Joe still remembers the first time he drove into New York. It was the late 1960s and there was a strike on in Toronto, and Joe and a friend named Patrick Grace boomed south in Patrick Grace"s brand new bright yellow Plymouth Road Runner. They drove straight into Manhattan. Patrick Grace was afraid for his car, that it would get scratched or dented or stolen in the mayhem of the city. Joe, as he looked up at the buildings, had other concerns on his mind. "Holy s.h.i.t, man, I hope we don"t get on one of those those jobs, way up in the sky," he thought to himself. They drove down to the Local 40 shape hall. Patrick Grace told the business agent he wanted to go connecting. "Well, I ain"t goin" connecting on jobs, way up in the sky," he thought to himself. They drove down to the Local 40 shape hall. Patrick Grace told the business agent he wanted to go connecting. "Well, I ain"t goin" connecting on them," them," announced Joe. So Patrick went connecting, and Joe went out on tagline with a gang of Indians. A few weeks later, Patrick Grace got caught in the drift of a column and seriously injured his leg. He returned to Toronto to recuperate, dropped out of ironwork, and Joe never saw him again. announced Joe. So Patrick went connecting, and Joe went out on tagline with a gang of Indians. A few weeks later, Patrick Grace got caught in the drift of a column and seriously injured his leg. He returned to Toronto to recuperate, dropped out of ironwork, and Joe never saw him again.
Joe soon got over his initial trepidation. He started connecting and found he loved it. Beverly came down to join him in New York, and they moved into an apartment next to her parents" home in Park Slope, over an ironworkers" bar called the High Spot. Newfoundlanders were all over Brooklyn in those days, at Snitty"s and Tyson"s, at the shortlived Newfoundlanders Club on 69th Street in Bay Ridge, at church on Sundays. Most of the Newfoundlanders came from the head of Conception Bay, but ironwork had spread to other pockets on the Avalon Peninsula. The Hartley brothers, for instance, came from Placentia Bay, on the southern sh.o.r.e of the peninsula. They settled in a small Newfie outport in Lindenhurst, Long Island. (The director Hal Hartley, son of a Newfoundlander ironworker, later used this neighborhood as a backdrop in several films.) Newfoundlanders were well represented in the union, too, const.i.tuting about a quarter of Local 40"s membership and holding much of its political power. They ran the union as they had been running it since 1937, when Jim Cole, a Colliers man, was voted in as president. Jim Cole was succeeded by Ray Corbett, whose family came from Harbor Main, and Ray Corbett would soon be succeeded by Ray Mullet of Conception Harbour, who would eventually be succeeded, in the 1990s, by Jack Doyle of Avondale.
One afternoon, on a skysc.r.a.per job on State Street, Joe saw an ironworker die for the first time. The victim was a fellow Newfoundlander named Bobby Burke. Joe glimpsed him plummeting off the edge of the 44th floor. "It looked to me like a bag of garbage. That"s what I thought it was. I said, "Someone"s thrown a bag of garbage off the side of the building, they shouldn"t have done that." When we went down, they called out the name of everyone there, "cause they didn"t know who it was. There was nothing there, just-I don"t know what it was. Just his boots. Some clothes. And a little soap stone that must have fallen out of his pocket, a little white spot." It was difficult to go back after something like that; you"d feel sick to your stomach for a few days. But then the sickness would pa.s.s and work, and life, would resume.
Most of Joe"s memories from back then are good ones. It was wonderful to be young and strong and building skysc.r.a.pers in the grandest city on earth. The days were exciting and interesting, and there was always beer or something stronger around to lend a festive atmosphere to the proceedings. All the drinking was foolish, in retrospect, but at the time it made you feel invulnerable, like you could dance over the steel-h.e.l.l, you were a hot s.h.i.t Newfoundlander ironworker-and no one, not even a hot-wrench Indian, could touch you.
Ironworkers still had a foot in their antic past in those days. Riding the load was by now strictly forbidden, a firing offense, but men still did it when they thought they could get away with it. Joe remembers going to a bar for lunch one afternoon with a fellow ironworker who was already so drunk the bartender refused to serve him. The ironworker threw a fit, then tossed a gla.s.s into the mirror behind the bar, shattering both the gla.s.s and the mirror. As the bartender called the police, the ironworker dashed out of the bar and jumped onto a load of steel that happened, at that very moment, to be rising off the back of a truck across the street. He ducked down and rode the steel up to the top floor, where he hid until the police had come and gone.
New York was a town of extraordinary events. There was that morning on the East Side, for instance, when a 7-ton derrick lifting a 10-ton load of steel broke loose from the guy wires holding it atop a building and all 17 tons of steel plunged 18 stories onto the street in the middle of rush hour. The falling steel demolished the flatbed truck below and turnbuckles smashed through a restaurant window across the street, but, miraculously, n.o.body was seriously injured. And then, moments later, another miracle: a geyser of water burst from a broken water main under the street and shot a 100-foot spout into the sky. As Joe remembers the story-he was not there himself to confirm it-hundreds of tiny fish came raining out of the geyser and landed flopping on the streets of New York. Real live fish.
