Vegetable Market

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J immy moran was still very young — barely over forty —

when he started having serious back pains. His family doc-

tor told him that he probably needed an operation on a disc,

and a second doctor (an expensive specialist) confirmed it. Both

doctors agreed that Jimmy would need to take six months off

from work. He would need to lie on his back and do absolutely

nothing at all for six months, and only then would he have a

chance at complete recovery.

“Six months! ” Jimmy told the doctors. “I’m in the produce

business, buddies! Are you kidding me? ”

Six months! He made his doctors an offer of four months,

which was still much more time than he could afford to lose.

They finally came down to five months, but only grudgingly

and with obvious disapproval. Even five months off was ridicu-

lous. He’d never taken as much as a week away from the Bronx

Terminal Vegetable Market since he’d started working there as a

loading porter, in the summer of 1970. Five months! He had a

wife to support and so many kids at home that it was almost

embarrassing to say the full number. But there was no getting

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around any of this. His back was injured and he needed the

surgery, so he went ahead with it. And here’s how they survived:

his wife, Gina, took extra hours at her job; they emptied their

small savings account; his brother Patrick gave them some

money. Things were not as bad as they might have been.

As it turned out, Jimmy Moran ended up accomplishing two

important things during his time away from the market. First of

all, he bought a gorgeous 1956 blue Chrysler sedan, which was

in great shape and drove like a luxury ocean liner. Gina didn’t

agree with the investment, but they needed another car, and

the Chrysler was a lot cheaper than anything new. Besides, he

bought it off an old man in Pelham Bay who hadn’t taken the

thing out of the garage for decades and had no idea what it was

worth. Honestly, the car was a steal. It really was. Jimmy had

always wanted a beautiful old car. He’d always felt that he

deserved a beautiful old car, because he would appreciate it and take good care of it and when he drove around town he would

wear a good-looking, old-fashioned kind of brimmed hat, just

like his dad used to wear.

His second accomplishment was that he decided to run for

president of his union local.

The current president of the Teamsters Local 418 was a guy

named Joseph D. DiCello, who had the obvious advantage of

being an incumbent and an Italian. Most of the union members

at the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market were Italian, and if

even half the Italians voted for DiCello, Jimmy Moran would

get whipped like a bad dog, and he realized that completely.

Jimmy, however, still believed that he had a chance to win.

Reason being, Joseph D. DiCello was basically an idiot and a

corrupted, useless fuck.

DiCello drove a big Bonneville and hadn’t successfully de-

fended a worker’s grievance in six years. He barely even showed

up at the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market at all anymore, and

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At the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market

when he did show up, he’d always be sure to bring some prosti-

tute with him, picked up from around the gates outside. A

Chinese prostitute, usually. DiCello would ask some tired, over-

worked porter, “Hey, kid? You like my wife? You like my new

wife, kid? ”

And the porter, naturally, would say something like “Sure,

boss.”

Then DiCello would laugh at the poor guy, and even the

Chinese prostitute would laugh at the poor guy. Therefore, and

for numerous other reasons, people were basically getting sick

of Joseph D. DiCello.

Jimmy Moran, on the other hand, was a well-liked person.

The few Irish workers left at the market would vote for him out

of instinct, and Jimmy got along with most of the Italians just

fine. Why, he’d even married an Italian. His own kids were half

Italian. He had no problems with Italians. He had no problems

with the Portuguese, either, and did not think in any way that

they were thieves by nature. He also had no problems with the

blacks (unlike that sick bigot DiCello), and he was actually

quite popular with the Hispanics. Jimmy had held many differ-

ent jobs over the years at the market, but he’d recently been

hired once again as a loading porter, which meant that he

worked mostly with Dominicans and Puerto Ricans. Who were

all very decent and fun-loving individuals, as far as Jimmy Mo-

ran could see.

When it came to the Mexican vote, this would also be no

problem. The older Mexicans would remember that, years and

years ago, Jimmy Moran had worked at the typically Mexi-

can job of handling and packaging peppers. (And not those

sweet Italian bell peppers, either, but pitiless Spanish peppers

— jalapeñ os, poblanos, cayennes, chilies, Jamaican hots —

fierce peppers that only Mexicans usually handled, because if a

person didn’t know what he was doing, he could really get hurt.

When a person got the oil from one of those peppers in his eye,

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it honestly felt just like getting punched in the eye.) Although pepper-handling was easy on the back, it was no job for a white

man, and Jimmy had quit doing it years and years ago. But he

still got along fine with all the older Mexicans, and with most of

the younger ones, too.

As for the Koreans, Jimmy had no experience with them.

Neither did anybody else, though, so it really didn’t matter. It

wasn’t like Joseph D. DiCello was best friend to the Koreans or

anything. The Koreans were strange people, and you could just

forget about the Koreans. The Koreans had their own market

within the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market, and they only

sold to each other. They talked to each other in Korean, and

besides, they weren’t even in the union.

There was another thing that Jimmy Moran had in his favor.

He was actually a true union man, and not some phony local

gangster’s kid like DiCello. He wasn’t even from the city. He

was born in Virginia, and his people were real coal-mining

people and honest-to-Christ workingmen. Back in Virginia,

when Jimmy was only ten years old, he’d watched his grandfa-

ther overturn a company coal truck and empty a shotgun into

the engine block during a workers’ strike. His uncle was mur-

dered by company detectives, his other uncle died of black lung,

his ancestors organized against U.S. Steel, and Jimmy Moran

was a true workingman in a way that an affluent cheat like

Joseph D. DiCello, for instance, could never be true in a thou-

sand corrupted lifetimes.

