Long Island City: A Dream Play

When I first arrived in New York, in the early 80's, I knew Long Island City only from the window of a Brooklyn-bound cab, speeding down the FDR through the Manhattan night with Joe Jackson's "Stepping Out" playing in my head. From that vantage-point my only inkling of what LIC was about was informed by the outlines of rusted and weather-beaten factories which rose black against the eastern sky, dark and unlit shapes of floating rail barge piers at the their feet and the soaring PepsiCo bottling plant with its 1940's neon sign in script above it the only source of light. Had I been like many New Yorkers, my acquaintance with the neighborhood would have stopped there.

I am a curious sort, however, and one summer day when I was still new to the City I found myself up early and walking the streets of Sutton Place when I was overcome by the smell of freshly-baked semolina bread, its scent wafting over the East River from a factory somewhere from beyond the PepsiCo plant.

I found myself compelled to follow my nose over the bridge. When I alighted from the elevated 7 train onto the eastbound platform at Court House Square, I surveyed the area to the south. Below me, in the early morning light the north-south streets, half-lit by the newly risen sun, cast long shadows to the west and glimmered in the puddles of rain water left over from the previous nights showers. The air was clear and clean, and the smell of fresh bread seemed to be coming from one particular area of the cityscape below me. I watched from my aerie as a fleet of white delivery trucks left a sprawling two-story tan brick building with industrial windows, even as a line of workers, each clad in a blue shirt and pants, entered at another door to start their mornings labors.

Each truck that emerged was shiny and bore the name of the Gordon Baking Company in fancy script, and both the script and the condition of the trucks evinced the bakery's pride in its products. From my perch, looking down, it seemed as though I was gazing at a city from another time, the post-war years of the early 1950's, maybe, a New York that had left two world wars and the Great Depression behind it and was preoccupied by the prospect of making things.

I descended the stairs of the elevated and made for the bakery plant, hoping that they might have some sort of retail operation at which I could buy a loaf. I hadn't had breakfast yet, and the smell of bread had awakened in me a desire for eggs, bacon and home fries at a diner. Arriving at the plant, I paused before a large doorway from which I could see the humming activity of scores of workers tending tall slicing and packaging machines, all connected by snaking metal rollers and conveyor belts which stretched back through the plant to the windows on the other side of the block.

Not being the shy type, I asked one of the workers where might it be possible to buy a loaf of their bread? He gave me the once over, as New Yorkers will often do when they encounter someone who they can't figure out asking such a question, but then must have decided that I was on the line because he told me that they delivered to a bunch of grocery stores in the City, naming two, the Food Emporium and Sloan's. I asked him, instead, if there was a decent diner nearby. This time his eyes lit up and he said, sure, there were three nearby and told me the name of his favorite one and how to walk there. I thanked him and he tipped his hat at me as I left.

I have not spent much time in Long Island City since that day, long ago. The neighborhood these days, like much of the rest of New York, is unrecognizable from the City that I knew when I first came here thirty-six years ago. While there are still neighborhoods in Manhattan that have retained much of their character from my first years here, almost all of which is due to their having been given landmark protection, much of the City has changed so much that I can sometimes feel like a stranger in my own home. I am able, however, to conjure up that earlier City, in neighborhoods that I either lived in and experienced on a daily basis, or, as with Long Island City, which appeared to me as if in a febrile dream on a summer day, long ago, when men in pressed blue uniforms drove shiny white delivery trucks through rain-mirrored cobbled streets while the smell of freshly baked bread wafted through the buildings on an early morning breeze.

Pietro Panto, "The Hook," "On the Waterfront" and "Stand-Up Guys" - the genesis of a play

The genesis of my play "Stand-Up Guys" is both complex and, at the same time, incredibly simple.

The short and simple story is that it is inspired by my musing on what my life might have been like had my maternal Italian grandparents decided to settle in New York City, rather than in eastern Washington State.

The complex version, however, is a little more interesting and derives from an unusual confluence of events. In 1988 I began to write for the Theater. The year before I had started a job as a prosecutor in Brooklyn, a job that eventually gave me access to wiretap recordings of the five New York mafia families and, as important, brought me into contact with many decent, incredibly skilled and very memorable cops and prosecutors, some of whom were of Italian-American descent. That same year, in 1987, I had - at the urging of my Italian grandmother - made contact with some of my relatives who had come over from the same area of Calabria which my mother's family is from, but only thirty years before. With them, I attended a number of Calabrese feasts and confirmations on Long Island. A year later, in 1989, I had returned to my Catholic roots and begun attending services at a church in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, St. Francis Xavier, which - at the time - was a very progressive parish with deep roots in the labor union movement. That same year I moved back to the Carroll Gardens neighborhood in Brooklyn, where I had first lived when I came to New York City in 1983 and which was, six years later, still strongly Italian-American and still connected to the Brooklyn waterfront where many of the retired longshoremen living there had once worked.