No event was more extraordinary than the building of the World Trade Center. Joe went there in 1968 and stayed two full years, working in a gang on Tower One. Few jobs were as swarming with Fish as that one. The Moores were all there, and Willie Quinlan and Jack Doyle, and Jack"s brothers, and Joe"s brothers, Ron and Jerry, and dozens of others. There were times, standing a thousand feet above the city, with a watery view of the harbor and a fog sweeping in from the east, when you could look around the derrick floor and everyone you saw came from a small patch of rock at the head of Conception Bay.
But New York was not home, and in 1975 Joe and Beverly, realizing that it never would be, moved the family back to Conception Bay. They wanted to raise their three sons-and later, a daughter-in Newfoundland. "Growing up in the place, I just loved it that much. I figured, why let them miss what I had growing up at eight, nine, ten years old? The fishing and the woods and the water. There"s no place like it on earth. And it"s what I wanted for them." The old Newfoundland catch, of course, was that Joe had to leave his family at once and go back out into the world to make a living. Like his father and many other fathers before him, he would be gone months at a time, returning home at Christmas and summers, his children grown a few inches taller every time he saw them.
The separation was probably harder on Beverly than on Joe. She raised the four children mostly on her own. Then Joe came home on holidays, barging into the order she had arranged, and they were like strangers who hardly knew each other. In retrospect, this wasn"t all bad. "There"s a special thing to it, even it being hard," says Joe. "You get that special time when you come home. It"s like you met her for the first time in your life. When you"re living with a person day after day after day, maybe it"s good. But I don"t think it"s the same."
Joe missed home terribly when he was away. "You go out to the bars on the weekends, meet up with the guys, have a few beers. You go home half-drunk, then get on the phone for an hour talking to your wife-you"d want to be home-and the next day you gotta break your back to work again. The only time you wouldn"t think about home was when you"re working, "cause your mind was on the job, to watch so you didn"t get hurt." Mose Lewis" death had put an end to any aspirations Joe once harbored of being a full-time professional musician, but music remained central in his life. He played with his brothers in bands all over New York, and when he boomed out to California and Tennessee, he always brought along his guitar or fiddle. Music was a consolation for a man far from home.
The part that made it all worthwhile-the flip side of the catch-was the return. The pre-Christmas drive through Maine and Nova Scotia, the endless quiet highway. The hours of antic.i.p.ation on the ferry, standing on the deck, the bow breaking through the North Atlantic, and somewhere in the foggy distance your family waiting for you. No place on earth was better than the head of Conception Bay, and a man could put up with a lot of hardship for the pleasure of going home. "It was," says Joe, "like going back to heaven."
Joe did not see much of his sons while they were young, but when they grew up they followed him into ironwork, and now he spent most of his free time with them. They were more like brothers than sons, solid and capable young men to whom he could speak of anything. Like Joe, they traveled between Brooklyn and Conception Bay. All three of them had bought houses in Conception Harbour, and it was there they planned to raise their own families. "I say, son, you"re going to do the same thing I did, all over again. Maybe that"s the way it"s got to be. I say if you"re happy with it, then go for it. They"re like me. They work in the city, but all they want is to be back home."
By the summer of 2001, Joe Lewis and his three sons were among the last of the true migrating Fish. Most of the old timers had made their lives around New York. Their children and grandchildren were born and raised in the suburbs, spread out over Westchester County or Connecticut or Long Island. Many of the younger generation earned their livings as ironworkers, but they were not Fish anymore, not really. They were Americans.
A great many men from Conception Harbour still practiced the trade of ironwork, but most did it in Canada now, going out to build oil rigs in the North Atlantic or traveling a few thousand miles west to Alberta. Newfoundland had come a long way since Joe was born. The cod were gone and Greenpeace had put an end to swiling, but oil and mining were strong. Tourism was on the rise, too. Many of the tourists who visited Newfoundland in the summer were American-born sons and daughters and grandchildren of ironworkers come back to see the Rock. They"d show up at Frank"s, which everybody still called Doyle"s, and drink and talk with the Newfoundlanders who shared their last names and some of their blood. The Yanks and the Fish sometimes had difficulty understanding each other after a few beers or a shot of screech (a rum-based drink so called because it makes you screech screech when you drink it), when the most frequently uttered word in a conversation between a Yank and a Newfoundlander was likely to be "What?" Or, as the Newfoundlander would put it, "Wha"?" when you drink it), when the most frequently uttered word in a conversation between a Yank and a Newfoundlander was likely to be "What?" Or, as the Newfoundlander would put it, "Wha"?"
Joe Lewis would finally get the O.K. from the doctors and the lawyers to go home. It would be late fall by then, many weeks after the terrorist attacks of September 11, and the world would be a very different place than on the August day Joe sat at the kitchen of the row house in Brooklyn and spoke of the bad luck that had afflicted his old raising gang. Newfoundland had never seemed as utterly peaceful and distant from Manhattan as it would in the autumn of that annus horribilis annus horribilis. Joe would celebrate Christmas in the old house near the bay, where he grew up and where his mother still lived, just across the street from his own well-tended white clapboard house.
