86'd

by Dan Fante

  seven

  Before dawn the next morning came the onset of the black dog. Madness. Shame. Jimmy screaming in my head. My eyes were not yet open but behind them the Voice was supplying my brain with poison. Nice, asshole. Now you’ve done it. You’re stuck with her. She’s got a ream of shit on you now. What happens when she pisses you off and you try to bump her? What then? Smooth, jerkoff. Well done.

  I felt like puking while at the same time my body screamed its demand for a drink.

  Ten minutes later, after half a bottle of Pepto, I was able to hold down two vikes and two fingers of whiskey. I could stand up.

  The unshaven madman’s face in the bathroom mirror told me everything I need to know: terror and humiliation.

  Then the flash of truth that all of it, my months of work, all my short stories, were gone. Lost. As dead as my dead computer. Then, over and over, the crazy rerun of the incident with Portia and the knowledge that there was a good chance I had permanently damaged myself with Dav-Ko. If the skinny English girl decided to, if she saw fit to spill her guts to Koffman, I’d be jobless and homeless too. The damage would be complete.

  When I peeled the tape and gauze away from my cut I discovered a quarter-inch-wide scab forming down the side of my neck. There was no bleeding, so no medical attention would be necessary. The hell with doctors.

  After a shower I was able to hold down another half a glass of whiskey. I could breathe again. The shakes were nearly under control.

  Pulling the sheets off the bed I discovered that a wide blood stain had leaked through on to the new mattress.

  Like a fumbling burglar covering his crime, I flipped the mattress to the clean side then picked up the lamp and broken glass, stuffing the pieces and all the bloody bedding into three plastic supermarket bags I’d saved for trash. There were a couple of bloody handprints on the wall above where I slept that wouldn’t come off. I scrubbed them as best as I could then covered the stains with a throw pillow.

  After dressing myself and putting on a new white limo-driver shirt and tie for the day I discovered the only good news in the last twenty-four hours; my collar actually did cover the neck wound.

  Downstairs in the kitchen it was almost six o’clock. Koffman and Francisco were not yet awake so I made a pot of strong coffee.

  Back in my room, sitting at the beast’s blank screen, I tried again in vain to recover my work. Nothing. Zip.

  I phoned my biker pal Eddy Dorobek, the guy who’d sold me his five-year-old laptop for a hundred bucks. Eddy was a house painter. He was always up early slapping color on the walls of his upscale West Side customers’ homes. He confirmed my computer’s death then made a last-ditch recommendation: that I call the technical support 800 number at Microsoft.

  After punching my way through their phone tree and ten minutes on hold, and another three fingers of whiskey, I got plugged in to Ramesh, a “second-tier specialist.” “No problem, sir,” Ramesh reassured me in his Hindyass-half-English accent: “Our rate is $3.95 per minute for service. How would you prefer to pay for this assistance: debit card or credit card?”

  That afternoon the kindness of David Koffman prevailed. After I explained the loss of my work and my computer’s death, he gave me a seven-hundred-dollar cash advance from the inch-thick bills on his money clip. An hour later I had a new PC.

  The rage of losing my sixty pages of work, then being subjected to Microsoft’s absurd “customer support” at the hands of Ramesh, twelve thousand miles away, had made me insane. I decided to put my PC to work. My first order of business was a letter to an asshole named Bill Gates.

  Mr. Bill Gates

  Microsoft Corporation

  1 Microsoft Way

  Redmond, WA 98052

  Hiya Bill:

  Just a note to say atta boy and keep up the good work.

  I’m a believer in capitalism and I know you are too. As of today I’ve decided to sign up and join you in your struggle for the rights of the bankers, Dubai oil sheiks, and instant payday advance broker shops everywhere. We both know that there are plenty of bloodsuckers and sniveling lowlife losers out there. Like you I’ve come to an inescapable conclusion: They get what they deserve.

