Bush Versus Kerry, With a Side of Tuna
The trucks start arriving at the sooty storefronts of Fulton Fish Market at 9 o’clock every weeknight. They come in great snarling convoys–out of the honeyed Carolina sunshine, from the craggy coasts of Maine, and everywhere in between–weighed down with whale-size tunas, scuttling lobsters and iced-up cod. By midnight, the lonely stretch of pavement flanked by the Brooklyn Bridge and the old Peking schooner at the South Street Seaport is transformed into a flurry of circling forklifts and screaming fishmongers. Gates rattle open. Shaved ice flies. Fish glisten under the floodlights where bleary-eyed restaurateurs navigate the Styrofoam labyrinth, trying to sniff out the best deal amid a stench that can only be described as somewhere between low tide and a bus depot.
The fishmongers have been here for 182 years. They’ve weathered seven wars, Mafia busts and a huge conflagration that all but incinerated much of their operation in the ‘90s. This November will be the first presidential election since the smoke plumes of the World Trade Center attacks lapped the edges of their open-air market, and the last before this venerable downtown institution disappears for good–it is slated to relocate to the South Bronx this January. But even on the crest of these two sea changes, it is perhaps not surprising that the political sentiments on Fulton Street are as myriad as the salty characters who inhabit it.
At Frank W. Wilkisson Seafood, there is a battered wooden podium draped with an American flag, where dispatcher Nick D’Antuono sits. He recalls the day of the terrorist attacks, when several of his co-workers were stranded on East Broadway, trying to leave the market. Since then, he says, he’s favored President Bush’s aggressive foreign policy.
“You gotta go after these guys,” he says, scribbling in a battered metal notepad. “This other guy, he wants to talk to them. You can’t talk to them. I think most people down here are for Bush.”
“Bush is a scumbag,” says one of his colleagues. “He wants to have a war for his own cause.”
“Don’t talk to that guy,” says a hulking man in sleeveless camo, jabbing at boxes of red snapper with a gaff hook. “Bush is our man.”
“What do you know about that blow monkey?” his colleague retorts. “He didn’t go to Vietnam. Cheney didn’t go to Vietnam. And you didn’t go to Vietnam. That’s why you like him.”
Out front, Rivera Isael, a 40-year-old forklift operator from the Bronx, isn’t crazy about Bush either. With five cousins in Iraq, two of them women, Isael is not happy with the president’s decision to go to war.
“How you gonna send 18-year-olds over there and give them a Tek 9 or an Uzi? You’re sending them to their death,” he says. “The president is supposed to look out for the people. Why doesn’t he send some of his family over there? But they don’t. They send us.”
Jimmy Valentino, a salesman for Beyer Lightning Fish Company, agrees. “Bush is nothing but a troublemaker,” he says, munching a sandwich as he stands among waxed boxes of flounder and halibut. Valentino says he lost a cousin in the World Trade Center attacks, but says he’s been losing confidence in Bush’s policies since then. “He’s just trying to fix his father’s mistakes,” he says. “But that doesn’t do anything for us. He hasn’t found Bin Laden and he hasn’t found weapons of mass destruction.”
Farther north, as dawn bursts through the rays of suspension cables on the Brooklyn Bridge, pigeons peck at shattered blue crab carcasses. A few workers gather around a pickup truck where a white-haired vendor sells coffee and pastries. Joe Centrone, the big, gruff Arrow Seafood salesman everyone knows as “Joe Tuna,” lumbers over to a milk crate and lights up a cigar. His co-worker, Darren, scrambles around, taking the last of the inventory. With an archipelago of earrings and a designer tank top, Darren is one of the few openly gay fishmongers at the market. But he has one thing in common with his more cantankerous colleague: both men are fed up with politics.
“Just look what they did to McGreevey,” says Darren, referring to N.J. Gov. James E. McGreevey, who amid a mounting scandal last month announced his homosexuality and his resignation. “So he likes boys? He can still do his job.”
“They’re both crooks,” says Centrone of the candidates. “That’s the way the system works. But who would I pick?” He sticks a finger in his mouth, then holds it up to the wind. “I guess it’s between John Kerry and the Nazi regime.”
“Bush got us into a war and we may as well let him finish it,” chimes Richard Klein, a manager at Third Generation Seafood. “He’s protecting our freedoms.”
“He’s protecting my freedoms by taking my personal freedoms away,” says Centrone. “That’s a great concept.”
“He didn’t fly two planes into the World Trade Center,” says Klein. “You wanna see more terrorists? You wanna see guys with knapsacks walkin’ around the subways?”
For a moment, it’s tense–nerves frayed by a long night of fish slinging, rubbed raw with partisan talk. Then, the white-haired coffee vendor cracks a smile.
“I like the car searches at Battery Tunnel,” he says.
“Ooh, I like being frisked,” offers Darren, with a wink that suggests he isn’t kidding.
Centrone leans back on the plastic crate. “I like the cavity searches myself,” he says, relighting his soggy cigar. “You never know. I might have a stick of dynamite up my…”
Assume, here, that Centrone says what you think he says.
