Fante

by Dan Fante

  One afternoon not long after the cars arrived, one of them stalled on the freeway and had to be towed. I got on the phone with David Kasten and we began arguing. “Look,” I finally said, “this isn’t working for either of us. Just buy me out.”

  The West Coast Dav-Ko operation, after two and a half years in Los Angeles, was now worth approximately $750,000. My end was 49 percent, or about $365,000. Kasten said he was broke but could raise fifteen thousand in the next few days and another fifteen thousand in two weeks. I said, “Okay, bring the money. I want out. I’ll take the thirty grand.”

  Forty-eight hours later David Kasten was at my door. In one hand was a contract, and in the other a brown envelope containing $30,000 in cash. Somehow he’d located the money in one lump sum.

  Terri Rolla, who was now up to two grams a day in her cocaine use and was orally servicing a young rock-star client who lived in Hollywood, was made manager of Dav-Ko West.

  I signed Kasten’s paper, took the envelope, and then called a motel on La Brea Avenue to make a reservation. By that night I had moved my clothes in and rented a new green Corvette.

  The house I leased a week later was in Laurel Canyon, on Wonderland Park Avenue. It was a modern three-story, two-bedroom A-frame, built into the hillside and supported by a dozen sixty-foot-long metal stilts planted into the sloped mountain below. The place had a one-car garage as the bottom floor, and a rear patio off the second-story level just big enough for a table and two chairs. The bedrooms were covered in patterned mirrored tiles. When I woke up in the morning, I particularly hated seeing myself everywhere I looked.

  I soon found that the transition from the limo business to consecutive days of doing nothing was an emotional bungee-jump into the shitter. A long depression began, fueled by drugs and too much alcohol. One morning, two weeks after moving in, I had a suicide attempt after a night of binging. The rage and self-recrimination from losing my livelihood and being screwed by Kasten had became an obsession. My mind raced, continually delivering the worst kind of nonstop self-hate.

  When I woke up I found blood covering my bedsheets and a steak knife on the floor. I had stabbed myself in the stomach in a blackout. The gash wasn’t as deep as it was long. After washing the wound I put superglue on it to close it, along with some paper towels and duct tape. My hangover was brutal, and I was afraid that I might vomit and open the cut, so I drank a bottle of Pepto-Bismol mixed with a half pint of whiskey. Then I took some sleep meds and went back to bed. The next day I put three thousand dollars down on a new sports car. A red one. I always bought red whenever possible.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Not Even Fifteen Minutes of Fame

  One of the chauffeurs who worked for me was a decent guy named Michael Humphrey. Michael was a tall, handsome guy who had once toured successfully with a rock band. Women flocked to Michael. He always had at least one girlfriend paying his apartment rent. He was a fine guitar player and singer, and, in many ways, comparable as a performer to James Taylor. He had a following of limo customers in the music business who had frequently offered to kick open some doors for him. Knowing I’d sold my end of the company, Michael refused to work for Terri Rolla and quit Dav-Ko.

  We decided to become music partners: me manager and lyric writer, he doing the music. He and his current girlfriend had just split up, so he moved into my garage and we began to work together. A string of the best-looking women in town bought us groceries and entertained Michael on his bed in the garage. I soon coughed up the money and had the space converted into a recording studio/single bedroom.

  A good friend of mine at the time was the wild, funny, Cockney-named Jackie Cross. Jack managed several rock bands and began showing me the ropes in the music business. He’d married a bright and classy British beauty named Margo. The two of them had a house under the Hollywood sign in Beachwood Canyon, where we’d snort coke at the parties he held several nights a week.

  Jackie’s genius was selling—anything to anyone: cat shit to pet-food companies. He was famous for meeting with presidents of record companies, then jumping up on their desks and screaming to pitch his music acts. After five years in America, he’d promoted himself to the top of the music industry.

  As a favor to me, in part to settle a cocaine debt, he rounded up the best session musicians in Los Angeles and helped me put together a demo record for Michael Humphrey.