Jimmy Moran gave his potential candidacy one evening’s

thought. This was four months into his recovery from back

surgery. He considered all the advantages and disadvantages of

staging a campaign, which would be his first. Gina wouldn’t be

nuts about the idea, but Jimmy’s back didn’t hurt anymore, he

was the owner of a beautiful 1956 Chrysler, and he felt really,

really capable. He couldn’t think of any reason that he — with

his good labor background, his decent personality, and all the

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different jobs he’d held at the market over the years — should

not be the president of the union.

Yes, he gave his candidacy that one evening’s thought, and

when he woke up the next morning, he was decided. Convicted,

even. It was a great feeling. It was like waking up in love.

And so Jimmy Moran returned to the Bronx Terminal Vegeta-

ble Market after only four months of recovery. His plan was

to campaign for a few nights, and then come back to work

officially. He arrived well after midnight, as the delivery trucks

were pulling in to load up. When he came through the entrance

gate, he stopped to talk with Bahiz, the Arab woman who

checked identification cards. She was a fairly attractive woman,

so everybody flirted with her. Also, she was the only woman

who worked at the entire market, or at least as far as Jimmy

Moran had ever noticed in nearly twenty-five years.

“Bahiz! ” he said. “Who let you out of the harem? ”

“Oh, Jeez. Jimmy’s back, ” she said. She was chewing gum.

“‘Jimmy’s back! ’” Jimmy repeated. “‘Jimmy’s back! ’ Hey, don’t say anything about Jimmy’s back, sweetheart. You should say,

‘Jimmy Moran has returned. ’ Jesus, I don’t want to talk about Jimmy’s back. You like my new car? ”

“Very nice.”

“Guess what year it is.”

“I don’t know.”

“Just give it a guess.”

“I don’t know. Nineteen sixty-eight? ”

“Are you kidding me? ”

“What is it, ’sixty-six? How should I know? ”

“Bahiz! It’s a ’fifty-six! It’s a ’fifty-six, Bahiz! ”

“Oh, yeah? ”

“Use your eyeballs for once, Bahiz.”

“How should I know? I can barely see it.”

“The ladies love it, sweetheart. I’ll take you for a drive some -

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time. You never would’ve refused me all these years if I was

driving a car this nice. Isn’t that right, Bahiz? ”

“Oh, Jimmy. Just go to hell.”

“You got a dirty mouth, Bahiz. Listen. How about some

figs? ”

Sometimes Bahiz had the greatest figs with her. The dried

figs that were widely available at the Bronx Terminal Vegetable

Market were mostly mission figs, from California. And after

eating Bahiz’s figs, Jimmy Moran was certainly never going to

eat any dried California mission figs again. Some of the better

houses at the market carried imported Spanish figs, which were

pretty nice, but they were expensive. Also, Spanish figs were

kept packaged in plastic-wrapped crates, so it was almost im-

possible to steal just a handful for free sampling.

Bahiz, however, sometimes had the most incredible Israeli

figs, and she would always give a few to Jimmy. Bahiz’s mother

shipped the figs to her by air mail all the way from the Middle

East, which was very expensive but worth it. It was a well-

known fact that, throughout all of the entire history of man-

kind, Israeli figs have always been considered the most valuable

figs in the world. Israeli figs taste like granulated honey. They

have skins like thin caramels.

But Bahiz didn’t have any figs that night.

“Forget about you, Bahiz, ” Jimmy Moran said. “You worth-

less old bat.”

“I hope somebody hits your dumb-ass car! ” she said, and they

both smiled at each other and waved good-bye.

Jimmy parked his car in front of Grafton Brothers, which was

his most recent employer, one of the biggest wholesale houses in

the market and a good place to start his campaign. Grafton

Brothers was a very profitable house, and here was why: Salvi

and John Grafton bought overripe produce with no shelf life for

the lowest, giveaway prices. Then they hired porters to pick

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At the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market

through the produce — most of which was rotten — toss out

the rotten stuff, and repack the rest of it. Grafton’s could triple

its investment on a cheap shipment of vegetables while still

underselling the rest of the market. It was practically a hoax.

Salvi and John Grafton might have gotten to be rich men this

way, with big horse-racing farms down in Florida, but their

wholesale empire still smelled like compost from all the ripe

food they threw out, and there were more rats at Grafton’s than

at any other house in the market. Grafton’s produce was gar-

bage.

There were specialty houses at the market that took produce

very seriously and sold only beautiful fruits and vegetables.

There was a Russian Jew in the north docks who flew endive in

every day from a small family farm in the middle of Belgium,

and that was the finest endive in the world. There was a Filipino who sold blackberries in February for five dollars a pint wholesale, and buyers were happy to pay, because the blackberries were fantastic and it was worth it. Grafton’s was not such a

house.

Jimmy Moran had worked for Grafton’s off and on over

twenty-five years as a porter, a driver, a vegetable sorter, and in

practically every other kind of job. The only thing was, he’d

never been able to get any kind of desk job inside the barracks

of Grafton’s offices. Office jobs at the Bronx Terminal Vegetable

Market were always a little harder to come by. There was a lot of

competition and a lot of pressure, and it helped, apparently, to

be good at math. In any case, Grafton Brothers had hundreds of

dock employees, and Jimmy knew nearly all of them.