Thus, I found myself, in 1989, immersed in several aspects of Italian-American culture, living amongst (in some cases) the same Italian-Americans who my Office was investigating or prosecuting and, at the same time, attending mass at the very church in Chelsea where the real world events which directly inspired Budd Schulberg's screenplay for "On the Waterfront" (those being the articles which Malcom Johnson had written in the late 1940's for the New York Sun) had taken place. On a more personal level, my return to the neighborhood brought back strong feelings of loss and mourning from the collapse of a relationship with a woman who had lived in a nearby neighborhood several years before. Walking around what is now known as the "Columbia Street Waterfront District" neighborhood in 1989 brought back memories of walking in that neighborhood in 1983, when, for me, a sense of loss and sorrow permeated my thoughts like a cold grey fog blown in off the Buttermilk Channel drifting along the waterfront streets and vacant lots like the ghosts whose presence was, for me, palpable.

As I told Budd Schulberg many years later when I met him, I wrote "Stand-Up Guys" in part as an homage to his script for "Waterfront" because, though I love his script and think that it is among the best screenplays ever written, I was not happy with the his line for Brando in which the hero, coulda-been-a-contender Terry Malloy, tells his true love, Edie, that he is going down to the pier to "get my rights." In my experience, people - in moments of crisis - are seldom motivated by abstract ideals but, rather, with more basic motivations: hunger, sex, greed, revenge. In truth, Terry is not motivated by any such abstraction as "getting his rights" but, rather, with a very visceral and understandable desire to avenge himself on Johnny Friendly for having murdered Terry's brother Charlie.

In writing "Stand-Up Guys" I chose to set my story amongst the Columbia Street piers and walk-up buildings that, prior to the construction of the BQE, had formed a very tight, mostly Italian-American neighborhood in the 1930's populated by longshoremen and their families who worked on the nearby piers, shopped on Columbia Street and worshipped at St. Mary's/Sacred Heart Church. This neighborhood, which is now known as the "Columbia Street Waterfront District" was, at that time, known simply as "Red Hook" or "the Hook" or, more generically, "Sout' Brooklyn."

I chose, as the names of my three male protagonists, Italian names which cannot be anglicized: Pasquale (Patsy), which means "Paschal" and alludes to Easter; Salvatore (Sal) which, of course, means "Savior" and Gaetano (Guy) who, for me, was a figure like Pietro Panto, a stand-up guy who has been much mythologized but who, really, is just a "guy."

I truly believe that the most important things in our lives happen for a reason, that - when we are being most true to our true selves - all manner of events occur which, from the outside, appear to be coincidence but which are not.


From "Stand-Up Guys" by Peter Basta Brightbill

In this scene, Sal confesses to his wife, Rose, what he had just told his step-son, Patsy, about his role in the death of Patsy's real father (and Rose's boyfriend), Gaetano. He has been forced to do this in order to prevent Patsy from going down to the piers to meet Tony, since Sal knows that Tony intends to kill Patsy there.

SAL

The night. The night Gaetano was killed. We were all playing poker that night. All the guys on the strike committee. All of a sudden, Gaetano comes running in with this story about one of the "big guys" who he's heard sold out the union. Says he heard a coupla stevedores talking about how one of the union guys--

PATSY

A guy named Tony.

SAL

A guy he thought mighta been named Tony - had sold the union regulars out on the contract. Gaetano tried to talk to Tony Pep about it. Tony kept putting him off. "Don't worry about it." Said he'd investigate it. Guy got fed up, started talking about going to the Waterfront Commission. We all tried to tell Gaetano he oughta just forget he ever heard that, that it wouldn't do no good raisin' a stink now. Stubborn. Typical Calabrese hard head. Then the Waterfront Commission caught up with him. Handed him a subpoena.

ROSE

You never told me this.

SAL

I'm telling you now! That night, the night of the poker game at my place, Tony called. Asked for Gaetano. They talked. When Guy hung up he said Tony had told him that it was all a misunderstanding and that he'd clear it all up. For Gaetano to meet him down at the docks.

