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by Dan Fante

  I’d driven by the Marina Club a hundred times when I lived in Venice and I’d seen people standing outside on the sidewalk smoking and holding Styrofoam cups but I had never been curious enough to stop and find out what was going on inside.

  I parked my Pontiac up the block on Washington Boulevard just in case I needed a quick getaway, then walked back.

  The meeting time posted outside on the door on a stick-on blackboard was eight o’clock. A guy with long sideburns in a Harley jacket, smoking a cigarette—blocking my way—stopped me going in and shook my hand. “Hi. I’m Vince,” he said grinning. “Welcome to the Marina Club.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “First time here?”

  “Yeah. Does it show?”

  “Like neon,” he said smiling. “So what’s your name, brother?”

  “Bruno.”

  “Well, welcome, Bruno. How many days you got clean and sober?”

  “I’ve stopped counting,” I said. “A week or so.”

  Vince sneered, then pointed. “Coffee’s all the way in the back. The meeting starts in five minutes. P.S.: You came on the right night. It’s Phil S.’s twentieth birthday. He sponsors me and five or six of the regular guys here. Big doings. He’ll be the main speaker.”

  “Lucky me,” I said.

  “No joke, Phil’s a miracle. Twenty-five years in the slam—pronounced dead twice—he gives a great message.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Hey Bruno…keep coming back.”

  “Ten-four. You too…brother.”

  The fluorescent lighting in the Marina Club reminded me of the intake corridor at old County Jail, downtown. The meeting hall contained over a hundred chairs and was filling up fast.

  After waiting in line and getting my free cup of coffee there were only a few seats left, so I decided not to sit down and subject myself to small talk. I stood at the back of the room near the bathrooms.

  As it turned out Harley Vince in the leather jacket was also the guy leading the meeting. He called the room to order. As before, at the last meeting I went to in Hollywood, someone got up to read part of the Big Book: Chapter 5.

  I was starting to feel trapped and closed-in. Beginning to sweat. This was a bad idea. There were way too many bodies—people pressing against me—a crowded hall populated by smiling, miracle-oozing, AA robots. The smells of bad breath, sweat, and the unventilated men’s room behind me was beginning to make me want to bolt.

  Then a pimpled teenage girl standing next to me, with ratty pink hair and torn jeans, held out her hand. “I’m Jeannie,” she whispered.

  “Bruno,” I said back.

  “First time here?”

  “Yeah. You?”

  “No. But I’m back again,” Jeannie sighed. “I had ninety days then I had a bad slip. My boyfriend’s back in County on a probation beef. I decided to try the program again.”

  “I hear that,” I said.

  “It’s really because Phil S. is speaking that I’m here. His wife sponsors me—well, she used to sponsor me. Anyway, everybody loves Phil. Have you heard him talk?”

  “No. But I met Vince at the door—the biker guy leading the meeting. He filled me in that old Phil has pretty much been canonized around here.”

  Jeannie was smiling. “Canonized?”

  “Forget it.”

  “Just keep coming back, Bruno. It takes what it takes. If I can do it anybody can.”

  A couple of minutes later, when the reading was over, Vince was back at the podium. “Any newcomers?” he yelled.

  Five or six people stood up and gave their names and how many days they were off booze and drugs. Ten dozen of the faithful cheered and hooted and clapped.

  Then pimples next to me raised her hand. Vince motioned for her to talk.

  “I’m Jeannie,” she yelled. “I’m back. I’m an alcoholic. I have two days sober.”

  “That’s great, Jeannie!” Vince boomed over the mic. The crowd clapped.

  Now Captain Harley was pointing right at me. “And the guy next to you…Bruno? Right? Your first meeting, right?”

  Jeannie nodded yes on my behalf.

  More clapping and a few cheers.

  “C’mon up here, Bruno. First timers get a seat right up front. Right here next to our speaker.”

  Trapped. All eyes on me. I had no choice.

