by Dan Fante
Nicolas Joseph Fante was a brilliant guy, but somehow his feet never really touched planet Earth. By appearances he was normal, but he became a 24-7 drunk. He worked a job and had hobbies and a social life, but he was never without a buzz. Hiding the illness became his bizarre life’s avocation.
Eventually Nick found his great skill. He became a precision toolmaker and designer. His boss could hand him a typed-out concept for any sort of widget, metal or plastic: a pen that retracts using four different colors, a wheel specifically designed for some oversized vehicle, or a multisided drill bit. Nick would then design it, go into the tool shop, and make the damn thing. His finest accomplishment was being a member of the design team that fabricated the feet of the lunar landing craft.
One night, years before he destroyed his career, while living in Santa Monica with his wife and eleven-year-old daughter, he came home in a blackout and got in the wrong bed—his daughter’s. He never forgave himself.
Near the end, he had an ulcer that exploded, and he was transfused in the hospital and given five pints of blood. My brother’s ass was narrowly saved, but his doctor assured him that if he continued drinking he would die. He’d dodged the bullet. However, just months later, after thirty-five years of booze abuse, his stomach exploded from the effects of his drinking and he died a terrible death. Nick Fante was crushed by alcohol like a dog in the street.
At his funeral, his secretary confided to me that two weeks after he returned to work from the ICU and his last blood transfusion, she had begun to discover his empty pint bottles under the daily newspaper in his trash can.
Nick and I never became friends. It would take me years into sobriety to come to terms with our relationship. I loved my brother but it was a difficult love, elusive, a love that struggled to find itself.
Five years after he died, I awoke in a rage one morning. At his funeral and service no one had mentioned what had killed him. They had talked about his ulcer and his stomach problems, but nothing was said about his being a chronic alcoholic.
I was living in Santa Monica at the time and had been sober for several years. In a rage, I got up and dressed, then got in my car and drove the short distance to the Venice Beach boardwalk, looking for a tattoo parlor. In my hand was a piece of paper with the words:
NICK FANTE
DEAD FROM ALCOHOL
1-31-42 TO 2-21-97.
The first two places I entered wanted too much money for the inscription, but in the third tattoo joint, when the guy saw what I wanted printed on my arm, he smiled. “You came to the right place, brother,” he said. “I’m sober too.”
Chapter Forty-two
The Death of Joyce Fante and John Fante’s Legacy
© KIM COOPER
As I was with my father, I was at the deathbed of my mother, Joyce Fante, in June 2005, holding her hand with my sister Vickie. I was reading to Mom. Her favorite poem, “The Lady of Shalott.”
Toward the end of her life, Mom would often see “ghosts” in the glass cabinet of her bookcase across the room and have conversations with them. Her father, my father, and many of her long-gone relatives. She frequently “dreamed” of my little son Giovanni, who had become a delight to her. Mom loved Gio, and when we visited she would hold him in her arms and beam with pride. There was a wonderful connection between them.
Joyce Fante achieved an unusual distinction with the Santa Monica Fire Department toward the end of her long life. One afternoon the chief arrived at her well-decorated room that for months had been adorned with Egyptian masks and two dozen needlepoint pillows. The chief’s face and manner were stern and inflexible. Mom had always been a well-turned-out lady and was invariably cordial and gracious to her guests, including those in caps and dark blue uniforms with gold badges pinned to their chests.
The fire chief was carrying a clipboard that contained a sheaf of reports. He placed them on Joyce’s bed and began rattling off the statistics: “Mrs. Fante, you have had the paramedics at your room here at Pacific Gardens fourteen times this month. In fact, you have sometimes called 911 four times in a ten-minute period. I am here to inform you that your 911 privilege is now suspended.”
Mom smiled quizzically. “Well, I wasn’t feeling at all well. I’m sure a man in your position can understand that. You people provide service. I pay my taxes and I needed service.”