Jimmy Moran walked along the Grafton Brothers docks, carry-

ing on his back a heavy burlap sack filled with the campaign

buttons he’d had made up the day before. The buttons said:

dicello’s not on our side, so let’s put him on the

outside. vote for jimmy moran, president. They were

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huge buttons, each approximately the diameter of a grapefruit,

with black lettering on a yellow background. He moved around

the stacks of crates and the vegetable displays and the tractors,

and he gave buttons to everybody and talked to everybody. He

tried to speak as personally as possible.

He’d say, “Hey, Sammy! Your wife still cooking you those

dinners? ”

He’d say, “Hey, Len! You still taking all those naps? ”

He’d say, “Hey, Sonny! You still work with that other crazy

bastard? ”

Passing out buttons, shaking hands, passing out buttons,

shaking hands, passing out more buttons. Jimmy Moran felt

really good. His back wasn’t bothering him at all. He felt rested

and capable, and it took him several hours to get through

Grafton’s.

He saw his old friend Herb talking to a young porter, and he

said, “Hey, Herb! Who’s that, your new boyfriend? ”

He saw a porter, not much older than his own son Danny,

smoking marijuana behind a melon display, and he said, “Police!

You’re under arrest, you dope! ”

He saw his old friend Angelo playing cards on the back of a

crate with some other guys and he said, “What is this, Angelo, a

casino? ”

Angelo and the others laughed. Everyone asked after his

back and hoped he was feeling better. Jimmy Moran had always

been popular at Grafton’s, and everyone was happy to see him

back. He used to do a funny trick when he was working in the

cucumber cooler there. He’d pretend to be a blind man. He

would stare off into space and put his arms straight out and

stumble around, bumping into everybody. He’d say, “I’m the

blind vegetable man... Excuse me, sir, could you tell me where

the cucumbers are? ”

There was only one guy who never laughed at that trick, and

that was a quiet and serious Haitian porter named Hector.

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At the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market

Jimmy got to the point where he would do the blind-vegetable-

man trick only if Hector was around, trying to get Hector to

laugh even once. Jimmy would stumble over Hector’s feet and

feel up Hector’s face, and Hector would just stand there, with

his arms crossed, not smiling. Eventually, Jimmy would quit it

and say, “What is it with you, Hector? Maybe you’re the one

that’s blind.”

“Where’s that Haitian guy Hector? ” Jimmy asked his old

friend Angelo. Jimmy’s sack of campaign buttons was already

half empty. He felt the campaign was going well.

“Hector? ” Angelo said. “Hector’s a distributor now.”

“Get out of here! Hector’s a distributor? ”

“He’s in broccoli.”

“I go away for a few months and Hector’s suddenly a dis-

tributor? ”

Jimmy headed down the Grafton docks to the huge ware-

house coolers of broccoli, and, sure enough, there was Hector, in

the distributor’s shack. Every individual cooler was as big as a

furniture warehouse, so every cooler needed a distributor. The

distributor’s job was to handle the charts and lists showing how

much produce was in each cooler and how much produce was

going out with each order. It was a pretty good job. If you were

good at math, of course, it was a lot easier. Jimmy Moran had

actually been hired as a carrot distributor for a few months once,

but his friends the dockworkers were always joking around with

him and distracting him from doing the job right, so that job

didn’t work out for Jimmy, and he ended up having to find a

porter’s job on the docks again.

Of course, the distributors worked on the docks, too. The

only thing was, they got to work in little plywood shacks that

looked like ice-fishing houses. The shacks had space heaters to

fight the cold, and sometimes even had carpeting on the floor.

Hector was in the shack studying his charts, and there was

another guy beside him, eating a hamburger.

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“Hector! ” Jimmy said. “Look at Señ or Hector the dis-

tributor! ”

Hector shook Jimmy’s hand through the window of the dis-

tributor’s shack. Centerfolds of nude black women hung on the

wall behind him. Hector wasn’t even wearing a jacket in there,

just a thin, cotton button-down shirt. A person could really stay

warm in a distributor’s shack.

“How are things? ” Jimmy asked.

“Not bad.”

“Who’s your friend? ”

“This is Ed. He’s from the office.”

Ed and Jimmy shook hands.

“So, what are you fellas doing over here? ” Jimmy asked. “Put -

ting broccoli in small boxes and labeling it twenty-five pounds?

What is this, some kind of hoax? ”

Hector did not smile. Neither did Ed.

“Listen, Hector, I’m kidding! Listen, I’m running for presi-

dent of the local.”

Jimmy slid two of his campaign buttons over to Hector.

“There’s one button for each of you, ” he said.

Hector read his button aloud with his funny accent: “dicel-

lo’s not on our side, so let’s put him on the outside.

vote for jimmy moran, president.”

“You running against DiCello? ” said the guy from the office

named Ed.

“That’s right.”

Ed stared at Jimmy Moran for a long, long while. He chewed

his hamburger in no particular hurry, swallowed, and said

finally, “What are you trying to do? ”

“What’s that? ”

“Seriously. What are you trying to do? Get yourself killed? ”

“Oh, come on now.”

“What do want? You want to wake up in the trunk of a car?

Seriously.”

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Jimmy Moran looked at Hector and shrugged comically.

Hector didn’t smile, and Ed kept talking.

“What do you want? ” he said. “You want to have your legs

cut off? ”

“I’m not afraid of Joey DiCello, ” Jimmy said. “And I sure

hope you two old boys aren’t afraid of him.”

“I sure the fuck am afraid of him, ” Ed said.

“Joey DiCello has no reason to pick on a good guy like me.

What do you think — he’ll kill me and leave all my kids with

no dad? Forget about it.”