  Bill, there are two slogans that just this morning I taped to my bathroom mirror. I wanted to pass them on to you—words that I will try to live by day in and day out using your example. I was hoping that you and your guys up there smoking cigars in the THINK TANK just might get a kick out of them. #1: WHEN IN DOUBT CHARGE MORE. And #2: NEVER GIVE A CHUMP AN EVEN BREAK.

  That brings me to reason number two for me sending you this letter. I’ve got to hand it you, Bill. In my book when it comes to wham, bam, thank you ma’am, most American companies shiver like drowned puppies compared to an outfit like Microsoft. When, just recently, I had occasion to speak with one of your offshore customer support techs regarding my computer’s software collapse and death, I really learned a thing or two about the old now you see it, now you don’t. After over an hour with your guy on the horn, at the end of a conversation, when nothing on my machine had changed, I actually discovered myself becoming physically sick when your trained tech—in his giddy and nearly inscrutable Hindi accent—presented me and my ATM card with the charges for his services: seventy-one minutes @ $3.95 per minute: two hundred and seventy-one bucks. That phone call left me speechless and I found myself contemplating a big sip of drain cleaner.

  There are some people who would say that you are to the computer industry what Idi Amin was to population growth in Uganda. Let’s not mince words here. To me any man who will whimsically crush a groveling call-in client or the tiniest software competitor at the drop of a hat is a man to be reckoned with. Personally, I’m hoping that someday your company will expand to the publishing industry and gobble up a firm like Random House. You and the guys could put out a pamphlet on corporate beheading or maybe a how-to chapbook on holding back a grin while encountering an amputee. I read quite a bit and I can pretty much guarantee you that there’s an untapped market for stuff like that.

  Your comrade in arms,

  Bruno Dante

  eight

  Working in the limo business in L.A. is a bizarre way to make a buck. Like licking up wet dog shit for God. The clientele for Dav-Ko in Los Angeles was mostly made up of night freaks and zombies. Rich, cranked-out movie producers, spoiled rock star punks, gangsta rappers with their black Glocks tucked into the belts of their pants, alkie ex-actors with too many DUIs, and a gazillion wannabe high rollers. Human beings who exhibited the most unpleasant personality characteristics common to L.A.: Too much ego and way too much money.

  People come to L.A. hoping to discover something out-pictured beyond themselves. Something they hope to name and believe in, some idea of satisfaction through success or accumulation or recognition. Of course it never comes. Then they buy a bigger house in Brentwood or another Benz or get more plastic surgery or smoke more amphetamine and marry someone they meet at the gym. Whatever’s next. Whatever it takes to hold on to the fantasy and avoid a hard look at what’s missing within. Here I was among them. Front and center. My ticket got punched at birth.

  Three weeks after the madness of my accident, Koffman and Francisco left town and he turned the day-to-day running of Dav-Ko over to me. Portia had kept her word about the incident and managed to contain my folly. And wisely, to cover my ass, I’d cut back on the booze.

  In effect Portia and I were now nearly partners in running the company. As planned her dispatcher hours were expanded. Her new schedule was six days a week. Twelve p.m. to ten p.m. except for our busy weekend twelve hour shifts.

  After the few days of us working at close quarters it became apparent to me that Darforth-Keats’s personality had two single overriding characteristics. The first one was the one I already knew about; a high-strung, gum-chewing, constantly talking, aristocratic weirdo, whose daily wardrobe consisted of nothing that wasn’t black. Though Koffman had been right about her polished English style and its po
sitive effect on our phone clients, it was personality number two in particular that, over time, was getting to me. Portia Number Two appeared to have a preponderant and unmanageable attraction to guys. All guys. I’d overhear her flirting on the telephone like an 800 number call-in hooker while taking bookings for agents and managers. And if she happened to be on the line with anyone whose life had ever included strumming an electric guitar, listening to her sycophantic cooing would often force me to take a bathroom break. And she never failed to sweet-talk her favorite chauffeurs as they came in to drop off cash payments or credit card slips—telling them how “splendid” they’d done on this or that airport run—or making a big deal and complimenting them for remembering ridiculous snot like emptying the ashtrays or vacuuming out the car, stuff that they were supposed to do anyway.

