This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
"Swordfish,"
Jack called into the intercom when someone asked who was there.
"Swordfish?"
Emerson asked. “Why not Afghanistan Banana Stand?”
"Why not?"
When the man answered their bell with a ubiquitous "who is it?" they
could have said anything they wanted. It was his choice to buzz them in or not.
His was the War Resisters League office in the Muste building, the 'peace'
building as it was known, on Lafayette Place a few blocks down from Tower Records.
Jack had looked them up on his computer and contacted them to let them know
they were coming. Maybe it was a password after all, “Swordfish.” Still, if
they said they were the police, Mitch Rabbinivik would have let them upstairs just the
same; they had nothing to hide or flush down the toilet.
Emerson and Jack went
up the dirty flight of stairs and found the studio of W.R.L. from the wall near
the intercom in the dirty dim hallway. They walked past in curiosity to see what the next office was. The last door down the hall was the largest Muste Building meeting room, Someone
had handwritten I.W.W. on a scrap of blank white paper and taped it onto the wood door under an engraved commemorative metal plaque. It tweaked their interest, a dozen windows from floor to ceiling, wrapped around the building's corner.
They heard the door opened down the hall. The boys turned and milled back sideways past Mitch's outstretched hand and into the room, eyeing as they did the posters randomly placed on narrow office walls to the left and right, pamphlets,
papers, and a large open window at its end. The War Resisters Office. The website made it seem grander than it really was. Two desks side by side, Steve’s on the left, Mitch's on the right, each against the wall but the men's backs.
"This is the War
Resisters League?"
"This is
it."
"Only you
two?"
"Well, we do
have some help every now and then but, basically, we are it."
"You are the
ones who send out those e-mails?"
"That's what we
do," said Steve Stacks while opening and closing a draw looking for
something which he didn't locate.
"And print that
newspaper you sent us?" asked Emerson incredulously.
"We printed it
and we sent it," said Steve, proudly almost.
"All by us,"
said Mitch raising a bushy black Groucho Marx eyebrow.
"You really need
some help, don’t you?"
"Are you
offering?"
"What do you
need to be done?"
"Well there is
next month's newsletter. You could start there.” Mitch reached over and grabbed
an open box of a thousand white business envelopes. “If you want to help, you
can take that yellow paper with this white one, fold them together like this,
and put them into these envelopes; okay?"
"Sure."
Emerson and Jack took seats, actually not seats but places to sit on; cardboard
boxes and an old swivel chair.
"What are your
names? You didn't say."
Emerson spoke.
"I'm Emerson Davinsky and this is Jack Covert."
"It's a pleasure
to meet you." He shook their hands. Mitch followed.
"What brought
you here?"
"We want to
help, that’s all. We heard about you at a demonstration and wanted to
help."
"That's great.
What school?"
"Norman Thomas
High School, Midtown."
"So you're both teachers?"
"ESL."
“Does the
I.W.W. really meet here?” asked Emerson.
“Sure when
they make it,” Steve replied reaching into his shelf and handing Jack a
brochure, a small piece of white paper with a gear shaft in the middle
announcing the Industrial Workers of the World New York City General Membership
Branch meeting for the following Saturday.
“I thought the
IWW was defunct.”
“No, they’re
still around,” replied Mitch shrugging his shoulders at the thought.
“When I was a
teen I used to love Phil Ochs and he mentioned the Industrial Workers of the
World in a song called “Joe Hill” but that was about years ago.”
“Yep, they’re
still around,” replied Steve incredulously.
On the way
home Jack and Emerson discussed the IWW. They each had some homework to do.
A few days
later it was decided by each to join up together.
Four people
were present at that first meeting Emerson joined; he and Jack made six. The
leader, it seemed, was some cranky shabbily dressed schlep who went by the name
Red Zinger. He was sincerely happy to meet the new members but didn’t know how
to really show it. When asked what the IWW did he could only repeat what they
had done in the past. Apparently they had just gone through some turmoil in the
branch and someone left or was booted out.
At that first
meeting, the first agenda item was that they needed to relocate because someone
in some other group in the Peace Building was too lazy to wake up Sunday
morning to get there and open the door for them. It was Adonis, May, and Richard
Tempo who mentioned ABC No Rio as a new spot. They had been to the communal
house before. Within a few months, the NYC GMB was meeting in the Zine room of
the ramshackle tenement on Rivington Street on the Lower Eastside.
The branch mutated; there had been a split. Emerson and Jack were in.
Zinger made room for the new Fellow Workers and they worked out a general
meeting procedure from some Wobbly literature they had from GHQ.
