Mooch

by Dan Fante

  Mooch

  A Novel

  Dan Fante

  With an Introduction by

  ANTHONY BOURDAIN

  This book is dedicated to my older brother,

  Nicholas Joseph Fante, 1942-1997.

  Dead from Alcoholism. Crushed like a dog in the street.

  Special thanks to Judy Berlinski for her help in

  editing my work.

  …he hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.

  (Isaiah 61.1)

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Other Books By Dan Fante

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  With Chump Change and Mooch, Dan Fante ratchets up the acceptable pain level of the personal hell/puke-in-the-kitchen-sink school of letters to painfully brilliant new heights. There are no good guys or bad guys in the squalid corners and soul-destroying office spaces of Fante’s Southern California—the struggle between good and evil goes on entirely inside his hero Bruno Dante’s head. The doomed son of a doomed father, Bruno careens perilously through life, always on the verge of that last irredeemable fuck-up. It’s breathtaking writing and deliciously excruciating, like watching a crack-smoking circus knife-thrower—you just KNOW something awful will happen.

  Once you read Fante, Jim Thompson will read like pure optimism. A basically decent guy, Bruno grapples with the Beast inside himself with such unflinching honesty, casually copping to every possible unlovely urge, that the wall between salvation and destruction seems filament thin. Everyone is both predator and prey in Fante’s sunlit underbelly, part of a voracious food chain in which everyone gets devoured. Life is a hideous carnival fairway where love, loyalty, charity and kindness are the flip sides of darker impulses: liabilities to be exploited by the canny and the uncaring.

  Burroughs wrote about The Algebra of Need, but Fante makes you smell it. The sweat-soaked hair plastered to a crack-whore’s neck becomes strangely beautiful, the idea of vodka before breakfast seems—suddenly—perfectly reasonable, a drone’s job in telemarketing hell becomes triumph…until the whip comes down and everything turns to shit.

  Somebody somewhere wrote a passage in which a character describes the end of a long drinking jag: ‘I went to brush something off my cheek and it was the floor.’ Reading Fante reminds me of that sudden moment of realization, that ‘How did I get here?’ feeling of finding oneself unexpectedly at the very brink, peering straight down into hell.

  This is dark, dark stuff—and presumably, very close to the bone. Fante, too, is the son of a doomed father and it’s hard not to read Chump Change and Mooch as memoir. The author sifts through entrails too incisively to avoid the supposition that some of those guts are his own.

  Angry, acerbic, self-pitying and often painfully funny, Bruno’s account of his own addiction and obsession, his heartbreaking need to redeem himself through writing even a magazine story in a men’s magazine is a caustic enema which boils straight through to the brain. Read it at your peril.

  Anthony Bourdain

  March, 2001

  Chapter One

  I HADN’T WRITTEN a word or a story or anything in months. And I hated my job. But that didn’t matter now. Nothing mattered because of the heat. It took an hour for me to finally make myself get up, put on a shirt, and get ready for work. I’d been avoiding it since Thursday.

  Outside on the burning, suffocating street, I yanked a new parking ticket out from under the windshield wiper of my 11-year-old Chrysler, then tore it into as many small pieces as possible, flinging it at the sky. I hated being back in L.A. I hated that I hadn’t had a drink in months. I hated that I was losing my hair. I hated my job. I hated filtered cigarettes and rap music and Tom Cruise’s big, stupid white teeth. And I hated the fucking Parking Violations Bureau.

  Opening the car door to my Chrysler was a mistake. The contained force of what had built up in an automobile after several days in the sun in a heat wave with the windows up, hit me. Exploding stagnation, decaying vinyl, strangled dust. A clear warning to go back to my room.

  I was running late, so I threw my canvassing book and my coupon demo packets across to the passenger side of the car, sucked in a gulp of the rancid oxygen, then stuck the key in the ignition.

  Nothing.

  I repeated the procedure. Nothing.

