The Porkchoppers

15

While Marvin Harmes was learning how to steal an election in Chicago, the man that he wanted to steal it for was giving a press conference in Washington. It was only the second press conference that Sammy Hanks had called since his campaign began, the first being the inevitable one to announce his candidacy.

This time he was suggesting, urging, and even demanding that Donald Cubbin resign the presidency of the union and quit the race for reelection.

Hanks didn’t really expect to get anywhere with his suggestion except onto the three network news programs that evening and perhaps onto page six or seven of those newspapers who thought that he had enough members among their readers to make the printing of his demand worthwhile.

The basis for Hanks’s demands on Cubbin were the revelations contained in the previous night’s television program, “Jake’s Night,” a transcript of which had been furnished the gathered press along with a prepared statement that Hanks was now reading for the benefit of the TV cameras. Hanks was virtually accusing Cubbin of having sold out the union in exchange for membership in the Federalists Club whose other members were all right-wing, big-business types who hated blacks just like Cubbin did.

Sammy Hanks didn’t say it quite like that, but it was still strong stuff carefully written in an awful, florid style to make sure that it would be both broadcast and printed.

“In summary,” Hanks read, “I must reluctantly call for the resignation of Donald Cubbin as president of this union because of the shocking facts revealed in the television program that I discussed earlier. I charge Donald Cubbin not only with racial bigotry but also with industrial sycophancy—”

“That’s a good word,” the Associated Press man muttered to a reporter from The Wall Street Journal. “The membership will think that old Don’s come down with a new kind of clap.”

“—which endangers the collective bargaining effectiveness of this union. If Donald Cubbin is half the labor statesman that he claims to be, he will resign — for the good of the union, for the good of the country, and for the good of himself. The evidence is perfectly plain—”

“If he’d said ‘crystal clear,’ I’d have given him four points,” the AP man said. “‘Perfectly plain’s’ only a two-point cliché.”

“Why don’t you get a job with Sammy?” The Wall Street Journal reporter said. “I hear he pays well.”

“I already work for a nut,” the AP man said.

“—perfectly plain,” Hanks went on, “that Donald Cubbin intends to drag this great organization of ours down the path to country-club unionism with all the vicious racist overtones which that term implies. This must not happen. This will not happen.”

Sammy Hanks sat down to the scattered applause of a few of his own sycophants who didn’t know any better than to clap at a press conference.

“Who writes this crap for Sammy?” the AP man asked The Wall Street Journal reporter.

“Mickey Della, I guess.”

“I thought so.”

“Why?”

“Only a real pro could make it so bad.”

After answering a few perfunctory questions, the press conference ended and Sammy Hanks left the large hotel room on Fourteenth and K Streets and headed down the hall followed by a heavy, stooped, shambling gray-haired man whose bright blue eyes flittered balefully from behind bifocal glasses with bent steel frames. The man had his usual equipment consisting of a Pall Mall cigarette parked in the corner of his mouth underneath a stained, scraggly gray mustache and a newspaper tucked under his arm. He was never seen without either a cigarette in his mouth or a newspaper under his arm because he was addicted to both. He smoked four packs of Pall Malls a day and bought every edition of every paper published in whatever city or town he happened to be in. If asked about his addiction to newspapers — he could never pass a stand or a street seller without buying one — the man always said, “What the hell, it only costs a dime and where else can you buy that much bullshit for a dime?”

The man was Mickey Della and if you bought him a new suit and got the nicotine stains out of his moustache and had it trimmed and took the cigarette from the corner of his mouth, you could have passed him off as at least a lieutenant of industry, or the beloved president of a small liberal-arts college, or even a United States senator with a trace of common sense.

But Mickey Della was none of these. He was a professional political press agent, or public relations adviser, or flack, or whatever anyone wanted to call him, he didn’t mind, and he was without doubt the most vicious one around and just possibly the best and he felt right at home working for Sammy Hanks.

He had been at it for more than forty years and for him it contained no more surprises, but he was hooked now, as addicted to politics as any mainliner is to heroin. Mickey Della needed politics to live and he lunched on its intrigue and dined on its gossip. Its heartbreak provided him with breakfast.