(More quietly, a buried memory coming back to haunt him)

He asked me what I thought he should do. I told him I thought he should go meet Tony.

ROSE

Oh, my God.

SAL

I didn't know what was gonna happen to him. If I had known, you think I'd a let him go down there? Then the poker game broke up. Few minutes later, Nicky Tomasso comes running in yelling that he was down by the piers when Frankie Lomanico comes running up to him.

ROSE

Frankie-the-fruit?

SAL

Yeah, only Frankie wasn't injured then. So Nicky tells us that Frankie takes him down [to] the pier where he sees Tony Pep standing over Gaetano and Tony says he seen the stevedore dead, and Gaetano, alive but bleeding a little from the gut, where the stevedore had stabbed him.

ROSE

Bleeding a little?

SAL

Nicky says that Tony had told him to run and get help, that he and Frankie would stay with Guy. So Nicky finds me and we go down there.

[SAL grows very quiet.]

Only when we got there Gaetano was bleeding real bad from the back of his head, and he had died. And Tony is standing over him. And I go to pick Guy up, and I squat down and take his head in my hands. And I can't figure out why he's bleeding so bad from his head! And then I seen it.

[SAL LOOKS STRAIGHT UP AT PATSY, WHO IS HOLDING THE CRATEHOOK BY HIS SIDE].

He's got a cratehook jammed into the back of his head.

[PATSY DROPS THE HOOK, WHICH FALLS TO THE STONE LOUDLY. ROSE BRINGS HER HAND UP TO HER MOUTH.]

ROSE

Mother of God. But Nicky had said --

[SAL nods his head vigorously in assent.]

SAL

We didn't know what to make of it. Rumors started going around that maybe it didn't happen the way it looked.

ROSE

(A dawning horror, something she's refused to believe for many years)

Nicky had an accident right after that...

SAL

(derisively)

Yeah, some "accident". Then, right after that Tony came around saying "Oh, didn't Nicky tell you? I saw the stevedore jump Gaetano".

[ROSE nods towards the cratehook at PATSY's feet.]

ROSE

So you knew. You had to know.

SAL

(pleadingly, desperately)

I swear to God, Rose, I didn't know nothing.

ROSE

You must have. You were with him right before it happened. You knew that Gaetano had found out something. You knew he was in trouble. And you let him walk down there knowing that he was gonna get killed.

SAL

No! Nobody knew. Nobody knew nothing for sure. Tony said that he saw the stevedore jump Guy -

ROSE

And you just ate it up, what Tony said, didn't you?

SAL

It was possible! The stevedores were still mad at Gaetano for what happened to Jimmy-the-Bug!

SAL

(With the pent-up anger of years of silence, of being cuckolded by a ghost)

BESIDES, WHAT IF I DID? HUH? ALL MY LIFE I'D BEEN LIVING IN THE SHADOW OF YOUR BOYFRIEND. GAETANO THIS! GAETANO THAT! "OH, GAETANO HE'S SUCH A STAND-UP GUY." WELL, YOU WANT TO KNOW SOMETHIN'? YOUR BOYFRIEND WAS A FUCKIN' HOT HEAD. HE COULDN'T KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT. NO, NOT THIS TIME. HE WENT TO THE STRIKE COMMITTEE WITH HIS SUSPICIONS. NOBODY WANTED TO HEAR IT, OF COURSE. GO AROUND TELLIN' CRAZY STORIES ABOUT TONY HAVING SOLD OUT THE UNION TO THE MOB, GETTING EVERYBODY UPSET, JUST AFTER THE UNION FINALLY GOT US THAT GODDAMN AGREEMENT. AND EVERYBODY TRIED TO TELL GAETANO THIS. EVERYBODY TRIED TO WARN HIM NOT TO MAKE WAVES. I MEAN, IF HE DIDN'T LISTEN, HE GOT WHAT WAS COMING TO HIM!

[Suddenly very contrite]

Oh, God. I didn't mean that Rose, honest. Gaetano was the most stand-up guy I ever knew. Rose, you gotta believe me.

[PATSY starts to walk past SAL towards the house. SAL grabs onto PATSY's arm as he walks by. PATSY shrugs him off.]

Pasquale. You believe me, don't you?

[PATSY looks down at SAL, then exits the yard.]

Doesn't anybody believe me? I didn't know.

ROSE

You all knew.

