The Porkchoppers

5

A little over five blocks away that September afternoon in Washington, in another hotel, a cheaper one at the corner of Fourteenth and K, Samuel Morse Hanks was having a fit.

It was really more of a tantrum than a fit, but he was lying on the floor, face down, pounding his fists into the carpet and screaming something that sounded like “cawg.” He screamed it over and over while the spit trickled down his chin. Four men sat around in chairs and watched him with expressions that registered a little interest, if not much concern.

The bed and bureau had been removed from the hotel room and now it contained a scarred wooden desk that looked rented and was, a couch, eight or nine folding gray metal chairs with padded seats, two telephones, one of them with an outside line, and a green metal filing cabinet whose drawers were doubly secured by a built-in combination lock and a metal bar that ran through their handles and that was fastened at the top with a padlock that looked tricky.

The room was one of twelve on the hotel’s third floor that had been rented as its campaign headquarters by the Rank and File Committee whose candidate for union president now lay on the floor, pounding the carpet with his fists, and screeching the word that sounded like “cawg” again and again.

Finally, one of the four men stubbed out his cigarette, rose, and walked over to where Sammy Hanks lay screaming. He nudged Hanks in the shoulder with the toe of his shoe. “All right, Sammy,” he said, “you’ve had your fun.”

The screams stopped. “For Christ’s sake, get up and go wash your face,” the man said. “You’ve slobbered all over it.”

Sammy Hanks pushed himself up to a kneeling position, hiccupped once, and then rose to his feet. Saliva glistened on his jutting chin that at one in the afternoon already looked as though it needed a shave. Hanks glared at the four men, three of them white and one black. “You know what you bastards are?” he said.

The black man, the one who had shown the least concern while Hanks lay screaming on the floor, smiled lazily and said, “What are we, Sammy?”

“You’re fuckin pathetic, that’s what,” he said, snarling the words so that their tone nicely matched his scowl. Before any of the men could reply, he turned quickly and darted into the bathroom, making sure to slam the door.

The four men looked at each other, exchanging glances of exasperated commiseration. The one who had nudged Hanks with a toe sat back down and lit another cigarette.

The four men were near enough in age and size and demeanor almost to have been cut from the same pattern. They were all in their late thirties or early forties, bigger than average, all of them over six feet, carrying a little too much fat, with shrewd eyes set in seamed faces that weren’t aging well, especially the black’s, whose face looked as if it had been hastily chiseled out of some dark, porous stone.

Although the four men did not look pathetic, they did look wary, as if they had made some dubious bet that there was no way to hedge. They were, in fact, the porkchoppers in charge of the palace revolt, the highly paid professionals who would be out of a job if they lost. So if they had nothing to say to one another now, it was because it had all been said before when they had first decided to put their jobs and careers on the line, knowing all about Sammy Hanks and his tantrums and his mercurial moods that could jitter from hard, bright cheerfulness to raging despair and back again in less than fifteen minutes.

The black man had said it all when they were discussing Sammy Hank’s candidacy six months before. “Okay,” the black had said, “so he’s a manic-depressive, but he’s our manic-depressive and he’s sure as shit the only one who’s got a chance of beating Cubbin.”

After that, there really hadn’t been much more to say although each of them, alone and a little afraid with his dark night thoughts, had wondered about the gamble he had made and whether he was really willing to risk his $30,000-a-year job that had provided the house and the pool and the GGG suits and the boat and the cars and all the rest of the crap that was supposed to be the answer to everything, but which had turned out to be just something else that you had to take out insurance on.

The four men not only looked something alike, but they thought, or rationalized, alike and each of them, by much the same method, had convinced himself that he had made the right decision. You could always get another house or car or boat or even a wife, if it came to that. But if you were a man of limited education but quick intelligence, and afflicted with gut-twisting ambition, then you realized that they only invite you once to where the quick boys play and if you don’t accept that invitation, they seldom send another.

While the four men sat around in the hotel room and looked at the carpet and the desk and at everything else except each other, Sammy Hanks held the end of a bath towel under the cold water tap and wondered why it was that most hotels never supplied any goddamned facecloths or washcloths or whatever you called them. We called them wash rags when I was a kid, he thought, and that should tell anyone all they’d ever need to know about me.

He used the wet end of the towel to wash the spittle from his face and the other end to dry himself with. As he looked in the mirror he thought what he had always thought since he was six or seven years old, You’re the ugliest goddamned person in the world.

