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by Dan Fante

  “I’m picking up a Lincoln Town Car,” Koffman went on. “You’ll drive me—us—around for the rest of the day and I’ll begin your indoctrination as the first Dav-Ko employee at the California branch. Dav-Ko Hollywood. You’ll be paid in cash for the day.”

  “Sounds good,” I said.

  Koffman was never less than a hundred percent business. “I’ve been working with a Realtor,” he went on. “We’ve found a furnished duplex on Selma Avenue, near Highland, near Hollywood High. It’s the perfect launch pad for the new company. The bottom floor is commercial space—a former doctor’s office—and the second floor has two bedrooms and there’s a full kitchen. Granted, it’s not the most elite neighborhood in Los Angeles, but the property has a fenced yard and it’s clean and close to the freeway. And there’s off-street parking for a dozen limos…and the rent is fabulously reasonable.”

  I knew the area. Years before, as a kid, I’d frequented the Baroque Bookstore, a block away on Las Palmas. Hank Chinaski and Jonathan Dante’s books were well represented at the Baroque. Red, the owner, had been a nice old guy too. But, aside from the Baroque Bookstore and Miceli’s restaurant across the street, most of the rest of the neighborhood was seedy and transient. A near slum in fact.

  Koffman beamed. “I’m signing the lease this afternoon.”

  “Ba-da-bing-ba-da-boom,” I said. “So I guess that’s that. Hollywood here we come!”

  Koffman eyed me. “Are you okay, Bruno?”

  “Clean and sober. Very okay.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely. I’m completely committed.”

  “I have your word on that?”

  “Five thousand percent.”

  “Okay then. Selma Avenue will be our first stop after you get back here and pick us up. I’m excited, Bruno.”

  “You bet, David. So am I.”

  “My New York astrologer says I’m coming into a Mars trine aspect. Excellent for business.”

  “So, I guess that means I’ll be relocating sooner than later,” I said. “So I guess you’ll want me living there?”

  Koffman was smiling. “Ten-four,” he said, imitating me. “When I leave Los Angeles you’ll be in charge. I’ll be entrusting Dav-Ko L.A. to you…if you prove yourself.”

  “You have my commitment,” I said.

  “We’re on our way, Bruno,” he grinned. “I can feel it.”

  Then Koffman swung the door open. “I want you to meet Francisco, my lover. He’s from Guatemala. Say hola, Francisco.”

  There was the kid across the room waving shyly and mouthing the word “hi,” now with his shirt on. About twenty-five. Black hair combed straight back and copper skin with the miniature body of a gymnast. Nice even teeth too.

  But, as promised, I went to AA. My first meeting the next day was at a place called Architects of Adversity in West Hollywood. I looked it up on Google.

  Five minutes into the deal while the leader is reading from the meeting format, two guys started screaming at each other. Guy #1 was mad. He appeared to be about eighteen minutes off crack and the leader made the mistake of read something about God in the format. #1 stood up and stopped the leader to protest.

  Then Guy #2 told Guy #1 that if he didn’t like what he was hearing then he should find another meeting. So naturally now Guy #1 loses it. He picks up his folding chair and begins screaming fuck this and fuck that and knocks his coffee cup over on the table soaking some woman’s purse. Turns out this is her best I. Magnin purse or some shit and now she’s pissed too because of the coffee stain.

  Enough was enough. I decided to leave.

  Outside, in front of the meeting hall, there’s a guy just lighting up a cigarette. He’s wearing a wool cap and a heavy black suede coat in the eighty-degree heat. I asked him for a light.

  “That was pretty crazy in there,” I said. “Are all the meetings around here like this one?”

  “Whatever, man. It’s cool with me,” he says back. “I’m just here to get my card signed.”

  “So,” I ask, “what do you do when it gets like that? How do you handle it?”

  The question amuses him. “Timing is the key,” he snickers. “I do the same thing every day. I come out here and smoke right after they read chapter five at the beginning. Then the speaker starts. I wait about half an hour and when I hear people clapping I know he’s done. I go back in. Then, after they sign the court cards and pass them out, I’m gone.”

  “You don’t stay to hear what’s going on?”

  “Yo, sixteen more meetings and I’m done. Free. My AA sentence is completed.”

  “Okay. But what if someone like me shows up and doesn’t like what’s going on in the meeting?”

