cut from the shape-up, five days, 850 men paying Big Mac two to five bucks a day for the privilege of being thumbed in over some other guys. Better than ten thousand dollars. Two piers. And Johnny had a third opening up any minute. Big Mac lingered and Johnny knew there was something on his mind. Johnny took him into the cubicle washroom, the inner sanctum for the business that even the Johnny Friendly boys didn’t have to hear. Johnny had a general’s sense of security.
    Big Mac, a material witness in a couple of local murders, including the Andy Collins job, a man with a hard jaw encased in the fat of easy living, put his mouth close to Johnny’s ear.
    “We got a banana boat comin’ in at B tomorra, the Maria Cristal from Panama. I was just wonderin’. Them bananas go bad in a hurry.”
    Big Mac looked at Johnny, waiting for the word go. What he meant was a work stoppage. You dream up some labor grievance—the company is using its own men to speed the unloading—any handy gimmick, and then you pull the men off and leave the bananas to rot. In twenty-four hours the banana people—the ones who contracted to buy ’em are the ones who get stuck—are singing yes we have no bananas. Then Big Mac whispers to them he can get the men to call off the strike for a consideration—some bills slipped into an envelope like it was Christmas. They had worked it with tulip bulbs from Holland last spring and shook the Dutch uncles down for 25G in cold cash. There’s a fortune in tulip bulbs and 25G is a small price to