No Questions Asked

11

I made four calls late that Sunday night. The first call was to Max Spivey out in Los Angeles to tell him that I would be there the next day. The second call was to Myron Greene in Darien to let him know what I had decided to do. The third call was to United Airlines for a reservation, and the fourth call was to Mickey Cupini who lived in Brooklyn, but who ran his union out of offices down near City Hall. He was the executive director of a public employees’ council that embraced nearly all the unionized city workers with the exception of the cops and the firemen and some hospital workers. He ran it as a despot would run it and every once in a while, just to show his muscle, he would call out the garbage collectors or the bridge tenders or the welfare workers and the city would gasp and go into a rapid decline until Cupini got what he wanted.

He was also a power in the Democratic Party, could make his weight felt down in Washington, and maintained loose but cordial relations with organized crime, among whose more notorious middle-management members he could count three cousins and one brother-in-law.

Mickey Cupini was smart, articulate, fairly ruthless, and had once confessed to me that by the time he was fifty-five he intended to be president of the AFL–CIO. He still had twenty years to go and I felt that he might very well make it. Fifteen years ago when he had been a kid head-merchant, struggling to organize the city’s white-collar workers who then thought of themselves as belonging more to management than to labor, I had written him up in a couple of more or less sympathetic columns. He had never forgotten it and every Christmas thereafter, he had sent me a twenty-pound turkey, which I usually turned over to an aging gay couple who lived on the fifth floor of the Adelphi, were marvelous cooks, and didn’t have too much money.

When I was through asking Mickey Cupini about his wife and each of his six kids, I asked if he would like to have lunch the next day. He said that he would and we agreed to meet at Minuto’s, which is a small restaurant down on Eighteenth Street where the food would be good and the service even better, possibly because it was owned by Mickey Cupini’s wife’s cousin.

Cupini was already there when I arrived at one o’clock the next day with my suitcase.

“You going out of town?” he said after we shook hands.

“For a few days,” I said.

There were only eight tables and four booths in Minuto’s and it was packed as always with reservations running right up until two o’clock. Cupini and I had the back booth and I let him order for me because he liked to make a little ceremony out of it.

“You haven’t been around lately,” Cupini said when he was through ordering. “What’ve you been up to?”

“Not a hell of a lot,” I said.

“You married again?”

“No.”

“Got a girl?”

“Well, there’s this one I’ve been seeing a lot of.”

Cupini nodded several times. “That’s good. You oughta get married and if you don’t get married, you oughta move in with her. Living alone’s what’s bad.”

“How’s the labor business?” I said.

Cupini shook his head. “The fuckin’ city’s going broke. The fuckin’ mayor wants to fire everybody. The fuckin’ members are screamin’ for more dough. Outside of that, business is swell.”

“I’m going out to L.A. today, Mickey.”

“Uh-huh.” There was nothing in the “uh-huh” one way or another. It was a cautious acknowledgment that I was going to ask a favor that he wasn’t sure he could grant. Or would want to.

“How’re you fixed out in L.A.?”

“Pretty good. We got about forty percent of the city and county employees and we’re moving up.”

“Any of them broke or out of work?”

“What’d you have in mind?”

“I’m going to be out there for perhaps a week. I don’t know Los Angeles too well. I need someone who does know it — and I don’t mean just the freeway system.”

“What d’you want him to do for you?”

“Drive, run a few errands, answer any questions I might have or, if he can’t answer them, know where I should go to ask them.”

“How much you willing to spend?”

“Thirty bucks a day. If we use his car, fifty.”

Mickey Cupini got interested. We were talking about how much someone should be paid and naturally it wasn’t enough. It never would be for Cupini. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table. He was wearing a nice dark grey suit that retailed for not much more than three hundred dollars. I liked his pale grey shirt and the dark grey-and-maroon striped tie that flounced a little before it dived down behind his vest. He smoothed the brown hair that just barely covered his ears and his collar and let me look at the gleam in his brown eyes. I decided that it was his negotiation gleam and I wondered how the mayor felt about it when it came time to talk new contract.