Ed slid the campaign button back through the window to

Jimmy. “You can keep your button, friend.”

“Vote for me, and things will really change around here.”

Hector still said nothing, but Ed asked, “You got a wife? ”

“Yes, I do.”

“You hate her so much you want to make her a widow?

Seriously. Is that it? ”

“Well, I’m not fighting with y’all about it, ” Jimmy said. “I

don’t fight with people who don’t know what’s good for them.”

Jimmy threw his sack of campaign buttons up over his shoul-

der and walked on down the docks.

“We vote for DiCello here! ” Hector called after him. “We’re

not stupid! ”

“The hell with you, then! ” Jimmy called back cheerfully.

Then Jimmy Moran stole a few beautiful Haitian mangos from

a fruit display and dropped them into his jacket pocket. Jimmy

had learned from Hispanics that Haitian mangos are the best

for eating by hand, because their flesh is not stringy. Grafton’s

didn’t usually have good fruit, but these were exceptional, gor-

geous mangos, with minty green skins just turning a soft banana

yellow. There were guys who had worked in the Bronx Terminal

Vegetable Market for years and never tasted a fresh vegetable or

fruit in their lives. It was sad, really. These were guys who would

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all die of heart attacks at fifty because they ate beef and bacon

every day instead of the fruits and vegetables that were all over

the place. Consider Hector’s friend Ed, for example, sitting in

front of a warehouse full of broccoli, eating hamburgers. A heart attack waiting to happen.

Jimmy Moran, on the other hand, ate everything, because he

was in love with vegetables. His mother had always raised beau-

tiful vegetables, and he would eat anything. He used to work as

a crate stacker in a big cooler full of fresh herbs, and he would

even eat parsley in bunches. He ate radishes and cauliflowers

like they were apples. He would even take a small artichoke,

peel off the tough outer leaves, and eat the rest of the artichoke

whole and raw. He ate more vegetables than a hippie. People

thought he was crazy.

On this night, he walked out of Grafton Brothers, eating

Haitian mangos the Puerto Rican way. First, he massaged and

squeezed the mango with his thumbs until the flesh was soft

and pulpy beneath the skin. He worked the fruit with his

thumbs until it had the consistency of jelly. Then he bit a small

hole in the top and sucked out the insides. Sweet like coconut.

Foreign-tasting, but nice.

In the next hours, Jimmy Moran campaigned through the

wholesale houses of Dulrooney’s, Evangelisti & Sons, DeRosa

Importers, and E & M Wholesalers. He introduced himself to

all the workers and made small talk with them. He talked to

one poor fool who’d just spent his whole life’s savings on a

greyhound dog, and to another guy whose teenage daughter

had cancer, and to a lucky son of a gun who was going on

vacation to Bermuda. He talked to a whole lot of guys who told

him he must be crazy to run for president against a mobbed-up

animal like Joseph D. DiCello.

As he walked, he ate a handful of baby zucchini he’d stolen

off a display at Evangelisti & Sons. Each zucchini was no

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longer than his littlest finger and tenderly flavorful in the sort of salty way that a big squash would never be. These were delicious

raw, and the only kind of squash that didn’t need any dip or

sauce to have a flavor. Baby zucchinis were rare for the season,

and expensive. He’d filled his pockets over at Evangelisti &

Sons. A delicacy. He ate through them like they were peanuts.

At 4 a.m., he reached the bottom of his sack of campaign

buttons. He was at a small, brand-new specialty gourmet house

called Bella Foods, a place known to be very exclusive, which

sold to the best restaurants in New York. He didn’t think he

would know anybody there at all, until he saw his old friend

Casper Denni. They talked for a while about Jimmy’s campaign

and about their families. Casper also had a whole bunch of kids

and an Italian wife. Casper had also been a porter for many

years.

“Now, what happened? You had some kind of accident, I

heard? ” Casper said.

“The whole town’s talkin’, ” Jimmy said. “Back surgery, buddy.

What are you, a distributor now or something? ”

Casper was sitting in a neat little white-painted booth, drink-

ing a cup of coffee.

“No way, ” Casper said. “I got me a little business, selling

coffee and replacement wheels for hand trucks.”

“What? ” Jimmy laughed.

“I’m serious, Jimmy. It’s great.”

“Get out of here.”

“Check it out. Here’s the idea. There are how many hand

trucks at the market? ”

“Hundreds. Millions.”

“Thousands, Jimmy. Thousands. And every one of them a

cheap piece of shit, as everybody knows. But every porter needs

a hand truck, right? Because how many crates can one man

carry alone? ”

“Get out of here, Casper.”

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“One crate, right? Even a big monster like you, in your prime,

you could only carry two crates, right? But with a hand truck,

you can carry — what? — ten crates? Twelve crates, maybe? A

hand truck is a very important tool, Mr. Moran, for the eco-

nomic success of the individual.”

“Excuse me, Casper? Excuse me, buddy, but who are you

talking to here? ”

“So, Mr. Moran, it’s the middle of the night and your shitty

hand truck pops a wheel. What do you do? ”

“Find some other fool’s hand truck and steal it.”

“And get your head beat in? That’s the old-fashioned way.

Now you can just come to me. For five dollars, I sell you a new

wheel. You give me another five dollars for a deposit on a

hammer and wrench, which you get back when I get the tools

back. Then I sell you a ten-cent cup of coffee for a buck, and I

make six bucks out of the deal, and you have your hand truck

fixed.”

“Who would do that? ”

“Everybody, Jimmy. Everybody comes to me now.”

