Fante

by Dan Fante

  The Box was a private, invitation-only collection of POP carnies—dopers and drinkers, a dwarf, and a couple part-time hookers. About a dozen in all. Most of them had traveled the Southwest circuit for years.

  Road people make their own rules. Essentially anything goes as long as you don’t get caught or cheat another carny out of money or screw his wife too many times. The unwritten law was to cover each other’s ass—no matter what. People stayed close.

  I gained admission to this crew because of my competence at the Derby as a caller. I was young, had a lot of energy, and could work a full ten-hour shift at the mic, and was known for my persuasive knack for keeping the suckers spending. To a carny, working in front of an audience is known as “dancing onstage.” I had learned to dance onstage from the best.

  My brother Nick was an occasional visitor to the Box, but he had fallen for a black out-of-work neighborhood waitress named Jazmine who had a reefer habit and was well-skilled at assisting him in pissing away his weekly pay.

  My nightly admittance price to the Box was a bottle of Hiram Walker. Without booze I was quiet, mostly because the older guys had a lot of fun at my expense, but after a few drinks I could talk shit with the best. I had also quickly picked up carny-talk, a weird insider road lingo spoken fast and usually not understood by the average midway customer. Translated into carny, a sentence like “I’m going to take this chump for all he’s got” comes out like this: “Eee-a-zime gee-a-zonna te-a-zake the-a-ziss che-a-zump fe-a-zore e-a-zall hee-a-zees ge-a-zot.” Carny-talk was crude, but it worked.

  My introduction to many different drugs happened on visits to the Box. I pretty much liked them all, but I’d already met my lifetime companion. Booze was my first love. Whatever else I’ve used during my life always ran a distant second. It was in the Box at night that I would learn the history of the carnival business from the people who had lived it, hear their crazy road stories of police chases and two-day parties and taking this or that mark for thousands at a flat-store game. In the Box I learned about the Life Show, Salome’s Dancers, the Magic Act, and the Geeks, and discovered a piece of America that was almost gone.

  Connie was the fat widow of an ex-magician, Henry Mize, who owned the shooting gallery at Pacific Ocean Park. He was thirty years older than his child bride, whom he’d met at a traveling show somewhere in the Midwest. The old-timers had a name for it, marrying a kid on the carnival circuit: Connie was a possum queen.

  According to Tootie, who had known Henry for decades, Connie was fat even as a teenager. After Henry died—he dropped dead in front of the gallery loading a rifle—Connie was alone, lonely, and eating herself into an early grave.

  Tootie, out of both kindness for her and his own selfish sexual needs, began asking her to join us in the Box. Connie was of average height, about five foot five or six, but weighed nearly four hundred pounds. She was less interested in booze than food and men. After POP closed for the night and Connie had done her daily count at the shooting gallery she now owned, she began joining in with the rest of us at the Box.

  All her life Connie Mize had done side tricks. Straight blow jobs, mostly, because guys were usually put off by her weight and not interested in anything else. As Henry got older and less interested in sex, he began looking the other way as she picked up extra cash on the road.

  Connie had three favorites in the Box: Lonzo Morales, a tall Latino guy with an intense sex drive; another kid named Bobby; and me.

  I had never seen a penis disappear down a woman’s throat before but Connie, who wasn’t shy, gave the best and deepest blow job I would ever witness or receive. She charged us Box rates—five bucks each. Her best friend and a part-time member of the Box was a middle-aged homosexual heroin snorter named Karl. Connie liked to watch Karl go down on his boyfriends. Sometimes, late at night when the booze took over, they would each blow the same boys, taking turns. This was how it was. Carnies made their own rules and lived by them.

  In the middle of my stay at POP, I was made an offer and moved from the Derby game to the Seahorse Races across the midway. It was the same kind of horse-race setup, but the animals’ names were different. Instead of Round Table and Swaps and Nashua, I was calling the names of Seafilly and Seawitch and Seastallion over the mic.