  My next suicide attempt at the time involved some antisocial craziness. To save money, I’d taken in a renter for my back bedroom, a British photographer named Louis LaCoss. He was new to L.A.

  A few weeks after the guy moved in, on a night when Michael was out of town with his new girlfriend, I found myself in and out of another blackout. Standing at my bedroom door, I began doing target practice with my .357 Magnum, firing five shots at a beer bottle at a distance of about twenty feet past the sliding-glass door of Louie’s bedroom into the hillside. I never hit the bottle.

  The sixth bullet was intended for my head. I remembered making the decision to do it. I cocked my gun, then pointed it between my eyes.

  Luckily, Louie was not at home. Instead of blowing my own brains out, I turned the gun at the last second, firing into the wall of my bedroom. The bullet traveled through the closet and then exited a few inches above the head of Louie’s bed, shattering several of the mirrored tiles in both bedrooms. After that I fell asleep.

  When Louie arrived home the next day, I was still asleep. He found glass on the floor of the bedroom and on his bed, then noticed the bullet hole in the wall. Apparently he then called a friend, who drove over to help him pack his belongings. They loaded his stuff into the trunk and backseat of her Saab.

  The commotion of people carrying boxes up and down the stairs, and suitcases thumping, woke me up.

  I was getting dressed when my roommate swung open my bedroom door. On my bed was the .357 Magnum.

  Louie saw the gun. “You really are crazy,” he said.

  I sat down on the bed to put my shoes on. “What’s the problem, roomie? What’s all the noise about?”

  He pointed at the gun, then backed up to the doorway. “Is that thing loaded?”

  Picking up the Magnum I checked the chamber and saw that the bullets had all been fired. “No. No live ammo,” I said. I held out the pistol for him to see.

  “If you don’t mind terribly, I’d prefer that you put your pistol on the floor. I have a matter to discuss with you.”

  I did what he asked.

  “You shot through the wall into my bedroom. There’s broken glass and plaster everywhere.”

  At first I couldn’t remember doing it, but then Louie pointed out the bullet hole in the mirrored tile.

  “Hey, I’m sorry,” I said. “I got fuckin’ crazy. It won’t happen again.”

  “Precisely. You being fuckin’ crazy is quite untenable for me. Precisely why I’m moving out now. Today.”

  “Well—that’s up to you, I guess.”

  “I’m paid through the end of the month, another twelve days. I’d like a refund.”

  Now I could feel myself getting angry. “Look,” I said, “if you want to move, that’s your choice. I’m not Kmart. I don’t give refunds.”

  “You know of course that, should I decide to do so, I could contact the authorities. What you did is strictly against the law. If I’d been here last night I might be dead.”

  I got off the bed. “That’s right, you could go to the cops.”

  Louie backed through the door. “On second thought keep the fucking money. Fuck off.”

  Then he was gone.

  It was July 1980. The demo record for Michael Humphrey cost me two thousand dollars, and eight months after moving to Wonderland Park Avenue, I was now close to being broke. Jackie Cross helped me make presentations to two record companies. They listened to the three-song recording and eventually rejected the material and the singer as not marketable at the time.

  On his own, Michael got one major deal. He had a meeting with the own
er of RSS Records, Robert Stapleton, who, while he was in L.A., always stayed in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Robert had been one of Michael’s limo clients when I had owned Dav-Ko. Stapleton loved the songs and offered Michael a recording contract. He also offered him a job as vice president of new talent with his company. The problem was that Stapleton was homosexual and any record deal came with a stipulation: He wanted to suck Michael’s cock.

  After three meetings and long discussions about his future in the recording industry, Michael saw no way out. He wasn’t gay and could not contend with the idea of sex with Stapleton. He turned the offer down. I had hoped the money I’d poured into Michael’s career as his manager and co-songwriter would come back to me through the Stapleton deal. No such luck. I was SOL in the music business.