  The guy scratched the top of his cap with the shiny end of his Bic lighter. “The key is, do you have a court card?”

  “No. I’m just here.”

  “Whoa! Don’t waste your time, bro. If I were you I’d go to the movies. Higher Power this and Higher Power that. It’s a group therapy circle jerk with Jesus in the middle.”

  “C’mon, really?”

  “No shit, dude. I’ve been to a hundred meetings. It’s always the same. Nothing changes. Go to therapy or whatever but don’t waste your time here. I promise you.”

  I tried one more meeting the next day. It wasn’t any better. I decided the guy was right. I took his advice. Every morning after that at eleven o’clock I’d tell David Koffman I was going to a meeting. I didn’t say that the meeting was being held at one of the local movie theaters or a bookstore or at a Starbucks.

  four

  It took three full carloads in my Pontiac to get my books and my computer and TV and boxed-up belongings from Uncle Bill’s house on Twenty-seventh Place in Venice to Dav-Ko’s new home on Selma Avenue in Hollywood. But I’d gone the entire day without a pill or a drink. Not easy because as it turned out eighty-year-old Uncle-fuckin’-Bill had a curveball to throw my way.

  I was passing the living room hauling a heavy box of books out to my car on my shoulder when Uncle Bill clicked the sound down on his TV remote and stopped me by using a cop-like hand signal. He motioned for me to set my box down. “Step in here for half a second, will ya, busta?” he hissed. I set the box down.

  Uncle Bill is a fat, wrinkled old shit with an arthritic back. Uncle Bill has elected to spend his golden years in a filthy, battered recliner watching cop show reruns. And judging from his odor, apparently the use of soap and water is an alien idea to Uncle Bill.

  So I waited and watched while he finished chewing his last bite of Pop-Tart and wiped his mouth with a rancid, overused paper towel from his shirt pocket. Then Bill looked at me and grinned. “You’re aware that I’m withholding your security deposit until further notice,” he said flatly.

  “No Bill,” says I. “I had no idea you were doing that.”

  “You’re a smoker, busta. That bedroom’ll need fumigation and a double coat of repaint. And me and Pauline gotta check for damage and excessive use.”

  “Excessive use, Bill? Is that a technical legal landlord term?”

  “I’m talking about wear and tear, busta. Repairs. That kinda thing.”

  “So when will I get my deposit back?”

  “How should I know?”

  “How about tomorrow?”

  “You can call me…first of next week,” the old prick snorted. “I’ll have Pauline cut you a check—less damages and wear and tear.”

  “Look Bill,” I said. “I’ve been here eighteen months. I paid a five-hundred-dollar deposit. In cash. I want my money back. Go check the room out for yourself. Right now. There are no damages.”

  Bill tore open the wrapper on a fresh Pop-Tart. Flakes of the hard sugar coating from the last two he’d eaten were still clinging to the front of his zip-up sweatshirt. “By law I have thirty days to return your deposit,” he grinned. “I’m just makin’ sure that I get a hundred percent what’s coming to me, is all.”

  “If you got what’s coming to you, Bill, that
recliner you’re sitting in would be resting in the center of a smoking crater half a mile wide.”

  “Huh?”

  “Forget it.”

  The building at 6736 Selma Avenue was what I’d expected—a semi-dump. As I pulled the Lincoln Town Car into the driveway what I saw before me was a re-stuccoed, renovated, ninety-year-old shithole in the armpit of Hollywood. No wonder the doctor had closed his office and moved out. The only redeeming aspect to the location was the ten-foot-high security fence surrounding it.

  Selma Avenue is the male hustler capital of the area and it was a warm day so the gay boys were out in force, populating the sidewalk. Crackhead skinny is a sexual fashion statement in Hollywood. Most of the hustlers still looked like teenagers and wore the uniform of the day, T-shirts and jeans. A few rode skateboards along the sidewalk while others—the fems in tight pants and eye makeup—hung together, leaning against parked cars, smoking cigarettes, posing for the passing traffic. But they all had that edgy, I’m-workin’-the-street look in their eyes.

  It took four guys and a truck with a crane to install Dav-Ko’s yellow and blue sign outside my bedroom above the second-floor balcony. That afternoon the male hustlers on Selma Avenue watched with fascination as workmen and moving trucks came and went.

