The file room was in a second-floor office, and the egress was down a winding staircase far too narrow to even consider using a hand truck. Bobby and I handled the first lateral down fairly smoothly, but there was no place to really grab the piece, and our sweaty forearms and hands made the seamless metal slippery. I couldn’t believe two guys were lifting something this heavy, this bulky, this slippery, down and around a flight of stairs. I was on the bottom, of course. Bobby might have taken me under his wing, but he wasn’t going to make things easy for me. Any giving way on the piece going down would have been instant death. We’d only just started, and already my arms were in agony. I was scared, and we had forty-four more laterals to bring down. I dropped the second lateral just before we got to the lip of the stairs, and the metal edge carved a crimson serpent down the inside of my forearm. First blood, I remember thinking, as Bobby whisked me to the men’s room to stanch the bleeding. Little Al grabbed some paper towels and tried to wipe the blood off the carpet. At this, the boys took pity on me, or more likely didn’t want any more blood sprayed over the shipper’s office, so they assigned me to lug banker’s boxes from the top of the stairs out to the truck.
My equally green colleague Gary Rogers was with me, and we commiserated together on how different this was from what we had expected. There were still forty-three more lateral files to be brought down, and my overriding thought was that they would be brought down. Everyone on the crew realized that this job was a bitch, but nobody ever considered not doing it. When you hired movers, they moved it. Execution was the imperative. This unequivocation was very attractive to me then, as it is now.
We finished loading at noon, piled into the truck, and drove over to Billy Graves’s West End Tavern on Fairfield Avenue for lunch. The boys ate at Billy’s whenever they were in Stamford because the beers were cheap, the service fast, and there was a big fenced-in parking lot in the back so John Callahan wouldn’t see the truck if he happened to be driving around. It had recently become a dismissible offense to drink on the job at Callahan’s. This constituted a huge break in tradition. The shift had been caused by the workers’ vote to join the Teamsters Union a few months before; John Callahan felt betrayed, and since there was already language in the Teamster contract about alcohol use on the clock, John decided to enforce it verbatim. From one day to the next, anyone caught drinking would be immediately fired. This didn’t change anything really. Everyone drank just as much and just as often, but now they had to hide their beers and find lunch taverns with enclosed parking lots.
In the preunion days, lunch would always be at a bar. On particularly tough jobs, John Callahan himself was known to show up late in the day with a case of beer for the crew. On road trips, it was the job of the guy in the shotgun seat to prepare a thermos of cocktails for the driver. At the end of a move, the shipper always offered us beer. Often our work would take us into New York City, which required a 7 a.m. start. At 7:20 we’d get off I-95 in Pelham and stop at Arthur’s Bar and drink a couple or three screwdrivers before heading into Manhattan. As far as I could tell, the moving business floated on an ocean of alcohol.
Lunch at Billy Graves’s was a frenetic affair. I had a bag of chips and kept drinking the beers that appeared in front of me. I was pretty shell-shocked by the morning’s work, so I didn’t really register the orgy of engorgement some of my colleagues were engaged in. It was as if someone had set a stopwatch and said, “OK, guys, you have thirty minutes, so get her done!” Jimmy ate nothing but drank at least seven beers. Richie ordered three calzones and drank four beers while waiting for them, drank two more beers while wolfing them down, and then drank two beers for dessert. Everyone else dined in a similar manner.
Someone had evidently told TC that maybe I’d better take it easy in the afternoon, because after lunch I was sent with Billy Belcher, Gary, and Ralph to work a small local job. Billy knew it was my first day and that the temperature was above ninety, so he sent me up to the attic to clean out chowder.
Now I grew up in an old Victorian house. It didn’t have an attic. I’d never even seen an attic, certainly never been in one, and definitely never been in one in the middle of a hot day, after a morning of killing work, after drinking four beers at lunch on an empty stomach, and after being gently hazed by a bunch of work-worn movers, most of whom knew me as one of the skinny, hollow-chested, wiseasses from Dan’s. So I didn’t know there was only Sheetrock between the rafters in an attic.
I grabbed one of those plastic clothes storage hanger things to bring downstairs, stepped between the rafters, heard a crash, and opened my eyes to find myself lying on the king-size master bed one floor below clutching the clothes hanger in a tight embrace. Looking up I could see in the sheetrock the jagged outline of a human form in free fall. Billy Belcher heard the crash and came running upstairs to the attic. He couldn’t find me and came down and saw me lying on the bed, fully involved with the clothes hanger, and observed: “Good thing these people are moving out and not in.” Gary Rogers went up to finish the attic. Billy went to call the office.
We finished loading and stopped at the warehouse, where I cowered in the truck trying to make myself invisible. Billy Belcher came back from a brief conclave with management and told me everything was going to be OK, but I needed to relax and slow down. We then drove over to the shipper’s destination house to unload. Billy told me to open the truck’s side doors to get a little air into the hot truck. I went around to the side and studied the door latch for a long time. Slow down. Relax. I figured out the door latch and opened the side door an inch or two. I had the matter well in hand. It was only a matter of applied main force to get some air to my sweating comrades. I pulled the door a little harder and it gave a little more. That’s the ticket, I thought, and I yanked hard. The door had given way another eight inches or so when someone yelled, “Stop!” I stopped. As is standard procedure, Billy Belcher had secured all the paintings and mirrors tightly together against the truck wall, using the strap and clip that fits into grooves along the sides. One of the clips was attached to the side door. By pulling on the door I had tightened the strap against all of the glass. By yanking on the door I had broken three mirrors, four picture frames, and the top of an antique vanity.
Billy told me to take it easy, smoke a cigarette, and fold some moving pads. Gary Rogers cleaned up the broken glass while Ralph scowled at me. Taking it easy, folding pads, and smoking cigarettes was evidently his job. Billy went to make another phone call.
John Callahan came out in his car to survey the damage and then drove me back to the warehouse. It was a long, quiet ride, though comfortable because John had the AC cranked up high. In fact it was the coolest I’d been all day. John was pensive and silent. We drove into the warehouse yard, and he told me to park his car and then collapse the empty moving cartons on the loading dock and put them in the dumpster. This I accomplished without incident, and frankly, I was rather proud of myself.