by Dan Fante
Shortly thereafter, ever alert to budding financial opportunities, this same ghoul then removed Pop’s leg above the knee. To say that the cure was worse than the illness is to understate what my father endured.
Several days after John Fante arrived home from the hospital, I was finally able to speak to him on the phone. “How’s it goin’, Pop?” I asked.
“How do you think it’s goin’, kid? It’s shit. Capital S.”
“Are you feeling any better?”
“I’m callin’ Dr. Blood and Guts after we get off the phone. I want the leg back. I’m having it bronzed and mounted over the fireplace.”
At home recuperating in July of that year, after the onset of blindness and as a result of his many surgeries, my father lost it. He became violent and incoherent.
My mom had been caring for him for months, dealing with a husband who woke up two or three times a night in fright, screaming, thrashing, falling to the floor in pain.
From the next bedroom, Joyce would go to him, hold him, lift him back onto his bed if necessary, and reassure my father that all was well, that the blackness and pain he was experiencing would somehow go away.
Soon after, John Fante became completely crazy. My mother was unable to cope with the situation and suggested to me that I return to Los Angeles for a few weeks. I agreed.
With no options remaining, it was decided to admit my father to the Motion Picture Hospital in Woodland Hills. There, for several weeks, he was visited by his family. Pop would have short stretches of lucid conversation where he’d ask about one of his dogs or children or about a grandchild, but these gave way to a deepening mania.
Our family now stopped being hopeful and began to discuss the end. These conversations exasperated me to the extent that I stopped going to the hospital when I knew one of my family members would be present. Pop’s doctors were full of noncommittal diagnoses and clichés, but when pinned down would finally agree that John Fante would probably die. Whatever my reasoning was at the time, I would not accept this conclusion or its possibility. I loved my father too much to let him go.
While visiting Pop, alone with him in the hospital, I would open the subject of writing and his work and talk to him about what I was doing. He would often engage me for half a minute, then begin to babble.
One afternoon several weeks after he’d been admitted and given a death sentence, I was sitting with him. When he spoke, his conversation made no sense whatsoever. Then his room telephone rang. In the past I had always picked up the phone, simply said “wrong number,” and then hung up.
The caller that day was Robert Towne, my old man’s on-again, off-again screenwriter friend. Towne asked how my father was doing. I said, “He’s holding his own for the moment, Robert. It’s not good.”
When my father heard the name Robert, he came to attention and sat up in bed. “Who are you talking to?” he said.
“It’s Robert Towne, Pop.”
“Give me the phone, kid.”
I handed my father the receiver and from that moment on he was completely lucid. The telephone conversation they had that day was about Towne’s plans for The Brotherhood of the Grape.
A few days later John Fante went back home completely coherent, completely himself. It was mid-1977.
In October 1979, Pop began a spell of untraumatized stable health. He wanted to work again and decided to start a new novel. Once a day, when possible, when not in a brain fog from his insulin injections, he would sit in his wheelchair in the living room and my mom would position herself on the big couch opposite. Pop, completely blind, would dictate word-for-word to my mother, who wrote in longhand on yellow legal pads.
My father spoke his manuscript. Sometimes four or five pages a day. He talked slowly but never paused to correct himself or change anything. He had “thought out” everything—every word—in his head.
Mom transcribed the novel and later, when she typed up the manuscript, the punctuation was inserted.
I was present with my father the day he dictated the last page of Dreams from Bunker Hill to my mother. Pop and I were discussing the end—the last paragraph. Young Arturo Bandini has returned to a cheap Filipino hotel in downtown Los Angeles. He is afraid he has lost his talent.
The text reads:
I had seventeen dollars in my wallet. Seventeen dollars and the fear of writing. I sat erect before the typewriter and blew on my fingers. Please God, please Knut Hamsun, don’t desert me now. I started to write and I wrote . . .
At this point, as Mom read it back, my father turned toward me. “Dan,” he said, “I want to end the book with Arturo stealing a quote. He writes a phrase from something he’s read to help get himself started. Then the text reads, ‘It wasn’t mine, but what the hell, a man had to start someplace.’”
Pop said, “I was thinking of that quote from Dickens. How’s it go? ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness . . .’”
I thought about it. “That’s not bad, Pop,” I said, “but what about something lighter? Something less important. Arturo’s just trying to get himself started again. Hey, remember that one from Lewis Carroll?” Then I quoted: “ ‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said, ‘To talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax—of cabbages—and kings.’ ”
My father took a few seconds to find the end of his cigarette with a lighter. After firing up a Kool and taking a deep drag, he said, “Yeah, kid, you’re right. That’s better. Something lighter. I like it.”
Then he turned in the direction of my mother. “Honey, let’s do the one from Lewis Carroll. It has just the right tone.”
“I like it too,” Mom said. “Delightful. Silly. It’s perfect.”
That was it. Dreams from Bunker Hill was done. My father had completed his last book.
He looked toward me. “There’s a program on the radio I want to hear, kid. Wheel your gimped, broken old man outside to the patio. Let’s enjoy a little sunshine.”
“Sure, Pop,” I said. “Congratulations on finishing your book.”
