Fante

by Dan Fante

  Our joint income barely covered the nut, but we read together almost every night and became more and more active politically. It had been three months since Mo’s demand that I quit booze completely and I was down to a beer or two a day, but not drinking had sharpened my every instinct and made my day-to-day life—my thinking—more than uncomfortable. A darkness had come over me. My brain was now a freewheeling cement mixer churning out poison. I’d convinced myself that the government was watching Mo and me, that I had no marketable skills and was destined to be what my father’d always called a shitkicker—for life. I became more and more nervous, always waiting for something bad to happen. If a couple came to our apartment—Mo’s friends from college—I removed myself. She was high-strung and I began to feel as if I was in a relationship with a woman who said she cared about me but spent her life going from one crisis to another. I felt separate from her—from myself—from everything. Brutal self-judgment clogged my mind and failures began replaying endlessly in my head, dogging me for days at a time. I was convinced that my brain was out to kill me, and would, if it didn’t have to rely on my body for transportation. More and more I removed myself from people, and fuck it became my daily marching orders. My life, my thinking, was now about keeping the secret that I was crazy. On the outside I appeared reasonably normal but the inside was a firestorm of madness. I felt as though there were a coiled spring in my head that I had to hold down, day and night. My problem became them: the Johnson administration, Robert McNamara, and the asshole politicians sinking us deeper into an unreasonable intrusion into Vietnam and Laos and possibly all of Southeast Asia. And the bigots. Race hatred. It was all them. I signed on to any radical cause that came down the pike. The cap was on the bottle, but the genie was loose at the circus.

  Chapter Seventeen

  John Fante Writes Again

  By the mid-1960s, Pop hadn’t published a book in thirteen years. He did well-paid, imaginative, grunt-work screenwriting but was washed up as a novelist and had become furious with himself. John Fante felt he was a failure at what he most loved—writing books.

  In 1964, John Fante, after another break from writing fiction, was sending off half the manuscript of his proposed novel later entitled 1933 Was a Bad Year. The rejection letters he got back were all similar in their harshness toward this new work: You’ve lost your touch, Fante. Stop writing about your past and your family.

  Pop became seriously depressed and began drinking again—diabetes or no diabetes. Several nights a week he could be found at the Malibu Cottage. One night, after several hours on a stool, in a heated conversation over the L.A. Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants, he was invited “outside.” Before Pop’s combatant could get his jacket off and his hands up, he was caught with a succession of hooks and crosses that left him bloody on the parking lot blacktop. No one, but no one, insulted the Dodgers—especially after Pop’d had five drinks.

  Over time Billy Asher, one of our Malibu neighbors and a poker-playing buddy, had become friends with my dad. Billy had directed I Love Lucy and was a big success by television standards. But Asher had an Achilles’ heel that my old man discovered almost immediately: With all his accolades on the small screen, he had never made a successful transition from television to movies. It was his weakness. A sore spot.

  In discussions with Asher, my father had come up with an idea for a TV series called Papa. It would feature a cigar-smoking, aging Italian male parent of six kids, their troubles, and his homespun, old-world solutions.

  Asher loved the idea and used his clout in the TV industry. Hopes were high. He took the pilot script with him to New York and wound up making several trips to present it to the various networks’ brain trusts. While reception to the idea was warm, there were no firm takers. Time went by and nothing happened. The idea was finally dropped.

  A year or so later, my father had just finished a spec script and bumped into Billy in Malibu. By now Asher had gotten divorced and moved away but was on holiday at the beach, visiting. Pop told him he had just finished a script that he was sure would make a great film. Billy suggested that my dad send it to him and that maybe he could help in placing it with the right production company.

  John Fante greatly disliked having to be solicitous, asking for anything from anyone. Six weeks later, when he had not heard back from Asher, he made the phone call. When Asher came on the phone, they chatted for a few minutes and then Pop asked his TV giant pal what he thought of the film script. “Great, Johnny. I loved it. No kidding, but it’s a bit too character driven with not much action. It’s the kind of film idea that’s not hot right now.”

