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the toughest jobs in America: exhausting, permanently subject to layoff, and extremely dangerous. The raising of office towers routinely claims a life or two. At least bridgework is worse. The Whitestone Bridge was regarded as a life-sparing marvel because only thirty-five men were lost on it.
    There is one major contradiction in the ironworker, his endless enthusiasm for street courtship. What other set of Don Juans ever went out so unromantically styled?—casually groomed, tactlessly dressed, unimaginatively verbal? “Got a cookie for me, honey?” they will utter as a woman strolls by. Of course she ignores them; it wouldn’t get you far in the Ramrod, either. Sometimes a group of them will clap and whistle for a ten, and I’ve seen women with a sporty sense of humor wave in acknowledgment. But there the rapport ends.
    So why do they keep at it? Has one of them ever—in the entire history of architecture from Stonehenge to the present—made a single woman on the street? There are the occasional groupies, true: a few days ago I saw a young woman with an intense air of the bimbo about her waiting outside the site next to my apartment building just before quitting time with a camera in her hands. But this is the kind of woman these men have access to anyway, not least in the neighborhood bars where they cruise for a “hit.” The ladies of fashion who freeze out these lunch-break inquiries are a race of person these men will never contact. After all, women like being met, not picked up, especially not on the street.
    One of the workers next door eats his lunch sitting on the sidewalk in front of my building. Men he discounts or glares at; women he violates in a grin. The pretty ones get a hello. I was heading home from the grocery when I saw a smashing Bloomingdale’s type treat his greeting to a look of such dread scorn that, flashed in Ty’s, it would have sent the entire bar into the hospital with rejection breakdowns. But the ironworker keeps grinning as she storms on; “Have a nice day!” he urges. Emotionally invulnerable, I tell you. Yet are they really trying to pick these women up—sitting on the ground in a kind of visual metaphor of the plebeian, chomping on a sandwich while ladling out ten or twelve obscenities per sentence? This ironworker at my building is young, handsome, and clean-cut; still, he’s riffraff. Sex is class.
    When I started working on my dad’s sites, I saw these men not as a social entity but as ethnicities and professions. There were Italians, Poles, Portuguese, and the Irish, each with a signature accent. There were carpenters, electricians, cement people, and the ironworkers themselves, the center of the business, either setters (who guide the girders into their moorings) or bolters (who fasten them). They were quiet around my brothers and me, not respectful but not unpleasant, either. We were, as they term beginners, “punks.” Still, we were the boss’ punks.
    My older brother Jim fit in easily with them and my younger brother Andrew somewhat admired them; I found them unnervingly unpredictable. They were forever dropping their pants or socking each other. They’d ignore you all day from a distance of two feet, then suddenly come over and bellow a chorus of “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree” about two inches from your nose. Surpassingly uncultured, they were nimble conversationalists, each with his unique idioms, jokes, passwords. One might almost call them sociable but for their ferocious sense of kind, of belonging to something that by its very nature had to—but also by its simple willfulness wanted to—exclude everyone who wasn’t of the brotherhood. Their sense of loyalty was astonishing—loyalty to their work, their friends, their people. Offend that loyalty and you confronted Major War.
    Most of them were huge, the mesomorph physiques expanding with the labor over the years so that even fat wrecks sported gigantic muscles under the flab. Strangely,