SAL

[desperately]

Hell, there were two bodies down there, Gaetano's and the stevedores! That's all anybody knew for sure, Rose.

ROSE

[still quietly, but with bitterness]

Oh, you knew. All you "brave union men". You knew that Gaetano was in danger. And you let him walk right to his death. And all this "stand-up guy" crap. You guys made Gaetano into a real hero, didn't you? Almost a saint. Lies. Lies and guilt, Sal.

From "True Life Tales - On the Waterfront" By: Stephen Schwartz
Film History | Friday, February 11, 2005

II. The Martyrdom of Pete Panto

In the discourse that has developed around On the Waterfront and “The Hook,” much credibility has been attached to Miller’s claim that he was drawn to the issue of waterfront union corruption by walks in Brooklyn, where he claimed to have seen, in 1947, graffiti in Italian reading “Dove Pete Panto?” or “Where is Pete Panto?” According to Miller, “down near the piers… this mysterious question covered every surface… the sentence began showing up in subway stations and chalked on Court Street office buildings. Finally, the liberal press took up the cry, with PM, the progressive daily… explaining that Pete Panto was a young longshoreman who had attempt to lead a rank-and-file revolt against the leadership of President Joseph Ryan and his colleagues, many of them allegedly Mafiosi, who ran the International Longshoremen’s Association [ILA]. Panto, one evening during dinner, had been lured from his home by a phone call from an unknown caller and was never seen again. The movement he had led vanished from the scene.”[11]

Panto, known to some as Pietro, to others as Peter, and to those who most sought to exploit his memory as Pete, appears several times more in Timebends. According to Miller, the author “took to wandering the bars on the waterfront to pick up whatever I could about Panto. It was a time when the heroic had all but disappeared from the theatre along with any interest in the tragic tradition itself. The idea of a young man defying evil and ending up in a cement block at the bottom of the river drew me on. It took only a couple of days on the piers to discover than men were afraid to so much as talk about Panto… Pete Panto had become heroic for me.”[12]

Longshoremen in Brooklyn in 1947 had little incentive to discuss Pietro Panto, as he was known in their community, with a non-Italian stranger lacking standing among them. Although Miller never mentions it, Panto’s disappearance had occurred almost a decade before, on July 14, 1939. It was mentioned in The New York Times six weeks afterward, in an article referring to a local criminal investigation, headed “Amen Will Press Brooklyn Inquiry.” Panto, according to the Times, was a “Red Hook longshoreman who had been fighting terrorists on the docks.” A certain John Harlan Amen, a New York Special Attorney General investigating official corruption in Brooklyn, had received a petition asking for an investigation of the Panto case. The petition was signed by something called the Waterfront Committee for Democratic Action, headed by a woman named Muriel Draper.[13]

Although there was never any evidence that Pietro Panto was a Communist, the entry of the Waterfront Committee for Democratic Action and Muriel Draper signaled the interest of the Communist Party in the case. The above-mentioned New York Times article appeared on a Sunday; the next day, August 28, 1939, the Daily Worker, the main Communist organ in New York, reported in fuller detail on the disappearance of Panto. Its article carried the more focused headline, “Urge Amen Probe in Disappearance of Anti-Ryan Stevedore.” The Communist daily noted the date of Panto’s disappearance, and said, “police agencies of Brooklyn, the Missing Persons Bureau, and the Alien Squad have combed all clues and pressed the search for Panto, to no avail.” The Daily Worker quoted a statement by Muriel Draper, chair of the Waterfront Committee for Democratic Action, as follows: “Pete was just an ordinary dock worker. He come home from his work on the Moore-McCormack piers on Friday, July 14, told some friends he was going to meet ‘two guys I don’t trust,’ and has not been seen since… Pete was also anti-fascist – he’d been back to Italy since the advent of Mussolini.”

The Draper statement appealed, to those interested in the case, to “get in touch with the Waterfront Committee,” but the Daily Worker printed no address for it.[14] The Committee was an ephemeral effort, which left almost no trace (it never appeared anywhere in any investigative records on Communism accumulated by federal and state authorities.) Unfortunately for Pietro Panto’s memory, the Communists at that time were preoccupied with activities justifying the recently-signed Stalin-Hitler pact; thus the Daily Worker, on the day before The New York Times reported on the matter, had a box on its front page stating “Tomorrow’s Sunday Worker will contain cabled news from Moscow, London, and Paris telling of the reactions to the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact,” and exhorting “all Party members and friends” to distribute the Sunday edition throughout the city.[15]

