A Flower on the Waterfront

He was a dazzling figure on the waterfront, a big, curly haired guy in a suit so red it glowed, striding around town on ostrich-skin boots, smiling and shaking hands like he was mayor. Funny way for a loan shark to act.

Some would say Robert Raymond McDonnell, known as Mac, looked like a flower out there against the gray background of the sea. When he wasn’t wearing fiery red, he’d wear a brilliant green suit or wild polka dot slacks and cowboy hats so big you could swim in them.

Mac had been a pool hustler and bookmaker too, and for a while ran a poker game out on 6th Street. He’d been arrested a dozen times for gambling and was once accused of being the head of organized crime in San Pedro.

“Hell,” he’d say, laughing, “no Irishman is gonna head up organized crime anywhere.”

He says he quit making book when the judge warned him that one more arrest and he’d end up in state prison. So Mac turned to what he liked doing best, which was lending money.

That’s what he called himself, a money lender, not a loan shark, because a shark is a guy who squeezes you for what he can, then breaks your legs if you don’t pay him back.

Mac charged 10% and sometimes, as his wife says, got zero percent. Other times he didn’t even get the principal back, but never had it in him to press hard for his money, much less break anyone’s legs.

That was the Mac everyone knew, a guy full of hell and laughter, as compelling as the suits he wore. But he’s a sick man now, a gaunt and raspy shell of himself. I’ve got to tell you, boys. Old Mac is dying.

I saw him the other day smoking Camel cigarettes in a corner of his garage, looking a lot like the guy in the old song who’s making St. Peter wait because he’s got to have another cigarette.

Mac, who is 73, has cancer. It started in his lungs and spread through his body. Last September they told him it was terminal.

“We’ve all got to face it sometime,” Mac says with a smile so bright it lights the room, and a voice so weak it can barely be heard.

A friend of Mac’s named Steve Bush who longshored with him wrote to tell me Mac was “going out,” as he put it, and wanted me to write about him. Mac had always been a fan, he said.

Anyone who does a column gets letters from those who want attention. You get used to being adored for what you can do for someone.

But here was a man facing the final sunsets of his life, the last starry nights, the last salty breezes blowing in from the sea. I’m not the kind of guy who can turn his back on that.

I called Bush and he told me about Mac, a kid from South Dakota who parlayed a love for pool and humanity into a life he played like a game.

Mac was king of the waterfront, he said, a guy who almost gave money away, and now that he was dying he ought to be acknowledged.

So I sat with him in the corner of his garage on a quiet street in San Pedro, but there was nothing somber about it. Even when you tried to whisper around his circumstance, like death tiptoeing down a back hall, Mac would say, “For Christ’s sake, I’m sick, not mentally retarded!”

Sit yourself right here, Death. Mac knows you’re around.

I don’t have a lot of room in a column to paint the quiet tones of anyone’s life. You’re going to have to figure out what kind of man Mac has been when I tell you he cooked food to take to the guys on the dock and visited strangers in hospitals just to make them laugh.

He owned a clothing store once but used it mostly as a front for making book. “I didn’t know what he was doing,” his wife, Betty, says, “but I wondered why the place was locked all the time.”

They’ve been married 20 years and Betty is Mac’s special love. He wrote her a letter of goodby a week ago and Betty cries when she talks about it.

“Goodby and thanks to both of you,” he said in it. The other person he was talking about was God.

Mac began lending money a few years after getting a job on the docks and a mortgage on his house for $12,000. A loan shark died and Mac took his place.

He never could turn anyone down or muscle them later. The guys knew that. When he and Betty were down and out once, they lived on money that had been owed for 15 years and suddenly came pouring in, interest and all.

“Everybody likes Mac,” Bush says. “Who else could get away with wearing a red suit on the waterfront?”

Somebody asked Mac once what his favorite flower was and he replied, “People.” It was an odd kind of answer until you saw him in a suit brighter than any rose.

When I asked why he dressed that way, I had to lean in close to hear. He replied in a voice as thin as a morning wind, “To be noticed.”

I hear you, Mac. This one’s for you.