  A month later I was out of money and forced to give up the house in Laurel Canyon. At the same time, my sports car was repossessed. Michael Humphrey had met a well-off Persian heiress at Carlos ’n Charlie’s bar on Sunset Boulevard about that time and moved in with her. Eventually they got married. She was a beautiful girl, but sadly, she was also deeply depressed and hooked on opium. She later killed herself. I never saw Michael again.

  Now, completely broke and without transportation in a city built for the automobile, I was at another bottom. The morning of my eviction I woke up depressed and suicidal.

  I had no place to live and no vehicle. I couldn’t bring myself to get out of bed. When I looked out my bay window at the canyon below, a strange thing happened: Light suddenly began streaming into my room. Its brightness was overpowering. It filled the bedroom and the strength of it made me cover my eyes. The glare persisted for several minutes, then finally went away. I’ve had no experience like it before or since. At the time I dismissed it as some sort of odd weather phenomenon.

  My father had recounted having a similar experience several times as a child. In his recollection of the events, he’d seen a lady dressed in blue with bright light surrounding her. She would stand by his bed in the morning for several seconds, then disappear.

  I moved in with my friends Jack and Margo Cross after a few days of staying at my parents’ home in Malibu. My father “gave” me one of his carport junkers and a couple hundred dollars to get me by. The car he gifted me was a Dodge two-door with a badly slipping automatic transmission. It had been sitting undriven for two years.

  One of the guys who’d worked for me as a chauffeur had a friend with a transmission shop. A rebuilt junkyard tranny was installed, and I promised to make six monthly payments of a hundred dollars for the work.

  My boozing remained out of control and, eventually, my personal issues did not sit well with my friend Jack. It took a month, but I finally managed to get a job with a guaranteed weekly paycheck—selling an in-home dating service—and began paying rent. I promised Jack that I would cut back on my liquor consumption.

  The place that hired me was called International Heartthrob, a computer matchmaking business created by the guy who had masterminded the Encyclopaedia Britannica in-home sales presentation. The guy, Bennett Coffee, and his financial partner had started the business out of a Torrance office.

  I managed to do okay as a dating-service counselor. Because the sales demos were at night, I had no choice but to stay sober. In a couple weeks I became one of their top guys, delivering a presentation that took two hours to complete and involved three long multiple-choice questionnaires. Eventually, at the end of the counselor-guided session, if the client decided against joining, I could prove to them on paper that they were lying about being committed to improving their love life. We called it the same close.

  I eventually achieved an 80 percent closing record. Then I got drunk with a customer and insulted her—a seventy-year-old, bad-tempered, gravel-voiced, surgery-augmented, chain-smoking bleach blonde from New Jersey. She paid me in cash but would not cooperate or do the company questionnaires in my briefcase. The woman wanted to date only Latino boys forty or fifty years her junior.

  As I was leaving with a fistful of her money and (finally) a signed contract, I made a rude remark and she pushed me out the door. I turned and yelled at her to keep her fucking hands to herself.

  That night, after leaving her house in Venice, I became disgusted with myself and my stupid job that victimized lonely, needy people. Instead of calling in to report my results and dropping off the paperwork and money in the office door’s after-hours slot, I found a motel in Hollywood and a street hooker and stayed drunk for two days.

  When I eventually reported back to the company, I was ordered into the sales manager’s office and fired. My boss accused me of assaulting a client and stealing company money. I was five hundred dollars short from my motel stay with the hooker, but my fat commission check easily balanced out the debt. After a long conversation with my boss and my explanation about the crazy old bitch, he decided not to pursue criminal charges against me.

  A couple days after my firing, Jack and Margo Cross asked me to move out of their home. My friends had had enough of me.

  At Christmastime that year, with John Fante rapidly declining as a result of his multiple amputations and his blindness, I attended a family dinner celebration at my parents’ Malibu home, bringing a gallon of Cribari rosé wine with me. I consumed most of the bottle myself.