Della had lost count of the campaigns that he had handled since breaking with the New Deal in 1937 over a matter of pay, not principle. Della didn’t allow himself too many principles, but he always claimed that, “I’ve never worked for a Communist and I never worked for a Fascist, at least none who’d ever admit it, but I’ve worked for damn near everything in between.”

He had run campaigns in New York with a staff of more than a hundred under him and he had run them in Wyoming where there had been no one but himself and the candidate battling the snowdrifts by car between Sheridan and Laramie.

Causes were another Della speciality and he had done professional battle for at least twoscore of them over the years and most of these were so long lost that even their battle cries had been made meaningless by time, cries such as Save Leland Olds! and MVA Now! They hadn’t been popular causes even then because not many people really cared whether Leland Olds was reappointed to such a vague governing body as the Federal Power Commission, whatever that was, or whether the Missouri Valley was developed along the lines of the Tennessee Valley Authority although some people thought it might be nice.

Lumping causes and candidates together, Della estimated that he was hitting around.650 and this kept up the demand for his services, which didn’t come cheap. He had learned to use radio in the thirties and television in the fifties and he used them skillfully in a nasty, clever way that assured maximum impact plus the added bonus of the newspaper stories and outraged editorials that his commercials invariably inspired.

But Della remained essentially a newspaperman, a muck-raker, an exposer of vice and wrongdoing, a viewer with alarm who had never quite got over the feeling that almost any evil could be cured by ninety-point headlines. And that was the principal reason that he was working for Sammy Hanks, because it was going to be a print campaign, as dirty, nasty, vicious, and lowdown as one could hope for and since it might possibly be the last such campaign ever held, Mickey Della would almost have paid to be in on it. Instead, he had lowered his usual fee of $66,789 to $61,802. Della always quoted his fee in precise amounts because he figured that exactitude served as a balm to the people who had to pay the bill.

As Hanks and Della strode down the hall followed by the usual bunch of hangers-on Hanks turned his ugly head and asked, “How’d I do?”

“You were peachy.”

“Jesus, you sure know how to boost a guy’s morale.”

“You’re not paying me to hold your hand.”

“Well, what about your professional assessment? I’m sure as hell paying for that.”

“Let’s sit down first. All this standing around and walking’s killing my feet.”

Exercise was Mickey Della’s only bane. The prospect of a six-block walk could send him into a deep depression. He had been known to take a cab to cross the street, but it had been Constitution Avenue, which is a wide street, and besides it had been raining.

At the door to his hotel-room office Hanks stopped and turned to look at the group that was following him. “Why don’t you guys go find something useful to do? The circus is over.”

“You were really great, Sammy,” one of the men said.

“You sure laid into ’em,” another said.

“Old Don’s gonna be stewing tonight.”

The only one in the six-man group who didn’t say anything was Howard Fleer, a tall, thin man in his early forties with brown eyes so sad that they seemed to hurt. He stood a little away from the others as though the slight distance would lend him an identity of his own and disassociate him from their claquish sounds. Fleer was a painfully shy man whose chief concern was that no one would ever notice him doing anything unseemly. Consequently most people didn’t notice him at all and that was precisely why Sammy Hanks had picked him as his running mate for secretary-treasurer.

“You said you needed to see Howard?” Hanks said to Della.

“For just a moment.”

“Howard, you come on in with us. The rest of you guys go drink some booze or something.”

Once inside the room Hanks sat behind his desk, Della sprawled on the couch, and Fleer stood hesitantly by the door as if poised to flee should someone say an unkind word. He was a candidate for secretary-treasurer because the union’s constitution required that Sammy Hanks have one and Hanks had carefully picked the one man who would never threaten him as he was now threatening Donald Cubbin. Whenever anyone objected to Fleer’s candidacy on the grounds that he had never worked with his hands in a plant, Hanks would answer, “Why the fuck should a bookkeeper get his hands dirty?”

“What’d you wanta see Howard about?” Hanks asked Della.

“I need five hundred bucks for that little girl in Cleveland.”

“I thought you already paid her.”