  I switched the ignition back all the way to the left to see if the electrical stuff, the gauges and flashers and the other shit, were working. Still nothing.

  Sweat was beginning to collect on my forehead and beneath my shirt.

  I tried the key again a new way: wiggled it, jiggled it sort-of, hoping that the motor might catch. It had worked before—another time on some other car before my life had turned on me. But not now. Again nothing.

  A man walked by.

  He appeared to be on his way to his own car. Dressed for the heat wave. Carrying a briefcase and wearing a pair of neatly-pressed tan slacks and a floral, green-mostly, silky, Hawaiian, sports shirt. L.A. casual. I recognized this person as a home owner from down my block, with the wife, the dog, the table saw in the garage. We had seen each other on the street a few times but had never spoken.

  As he came closer, his eyes met mine for an instant, then darted away. I knew why. He recognized me. I was one of the come-and-go residents of the sober-living apartment house on the corner. A shitsucking loser. I would live to be six hundred million years old and still never earn the word ‘hello’ from this citizen prick or his fat-butted wife who spent her afternoons digging in the garden.

  Passing my car’s side window, he slowed down, bending at the waist to steal a glance inside. Maybe, I thought, maybe he’s wondering why another adult, dressed for work in a sports jacket, slacks and tie, would be sitting behind the wheel of his car in the direct sunlight on the hottest day of the year with the windows up and his motor not running, sweating, suffocating, wiggling his ignition key back and forth like a brain-damaged retard fuck.

  I looked at my watch. It was 10.15 a.m. I’d never make the sales meeting.

  Unable to think of anything else to do, I lit a cigarette. It was the last cigarette in my pack of Lucky’s. I took a hit and watched the inside of the Chrysler fill with drifting rivers of smoke. I hated everything. God. Everything.

  ‘This is Albert Berlinski. How may I help you?’

  ‘Mister Berlinski, it’s Bruno Dante.’

  ‘Dante! What’s up? Where’ve you been? You missed both of the demos we had scheduled for you on Friday night!’

  ‘I’ve had car problems with my Chrysler again, Mister Berlinski.’

  ‘Myrna had to “no-show” those presentations—call your clients, re-schedule everything herself. You never phoned in.’

  For the last few days I had been reading a David Martin novel and staying in the coo
lness of my room because of my revulsion for door to door canvassing in the miserable heat and smog of my Glendale sales territory. ‘I was waiting for my mechanic to finish another car before he could start work on mine,’ I said. ‘An engine job.’

  ‘This is Monday, Dante. You’ve had three days to fix your vehicle. What time will you be in?’

  ‘The goddamn thing wouldn’t start again this morning.’

  ‘Sooo…now what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Personally, I’m at a loss. Nonplussed. Befuddled.’

  ‘Of course this means you won’t be attending the sales meeting again. I’ll have to tell Mister Fong.’

  ‘I promise you I’ll get the car squared away and be in by this afternoon. You have my word.’

  Berlinski paused—the death pause—I recognized it immediately. It comes just before the words that tell you you’re bumped. ‘You know Dante,’ he said, ‘we’re prolonging the inevitable here. Bring in your units and I’ll cut you a final check.’

  ‘Mister Berlinski, I just said that I’d be there this afternoon!’

  ‘We totaled out the sales numbers this morning. Last month you were number twelve. Down from number ten.’

  ‘I can count, Berlinski. I’m aware of that.’

  ‘In May you were also number ten. You’ve been number ten twice and number twelve once. You also no-showed at the Track Selling Seminar last Saturday. Mister Fong himself brought that up to me during our strategy review. Not being there was a mistake.’

  ‘I know I missed the seminar. I felt like rat shit missing the seminar. That seminar course was a vital component in my growth as an ambitious sales professional. I had a sincere desire to be there, believe me. It’s my goddamn car.’

  ‘Fortunately for the company, as I just said, the issue is now resolved.’