“In the last four months this happened? ”

“I’m telling you, Jimmy. It’s great. Tax-free. No union.”

“You’re something else, Casper. I tell you. You’re really some-

thing else.”

“You get to be old fucks like us, you need a new idea.”

“I got an idea, ” Jimmy said, laughing. “I got a new idea. You

make me your partner, buddy.”

Casper laughed, too, and punched Jimmy in the arm.

“Listen, ” he said, “you ever work around this outfit before? ”

“Around this place? No.”

“You ever seen the mushroom man? ”

“Casper, ” Jimmy said, “I don’t know what you’re talking

about, buddy.”

“You never saw the mushroom man? Oh, that’s great. Oh,

you gotta check this out, Jimmy. I can’t believe you never heard

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about this guy. You want crazy? You want to see crazy? You just

gotta check this guy out.”

Casper came out from his neat little booth and led Jimmy

into a huge refrigerated cooler warehouse.

“You’re gonna love this guy, Jimmy.”

They walked back to the end of the warehouse, and Casper

stopped at a wide doorway, covered with the thick strips of

plastic that keep temperatures even. A small refrigerated room.

Casper pulled back a few of the plastic strips and stepped inside.

He waved Jimmy to follow him, grinning like it would be a

bordello in there.

Once inside, Jimmy Moran was faced with simply the finest

mushroom produce he had ever seen in his life.

“Look at this booty, Jimmy, ” said Casper. “Have a look at this

produce.”

The crates were piled neatly, no higher than five to a stack,

and the top crate of each stack was open for display. Right by

the door was an open crate of snowy white button mushrooms,

bigger than plums. There were crates of glossy shitake mush-

rooms, crates of shiny yellow straw mushrooms, and fresh por-

cini mushrooms that looked valuable enough to serve at God’s

table. Jimmy saw crates of portobellos as fleshy and thick as

sirloin fillets. He saw a crate of wild black mushrooms, tiny and

feathery like gills. He saw a crate of the kind of woody mush-

rooms his mother used to call toadstools, and also a crate of

mushrooms that looked exactly like cauliflower heads. There

were morels in the shapes and shades of coral. He saw a crate

full of the tan, shelf-shaped mushrooms that grow out of rotting

tree stumps. There were crates filled with Chinese mushrooms

he could not name and other crates were filled with red- and

blue-spotted mushrooms that may have been poisonous. The

entire room smelled like damp manure, like the soil in a root

cellar under a barn.

Jimmy Moran reached for a portobello mushroom, the big-

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gest one he’d ever seen. He wanted it so much, but just as his

hand touched it he heard a growl like an animal’s. A huge and

ugly man in overalls and a brown wool stocking cap was coming

at him, exactly like a big dog.

Jimmy jumped back, startled, and Casper shoved him hard

and shouted, “Get out! Get out! ” Jimmy stumbled and fell

backward out of the room, panicked. He fell through the plastic

sheeting and landed hard on the concrete floor of the ware-

house. Casper jumped out of the room after him, laughing and

laughing.

Jimmy lay on his back on the cold floor and Casper said,

“You’re safe out here, Jimmy boy. Old mushroom man never

comes out of there. Christ, what a crazy fucker. Don’t touch the

mushrooms, Jimmy. I should’ve told you don’t touch the god-

damn mushrooms unless you have permission.”

On the floor, Jimmy tried to sit up, but his back spasmed, so

he lay there for some time, willing his back to relax. Casper

offered him a hand and Jimmy shook his head to refuse it.

“You okay, friend? ” Casper said.

Jimmy nodded.

“Shit, you probably hurt your back. I forgot about your god-

damn back. Jesus, I’m sorry.”

Jimmy nodded again.

“That’s a crazy fucker in there, ” Casper said, and again of-

fered Jimmy his hand. Jimmy took it this time and very gingerly

stood up. Casper parted the plastic strips and said, “Just look in

there at that fucker.”

Jimmy shook his head. He found that he was breathing very

carefully.

“Come on. You don’t have to go in there. Just look at that huge guy. He won’t touch you if you leave the mushrooms alone.

You got to take a good look at that guy.”

Casper continued to insist, so Jimmy finally did poke his

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head into the refrigerated mushroom room cautiously. The man

in the room was indeed huge, and he stood quietly in the center.

He was wearing brown overalls and he had a long brown beard.

His feet were placed apart and his hands hung loosely fisted.

Jimmy Moran and the mushroom man looked at each other.

And while the man did not growl again, and while the man did

not make any kind of a move forward, Jimmy Moran withdrew

his head very slowly and stepped away from the door. He and

Casper walked back to Casper’s booth in the hallway.

Once they were out, Casper said, “The best mushrooms in

the whole goddamn market.”

Jimmy sat down on a crate next to Casper’s booth and shut

his eyes. His back was stiff. Sitting didn’t help, so he stood

again.

“The owner hired that crazy fucker a few months ago, ” Cas-

per explained. “The guy used to be a trucker. He’s from some-

where like Texas, or nobody knows where. They’ve got some

kind of an arrangement, him and the owners. The guy never

leaves the room. I sit here night after night, Jimmy, and I’m

telling you, that crazy fucker never leaves the room. Those

mushrooms, Jimmy, are honestly the best goddamn mushrooms

you will ever see. The owners used to have a problem with

people stealing the mushrooms, see.”

“Jesus.”

“No more problems with stealing anymore. I’ll tell you that

goddamn much. You plan on stealing these mushrooms, you

gotta wrestle the big fella first.”

