86'd

by Dan Fante

  Koffman gave each of our new guys his own credit card. He also supplied them with a company cell phone, with strict instructions about personal use. But, after thinking about it, I decided to buy my own. I didn’t want David up my ass and I wanted to keep my privacy.

  Then one morning my boss had a brainstorm. Because limo parking in L.A. can sometimes be impossible, he came up with a scheme to make the rounds of the local old-age homes, offering free afternoon transportation to their clientele, to and from their doctor appointments. Mid-afternoons were always slow in the limo industry and this act of limited and manipulative charity allowed Dav-Ko to obtain half a dozen handicapped parking plaques from the State of California. With these blue beauties hanging from the rearview mirrors of our cars we’d be able to park almost anywhere, anytime. Smart. Very smart.

  Dav-Ko was ready to roll.

  But the dispatcher we hired was a different story. A woman. To my annoyance I came to discover that David Koffman had developed an affinity for snotty British accents. I’d known him to be overly impressed by status and money and New York fashion but it had never clouded his good judgment before.

  Her New York driver’s license said that her name was Pat Waltz but on her job application she claimed to be Portia Darforth-Keats, and she confided that she was a distant relative of the British poet John Keats.

  Waltz was thirty-two years old but her physical appearance was that of unearthed, well-scrubbed zombie with a pretty face. She was an ex-smoker turned nicotine gum chewer. Her constant chomping was endless and annoying and apparently unconscious.

  Portia was my height, five foot six or seven, but weighed no more than a hundred pounds. She wore black horn-rimmed Gucci glasses and her boy’s haircut was dyed Madonna white blond. Somewhere along the line she had surgically endowed herself with what appeared to be two NFL footballs for breasts. These two incongruous protrusions would arrive in a room long before the skeleton attached to them. When she sat down I noted that it would take three of her to fill one of our office swivel chairs—excluding her tits.

  According to Ms. Darforth-Keats she was educated at Grafton College in London and during our interview she confided two things that told me all I needed to know about her lopsided personality: (a) As a teenager she’d developed an eating disorder (she said she was a recovering bulimic), and (b) she had a strong personal affinity for gay men. Her lifelong best friends were all gay. Swell.

  I learned that she’d obtained her green card and U.S. residency by marrying a New York City Times Square beat cop, Bernard Waltz. Her letters of reference testified that she was good with computers and had been a part-time nanny for ten years and then a dispatcher-bookkeeper for a Manhattan ambulance company. She’d recently slapped her ex Bernie with a restraining order then headed west on American Airlines.

  Waltz’s vocal manner made her sound more like Queen Elizabeth’s personal assistant than a half-alive Biafra survivor. The woman was a yakky know-it-all and a snob and clearly held herself above all lesser humans. Looking across my desk at her the thought of having sex with this skeletal, nicotine-sucking phony made me want to reconsider my own sexual orientation. I immediately concluded that it would be impossible for someone with her uptight wiring to deal with our staff of homegrown L.A. beach-boy chauffeurs. Weekends in the limo business are made up of brutal hours and handling overworked drivers during the grind of back-to-back ten-hour shifts would take its toll. Her uptight attitude would do her in and the shit would fly. Bottom line: The woman was wrong for the job. And the notion that I’d have to spend some of my days at Dav-Ko cooped up in an office with her set me craving a handful of painkillers.

  But David Koffman was the boss and his reality block was impossible to overcome. He’d wanted class for Dav-Ko and had somehow decided that Portia was it. He had interviewed her separately the day after I began training the drivers, then hired her on the spot. As it turned out my interview with Portia was a formality.

  When Koffman arrived back at our office with Francisco I pulled him aside into our dispatch room and imparted my personal assessment of Pat Waltz. “Look, David, she’s a puker and a whackjob,” I said. “I don’t like her. She’s wrapped way too tight to deal with a staff of young drivers. And as far as I’m concerned that accent of hers is a ding—no plus whatever.”

  “Portia’s hired, Bruno. That’s that,” he hissed, balancing his gargantuan frame on the edge of the dispatch desk after pouring himself a cup of coffee.

  “Ouch! Thanks for not telling me.”

  “I think she’s fabulous. I made a spontaneous decision.”

  “Well, it’s a mistake, David. The woman’s got emotional baggage up the wazoo. She looks like she hasn’t taken solid nourishment in ten years. Bottom line, she doesn’t know how to talk to people.”

  Koffman was now sorting through the day’s mail. “That’s your opinion,” he said distractedly.

  “It sure is. Apparently she’s addicted to nicotine gum too.”

  “So…you’re saying that I should steer clear of hiring a person because of how they look?”

  “She says that all her best friends are pole smokers. She loves gay men.”

  “Does being around someone who likes gay men represent a problem for you?”

  “Let’s just say that I don’t expect us to ever exchange Valentine’s cards. Her only plus I can see is her knowledge of computers. Did you at least check her references?”

  “I did not.”

  “Then I rest my case.”

  “I found her utterly charming,” he sniffed. “She’ll bring class to our company. And I see no reason why how she looks or her physical problems should disqualify her.”

  “Fine. Set that aside. How about that she’s a pretentious, condescending asshole?”

