Just One More for the Road

By R.Z. Sheppard

Nine hundred feet below the pavement, Owney Morrison works on a tunnel that will bring water to millions of New York City taps. Drill, blast, drill, blast, 45 ft. a day, 225 ft. a week. The job will take years and men's lives. Some will get careless and fall down shafts; others will be blown up when they stick their drills into holes containing unexploded charges. Most will succumb to what can euphemistically be called the sandhog's life-style, a grimy regimen that scorns the world of paper pushers and blots out feelings with alcohol.

Booze is the thematic undercurrent of Jimmy Breslin's fifth novel, a brutal slab of working-class life set among the Irish in the New York City borough of Queens. This is where Breslin learned his own trade as a newspaperman, reporting on the ways and means of the Archie Bunker set. His headlong bowling-ball prose can currently be found in the New York Daily News, where he is a Pulitzer-prizewinning columnist. There, as here, Breslin's lack of subtlety is his greatest strength. His characters are undereducated, abusive and conflicted by feelings of pride and shame. Table Money is burdened by stereotypes, although this is not necessarily a bad thing. Breslin knows what few members of the gentility are willing to acknowledge: that there would be no stereotypes if groups and classes did not demonstrate distinguishing characteristics.

Owney Morrison is descended from a long line of drinkers. He likes beer for breakfast and whiskey and beer chasers at lunch. "Just one" after work frequently turns into one too many. Sometimes Owney sleeps it off overnight in the hog house, the dressing room at the construction site. This does not please his wife Dolores, who wants to study medicine but is stuck at home with a baby. Dolores is a latter-day stereotype and one that Breslin is less sure of than he is of the guys and dolls along Queens Boulevard. Still, she is vital and feisty enough to make his point about the gulf between blue-collar men and their women.

There are two kinds of courage in Table Money. Owney's is physical, as he displayed in Viet Nam by winning a Congressional Medal of Honor. Dolores proves her valor by overcoming generations of inertia and fatalism. She does it by demonstrating that behind the male swagger there is usually an unsteady little boy in need of a firm maternal hand. When a neighborhood Rambo threatens to shoot at police from his window, Dolores arms herself with a basket of wet wash and gets him to help her hang it: "She held her hand out and Ralphie gave her the blue pajamas. She pinned them to the line and then moved them out, boldly, the pulleys on the far end of the line, on the telephone pole flush against the garage, squeaking loudly and comfortingly." Ralphie is calmed by the childhood ritual. He hands Dolores bedspreads, sheets and then his rifle.

Hanging laundry is not a bad analogy for the way Breslin works. His book relies less on plot than on the cumulative effect of colorful anecdotes flapping on a slack story line. There are tales of the old sod, immigration and Boss Tweed's New York. The first male Morrison in the U.S. walks off the boat in 1870 and is put right to work sandhogging for 75-c- a day plus three hots and a cot. He soon discovers that he is restricted to the construction camp because the nearby Hudson River town of Beacon, N.Y., does not want muddy foreigners on its streets. Later Morrisons dig water tunnels in the Bronx. Owney's granduncle Jack stays above ground to work as a messenger for an influential Irish lawyer. One of Jack's jobs is to deliver expense money to William Butler Yeats, then staying at the attorney's (would you believe?) 30-room Manhattan apartment. Jack has sticky fingers; he usually lightens the cash envelope, and when his boss dies, Morrison and his sister-in-law steal a Yeats manuscript from the apartment, bypassing a stack of paintings by Renoir. Says Emily Morrison: "Anything Irish got to be better." Her son Jimmy has no such flair for literary appreciation. He finds easier pickings as a corrupt union officer, and fathers Owney in 1949.

Breslin sets most of his action in the early '70s, after Owney returns from Viet Nam. His war experiences are locked inside him, and he has thrown away the key. He is literally and figuratively an underground man, emotionally detached from his family but bound by code and tradition to his brother sandhogs.

Table Money has its affectionate touches, like the etiquette for throwing out the trash: "The proper Glendale housewife keeps such a small garbage can in the kitchen that it must be emptied four and five times a day. The sweater tossed over the shoulders goes with the chore." There is a salute to the Delahanty Institute, which prepared generations of young men for the police- and fire-department exams, and a bitterly funny scene in which two sandhogs find themselves in a midtown Manhattan bar filled with three-piece suits and attache cases.

But the comedy of class consciousness is only a distraction. Breslin is interested not in sociology but in evil. His Queens has more than its share of ethnic Snopeses, gangsters, murderers and thieves. These are the people who truly stimulate the author's descriptive instincts for the deadly sins. There is Old Jack, for example, "who pushed drugs for tens of thousands with the same fervor as he filched a newspaper from a candy store," or Charlie O'Sullivan, an ex-baseball player and contract killer who swings a deadly bat. That these and other characters do not have much to do with the story of Dolores and Owney is not so noticeable as one might imagine. Breslin puts a lot of life on the page. Like a good barroom storyteller, he can make you miss your bus with one more for the road. --By R.Z. Sheppard