NOTE-S
ON
A
CHARACTER
51
story. From the story's "tone" Tommy thought the reference was to a
cop. He respected cops. They had been facts of his all his life. When
the cousin pointed out that the reference was actually to a young police
dog, Tommy was mollified, but said that anyway they needn't talk so
much, or that way.
Yet now that Tommy had found the streets of his kid-gang days
again, and people with the "real stuq" in them, he clung to them as if
at last he had found something on his own grounds that had "class" to it.
He kept drifting among the organized unemployed groups, among strikers,
lending a hand here and there, to no matter what group, if they let him,
and so long as he thought they were trying to solve for someone, by
action , the helplessness he felt in himself. Tommy still wanted to go along
with the facts. And "the facts" were st:ll those solid immediacies of his,
now related to his own· sense of ebbing security. All that had happened
in this time was that without thinking of it he had switched his allegiance
from his wife's "class," which was somehow betraying him, to what
he found in these baffling, bauling groups who would not sell out, who
were doing something and not talking.
When I saw him again and asked him how he was, he said: "0$."
"Starving?" "Yeah-a little." "Doing anything about it?" ""VeIl" he
said doggedly, "I'm not a chump looking for a job by my lonesome any–
more· Bet on that." No. Tommy belonged, practically, to an Unem–
ployed Council!
That is, he was not a member of one, but he was going there
regularly, putting back evicted people's furniture, relieving on picket lines
whenever he was asked to. He still would not march in a general demon–
stration or anything like that: he didn't believe in it, he said. Tommy
still couldn't get that word "solidarity": too deep. But he would join any
mass unit whose goal was explicit in action.
It
was strange to watch
him those days. No, he had made no new friends, he said (actually, some
of the active ones were old friends of his) and, no, he was not associating
with the "reds." All he would concede to me was that you needed a
crowd, as he used -to know when he was a kid.
The next time I saw Tommy he was in jail. "Say,-" he said, "can't
you get me out of here? I didn't want this-" "\Vhat did you do?"
"Nothing. I was helping some strikers in front of a factory and I poked
a cop." "You?" "Why not!" "A police pup?" I aSked. Tommy grinned
and fell silent. Then, suddenly, he was sore. "The damn fool cops, they
knew what we were doing. We were getting those guys a raise -in wa!1;es.
Some cops are damn fools."