Emerson didn't care but Zinger was
happy to learn there was one woman in the group. The only females he saw at ABC
No Rio were in the kitchen cooking for a group named Food Not Bombs and none came to IWW meetings. They were
cute young darlings, with an air of natural womanhood and suffragette pride;
real people. But there were no women in the GMB until they met Sadie, rowdy and
dear Sister Worker Sadie Strumbeck.
Not long after
Sadie returned, as was clear by Zinger and Adonis’ familiarity, a new recruit
came up the rickety stairs into the Zine room through the creaky off-hinged
door and introduced himself formally.
“May I
introduce myself my Fellow Workers; I am Eupheus Crutch from Macon, Georgia.
This is the IWW, isn’t it?” For a moment Jack and Emerson looked at each other
thinking of telling him otherwise until FW Crutch took a seat, unbuckled his regal timeworn leather satchel and removed an old red book. “We are the mighty union
and I am to directly do so,” he crowed. With his Southern accent, blond hair
and goatee, and be speckled face with red cheeks, Emerson called him “The
Colonel” and the name stuck. “Y’all call me what you may, but do not associate
me with that Fascist capitalist chicken dealer, you hear?” They all heard and
laughed, anyway.
By the time Skuzzy
joined the general membership branch, everyone was ready for some comic relief.
The older tall members knew that from Skuzzy's height and young age, he would
be the embodiment of entertainment, yet Skuzzy, well aware of his diminutive
height, was insulated from criticism having been that height his entire life;
he knew how to deflect criticism and prejudice. He was an Industrial Worker of
the World, however large or small he was, and he was there, like the
others, to fight for the right to organize unions. Since he didn't have an
occupation, like most of the general membership branch, the union he would organize
would be someone else’s.
Eupheus Crutch
made sure Skuzzy was put right about the procedures of a meeting and Skuzzy
participated like the rest, except for Jack Covert, busy as ever, outside
looking in.
The first project
Skuzzy undertook was to safeguard the collection of Industrial Worker news
monthlies in cardboard boxes on the lopsided shelves of the room in which they
met, a room that was called a ‘zine room’ by virtue of those and other cardboard
boxes, filled mostly with unbound stapled chap books, manifestos, and zines.
Yes, zines was what was in the library that the Workers of the World who lived
in New York would be the protector of, and Skuzzy would be the point person to
safeguard those zines of Industrial Worker origin.
"We should take
them with us," said Skuzzy, addressing the third item in the order of
business, the motion behind a motion to pay Mr. Hollander yearly instead of monthly
fees for use of the room; deciding at each meeting was how they would donate to
him that month for using the zine room. "Maybe if we give him a fee for
the year, he can do something about those radiators." Skuzzy believed.
"Those radiators
didn't work last winter either," said Red Zinger, the historian and
longest member. "We asked about it last year. It doesn't help."
"Well then maybe
we should have a rent strike and refuse to pay at all; that may put some sense
into him," said Colonial Crutch, seriously, but out of order by his own
definition, throwing personal opinion into a factual matter.
"The whole
building is falling apart," came Jack Covert’s words from the back of the
rectangular room, somewhere between boxes of assorted wires and disused hard
drives." His first priority is making sure the staircase doesn't fall
down."
"Is that a fact!?"
"You saw! I am
afraid to walk up anymore."
"Order in the
room: Crutch, Covert; Skuzzy has the floor," said this month’s facilitator,
The Carpenter. Emerson took notes as quickly as he could; rather easily since
most of what was being said was out of order and not for the minutes to be
written about.
"Point of order:
how much do we pay Hollander now?"
"Zinger? Do you
know?"
"We’ve given him
twenty dollars a month the last few months; I wasn't here before then."
"It was $10 a
month; $2.00 a person and we had ten people attending, then, the meeting size
dwindled to five when Sadie Strumbeck flew off somewhere."
"She's been working on
that island near Riverhead with toxic samples."
"Is that what
she's doing?"
"How’s that?"
"I call the
meeting to order! Skuzzy, repeat your motion?"
"I move that we
pay Mr. Hollander $100 for a year’s use of this room."
After it was voted
down, one hand one vote; simple majority, and Skuzzy didn't get his way, he
went on to the third item on the agenda which was also his; the one about
adding to the zine collection of Industrial Worker newspapers. That motion did
pass and Skuzzy was appointed the point person to go upstairs to Hollander's
office, with Emerson, to see what could be done about adding zines and creating
a new box for them.
That was easy. Mr.