The numbness in Joe"s hand would improve, but only slightly. Joe would never pick the strings of a guitar or handle a fiddle with his old finesse. On New Year"s Eve, Joe and his brothers would take the stage of the Oasis, the tavern he and Beverly owned in Colliers, just over the Pinch from Conception Harbour. Joe would look out into the crowd and know every one of the two hundred or so faces looking back at him, and the Lewis brothers would begin to play. During the instrumental sections, Joe would mostly pretend to strum the guitar while his brothers covered for him. But when it came time to sing, Joe would not have to fake anything. He"d still have his voice. He"d sing a country song, then a few rock ballads, and then, for the old-timers, some of the jigs and reels he used to play in the kitchen when he was a boy. He"d sing "The Star of Logy Bay." He"d sing "Kelegre"s Swarree." And then, of course, he"d sing the song that every true Newfoundlander knows by heart, "I"s the B"y":I"s the b"y that builds the boat I"s the b"y that sails her I"s the b"y that sails her I"s the b"y that catches the fish I"s the b"y that catches the fish And brings them home to Lizer. And brings them home to Lizer. Cods and rinds to cover your flake Cods and rinds to cover your flake Cake and tea for supper Cake and tea for supperCod fish in the spring of the yearFried in maggoty b.u.t.ter.Everybody in the Oasis would be stomping their feet and singing along, and a few of the old-timers would stand and begin to dance, the large tavern vibrating and warming with moving bodies. Then the front door would open and someone would enter, and as a blast of cold air rushed into the Oasis, a sc.r.a.p of music would slip out into the night and go skipping up over the spruce trees to the cemetery on top of Colliers Hill, where Mose Lewis and the other dead lay buried. A clear cold sky would be glittering overhead, and the black bay heaving in the distance, and if you were lying on top of the hill on this frosty night, you might hear the faint strand of music from below and you might remember, for a moment, what it was to be alive.
PART III.
The Fall
NINE.
The Old School
Bunny Eyes quit one hot afternoon at the start of August. Or was fired. Or was fired and then quit-the details depended on who was offering them and n.o.body was offering much. This part was certain: Bunny and George, the gang"s foreman, got into some kind of dispute about the heat, which had soared into the high nineties several days earlier and been parked there every day since. Heat waves brutalize ironworkers. All other trades on a skysc.r.a.per job work under the derrick floor, in shade, but there is no shade for the ironworkers on top. The sun beats down on them mercilessly, and it radiates back up at them from the stainless steel decking and the beams and columns.
On the fourth day of the heat wave, Bunny announced that he favored cutting out early. George wanted to keep working. The argument quickly escalated, and before it was over, George told Bunny he no longer wanted him in the gang and he could now consider himself a bolter-up. No one expected Bunny to accept this-"Bunny"s a raising gang man," said Matt, "no way was he gonna bolt up"-and Bunny promptly quit. It had been a long time coming. As Matt said later, "Bunny was never happy in this job."
The real reason Bunny quit, or got himself fired, or whatever happened exactly, wasn"t that he held anything against George or the gang, and it wasn"t that he couldn"t take the heat-Bunny liked liked it hot. It was, simply, that he hated the job. He had come to loathe it. "That job was just a horror," he would say later. What made it such a horror? "Just the job itself," he would vaguely elaborate. "Christ, just everything." it hot. It was, simply, that he hated the job. He had come to loathe it. "That job was just a horror," he would say later. What made it such a horror? "Just the job itself," he would vaguely elaborate. "Christ, just everything."
The job had turned out to be nothing like what he, or any of the men, expected. The great compet.i.tion he"d looked forward to, those four kangaroos bobbing and swinging, the four raising gangs clambering over the frame, pushing themselves to excel-none of this had come to pa.s.s. Instead, the Time Warner Center had crept upwards at an excruciating pace. Six months had elapsed since that morning in February when Bunny and the rest of the raising gang arrived, five months since the ironworkers began setting steel. And the building was only on the fifth floor. A floor a month. Given the acreage and the size of some of the steel members, this represented a good tonnage of steel, but still-five floors in five months? No ironworker at Columbus Circle could remember a job that had advanced at such a slow grind.
The problem was the same one that had plagued the job since May: lack of steel. The ADF plants in Quebec were pumping out fabricated shapes at full throttle, but this was not fast enough to feed the hunger of the Time Warner Center. To make matters worse, when the steel finally did arrive, the ironworkers complained that it was poorly fabricated. It didn"t fit as it was meant to. The bolt holes did not align properly. Or the piece came a few centimeters too long and had to be trimmed to size with an acetylene torch. Often, the only way to get the steel to match was by hitting it again and again with beaters, or by slamming the ball of the crane into it, or by straddling it and bucking up and down on it or, all else failing, kicking the s.h.i.t out of it. The goal of all this activity was to get the holes of the facing pieces close enough together that you could stick the tapered end of your drift pin through both-getting a "bite," this was called-then pound the pin in with a beater, pulling those two holes, and all the others on the facing pieces, into alignment. Only then could you fit your bolts and move on.
It was arduous and joyless work. Connections that should have been made in three or four minutes routinely took an hour. Instead of setting 40 or 50 pieces a day, as they should have been doing, the gangs were lucky to set 10 or 15. Joe Kennedy, the superintendent, had recently brought in Tommy Emerson"s raising gang from the Random House job to take over the northeast crane but he hardly had enough steel to keep two cranes busy, much less three.