“You have to stop it, Mrs. Fante.”
Joyce then smiled coyly. “I’ll take the matter under consideration, sir. Thank you for your visit.”
When the chief left Mom’s room that day, he was scratching his head.
My sister Vickie had been Mom’s default caretaker for the past two years, during her stay at two separate extended-care luxury rest homes.
Vickie made sure Mom’s hair was “done” once a week and kept her in the latest fashions and spoke to her by phone three times a day, and often in the middle of the night if Joyce decided it was time for another extended discussion about the beneficiaries of her will. Vickie even hired a college student to come in and read English verse to the old girl twice a week.
My sister’s devotion was above and beyond the call, and, as a geriatric invalid, our mother was no day at the beach. Vickie dodged and caught plenty of bullets in her mom’s last days.
All that being said, Mom and I were good friends at the end. I still love her and miss her and her snooty DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) librarian’s bad temper.
In 2009 the University of California at Los Angeles offered to buy my father’s collected papers, photographs, and memorabilia. Professor Stephen Cooper was a key figure in the proposed acquisition.
For years I have been traveling back and forth to Italy to visit my father’s ancestral home in Torricella Peligna. Over that time the Italian people, especially those in the region of Abruzzo, have become passionate John Fante fans and have treated me as one of their own. Several of my own books are published in Italy as well.
In Torricella Peligna, a town of 1,200 people high in the mountains, one of the few buildings not bombed by the German army in World War II is a stone house built by Nicola Fante, my grandfather. It is neglected and unoccupied, but some day I hope to have it renovated and dedicated as a monument and museum to my father and his father.
On a visit to the region of Abruzzo in 2009, at lunch with my good friend Paolo Di Vincenzo, who is the cultural editor of Il Centro newspaper in Pescara, I was introduced to a group of men representing the province who proposed to buy my father’s papers—everything from the collection my brother Jim and my sister Vickie and I inherited and still run as an entity called the John Fante Trust. The total of my father’s work and mementos filled two ample storage units.
At lunch that day the men from the province offered to convert one floor of an old palazzo in the region into a John Fante Museum. It would be open to the public all year round. My father’s work and mementos would be cared for and displayed for all to see.
John Fante loved Italy’s culture and the kindness, passion, and generosity of its people. I was very much in favor of placing my father’s papers and memorabilia in Italy, and not at a university where access is restricted to academics and students via computer. To me the choice was an easy one.
This was not to be. I was outvoted by my sister and brother. The collection was sold to UCLA. Though I deeply regret their choice, my affection for them is strong and I know they did what they felt was right for my father’s work, though I continue to feel it was a grave mistake.
April 8, 2010, six weeks after the death of my brother Jim’s twenty-year-old son Dustin in a tragic car accident, marked the one hundred first anniversary of John Fante’s birth. That day the City of Los Angeles dedicated the intersection where the beautiful old Central Library still stands in Bunker Hill as John Fante Square. The buildings on all four corners bear gold plaques. Though little of old Bunker Hill remains, I know my dad is somewhere on a putting green in heaven, pleased as hell.
Epilogue
No
two people were more different than John Fante and myself—yet we were the same in a few essential ways.
My father was an artist of great rage and great passion, perhaps born out of his own time. He was not a nice guy. A third-generation drunk, he passed on to his children what had been passed on to him. Yet his unstoppable passion for his work and his love for literature has survived intact. That passion became my inheritance, my legacy.
What has saved my life and saved me from myself, other than the twelve steps, has been my own writing. The discovery that I have something to contribute with my work has given my life a festering purpose and great passion. I don’t write clever tales or make up disposable yarns that lend themselves to rehashed TV plots; I write about myself. The reason I write is not to change you but to let you know that you can change. I write about living and dying and falling in love and throwing it all away—then surviving it. I write about madness and death. I write for the survival of my heart. I am swallowed by, and in love with, the miracle of the human condition. My heroes are real people struggling to find their place on a planet. A planet where fitting in has become a disease as powerful as cancer.
