Fante

by Dan Fante

  Now, on either side of the closet, guns up and ready, Buck slammed the rear section open.

  Inside were two blond-headed girls, both preteens. Both standing upright and looking sleepy as if we had woken them up. They were wearing matching striped pajamas. There was a strong smell of alcohol coming from the contained space and a half-empty quart of vodka on the floor.

  Schroeder motioned for me to go turn on one of the bedside table lights. I did this.

  He asked one of the girls her name. They both looked puzzled, then turned toward each other. They began speaking in Russian.

  Schroeder interrupted and put his finger to his lips in a shushing gesture.

  The girls exchanged a few more words, and then the taller of the two came out of the closet, quickly sliding her pajamas off. She unashamedly walked the few paces across the carpet and stopped in front of my boss.

  She got down on her knees and began to unzip the fly of his slacks.

  Schroeder’s face was red. He picked the child up in his arms as he shook his head, no no no.

  Eventually, as the investigation went deeper, Schroeder and I found ourselves in further over our heads. Several of our targets had jackets and carried weapons. We were regularly tailed now and I got pretty good at disguises and often slept at the office or didn’t go home at all for days at a time. When I did go to my apartment, I took two cabs with a subway ride in between.

  Schroeder was Clint Eastwood in a time when he should have been Ollie North. Though he was a pro and took his troubles in stride, the pressure from all sides eventually caused my boss to start boozing heavily again. Being a cowboy with uncanny good luck was the only thing between Buck and two “pills” in the back of the head.

  Eventually, from our investigations, we were sure convictions could be made. Our cases were strong. But again and again we were held back by our clients. They refused to involve law enforcement except when Schroeder or I took someone down in a physical confrontation. Finally, my boss lost his patience with the clients. We had risked our necks to put the bad guys away, but the prime objective of our employers had not been prosecutions. They wanted the apartment buildings empty and our work had helped achieve that. Money changed hands. Deals were made as necessary. Tenants were relocated.

  In the end an indignant Schroeder was given a large bonus to keep him silent and compliant.

  The day Buck got his bonus (which I was sure was in the five-figure range), he called me into his office. There were three hundred-dollar bills facing my side of the desk. “Those are yours, Danny,” he said, grinning. “I wish it could be more, but you know me, I’ve got a line of sharks half a block long waiting for a chunk of my ass.”

  My PI career ended badly and stupidly. In a high-end, east-Eighties watering hole, Schroeder, who could be a kitten or a cornered bull when intoxicated, punched out a couple guys, one of whom was an important Manhattan attorney.

  At the time I was still owed four hundred dollars in back pay, plus expenses. That night my boss was arrested and held without bail because his gun had fallen from its holster in the struggle and was found on the floor at the scene.

  To Schroeder’s shock all of his “out” doors slammed shut. This, I was sure, was blowback from the cases we had worked. Too many toes had been stepped on by Schroeder and too many important people intimidated.

  The day after my boss’s arrest, I took the nickel-plated .45 automatic down from its frame on the wall in Buck’s office. It was the only thing in the joint worth hocking that was small enough to carry down the elevator. So I took it. I also found a black box-marker and drew a Hitler mustache and black matted hair on the framed portrait of J. Edgar Hoover on the wall above his bookcase. The next day at a pawnshop on Fourteenth Street, I got a hundred thirty-five dollars for the gun.

  Schroeder Investigations was out of business, and I found myself digging through my bureau drawer in search of my NYC hack license.

  I was done with the self-righteous, expedient-minded clients; done with scumbags, the high- and the low-level ones; done with cops who could change their tune at the expense of the public trust; and done with the deep cesspool inherent in the New York City politics of the time. I’d risked my ass for nickels and dimes and worked for people who made me sick. For two hundred bucks a week!

