by Dan Fante
He came from the festering volcano of humanity that is New York City. Crime was his target and trouble was his business. They called him Smoke, but his game was fire!
My income from writing the series wasn’t much, a couple hundred bucks a week. FM radio was in its infancy and sponsorship was rare, but there was enough money to cover the cost of the studio engineer and the rent for the rehearsal hall.
After driving my cab all day on Monday, I went home and wrote the script for that week’s show. Monday night became my light-drinking night. On Tuesday, in our three-hour evening rehearsals, the cast and I worked on what I had written, made changes to the script, and added sound effects. On Thursday nights we taped the program.
One weekday morning during that period, I was driving a fare from the East Seventies in Manhattan to Lincoln Center on the West Side. After crossing the transverse in Central Park, I stopped for a light at Sixty-third and Columbus Avenue next to a tall building under construction. Suddenly, the guys in the orange hard hats and jumpsuits began to scatter. In front of me on the street one of them began waving and screaming, “Look out! Move!” An instant later a half-ton load of wet concrete from the fifty-fifth floor hit the roof of my cab. Everything went black.
My taxi’s roof was crushed and I was unconscious for a few seconds, but after getting pulled from my taxi by EMTs who had to pry the doors open, I was okay, except for a few cuts from the car glass. My cab, #371, looked like it had been dropped off a bridge and landed on its roof.
I sat on the curb with my passenger. His white shirt and tie and business suit were stained with blood and his hair was full of glass slivers. He was dazed and in shock, not talking at all.
After the EMTs cleaned me up, they wanted us both to go to the hospital. My passenger was diagnosed with a head injury and helped away on a stretcher. I said I was okay. What I needed, I said, was a couple of drinks. I sat there smoking cigarettes for half an hour and watching until my demolished cab was hooked up and towed away.
I walked to a saloon on Columbus and ordered a double and began telling the bartender and another guy what had just happened. Then the shock of the event started to hit me. My body began shaking badly. Sweat soaked my clothes. But, after a few more doubles, I was okay.
I rode the bus back to my taxi garage. When I got there my cab had already been dumped outside at the body shop. The manager, Benny, pulled me aside. He had spoken to our insurance company. “Looks like maybe you hit your lucky number here, Daniel. Hear wha I’m sayin?”
“I didn’t win anything. I just lost my steady cab.”
“You drunk?”
“Sure, a little. How about some slack? I just almost got killed.”
“Look here, I’m gonna pull your coat about somethin’, okay. Free of charge. If shit hits a person from the top of a construction site and that person ain’t dead, the shit that he’s hit with comes with a nice price tag. You juss won big, pal.”
“C’mon.”
“According to my guy, a grand or two a floor.”
“No kidding?”
“Juss listen. How tall was the building?”
“Fifty-five floors, I think.”
“Wha’d I juss say? You hit the fuckin’ lotto. One hundred and ten fuckin’ grand.”
The following day I couldn’t work because of my shaking from the accident. I called in sick. The phone rang in our apartment. I was offered five thousand dollars cash to settle immediately. No court case. No further discussion.
That afternoon the rep from the building’s insurance company, a briefcase under his arm, took a cab down to Eleventh Street. Five minutes after he sat down he handed me five thousand dollars in cash and a release form. I had never seen that much money in cash at one time. It was an easy decision.
That Friday Vonnie and I flew to Las Vegas for a long weekend. A five-thousand-dollar weekend.
As it turned out, for the next year or two I had periodic tremors as a result of the accident. They would come on at no particular time but usually occurred in my cab when I slowly passed a tall building under construction in heavy, stop-and-go traffic. I’d have to pull over when I got passed the building and wait for the shaking to stop. Of course my solution to deal with effects of the near-death experience, as always, was to use booze to medicate myself. Sometimes the shaking would last a few minutes, sometimes half an hour or more.
Soon my living-together relationship with Vonnie was over. I was often mean when I drank and my girlfriend began to consider my behavior out of control. Several times I even brought other women back to our apartment.
I now needed to vomit in the morning, then have a drink before food would stay down. I was waking up once or twice a week to find I’d shit myself in my sleep and stained our bed.
All this was more than Vonnie could handle. She was afraid for me and disgusted by my behavior. I was told to choose. For me, the choice between Vonnie and drinking and the life I was leading was a no-brainer. She had to go. I helped her rent an apartment uptown on Second Avenue.
From the start it had not been easy for us. In those days, in the late sixties, a mixed-race relationship invariably created problems in almost all social situations. Vonnie’s Christian parents were relieved when she packed her bags.
After she moved out we still had sex regularly. I was her first man and Vonnie never said no to me. But most nights I drank in the local bars on Fourteenth Street and chased the hookers on lower Third Avenue, occasionally coming to in a porno movie with some guy giving me a blow job.
My radio drama Smoke finally made the big time on New York City radio. WBLS was the largest black AM station in America. They aired my show twice a day during morning and evening rush hour.