  In less than a week David Koffman and Francisco and a swish decorator friend who called himself Benecio had furnished both floors of the building with high-end used stuff from the second-hand shops on Western Avenue and Robertson Boulevard. Beds, desks, chairs, filing cabinets, paintings, a rebuilt stove, and a washer and dryer. The whole deal.

  Upstairs in my room I took most of the afternoon to arrange my books by category and author on the freshly painted shelves, then I set up my desk. I had written my one page a day almost since I’d left my phone room burglar alarm gig with Kassim and I wanted to keep going. Now, in a new place, working a new job, I was sure I’d be able to continue. My life plan was simple: I would drive and write. Sleep and work. Make money. I’d give Dav-Ko my best shot. Just like I’d done with my short stories, through will power, I’d force myself to cut back on the booze and the vikes and do my best to hold my rages and mind stuff under control. I’d watch my mouth with my boss and his boyfriend and ride the horse in the direction he was going.

  It was after sunset as I sat in the near darkness that first night, observing the male hustler action on Selma Avenue outside my window; the johns in their flash L.A. cars, the Benzs and BMWs and Porsches, pulling over to chat up the fresh curbside meat while a block away the bright street lights from Hollywood Boulevard began burning through the evening freeway smog.

  I was a hundred yards walking distance from Musso and Frank Grill, where sixty years before my father would get drunk on a daily basis with his mean-spirited Hollywood screenwriter buddies. Everything in Los Angeles had changed but nothing was different. L.A. had become a perfect example of twenty-first-century America. A city of pay and play.

  I lit a fresh Marlboro Light and in the fading light watched while a black kid down the block unzipped has pants to flash the merchandise for a guy in a red convertible.

  Disgusted, I turned away and clicked on my computer to find my stories. I’m Bruno Dante, I thought, a writer of short fiction, a guy with a failed book, and a twelve-year-old Pontiac to his name. A forty-two-year-old wannabe. Swimming against the tide. Starting over one more time.

  On the roof Dav-Ko’s new neon sign clicked on. It began flashing every three seconds, alternately flooding my room with light, then blackening it. I was home.

  five

  I was beginning to see dead people. They were not really dead. They were people who I’d meet who looked like people I had known who were now dead. It seemed to be happening more and more. In bookstores or supermarkets or liquor stores or bars. People who look like guys I used to know. For instance I saw Timmy Healy a month or so ago. The guy was a ringer for Timmy—except twenty years younger than the dead one. Then there was Bryan Mann. Bryan played jazz flute around town for years then got liver cancer—and ba-boom, he was dead in two months. And last week I saw KK Colberg. Bigger than shit. The KK look-alike sold me a pack of smokes at a liquor store. He reminded me exactly of him. I’d begun to think it might be an omen of my own death. A sign perhaps. And it happened enough that it was beginning to scare me.

  But then the night after I saw the KK guy who sold me the cigarettes, I bet another guy—a baseball fan—twenty bucks at the Warm-Up Room bar. I’d bet him that Barry Bonds would homer for the Giants by the seventh inning. Bonds cracked one in the fifth so I decided to set aside the omen curse idea.

  Two of the first four limos arrived at the local Lincoln dealer in Hollywood several days after we moved in. These were new ones. Custom-built stretch limos. Both with tinted windows and chrome wheels. Black and sleek and elegant.

  Our next two cars were trucked directly to Dav-Ko Hollywood from New York. These were David Koffman’s pride and joy. Both only a few months old. Francisco had already christened the white one “Pearl” and the brown one “Cocoa.”

  While Cocoa was a state-of-the-art stretch limo, it was Pearl that was our company’s most requested car in New York. Over-the-top glitz and piss elegance. Pearl actually had eight pounds of crushed pearl in the paint and a forty-eight-inch extension body panel in the center between the front and rear doors. The windows were smoked gray. It had a silk headliner, a stocked bar, a moonroof, two color TVs, and two phones. Pearl’s inside trim was gaudy, gleaming burl wood and her seats were covered in maroon calfskin. Fabulous.

  Because he’d chosen to move our office to Selma Avenue I’d pegged David Koffman as a business cheapskate. But I was wrong. When it came to publicity he spared no expense to jump-start Dav-Ko Hollywood, even hiring a top-shelf L.A. PR firm.