  The great Phil S. went on for over forty minutes. He was sixty-six years old and skinny and gray. He’d robbed twenty-six supermarkets and been stabbed in prison and shot in the knee and crashed his bike into a police barricade at a hundred miles an hour and been pronounced dead and lots of other stuff. All until he found God and AA and the Twelve Steps. Right.

  Eventually, when old Phil was done, the cheering went on for a full half a minute.

  Then Vince and a couple of his Harley henchmen presented Phil with a twenty-year cake.

  More adoration. More applause.

  Finally, when Vince announced it was time for sharing, hands went up around the room.

  One by one people they came to the podium to deliver the Good News and congratulate Phil S. Saved marriages and walking on water and commuted sentences and transplanted livers, and not one juicer among ’em. Whackos and drunks and doper pillheads all cured of a hopeless malady of mind and body.

  Finally, the meeting was winding down. Almost over. I’d had more than enough. I felt like I hadn’t had a drink in a hundred years and my brain was tuned to internal scream. Jimmy wouldn’t let me alone—hissing in my head—mocking me.

  My shirt was wet and I felt my brain becoming unglued.

  Vince was back at the podium. There were plenty of hands still raised in the room but he pointed down at the front row. At me.

  Standing there facing a horde of the anointed, on the podium, sucking in air, I had come to hate Vince and the great Phil S. and Jeannie with her stringy fucking pink hair. It occurred to me that I had arrived at a place in my life where I was willing to commit murder—to do anything—but be where I stood.

  “How long are you sober?” someone near me yelled.

  I was unable to make my lips move. I could not speak.

  Then Vince was beside me at the podium. “Take your time,” he whispered. “You’re doing fine. Just say whatever comes to your mind.”

  Near me on the podium was a half-full plastic bottle of Sparkletts. Phil’s leftover speaker’s water. I didn’t care. I took a sip anyway.

  “My name is Bruno Dante,” I said, shaking a little, clearing my throat. “And to tell you the truth I have never heard so much bullshit in all my life.”

  On my way out, after I got the meeting secretary’s signature on the attendance sheet given to me by David Koffman, Vince spotted me as he stood by the door shaking hands.

  “How ya doin’?” he whispered.

  “I’m here. I made it through the worst part,” I said.

  He handed me a printed card with his phone number printed on it in bold Century italic. “Take this,” he insisted.

  I slipped the card in my pocket.

  “Hey, look, Bruno, don’t worry what people think.”

  “I don’t,” I said, now annoyed. “I don’t give a fuck what people think.”

  “Use the number. It’s my cell. Use it twenty-four seven. Anytime you need to talk.”

  Outside, up the street in my Pontiac, I lit a smoke and took a deep hit. Jimmy began sneering. You really are a limp-dicked mental gimp. You belong in that room, bigshot—you and the rest of those tit-sucking Jesus whiners. Nice going.

  But when I began to calm down I realized that old Phil S. had said a few things in his drunkalog that had stuck. Number one: He said that “AA is for the people who want it, not for the people who need it.” I concluded that the statement was accurate. Judging from the assembly of zealous outpatient whackjobs gathered in the room that night, the want-it tag made a lot of sense.

  Number two: “Wear the AA program like a loose garment.” His meaning there, I decided, was to not to be
too hard on yourself. To just do the best you can. A reasonable bit of advice.

  And Number three: “Fake it ’til you make it.”

  Number three fit me to a tee. Faking it would be no problem. Faking it would be a breeze for me.

  eighteen

  A week later David Koffman was gone and I was back as a full-time chauffeur and part-time manager, still going to an AA meeting four times a week and waiting in line afterward like a weak suck to get my paper signed.

  Cal Berwick, one of the regular drivers, had been filling in for me on the all-day, It Creeps movie job. I finally took over for him at Stedman’s request. When I knocked on Ronny’s door at five thirty a.m. on my first day back, the guy’s grin was ear to ear. “Bruno! My lad! And just where the fuck have you been?”

  “Long story, Mr. Stedman. But I’ll tell you this and drop it: It involved a crazy woman.”

  “Say no more. Been there—done that,” he sneered. “Hey, I like your guy Cal. He’s a decent lad. Don’t get me wrong, though. He ain’t you. You’re my driver. My man! From now on, right?”