There are two quotes from Franz Kafka that have helped shape my work: A good book “shakes us awake like a blow to the skull,” and “A book must be an axe for the frozen sea within us.”
Since I finished my first novel, Chump Change, I’ve just kept going. My life suddenly had a purpose. So now, when I’m done with one idea, I go on to the next. Sometimes it’s a book of poems, sometimes a play or a stack of short stories.
I believe every person is born with a purpose. Our job on the planet is to find and fulfill that purpose. To date, I have written eleven published books. I wake up every day in a state of gratitude. I thank God for what I have, then kick the covers off. I slurp coffee and sit down at my desk and start typing. Often I don’t know what will come out. So I just start typing and see what’s there. I’ve done it for twenty years, six days a week, yet still the words keep coming. I work an hour or two a day, unless I hit a patch where I cannot stop and I am driven and the words keep spilling out of me.
Today, as I write these words, it is 2011. I have been sober for almost twenty-five years. I am married to a brilliant, beautiful, and sexy woman who accepts me the way I am, bad temper, dark moods, and all.
Guys like me don’t survive our own personalities, let alone our booze problem, without some kind of spiritual intervention. My experience of having a living, loving God in my life is what has made the difference.
The spiritual zapping I got at Bob Anderson’s retreat so long ago is still with me. I’ve learned over time to treat my alcoholism—the mental part of the disease—through what came out of that experience. I talk to God all day. I have an ongoing relationship with this Power. Mine is no church God where you stop in once a week to tip your hat and kneel down. Not with my kind of mind that still assaults me ten times a day. My God is a walking-around God who stays with me. We’re friends. I talk to this power as you would talk to someone in the passenger seat of your car. I do it as much as possible and try not to listen to my thinking. Most days it works out pretty well. I have a good life and I’m doing the thing I always dreamed of doing but never trusted myself enough to try. No one wants to kill me. I have not been to jail in years. No cops have come to my door asking where I hid my gun. And I have paid back all the money I owed and said I’m sorry a thousand times to the people I gypped and screwed and betrayed over my years of boozing and flimflamming.
I’ve had my financial ups and downs as a sober writer. Trying to survive and pay my way hasn’t always been easy, but I have never been homeless and I have never stopped writing. When I began my writing career I made a deal with God: I’ll do the typing and you show me how to pay the bills. There have been many more jobs—pay-the-rent kinds of jobs—but that’s okay. That’s how the wheels keep turning.
Today I have a damn good life. A crazy, hope-to-die recovered drunk. Go figure, right? A guy like me.
Acknowledgments
In Italy:
David Piccoli and his wife, Loredana; Paolo Di Vincenzo; Pietro Ottobrini; Nicola De Sangro; Vinicio Capossela; Vincenzo Costantino Cinaski; Giovanna DiLello; Tizziano Teti; and the wonderful people of Torricella Peligna.
In America:
Ben Pleasants for badgering me to write this book; Al and Judy Berlinski for their unshakable faith in my work; Ayrin Leigh Fante for being my wife and my best friend; Amy Baker, the best editor in America, for going the distance; Shera Danese Falk; John Fante, my hero, and Joyce Fante, my mother, a gifted poet and a tough cookie.
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .
About the author
Meet Dan Fante
Back in L.A.