  Max Kleeger, an old-time Pacific Ocean Park bookmaker and bingo-parlor operator who had once risked his ass by testifying secretly in a Mafia sting prosecution, was the owner of the game. He offered me a manager position at the Seahorse Races and $550 a week—off the books, of course. The offer was $50 a week more than my brother Nick was being paid, so in the interest of topping my brother, I let myself be tempted away from Eddie Rafeedie and the Derby.

  Now, at nineteen, I was a hotshot manager making damn good money. My daily regimen of eight to ten cups of coffee and forty to sixty cigarettes began when I worked at Pacific Ocean Park and it continued for the next thirty years.

  My boss visited the game once a week and turned the day-to-day operation of the concession over to me. I made all the rules and hired whomever I wanted.

  My idea was to sex up the concession, to have slutty-looking girls in low-cut white blouses working the floor. It worked. I trained and schooled them myself. The idea caught on and the weekly grosses improved. So did my romantic life.

  I’d gotten lucky and hired a tall college student named Misha Galinski. A journalism major. Misha wasn’t busty, but she was a fast learner and in two months was as good as any horse-race mic hustler at POP. With her seductive pitter-patter and in-your-face enthusiasm, Misha kept the players spending their dimes. I paid her top dollar and my career as a manager became a success.

  Because I had become a POP executive, my uniform of black pants and white shirt had been replaced by a sport coat, slacks, and tie. On my lapel was a gold manager’s pin that allowed me access to any ride or concession and permitted me to bring any friend I chose into the park free of charge. I was hot stuff.

  One of the girls working the Milk Can Toss down the midway was named Millie Arias. Millie was twenty-one and Mexican, five feet tall with black hair down to her knees. A hot-tempered, hot-blooded, sexy woman. She had a fiancé several years older than she but neglected to mention the relationship to me. The guy was a boozer and smack user and owned his own novelty store in Santa Monica. I eventually learned that they fought continually and were separated off and on. But I never knew about the guy at the time. She kept that relationship to herself.

  When Millie and I began dating seriously we would meet on her schedule because my working hours at the Seahorse Races were bell-to-bell, seven days a week. It was up to Millie to show up as she pleased.

  She’d been visiting my game on her breaks and we would go in back to my small office and paw each other.

  Millie wasn’t shy and the first time we made it together at my apartment was at her suggestion: “What about it, buddy-boy? You all talk or what?”

  “What’ve you got in mind, Millie?” I said, yanking her chain.

  “I got you and me in mind, stupid.”

  And that was it.

  A month or so later, when we began to cool off, I finally found out that Millie’d been playing both ends against the middle.

  After-hours boozing was now a steady part of my life. In the summer of 1963, after Millie and I split, an incident took place that would mark me for life. I’d been drinking at the Box with the others. That evening we’d been joined by a pretty female visitor and after several drinks I’d decided to make a move on her. I’d been told that she was the niece or cousin of one of the track-repair guys named Spit who worked the roller coaster, but I was drunk and didn’t care. I had a carny’s big mouth and would let no one stop me. The result was a fistfight in which I was beaten easily and badly by the guy. As I lay on the floor in pain and out of breath, he punched me several more times for good measure, then urinated on my face. I was covered with piss and couldn’t breathe.

  I staggered home to my apartment long after midnight. There I d
rank more and apparently lost consciousness. When I woke up the next morning the place was in shambles: table in splinters, lamps broken, mattress torn open, bathroom mirror smashed. Both my hands were cut and dried blood was caked on both arms. I pieced things together and realized I’d done it myself. This was to be the first of many blackouts over the next twenty-two years.

  I decided fuck it. I’d been humiliated—dissed. It was time to move on. That morning after packing my suitcases and loading them into my car on my first break from my game, I walked down the midway to the roller coaster with my gun tucked into my pants. I’d decided to kill the guy who had pissed in my face. I’d walk up, shoot him between the eyes, then drive to Las Vegas and buy a fake ID. I knew a carny there who’d put me up.