  I moved to Queens with an ex-cop friend of Schroeder’s, grew my hair and my mustache out, and began using a fake name and mailing address.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Hollywood “Luck”

  For John Fante the novelist, what had gone around was beginning to come around. In 1971, a writer named Robert Towne was doing research for the screenplay that would later become the movie Chinatown, Roman Polanski’s most famous film. Towne was a bright, moody young guy. In his search through books about Los Angeles from the 1930s period, he’d come upon Carey McWilliams’s Southern California: An Island on the Land. McWilliams and my father had remained close friends over the years. Carey was now the well-established editor of The Nation magazine. In McWilliams’s book was mention of John Fante and the novel Ask the Dust.

  Towne found a copy of the out-of-print hardcover at a friend’s home, read it, and eventually contacted my dad.

  The two men had several meetings and Towne came up with a check for a six-month option on the film rights to Ask the Dust. Pop gave him a hard time when they met. He was suspicious and mistrustful of all Hollywood players. To my father Robert Towne represented the Hollywood that stank, and John Fante had little kindness left in his heart for an industry that had long manipulated him and misused his talents.

  Nonetheless, a deal was made and Robert Towne took a film option on Ask the Dust. He would do it again and again over the next thirty-plus years, long after my father’s death.

  A few months later John Fante signed a contract to write the screenplay for My Dog Stupid and was paid fifteen thousand dollars. His old pal Bill Asher had once again taken an interest in his work. Asher thought Stupid would make a fine film and sent the manuscript to Peter Sellers. Sellers was enthusiastic, but in the end, like many blue-sky Hollywood projects, Stupid was eventually consigned to oblivion.

  My father was now over sixty, a deteriorating diabetic who spent his time limping around Santa Monica Shores’ nine-hole golf course and trying to hustle up a buck in an industry where most of the paid hacks were less than half his age.

  The new Hollywood no longer needed real writers. The new Hollywood was run by boy wonders who didn’t read books. Film school was the place where budding producers and scenario authors cut their chops by watching old films and ripping off chunks of the plots. A literary sensibility was old hat. Passé. Screenwriters like John Fante who had, over the years, established a weekly pay scale for their work were now overpaid dinosaurs, extinct and unnecessary. The medium had become known by the pretentious term filmmaking. The fifty-year-old Eastern European fantasies of the pioneer moviemakers like Louis B. Mayer and Carl Laemmle about the fairy-tale good life in America and California had become the national mind-set. More than ever, movies and TV were the source of dumbed-down and rehashed fluff. Street thugs in East L.A. now selected their armaments by way of the last gangster movie they’d seen. Fantasy had become reality. Producer-accounting gurus hired market-research teams who decided which stories would be profitable. Market niche determined whether a movie was green-lighted or not. The fourteen-year-old male was now the new American audience. More than ever, the guy who turned in the first draft of a movie script was just a fix-it man, the chump who took orders and made the changes that the producer and the star and the all-powerful director wanted. My father’s contempt for the movie business was greater than ever. The upside for Pop was that he was once more driven back to what he did best: writing books.

  Instead of going to a studio job every morning, my father met with a group of his cynical pals at Manning’s Cafeteria in Santa Monica. Out-of-work screenwriters and novelists, one or two Venice artists, and an occasional aging actor loudly debated everyt
hing from politics to literature and philosophy, taking up space at Manning’s tables until the lunch rush started moving in and they were booted out.

  Bitter, stubborn John Fante would occasionally try to ring the bell in Hollywood even as his late literary recognition was under way. Pop needed to put bread on the table and, Christ knows, he was no quitter.

  To hustle up a buck, one of my father’s solutions, when not at work on a fiction project, was to take on partners and write numbing spec movie and TV scripts. Other busted-out screenwriters were his collaborators. Guys like Harry Essex and Edmund Morris and Buckley Angell.

  My father’s association and phone conversations with Robert Towne had renewed his tolerance for Hollywood. Although disillusioned with the film business, John Fante was encouraged by the renewed interest in Ask the Dust. He began to feel like there was hope. He might still make money in the movies.