The last anyone saw of Bunny around Columbus Circle, he was sitting at the bar of the Coliseum on a Thursday afternoon. The place was spa.r.s.ely populated and deliciously cold. A few men slumped listlessly over the bar, and a few other men slumped over tables against the wall. n.o.body was saying much, certainly not with any animation, except for Chad Snow, the connector in Chappie"s gang. Chad sat on a bar stool near Bunny telling stories about close encounters he"d had with death, each story slightly more harrowing than the last. "When I landed," Chad was saying, "I hit right on my sternum. They wanted to take me down in a scale box but the last guy I"d seen go down in a scale box died, so I said no way, and I walked down the stairs. All I knew," said Chad, "is there was no way I was going in that box."
Chad had suffered many accidents in his 36 years. Even before he"d learned to walk he"d almost killed himself by crawling into his older sister"s walker, pulling himself up to his feet, then shuffling over to the stairs and tumbling down them. Since becoming an ironworker, he"d fallen badly three times and had many close calls. Chad was short but quick and solidly built, with wide bow legs and large thighs, and he had proven himself to be fairly indestructible. He was in the middle of telling a new story about the time a piece of steel flew out of control and nearly knocked him off the edge of a building when Bunny, who had been quiet and remote, looked up from his beer and turned his liquid blue eyes on Chad. "Christ, Chad, didn"t anything good ever happen to you?" Chad paused for a moment, then went on telling his story. Bunny took a last sip of beer, stood up, and walked out without a word.
Quitting was a right ironworkers took as G.o.d-given. An ironworker owed his loyalties to his union and his trade, not to any specific job. Indeed, an ironworker was expected to quit if he was unhappy in a job. "You can shove this job up your a.s.s," a New York ironworker told his foreman one day, according to a well-traveled bar story. Off the man went to find a new job, booming down south, all the way west, up north, but no luck, there were no jobs to be found. Finally, he returns east, just where he began. "If that job"s not too far up your a.s.s," he says to his old foreman, "I"d like it back now." The real punchline is that he got it back, no hard feelings.
In a boom, a new job was pretty much guaranteed to a good raising gang man like Bunny. The local would send him right back out for a fresh start. A construction slowdown might change the equation-a man was more likely to stick it out when there were few other jobs to go to-but the standing rule was that an ironworker worked at his own discretion. He earned that right by the risks he took. Every decision, even one ill advised or lightly made, could turn out to be the decision that saved his life. In 1907, Dominic McComber walked off the Quebec Bridge three and a half hours before it fell because he"d gotten into an argument with his foreman. No matter why he made it, that decision, that single autonomous act, turned out to be the most important of his life.
In the spring of 2001, the American Psychological a.s.sociation published the results of a study on human happiness. According to the study, happiness is nourished not by popularity or affluence or the pursuit of pleasure. Rather, it derives from a recipe of four ingredients: autonomy, competence, self-esteem, and relatedness. Autonomy tops the list.
Ironwork provided all four. It was difficult work that gave men a chance to apply their physical strength and skill to the problem of handling and connecting steel. It was work most other people found inconceivably dangerous and which set apart its pract.i.tioners as men of courage. As a result, most ironworkers were fairly bursting with pride. The work also provided "relatedness." Once an apprentice survived the ribbing and hazing that was part of his initiation into ironwork, he belonged to a tight fraternity, a "family," as many ironworkers described it. For many of the members, of course, the relatedness was literal. They were cousins and brothers and fathers and sons.
But it was autonomy, in the end, that set ironwork apart from most blue-collar jobs. Autonomy is what blue-collar jobs are generally supposed to lack. Lack of autonomy, in fact, is one of the defining characteristics of working-cla.s.s occupations. "Cla.s.s is about the power some people have over the lives of others, and the powerlessness most people experience as a result," writes the labor historian Michael Zweig. "For all their differences, working cla.s.s people share a common place in production where they have relatively little control over the pace or content of their work, and aren"t anybody"s boss."
Ironworkers were indisputably members of the working cla.s.s, but throughout most of their history they"d exerted a good deal of control over the pace and content of their work. Gangs of ironworkers operated as self-determined units. As long as they completed the work in a timely fashion, they were free to carry it out more or less as they pleased. Within the gang, the foreman was the leader, but in most gangs, especially in raising gangs, his rank was only marginally higher than that of the others. They were all members of the same union, and the foreman earned just a dollar more per hour. Nor was his rank permanent; it lasted as long as the job. On the next job, he might find himself back in the gang; he might very well find himself working for one of the men he was now pushing. He did well not to lord his power over the others.
A journeyman ironworker went where the union sent him and carried out the tasks that his foreman or super a.s.signed him. Beyond this, he was given a wide berth. If he didn"t want to come to work one day, well, all right. If he felt like coming to work drunk, n.o.body would say anything against him, just so long as he could hold his liquor and didn"t slow down the gang. If he was inspired to slide down a column upside-down or do cartwheels on a six-inch beam, he was probably a fool, but foolishness was his prerogative. Within the quasi-socialistic brotherhood of unionism, ironwork was a libertarian"s paradise.
Or rather, always had been. In the summer of 2001, it was a paradise quickly vanishing, much to the dismay of the men who lived in it.