“You have aspirin? ” Jimmy asked.

“No, but I’ll give you a cup of coffee, you pathetic bastard.

Now get out of here, Jimmy. Feel better. Good luck on your

election, even though I think you’re a crazy bastard for running

and I think somebody’s probably going to put a bullet in your

neck for you pretty soon. Now take your coffee and get out of

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here. Hurry up, or everyone will think I’m giving the stuff away

for free. Everyone will think I can’t even run my own goddamn

business.”

Jimmy Moran walked slowly through the complicated and con-

necting parking lots to find his car. He swung his arms as he

walked, trying to take the stiffness out of his back. He thought

that he probably looked like an idiot doing this, but he didn’t

care. As it turned out, he was walking along the back parking lot

of the Korean market most of the time anyway, and he didn’t

care what Koreans thought of how he looked. The Korean

market was huge now. Jimmy Moran thought that someday the

Koreans might take over the entire Bronx Terminal Vegetable

Market, an idea he wasn’t crazy about in any way. The Koreans

worked ridiculous hours and didn’t even have a union. They

sold vegetables nobody had ever even heard of.

He was tired. During his four months off, he’d been keeping

human hours for the first time in his adult life — asleep during

the darkness and awake during the day — and he was not yet

readjusted to being up in the middle of the night. It was nearly

dawn. It took him almost an hour to get back to where he had

parked, under a strong streetlight. His car did look beautiful.

He loved his car. On this cloudy and damp night, under this big

artificial beam of light, it looked like some kind of a sea animal

— watery blue and powerful, with shimmering fins. The tail-

lights looked like reflective decoy eyes.

He had a second sack of campaign buttons in the trunk of his

car. His plan was to drive to the north side of the market and

hand out buttons at some of the bigger commercial houses over

there before everyone left for the day. He drove toward the

north, passing the lines and lines of freight trucks all backed up

against dark loading docks. The cabs of the trucks were dim and

closed. The drivers, mostly Southerners like himself, slept in-

side on hidden mattresses while the porters loaded the freight.

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Men pushed hand trucks loaded with crates and maneuvered

along the narrow alleys between the big trucks. Sometimes

the men would pause and give Jimmy Moran a thumbs-up

gesture for his beautiful car. Sometimes they would come jog-

ging across his path, concentrating on their destination, and he

would nearly hit them.

Jimmy came upon a security guard he knew, patrolling a

parking lot on foot. Low, thick diesel fumes reached up past the

man’s knees, making it look like he was wading in mist. Jimmy

stopped to talk. The guard was a friendly Polack from Jimmy’s

own neighborhood named Paul Gadomski. Jimmy rolled down

his window and Paul leaned against the Chrysler and lit a cig-

arette.

“What is this, a ’fifty-eight? ” Paul asked.

“It’s a ’fifty-six, Pauly.”

“She’s a sweetheart.”

“Thanks. Have a button, ” Jimmy said, and handed a cam-

paign button out of the window.

“What’s this? You’re not running against DiCello? ”

“I am, ” Jimmy said. Christ, he was tired. “And I’d like to

think I can count on your vote, Paul.”

“Hell, I’m not voting in your union, Jim. Get serious. I’m no

teamster. I’m a cop.”

“ You get serious, Pauly. You’re no cop, buddy.”

“Same thing.”

“Security guard? ”

“Well, I’m damn sure no teamster.”

“I’d sure like it if you’d wear the button anyhow.”

“Hell, Jim. I can’t wear no teamster’s campaign button on my

uniform.”

“Well, think it over, Pauly.”

“I’ll bring it home for my kid to play with, ” Paul said. He put

the button in his jacket pocket.

The two men, alone in a back parking lot, talked about

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business. Paul said that when Jimmy was out for back surgery,

there was a trucker who got his neck slit one night. Nobody had

been arrested for it yet. Jimmy said he hadn’t heard about that.

Paul said the corpse had been found underneath some other

driver’s truck. That driver, some guy who was hauling bananas all the way up from Florida, claimed he didn’t know anything

about any murder, so the police let him go. Paul couldn’t be-

lieve how gullible the cops were. Paul said the cops didn’t seem

too interested in finding out what really happened that night.

Jimmy said that it was almost always that way, because the cops

were usually mobbed-up and corrupt like everyone else. Paul

said he knew for a fact that the murdered guy had hit the

Trifecta that very afternoon and had been bragging all night

about making something like twenty grand. Paul said there

was crazy bullshit all over the market for about a week, what

with the cops sealing off areas and asking all the wrong ques-

tions. Jimmy said it sounded to him like the murder had been a

fight over a parking spot, and he would be suspicious of the

banana-truck driver from Florida. Jimmy recalled that the first

year he’d ever worked at the market, he’d seen a guy beaten to

death with a tire iron over a parking spot dispute. Jimmy had

seen lots of parking spot disputes turn violent.

Paul said that it was just a bunch of fucking animals working

at this place. Jimmy agreed, and the two men said good night.

Jimmy Moran drove on. He passed a handsome fleet of re-

frigerated supermarket trucks, loading in at Bennetti & Perke,

the major corporate wholesaler that distributed to all the big

Eastern seaboard supermarket chains. Jimmy didn’t know who

owned Bennetti & Perke, but it was definitely a very, very rich

man, who was probably asleep somewhere in a big house right

on the ocean.

There was so much fortune being shuffled around every

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night here at the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market, it was

almost unbelievable. It would be unbelievable and unimagin-

able to those who had not seen the place at work. The hurricane

fences and razor-wire coils and security floodlights gave the

market the look of a prison, but it was certainly no prison, as

Jimmy and everyone who had ever worked there knew. It was

no prison. It was, actually, a bank.