  Robert Towne’s devotion would ultimately materialize into the film version of Ask the Dust in 2006. To his credit, he was passionate and committed to the material, but his single-minded over managing of the project eventually led to the film’s undoing. The movie version of Ask the Dust was miscast, and the main character Arturo sanitized to the extent that his heart and passion were absent from the script.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Skinning a New Cat

  Having been stark-raving sober for many months, I was back driving a cab. Because of my renewed steady attendance, in 1973 I had graduated to what the taxi industry in New York called a single: one man in one car on one shift for a twenty-four-hour period. By not drinking I was putting money away. I had returned to my old method of staying sober: exhaustion. Every day at ten o’clock I took the IRT subway to Fifty-seventh Street. The walk to my garage was over a mile. I did the same thing after I turned the car in at night. Staying sober was what mattered.

  One late spring morning, cruising up First Avenue, I stopped to pick up a girl wearing tight cutoff jeans and a fitted elastic top. She was pretty and chatty. Chubby too, maybe fifty pounds too heavy. She carried most of her weight in her ass.

  It was spring in New York and the girl was toting a folding card table and a heavy backpack that I helped her stow in my cab’s trunk.

  My copy of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Collected Poems was on the front seat next to my poetry notebook. When the girl leaned over the seat back to tell me her destination—Fiftieth Street and Sixth Avenue in midtown—she saw the edition of Millay poetry and asked to see it. I had a paper clip on a page marking one of my favorites. I handed the book to her. On our way across town, she read the poem I had marked, “Spring”:

  To what purpose, April, do you return again?

  Beauty is not enough.

  You can no longer quiet me with the redness

  Of little leaves opening stickily.

  I know what I know.

  The sun is hot on my neck as I observe

  The spikes of the crocus.

  The smell of the earth is good.

  It is apparent that there is no death.

  But what does that signify?

  Not only under ground are the brains of men

  Eaten by maggots.

  Life in itself

  Is nothing,

  An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.

  It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,

  April

  Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

  She smiled after she’d read it. A pretty smile. “I know that poem. We studied Millay in my literature class at City College. You like her stuff?”

  “I do,” I said. “We share the same slant on things.”

  Another big smile. “Geez, that poem’s pretty pessimistic. Don’t you think?”

  “Not for me,” I said, a little annoyed. “April coming yearly down a hill babbling and strewing flowers is a kick-ass image. You gotta dig a little deeper with Edna sometimes.”

  The fat girl was staring at my hack license mounted on the dashboard. “So, your name’s Daniel?”

  “It’s Dan.”

  “Can I call you Danny? Danny’s cool.”

  “Call me whatever you like. What’s your name?”

  “Sara.”

  “Hiya, Sara.”

  When we arrived at Fiftieth and Sixth, it was just before noon. A half dozen street peddlers with blankets were in the process of unfolding their wares on the sidewalk against the Time-Life Building. I helped my passenger unload her stuff from my trunk, and then she handed me a fat tip. “This is my gig—my office. Stop by anytime, Danny boy.”

  “You work here?”

  Again the bright smile. “Sure do. I’m a peddler.”

  “A peddler? Any money in peddling?” I asked.

  “I did waitressing until a year ago, making three bucks an hour working a ten-hour shift. So un-okay. Now I make a couple hundred bucks a day, sometimes more, working four hours total—twelve to two and four to six. Lunchtime and the after-work rush hour.”

  “No kidding?” I said.

  “No kidding.”

  “Hey, can I call you—have coffee sometime?” I asked. “I’d like to hear more about what you do.”

  “Will you bring Edna along, and your poetic mouth?”

  “Edna’s my girl. Can’t help the mouth. It’s part of the deal.”

  The chubby girl took the pen from my shirt pocket and wrote down her telephone number on the back of a matchbook.