  Unger & Lilly invaded our office. By mid-afternoon on Wednesday of the first week they’d begun making up fluff news stories and calling local celebrity TV gossip shows. Patricia Unger herself spent all day on the phone framing press releases about Dav-Ko Hollywood. Her staff photographer took a hundred photos of Buffalo Bill in his white linen suit getting in and out of Pearl and by week’s end Unger had managed to get a local TV news program involved in doing a feature on Pearl’s supposed one-year birthday.

  Her brainstorm was to give a street party and parade for the limo to kick off the new office. By that weekend two local high school marching bands were recruited and a three-block stretch of Grand Avenue near the L.A. Music Center was closed off for the event. David Koffman contributed to the festivities by hiring three big-titted strippers in bikinis to ride on Pearl’s roof and throw rose petals as the cameras rolled. Pure Hollywood. It took me five Vicodin—three before and two during the event—to get me through.

  But Unger’s gimmick worked and our phones began ringing. A record label booked two cars a day for a week to take an English rock band back and forth to their Staples Center concert gigs. Me and Francisco and Koffman himself did the driving.

  By the third week our business had picked up to the point where David Koffman ran a new ad in the L.A. Times. “DRIVE THE STARS!!! Elite limo cmpny seeks drvrs and day-line dsptchr. Drvrs ern $20 p.h. while wrkg. Gd DMV recrd req’d. Mst be cln cut and kno L.A. streets.”

  The line of applicants went from our office door to around the corner on Highland Avenue. Even a couple of the local street hustlers, after quizzing the guys in the queue and finding out the pay rate, buttoned up their shirts, tucked them in, and invaded our waiting room wanting to fill out a job application.

  Me and Koffman did the interviewing. It took most of the day but between us we hired four new drivers. All men. David wasn’t looking for real chauffeurs. Dav-Ko didn’t want middle-aged, cigar-smoking, fat-bellied, ex-cab-driver airport hustlers.

  We ended up with a staff straight from central casting. All our guys were clean-cut L.A. locals—perfect for a young Hollywood rock ’n’ roll limo company. None had experience and not one arrived wearing a tie. All were twenty-five
to thirty years old and needed a haircut.

  These are the guys we hired: Marty Humphrey, a former rock band backup singer living on his girlfriend’s couch. Cal Berwick, a skinny vegetarian from Whittier. Robert Roller, a shaved-headed 250-pound former security guard monster who had recently managed a Pizza Hut. And Frank Tropper, who, I later discovered through one of his ex-girlfriends, had once been a Hollywood escort.

  My assignment was to take these guys to the Manhattan Tie Shop over on Cahuenga Boulevard and then to the ten-dollar Supercuts barbershop on La Brea. By mid-afternoon the next day Koffman’s gay pal Octavio had outfitted all four of our new employees with vested blue polyester three-piece suits: $179.00 each. Two one-hundred-percent-synthetic drip-dry white long-sleeved dress shirts: $11.00 each. A Greek seaman’s cap: $29.00. One black clip-on necktie: $8.00. And one red pocket hankie: $8.95. The hardest guy to fit was Robert Roller. Sixty-five bucks worth of alterations were required to get his bulging body to fit a suit.

  My boss’s plan was to keep the new company running for thirty days, then return to New York City. At that time he would turn the day-to-day running of Dav-Ko Hollywood over to me as resident manager.

  When I began training the new drivers I was upgraded to the title of manager/chauffeur supervisor and given a weekly salary to augment my driving income.

  Every day for a week the new guys took a turn at the wheel with me calling the shots from the backseat as we toured the L.A. streets, driving the half dozen best routes to the airports from the most popular West Side and Beverly Hills hotels. The freeway system in L.A. had become gridlock. From six in the morning until after ten at night most of them were impassable. Knowing the fastest ways to navigate the city streets was essential.

  I continually emphasized to the guys how to anticipate the needs of our customers and I showed them how to behave like their professional New York City counterparts. I taught them little chauffeur tricks too, like how to wash out a shirt and leave it wrinkleless on a hanger after consecutive daily ten-hour gigs, and how to scrub stains off a polyester suit with just soap and a damp sponge. Also, because we lived in rainless Southern California, it was pretty much unnecessary to wash a car more than once per week, so I instructed my guys on how to clean the windows and exterior on a daily basis with just one damp terry-cloth towel straight from the spin cycle of our washing machine.