When Jimmy Moran was just a young porter, he and his

buddies had wasted a lot of time trying to figure out how to

skim off some of that fortune. They’d wasted a lot of time trying

to imagine how much money was passed around every night at

the market. That was a young man’s game, of course. It was the

old men who understood there was never a way to steal any real

money unless you were already rich.

The summer earlier, Jimmy’s oldest son, Danny, had worked

part-time at Grafton Brothers as a porter. Danny had tried in

the same lazy way to figure out how much money was contained

in the market and how to get his hands on it. Jimmy was aware

of this. Danny also wanted to know how to steal it, how to

hoist it, how to skim it. On their drive home together in the

early morning, Danny would speculate aimlessly about money.

Wouldn’t it be fantastic, Danny would say, to skim even one

lousy cent off every pound of produce sold at the market in one

night? How much money would that be a week? A month? A

year? Wouldn’t it even be fair to be able to skim a little off the top? Considering how hard porters worked, and for such a

shitty pay?

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, ” Jimmy would

tell his son. “Just forget about it.”

“What about the Korean market? ” Danny asked. “All their

deals are in cash. You could just mug one of those guys and get

a fortune. All those Korean guys are carrying around at least five

grand all the time.”

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p i l g r i m s

“No, Danny. Nobody carries that kind of cash.”

“Koreans do. Koreans are scared of banks.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That’s what the truckers say.”

“Then you can be damn sure you don’t know what you’re

talking about.”

Of course it was ridiculous to think about stealing money

from anybody here, because a lot of people carried guns and

knives. People were always killing each other over nothing, just to pass the time. It was ridiculous to think about all the money

other people made here. It would give you chest pains, just

thinking about it.

Jimmy had meant to park at Bennetti & Perke. He’d thought

it was a good place to hand out his second bag of campaign

buttons, but now he wasn’t so sure. His back was really bother-

ing him, and he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to carry the

heavy sack. For that matter, he wasn’t sure how he was supposed

to go back to work as a porter in just two days, as he was

scheduled to. How was he supposed to haul crates of fruits and

vegetables around? How was he supposed to do that? Hon-

estly, how?

So Jimmy Moran drove on. It was after 5: 30 a.m., and his back

was seriously hurting. He circled around Bennetti & Perke and

then headed out of the market altogether. He would just go

home. He would just forget about campaigning. As he drove, he

thought for the first time in ages about his old friend Martin

O’Ryan.

From March of 1981 to January of 1982, Jimmy had worked as

a buyer on a trial basis for a discount greengrocery chain called

Apple Paradise. It was a big opportunity for advancement, and

his old friend Martin O’Ryan had gotten him the job. It was

quite a promotion, to be taken off the docks and made a buyer.

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At the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market

Buyers got to work in offices up above the actual market, and

buyers could really prosper.

Jimmy’s friend Martin O’Ryan had actually been very good

at buying. He was a maniac at telephone deals, really fierce at

negotiating with truckers, farmers, importers, and distributors

for the best price. Martin made a lot of money for Apple Para-

dise and for himself that year.

“Whaddaya got?! ” Martin would shout into the phone. “I

need iceberg!... Twenty-five dollars? Fuck you, twenty-five

dollars! I’ll take it for eighteen!... Give me eighteen or I’ll

come over and burn down your motherfucking house!... Give me eighteen or I’ll rip your motherfucking lungs out!... Give me eighteen or I’ll blind you and I’ll personally come to your house myself and I will blind your — okay, I’ll take it for

twenty.”

Then Martin would hang up the phone and start with some-

one else.

Martin O’Ryan and Jimmy Moran were put in the same

office, at desks across from each other. They were best friends.

Martin was the first friend Jimmy ever made when he came

up from Virginia with his mom as a twelve-year-old hillbilly

kid. Jimmy and Martin had started off as porters together and

joined the union together and been to each other’s weddings.

He loved Martin, but he couldn’t concentrate on his own tele-

phone deals with Martin shouting across the room from him.

(“Get me that truck of potatoes, you worthless fuck, you worth-

less, lying cocksucker fuckhole, or I’ll rape you personally my-

self! ”)

Martin was the nicest guy in the world, but it was distracting.

At the end of the year, Martin got a huge bonus and an official

job for the company, and Jimmy did not. It worked out fine, in

the end. Jimmy found another job quickly enough, working on

the loading docks as a porter again.

Martin was honestly one of the nicest guys in the world, and

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p i l g r i m s

Martin and Jimmy loved each other, but they hadn’t seen each

other for quite a while.

Jimmy needed to gas up the Chrysler and he knew that the

small gas station in his neighborhood wouldn’t be open yet, so

he didn’t take his usual exit toward home. Instead, he kept on

driving around, looking for a twenty-four-hour service station,

and that is how he eventually ended up on Route 95.

He was familiar with that highway. Back in the middle of the

1980s, he’d worked for a while as a delivery driver for a small

gourmet vegetable wholesale company called Parthenon Pro-

duce, run by two Greeks. This was the nicest job he’d ever had.

He used to deliver quality greens — mostly arugula and water-

cress — from the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market, up Route

95, to all the fancy stores along Long Island Sound and up into

Connecticut as far as Ridgefield. It was a long drive but pleas-

ant, and he used to get into Ridgefield (a place he and Gina

used to call “Rich-field”) around eight or nine in the morning,

when the wealthy men were just heading off to their jobs.