SAFE NEW WORLD.
Joe Kennedy, the white-bearded superintendent of the ironworkers, just a few jobs shy of retirement and peace, stood near the front gate on Columbus Circle, in the three-sided court that would eventually become the magnificent portal of the Time Warner Center. The budding towers rose on either side, casting afternoon shadows over the court. Above Joe, to the south, George"s gang, minus Bunny, was "jumping" its kangaroo crane, an astonishing process whereby the crane lifted itself on hydraulic pistons while the raising gang slipped a new 13-foot tower section into the gap. Matt Kugler and Jerry Soberanes stood on the tower section, hanging by the crane"s hook. John White and Danny Donohue were whacking away at the tower, pulling out pins to make room. To a man looking for signs of progress, and Joe was such a man, this was a good one.
On the other side of the court, a crane lifted a stack of stainless-steel decking. As the decking rose and yawed slightly, several hundred gallons of brown water poured out of its corrugated hollows and cascaded down onto the concrete floor. Joe lifted his two-way radio from his belt.
"Jesus Christ, Tommy, you guys break a water main up there?"
"No, Joe," came the response. "That"s me taking a p.i.s.s."
"That"s lovely, Tommy, thank you for that information."
"Any time, Joe."
Joe Kennedy pa.s.sed most of his days inside a small trailer propped on the scaffold bridge over the sidewalk of Columbus Circle. The trailer was furnished with a few phones and drafting tables and reams and reams of shop drawings. From this vantage, Joe attended to the hundreds of logistical problems that beset the a.s.sembly of a steel building in the middle of Manhattan, from arranging deliveries of materials to coordinating with other trades to dealing with catastrophes. These days he spent a lot of time placating the general contractor, Bovis Lend-Lease, about the all too evident lack of steel. "There"s absolutely nothing I can do," said Joe. "I can make phone calls and holler and scream and stamp my feet as loud as they do, but I get the same result." The project manager from ADF kept a.s.suring Joe that more steel was around the corner, that the bottleneck was about to bust open. "Every week he tells me it"s great, it"s gonna be fine, and I say, "Listen, you tell me that every week for the last month. You better change your system or do something different, cause it ain"t changing any." From our end, all we want is to be able to order the steel, have it delivered, erect it, bolt it up, plumb it up, whatever we have to do. But it isn"t happening."
Superintendent is a powerful but thankless position, the intermediary between impatient contractors above and unruly ironworkers below. n.o.body loves a superintendent except his own family, and Joe couldn"t even count on them them since several of his brothers and sons worked for him. "When you"re super, you"re the boss, which makes you the enemy," said Joe. "The pay is better, but there"s everything else that goes along with it. To be honest, it"s not much fun." since several of his brothers and sons worked for him. "When you"re super, you"re the boss, which makes you the enemy," said Joe. "The pay is better, but there"s everything else that goes along with it. To be honest, it"s not much fun."
There were moments of pleasure, however, and this was one of them. In the afternoons, when things quieted down, Joe stepped out of the trailer and took a tour of the building. He walked slowly, with the measured authority of a bishop admiring his cathedral. Even now, after all these years, Joe got a charge out of the sight of iron rising and cranes jumping. These were accomplishments you could measure and appreciate with your eyes.
"Joe, why aren"t they tied off?"
Joe"s reverie was abruptly terminated by the approach of a large bearded man named Mike. The site safety manager for Bovis, Mike looked ponderous and grim, as he often looked when approaching Joe. He pointed up to a wide girder running along the edge of the courtyard. Several plumber-uppers stood on the girder, drawing a tape measure between two columns, unaware they were under observation.
"They aren"t tied off."
"They aren"t tied off," responded Joe, "because they aren"t thirty feet over the floor."
"Looks like thirty feet to me."
"Well, it isn"t. It"s twenty-nine feet, ten and a half inches."
"You measured it?"
"Yeah, we measured it. It"s an inch and a half in compliance. You want to measure yourself, be my guest."
Mike squinted up at the beam skeptically. He was a heavyset man and no ironworker. He scratched his beard like he was thinking about it.
"Twenty-nine feet, ten and a half inches. All right, then."
"Every day the safety thing is a headache," said Joe after Mike had departed. "Everything is changing. The men don"t like it, but that"s the way it is, and they gotta get with it or go."
The "safety thing" was a new set of revised OSHA regulations known officially as the Subpart R Steel Erection Standard. Subpart R dictated how ironworkers were to rig steel, how they were to land it on the derrick floor, how they were to connect it in the air. Most significantly, as far as the ironworkers were concerned, Subpart R mandated that ironworkers use fall protection whenever they worked a considerable distance above the ground or the floor below. That is, they had to "tie off" by wearing a harness attached by cable to a nearby beam. Most ironworkers would have to tie off when working more than 15 feet above the derrick floor or the ground. Connectors would have to tie off at 30 feet.
Tying off was not a new practice, but contractors had always been pretty lax about enforcing it. That was about to change. Insurance companies would not carry contractors with high accident rates. Even contractors with good safety records would suffer premium boosts if a single employee got injured on one of their jobs. "I tell the guys, don"t think for one second they"re worried about your health," said Joe Kennedy. "It"s all about dollars and cents."