  In particular she seemed to have taken a shine to Frank Tropper, our former male escort turned chauffeur. Frank was tall with red hair and blue eyes and nobody’s fool when it came to manipulating any human who pissed sitting down, especially Dav-Ko’s nicotine-gum-chewing dispatcher.

  If a choice driving job came in from an e-mail or over the phone—an all-nighter with a rock star or a big money cash tipper—on too many occasions it was Frank who was somehow immediately available for the job, and got it. More than once I had to delete his name from the computer’s dispatch screen and let her know that playing favorites with chauffeurs was a bad idea. The fact that Frank was an arrogant self-consumed pretty boy asshole and had a variety of woman picking him up after work every night was apparently the only thing keeping Portia from jumping his bones. This was in stark contrast to big Robert Roller. Robert could pass an entire afternoon sitting in our chauffeur’s room with the TV on without so much as a glance from his selective dispatcher.

  But, frighteningly, the other member of our company whom Portia appeared to have developed an attraction to, over time, was me. The closeness of us being stuck in the dispatch office together, when I wasn’t out driving or supervising an on-site limo job, allowed her to yammer away by the hour. In the past she’d had a female cyst removed and two miscarriages and somehow had given herself permission to yammer away at me on the minutia of each procedure. I got to hear endless details about sedation and the three doctors in white coats staring at her coochie and her being treated like a lab animal. And on and on about other stuff. Her victory over her eating disorder and then jogging and her bad back and the right running shoes and how she’d once played the cello as a girl in some symphony in Glasgow. And her ex-husband’s propensity for Times Square hookers. Tiresome, endlessly, vapid crap.

  Every once in a while I’d try to interject stuff about work but the topics always seemed to come back to her and her physical ailments and how many times she used to puke per day or some male gynecologist pig or other.

  After many nights of this I eventually found an opening. It turned out that Portia was an avid reader and a mystery novel buff and had consumed all the works of Agatha Christie and Lynda La Plante and Stephen King. Of course she’d known about my computer crash and the loss of my months of work and writing, so books and literature gratefully entered our topics of conversations.

  I had mixed feelings about discussing my writing but sometimes in the late afternoon, after I’d had a few drinks following my shift, I didn’t mind. Sometimes I even liked it. Talking about Kafka and Dostoyevsky and Henry Miller and Selby and Edward Lewis Wallant was a welcome relief.

  One night when the dispatch desk was quiet, after half a bottle of Chianti and after her asking again and again, I did something I had never done before with anyone I had worked with: I showed Portia some of my work—a few poems and a short story I had just finished. The piece I gave her was about my working as an L.A. taxi driver. Over the last few days I had completed two stories on the idea and was deciding if I had enough to write a series. Maybe even a book.

  Portia took my poems and one of the stories into the chauffeur’s room to read. The yarn I gave her was called “Happy Birthday Tuesday.” A true story. It happened on my first night as a cabbie in L.A. I had taken a radio call to go to Venice after a drop at LAX. My passengers turned out to be a pair of drunk and stoned out Latino drug dealers on their way to a section of Venice that is known to the locals as Ghost Town. Five square blocks of crack houses.

  One of the guys was on his cell phone threatening his girlfriend in Spanish. Somehow after the call, after he had hung up, the two jerks began to fight, punching and ripping at each other. I had to pull the cab over on Rose Avenue and get out, to make them stop. Their whiskey bottle had spilled on the rear floor and a brown bag that contained a couple of dozen gram bottles of white powder got strewn across the backseat.

  After they left my cab, after paying me, the two assholes continued up the street shoving each other and yelling curses in Spanish.

  At a gas station nearby I got some paper towels from the men’s room and began cleaning up the mess. That’s when I found the ring in the corner of the back seat. A two-karat diamond pinkie. With the money I received from hocking it I paid my rent for the month in advance and took my girlfriend Stinky to Lake Tahoe for a weekend.