Cupini sighed and frowned and the frown caused two deep vertical lines to run down his forehead until they almost touched the start of his long, thin nose. His wide mouth went down at the corners. He wagged his stubborn chin a couple of times. Then he made a little deprecatory motion with his right hand. I looked to see whether he was still wearing his Sigma Chi ring. He was.

“If you just wanted somebody to drive for you, Phil, well, hell, thirty bucks a day wouldn’t be bad. But, Christ, you don’t want just a driver. You want somebody smart, with connections, maybe even a Ph.D., and you think you can get somebody like that for a lousy thirty bucks?”

“A recession is abroad in the land, Mickey. Perhaps even a depression. I’m not on an expense account. It’s my own money and it’s been a bad year. Thirty-five.”

“Forty-five, at least.”

I shook my head. “Forty and if we use his car fifty-five, and I pay for the gas.”

The gleam in Cupini’s eye turned into a glint. We had just struck a bargain. “I know just the guy.”

“Who?”

“My wife’s brother-in-law’s cousin. He’s a nice kid. Twenty-two, twenty-three, maybe. And smart.”

“What’s his name?”

“Giovanni Guerriero, but you can call him Johnny. Everybody else does.”

“What does Johnny do when he’s not working for me?”

“Sometimes he goes to school. So far he’s been to UCLA, Georgetown in Washington, Dartmouth, and the University of Texas.”

“And when he’s not going to school?”

“He’s done a little organizing for us out on the Coast. Then for a while he worked for a cousin of mine in Vegas. You know, muscle work, but the kid didn’t like it and quit. He’s got a few weird ideas. Maybe that’s because he’s hooked.”

“On what?”

“Politics,” Cupini said. “The kid’s a political junkie.”

“Okay,” I said. “He’s hired. How do I get in touch with him?”

Cupini looked at his watch. “What’s your flight number?”

I told him.

“United?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, when we get through lunch, I’ll go back to the office and call the kid and have him meet you at the airport. Forty bucks a day or fifty-five if you use his car. Right?”

“Right.”

“You just got yourself one hell of a good kid.”

“And you’re sure he knows L.A.?”

“He should,” Mickey Cupini said, “he was born on the Hollywood freeway.”

My flight left Kennedy at 9:15 that night. We flew for a little over six hours and with the time change we landed at Los Angeles International at 12:35. The flight had been what is often described as uneventful, which means dull.

At Los Angeles airport I went directly from the plane into a reception area. I was among the last of the passengers off and when I came out into the reception area I spotted Giovanni Guerriero, whom I was going to call Johnny.

He was about average height for the young in California, which meant that he was at least six feet tall. It may be because of the sunshine and the vitamins and Dr. Spock, but the average height of both males and females in California during the last twenty years must have risen by at least three inches. He was wearing blue jeans, a short-sleeved shirt, loafers, and a slightly worried expression. I knew he was Johnny Guerriero because of the neatly printed sign that he displayed, which read, “Mr. St. Ives, This Way Please.” I felt that we were off to a good start. Maybe he was as smart as Mickey Cupini said he was.

I went up to him and said, “I’m Philip St. Ives.”

He gave me a big white grin and put out his hand. “Hi, Phil. I’m Johnny Guerriero.” That was nice. I was Phil and he was Johnny and we would probably become great chums. In New York there were people who had known me rather well for fifteen years but who still called me Mr. St. Ives. But they were mostly old fogeys in their late thirties or early forties.

Johnny Guerriero led the way. We walked for a while and then we got on a moving sidewalk and rode a bit, perhaps a block or so, and then we walked some more and finally we got to where they let you pick up your luggage, providing that they haven’t lost it.

While we were waiting for my bag we talked about the weather, which Guerriero said had been mild and warm and when I told him about the snow that had hit most of the East Coast last week he said that he hadn’t had much to do with snow since he left Dartmouth a couple of years ago.

“You’re not going to school now?” I said.

“No, I don’t think I’ll go back until after the election.”

“What election?”

“The presidential one.”

“That’s this year.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m trying to decide who to hook up with.”

“Mickey mentioned that you were interested in politics.

Guerriero grinned. “Did he say that I was a political junkie? He usually does.”

