On the Waterfront Read Online Free Page A

and he liked to do his jobs a little more in the Sicilian manner. A certain finesse. If you didn’t think there was an art to these things look at his friend Danny D. who lived in the big house on the Jersey heights. Danny D. had tradition behind him, generations of disciplined viciousness. It was in his heritage to be secretive and thorough and merciless and never to go back on his word. Johnny admired Danny D.
    “Okay, Matooze,” he said to Charley, “go get the kid brother, put ’im to work.” Matooze was Johnny’s name for anybody he liked. Nobody knew where it came from or what it meant. All you had to know was you were in pretty good shape if he called you Matooze. But if he called you Shlagoom, then you better look out. Then you ship out or go to Baltimore or something. Charley had seen many a bum turn sickly white at the sound of that dark invention of a word shlagoom. Johnny followed Charley up the gangplank to the shore with his arm on his shoulder.
    “You got enough padding in there for a football team,” he said to Charley approvingly. Charley was a very natty dresser. He had his overcoats made to order. He wore a camel’s hair that was really a beaut. It looked like it must have come off a very upper-class camel. And it fitted Charley a lot better than it ever fitted the camel. Johnny Friendly, he’d buy a hundred-and-fifty-dollar tailor-made suit and after twenty minutes it’d start to hang baggy on him like it was ready made. It had something to do with the bulk of his figure. Charley was on his way to a round belly too, from too much sitting around and the big bills he ran up at Cavanagh’s and Shor’s, and he was softer than Johnny, having always lived off his wits while Johnny started up the hard way and smartened up as he went along. But Charley’s clothes hung creased and neat on him, another reason for having picked up the affectionate billing Charley the Gent.
    “Okay, Matooze,” Johnny said again. “I’ll be over at the joint.” That was the Friendly Bar, a little farther up River Street. Johnny’s brother-in-law Leo ran it for him. There was as much business done there as in the union office itself. The horse play and the numbers and a lot of the kickback and of course the loan sharking, that all went on in the bar. The back room was Johnny’s second home. He kept an apartment, but he only went there to sleep or jump a broad. He wasn’t much for home. He saw his mother had a nice home and he helped his two sisters get places of their own, put their husbands on as dues collectors and shylocks so they could make an easy living. But Johnny was raised in the streets and in the bars, and that’s where he felt at home even if he wasn’t much of a drinking man. Labatt’s Pale India Ale was his pleasure. He wanted to stay in this business and he had seen a lot of tough monkeys drink themselves down the drain.
    Charley the Gent, in that dry, quiet way he had, said see ya Johnny, and then turned toward the row of tenements one block in from the river. It was a cool autumn evening and Charley liked the way the odds and ends of laundry fluttered on the lines. There was a maze of colored shirts and long underwear and panties and diapers and kids’ stuff. The poverty of the waterfront hung out for all to see, denims that had been washed hundreds of times, and pajamas scarred with darning patches and the dresses of little girls that had long since washed out their colors. The poverty of the waterfront hung out for all to see. But poverty comes in bright colors too, here and there a yellow towel, a red wool shirt, a pair of green-checked socks, the life of the poor, respectable, drunken, hard-working, lazy, cocky, defeated, well-connected, forsaken waterfront poor hung row on row across the steep canyons between the tenements. Charley looked up at the crowded clothesline and thought of all those wives doing all that washing, every day clothes piling up full of sweat and coffee dust and the