  “Ten-four.”

  The best news for me was that I had printed up my short story collection, Belly Up, and was ready to send it out to publishers. One hundred and seventy-five pages. In Writer’s Market I found five new publishing houses that specialized in short fiction. I had copies made at Kinko’s on Cahuenga Boulevard and then stopped off at the post office to pick up a stack of Priority Mail envelopes. The stack was sitting on Pearl’s front seat waiting to be mailed.

  It Creeps had moved its location to Malibu and was using the former home of Michael Landon, the TV cowboy star who died of cancer a few years before. Young Ronny liked the high-end ambiance because it was near the fucking fabulous homes of Bob Dylan, Barbra and Cher and Anthony and Nick and Lewis and Martin and Mel and Goldie. Ronny apparently had a sycophantic desire to be noticed by his peers while he worked.

  Cal had told me that the days with Stedman were twelve to fifteen hours and there would be lots of down time. I planned to spend it reading and writing stories in longhand in my notebook, sitting in the Malibu sun. I still didn’t like Stedman much but he was a good cash tipper, and as a driver I was hoping to knock down some decent daily money on top of my Dav-Ko partner salary.

  David Koffman had grudgingly agreed with me that it would be tough getting to AA meetings while I was on-call with Stedman and decided to cut me some long-distance slack. I said I would find a local Malibu group and go as often as I could on my meal break. But I was free now, unhampered by the ball and chain of a Twelve Step program. My new plan was to take a pass on the local meetings and have a couple of different guys on the crew sign my attendance paper in the column marked “Secretary’s Signature.” I was friendly with the assistant director and one of the lighting guys. Both of them were juicers I had met at the slashing-surf-scene beach location. We’d drunk beers together and watched the filming, so signed meeting papers would be no problem. “Fake it ’till you make it.”

  It Creeps had been adapted from a book by a true crime writer named Lawrence Scuccimarri, an In Cold Blood kind of story. It took Larry three years of traveling the country taking photographs and doing interviews and getting legal releases to finish the thing. I’d read the first twenty pages of the hardback the night they shot the slashing scene on the beach, for fun, then left it to gather dust in Pearl’s trunk. It was pop slop, sensational and disposable.

  Scuccimarri, I’d heard, had been paid peanuts for his book and the screenplay by Ronny’s company. When Larry arrived on the set to do scene rewrites Stedman had condescendingly introduced him to the cast and crew as “Scooch.” This was because Ronny Stedman couldn’t pronounce the name Scuccimarri correctly twice in a row. Larry’s day job was as a professional translator. He was an immigrant from Calabria, Italy, and what my father, Jonathan Dante, used to refer to ungently as a Mustache Pete—a greenhorn and a patsy for the sharks in the American movie business.

  That afternoon I was working on a story in my notebook with my stack of ready-to-mail envelopes next to me on the front seat, trying to find a sitting position that didn’t bother my red and still-healing crotch. Stedman stormed out of the house and down the driveway and got into Pearl before I could get out of the car and open the rear door for him. His director, Mel Kleinman, had been filming a garage suicide scene where a fat mother of one of the victims decides to hang herself but fails when the rope breaks.

  “Just drive, Bruno,” Stedman snarled. “Head up the Coast Highway toward Trancas. I’ve gotta get away from that fucking guy. That goddman imbecile is ruining my movie…Hey, is there booze in the car?”

  “Sure,” I said. “In the console. Ice too. You know where it is.”

  As we drove Ronny poured himself a tall Scotch and ice, lit a cigarette, horned two toots from his coke vial, then tossed his Prada sunglasses on the seat next to him. Five minutes later he was more sociable. He leaned through the partition opening to talk to me about something but instead saw my stack of envelopes.

  “Hey, Bruno, what are those?” he asked.

  I hesitated. “Nothing special,” I said.

  “So, you’re in the direct mail business or some goddamn thing?”

  “No,” I said, “just stuff I’m sending out.”

  “Like what?”

  “A manuscript. A collection of short stories.”