“I think he might have said something like that.”

“I started eight years ago when I was fifteen. I was up in New Hampshire with Gene.”

“McCarthy?”

“Yeah.”

“It seems longer ago than that.”

“Yeah, it does, doesn’t it? Then I was in Chicago for the convention and I damned near got killed there. Then I went down to Mississippi for Humphrey and that was one fuckin’ lost cause. After that I came back out here and started at UCLA, but by 1970 I was organizing full-time for the peace movement and I was at Kent State when all the crap happened. After that I spend a year at Georgetown and worked in a congressman’s office part-time and then I hooked up with McGovern and went back up to New Hampshire and then out to Minnesota and when he got clobbered, I tried Dartmouth for a while, but I didn’t like the weather so I quit and transferred to Texas down in Austin and worked a congressional campaign down there in ’74 and then went to Vegas for a while.”

“What’d you do in Vegas?”

“Whatever they thought was necessary. I didn’t happen to agree with their idea of necessity, so I quit. But I did get a good look at the slimier side of life, if you’re interested in that kind of thing. From what Mickey tells me, that’s sort of the side of the street you work.”

“Sort of,” I said.

“You interested in politics?”

“I vote,” I said. “But that’s about all — unless you count a growing feeling of despair.”

He nodded understanding. “A lot of guys your age feel that way.”

When my bag arrived I let him carry it so that I could save my strength. At my age, I might need it. We crossed over to a parking lot and stopped in front of a green Ford van.

“Is this it?” I said.

“Uh-huh.” He opened the rear door and put the bag in. “I’ve sort of fixed it up inside,” he said.

I looked. There was a deep green shag rug on the floor. A raised section supported a thick slab of foam rubber that was long enough and wide enough to serve as either a bed or a couch. A yellow throw rug covered most of the foam rubber. Opposite the bed was a small butane stove that rested on a two-shelf wooden stand that was filled with canned goods, a skillet, a pot, some plates and glasses, and a miscellaneous collection of kitchen utensils. A portable cooler rested on the floor next to the shelves and the stove. On some hooks that came off the wall were three or four hangers that held a sports coat, a couple of pairs of slacks, and a few shirts. I noticed that there was more storage space in a couple of deep drawers that were cleverly fitted into the platform that held the bed.

“You use it to go camping in?” I said.

Guerriero shrugged as he closed the door. “Sometimes,” he said. “Sometimes when I’m broke I live in it. They’re handy for a lot of things.” He grinned again. “I guess that’s why they sometimes call them fuck trucks.”

I felt even older as I went around the van and got into the passenger’s seat. Guerriero slid behind the wheel, started the engine, and backed out.

“I need someplace to stay,” I said.

“You want a hotel or a motel?”

I thought about it. “A motel, I think.”

“There’s a small one on La Brea that’s pretty good,” he said.

“Okay.”

Past the airport, Guerriero got on to the San Diego freeway going north and then switched to the Santa Monica freeway and we went east for a while. He drove the way that a lot of Californians drive, with smooth, easy motions and careful attention to the rear-view mirror.

On La Brea we went north for almost a mile and then turned into what was called the Riverside motel, although I had seen no evidence of a river anywhere. It was a typical cinder-block affair, painted blue and run by a tired-looking man in his fifties whose only question was whether I’d be staying more than one night. When I said that I would, he seemed mildly pleased. At least he smiled a little.

Guerriero carried my bag into the motel room and helped me inspect the bath and the bed. There was one of each and everything looked fairly clean and fairly new and about as cozy as a hospital room.

“Is it okay?” he said.

“It’s fine.”

“What time do you want me to come by tomorrow?”

“Make it about nine-thirty.”

“Where do you think we might go?”

“I’m not sure yet,” I said. “Why?”

“No reason. Just curious.”

“I’ll know by nine-thirty.”

“Okay,” he said and started for the door. He paused and said, “Well, have a good night,” and then he was gone.

I unpacked my bag and then fixed a drink. I drank it sitting there in a chair that was covered in lime green plastic. There must be far lonelier spots than a cheap motel room in a strange city after midnight, but just then I couldn’t think of any.