“Yeah. I’m having a good day. I’m not dead yet.”
Chapter Thirty-one
Dav-Ko Hollywood
By late 1978, I was about to relocate from New York City back to Los Angeles, after fourteen years, to open the West Coast branch of Dav-Ko Limousine Service. David Kasten had chosen me to be his resident live-in manager and his 49 percent partner in California (with the remaining 51 percent held by himself). He apparently respected my work ethic. Kasten, of course, didn’t know I was an unrepentant drunk and in the process of losing my mind. Between the job offer and my father’s declining health, I talked myself into leaving New York City.
My existence for the past two years had been reduced to my job and a daily routine of late-night bar and home drinking. My days were spent sweating out an insane Purgatorio of hangovers that had gone on for too long. I had a brain that raced uncontrollably, giving me minute-by-minute bulletins of how I had ruined my life. I’d begun to consider my mind as something separate from me, a sort of newsroom delivering endless, poisonous indictments. Often I’d find myself talking back to it in public and find people staring at me. To calm myself down while working my daytime limo gig, I continued to write in my notebook as a hobby. Dark, angry stuff. Poetry, mostly, with occasional ranting letters to politicians.
Dav-Ko had added another half dozen stretch limousines and was conquering the limo world. Kasten’s family had now successfully paid his way through the minefield of legal and drug problems and, after weighing what was at stake for himself and his business, David had cleaned up his act.
Dav-Ko was now in its own garage on Fifty-second Street near Twelfth Avenue, next to a towing service. Kasten had hired his own in-house mechanic and had internal offices built, and there was floor space for twenty cars. At night, after work, I’d begun dating the dispatcher-bookkeeper from the towing company next door, Terri Rolla.
At the
time Kasten formally offered me the partnership, I was unsure if I wanted it and told him I’d have to think it over. Leaving Manhattan did not appeal to me. My employer was selfish, preening, and egotistical, and very demanding as a boss. I liked David well enough but I didn’t like his friends or the way he talked to his employees, and I came to consider the prospect of him running my life over the phone from New York City as something potentially unpleasant. But that notion soon changed.
By now, as a chauffeur, I was making a side income by supplying a few of my rock-star customers with drugs. I sold coke by the gram as a convenience and made myself an extra few hundred dollars a week doing it.
Between my chauffeur income and my small drug sales, I had managed to stash a good chunk of cash under the floorboards of my planked living room: close to ten thousand dollars.
My main supplier of drugs was also a weekly limo client, a five-foot-tall racehorse trainer and bulk cocaine supplier named Pug Mahone, an immigrant from Ireland. He had once been a jockey but had lost his permit to ride as a result of accusations of having associations with known gamblers.
One day when I was picking up my package of dope at his apartment, Pug gave me a tip on a sure thing. The horse’s name was Itinerant Slim and his odds were going to be six-to-one at post time at “the Big A,” Aqueduct racetrack.
My drug-dealer client assured me that the race was a “lock” and that in his riding days he’d come to be pals with the jockey riding Slim that day. He’d even worked for the horse’s owners in the past. These guys had been saving Slim, holding him back, Pug said, for this specific race. A winning bet would net me 60K for my ten-thousand-dollar bet that Sunday.
I went for the idea. Screw David Kasten and Dav-Ko. I’d be able to buy my own limo. I already had two dozen steady high-end clients who always asked for me by name. In fact, I hated L.A. The brutal town was killing my father and I never wanted to go back. In a few days I might well be financially secure. Maybe I’d even quit drinking, go into a hospital, and stop burning my life down.
That Sunday Itinerant Slim got nosed out at the finish line by a spotted gray horse named Javelina’s Consent, who came from behind down the stretch to win it, having never before finished in the money.
When Pug eventually answered his phone a day later, he was high on his own powder. He whispered, “Dahnee boie, din’t I tell ya to bet the beast to Win and to Place? Din’t I now?”
“No,” I said, “you tweaking midget fuck. You didn’t. And you just put me out of business. You’re so cranked on that shit that you forget what the hell you say to people. I just lost ten grand. People get hurt for things like that, Pug.”
“Calm down, Dahnee. Ol’ Pug’ll put it right, straightaway. I bet him meself across the board. So you’re covered. You’ll get it back in product. Ya have me word on it.”
This I knew to be a dope dealer’s lie and for the rest of that day I considered my options. There was only one way to get my money back and that was to call the Bronx and pay a couple guys I knew to make a visit to Pug’s place. But rather than make that call, I decided to wait. There was an outside chance that Pug might make it good. I’d give it another twenty-four hours.
The next day, when I phoned his apartment again, I got no answer. I drove to his building in my limo on the way to a client pickup and gave the excuse to the doorman that I was there to drop off something for Mr. Mahone.
The guy shook his head. “Pug’s gone,” he whispered. “Three fellas came by early this morning. He left with them in a white gypsy cab.”
From the way the doorman guy said it, I could tell that something was wrong. By the end of the week, still not having heard from Pug, I was sure my 10K was gone for good.