Hollander agreed, since it was magazines from their organization and he didn't
know how they'd gotten there in the first place; that was a volunteer’s responsibility,
he didn't remember which one or when it was last attended to. That was easy to
find out, too. Skuzzy opened the box, the one that said 1976-1982 and found
each monthly issue in proper order. He took the next box off the shelf with no
label, opened it, and found issues from 1992-1995. That was in order, too. Four
more boxes were opened and investigated. It was during the course of the
meeting, which suited everyone just fine since it kept Skuzzy busy and mostly
away from the discussion. Skuzzy had a tendency to talk more than needed, like
Gabby in the Al Zukof cartoons; he wouldn't stop yapping.
"Sorry to
interrupt, but do we have any new issues here?"
"Skuzzy, can
that wait for later? We're finishing up."
"Yeah. Sure.
Later."
The Industrial Worker
magazines never did leave the zine room at ABC No Rio - half of the third
agenda item's motion, but at least it could stay there and have issues added to
it, putting it up to date. Maynard Carpenter would provide a box "that may
not match the others" but that was okay and no one minded.
Eupheus Crutch
excused himself and had to leave early. It was okay; the votes were in and a
quorum was no longer needed, then everyone realized that Jack Covert was still
there, the fifth man, and they could still vote if they wanted to, but it
wouldn’t be fair to Crutch and he’d be annoyed. The meeting was ended. Emerson
read back the notes. Crutch stayed until he was finished, just in case Emerson
left out some important points. Satisfied, the minutes were to be written,
typed up, and put on the e-mail list-serve for approval before sending out to
every member in the branch, whether they had been to the meeting or not, whether
anyone even knew who they were or not, but Red Zinger knew who was who and they
should all get a copy. The meeting was adjourned. Skuzzy was welcomed again,
and didn't miss another meeting after that.
The positive
vibrations and possibilities kept mounting as Emerson and the others were
reshaping the New York City General Membership Branch of the Industrial Workers
of the World. The group hadn’t been this strong in years, since the 70’s in
fact, when it caught the upsurge from the anti-Vietnam War movement and
environmentalists. Judy Bari, one of the organizers of the “Earth First!” Campaigns
against logging redwood forests in Northern California was a Wobbly hero in the
‘80’s who had survived a pipe bombing attack but had just passed away from
breast cancer. But in New York City, the IWW lingered until Emerson, Zinger,
Jack, Sadie, Adonis, May, and Red brought it back to life with Skuzzy and
Colonel Crutch in tow.
“Rusty’s Rules,” a
simplified version of Roberts’ Rules was borrowed from the Portland, OR GMB and
employed to define and focus the NYC GMB meetings; Colonel Crutch made sure of
that. Communication between the Wobbly branches around the United States, Great
Britain, and Australia were social and personable thanks to the advent of the World
Wide Web.
Emerson was proud to
be part of a labor union that had done more to ignite the spirit of American
workers than any other union in the history of the nation. The IWW was to
American Workers what the Russian October Revolution and the Chinese May 4th
Movements were to workers there. Never had there been so much focus and
attention put into fighting the class war against the bosses in the Industrial
Revolution. Even after the United States government clampdown on revolutionary
unionism with the Palmer Raids of 1919 took its toll, the IWW managed to live
on and helped organize loggers in the Northwest and longshoremen on the East
Coast.
If the IWW had not be
decimated by the time the Great Depression hit the capitalist world in 1929,
the industrial union would have been there, ripe and ready, to create the new
world out of the shell of the old instead of Franklin Roosevelt hijacking the
socialist agenda to create the WSA to rescue the ruling class of a sorely
needed redistribution of wealth. Hell, if the workers were stronger when Wilson
forced them to be slaughters with Europeans in the ‘war to end all wars,’ World
War I would never have happened and six hundred thousand workers wouldn’t have
been slaughtered to fight the rich men’s war.
There would have been a strong resentment to the
scapegoating and red-baiting of Franco in Spain, Adolph Hitler and the other
Fascist states. World War II might not have happened if the workers were united
in strength.
Emerson was
sure that as the United States slipped further into anti-worker neo-liberalism
in the 1990’s, the workers livelihoods could be saved before it was too late.
Emerson in the Industrial Workers of the World of the 21st century
were just beginning to flex their muscles and organize workers into unions.
There was a way to go before a critical mass needed for non-violent revolution
was reached but he and the other Wobbly activists believed that with agitation,
education, and organization, the ultimate goal of abolishing the wage system
could become reality. There would be nothing that wouldn’t neutralize the
government-corporate media propaganda machine. There was a feeling of beginning
in the right direction, the way it should go to help down-sized workers wrestle
themselves from the exploitative designs of the ruling class.