Muriel Draper (1886-1952), for her part, was a well-known Stalinist. Her most ignominious act was doubtless her signature on a statement published in the Daily Worker of April 28, 1938, hailing the verdicts (and death sentences) in the recent Moscow trial of Nikolai I. Bukharin and 17 other Soviet political figures. Therein she joined “such famous Russian and legal authorities,” in the words of the anti-Stalinist Eugene Lyons, as the Hollywood actor “Lionel Stander…, Dashiell Hammett [and] Dorothy Parker.” The list of endorsers of Stalinist “justice” against “the Trotskyite-Bukharinite traitors” totaled 150 prominent Americans.[16] Draper was an active promoter of Soviet interests in America until her death.[17]

In April 1940, The New York Times again reported on the Panto case. The mobster Abe Reles, alias “Kid Twist,” had become an informant to Brooklyn District Attorney William O’Dwyer, and the paper reported on numerous members of New York’s worst criminal gang, as named by Reles. They included Louis (Lepke) Buchalter, Benjamin (Bugsy) Siegel, Harry (Pittsburgh Phil) Strauss, Joe Adonis, and Charles Lucania, better known as Lucky Luciano. Investigators also identified Albert Anastasia as “one of the higher-ups of the ring.” The Times noted, “Albert Anastasia and Joseph Florino are being sought by the prosecutor’s staff in connection with the disappearance of Pete Panto, Red Hook longshoreman, who had been fighting terrorists on the docks.”[18]

Strangely, however, the Daily Worker’s reportage on the O’Dwyer investigation, appearing one day before The New York Times’ 1940 account, made no mention at all of Panto or Anastasia.[19] The Waterfront Committee for Democratic Action had disappeared. But some Communist interest in the Panto case persisted, at least among the party’s few Italian-speaking followers. On July 20, 1940, a year after his disappearance, L’Unità del Popolo (People’s Unity), a New York Communist Party weekly aimed at Italian-Americans, published a “declaration by O’Dwyer,” in which the Brooklyn District Attorney stated on his 50th birthday that “the best celebration of my birthday will be to solve the murder of Peter Panto.” The article announced that a memorial for Pietro Panto was to be held on July 19 at a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in Red Hook, with speeches by a prominent follower of the Soviet line, Congressman Vito Marcantonio of the American Labor Party, and Rev. Edward Swanstrom, who had published a book, The Waterfront Labor Problem.[20]

L’Unità del Popolo also reported that Marcantonio had intended to address a similar meeting two weeks before, at a Knights of Columbus hall, but that Emilio Camarda, vice-president of the ILA, had “succeeding in terrorizing the Knights of Columbus” into refusing the use of their facility for the event. It further stated that a “Rank and File Committee” had been set up to hold the memorial.

A week later, L’Unità del Popolo reported on the Panto memorial meeting, in an issue that bore the auspicious headline, “The borders of true democracy are extended in Europe – The Baltic states agree to join the Soviet Union – A protest by [U.S. Under-Secretary of State] Sumner Welles against this free decision is an insult to all progressive Americans.” The Italian weekly was, like the rest of the Stalinist press in the U.S., mainly concerned to defend Soviet foreign policy, but it also described the memorial for “Pietro Panto, kidnapped and killed by camorristi [gangsters].” In this account, 200 dockworkers had come to the V.F.W. hall, where they encountered officials of the ILA locals spread out in front of the building, threatening them with dismissal and other punishments. But 200 police had also been sent to prevent the outbreak of violence, and the memorial was addressed by Congressman Marcantonio and presided over by Pietro Mazzei, described as Panto’s successor as rank-and-file leader in the union. The article also mentioned an English-language waterfront bulletin called “Shape Up,” distributed by the Communist Party, apparently to Irish longshoremen.[21]

There the case stood until 1947, when Miller began, as he put it, “searching for a handle on Pete Panto.”[22]

But in 1951, the long-past testimony of Abe Reles, who had died in 1941, in an incident described in newspapers as an attempt to escape from custody, during Reles’ disclosures, provided the basis for the most detailed version of the death of Panto, appearing in a book titled Murder, Inc.[23] Co-authored by Burton B. Turkus, who had been Assistant District Attorney for Kings County (Brooklyn) during the 1939 inquiry, and veteran journalist Sid Feder, the volume includes a graphic description of the young longshoreman’s death. “In mid-summer 1939,” Turkus and Feder wrote, “Peter Panto was waging a determined war against gangster rule on the water front. For months, he had been whipping up the longshoremen to shake off the mobster grip. Panto was only twenty-eight… ‘We are strong,’ he urged the union men. ‘All we have to do is stand up and fight.’”

