The laws against it didn’t stop us. Did laws ever stop anyone who wanted to do something really bad from doing something really bad? A failure of nerve stopped us. His All his. He, the adroit, well-built, well-practiced man, who did it daily, for real, chickened out. I, who hadn’t yet mastered long division or my dread surrounding it, was ready to jump right in.
Upon starting work at a new job, Dad would half-promise and half-threaten to cart me along to the worksite, fix me in place around his tough neck, my legs parted, one leg dangling off each of his shoulders, and lug me around the job all day, up and down the tiers of the bridge, everywhere work required him to be while he painted. A regular workday, but with a Beth on his back. He’d try not to let me fall. He’d do the best he could. His six feet and three inches — a tall Jew! — guaranteed me an even better view than his of water, sky, skyline, land, of the whole place that Mark LaPlace, a mixed-blood Mohawk, who, along with many Indian ironworkers, drove in every week from the Caughnawaga reservation near Montreal, called the City of Man-Made Mountains.
Earthbound, at home or school, the world was scary and too big as it was. High on a partially completed bridge, higher yet on Dad’s shoulders, the world would swell to unmanageable dimensions, awesome frights, sickening beauties. The anticipation of visual sublimity wasn’t what thrilled me at every promise-threat. I thrilled to Dad’s singular power to scare me, to his correspondingly exclusive power to soothe me. Dad could reassure me; I’d believe his reassurances, trust in them, because he knew, the cells that made him him understood how bad fear could get. Climbing together, he’d have his rope, hook, muscle-meat, and deeply treaded, break-a-leg boots, acting on behalf of his physical integrity and safety. All I’d have was a perfunctory pat on the head, knock ’em dead, kiddo, and his body. I’d be terrified and love it, love him for terrifying me, for his unique capacity to assuage terror he’d authored himself. If some evening, he’d casually, passingly mention taking me up — maybe tomorrow… you never know, do you? — the next morning, suited up in my dungaree overalls, prepared for action, I’d park my tush on his lunch pail, so he couldn’t leave without first reckoning with me, as a housecat might tuck her body within the lining of a suitcase her owner was packing for a journey, not-so-subtly notifying her master, You’re not going anywhere unless you take me, too. As if the cat, no matter how well-loved, had any say at all in the matter.
Every day he left without taking me, until I was twelve and God damn it to Hell he died and stopped no taking me.
Before he pulled that stunt, he kept on pledging and daring me to go. I’d dare him back with a fiercely incautious, You’d better believe it! As if I, no matter how well-loved, had any say at all in the matter.
Every one of New York City’s children grew up in the shadows of bridges. A smaller subset grew up or died in the penumbrae of bridge deaths. Child endangerment was a Class A misdemeanor, as naughty as a misdemeanor could be before it graduated up a grade to felony. So it was one crime, child endangerment, if I hung around bridge bases when school was out so Dad could half-look after me — babysitters and summer camp didn’t exist in our economic cosmology, the unfeasibility of camp accounting for my never learning how to swim — and it was another crime, child neglect — which was often a felony, not to mention a big fat bore — if he left me alone at home.
An outlaw either way.
Even when school was in session, most of the guys in all the gangs brought their sons to work, where they received their real education. Bridge-building was existence itself, what their fathers before them had done, what their sons after them would probably do. Ironworkers formed multi-generational lines of risk-takers, cold-nerved men bonded together like the high steel it was a life’s assignment to connect. Those burly, balletic men — who took chances only circus acrobats, suicidal souls, Wallendas, or bridgemen would take, who pronounced me cuter than a button, who bear-hugged me till the guacamole would come outa them ears, who gave me quarters just because I was Lefty Tedesky’s girl — were criminals? Plain as day, it couldn’t have been a crime when Chicky Testaverde, who spun cable, brought his fourteen-year-old, Danny, to a job, and it couldn’t have been a crime when a tall ladder caught Danny’s curious eye, and the boy asked, “Can I climb that?”
Chicky replied, in a resigned, benumbed, oh-no-here’s-where-it-all-begins voice, “Awright, but don’t fall.” Could Chicky authoritatively have refused, without Danny laughing in his face as father and son stood right there on a bridge-construction site, where Chicky was now working iron, where both might have been remembering that Chicky’s father, Danny’s grandfather, had worked the Williamsburg Bridge, lifting steel beams with derricks pulled by horses?
Danny climbed that ladder higher and higher, until he stood alone on a slippery top beam — a beam much higher than Chicky had bargained for or would have allowed if Danny had asked — and looked around, taking in the world’s magnitude, and marveled at how extraordinarily far he could see from that height, and instantly decided that ironwork was what he’d someday do. Down at the base, Chicky went all-out ape. “Get down, Danny, you crazy fuck, damn you! You’ll kill yourself up there. And if you die, Danny boy? You know what’ll happen if you die?” Danny smiled down at everyone, smiled what the men called a shit-eating grin. I couldn’t see how eating shit was anything to grin about, but I figured adults knew things I was too young to understand. “If you die,” Chicky screamed at the sky, “I. Will. Fucking. Kill. You.”
Wearing an aw-shucks-I’m-caught-but-I’m-cute mug, Danny climbed down. Everyone, high and low — physically, up on the bridge and down at the base, and professionally, at every station within high steel’s complex system of ranking its men — applauded and cheered. One after another, ironworkers thumped his back hard; sometimes truly to hurt him, because he’d done wrong, he’d gone against his father, and sometimes to congratulate him, as a display of respect, because he’d proven himself bridge-worthy. Danny had demonstrated his passion for and merit within his family’s legacy precisely by defying it in its current incarnation: Chicky. Mostly the men’s back-clapping extended both — contempt and admiration — through the infliction of pain. Just a little pain.
Or a lot. But a lot usually happened at home. Like what they did in public was practice for what they’d do at home. Like they saved a lot up during the day. For later.
Chicky played at grumbling and grousing but couldn’t persuasively beat down his smile — crooked-lipped, prominently lacking some teeth, but jam-packed with filial pride — when he submitted that Danny’s ascent had earned Danny his first beer. Chicky kept a cooler with sodas and beers in his Buick’s trunk on days when the walking bosses weren’t around. He called, “Little Tedesky!” I jumped to attention. “Couldja make yourself useful? Shake a leg? Get my boy here a beer?”
Chicky tossed me his car keys and threw me an approving nod when I caught them no problem. Keds crunching gravel, I ran toward the parking lot, delighted to have a task to fulfill for the men. Danny, overjoyed with his big day’s second distinct launch into masculine adulthood — his illicit, under-age drink, perhaps not his first, as Chicky chose to think — jogged close behind me.