People in the racing business sometimes disappear unaccountably, and the dismembered body of a small male was found several weeks later on the Jersey Shore. I assumed it was Pug but I never followed up.
I later learned from an Irish bartender that the name Pug Mahone was a fake, like everything else I thought I’d known about the ex-jockey. The term comes from the Irish phrase “pogue mahone.” In Gaelic it means “kiss my ass.”
With the loss of my savings, any misgivings I’d had about a partnership with David Kasten and the move to Los Angeles were gone. I was now also out of the cocaine business.
A couple days before Christmas, I left for California. Terri Rolla told me that she was in love with me. She was a small woman, five feet tall, twenty-two years old, with big brown eyes. Terri loved boozing and was happy to indulge all of my varied sexual requests. I’d had no thought whatever of continuing the hookup after my move to L.A.
The setup of Dav-Ko Hollywood went well. It took time to do the alterations of the duplex on Selma Avenue and hire and train a staff of six drivers.
The Dav-Ko West office (which doubled as my home) was near the freeway and close enough to the Beverly Hills hotels and the music-business offices of many of the clients we serviced. Unfortunately, our business could not have been deeper inside the moist crotch that was Hollywood in those days. Selma Avenue was home to teenage male hustlers who worked the street just outside our driveway.
With only three limos to our fleet, David and I needed to make backup arrangements with the other local services. We spent the first couple weeks (me driving him around) meeting other company owners to ensure that our overflow would be covered for weddings and concert work.
At the time, our company operated the only non-black fleet of stretch limousines in Los Angeles and New York. White, red, and brown. Our limos featured a stocked bar, telephone, and console TV. Our white limo had eight pounds of crushed pearl blended into its paint. Kasten named the car Pearl.
The novelty of having non-black stretch limos caught on quickly with our rock-star, doper, and entertainment customers. The drivers we hired and trained were all young and had never been chauffeurs before (most had never owned a suit). Dav-Ko had broken the stodgy limo-services mold in Los Angeles and our business began to take off.
Within a couple months each of our cars was busy fifteen to twenty hours a day. Riding the wave, Kasten, now back in New York, immediately ordered three more Lincolns to be stretched in Mexico and shipped north to Los Angeles.
On the phone with him from my live-in office in one of our twice-weekly, nitpicky strategy meetings, Kasten suggested that I invite Terri Rolla to move from the Manhattan towing service to Los Angeles to become our resident live-in day-dispatcher. He knew I’d dated Terri, and angle-shooter that he was, David was ever on the lookout to save a buck by getting discount labor.
I didn’t like the idea. I’d kept in touch with Terri because she phoned all the time. She’d wanted more of a permanent relationship, but I’d sensed potential problems and put her off. Terri was not my girlfriend. We partied. We screwed and drank and did dope together. Period.
A few days went by and Kasten kept pushing me. I’d already hired a part-time night guy to cover my evenings out—hooker-hunting on the company’s dime—and my boss was annoyed over the added expense and suspicious when I refused to come to the phone. In the end I had to give in.
The upside of having Terri in Hollywood was that she was a skilled bookkeeper and had experience as an effective radio dispatcher. And, as I soon found out, our L.A. clients enjoyed talking to a young girl with a Bronx accent. Terri was spunky—cute and never without a quick comeback. What I didn’t know was that she was developing a serious amphetamine jonz.
Within a few months of my girlfriend being in Los Angeles, the two of us were at war.
Because of the nature of the limo business in L.A., several of my customers paid in cash—pimps and dope dealers, mostly. There was now plenty of spending-green changing hands. I made it my business to be gone at night four or five evenings a week, boozing, making the rounds. Terri, alone at the office and stuck at a phone, was left to troubleshoot problem calls from whacked-out movie stars and music-business hotshots who complained over everything from the car phone not dialing proper
ly to the color of the limo to not having enough free Scotch in the stocked bar. This went on every night. Terri’s answer to sleeplessness was a pill called a black beauty.
In the morning, when we did the books for the previous night, Terri and I would split up the cash. She always got thirty percent. I got the rest. David Kasten condoned this practice in lieu of having to shell out higher salaries. The cash income was gravy.
One of our clients, a thug and doper musician named Buddy Smiles, was in the habit of renting two limos for his local performances. Buddy was a cash client, and it was my strict policy to have the chauffeur get the money up front at the pickup location.
On his first booking with Dav-Ko, Buddy, who did not have a good rep with other limo companies, jived and shucked and attempted to put off payment until, he said, he could get back to his hotel room. Over the two-way radio I told my two drivers to leave him and his instruments and his band at the front door of the club. “Pickup canceled,” I said over the two-way radio. “Just pull away. Get out of there.”
Standing next to the car, Buddy heard my radio orders and quickly came up with a roll of hundred-dollar bills. He and his manager, Champ, I later learned, both carried guns.
My business relationship with Buddy further deteriorated.
With the parking problems at smaller club venues in Hollywood, it was often tough to have the limos waiting at the entrance door at the end of a performance. The last time we ever furnished cars for Buddy and his band, he called our office after the gig and began ranting at Terri. His up-front cash deposit had expired and she’d demanded more money.