According to Turkus and Feder, Panto’s fate was ordained after he called a meeting of ILA local 929 on July 8, 1939, attended by 1,250 members. Panto insisted on an honest count in an approaching union election. “He was cheered for that – and the cheering did it. The applause was a sign to the hoods that their control of a very lucrative racket was menaced.”

In the Turkus-Feder account, Panto was visiting his fiancée, who bore the unfortunate name Alice Maffia, on the night of Friday, July 14. At 10 p.m. he went out to meet two men, on his way to a union committee meeting. He promised Alice he would return in time to make sandwiches for a trip to the beach in the morning. The couple planned to be married in October. But Peter Panto disappeared, without a trace. A year and a half later, Reles told what he knew about the case. Panto had been picked up by two men, described by Reles only as brothers, who took him to see “certain people.” The latter offered the longshore leader cash to end his activities, but he contemptuously rejected the suggestion. He was then hustled into a car along with at least four others, possibly including Albert Anastasia’s associates Joseph Florino and Tony Romeo.

Peter Panto was, Turkus and Feder said, a slender man of 163 pounds, but in the car he fought wildly for his life, nearly biting off the finger of one notorious gangster, Mendy Weiss, before he was strangled to death. He was then dumped in an empty lot in New Jersey. A lump of dirt and quicklime was eventually dug up by the investigators, who believed it contained Peter Panto’s corpse. According to Reles, Albert Anastasia had overall responsibility for the act.

The Panto murder figured in an inventory of crimes for which Albert Anastasia might have been charged – had Reles, the chief witness, not conveniently died in 1941. Anastasia was not indicted, and a grand jury investigation in 1945 led to the questioning of O’Dwyer himself. At that time, a certain “Peter Masi,” who may be the same person as the previously-mentioned “Pietro Mazzei,” complained to the grand jury about the continued domination of the Brooklyn waterfront by racketeers, and alleged a quashing of the investigation from within O’Dwyer’s office. “Masi” was described by Turkus and Feder as “the former associate of and successor to the murdered Peter Panto as leader of the rank-and-file dock labor.” Tony Romeo, who might have been called as a witness instead of Reles, and through whom the Panto case might have become the keystone of a trial of Albert Anastasia, was murdered in 1942.[24]

It should be noted that Communist writers took up the Panto affair from time to time. As late as 1999, Roy Rydell, a veteran Stalinist activist in the waterfront labor milieu, recalled the case in the People’s Weekly World, successor to the Daily Worker (and nicknamed by critics of the party, because of its fantastic propagandist claims, the People’s Weekly World News, equating it with the supermarket tabloid known for reporting such stories as the allege sex change operation of Saddam Hussein.)

In the typically distorting idiom of the Communists, Rydell wrote, “Pete Panto, a rank-and-file longshoremen who had been calling meetings of longshoremen in Brooklyn, disappeared, and the New York Police Department and the district attorney never did anything about it. Panto’s body was later found buried in a lime pit, but no one was ever prosecuted for the murder.” Rydell described “Shape Up” as “a rank-and-file publication that appeared regularly on the New York waterfront and was distributed by the Waterfront Section of the Communist Party.”[25]

Strangely, in Timebends, Miller refers to “The Hook” as “the screenplay about Panto’s doomed attempt to overthrow the feudal gangsterism of the New York docks,” although not one word of “The Hook” can be cited to support that description.[26] Miller’s quest for information on the Panto case seems to have been carried out in a place far distant from New York itself, in a historical void. By 1947 there had been so many investigations of Brooklyn gangsters and there had emerged enough of a broad insurgency in the ILA that Panto was long-forgotten.

In 1945, a wildcat strike hit the New York docks, and the Communists, as described by Father John Corridan in an article by Schulberg for The New York Times, “did move in and try to take credit for the leaderless, rank-and-file strike.”[27] This upsurge by the real longshoremen offered a powerful repudiation to the cult of leadership in Miller’s “The Hook.” But the longshoremen themselves, overwhelmingly Catholic and fierce anti-Communists, rejected the Stalinist ploy. When the longshoremen struck in defiance of Joe Ryan in 1951, again as reported by Schulberg, rank-and-filers bitterly declared, “The mob called us Reds and the Reds called us Fascists… [we faced] the Commies on one side and the mob on the other.”[28] The situation was remarkably reminiscent of the Stalin-Hitler pact a decade before. But none of this was ever mentioned in Miller, for whom all knowledge of the waterfront began with the Italian graffiti he claims to have seen.