  There was a long pause on my father’s end of the line, then the snarling words, “You mean because it’s not a fucking sitcom! I forgot you’re a limp dick—a guy who’s been a no-show in the movie business for the last twenty years.”

  The two men did not speak again for years.

  In the late 1960s, another novel was in the works, My Dog Stupid. John Fante had been forced through lack of screen work to return to what he truly loved. The book would posthumously be judged by many critics as one of his best. It was set in the present and involved an aging screenwriter needing to find something worthwhile in his life and marriage. There was sadness and irony and humor and great wisdom in its flawed main character, a man floundering to rediscover himself. Pop’s character Henry looks out from the window of success and security to examine a life of easy choices and mistakes. It was brilliant stuff written with my father’s characteristic simplicity and insight. Sadly, one more time, another fine piece of fiction was completed that would not see print until after my father was dead.

  My father was an artist, win, lose, or draw. He avoided his passion for long periods but never denied it. Throughout a life of near obscurity, he clung to his gift. Most of his novels were written for nothing. Not fame. Not recognition. He wrote because a writer was what he was. For me, his second son, a ne’er-do-well, a whackjob, and an alcoholic, this enduring example made me love him with all my heart.

  Back in New York my life began to crash. My relationship with Mo was winding down. I had become a version of my father: snarling, angry, and uncommunicative. For months I’d made a habit of spending as much time away from home as possible and our sex had stopped long before. Talking without hysterics had stopped too. I’d come from a family with a hundred secrets that no one ever spoke about. The outside looked fine—the inside was a snake pit. I’d been raised by smart, verbal people who never discussed their own madness or differences except to assign blame. My relationsip with Mo was a photocopy of that.

  I had been changing jobs regularly: night guard, waiter, proofreader, and hardware-store stock clerk. I quit them all or got fired. Drinking and porn had been the only things that had ever helped to stop my brain and its endless accusations. Now they were gone. Unmedicated, on a natch, I had an unfiltered streaming internal monologue keeping me awake every night. Sometimes it’d be louder than others. Sometimes it would scream: You dumb fuck, why did you talk to your manager like that? You don’t know what you’re doing. They’ll fire your ass for sure. You’re a mental cripple.

  I spent a month studying for the taxi exam and with Mo’s coaching passed it, having never driven a car in New York City and not knowing Wall Street from Fifth Avenue. My hack license was issued, #7912.

  A few weeks after I started the taxi job, Mo and I finally split up. The relationship had essentially been over for months.

  I moved my clothes to a residential hotel on Fifty-first Street in Manhattan, and began drinking again in earnest.

  With the end of the relationship came another physical reaction: I stopped eating. I knew I needed food, but the best I could do was a quart of Pepsi and a bag of Fritos a day. This went on for three months.

  I knew I was crazy. Two or three times a week I’d find myself drunk at porno movies on Forty-second Street. During the day, while driving, I’d become overwhelmed by a feeling from nowhere and have to pull my cab over t
o the curb because I would be sobbing and out of control.

  Because sleep was impossible, I began walking again at night to exhaust myself. Forty or fifty blocks. The East River to the Hudson River and back again. Sometimes I would stop to get a blow job from whatever Times Square guy was handy, then return to my hotel and drink myself to the point where I could pass out.

  A darkness had come to my life, a despair that only those who have known the unendingness and bottomlessness of their own psyche can understand. No matter what I did or what female hostage I took in a relationship, I knew that sooner or later I would die from suicide. And, as it turned out, I would continue to drink for at least another fifteen years.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Taxi Taxi and Uncle Spit

  Learning the streets of New York City became a crash course, coming at me a day at a time. When I began hacking in Manhattan I had zero knowledge about the five boroughs of New York City, so during most of my first year as a cabbie, every passenger in my cab, after getting in and reciting a destination, would hear me say, “Sure. But look, I’m new, can you direct me?” Sometimes it would be two blocks away and sometimes it’d be thirty miles.