  “Now there’s a solid professional assessment?”

  “Just let me talk to her last employer—do some phone calling and some checking.”

  “Should I call your last employer?”

  “Why would you?”

  “The point is, I took a chance on you?”

  “That’s one hundred percent pigsnot. You and I worked together in New York. I proved myself. You know all about me.”

  “Correct. And I hired you again anyway.”

  “I think you’ll be sorry.”

  “It’s my decision. I’ll live with it.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  “How kind of you to concede that point.”

  Big Koffman began leafing through one of the two thick men’s magazines that had arrived that morning and I went upstairs to shoot myself in the head.

  six

  As it turned out I was more than half wrong about Portia. That Friday afternoon a full staff meeting was called at Dav-Ko. The guys began showing up in their blue suits, white shirts, and Greek seaman’s caps, ready for action. David wanted his drivers to meet their new night dispatcher, and as they filed passed the office on their way to the chauffeur’s room, I watched Ms. Darforth-Keats checking out the talent.

  We had a four-car job scheduled for six o’clock: A world premiere movie in Westwood.

  As the meeting began Koffman and Portia positioned themselves in the front of the room, him wearing his best Tom Wolfe milkman getup, nervous about making a good impression that night with our newest account, the Beverly Hills GMA Agency. Koffman felt it necessary to reemphasize the fine points of opening and closing the rear door of a limo and greeting our clients and other stuff that they knew already, and there was Portia smiling, chomping her nicotine gum, eager to be every chauffeur’s best pal. Watching her expression as the guys asked questions I quickly deduced that puking three times a day was most likely her second priority. Her lifelong best friends may have been gay, but she clearly had an affinity for California boys, as did her boss.

  But Portia could be charming too. When David explained how he wanted the guys to each report in on the hour via cell phone she made a joke in her best snooty London accent about being there to s
erve their every need, rain or shine. “Think of me as your ’umble servant,” she crooned. The boys ate the shit up.

  I felt better. She’d somehow left her arrogance at the door.

  That night, clicking on my computer to write my page for the day, my mind gave me a reprieve, another needed perspective. Screw it, I thought. I’ll make it work. In truth, on balance, Portia or no Portia, everything was going okay for me. I had a good job with paid medical insurance for the first time in years, a big upstairs bedroom with a newly swish-decorated john. I had a writing desk for my laptop and enough after-hours time to work on my new book of stories. For once I didn’t have to worry about scuffling around for enough money to pay the rent. All I had to do was to show up and control my mind and my tongue. I even promised myself to cut back on the booze and try a few more AA meetings.

  But it happened anyway. I woke up in bed from a blackout, still drunk, in a pool of blood with my neck slashed.

  Koffman and Francisco were out for the night at the ballet and Portia was downstairs chomping on nicotine gum, manning the phones for her third full shift. I’d penciled in all the morning pickups for the drivers and set up the work schedule for the next day on the computer before going up to my room to work on my writing.

  Ten minutes into it there was a sudden Hollywood power failure. My screen went blank. A minute or so later when the electricity was restored, I restarted the machine but everything was gone, all my writing, months of work.

  I started the machine again. Nothing. I tried everything I knew. Anything I knew. But no luck. Sixty pages of work, all of it—my entire Word file—lost—down the shitter. No desktop, either. Complete death. I’d never had trouble with the goddamn laptop before so, out of laziness, I’d never bothered to backup my writing files. There I sat. SOL.

  In my closet were two unopened fifths of Ten High. I turned off my computer then cracked the seal on one, pouring myself four fingers of dark blended whiskey. Fuck it. Fuck sobriety. Fuck the job. Fuck the writing. Fuck trying. Fuck breathing. Fuck it all.

  By nine-thirty that night, driving my Pontiac with the bottle between my legs, I’d finished the jug and unsuccessfully negotiated for a blowjob from a Santa Monica Boulevard hooker. After that I stopped at a Latino bar on Western Avenue and ordered a double from a bartender whose only language was Spanish. But the weird omen was back. The guy sitting next to me turned out to be a dead ringer for my brother Rick who now had a house in Roseville up by Sacramento.

  That was the last thing I remember.

  It was Portia who found me. Koffman and Francisco were still out on the town making their usual stops at the gay bars on Santa Monica Boulevard. In my blackout I’d returned home and run my cutting knife across the base of my neck.

  “Get the hell away from me!”

  “You’re bleeding. Oh my God!”

  “I said get away—I mean it.”

  “There’s blood all over your sheets—all over the bed.”

  “Who’s that? What do you want?”

  “It’s Portia from downstairs.”

  “Who? Portia. Go away! Let me alone.”

  “I heard a crash. You must’ve knocked over your table lamp.”

  Something was in my eyes. Whatever it was prevented me from opening them. “What’s wrong?” I yelled. “I can’t see.”

  “It’s the blood. Lie still. You have blood in your eyes and in your hair.”

  “Forget it. Just leave me alone. Get away.”

  Again the snooty British accent. “I’ll be back in a jiff. Just stay calm.”