He had liked that delivery job. He had been happy with that

job, but the two Greeks had sold their business in 1985. They’d

offered him a chance to buy that particular delivery route as his

own, but Jimmy Moran just didn’t have that kind of money at

the time.

Jimmy Moran drove past New Rochelle and Mount Vernon

and into Connecticut. It was very early in the morning, and a

clear day. As he drove, Jimmy thought that if he could have

made more money at the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market, he

would have moved his wife and all his kids up to Connecticut

long ago. They still talked about it all the time: the broad lawns,

the quiet schools, the tall wives. Jimmy Moran’s brother Patrick,

ironically enough, had married Gina’s sister Louisa, and those

two had moved to Connecticut right away. But Patrick and

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At the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market

Louisa, of course, didn’t have any kids, and it was easier for

them to move. They had moved to Danbury, and they had a

pretty nice little place, with a patio.

Gina’s sister Louisa used to be a genuinely sexy girl when she

was a teenager. She was famous around the neighborhood for

being no good in a very fun way, and Jimmy Moran’s brother

Patrick had always been crazy about Louisa Lisante. But Jimmy

had always preferred Gina. In the summer of 1970, when Jimmy

had his first job as a porter at the market, he would see Gina and

Louisa Lisante waiting for the bus together every morning

when he got home from work. They always wore shorts and

sandals. They were setting off for their summer jobs as wait-

resses near the beach. Jimmy used to steal beautiful ripe Hol-

land tomatoes from the market and leave them on the Lisantes’

doorstep as paperweights for little love notes to Gina: I love

Gina... Gina is pretty... Gina has pretty legs... I wish Gina would marry me.

Jimmy thought about Gina and Patrick and Louisa as he

drove all the way into Ridgefield, Connecticut. Although he

had not planned it this way, his timing on this particular morn-

ing was the same as his timing with the Parthenon Produce

delivery route, and he arrived in Ridgefield just as the men of

the town were leaving for work. It was nearly ten years since he

had been to Ridgefield. In the old days, when he was finished

with his route, he used to drive around the most affluent neigh-

borhoods, studying the houses. These homes had all seemed so

confidently undefended to him, and he had felt traces of a

young man’s desire to rob them. Of course, it was not the con-

tents of the houses he had wanted but the houses themselves.

Particularly the large stone houses.

The house that Jimmy Moran had always particularly really

wanted was absolutely huge. It was a half-mile from the center

of Ridgefield — a great slate-roof manor on top of a steep hill,

with a circular driveway and white columns. He used to drive up

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p i l g r i m s

to this exact house some early mornings when the gourmet

greens were all delivered. His three-ton Parthenon Produce

delivery truck would rumble obnoxiously up the grade each

time he downshifted. In all those mornings, he never once saw

anybody, or any car, anywhere near that house. It always seemed

like such a crime to have such a huge house sitting there empty.

It was such a well-kept empty house, and Jimmy used to con-

sider simply moving in. What if he could do that? What if he

could simply take it over? He would think: Imagine what all my

kids could do with all the room in that big house.

On this morning, he parked his Chrysler across the road

from the house, which had not changed as far as he could

see. He had stopped in Stamford to fill the tank with gas and

had purchased a bottle of aspirin at a convenience store there.

Christ, his back hurt! How was he supposed to go back to the

docks in only two days? Honestly, how?

Jimmy opened the bottle and ate a handful of aspirins —

chewed and swallowed without water. It was a well-known fact

that a chewed aspirin, while disgusting to the taste, would act

faster than a whole aspirin, which would sit intact and useless

for some time in a person’s stomach acid. He ate several aspirins

and he thought about his wedding night. He was just nineteen

years old then, and Gina was even younger.

She had asked him on their wedding night, “How many kids

do you want to have, Jimmy? ”

He’d said, “Your boobs will get bigger whenever you’re preg-

nant, right? ”

“I think so.”

“Then I’ll take ten or eleven kids, Gina, ” he had said.

In fact, they ended up having six, which was ridiculous

enough. Six kids! And Jimmy in the produce business! What

had they been thinking? They’d had three boys and three girls.

The girls had Italian names and the boys had Irish names, a

cornball little gimmick that was Jimmy’s idea. Six kids!

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At the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market

The pain in Jimmy’s back, which had started as stiffness and

turned to cramps, was stoked up even higher now. It was a

terrible pain, localized at the point of his recent surgery, empha-

sized periodically by a hot pulse that shook his body like a sob.

He emptied some more of the aspirins from the bottle into his

palm and he looked at the big house. He thought about his

grandfather who had shot through the engine of a company

coal truck, and he thought about his uncle who’d got assassi-

nated by company detectives for organizing, and he thought

about the black lung. He thought about his doctors and about

Joseph D. DiCello and about the mushroom man and about

Hector the Haitian distributor and about his brother Patrick,

who he rarely saw anymore at all because Connecticut was

so far.

He chewed the aspirins and counted the windows of the

great house across the road. Jimmy Moran had never thought to

count the windows before. He worked the bits of aspirin out of

his teeth with his tongue and counted thirty-two windows.

Thirty-two windows that he could see, just from the road! He

thought and thought and then he spoke.

“Even for me, with six kids and a wife...” Jimmy supposed

aloud. “Even for me, with six kids and a wife, it must be a sin to

have such a house. That must be it.”

Jimmy Moran thought and thought, but this was the best he

could figure. This was all he could come up with.

“Even for me, ” he said again, “it must be a sin.”

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