Furthermore, it is never mentioned in the literature that has grown up around On the Waterfront, Kazan, Schulberg, Miller, and “The Hook,” that the American Federation of Labor had joined battle against Joseph P. Ryan, the corrupt head of the ILA, and that the union was expelled from the A.F.L. because of racketeering in 1953, giving On the Waterfront the immediacy of daily newspaper headlines when it was released the year afterward.

Barbara Christian, David Henderson and "De Mayor of Harlem"

When I was nineteen my family moved from the Midwest to California and, shortly thereafter, fell apart. At the time, I was a freshman at the Midwestern university where my father had taught for twenty-one years and my parents had not bothered to tell me that, contrary to the experience of most college freshman who leave home, "home" was about to leave me. In any event, I eventually learned that my parents were moving, with my younger brothers, to California and that my childhood home was being sold, and I decided to go with them.

In the course of my peripatetic undergraduate education, I briefly touched down at UC Berkeley where, among other classes, I took a course in African-American poetry taught by an amazing woman by the name of Barbara Christian. At the time that I met her, in 1975, she was a thirty-year-old Asst. Professor in the newly-created Department of African-American studies. She and her husband, David Henderson, a prominent poet in his own right, had been fixtures on the African-American poetry scene in New York in the Sixties. Their paths had diverged, however, and Barbara and their daughter had relocated to Berkeley while David remained in New York.

At the time, I was a confused kid from the Midwest who had moved to California with his parents the year before and had sought shelter from a disintegrating family and the strange and weird Beserkeley streets in the refuge of the classroom, and, in particular, in the words and images of African American poets. It was an odd curricular choice, on its face, for a nineteen year old white Midwesterner with only vague and inchoate notions of what he wanted to do with his life. In retrospect, however, I believe that it was one of the most important classes that I ever took in college and one which truly lived up to the Liberal Arts ideal of making me a better person, a better citizen... not to mention helping me to find my own voice as a writer.

In the spring of 1975, I was the only white student in her class. Most of the black kids had afros and the racial politics of the day were, to say the least, pretty strained. The Black Panthers HQ was located just down the Avenue in Oakland, and Huey Newton had been arrested the year before and charged with killing a prostitute. That term Patty Hearst, in her radical persona as "Tania," had participated in an armed robbery of a Crocker Bank branch with a self-styled radical group, the Symbionese Liberation Army. Hearst had been kidnapped by the SLA a year before,out of the Berkeley apartment that she shared with her boyfriend (also, fiancée and former teacher), Steven Weed. She had quickly morphed, however, from spoiled heiress to radical freedom fighter. In the radical lexicon of the times, Huey Newton was being framed by "the man" while Patty Hearst had joined "the revolution."

To her credit, Barbara drew me out of my shell and welcomed my comments on the work of the poets whom we were studying, even as most of my black classmates didn't accept me at all and wondered (often aloud) what I was doing there. I connected deeply with the work of many of these poets, and can recall some of their verses by heart all of these years later. In retrospect, what I related to most, what I had in common with these poets, was the struggle of someone who had been silenced to give birth to their own voice. It was, looking back, the beginning of my journey to find my own voice as a writer.

One of the writers whose work we studied was David Henderson, a founder of Umbra and a major voice whose collection of poems giving his view of what New York City was like then, circa 1962 to 1966, De Mayor of Harlem (Dutton, 1970), thunders across time to this day.

Many years later, after I had come to New York and started to establish myself as a writer in my own right, I was reading one of my poems at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe on East Third. I had just finished reading a short poem and was ordering a drink at the bar when the dude sitting on a stool just to the right of me told me how much he liked my poem. I thanked him, and asked him his name. "I'm David Henderson," he said.

Beckett in Exile, and the genesis of "Godot"

Those who know me well know that "Waiting for Godot" is one of my favorite plays, and one which was seminal to my becoming a writer. Those who know me well also know how much I love the south of France and, in particular, the region of Languedoc-Roussillion.