  The first time Sara and I had sex was at my place. We’d met at a bookstore in Chelsea and started discussing poetry. I’d never done it with a big girl and wasn’t sure if I wanted to screw her or not, but I finally asked if she’d like to see some of my poetry. At my place.

  I was in the kitchen making coffee the day she dropped by. I turned around with two cups in my hands to discover she was naked—and smiling.

  I hadn’t had sex without alcohol in a long time and my cock wouldn’t get hard, and when I stood up a few minutes later, embarrassed and annoyed with myself and still limp, Sara grabbed my hand and pulled me back down on the bed. “No big deal, Danny boy,” she said. “Let me show you a little trick I do.”

  I pulled away. I didn’t want any help. In my kitchen cupboard I still had an unopened pint of blended whiskey. I poured four fingers into my coffee cup, then drank it down. The rush was instant. I knew immediately I’d be fine. Then I walked over to the naked girl on the bed. “Okay, Sara,” I said, “let’s fuck.”

  The thing I’ve discovered about big girls is that they try harder.

  I quit the taxi business two weeks later. In the beginning Sara and I spent a lot of time together. She’d come over two or three nights a week.

  I became a controlled drinker when we were together, after many months off booze. Our sex was excellent and frequent because Sara enjoyed doing all the work.

  Through the big girl I started my career as a street peddler and eventually applied for my city license. I worked Sara’s spot on Fiftieth Street with her. Our main clients were the secretaries from the area. Hundreds of them all took their lunch break during the same two-hour span. Tourists from Radio City made up the rest of our clientele.

  There were usually no more than half a dozen other peddlers near us against the building. Sara would spread her big blue blanket on the sidewalk just before noon. I would help her separate her stuff out of the plastic bags and unopened boxes, then display the assorted merchandise. Sara’s items were costume jewelry and printed scarves.

  There is an unwritten law among New York peddlers: You don’t set up near someone who is selling the same item. Competing is stealing business. If another peddler was first on the block that day hustling similar merchandise, then we would move to another street, usually in Times Square.

  The other peddlers on Fiftieth Street were selling belts, neckties, brooches, earrings, makeup, polyester scarves, key chains, wristwatches, and copper bracelets. What all of us referred to as schlock. These items, except the wristwatches, could usuall
y be bought for six bucks a dozen wholesale and sold for a dollar each on the street—double the price.

  Sara put me in touch with the wholesalers on lower Broadway and paid me 25 percent of every day’s profit. It was more than I made driving the cab.

  Eventually, I began working on my own. It came after we’d made the rounds of several shopping neighborhoods in Manhattan to see what the other peddlers were selling. Sara and I wanted something unique for me that was not already being oversold on the street.

  We settled on baby bracelets, the kind with the child’s name spelled out on white alphabet beads, then attached to a short string of different-colored small beads, with a clasp at the wrist.

  I had to buy from three different wholesalers to put all my supplies together: beads, spring-ring clasps, two sets of needle-nose pliers, and a clear plastic tackle box that contained partitions for the alphabet beads. I found a used fold-up card table at a secondhand store on Twenty-third Street and paid three bucks for it. I was in business.

  At Sara’s request my last purchase was a two-dollar razor-sharp box cutter. She wanted me to buy it so we could open and unpack boxed stock in a hurry, on the street. I wanted it for other reasons—I needed backup in case of trouble. I was now a peddler, and midtown Manhattan was no place to carry my gun.

  My first lunch hour I made thirty bucks. I was slow and clumsy, fumbling to put the alphabet beads and strands together with my needle-nose pliers while a line of six secretaries stood by. My (assembled) baby bracelets sold for a dollar and a half. Three bucks for a double—two names. To control my hands from shaking I had begun to have a few snorts before hitting the street. It helped.

  In a week I was an ace at the gig. I could put together a bracelet with a clasp in less than a minute. Sometimes I sold thirty or thirty-five of them on my two-hour midday shift, sometimes more at the five o’clock rush hour. My income soon became a steady hundred bucks a day, minimum.