The majority of the ironworkers loathed the practice of tying off. This was one of those mysteries that the good people of OSHA simply did not understand. OSHA had probably saved hundreds of ironworkers" lives and prevented many more injuries since President Nixon signed the agency into law in 1970. Now, with Subpart R, they had crafted and honed a package that would, by their a.n.a.lysis, reduce fatalities from an average of 35 or 40 a year to about 5 a year, while cutting the number of injuries in half. The regulations had been conceived to save ironworkers. But rather than applaud them, what did the ironworkers do? They got angry. They got angry. "It is odd," Richard Mendelson, area director for OSHA, conceded. "The ironworkers are one of the few trades that argue "It is odd," Richard Mendelson, area director for OSHA, conceded. "The ironworkers are one of the few trades that argue against against compliance." compliance."
Obviously, n.o.body wanted to get hurt or killed, and the majority of the OSHA regulations made good sense to the ironworkers. The phase-in of slip-resistant steel surfaces and the removal of lugs and other tripping hazards from steel beams were examples of measures the ironworkers backed. They likewise supported laws that forced contractors to hang safety nets under bridges and along the sides of buildings. But tying off was different. Many ironworkers considered the practice an imposition, at best, and very likely counterproductive. Connectors, most audibly, tended to believe it made their work more more dangerous by restricting movement. Nearly every connector had been in a situation where a quick duck or leap had saved him from a wild piece of steel. Yes, the safety harness might protect them if they were knocked off, but they preferred to avoid getting hit in the first place. "I"ll wear the harness if they make me," said Jerry Soberanes. "But there"s no way I"m tying it to anything." dangerous by restricting movement. Nearly every connector had been in a situation where a quick duck or leap had saved him from a wild piece of steel. Yes, the safety harness might protect them if they were knocked off, but they preferred to avoid getting hit in the first place. "I"ll wear the harness if they make me," said Jerry Soberanes. "But there"s no way I"m tying it to anything."
In the end, whether the new rules saved lives or cost lives wasn"t the whole issue to the ironworkers. Every work site would be staffed-it was already happening-with several full-time safety inspectors like Mike, whose entire job was to watch them, spy spy on them, and reprimand them for infractions. For men who were used to doing things their way, autonomously, this was galling. "f.u.c.k the insurance companies," said a middle-aged veteran plumber-up one afternoon as he sat in his usual lunch spot on the sidewalk. "We"ll get up a few floors, and then we"ll do whatever we want." on them, and reprimand them for infractions. For men who were used to doing things their way, autonomously, this was galling. "f.u.c.k the insurance companies," said a middle-aged veteran plumber-up one afternoon as he sat in his usual lunch spot on the sidewalk. "We"ll get up a few floors, and then we"ll do whatever we want."
KEITH AND MARVIN.
"Yo, get in the truck and back it up, ya bonehead!"
The truck driver, a small bald French Canadian who had driven four hundred miles to deliver a load of steel and get abused by Keith Brown, grinned sheepishly and stepped up into the cab of his truck. On 60th Street, Keith took a last drag of his French Canadian cigarette-a cigarette from a pack, as it happened, provided to him several minutes earlier by the truck driver in the futile hope of placating Keith-and threw it to the ground, as if the cigarette suddenly disgusted him, as if the ground itself rubbed him the wrong way.
[image]
Tying off.
(Photo by Michael Doolittle) "Hey, moron," he called to a young apprentice loitering near the back of the truck. "Quit scratching yourself like a r.e.t.a.r.d and stop traffic so this s.h.i.t-for-brains can back his rig out." The apprentice ran out into the street, nearly getting clipped by a taxi.
"Now look at this idiot," muttered Keith. "He"s gonna get himself killed down here on the f.u.c.kin" street street?" He pulled another cigarette out of his pack. He stuck it in his mouth and struck a match.
If there was anyone to light a fire under a slow job it was Keith Brown, the walking boss, recently arrived at Columbus Circle in the August heat, bringing with him his impatience, his shouting and cursing, his disgust for the lazy and the incompetent, for no-good apprentices and French Canadian truck drivers. He split his time between overseeing the raising gangs up top and coordinating the delivery of steel down on the street, stalking back and forth with a cigarette in his mouth and a scowl on his face. Folded lengthwise in his back pocket was a schedule of truck arrivals. Now and then Keith would pull the schedule out, glance at it, and shove it back into his pocket. The secret of the schedule was that it was meaningless. Trucks routinely showed up a day early or a day late. A truck due tomorrow would arrive today and two trucks due today would not arrive at all. It was enough to make a relaxed man crazy, and Keith Brown was far from a relaxed man. He was, as he himself admitted, wired for movement, for combustion. When he removed his hard hat to air his scalp, as he often did, he revealed a small fuzzy bald spot on the crown of his head. It did not look so much like the hair had fallen out. It looked as if it had been singed.
