On the appointed day I left my house at 7:30 a.m. for the ten-minute walk to Callahan Bros. It was humid and hot; one of those June days when the early morning temperature is hovering around eighty-five, giving you a slapping reminder of the brutal summer weather on the way. I hadn’t slept much the night before because I didn’t want to be late for my first day as a mover.
I arrived at Callahan’s at twenty to eight, and though I was early, Bobby Rich, one of the regular guys, was already there. He said, “Hi, Murph,” and looked me over as I tentatively hovered near the time clock. He asked me if I was there to service John’s car, and I swelled with pride and said no, I was coming to work for Callahan’s. Bobby nodded, showed me how to punch in, including how to hit the punch button before the ten-minute click so I’d be paid from 7:50 instead of 8:00, and led me downstairs to the employee room. It was a humble place permeated with the smell of cardboard boxes, which I’ll take to my dying day. There was a ten-seat poker table in the corner with a Masonite cover topped with porn magazines and ashtrays. Everybody smoked. Bobby sat at the table, and when I went to sit down next to him he directed me to the sprung sofa against the wall. I may have been wearing a Callahan shirt, but I hadn’t earned a place at the big table.
The guys began to trickle in, and I could hear the thump of work boots and the click of the time clock as each worker came through the door upstairs. Down they came: Little Al, the resident Mephistopheles; Ralph, the laziest drunk in southeastern Connecticut; Cuzzie, a teetotal cousin of John’s from Stamford; Billy Belcher, called Bull; Richie, a huge taciturn kid they called the Gentle Giant; Jimmy, the policeman, who could drink more beer than any three men; Howard and Joe, the two black men; David, the overweight son of the boss, christened by Little Al as The Incredible Bulk; and a couple of other part-timers. All the regulars, including Howard and Joe, sat at the poker table.
In addition to me there was another new guy that day: a seven-foot two-inch colossus named Gary Rogers. I knew Gary vaguely from Little League, where he had been the home run king. When I looked at Gary I realized how little I was bringing to this moving game. I was small for my age, chicken-chested, and scared. Gary was massive and confident. He was from a posh family in Old Greenwich, and everything he’d ever done in life had been a rousing success.
TC Almy, the Callahan dispatcher, came down promptly at eight to hand out work assignments. Each assignment was on a clipboard attached to a vinyl case containing basic tools. On top was the bill of lading, which contained the vital information for the job: the address of the shipper, a listing of who was on the crew, the hourly billing rate, the destination address, and an estimate of how much time the move should take.
Moving companies like Callahan’s perform four categories of moving work: local, commercial, long-distance, and international. Callahan’s work was mostly local moving, which entails loading up someone’s house in the morning and then unloading in the afternoon at the new house. It takes the greatest toll on the body because you are handling stuff every working day. Long-haul drivers get plenty of days when they’re just sitting and driving; international moves are almost never time-sensitive, so the pace is easier; and commercial jobs—moving offices around—are mostly done with dollies and elevators. It’s the local stuff that eventually kills you or drives you to drink; more commonly, both.
I was assigned that first morning to work in Little Al’s crew and take part in a big commercial job moving a company from the second floor of a house in Stamford to an office building in Greenwich. The company was called International Aviation, and whatever they did required a lot of paperwork, because they had forty-five lateral file cabinets, all of them full. At a guess I’d say each one weighed 400 pounds.
We arrived at the job late because Little Al had gotten the address wrong. He had extremely poor eyesight but out of misplaced vanity he refused to wear glasses. At five feet five, with a massive beer belly and weighing over 220, he was strange-looking in an off-balance sort of way, like maybe he’d had glandular problems as a kid. He had long muttonchop sideburns, oiled hair going straight back, and a permanent wad of Copenhagen in his lip. Glasses wouldn’t have made much difference to the overall impression he created, which was that of a genial circus dwarf with more than a touch of malice. Little Al’s standard procedure when driving to a shipper’s house was to hand the bill of lading to the guy in the shotgun seat and ask him to read off the address. This usually worked pretty well, except in this case Joe was sitting shotgun. Joe wasn’t much of a reader, so when he read the street address of International Aviation, 2002 Summer Street, he told Al it was “two hundred two.” Half an hour later, when we were sitting in front of the triple-decker tenement at 202 Summer Street, Little Al insisted on looking at the bill of lading. He fished out the glasses he kept for emergencies, read the number 2002, and said, “Joe, what number did you say the shipper was at?”
“Two hundred two.”
“Is this the number?”
“Yup.”
“You call this number two hundred two?”
“Al, don’t you know nothing? Don’t blame me ’cause you’re blind. Two zero zero is two hundred, right?”
“Right, Joe.”
“So two zero zero two is two hundred and two.”
“OK, Joe. Never mind.”
So we were a little late arriving. It was only eight thirty, but it was going to be a scorching hot day when everything shimmers in the distance and dogs and cats find a shady corner somewhere to wait it out. Al handed out work assignments, and, seeing as how the whole crew had known me for years as one of Dan’s candy-ass gas jockeys, I was assigned to the file room. Such work I never imagined. I carried the first lateral file with Bobby Rich. Bobby was short, thick, and about fifty-five years old, and he’d been a mover his whole life