Beckett joined the Resistance movement in Paris in September of 1941 and helped pass secret information to England about German military movements. When an infiltrator began uncovering the names of Resistance members in Beckett’s group, Beckett and his companion (later his wife) Suzanne had to flee Paris and travel into the South, where they eventually found refuge in the small village of Roussillon, near Avignon.

In the French version of "Waiting for Godot" (En Attendant Godot), this village is named as the place where Vladimir and Estragon picked grapes, an activity that Beckett and Suzanne actually engaged in. This has led some scholars to suggest that Vladimir and Estragon, at least in part, represent Beckett and Suzanne in flight from Paris to Roussillon.

"A country road. A tree. Evening." 

Other scholars have suggested that the situation which Didi and Gogo find themselves in has its genesis in Beckett and Suzanne's waiting in an extremely dangerous form of exile for the war to end.

In Roussillon, Beckett earned food and shelter by doing strenuous manual labor for local farmers, eventually working for a small local Resistance group, and trying to keep his identity hidden from the Germans occupying outlying areas. After the war, Beckett was awarded two French medals, the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille de la Reconnaissance, for his contributions to the war effort.

Snow Was General All O'er Ireland...

On the eve of our first real snowfall of the season, from possibly the single best piece of short fiction ever written in the English language:

"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

-- from "The Dead" by James Joyce, in Dubliners

Cassandra's monologue from "Going Home"

When I first moved to New York, in the early eighties, I lived for a while in a renovated Old Law (dumbbell) tenement in Chelsea. My next-door neighbor was a late middle-aged woman who had been living, for years, in the un-renovated tub-in-kitchen version of my apartment. She was usually very nice, but was sometimes given to loud one-sided aggressive declaratory conversations with Jesus in the wee hours of the morning. I later learned that she suffered from schizophrenia, and was always one disability check away from being out on the street. At the time, rapacious New York landlords were emptying SRO buildings through any means that they could find, fair and foul, and were often "warehousing" the empty buildings until the market turned in their favor.

One day, I read in the News the sad story of a little girl on the Lower East Side who had been playing beneath the stoop of her building and was killed when the stoop collapsed on top of her. She was a very well-loved child and the neighborhood was very tight. It was one of those moments in a neighborhood, a much smaller version of the General Slocum disaster from eighty years before, when you could practically hear a collective keening arise from scores of kitchens where mothers were cooking dinner, empty lots where kids were playing stoop-ball and in Tompkins Square Park where she was memorialized by sad-eyed men.

This was the first thing that I ever wrote for an actor, and it was given wonderful voice by the late Rosanna Carter of the Negro Ensemble Company.

Scene: The doorway of a former SRO tenement building on the Lower East Side of New York. CASSANDRA, a black homeless woman of indeterminate age, stands at the foot of the stoop with two large paper bags at her side packed with all of her earthly possessions blocking the steps. She addresses PAUL [an actor who has taken a job as the super of an empty tenement building in the process of being renovated].

CASSANDRA

You think I don’t know you? You live here now, in this building, don’t you? You like it? You think it’s built solid, do you? I’m here to tell you. You best be saying your prayers ‘fore you go to sleep at night, ‘cause this building’s liable to fall down any moment.

[beat] You moving away. You think I’m out my mind, don’t you? You sure as hell don’t know me. But I know you.

You read in the paper, sometimes, see on the TV, about some old building fallin' down somewheres. Always seems to be in East New York, South Bronx, Lower East Side... one of them poorer neighborhoods, don't it? Why you spose that be?

What?

Just cause they old? No, chile. I'll tell you why. Old buildings be a lot like old people. They be storing up memories and souls since the day they be built. Souls of everyone who ever lived there. Every gal who give birth over some tub inna kitchen 'cause she be too poor to afford a doctor. Every old man who pass on in his sleep with a bottle in his hands 'cause he don't got no good reason to get up no more. And every little thing that happen in between.

After a while, see, the weight of all them souls starts to press down on the walls, press down on the floors, until something just give way.

No suh. Old buildings don't fall down for no reason at all. Not in these neighborhoods. They collapse from the weight of all the souls they got in 'em, all the life they've seen.

Oh, I know you well enough. You the one they hire to watch this old building they "warehousing" like you say. You the one holdin' the keys. It be getting cold for November. Now, will you let me in my home?

- from Going Home ©1989 Peter Basta Brightbill

Crossing Fulton Ferry from Fly Market to Iphigenia, suspended in the great grey arms of the Manhattan Bridge. The sun glints off the Harbor, reflecting desire, as the City of Aspiration gathers her breath in anticipation.