  ‘Mister Berlinski, never buy a Chrysler product. They’re hog excrement. No wonder the Japs and other alien conglomerates are taking over America. My car is further evidence of the demise of the fucking U.S. economy and the American dream. May I please talk to Fong personally on this?’

  ‘It’s my decision, not Mister Fong’s. You’re terminated. As of today. Bring in your units and your demo kit and the coupon books. I’ll have Myrna total up what we owe you.’

  ‘I’m being kicked while I’m down. I fucking-goddamn strongly suggest that you reconsider your decision.’

  ‘How many units do you have in your trunk?’

  ‘I’ve got the two Kirbys, a Hoover upright and the five hand-held Dirt Devils that were distributed to my team after the show. Eight pieces all together. What about another shot here, Mister Berlinski?’

  ‘Bring the units in. I’ll voucher them myself.’

  ‘That’s it? I’m fired?’

  No answer.

  ‘Well…okay, Mister Berlinski. But before you hang up, I would like to share something with you. Can I do that? On a man-to-man level? May I be permitted thirty fucking seconds of your valuable, priceless, sales-executive time?’

  ‘I’m busy, Dante. I’m in the middle of figuring the totals for all three teams. We’ll talk when you get here.’

  ‘You and I have spoken a lot on the phone, Mister Berlinski. Sometimes two or three times a day. Sometimes more if I got lost on my way to a demo and had to stop at a pay phone for directions. Okay? Correct or uncorrect?’

  ‘Bring the units in, Dante. I’ll make sure you get your check.’

  ‘I just wanted to say, Mister Berlinski, that almost every time after we’ve talked, after I’ve hung up, I’d get back in my car and I’d feel like I just finished interacting with a sour-faced sub-human cocksucker with the same empathy and interpersonal dexterity as one of the assholes behind the glass at the DMV Information Window. I regard you as a complete putz, Berlinski. I always have.’

  ‘No demo units, no check.’

  I looked through my pockets. I had four dollars. Enough for a newspaper, a new pack of Lucky Strikes, and a container of coffee at the 7—11. I went back upstairs to my dorm room, took off my jacket and necktie and slacks, and threw them at the wall.

  Yesterday’s shirt and my unwashed jeans fit my body like old friends.

  On the floor in my closet on top of my father’s hand-me-down Smith-Corona portable typewriter I found my Yankees cap with the big ‘NY’ on the front. I slipped the hat on as protection against the heat. Jonathan Dante, my father, had been dead for eleven months. He died broke, broken hearted, collecting a stinking Writer’s Guild Pension and seven hundred and sixty-two dollars a month in Social Security. A forgotten screenwriter. I had returned here to L.A. from New York City to watch him die, to inherit this typewriter. Three months ago, my cousin Willie checked out too. Booze and an overdose. Crazy, fat Willie. Thirty-five years old. Two Dante funerals in less than a year.

  Next to the typewriter, on the floor in the typing-paper box, was the only thing I had written and not thrown out since returning to Los Angeles: a short story called ‘Compatibility’. Twenty-five pages. I picked the story up and looked at the wrinkled title page, then back down at the typewriter’s bared black keys. They stared up at me like the eyes of frightened boat people. Hurling the pages back into the darkness, I slammed the closet door.

  On the street, on my way to the store, I had an insight, a flash that penetrated my understanding. My real difficulty—my problem—wasn’t my depressions or my drinking or my job failures or even the unarticulated fear that I was a fucking insane whack. My problem was people. And they were located everywhere.