  Tootie saw me coming from his roller-coaster ticket booth next to the pier railing. He came out and blocked my path to the workmen’s shed. We talked. Tootie was a decent guy so I listened to him. I was told in a nice way that I had a big mouth when I drank and that I had put my hands on Spit’s niece and generally made a jerk of myself. I’d earned the beating but not the getting-pissed-on part. He must’ve noticed the gun tucked into my waistband because, while I was lighting a cigarette, he reached in, snatched it, and quickly tossed the piece over the railing thirty feet down to the ocean below. I never returned to the Box again. I left POP.

  The carny business changed my life, setting a tone that would continue for many years. Fast talk and the fast buck were in my blood. Wherever I lived—wherever I’d go—I would always hustle to make ends meet.

  Now drinking alcohol was the only thing that brought peace to my existence. It had from my very first taste. It made me feel normal and like everybody else. It removed my self-consciousness and self-doubt. When I drank I was comfortable, I was who I wanted to be. I was in control. When I drank I was myself. The problem for me was balance. For me it would be all or nothing. I would never find a middle, and almost always overshot the mark.

  What I didn’t understand then and what would take years for me to come to terms with was my own intense sex drive while I was drinking. It would cost me whatever I had in my pockets and a raft of what many reformed drunks jokingly refer to as a series of bad breaks and misunderstandings. Endless misery. From the beginning, at eighteen years old, I could never drink socially.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Life of a Salesman

  © JOHN V. FANTE

  The decision had been made to shut down Pacific Ocean Park for the winter of 1963–64. The place had fallen irreversibly into debt. Attendance was down and the dream of a Disneyland at the beach was gone. The carnies scattered, scrambling to get hooked up with the few road shows left in America. After I’d quit and given up my apartment, I moved back to my parents’ home in Malibu, went back to school, and flunked out of Santa Monica City College. The only high spot in my short college career was my theater arts class. I’d taken it as an elective for the easy credit. Somehow, the time I had spent in fantasy as a boy playing out cowboy characters and letting my imagination run wild had helped transform me into a fairly decent actor.

  Of course John Fante had utter contempt for the profession, as he did for agents and TV writers and film directors and almost all movie people. During the last few years of my education, on the rare occasions that we actually talked to each other, he promoted the idea of my becoming a plumber or an electrician. “You’re no genius, kid,” he’d say. “Get yourself an honest career. Work with your hands.”

  When my mother told him I was doing well in a small college production of A Streetcar Named Desire, he sneered, “An actor! That figures. The kid is hopeless. Whatever he does, there’s always an angle. In that boy’s life any scheme is preferable to an honest day’s work.”

  I became friends with two guys in my short college career. The first was a kid named Ray Sanchez, a tall, very funny, outgoing Latino guy. He wasn’t really a student. The only reason Ray went to City College at all was for the purpose of selling grass and pills and making dope contacts with the other students. Fucking up his life was Ray’s real talent.

  His uncle Benny managed a motel on Lincoln Boulevard, and in my brief career at college we spent several afternoons there ditching class. Ray came from a lousy family and his pops was a drunk and a doper, in and out of jail, so the motel became Ray’s hideout, his home away from home. Our crash pad.

  Luckily for Ray he could come and go at the motel as he pleased. He would pull his car into the parking lot, say hi to his uncle at the desk, and then grab the key to a room. We’d spend the rest of the day watching TV, drinking, and hanging out.

  The only stipulation from Uncle Benny was that the room we used be clean for a new guest and the towels and sheets be replaced from the supply room before we left.

  Ray Sanchez’s most important talent was with women. He was a good-looking kid, and having downers and uppers and dope and the gift of gab gave him a distinct advantage with the ladies. On one occasion the girl he’d brought along with us did him first and then me. No problem. Ray was laughing and cracking jokes the whole time. Some guys have the gift. Sanchez had it big time.

  Then one day Ray was gone. I asked around school and found out from another student that my friend had been popped and had gone to the can. Then, several days later, I dropped by the motel and asked Uncle Benny where his nephew was and if he was okay. I was ordered off his property and told never to come back.