If Keith Brown was a first cla.s.s ball-buster, he was also, as apprentices and even some truck drivers came to realize, a decent guy-a "real ironworker," as the journeymen said of him, which is about the highest compliment one ironworker can pay another. None of these tributes made Keith exactly cuddly. And as soon as you dismissed his ranting as humorous-it was was humorous-he reminded you that, like most humor, his rose out of deep convictions. He really did hate these kids sometimes. "Don"t you f.u.c.kin" ruin my business, you and the rest of you lousy apprentice s.h.i.ts," he liked to shout at them. "You"re not gonna ruin this business if I can stop it." In his quieter moments, Keith conceded that it was probably already too late. "Oh, G.o.d, I used to love this business. Now, it"s just a job. I"m just glad I"m on my way out." humorous-he reminded you that, like most humor, his rose out of deep convictions. He really did hate these kids sometimes. "Don"t you f.u.c.kin" ruin my business, you and the rest of you lousy apprentice s.h.i.ts," he liked to shout at them. "You"re not gonna ruin this business if I can stop it." In his quieter moments, Keith conceded that it was probably already too late. "Oh, G.o.d, I used to love this business. Now, it"s just a job. I"m just glad I"m on my way out."
Keith Brown was a Mohawk by blood, a New Yorker by birth and att.i.tude. He spent his early childhood in an apartment on State Street in the old Mohawk neighborhood in Brooklyn, while his father worked on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. The family moved from Brooklyn to the suburbs of New Jersey as soon as the bridge was finished.
As a boy, Keith had only the vaguest sense of what ironworkers did. Sometimes his father came home with broken bones and sometimes he came home drunk-this was the sum total of Keith"s knowledge of his father"s occupation, and neither part held much appeal. "Don"t worry about me drinking," he a.s.sured his mother after taking a sip of beer. "This tastes like s.h.i.t." To please his mother, Keith tried college. He lasted three days. "I told you he was a moron," his father said. "Let"s hope he"s tough." Keith followed his father into ironwork.
Keith"s father was a hard man. When Keith fell into the hole on one of his first jobs, a drop of about 30 feet that ended, fortunately, in a pile of sand, he wiped the sand from his eyes and looked up to see his father glaring down at him from above. "You no good b.a.s.t.a.r.d, get up here!" his father shouted. "You"re embarra.s.sing me." Then there was that time his father swung a maul at a lintel and missed, landing the blow on Keith"s kneecap. It made a pop so loud men could hear it on the other side of the building. "Ah, get up, you sissy," scolded his father when Keith fell back in pain. "That didn"t hurt."
Keith"s father may have shouted louder than some of the ironworkers of his generation, and he may have been tougher on his son, but not by much. A lot of the old timers handled their novice sons much as they handled steel, with force and diligence. They woke them up at four in the morning and got them to the job site an hour early, because that was the ironworkers" way. Some made their sons wear connecting belts all day long so they"d get used to the weight of the clanging tools, so they"d turn into good connectors and make their fathers proud. When their sons screwed up, the fathers shouted, and when their sons got hurt, they told them to shake off the pain and get back to work.
As an apprentice in those days, you worked hard and did what you were told and hoped no one noticed your mistakes. Keith was so scared of getting shouted at by his father or one of the other older men that he never found time to worry about the height or the danger. In the meantime, the boy who hated the taste of beer had begun to drink it with a convert"s pa.s.sion.
It was drinking that brought him one afternoon in 1982 to a bar near a job site in Parsippany, New Jersey. Keith was an experienced connector by now and was looking for a partner. There at the bar among the other ironworkers sat a quiet young Mohawk with black hair and olive skin, named Marvin Davis. Marvin was not from Kahnawake but from Six Nations, an Iroquois reservation in northwest New York. He"d just spent a few years in San Antonio, Texas, working on office buildings, and had recently boomed up east in search of better wages. The fact that Marvin was a fellow Mohawk was enough to recommend him to Keith. He asked Marvin if he felt like going connecting. Marvin said he did. And so began an extraordinary partnership and friendship that would still be intact 20 years later.
Their shared Mohawk heritage aside, Keith and Marvin were about as different as two men could be. Whereas Keith was verbose and volatile, Marvin was quiet and even-keeled. "By the way, Marvin," Keith would announce to his friend at the end of a workday, "I just quit for us." Marvin was the peacemaker, smoothing things over with foremen or supers whom Keith had told off. Sometimes, too, Marvin was there to break up fights between Keith and his father.
One thing both men had in common: they liked to work hard. "It wasn"t just show up and go to work," said Marvin. "We"re both guys who wanted to go to work. We looked forward forward to it." to it."
When Keith and Marvin met, Keith was still working out of No. 711, the Canadian local through which many Kahnawake Mohawks came into ironwork. One day he got a call from the business agent of Local 40 in New York inviting him to join, a high honor. "This may sound funny," Keith told the business agent, "but can my partner come in? No disrespect, but if he doesn"t come in, I don"t want to come in." The business agent consented.
After that it was understood that when Keith Brown and Marvin Davis showed up at the shape hall for work, they went out together. "They don"t want both of us," said Keith, "they don"t get either of us." In the meantime, Marvin had moved into a house less than a mile away from Keith"s in New Jersey. Both men were married to pretty, young Mohawk women and their wives. .h.i.t it off, and so did their children. Meanwhile, on the steel, Keith and Marvin developed into a superb connecting team. It wasn"t just that they liked and trusted each other, it was also a physical chemistry. "Some guys will fight each other on how to make a piece," said Marvin. "Me and him, we just moved forward. It got to the point where we didn"t have to look at each other. We knew each other"s moves."