  Portia came back to the dispatch room and flopped my pages down on the desk. She stuck a fresh piece of Nicorette gum into her mouth and began swooning over my poem, telling me how much she admired my directness and brevity and passion.

  But when we got around to my short story her face changed. “This,” she said, holding it up, “I truthfully found implausible and artificial. Unbelievable, actually.”

  The words stung and I was instantly sober. It felt like a kick in the balls. “In what way?” I said.

  “Wellllllll,” she whispered in her most melodious snooty drawl, “candidly, I found it’s preposterous. Sort of a cab driver’s old wives’ tale. More of a fantasy, actually.”

  “The story’s true,” I said. “I found a two-karat diamond. It might not have belonged to one of the guys—it might have been stuck there in the crack of the backseat for days or months—but the story is true.”

  “Perhaps. But it didn’t have the ring of truth. It rang of hyperbole. Exaggeration.”

  Before I could stop myself the words had leaped from my mouth like some fool on a bungee jump off the Grand Canyon. “You mean…exaggeration like those two fake fucking water balloons you have implanted in your bony chest?”

  Thirty seconds later she was gone. She’d wordlessly scooped up her purse and her black coat and was out the door.

  It took half of the following day, after threats of calls to David Koffman and accusations of a sexual harassment lawsuit, and a ten minute apology, to talk her down and get her to come back to work.

  nine

  I picked up the phone after midnight thinking it was one of the limo drivers calling in to report his hours at the end of a job. My sister, Liz, was crying softly. Whispering the words. Rick Dante, Jonathan Dante’s firstborn son, his favorite son, a chess expert at ten years old and one of the precision toolmakers who designed and fabricated the landing feet of the Mars rover, was dead. He had boozed himself into the emergency room after his ulcer exploded onto the beige carpet of his bedroom in Roseville. His wife, Karin, found him there doubled over and moaning.

  This time he and Karin had been separated for three weeks. When he failed to answer his phone for a couple of days she set her anger aside and drove to the house with their daughter.

  Rick was forty-six years old and a 24–7 drinker from the age of thirty. A guy filled with demons and genius and bitterness and rage and isolation, tortured by his own failures, a man whose feet and spirit never really connected to solid land.

  The news of his death hit me like a club. I’d seen his strange look-alike sitting at the bar the night I’d cut my throat. Another coincidence in a series of weird coincidences I’d been experiencing lately. An omen perhaps. But this time it turned out to be one that was real. The recollection sent a cold chill through my body.

  The next day I left
my limo office and took a plane from LAX to Sacramento airport, then drove the twenty miles to Roseville in a black sedan furnished by one of our Northern California affiliate limo companies. It was 103 degrees outside while I smoked and sipped from a pint bottle of Schenley, watching the Sacramento Valley go by.

  For the last few years Ricardo Dante had been the general manager of a factory that manufactured shipping pallets, a grunt job he’d taken for money to support his family after drinking himself out of the aerospace business.

  At Rick’s home that afternoon I met a dozen people; friends and neighbors and a couple of my brother’s coworkers. They sat in the living room while the air conditioner screamed, sipping wine and ice tea and eating from two prepared supermarket trays of cheese and salami and crackers. There were no televisions in my brother’s house. All his life he’d detested their presence.

  His best drinking buddy was an older guy named Cecil, a car collector and retired auto mechanic wearing overalls to a wake. He and Rick met at a Sacramento memorabilia trade show.

  Cecil was working on a wine buzz and sported the red face of a lifelong juicer. He poured me a tall glass of the rosé then insisted we go outside to the shed behind the garage.

  There it was. My brother’s pal pulled the tarp away to reveal a 1957 Studebaker Golden Hawk, complete with new paint and swooping fins and dripping with gaudy, replated chrome and a gleaming rebuilt motor. The two guys had spent the last eighteen months as partners working on weekends to restore the car. The only thing still left undone was to reupholster the seats.