  “You’re a writer?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but not like Larry Scuccimarri. Not that kind of writer.”

  “You never mentioned that.”

  “You’re not a publisher. It never came up.”

  “What do you write?”

  “Fiction,” I said. “Short stories. Some poetry too.”

  “Anything published?”

  “Look, Ronny, I don’t like talking about my work, if that’s okay.”

  “Hey, man, just tell me. I ain’t the book police, for chrissakes. You know me. I’m always looking for new material.”

  “I have a book pending with a publisher, but nothing in print right now. This is my newest collection.”

  Ronny Stedman was smiling. “Can I have one? I’d like to read it.”

  I handed him one of the sealed packages. “Sure Mr. Stedman,” I said. “Whatever. No problem.”

  When we reached Broad Beach I pulled into the parking lot and Ronny got out. After he threw his sports jacket onto the backseat next to my envelope he climbed down the path to the sand and took a walk by the ocean.

  nineteen

  That night I got back to Dav-Ko after dropping Stedman off in east Hollywood at one thirty a.m. I was beat. It had been an eighteen hour day. Rounding the corner off Highland Avenue on to Selma I saw flashing patrol car lights in front of our office—three sets of pinball machines stinging the darkness. A crowd of two dozen of the local hustler talent, unable to conduct business because of the confusion, stood by smoking cigarettes and nancy-baiting the cops.

  Joshua, our night dispatcher, was on the front steps talking to two of the uniforms who held notebooks, and my driver, huge Robert Roller, his suit and shirt torn and his nose caked with dried blood, was splayed out across the hood of one of the prowl cars that looked to have crossed the curb in a hurry, coming to rest on our front walkway. Robert was in handcuffs.

  The limo he had been driving, Big Red, was a few feet away, parked in our driveway with a smashed-in hood and two broken headlights. One of the front wheels had scraped itself bald on a dented fender.

  Roller had been chauffeuring Nick Tallman and his manager to a concert that night at the Staples Center. Tallman was the co-headliner and had just completed a two-year bit for spousal abuse and drug possession. This was to be the first of his comeback gigs.

  I interrupted the cops telling them I was one of the owners of the company, then pulled Joshua aside to get the full story. According to my night dispatcher, Tallman apparently was still a full-on juice mooch and had chosen to anger his audience by being too drunk to finish his se
t.

  Joshua retold what happened. Half an hour after Tallman left the stage, as his limo pulled out of the underground limo entrance, two dudes in motorcycle boots who had not gotten their seventy-five-bucks worth stopped the car and did what is known in limo-eze as a raindance on the hood, causing the damage.

  Apparently Robert Roller was the right guy for the job at the wrong time for the two bikers. A former bouncer and mixed martial arts fighter, Robert got out of Big Red to offer a short dissertation in pain management. After the beating he drove Nicky and his manager back to their hotel. The upshot was that someone in the parking lot had taken down the limo’s plate number, and as Robert pulled into our driveway he was swarmed by the three squad cars and six uniforms. My driver was busted for assault with a deadly weapon—his fists.

  I had David Koffman on the phone at five a.m., New York time. He’d just gotten in from an after-hours club and was half gassed, but he woke up our L.A. attorney and by ten o’clock that morning, after interviews and witness confirmation, the charges against Robert Roller were dismissed. I drove down to County Jail to pick Robert up as Big Red was being limped to the local Lincoln dealer where we had our limo warranty work done. The damage estimate was $7,560.

  Then, a crazy twenty-four hours got even crazier: the strangest day I’d ever spent in the limo business.

  While I was on my way downtown to pick up big Robert, Rosie Camacho received a frantic call from Don Simpson’s mansion in Beverly Hills. Simpson was a new client for Dav-Ko, our richest client along with his producer partner, Jerry Bruckheimer. The two guys had ten of the biggest-grossing Hollywood films in the last few years.

  According to Rosie the emergency call came from Simpson himself. He’d been standing in his bathrobe outside his pool house. He demanded that we immediately dispatch three limos. The EMTs and the fire department, he screeched, were already on their way.