“Out of my own pocket, Sammy.”

“Give him five hundred, Howard.”

Fleer nodded and took a fat wallet from his inside coat pocket. He counted out five one-hundred-dollar bills and handed them to Mickey Della who stuffed them in his trouser pocket. Fleer replaced the wallet and took out a small notebook and started to write something down.

“What the Christ are you doing?” Hanks said.

“Just making a note of it.”

“Of what?”

“Of the five hundred I gave Mr. Della.”

“Mickey,” Della said. “It’s not hard to call me Mickey and I don’t like being called Mr. Della by the bagman. It makes me uncomfortable.”

“What kind of note are you gonna make by the five hundred dollars?” Hanks said. “Are you gonna write down: Mickey Della, five hundred dollars for bribes?”

“For reimbursable expenses,” Fleer said.

“You know what Mickey spent that five hundred on?”

“I think so.”

“What?”

“On information about the Cubbin letter to A. Richard Gammage,” Fleer said.

“Don’t fancy it up, Howard. Mickey spent five hundred dollars to bribe a file clerk in Gammage International to Xerox a copy of that Cubbin letter and hand it over to us and us means me, Mickey, and you. Now that’s where that five hundred went and I don’t want any note made about it.”

“Yes, well, we have to have some records, Sammy.”

“We sure as hell don’t have to have any records about how much we paid out in bribes.”

“It was merely for my own information,” Fleer said.

“He knows what he’s doing,” Della said. “He’s the head chef when it comes to cooking the books so you’d better just let him cook them his way.”

“Well, we might as well have a little talk about money right here and now,” Hanks said. “Sit down someplace, Howard.”

Fleer moved from the door to one of the folding chairs. He perched on it stiffly, his hands in his lap, and looked apprehensively at Hanks. It’s his negotiating look, Hanks decided. He looks like that when we’re negotiating and the companies think they have a real dummy and then he starts reeling off the facts and figures that cuts their balls off and he sounds and looks like he’s apologizing for the dullness of the knife. “So how do we stand?” Hanks said.

“Overall?” Fleer said.

“Yeah.”

“Well, nearly all of the bank money has been channeled to the twenty Rank and File Committees that we set up. The committees are sending the money to us in bits and pieces as we advised. The total so far is approximately three hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“How much more is due?”

“Fifty thousand from the bank in Los Angeles.”

“What’s their hang-up?”

“None really. It’s just that I had to supply them with the names of fifty people that their... uh... intermediary could distribute the money to and who would then send it to various committees as individual contributions.”

“And you found them?”

“Yes.”

“What else is due?”

“About one hundred thousand from those who’ve received loans from the pension fund.”

“Is that certain?”

“Quite certain.”

“Anything else?”

“We’ve collected approximately twenty-seven thousand, five hundred from locals and individual members. I don’t think we’re going to get much more.”

“What do you mean we’re not gonna get much more?”

Fleer looked embarrassed. He clasped his hands tightly and made his body go rigid so that he wouldn’t squirm. I hate personal conflict, he thought. I hate it when people are rude and impolite and yell at each other. I hate these two men here because they thrive on conflict and I don’t understand why. God, I wish I were dead. Fleer usually wished for death at least a dozen times a day. “There isn’t going to be much more in the way of contributions from locals and individuals,” he said, “because, well, because they simply don’t seem interested.”

“In me?” said Hanks who always had to relate everything to himself as quickly as possible.

“In the election,” Fleer said. “From what I hear, Cub-bin’s having the same trouble.”

“We’re going to have to stir them up,” Mickey Della said. “You get a good, nasty fight going and they’ll get interested.”

“Maybe,” Fleer said, which was as close as he could ever come to dissent.

“Well, how much money can we count on from all sources?” Hanks said.

“A little over five hundred thousand,” Fleer said.

“And that’s it?”

Fleer nodded. “That is the absolute maximum.”

Hanks looked at Della. “Is that enough for what you’re going to do?”

Mickey Della studied the ceiling for a few moments as he puffed on his cigarette. “If that’s all you can raise,” he said, “then that’s all I’ll spend.”