A short time after we began our run and started getting media attention, I attended a meeting to discuss syndicating my show on fifty stations across the country. I arrived following a liquid lunch. The network guys in the suits sitting around the table had calculated the income revenue from Smoke at $50,000 per week, nationwide. I looked the papers over. In the agreement I was shown, the cast and I were offered a 10 percent share of the money. They, the network, would get $45,000 a week. I tore the papers up, then pushed them across the table. “Fellas, this is bullshit. No way.”
Then I got up and walked out.
An hour or so later, in a conversation with a radio airtime salesman I knew, still angry, I mentioned what happened at the meeting. The guy brought something up that had never crossed my mind. He said he was fairly sure they had come to the table with at least one other contract but had only shown me their first offer. That, he said, was how the radio business was done.
Smoke and my radio career ended that day. My mouth and temper had made certain I would never be welcome at WBLS again. I stayed drunk for a week.
When I finally came out of the bender one morning to go back to work at my taxi job, I discovered I was unable to stand. I did finally get to my feet but then passed out.
Coming to, I found myself on the floor in a pool of puke and blood. It was July, a hot and humid summer in Manhattan.
It took me some time to make it across the room to the phone; then I got dressed and managed to walk downstairs to find a taxi.
At the doctor’s office I was diagnosed with a bleeding ulcer, shock trauma, depression, and some other stuff, then given pills to calm me down and some more stuff for my stomach and several pages of printed material about what not to eat. I was told to go home and stay in bed.
The next night, drunk in a blackout, I cut my wrists. When I woke up there was blood everywhere. I called Vonnie and told her I was in trouble—I needed her help. She left work and took a taxi downtown to my apartment. When she saw what I had done she went to the drugstore and bought bandages and tape and alcohol.
There were several slashes on my arms and stomach but I decided, against Vonnie’s protests, not to go to the hospital. She was shaking as she bandaged my wounds. When she was about to leave, standing at my apartment door, she tu
rned back and said, “I don’t want to see you anymore, Daniel. You scare me. Please, never call me again.”
A week later I returned to work wearing a long-sleeve shirt.
The idea that I was crazy stalked me like a hungry dog. At my taxi garage, another driver, a young guy named James whom I spoke to from time to time, pulled me aside to talk to me. We’d both just checked in and had our trip cards punched at the dispatch booth. I’d had a yelling match with the dispatcher Benny over the cab he’d assigned to me, a beat-up shitbox with a failing transmission. I had driven the car the day before and refused to take it out again. After the argument with Benny, I’d slammed my fist against the plastic dispatch booth and my hand had swelled immediately. It took several days for it to return to normal.
James saw that I was sleepless and crazy. He asked me if I’d come with him to the diner on Twelfth Avenue, before the shift, to talk.
James was a strange duck. I liked him. We had become acquainted because of a coincidence: We shared the same birthday, a year apart. Physically, we were also the same size, but James’s head was shaved and his face had a red scar above one eye that ran almost to the top of his head. He was an intense guy who rarely spoke to anyone, and most of the drivers at our garage avoided him.
We sat at the diner. I ordered coffee and he ordered hot water and used a tea bag from his jacket pocket. James spoke quietly, almost in a whisper. He looked down at my red and swollen hand, then said he wanted to tell me about himself. I could see that this was a big effort for him, probably something he’d never done. He said he’d spent his growing-up years first in foster care, then in orphanages, and that he’d had at least one fight a day from the age of ten to eighteen, when he’d become legally eligible to leave. He included the information that for the last year he’d been at the orphanage he’d spent most of his time at the top of an oak tree in the backyard where no one could get to him. Then, James said, he’d started going to the gym to manage his tempers and rage. Eventually, five years later, he became a scary martial-arts black belt. For the last few years he’d begun to meditate two hours a day.
One of the things James said he did for exercise on his days off from hacking was to run (not jog) to Connecticut and back with his sleeping bag strapped to his back. Seventy miles round-trip.
James was telling me all this, he said, because he saw a lot of himself in me. He said that he saw a darkness in my heart and that he felt I was about to hurt someone or myself or do something crazy. He suggested I put something between me and my emotions: exercise or meditation or a hobby. He was staring at me as he spoke.
I said thanks and told him I was okay mostly. I said that I had trouble sleeping and that I drank too much from time to time. Then I told him to stop glaring at me.
James got up without a word and left the coffee shop. But he did pay for my coffee.
That afternoon, for the first time in years, I pulled my cab over on Amsterdam Avenue and found myself in a church, St. John the Divine on the Upper West Side. I was still unsettled from the argument with my dispatcher, Benny. But the idea that James apparently possessed some sort of knowing had startled me, even though I wanted no part of two-hour meditations or running to Connecticut or any of that shit. The expression on the guy’s face and the look in his eyes had stayed with me.
My bargain with God had always been for us to ignore each other. I was pretty sure that someday He would make me a grease spot in some alley somewhere or maybe get me killed crossing a street drunk. I’d always kept my distance from the big, long-robed prick with the white beard and flaming cross. But now, ever since the incident with the wet concrete crushing my taxi, I’d come to be almost constantly possessed by thoughts of my own death.
Inside the huge, silent, almost empty church, I made my way to the front. I kneeled down at the long altar rail beneath a statue of the Blessed Virgin.
