On the Waterfront by Budd Schulberg Read Free Book Online Page B

tilted at a rakish angle. They were hard workers who carried their liquor and got their pay safely home to the wife, and staggering among them the casuals who picked up just enough work to keep themselves in whatever it was they drank in search of reassurance or forgetfulness.
    Terry said Hi to this one and threw a friendly jab at that one and pretty soon he had come to the Friendly Bar on the corner across from Pier B. There was nothing special about the Friendly Bar; it looked like most of the other gin mills along the street: a plate-glass window with a green blind running half way up so the wives couldn’t spot their truant husbands, a beautiful old bar, exquisitely carved in the old rococo manner, surrounded incongruously by unscrubbed walls of corrugated brown sheet metal decorated with pictures of fighters, ball players and calendar nudes. A few humorous signs—“In God We Trust—No Exceptions”—“Ladies, Watch Your Language. There May Be Gentlemen Present”—and a Back Room for the big and little wheels, that was Friendly’s, a deceptively unimposing command post for the Bohegan sector of the harbor.
    Johnny Friendly (through his stooge brother-in-law Leo) didn’t pay any rent for the street corner outside the Bar and Grill, but it was considered an integral part of the establishment. There were always half a dozen or a dozen or more of the Friendly boys standing around, leaning against the plate-glass window or the lamppost, talking shop or sports or doing a little business. “J.P.” Morgan, bat-eared and weasel-faced, was a familiar figure on the corner as longshoremen sullenly accepted his loans of fifty or a hundred, to be paid back at the generous rate of ten per cent a week, which didn’t sound too bad until you remembered the ten per cent was accumulative, and that if you failed to come up with the hundred the first week, the interest was ten per cent of $110 and so on and on until you were paying thirty or forty per cent. If you fell too far behind “J.P.” would signal a hiring boss, Big Mac McGown or Socks Thomas, to put you to work. The debtor would turn over his work tab to “J.P.” and “J.P.” would collect straight from the pay office, so there was no chance of the guy drinking it up or turning it over to the wife before “J.P.” (really Johnny Friendly) got his. So one way to be sure to work (eventually) was to cooperate with “J.P.” Morgan’s street-corner banking system.
    The financial see-saw of the labor set-up on the waterfront balanced on a nondescript but vital little fulcrum like “J.P.” Most longshoremen lived all their lives in debt, spending the last dollar in their pockets on a Saturday night and starting from scratch, or rather, behind scratch every Monday morning. Loan-sharking plus two or three men for every job, keeping a floating population of insecure and hungry men—these were the two prongs of Johnny Friendly’s power in Bohegan. And it was the power of dock bosses in Port Newark and Staten Island and Red Hook and every section of the harbor split up into a dozen self-sufficient multi-million-dollar operations according to the tacit understanding of the underworld executives who referred to themselves as union leaders. These waterfront lordlings were smiled upon by President Willie Givens, who could pound his chest and weep at union conventions and communion breakfasts about his love for his dock-working brothers who expressed their gratitude by voting him twenty-five thousand dollars for life and an unlimited expense account. The vote was one hundred per cent legal, as well as phony, for the convention delegates were hand-picked, opposed only here and there by an obstreperous, irrepressible Runty Nolan, or a serious, young parliamentarian like Joey Doyle. The rank and file spent their resentment in undercurrent humor, calling their President “Weeping Willie” and “Nickel and Dime Willie” because his contracts with the shipping association