  Chapter Two

  IN ORDER TO live at the sober-living house where I lived, I had to not drink and attend three Alcoholics Anonymous meetings per week. At these meetings, I would hear reformed alkies stand up and blubber on about how great and miraculous their lives were without booze and drugs. How wonderful their new job was and what gifts from God and all manner of preposterous, come-to-Jesus bullshit. How they were now able to form lasting relationships or patch up the old ones with their separated wives and girlfriends and how their children had stopped darting behind furniture and fleeing to their bedrooms when they saw them coming through the front door. Tra-la-la. Etcetera. So forth. Not my experience. I was not what AA’s call a WINNER even though the WINNERS are supposed to be the people who haven’t had a drink all day. I was not some transformed, anointed, cured gimp, tap dancing my way through life and thanking God and the Twelve Steps for keeping him sober and saving his ass. Recently, I’d heard Chickenbone, our moron, sober-living house manager, giving an AA peptalk to one of the miserable new guys who was two weeks off alcohol and rock cocaine. At the end of his lecture, he looked the kid in the face and said, ‘You know boy, sometimes you’re the windshield and sometimes you’re the bug.’ I hate hearing pig snot like that. AA is full of that shit. Philosophical one-liners that imply that life on life’s terms has its ups and downs but will somehow all equal out in the end. Tell that shit to the guys collecting plastic bottles and soda cans pushing their shopping carts down Broadway in Santa Monica or the young kid I met at the Friday Night meeting who was out on bail after a his last ‘slippy-poo’. He thumped his girlfriend in a blackout and is now about to be sentenced to five years because of the O.J. violence laws in California. Nice work God. Hail Mary, full of grace.

  For me, going without booze for the last four months straight was the hardest thing I had ever done. I was sober and no better off than before.

  My weekly rent for my dormitory room at the sober-living house was already three days late. I telephoned my AA sponsor, Liquor Store Dave, from the coin phone in the upper hallway. In AA a ‘sponsor’ is your support system, someone who has already worked the Twelve Steps and has been sober a while. Liquor Store Dave had dozens of recovering alkie friends. My hope was to catch a break and get a job recommendation.

  After spilling my guts to Dave about getting bumped from Fong’s Home Maintenance and letting him know about my rent situation, he made me endure a five-minutes sponsor lecture. In the end, he insisted
that I be willing to surrender to his advice. ‘You can’t think your way into right acting, Bruno. You have to act your way into right thinking. Your Higher Power has to be your top priority. Recovery first, right?’

  ‘Right Dave.’

  I heard him leafing through his address book on the other end, looking for a number. Then he stopped. ‘Didn’t you once tell me that you were a writer too?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘I’ve got a friend who writes résumes. He has an office in Culver City. Used to be a serious drunk; a hot-shot genius like you.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about writing résumes, Dave.’

  ‘What kind of stuff have you written? Bad checks? Ha ha.’

  ‘Poetry—a short story now and then.’

  ‘You the next Stephen King?’

  ‘The last Bruno Dante.’

  ‘Ever make any money writing, Bruno?’

  ‘High two digits.’

  ‘Ha ha.’ Dave kept flipping through his address book. ‘You used to do phone work, didn’t you? Boiler rooms? Telemarketing?’

  ‘In New York,’ I said.

  He stopped turning pages. ‘Perfect. Okay, call this guy.’

  I copied down the phone number of a friend of Dave’s, Frankie Freebase. According to Dave, Frankie was a ‘Winner’. He had over seven years of continuous sobriety and was now making good money at a phone sales gig. Then I was given more sponsor direction. Dave told me to write a letter to God asking for help in finding the right career.

  What follows here is a copy of the letter I wrote after I got back to my room:

  Dear God:

  Please help me to know what the fuck to do with my life and how to fix it.

  Sincerest personal regards,

  Bruno

  When I was done, I folded the letter and stuck it in the fly leaf of the novel I had been reading, Tap Tap by David Martin.

  After sitting quietly for a minute or two, a thought came to me. The AA Big Book on page eighty-seven calls this inspiration and spiritual guidance. The guidance I got was to go out to my Chrysler and try to start it again. I scooped up my car keys, went downstairs in the nostril-searing heat, and did what the guidance said.