  In the morning, before dawn, we’d “shape up” at the Calhoun Maintenance Garage on 138th Street above Harlem, an area of the Bronx some glib news reporter had nicknamed Fort Apache, waiting to have our daily tasks assigned. The driver pool at Calhoun was split thirty-seventy, white guys and black cats. At the bottom of the pile were the Puerto Ricans; they were mechanics’ helpers and yard men.

  The company’s lot contained an ocean of yellow taxis, over a hundred cars. In the late 1960s, shootings and cab stickups were almost as common as a trip to the Laundromat. It would take a long while for bulletproof partitions to make their way into New York taxis.

  The dynamics between the races in New York in the late 1960s were different than they are today. Where you came from or the color of your skin was still very much an issue. The Calhoun garage was mostly black. Several of the guys were political and militant as hell and packed weapons during their shift. Some wouldn’t talk to a white man at all, period, unless he was paying—riding in the backseat of their cab.

  Many of the men I befriended were white, years older than me, so I wound up keeping mostly to myself. At that time, vets who were in their fifties, who’d come back from World War II and Korea, had returned home to find their jobs or businesses gone. They’d been forced to take anything to make a buck, and many became cabbies. The white faces at the Calhoun garage belonged mainly to Italians and Jews. Occasionally a mixed group of us would argue politics and race relations as we drank our coffee and waited our turn to get to the dispatch window.

  Tempers flared. Race and Vietnam were the hottest topics among the cabbies in the garage. Race-wise, the Bronx in the mid-sixties had turned upside down in less than five years and neighborhoods that had been safe were now changed and dangerous. Almost to a man the white drivers and war vets were law and order and right-wing. They would simply refuse to pick up black or Puerto Rican fares in the Bronx and Manhattan. Because I had become very political and hated this, I would argue bitterly with some of the guys.

  Our garage manager was an intense, five-foot-three-inch, cigar-smoking black Napoleon named Shorty Smith. Shorty was loud and ready for anything and was always backed up by his thug dispatcher. His method of management by yelling warded off many early-morning fistfights.

  The Calhoun taxi fleet itself was on its last legs. Most of our Dodge cab motors had over 150,000 miles on them, and our body shop replaced the dented fenders of the mangled cabs with re-straightened ones that almost never fit correctly. Even the paint never matched.

  Because I was new to the company, I always got one of the worst cars. If it was a particularly bad rattletrap or it wouldn’t start, I would bring my dispatch card back to the office and shove it through the cutout in the Plexiglas window at Shorty.

  “Whaz up, Fantee? Whaz u problem now, kid?”

  “Car won’t start, Shorty. C’mon, I gotta make a buck like everybody else.”

  “Have one of the geniuses standing outside talkin’ shit, drinking coffee, help you push it to the shop. Hotrod’ll fix it right up.”

  “C’mon, Shorty, how ’bout just giving me another car?”

  “Hey, Fantee, tell it while you’re walkin’. Go call a union delegate or the Grand Dragon. See if I give a fuck.”

  Tell it while you’re walking. If I heard the phrase once, I heard it a thousand times.

  One of the more militant drivers at the Calhoun garage was a man named Arthur Sunday. (Arthur would always refer to his last name as his slave name.) Arthur and I liked each other, but in the beginning we argued bitterly and had nearly come to blows over his deep hatred of most whites and my increasingly radical left-wing rants. He was in his fifties and his wife, who no longer spoke to him, was a teacher in Bed-Stuy. Arthur lived in the rear bedroom of their apartment and came and went through the building’s back door. Because he was an intensely proud man, Arthur stayed in the bad marriage for his ten-year-old daughter and vowed that she would not be subjected to another broken black home.

