Dawn's Early Plight

Shortly after midnight, Frankie Farrell swallows a final gulp of steaming tea, rises from a seat at his kitchen table and walks into the dimly lit living room of his Lower East Side walk-up. A battered stereo plays a Glenn Gould album at low volume; Farrell abruptly shuts it off. After feeding his dog, he yanks a heavy flannel jacket from a coat rack, pulls a beret over his thick shock of white hair and tucks a library-issued copy of Finnegans Wake under his arm.

Twenty minutes later, he's standing on the corner of Allen and Delancey, waiting for a cargo truck to take him to Queens. There, as he has for the last 26 years, Farrell will "shape up"-appear and proclaim himself available for work-at a major daily's printing plant. If he's lucky, he'll be selected to help deliver that day's paper.

A bit before 1 a.m., the truck comes into view. Farrell drags his hulking frame into the street to flag it down.

The driver, Pedro, a somber middle-aged man wearing a ski cap, painter's pants and a worn sweater, waves Farrell aboard. For 10 minutes, they ride together without speaking. On a quiet stretch of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Farrell breaks the silence. "You know, I used to walk all the way out here from Manhattan," he says, gesturing in the direction of a well-kept park. "There used to be wild dogs all over the damn place. I had to outrun them on more than one occasion to get to work."

At 1:15, the truck pulls into the printing plant's parking lot.

As Farrell walks through the vast, airplane hangar-like space of the plant, he tells me, "I've got a lot of regrets about what I'm doing with my life. This line of work is depressing-it's as simple as that." It's 1:30 in the morning, a half hour before the shape-up, and bundles of that day's paper whiz along conveyor belts, headed for the trucks. A midget keeps an eye on things from a balcony above.

The newspaper business represents one of the last outposts of the the shape-up. Farrell's is held each day of the year, and being picked can lead to $185 for five hours of labor. Jobs are doled out on the basis of seniority, but because attendance is not mandatory, the roster of participants, and each man's claim on an assignment, varies from night to night. Only a fraction of the men who shape up are guaranteed work.

Those not chosen return home empty-handed, lending the affair an element of tension and uncertainty that persists from the earliest days of the shape-up. This is how things have always been. For the 58-year-old Farrell, it's hardly a charming artifact of the past.

"This whole racket's a damn headache," he says, his pale, freckled face scowling. "The crookedness, the politics over who gets work and who doesn't, who gets the prime routes and who gets the shitty ones-I'm sick of it all."

Farrell pushes through a swinging metal door with one extended hand and enters a loading dock that smells of gasoline. He descends a flight of metal stairs, exchanging somber nods with a few rough-looking characters shooting the breeze around a wooden folding table.

"My goal at this point is to make things as easy as possible on myself," Farrell says in a conspiratorial voice. "I've got other things to worry about and I don't need to be stressed by work. So I try to play the system to my advantage. I cut every deal I can to get the lightest route possible and when I'm working I take things nice and slow-I don't need to be some kinda superstar. I killed myself for this job when I was a greenhorn, but now I know better. Just get done, get my swag money, go home. That's it. Easy as pie."

Swag money?

"Yeah, swag money," he says, squeezing the words out of the side of his mouth in the manner of Jimmy Cagney. "You skim papers off the top of bundles and sell 'em at cut rates to newsstands that don't have contracts with the newspaper. After you split the profit with the other guy on the truck you can take home an extra $30 or $40 a night from it. That's not peanuts."

At exactly 2 o'clock, Farrell enters the shape-up room, a very tiny space awash in sickly, yellow light. Paint is peeling off the walls, the air thick with cigarette and cigar smoke. In one corner of the room, food dispensers proffer moldy peanuts and gumballs; in another, a large bulletin board contains but one piece of paper, the funeral notice of a former deliveryman.

About 40 men of varying ages and ethnicities are gathered for the shape-up. An elderly man wearing a dirty New York Mets cap sits at a table by himself, drinking from a can of Budweiser; a bookie of similar age is leaning against a soda machine, accepting, with a smirk, a fistful of money from a young, dreadlocked gambler. Five or six card games are in progress. To a man, the participants play with blank looks on their faces.

A wretched-looking soul hobbles through the room with the help of a cane, grimacing. "I gotta get a goddamned hip replacement," he mumbles. "It could be worse," says an acquaintance. The gimp stops, smiles sardonically. "You think so?" he asks, glaring.

From an adjoining office, names are called out. With each one, a man rises to accept an assignment. As Farrell looks around the full room, his face registers disgust.

"There aren't enough jobs to go around," he says. "The paper's circulation is way down." He pauses. "Goddamned pathetic."

Eventually, Farrell is called forth-he'll be working a Brooklyn route, unloading papers and collecting outstanding bills from newsstands. He immediately leaves the room and joins a group of men huddled together outside in the cold. An iron door clangs shut behind them, and a moment later an obese man with a kind, open face, emerges from the office. This is the shape-up dispatcher.

"Sorry, fellas," he says with a tinge of embarrassment. "That's it-slow night. See ya tomorrow."

The room empties quickly but for a handful of men sticking around to finish their card games. The shape-up was over in 10 minutes. Only 13 jobs were handed out.

Shortly before 3, Farrell takes up a position at the parking-lot exit of the printing plant. A few feet away, a long, overfed rat emerges from a thicket of weeds and scurries across a pothole-strewn road before disappearing into a ditch. A Manhattan-bound delivery truck approaches. Farrell hails it, and tells the driver that they're partners for the shift.

"Aren't you supposed to be working in Brooklyn, Frankie?" the driver asks.

"This route works better for me, so I switched off."

"Figures."

"Let's just get this done as soon as we can," Farrell says, folding himself into the passenger seat and setting his book on the dashboard. "I've got a lotta stuff to do tomorrow."

"Yeah, I bet," the driver says, and steps on the gas.