Sam had left the union years earlier when it was under communist domination, preferring to work for peanuts on his own. But now it was the 1950s and he wanted back in. So there he is in the large office of Rarback, who is facing him behind his large desk. He is genuinely delighted to see my father. They remember each other from the old days when Rarback was a burly young rebel who served as Leon Trotsky’s bodyguard during his brief stay in NY—before Trotsky headed to Mexico, where Stalin’s ice-pick awaited him. He eyes my father with a combination of warmth and veiled contempt. But the nostalgia wins out.
“Still at it, eh Sam? The Wobblies, the old days! I know what you think, seeing me here ‘taking Pie.’ Big office, good money, soft.” He grows passionate now, leans forward. “But Sam, let me tell you, I’m the same man. When those barricades go up, you’ll see me there!”
In the course of waiting for those barricades to go up, Martin Rarback came under criminal indictment for being neck deep in corruption. The inexcusable part to Sam was that Trotsky’s former bodyguard, who now lived at a lofty twin towers Central Park West address, took kickbacks for having his men work under substandard, dangerous conditions. He considered him a depraved person.
This is as good a time as any to mention that Sam had guts—a quality of his that I discovered in a strange way when I burst home from school one ordinary day to find him in bed, in fetal position, wrapped in blankets, shivering violently, and Mother draped over him, cradling him in her arms. Sun streamed in through their bedroom windows. It was broad daylight. Sam was never home at this time and never in bed. I was eleven years old.
He had been brought home by two of the men on the job. Seems he had cleaned his arms and neck with a rag soaked in benzene; that is how you removed the oil-based paint. But he had neglected to dry himself thoroughly and lit a cigarette, which ignited his right arm in flames. It was a revolting scene and as his flesh started to roast, some of the men started to gag and vomit from the odor. And in those seconds when he could have burned to death he extended his flaming arm outward—horizontal to the ground—and walked calmly to the other end of the large room, some thirty feet, and thrust it into a pile of sand. The men said they had never seen anything like it.
Sam went into shock; he could not stop shivering. Then he caught the flu and it took him ten days to get back to work. Not once did he mention the incident to us.
Old-fashioned guts: intestinal fortitude. The second time I was surprised to find him home in the afternoon involved high scaffold work—which he was wary of, and took only when there was nothing else to feed us. Far above the pavement, some ten stories up, he discovered the hard way that his partner, a new man, did not know how to tie the security knots. The scaffold turned into a lever, which rotated in a vicious arc, and threw the man off. Desperately, he hung on to the scaffold, torso and feet dangling, rigid with fear. As happens in New York, a crowd materialized in an instant to stare upward at the unfolding horror. Sam was at the pivot point twenty feet or so above the new man. He, too, had been knocked off balance and clung to the vertical cable. Somehow, he got to the new man, spoke to him gently, and holding him firmly, guiding him, managed to slide the two of them down the cable to the ground. The audience clapped, which was nice, then dispersed.
I remember his hands that day. The cables had sheared off a lifetime of calluses, and left them red, smooth, and painful. But the interesting thing to me now, as I write this, was his response: he got on the scaffold the next morning. And he took the new man, a Dominican immigrant, up with him after a stern talking to, and taught him the ropes. The man explained he was desperate for the work and had lied about his experience, thinking he could pick up what to do by watching Sam. All Sam had to hear was that the man was desperate for the work.
I think it is self-evident that Sam’s life strategy was not designed for economic advancement. You can add to that his refusal to take unemployment insurance for many years because he thought it charity from an institution he opposed: the State. Nor would he accept a tip or bonus, which he thought demeaned him. He put food on the table with back-breaking labor. Mostly he painted the decrepit apartments of the crumbling nineteenth-century tenements in our neighborhood. He was a superb old-fashioned craftsman: able, in the age before hi-tech, to match colors perfectly; even those that have faded from exposure over the years. He knew how to plaster, spackle, provide primer coating, and otherwise prepare a wall before actually applying the finishing paint that you see. It was incredible the way he could cover one-quarter of a wall with a single dip of the brush and long seemingly effortless strokes of his right arm—all to the rhythm of a Wobbly tune that he exhaled faintly, as unconscious to him as the Hebrew prayers were to his sleeping father.
I have often asked myself why a man able to destroy a trained trial lawyer in public debate was no match for a slumlord who wanted him on the cheap. Sam was incapable of bargaining effectively on his own behalf. They sensed his need. He always gave in, consistently underestimating the time element, especially in the winter months when pickings were lean. “Boys, go help your father,” Mother would say to us as he toiled late into the night. Abe and I would find him on the top floor of a forsaken tenement somewhere, a naked light bulb revealing him in coveralls on a rickety ladder, long shadows dancing across the walls. The wide open windows and the piercing cold did not hide the oily paint smell, which triggered my gag reflex, nor did it prevent choking from the fucking dust everywhere. I hated being in the room. But I can still sense my father’s simple pleasure at having his two boys, his sons, by his side in the night.
This lasted about three minutes. He did not want us anywhere near what he had to do. “Go home, boys,” he’d say. “Tell your mother, ‘Soon, not to worry.’”
“Soon” stretched to the incipient morning light.
In 1948, Sam painted the home of a Mrs. Harris, which required an interminable subway and bus journey “to the country”—that is, to far away Jamaica, Queens. I was dumbfounded that she and her family occupied an entire house, and that grass and trees grew in front and in back of the house! Every Saturday morning, for months after the agreed-upon work was completed, there came the dreaded Harris phone call in a whining, wheedling accent that grated like chalk on a blackboard:
“Sammy, pleees, one more thing…”
The woman was insatiable—a tapeworm of demands. Like shit on my poor father’s shoe, there was no shaking her off! Mother loathed her. Still, Mrs. Harris kept calling to extract every ounce of advantage from my father’s hide. She smelled his essential decency, his good heart, his inability to say “no.”
The Harris Job passed into family lore. Abe shared Sam’s mordant wit and it became a running joke, a bond of affection between them.
“Finish the Harris Job yet, Sam?” he’d ask whenever he came to town. (He lived first in Houston, Texas and then Chicago.)
“Just a few things, here and there,” Sam would answer, deadpan.
The joke went on like that forty years. Abe asked Sam about the Harris Job for the last time in the final weekend of Sam’s life, beside his hospital bed. Sam smiled “Just a bit here and there,” he answered, deadpan.
That is how he was. He and Abe spent their final Sunday afternoon together singing the old Wobbly songs. They are piercingly beautiful sung in the right spirit. I came the next morning to take him home by ambulance in a stretcher with oxygen tank. He was not supposed to die just then. Dr Inkles predicted he had a month or two. Sam knew better. “It’s getting dark. Turn on the lights,” he said as I eased him into bed.
“It is broad daylight,” I snapped.
“Give me the phone! I want to call Federico!”
Federico Arcos was an old and unrepentant anarchist, an autoworker in Windsor, Ontario. As a boy he had fought on the barricades of Barcelona with a rifle from the Crimean War that was taller than he was. My father loved Federico. I handed him the black rotary phone with the long cord. He insisted on dialing the number himself. I do not know where he got the breath to speak without panting.
“Hello Federico! Listen, I’m going to go soon. I wish you farewell.