  We would meet after work once or twice a week and have dinner at a diner off 149th Street. Beneath his strut and instant rage, Arthur was a wise and serious man. With only six years of formal schooling, he had read everything from Kant to Tolstoy to Karl Marx.

  Arthur became more of a big brother to me than a friend. He could see I was a troubled guy and a heavy drinker, and he would often spend time advising me. Eventually, during our friendship, I was schooled on the history of black America, the history of slavery, and the roots of black radicalism. After several months of weekly dinners, I told him a sanitized version of my dark tale about being attacked in Times Square. He understood. That day Arthur taught me two valuable lessons. One: how and when to keep my mouth shut. Two: how to deal with street guys who didn’t care if they lived or died.

  After about a year on the job, I moved into my own apartment on the Lower East Side. 414 East Eleventh Street. Alphabet City. A very tough neighborhood in those days.

  At the Calhoun garage I began being invited to an afternoon dice game a few streets away. There were shylocks (street guys with fat pockets who loaned money, charging huge interest rates). One or two connected guys ran the action. These guys came from the Arthur Avenue section of the Bronx. Because my last name ended with a soft vowel and because I worked for Calhoun, I was allowed to participate or just hang out and watch the action. I was introduced to a guy they called the Uncle. His name was Vincent Sputtimare; to those at the game he was either Mr. Sputtimare or Uncle Spit, depending on whether he liked you or not. When, in a conversation with me, Spit learned that my father was a Hollywood screenwriter and had written movies for Kim Novak and John Garfield and Barbara Stanwyck, he became a kind of mentor. Uncle Spit was a starstruck, working-class gangster. He wanted to know all about Hollywood and every movie star my old man had ever worked with. I made up what I didn’t know. I was in.

  Uncle Spit had a cousin who was a shill for the action at the dice game. A shill is a guy who is there to keep betting and to keep the action moving. One day the guy didn’t show up and, on Uncle Spit’s orders, I became a shill too. I was given money outside before the game and told to play a certain way, to bet specific amounts, and to quit the game when I got a sign from Spit.

  The South Bronx was a tough place, and there was always drinking and dope for sale at the game and a pretty young hooker or two to assist the winners in leaving whatever cash they had won in the neighborhood.

  I would see guys get too drunk and sometimes get hurt over their losses or their mouth. In one game a fellow Uncle Spit referred to as a catso, a bigmouthed guy who worked for the city in some section of the planning department, had a serious accident on the weekend when he did not cover his losses.

  As a shill, if I lost a hundred bucks or more at the game, I received a payment of twenty-five dollars, after the g
ame, for my time. If I won I was allowed to keep the money—up to fifty bucks. I occasionally got free trips to the van with one of the girls. Eventually, I learned the skill of becoming what is known as a “wrong better” at craps. A wrong better in a street game is a guy who always bets that the man rolling the dice will lose.

  Soon, Uncle Spit began to offer me small jobs to do in my cab. Pick up an envelope at a location, then drop it at a candy store or a shop or a bar. I did these errands and was always paid cash in a white envelope at the end of every week.

  One of my pickups became a woman the police had nicknamed Shopping Bag Millie. My job was to pick up Millie and her shopping bags on Tuesday and Thursday mornings at Forty-fourth Street and Eighth Avenue at eight o’clock. She was a chubby, chain-smoking, middle-aged housewife who was married to someone’s uncle.

  Millie was a crazy woman, or so I thought. She muttered constantly while I drove her. After she’d given me the address of her drop in the Bronx or Harlem, she would sit in the back of my cab, whispering for the next half hour until we got to the bank (the location where the numbers were recorded and the money sorted). I had instructions from Uncle Spit to never play my car radio and never talk to Millie.

  It took several months for us to actually have our first conversation. It came as a shock. One morning she got in and wasn’t mumbling. She leaned up across the backseat. It was the first time I had seen her smile or even look at me.

  “Hey,” she said, “you work for Uncle too, right?”

  “Right,” I said. “But look, I’m not supposed to talk to you.”