  The sounds of someone in the crapper opening, then rifling, then slamming my medicine cabinet shut. Then Portia’s voice again: “I’ll be right back. There’s a first aid kit in the chauffeur’s room downstairs—I’ll go and get it. How did this happen?”

  Struggling to get to my feet. “I have no idea. An accident maybe—bad luck maybe.”

  “Just please stay still. Stay where you are. Don’t get up.”

  A minute or so later the voice was back. “Mission accomplished. I’ve got the first aid kit. Situation in hand.”

  “How bad is it?” I asked. “What the hell did I do?”

  “You’re drunk, aren’t you?”

  “Not drunk enough.”

  “Lie back. Please. Try to be still.”

  Running water in the bathroom sink then a warm wash cloth against my eyes and face then down across my belly.

  “Can you see now?”

  “Yeah, I can see.”

  “Excellent. Better already.”

  “Better? So why am I scared shitless?”

  “Can you stand? Let’s try to get you to the loo so I can wash you properly. I had some EMT training in New York. I know what I’m doing.”

  “Apparently my ass is in your hands.”

  On my feet shuffling toward the john I look down to discover that I am naked. For some unknown reason my cock is hard.

  I looked at Portia then back down at my cock. “Sorry,” I say.

  Her face was stone. “Never mind. It happens.”

  I sit on the crapper while the pretty face further cleans the cut on my neck and washes my arms and begins cleaning the blood out of my hair.

  “Help me up. I want to look in the mirror.”

  “Not yet. Remain quite still. Please.”

  “Then just tell me—how bad is it?”

  “Apparently it’s not fatal,” the accent hisses, glancing back down at my cock. The damn thing is still thick and throbbing.

  “Help me get up,” I demand.

  In the mirror I see it. The cut—the gash—is about four inches long, sloping down the side of my neck. The bleeding is slowed. “That doesn’t look so bad,” I say.

  “You soaked your pillow and the sheets.”

  “Well, shit happens, right?”

  “You’re still drunk. No doubt it’ll hurt tomorrow.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You missed the artery but you’ll need immediate medical attention. A doctor. I’ll telephone David on his mobile then transfer the phones to the answering service. I’ll drive you to the hospital myself.”

  “No! No fucking way. You fix it. You just said you had training.”

  “That wound will require stitches. You’re going to need a proper hospital.”

  “No hospitals. No goddamn doctors.”

  “That’s absurd. Don’t be a fool. Without treatment that cut could easily become infected.”

  “If Koffman finds out I’ll lose my job. We had a deal. A no-more-drinking-or-you’re-out-on-your-ass deal.”

  “There’s nothing else I can do.”

  “The bleeding’s almost stopped. Just help me back to bed.”

  “No it hasn’t. Don’t be an ass.”

  “Promise me—you won’t tell Koffman. Promise me, god-damnit.”

  “I won’t tell anyone. Why would I?”

  “Okay, I’ll go tomorrow. I’ll do it on my lunch break. But don’t tell David, okay?”

  “Just tell me what happened?”

  “I was drunk. I was in a bar. Then I came back here. I don’t know. I guess I cut myself.”

  “Splendid.”

  “I said I can’t remember.”

  “You drink too much, Bruno.”

  “Have I stopped bleeding?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  Portia finished cleaning my cut. She put bacterial ointment on it, then a bandage and some tape to hold the gauze in place.

  Standing up again I faced the mirror to examine her work. The bandage was right at my collar line. She’d done a good job. If I wore my shirts buttoned up, no one would be able to see what I’d done.

  “You must promise you’ll go to the doctor tomorrow? First thing.”

  “You have my one hundred percent guarantee. My personal commitment as a gentleman.”

  “Don’t mock me. I’m deathly serious.”

  “So am I. No shit.”

  “Very well. Then I’ll go back downsta
irs to my desk. You’ll be okay for the time being.”

  “Wait,” I said.

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “Don’t leave. I need you to help me back to bed.”

  “Certainly. Are you dizzy?”

  “Yeah. I’m dizzy.”

  My arm around Portia’s shoulder as we shuffle across the floor toward my bed.

  When we reach my rack Portia throws a towel down over the bloodstains. She helps me sit, then lifts my legs up on to the mattress.

  I glance down at my cock—amazingly the thing is still half hard. The skinny woman with the Madonna hair is standing above me, looking down. “I don’t want to be alone,” I say.

  “Not to worry. I’ll be right downstairs.”

  “Then—how about a nightcap before you go?”

  “That’s preposterous.”

  Nodding down at my cock. “What about…that? You could be a big help…with that.”

  “You’re an evil pig.”

  “I’m attracted to you. Sexually. I love your tits.”

  “That’s absurd. Tell the truth. You have an erection and I happen to be in the room.”

  “C’mon, Portia? One drink.”

  “Absolutely no. Good night.”

  “Okay, good night…Hey, what about this: You stand there and watch and I’ll do the rest.”

  “Fuck off!”

  I couldn’t sleep. Two hours later, after the bleeding had finally stopped and I’d had a couple more drinks, and I was sure she’d fallen asleep, I went downstairs, tiptoed toward her snoring body, found her purse, then reached in and stole her supply of nicotine gum.