He may well have been among the top ten contenders. Whenever he and the strikingly handsome Donald Cubbin appeared on the same public platform, someone always made a crack about beauty and the beast.

For one thing, Hanks’s head was too large for his short, slight body. The head would have been nicely proportionate if it had rested on the neck and shoulders of someone who was at least six-and-a-half-feet tall. It would have looked in proper proportion then, but it still would have been ugly.

Hanks also had bad skin. It had started when he was six, a virulent, precocious kind of acne that had persisted through adolescence and on into maturity, the despair of an endless series of dermatologists. A full beard could have been an answer, except that when he tried to grow one it grew in a crazy-quilt pattern that made him look even worse.

Another personal tragedy was his nose, an enormous pink pickle that dived down toward his chin that seemed to be jumping up to meet it, especially when he talked. It was the acne-splotched face of an aging Punch whose mud-colored eyes were set much too far apart and which were guarded over by thick, black eyebrows that looked like shoe brushes.

It was Hanks’s mouth that saved him, or rather the smile that the mouth formed. The smile warmed you. It made you feel delightfully superior because only you had the gumption to like such an ugly man. More important, you wanted him to like you. Sammy Hanks knew what his smile did and he used it often.

When Hanks came out of the bathroom he crossed to the desk and settled himself behind it, no more discomfited by the exhibition he had provided a few minutes before than if one of the men in the room had mentioned that his fly was unzipped.

“All right,” he said, “let’s start all over. Let’s have those results again.”

The man who had nudged Hanks with the toe of his shoe sighed and took a sheet of paper from his inside breast pocket. His name was Art Olkes and he was Northeast Regional Director, which meant he was the union’s liege lord for everything north of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

“I’ll start with the Northeast again,” Olkes said.

Hanks nodded. “Fine.”

“You’ve got forty-five percent, Cubbin’s got forty-four, eleven percent undecided. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“The Mid-Atlantic,” Olkes said. That was everything south of Pennsylvania and New Jersey down to and including Alabama. “You’ve got forty-two percent, Cubbin’s got forty-eight percent. Ten percent undecided.”

“Okay,” Hanks said. “We’ll give him the South.”

“Pennsylvania, Jersey, Ohio, and West Virginia, the Upper Midwest Region.”

“The big one,” Hanks said.

“You’ve got forty-three percent, Cubbin’s got forty-four. Thirteen percent still undecided.”

“That’s not so bad,” Hanks said.

“You want the West Coast now?” Olkes said.

“Yeah, give us that now.”

The West Coast Region was everything west of Pueblo, Colorado. “You’re leading,” Olkes said, “forty-seven to forty-three with ten percent who haven’t got enough sense to make up their minds.” Hanks merely nodded.

“All right,” Olkes said, “here’s the Midwest Region again.” The Midwest Region was everything west of Ohio to Pueblo. “You’re behind there, like I said, forty-one to forty-eight with eleven percent don’t-knows.”

Sammy Hanks nodded again and looked at each of the men in turn. He smiled because he knew it would make them feel better if he did. When he spoke, he made his tone that of a reasonable man who is trying to explain a simple idea. He was all charm and he knew it.

“Then it works out like this, doesn’t it? I’ll take the Northeast and the West Coast and Cubbin will get the Mid-Atlantic and the Upper Midwest. If he takes the Midwest itself, he wins; if I take it, I win. The Midwest is Chicago and I’m by God not going to lose Chicago, is that clear?”

The black man stirred in his chair, crossed his legs, and cleared his throat. Hanks glanced at him. “Do you want to talk or spit?”

“Talk,” he said.

Hanks made his big head nod abruptly once more. “Go ahead.”

The black was Marvin Harmes, thirty-seven, and the youngest man in the room. He was regional director of the union fief known as the Midwest which mostly meant Chicago and the industrial towns that lay just outside it in Indiana.

In 1964, when many still thought that there would be a somehow happy ending to the nation’s racial turmoil, Donald Cubbin had decided to appoint a black to the next high-echelon vacancy in the union. It seemed like such a good idea that he even mentioned it during a television interview. The vacancy he had in mind, however, was in the union’s research or legal departments, not in the center of its power structure.

Unfortunately, three days after he made the statement, the incumbent Midwest Regional Director, an elderly Irishman, had taken drunk and rolled his Cadillac over eight times halfway between South Bend and Gary. A diligent labor reporter on the Chicago Sun-Times called Cubbin on his promise and so, as Cubbin later put it, “there was nothing to do but look around for a house nigger.”

