Warren Murphy: Firing Line

But they were all together in one thing. They did

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not like Ziggata being in their firehouse. Even though it happened only every three years at contract-negotiating time, there was a strong feeling among them that Ziggata might be spying for the city administration, ready to report them for some minor rule infraction. That this had not happened in the last nineteen years wasn't really important; what was important was that it could happen.

"Who did this?" Ziggata yelled again.

"G'wan," came a voice from the end of the room. "If you don't like it, leave."

"Yeah," echoed another voice. "Who asked you here anyway, spy?"

"Spy?" shouted Ziggata. "A spy? Ain't I your legally electoral representative? Ain't I bringing you back a big contract?"

"Yeah, that's what you say. What are you getting out of it?"

"Satisfaction in a job well done," Ziggata said. "I'd like to cut the throat of whoever threw my pants on the floor."

"Go home," yelled another voice. "Wear one of your expensive Guinea suits. You got plenty of them."

"Yeah," said another. "With our money, you got a lot of them."

"Ooooooh," groaned a third as if in real pain. "Why does everybody get fat off us?"

"You're paranoids," Ziggata yelled. "Frigging paranoids."

"Yeah? Well, that don't mean you ain't taking advantage of us."

"Screw you all,' Ziggata said. "If I never see you again, it'll be too soon." He had finished putting on

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his uniform. He looked as if he had just gotten the jacket out of the dry cleaners and found the pants on a subway platform. "I look like hell," he said.

"Stop worrying about how you look, and try to negotiate us a contract," a fireman yelled.

"What?" screamed Ziggata. "I got us everything we wanted."

"Bullshit," yelled back one of the fireman. He sat up on the edge of his bed. He was wearing an armless undershirt. He had tattoos on both arms from wrist to shoulder. "I got a brother-in-law in Skan-eateles, New York," he said. "Who cares?"

"Yeah? Well, he's a fireman, and they get off the first day of deer season. Paid."

"When the hell is the first day of deer season?" Ziggata asked.

"I don't know but they get it off." 'They get any other holidays off?" Ziggata asked. "Like Christmas or July Fourth?"

"Who the hell cares? They got deer season day. A paid holiday. But they probably got real union leadership."

Ziggata realized it would do no good to explain to the firemen that the fire union had negotiated so many paid holidays for its members that the department's work year was hardly longer than that of public schoolteachers. It wouldn't do any good. His arms were starting to itch. He recognized the signs and tried to calm himself down.

In a final attempt at restoring a spirit of friendship, he went to the pot of food on the stove at the end of the room and dipped out a small helping of spaghetti and sauce. He sat down at the white enamel-topped table in front of the stove, lifted a

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spoon of spaghetti to his mouth, tasted it, then spat it out. Drops of food and sauce fell all over the front of his pants and jacket.

"Sumbitch," yelled Ziggata. "Who the frig put the frigging orégano in that sauce?" He wiped his spattered mouth on the dirty tablecloth. "Look at me. I look like a pig." He ran to the sink to try to blot himself clean.

"You always look like a pig," shouted back one of

the firemen.

"With our money," another one said.

"I hate orégano," Ziggata moaned. "It makes me break out."

"Everything makes you break out. I'm going to use orégano forever," a voice cackled from the corner of the room.

So, itchy, bumpy, skin scaly Anthony Ziggata reached the mayor's office at City Hall and was not in a good mood and when the mayor smiled at him, waved across the room, and walked up to shake his hand and asked, "How'm I doing," Ziggata said, "You're doing shit."

"What's wrong?" the mayor asked.

"We ain't got no deal unless we get deer season day off."

"Deer what?"

"Deer season day. It's the first day of deer season."

"When is it?" the mayor asked.

"I don't know," Ziggata said. "Ask a frigging deer. I ain't no frigging deer."

"Why do you want it off?"

Ziggata took a deep breath. "There is a large hue and cry among the men of our valiant department for deer season day off as a paid holiday to bring

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us parity with the vast majority of other fire departments across the breadth and depth and longitude of the United States."

"You already have sixty-three paid holidays," the mayor sputtered.

"Well, make it sixty-four. Deer day or we walk," Ziggata said.

"Walk," the mayor said. It was the first time in twenty years that the occupant of the New York City mayor's office hadn't knuckled under to a threat. The mayor was surprised to look around and find that the clocks hadn't stopped, the sun had not stopped moving, and the walls of the building were still intact. He felt exhilarated. Probably, there were mayors and public officials around the country who said no once, maybe even two or three times a year. He bet they liked doing it. It was like having power.

He yelled at Ziggata's back. "No, dammit. I say no, no, a thousand times no. I'd rather die than say yes."

And so Anthony Ziggata, in a funk over the orégano sauce stains on his blue uniform, his skin itching, went out to the waiting reporters and called the city administration and specifically the mayor a gang of fascist, racist oppressors and repressors intent upon breaking the spirit of true trade unionism in America. And he said that if the firemen were expected to be ready to die for the city, as so many did, they were also ready to die for their honor, and the mayor had not heard the last of this.

By the time the stories had reached the fire-houses of the city, they had been changed somewhat. The firemen "learned" that the city police had demanded in their next contract that each po-

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liceman be paid three times what a fireman was paid, since they worked three times as hard. By unanimous voice vote, every fire company in the city authorized Ziggata to call a strike to hold off the rampaging police union plunderers. Ziggata by now had on a fresh pair of pants, and a bath had gotten rid of most of the itching, and he was home in Ozone Park, Queens, and he didn't want to hear from strike. But when he got the first of many phone calls calling him a traitor to the firemen's cause and warning him that he might forfeit the 125 percent of salary pension all firemen were entitled to after completing ten years of more or less loyal service, he did the only thing a self-respecting union man could do.

He brought the department out on strike.

Soon after, Solly and Sparky arrived.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The mayor had set up a crisis headquarters in City Hall, and when he arrived there after eating Szechuan food in Chinatown, he asked a woman outside City Hall, "How'm I doing?" She hit him on the head with her umbrella. He arrived at the crisis center shaken, careful enough to ask his aide, "How are you doing?"

"Terrible," his top aide said. He was a swarthy Latin-looking man with a rumpled suit and a greasy tie who wanted to stay in office just long enough to buy a restaurant. "Goddam, alarm boxes are going off all over the city, and nobody's answering them."

"What's burning?"

"Nothing yet. They're all false alarms."*

"You sound like you've got it under control. Fm going out to mingle," the mayor said. He had been out of the building only a few minutes when the fires started.

Solly Martin and Sparky McGurl drove through New York's nighttime streets. They headed east down 81st Street.

"This block'd go in minutes," Martin said. The

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boy didn't answer, and Solly looked over at him.