I was alone. The place was like an immense mausoleum; big Jesus-chilled breath was everywhere, exacting its toll on frightened misanthropes like me.
I closed my eyes and attempted to pray. A minute or so later, the only sensation I was experiencing was emptiness. I continued to repeat the only prayer I could think of again and again: God help me. God help me.
A long time passed with my eyes clamped shut, perhaps ten minutes.
Then I felt something, someone near me. Not a saint or the Virgin or God but someone who stank. I opened my eyes. There on the cold marble kneeling beside me was a bum, a street guy, long-haired and unwashed. He was pressing his shoulder up against mine.
The empty altar we were kneeling on was perhaps eighty feet long, but this smelly reprobate had apparently picked me to roust.
We looked at each other. He appeared clear-eyed. His face was worn and unshaved. Finally he smiled. “Hey, pally, can you help a brother out?”
I turned away, closing my eyes, and tried to ignore him.
He nudged me again. “Hey,” he whispered, “can you help a guy out?”
Without looking at him I spat the words: “Look, man, you need to help yourself.”
Then he was gone.
A few more moments passed. I could still feel him there so I turned toward him again, but he was gone; only the feeling of his presence remained.
Looking over my shoulder I could see a hundred pews and perhaps half a dozen people kneeling or waiting near the confessional, but the bum had disappeared. Suddenly I felt a shudder. I realized that was no bum. I had said God help me and the answer I had received back had come from my own mouth: “You need to help yourself.”
Chapter Twenty-one
The Cure
© JOHN V. FANTE
That afternoon, still affected by my experience in the church, I brought my limping cab in early and claimed illness. Benny the boss was furious. I’d been a fairly reliable driver for months but lately I had become trouble, a pain in the ass. I was warned that I was on thin ice.
I telephoned Vonnie at work from the pay phone on the dispatch office wall. I had a plan. I needed money and she was the only person I knew who would be good for an immediate loan. Vonnie was now sharing her East Side apartment with an old City College classmate, a short black dude named Chester. He was a humorless jazz player with a chip on his shoulder. Chester had a nice gig at the phone company doing in-home repair and installation. He was paying Vonnie’s rent. I’d met the guy a few times and we had immediately disliked each other.
My ex-girlfriend’s last on-the-side visit to my place had been only a few days before. She had made me promise to stay away from her and her apartment. She wanted no trouble between me and Chester and lived in fear of me showing up drunk some night.
Hearing my voice, she immediately became worried. “What’s wrong now?” she wanted to know.
“Nothing. Can’t I call my old girlfriend?”
“I call you, Daniel”—Vonnie always referred to me by the name on my driver’s license—“you never call me. What’s up? What’s going on?”
“I just wanted to say hi.”
“Cut it out. Just tell me.”
“I need to see you. Can I come over tonight?”
“You’re kidding, right? You wanna start shit with Chester, don’t you? Can’t you just leave things the way they are?”
“This isn’t about me and Chester.”
“Okay, what is it?”
“I need some money.”
“I knew it.”
“It’s a favor. Look, I’ll come over tonight and we can talk more.”
“That’s blackmail. That’s a threat, isn’t it? I don’t know why I still put up with you. You’re such a prick.”
“It’s important. I can explain the situation to you and Chester. He’ll understand.”
“Okay, how much? How much money?”
“Two hundred.”
“What for?”
“I have to do something. It’s important. Seriously. I need a loan.”
“Jesus Christ! Okay, meet me after work. I’ll go to the bank.�
��
“Thanks, Vonnie.”
“Stay away from my apartment. Please.”
“Okay, Vonnie.”
That night with my borrowed money I took the subway to Queens and checked into Dawson’s Motel. I had taken passengers to the place once or twice and knew I wouldn’t be bothered. No bars nearby. No phone in the room. It was $11.95 for a three-hour afternoon delight or $16.95 a day. Cheap and clean. It had porn on the TV and a small refrigerator in every room. It was safe, away from my haunts on the Lower East Side.
I paid a week up front in cash, then signed my name. I was guaranteed a refund if I checked out early.
Opening my room’s door I dropped a plastic garbage bag containing a couple pairs of pants, some underwear, three or four shirts, and a bag of Fritos on the bed.
After finishing off my last pint of Ten High, I tossed it into the wastebasket in the crapper. My plan was simple: a detox. No matter how long it took. No booze. No inpatient hospital stay. I was determined to quit alcohol.
The first twenty-four hours were the worst. I was constantly shaking. I had sweats and dizziness. The cramps were brutal and I began to hallucinate. My mind continued to give me orders to kill myself, so I banged my head against the wooden nightstand until my shirt was soaked with blood. Then the pounding headache began.
No sleep was possible, so I began walking the length of my motel room. Falling down, then getting up. Back and forth. I’m sure I traveled fifty miles in the first twenty-four hours.
I began to see snakes entering from under my room’s door. First one or two, then several. Then dozens. Little snakes, not big ones, but with large heads. I began opening and closing my room’s door. Slamming it shut again and again. The manager came to my room and threatened to throw me out. Finally, I locked myself in the bathroom and the snakes gave up and went away.