Between moves, they drank. Sometimes they drank all day. They started the morning with a shared six-pack on the way to work, then split a few more six-packs at coffee breaks and lunch. After work, they really started in, making a tour of the usual ironworkers" haunts, ending the night at a place in the Port Authority Bus Terminal. By the time they got home, they were often too drunk to remember the alibis they"d contrived for their wives. The next morning, they would start all over again with a six-pack just to straighten out from the night before. They drank extravagantly, but never so much they couldn"t do the work. Officially, on-the-job drinking was strictly prohibited; tacitly, it was tolerated. "Back then, they"d just say, "Keep drinking and keep working,"" said Marvin. "As long as you were doing your job, it was, "Here, have some more. If that"s what makes you go, go go.""
There were days Keith Brown drank two cases of beer between morning and night. The boy who hated the taste of beer had grown up to be a full-blown alcoholic.
One day, Marvin announced he"d decided to stop drinking. He wanted nothing more to do with alcohol. "I was getting sick and tired of it," said Marvin. "You get to that point in your life-you gotta grow up sooner or later." Keith kept at it for another year after Marvin stopped, but the pleasure went out of it.
That was the year Keith"s father died. It was also the year he and his wife separated. His life had reached a crossroads and he knew it. He was sitting in his house one night, drunk, halfway through a can of beer. He realized that if he wanted custody of his children-and he did-it was now or never. "I said to myself, you gotta make a decision. You"re either going to give them away, cause you can"t raise no kids drinking, or you put it down and never touch it again." And that was the end of it. Once he made the decision, he never went back.
Keith and Marvin connected together for another eight years. Their last connecting job was a huge Midtown office building for Bear Stearns, the New York financial concern. It was 1998 and they were both on the cusp of forty, generally the age a connector starts thinking about moving on to less strenuous labor. One afternoon the superintendent approached Keith and asked him if he wanted to take over as walking boss. Keith knew that accepting the promotion would mean severing his partnership with Marvin, perhaps forever. Before giving the super an answer, he went to Marvin and spoke to him. "If you don"t want me to take it, I won"t," he said. "It"s your call." Marvin told him to take it. He told Keith he was going to see the job to the end, and then he, too, was going to hang up his connecting belt.
Three years later, in the late summer of 2001, Keith Brown and Marvin Davis were still together, still partners, and still went everywhere together. They were both walking bosses on the Time Warner Center, sharing the building between them. Keith commanded the first phase of erection, the raising gangs, the rigs, the bolter-ups, and the steel deliveries. Marvin took care of the follow-up, the detail crews, the welders. They didn"t see as much of each other as they used to. They no longer commuted to and from work together, as they had for years, because Keith had recently started seeing a woman who lived in the East Village. Most afternoons, though, they met up for lunch, usually at a Greek deli on 58th Street where everyone knew them.
"How are my friends today?" the counterman bellowed as they straddled a couple of stools one afternoon.
"Happy as a bowl of f.u.c.kin" sunshine," mumbled Keith. "Lemme have a cup of coffee. What are you having, Marv?"
Marvin ordered a grilled cheese. At 43, Marvin was a year older than Keith but looked a couple years younger, his features softer, less weathered. He was still the quiet one, the calmer one, still married to the same woman, still living in the same house.
Both men appeared fairly exhausted as they sat at the counter. Keith"s stomach was bothering him this afternoon, squelching his appet.i.te. The stress of management was more difficult than the bodily wear and tear of connecting. It was also, both agreed, less satisfying. Instead of building all day, they were digging through an avalanche of logistics and paperwork-and rules. They both appreciated the irony that they, who had broken all the rules, now found themselves in a position where part of their job was to enforce them.
"That"s hard for me," said Keith. "Who am I to tell somebody he can"t drink? For me to say no drinking, they just look at me and say, "Yeah, right, who are you bulls.h.i.ttin"?" But I have to do it. And they all know where it"s going."
Where it was going was toward a more bureaucratic kind of steel erection driven not by the quest for speed but by the fear of liability, by the proliferation of rules and regulations. Every small change, the sort of thing ironworkers used to take care of by themselves with a torch and beater, now had to be signed off on by an engineer. Every move the ironworkers made was scrutinized by someone else. Every walk across a beam was nit-picked by a site safety manager. "Now insurance companies are coming looking at the way we"ve done it for a hundred years and wondering how the h.e.l.l they let this go on."
Keith didn"t miss the drinking but he missed the old days. He missed his father, too, tough as the old man had been. Keith understood now how alike they were, just as his mother had always told him. He also understood now that there was a strange kind of caring behind the shouting. His father had wanted his son to become a good ironworker. And Keith had become one. "If he hadn"t busted my b.a.l.l.s, I wouldn"t have worked so hard. That"s one thing I give him credit for. Much as these kids hate me, I see "em standing still, I yell at "em. I"m probably the worst of them around, but I"m not half as bad as the old-timers. Christ, I used to want to kill those old b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. I"m sure these kids feel the same about me. But someday they"ll look back, they"ll understand what I was shouting about."