About the book
Comments and Thoughts on the Photographs Throughout the Book
Read on
Letters from John Fante
Poems About My Father
A Poem by Joyce Fante
More Books by Dan Fante
About the Author
Meet Dan Fante
DAN FANTE was born and raised in Los Angeles. At nineteen he hitchhiked across the country, eventually ending up in New York City, where he was a cabdriver for seven years and held countless other odd jobs in order to survive. Fante battled with alcoholism for many years and was arrested many times for his numerous stupidities. After getting sober, and in hopes of remaining permanently indignant, Fante took up writing novels in his mid-forties. Today Dan Fante has been sober for more than twenty years. He has recently returned to Los Angeles with his wife Ayrin and his son Michelangelo Giovanni Fante. Fante is the author of the novels 86’d, Chump Change, Mooch, and Spitting Off Tall Buildings; the short story collection Short Dog; the poetry collections A gin-pissing-raw-meat-dual-carburetor-V8-son-of-a-bitch from Los Angeles and Kissed By a Fat Waitress; and the plays The Boiler Room and Don Giovanni. He writes six days a week and is currently at work on a detective novel set in Los Angeles.
Back in L.A.
IN 2006 after the death of my mother Joyce Fante, I came into a bit of money, enough for a down payment on a house. I’d supported myself by the seat of my pants ever since I became a writer, and my wife Ayrin and I were fed up with Los Angeles and the bumper-car lifestyle of its citizens.
As a young guy I could drive across L.A. and take in the town and its neighborhoods. The city was a big, gasping, giggling, drunken slut of a place and her kisses were always wet and deep. I loved the Hollywood Hills and Laurel Canyon and Las Feliz and the Grand Central Market. I loved the crazy disposable architecture. Los Angeles was a special place for me: tireless and unpredictable. It had its own energy and freedom, and a powerful pulse.
Then, around the mid-1980s, it began to be more and more crowded and more difficult to travel the streets. More and more of its citizens began settling their street disputes with a Glock or a Sig, and I was getting grumpy for what had been. Because I’m a born car guy, an L.A. kid who grew up in a place that made everything within reach ON FOUR WHEELS, I missed what had been. I used to be able to cop dope in Hollywood, catch a great band on the Strip, hang out at the bars in Venice, drop by my favorite bookstore, and be home by 2 a.m. But that L.A. was gone, the town where you could be anything you wanted to be if you just had a clean shirt and gas money. Enough was enough. For me and my wife L.A. had grown beyond its capacity to be livable. We had a new son and we wanted to see some open sky and to be away from the clog of a big, dirty city. So off we went to Arizona and the high desert.
Then, almost five years later, we were swallowed by that desert. The house I’d paid top dollar for was now worth half what I’d coughed up for it and I now saw myself pouring even more money down B of A’s crapper—money I no longer had. We felt smothered under Arizona’s smogless sky and, more than anything, we missed our amazing Pacific Ocean and her afternoon breeze.
I’d been traveling a thousand miles round trip by car every month to see my friends and d
o readings back in Los Angeles, and now it was time to reshuffle the cards—to see if we could come home again. So we pulled the plug.
The upside was that my books were doing well and my fine editor at Harper Perennial was always encouraging, and my passion for writing was as strong as ever. But for me, as for so many others, the American dream had quietly grown rattlesnake fangs. Surviving a crashed economy and rocketing gas prices was becoming serious business. So we scraped together our first and last month’s rent in a new place, called the movers, and held our breath.
Now, after a few months back in L.A., I’ve concluded that home is not a structure. For us home is the place where the heart and history are stored. Home is where you can re-feel your roots while drinking strong coffee and staring out at an endless ocean. And of course I’m well-suited to live in Los Angeles. I’m a bungee jumper by nature, impatient, intolerant, and always curious. I love and hate at the drop of a hat. I drive too fast. So it turns out that I’m back where I belong.
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About the Book
Comments and Thoughts on the Photographs Throughout the Book
Cover Photo
My father and I in front of the house at 625 South Van Ness Avenue. It’s 1945 and I am one year old. The scowl on my face is telling of the many years of anger and depression I’d have to face before finally figuring things out.
Title Page Photo
My dad and I at the house in Los Angeles around 1949 or 1950. I remember having a cap gun in the back of my pants. Pop took it away and threw it on the lawn just before the photo was snapped.
Photo Opposite the Dedication
Joyce and John Fante—long after the hurricane had ended. They were good friends at the end.