Marvin Harmes had been the choice, and doubtless a superior one, except that he detested Donald Cubbin and was now one of Sammy Hanks’s most partisan supporters. Harmes despised Cubbin for having chosen him as regional director because he was a black. If Sammy Hanks had done the choosing, Harmes would have been supporting Cubbin. Harmes didn’t have much faith in happy endings for anything.

“It was like I was saying before when you—” Harmes stopped and started over. “It was like I was saying before. I admit the Midwest looks dicey just now. Forty-eight to forty-one percent’s a big lead for Cubbin, if that poll’s right. But hell, we haven’t even started yet. I can put fifty guys to work tomorrow, real arm twisters. And besides, we’ve got almost six weeks to—”

“Five weeks,” Hanks said.

“Okay, five weeks. I can change a whole lot of minds in five weeks.”

“You think you can?”

Harmes frowned. “Look, Sammy, I’ve got just as much riding on this as you do.”

“I know. That’s why I asked you.”

“Well, I’m telling you it can be done.”

Hanks turned to one of the four men who was noisily stripping a cigar of its cellophane wrapper. He was Emil Lorks, a vice-president of the union who lived in West Los Angeles in a house with a pool, two Russian wolf hounds, and his wife. As a vice-president of the steel union, Lorks drew only about $10,000 a year in per diem and expenses. His principal income, around $27,000, came from his job as business agent of a large, rich local whose base was a relatively new and gigantic fabricating plant about twenty miles east of Los Angeles. Lorks was up for reelection and he was worried about his chances.

“Well, Emil?” Hanks said.

Lorks’s hair was still a pale, fine blond and he liked to wear it a little long so that it lapped over his shirt collar. He stuck the cigar in his mouth, tipped his chair back, looked up at the ceiling, and patted his hair. He was stalling for time so that he could think of how to agree with Sammy Hanks without getting the nigger mad. He was a damned good nigger, but he sometimes went off half cocked. “I think,” Lorks said slowly, “that we oughta do both. Now just think about it a minute. If we do both, we can’t lose.”

Lorks shifted his glance from the ceiling to the men in the room. Hanks was nodding. Harmes was impassive. Olkes looked vaguely impressed. The fifth man in the room was also the oldest. Like Lorks, he was a vice-president up for reelection. He was also business agent of one of the big Pittsburgh locals that paid him nearly $27,000 a year for his services. He got another $10,000 a year from the union in per diem and expenses. He lived in a seven-room apartment with his wife and nineteen-year-old son who was studying piano and didn’t seem to like girls much, which worried his father whose real name had been Zbigniew Kowalczewski until he had had it legally changed to Ziggy Kowal. He knew over three hundred Polish jokes and he told at least twenty of them in every speech he made.

The four other men in the room were now looking at Ziggy Kowal. In what Lorks had said he sniffed a compromise that would satisfy everyone, keep the nigger happy, and Sammy from wiggling around on the floor again. And it wasn’t a bad idea either, Kowal thought, and decided to make a little speech about it.

“Well, you guys know that there’s nothing dumber than a dumb polack and the dumbest polacks in the world work in the plants around Chicago.”

“We got some pretty dumb niggers up there, too,” Harmes said softly.

“They ain’t as dumb as us polacks. Well, I was up there a week ago as you all know and I was trying to find out how they were gonna vote. Now I don’t know what your poll says about ’em, Sammy, but from what they told me they’re all gonna go for Cubbin. Now that’s a sizable chunk of votes and maybe we can change their minds in five weeks and maybe we can’t. I’m not sure we can because they’re so goddamned stubborn. But like Harmes and Lorks said, we oughta try. But I also think we oughta take out a little insurance so that’s why I’m willing to go along with Sammy.”

Sammy Hanks let the silence that followed grow for a few moments. Then he turned to Olkes. “Well?”

Olkes shrugged. “I guess we’d better do both, like Emil says.”

The last man that Hanks needed consent from was Harmes, the one who would have to do it. “Marvin?” Hanks said.

Harmes shrugged. “It’s gonna cost,” he said.

“Everything costs,” Hanks said. “So we’re agreed. We run a real tough campaign around Chicago. But like Ziggy says we take out insurance.”

“Don’t fancy it up, Sammy,” Harmes said. “Just say it out plain what it is you want me to do around Chicago.”

The scowl came back on Hanks’s face. “All right, goddamnit, I want you to steal the fuckin election.”

“I just wanted to hear you say it plain,” Harmes said.