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ironworkers don’t throw their weight around, don’t try to characterize themselves the way gay Attitude Hunks so often do. Ironworkers don’t care whether you’re impressed with them or not: they are what they are. They’re impressed. And just when you think you’ve figured them out, they’ll pull a twist on you. My dad built the Louisiana pavilion at the 1962 World’s Fair, an evocation of “Bourbon Street,” and one of the setting crew, a tall, silent Irish guy who drank literally from start to finish of every day, impressed me as being the meanest bastard on the site. “Hey, you,” he said to me, on my first hour on the job, “what the fuck are you doing? ” I had been sorting material so bizarre I don’t think it has a name, and I said as much. He stared at my mouth for a moment, then said, “Fuck you and fuck your college. ” I avoided him as much as was possible. And it happened that one day, some weeks later, the wind blew a speck of dirt into my eye while I was on the roof, and before I could do anything about it, he had come over, pulled out the bandanna they all carry, and was cleaning out my eye with the most amazing tenderness. “Okay?” he asked. It was, now. “Thanks,” I said. He nodded, went back to what he was doing, and never spoke to me again.
    The younger ironworkers had a certain flash and drove dashing cars, but my dad warned us not to take them as role models; they spent their evenings getting drunk and came home to beat their wives when they came home at all.
    “Is that what you want to be?” he asked us grimly.
    “Yeah,” said Andrew.
    The superintendents on these various jobs were supposed to keep an eye on us lest we get into trouble, but they seemed to delight in posing us atrocious tasks, such as climbing rickety, forty-foot ladders on wild-goose chases. Sometimes they’d give us a lift home, whereupon we’d be treated to an analysis of the social contours of the business: “Doze Italians, now, all dey wanna do is make fires. De niggers are lazy good-for-nothings.” And so on. Once, on lunch break, Andrew told my dad about this. “That idiot,” was my dad’s comment. “Look,” said Andrew, pointing to a group of Italians who had just made a pointless little fire so they could watch it go out.
    *   *   *
    Unlike the rest of us, Jim stayed with it. After a year of Rutgers he abandoned college forever and joined the ironworkers’ union, an unthinkable act for a building contractor’s son, virtually a patricidal betrayal of class. Yet I doubt he could have gotten his union book without my dad’s assistance; the building trade is harder to get into than a child-proof aspirin bottle. By the time I reached New York he was living in Manhattan. We ended up a few blocks from each other in the east fifties, and tentatively reconvened the relationship. My dad’s “Is that what you want to be?” ran through my head when I first visited Jim’s apartment, nothing you’d expect from a birthright member of the middle class. It was somehow blank and gaudy at once, rather like a pussy wagon with walls. Mae West, reincarnated as a blind lesbian, might have lived there. No, I’m giving it too much texture. It was the house of a man whose image of sensuality was a nude photograph of himself, his torso turned to the side to display a tattoo of two crossed swords. The photograph hung on his wall, and when I saw it I said, “If that thing on your arm is real, you’d better not let Mother see it.” He pulled off his shirt, smiling. It was real.
    “Girls like a breezy man, sport,” he told me. No one else in my family talks like him.
    I don’t understand this craze for tattoos among working-class men. Permanently disfiguring oneself falls in with that hopeless flirting with inaccessible women and other self-delusory acts of the reckless straight. At least Jim’s tattoo was high up on the arm, easily hidden even in a T-shirt; his pal Gene Caputo had a tattoo on each