  After dinner my father and I began to argue about my politics. He challenged my long-held stand on the war in Vietnam and my hatred of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan as over-the-top radicalism. The back-and-forth discussion got nastier and my mother left the room. I ended the conversation by telling my father that his physical disabilities were his own fault, that I was glad he’d gone blind. He deserved it because he was an angry old sonofabitch who had abused people all his life.

  That night, on my way back to Santa Monica, I was pulled over by the Malibu police and charged with a DUI. I spent the night in jail. When I awoke in the morning and remembered what I had said to my father, I tried to hang myself in the cell with my belt.

  I was now at another physical and mental bottom: jobless, shitting blood during the day, unable to keep food in my stomach, and harboring the thought that I wasn’t long for the planet. I decided to take the lock-in, dry-out motel cure one more time. For most of the next week, twenty hours a day, I walked the floor, drank only water, puked, shit myself, and shook. It worked.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Bukowski, Ben Pleasants, and the Rediscovery of John Fante

  In the late 1970s, a literary stroke of good fortune came my father’s way, something that not even he, with his snarling, suspicious disposition, could smother.

  In 1973 an author-poet-newspaperman named Ben Pleasants had asked his drinking pal Charles Bukowski who his most important influence was as an author. Bukowski on his own was well-read enough, but Pleasants was a literary scholar and had been the poetry editor of the L.A. Times. Bukowski named John Fante without hesitation and spoke of him as the best writer alive. His literary mentor. Pleasants got busy and read every out-of-print book by my father. Finding these books was not an easy task.

  More background: In the late sixties, Bukowski’s work had been noticed by John Martin. Martin, an avid reader and a passionate guy, had worked for a large and successful furniture/office supply company and over the years helped build it into a million-dollar operation. He had read Charles Bukowski’s poetry in little magazines of the time and felt Hank had an important voice, eventually important enough for Martin to put his own money behind a publishing venture.

  After learning that Bukowski lived in Los Angeles, Martin sent him a letter. Hank responded with an invitation for them to meet. Soon after, Martin began to publish a selection of Bukowski’s poems as broadsides. John Martin financed his new publishing venture by selling his own collection of D. H. Lawrence first editions, and Black Sparrow Press went into business in 1966.

  Martin had an uncanny eye for good writing and excellent marketing savvy, and, to his credit, many of the best writers from
Bukowski’s generation might have been forgotten if not for Martin’s single-minded determination to keep their work in print. Over the years John Martin’s small publishing venture became a formidable force in postmodern American literature.

  Unlike the major publishing houses, Black Sparrow Press had no return policy. When a bookstore bought books from Black Sparrow Press, they owned them.

  As Bukowski became more famous in the seventies for creating his own literary genre, Pleasants began badgering him to contact John Fante and help get my father’s work back into print. After reading my father’s work, Pleasants wrote to Bukowski soliciting his help in resurrecting my father’s career. Here is part of his note:

  I am in correspondence with two publishers about the idea of issuing a JOHN FANTE READER: St. Martin’s Press and New Directions. If this works out you would do an essay [about Fante].

  Bukowski, it should be noted, was no one’s cheerleader. He balked at first when Pleasants tried to persuade him to help.

  But Pleasants persisted, and around this time the Los Angeles Times Book Review editor, Art Seidenbaum, assigned Pleasants the job of reopening the idea that John Fante was a major writer.

  The Los Angeles Times published an article by Pleasants on July 8, 1979, titled “Stories of Irony from the Hand of John Fante.” In his profile Pleasants pointed out that Bukowski was my father’s biggest fan. The ball that had begun to roll slowly was now gaining momentum. John Fante was starting to get some decent press for his forgotten fiction.

  Sadly, as it turned out, neither New Directions nor St. Martin’s was interested in my father’s out-of-print books. But Pleasants is a stubborn guy, and he continued to write letters to other well-known writers who knew my father and admired his fiction. That persistence finally resulted in “Hollywood Ten” screenwriter Alvah Bessie’s authoring an excellent article in the San Francisco Chronicle about John Fante and his work.