  After Ray’s disappearance, I made friends with a kid in my English literature class named Charles Wellington Bosworth. Chuckles was a wild kid and pretty crazy when drunk. We began to spend time together. We were both flunking out for nonattendance of classes, but kept bumping into each other at a coffee shop on Twentieth Street. Chuckles had just taken a job selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door and wanted me to quit school and give the gig a try.

  One hot December night the Santa Ana winds were blowing and me and Chuckles had just won a few bucks playing eight ball at the Billiard Den. We were drinking beer and driving down Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica in his beat-up VW Bug when we stopped for a light.

  With no warning, Chuckles popped the shifter into neutral and suddenly jumped out. The car in front of us was a Benz sedan with a pretty woman behind the wheel. Chuckles rushed up to her passenger door, opened it, and jumped in.

  “Sophia,” he yelled, “I love you. Don’t leave me!”

  The woman, of course, was scared stiff. Chuckles looked at her closely. “You’re not Sophia! Jesus. Fuck. You don’t even look like Sophia! Who the fuck are you?”

  With that he jumped out of her car and began running down the double line on Wilshire screaming, “Christ is my savior! Bob Dylan is a faggot! Save yourself!” I liked Chuckles a lot.

  Chuckie got me an interview with the vacuum cleaner company on Pico Boulevard and I showed up in my POP manager’s duds, my only suit. After I was hired, Chuckie received some kind of percentage sales bump for bringing me in. My pal was always shooting angles.

  The sales trainer of the company partnered us up as a selling team. Because I already had the right uniform and because of my carny background it was an easy fit for me.

  Our co–field managers were two weekend Muscle Beach bodybuilders named Ron and Darren. Both were buff and acted macho but (secretly in those days) were batting from the other side of the plate.

  After the morning sales meeting, Chuckles and I would buy a six-pack on the way to our territory and be ready to hit the street. It was fun at first.

  At ten o’clock we’d begin knocking on doors and setting up our two-hour dinnertime appointments to demo our Kirbys, offering our customers five hundred redeemable Blue Chip Stamps whether they bought a vacuum cleaner or not.

  Three weeks into the deal, I was bringing in decent money, not as much as in my POP days, but a few hundred a week. I’d simply done what I’d been taught by the carnies at Pacific Ocean Park: never take no for an answer.

  Then, one day, my vacuum cleaner sales career ended befor
e sundown. On this day our assigned area was the Westchester section of L.A. Chuckles and I already had a good buzz going and were knocking on doors offering books of stamps to come back and do our song-and-dance sales pitch after dinner that night, when both husband and wife were at home.

  We stopped at a house like many others we visited, an expedient, post–World War II, slapped-together, twelve-hundred-square-foot cracker box in a planned subdivision. We’d been striking out that morning and between us, after knocking on many doors, had landed only one set appointment.

  It was my turn to do the knocking next, and I did what I always did when I got to the front door. With my brown-envelope demo kit under my arm, I banged loudly. Rap rap rap rap!

  No answer.

  Chuckles is behind me, watching from back on the sidewalk thirty feet away. “C’mon, ace,” he snarls after my second try on the door, “no soap. Let’s hit the next one!”

  “Hang on,” I yell back. “I hear something. Lemme try again.”

  Louder this time. Rap rap rap rap!

  Still no answer.

  I turn and am making my way down the front walkway when the door swings open. A beefy guy in an open bathrobe is standing there, his dick hanging out. His hair is mussed. My intrusion has clearly interrupted his sleep.

  We’re fifteen feet apart when I catch a glimpse of something gleaming in his hand behind the fold in his robe.

  “One more step, punk, and you’ll never make the curb!”

  The words stop me cold. “Hey,” I say, not sure how to play the guy, “looks like I woke you up. Sorry about that.”

  “Drop the brown package on the ground, asshole. Right there.”

  “Look,” I continue, “I just told you I was sorry. Let’s leave it there. I don’t want any trouble.”

  “Do it, I said! Do it now!”

  “No way!” I hear myself yell back. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”