86'd

by Dan Fante

  “Me? Nuts? Is trying to get some sleep an abnormal desire? Do you consider that nuts?”

  “You’ve made your point, okay? Turn the sound down. We’ll call it even.”

  “Fuck you,” I yelled. “I’ll let you know when we’re even. This shit goes on every night. Now it’s time for a free concert. I’ve got all the time in the world.”

  “Look, asshole, kill the noise before I come over there and really put you to sleep!”

  “Suck my dick!”

  “Okay, how ’bout this: no joke. If you make me come over there I’ll take those speakers apart and shove them down your throat—one at a time!”

  “How about this, Lucifer: Lick the shit off my dick after I fuck your mother up the ass.”

  “Whad’ya call me? Wha’d you say?”

  “I said fuck you, moron!”

  “You’re making a mistake, my man. I don’t like mama-rippin’.”

  “It was your mama that made the mistake. That mistake was not to flush you after she took the shit that made you.”

  “Okay, you got it! Stay right there. I’m on my way.”

  I hadn’t factored in the other neighbor’s reactions. Apartment lights in both buildings were now coming on. People began appearing at their windows. Balcony doors came open. But I was too crazy now and too filled with rage. It didn’t matter. I didn’t give a shit what happened now.

  Captain Strobe appeared in the courtyard below wearing workout shorts and a cut-down college sweatshirt, carrying what looked like a pipe wrench in his fist. The sweatshirt was red. USC. Joshua, my ex-night dispatcher, had attended fucking USC! I’d flunked out of Santa Monica College and UCLA as a kid but I never would have attended that pissant school. Not on a bet. Dentists and engineers and wannabe psychiatrists. The offspring of the Los Angeles elite went to USC. Rich kids with family money. Those who considered themselves better than everybody else. Those who carried pipe wrenches in their hands to ensure their advantage.

  He was standing directly beneath my balcony now, yelling up. For the first time I could see him and his face clearly. His round head and short, light hair and expression somehow looked familiar. Maybe I’d known him from a job somewhere, or a bar. Maybe we were once neighbors. Then it hit me. This asshole reminded me of myself.

  I couldn’t hear what he was yelling because of the angle and my blasting rap music, so I went in and lowered Sam’yall K a little more.

  On my way back to the balcony I ripped my computer’s monitor off the desk and brought it along.

  “Hey!” I yelled down. “Lost your guts? You’ll need more than that wrench to deal with me. I’m waiting, fucker!”

  “C’mon down here you little shit,” he bellowed, waving his pipe. “I’m going to adjust your speakers for ya.”

  In a single motion I raised my computer monitor and threw it down at him. The guy’s reflexes were good and he ducked quickly. The thing missed him and crashed on the concrete patio, glass and plastic flying in all directions.

  “You’re dead,” he raged. “You are a fucking dead man!”

  “Maybe I am,” I said. “But I’ll take you with me. That’s a promise. Now I’m coming down. Wait right there!”

  It occurred to me then that I wanted to die. The idea came simply and clearly into my head. I was tired—exhausted by my own unending obsessions and my scalding brain and the pain and empty absurdness of my useless life. Death would be a relief. Today—now—was as good a time and place as any.

  I still held the advantage over this asshole and I knew it. He was the one without the power. Beneath me three floors down, there on the ground with his big mouth and his weapon. I was up here.

  So, instead of heading out my door and down the stairs, I decided to throw something else first.

  The next closest thing in my room was my computer’s CPU. I ripped it from the table.

  The jerk was looking away when I threw it, waiting for me to come out the ground floor patio door.

  The heavy metal unit caught him on the shoulder. He yelled out, then grabbed his arm and went down to one knee.

  “Now I’m coming down!” I snarled. “Now you’re the fucking dead man!”

  On my way out, in LeCash’s kitchen, on the counter in a wooden holder was a butcher’s knife set. I grabbed the biggest one he had, then went to the door and started for the stairs.

  But suddenly, as I stomped down the steps, on the landing below stood a big black dude blocking my way. He had his hand up like a traffic cop. “Hold it!” he ordered.

  I was the one with the knife and nothing was going to stop me. “Move,” I yelled. “Get out of my way. Don’t fuck with me.”

  In a one-two motion the guy grabbed the knife from my hand and punched me. I second later I could feel my head strike the wall with a thud.

  Looking up from the floor he was standing above me. “I’m Victor,” he said, “your downstairs neighbor. You’re Bruno, right? Remember me?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Now I do.”

  “Time to call it a night, Bruno. You’re in pretty deep as it is.”

  “That fuckshit is waiting downstairs. The prick’s got a pipe in his hand.”

  “I know. I saw what happened. And you winged him pretty good with that amp.”

  “It was my computer’s CPU. Just let me up, okay? Get out of my way.”

  “You gonna kill that fool or maybe get killed.”

  “That’s right,” I hissed. “One hundred percent. Someone’s going to die tonight.”

  “Not here. Not now. I live here too, my man. This is my house too.”

  “Look, he started this.”

  Victor outweighed me by fifty pounds. He yanked me to my feet, then threw my knife up the steps to the third floor landing. He grabbed me by the back of my shirt and one arm and began pulling me down the stairs. I tried twisting myself free but it was useless.

  When we got to the front door exit he reached into my pants pocket and pulled out my house keys. “Get going, Bruno,” he said quietly. “If you come back here tonight you gonna be dealing with me. Juss go find a park somewhere and sleep it off.”

  thirty-two

  The first couple of days at the beginning of my six-month stay at Charles Street Recovery House, near the beach in Costa Mesa, were the worst of my life. By calling in a favor from a probation judge, Attorney Busanzian had managed to wangle me a scholarship grant to the program. I was a charity case. Had he not done so I would have been on my way to Wayside jail for the full term. But I hated the place. It was a jail without bars.

  My group was comprised of twelve guys. Most were crackheads or tooth-rotted meth suckers. Only one or two were like me: drinkers. The current catchphrase in the recovery business is “dual-addiction.” They tell you it’s all the same disease, but that’s crap. Alcohol and drugs are very different. They affect the brain differently. But recovery is a big, snowballing industry. They want your money—everybody’s money—and they mix all species together in the same bubbling piss pot.

  At first you sit in “group” three times a day and listen to the raging rock-heads scream and whine about their bizarre lives; this burglary or that carjacking or ripping off their parents’ jewelry to get money. Confrontations and fights between the speed freaks are common in the first few days. Then, luckily, the staff physician, Dr. Fix-You-Up-Right-Away, prescribes load-levelers and downers for the rock-heads and they become more like amiable, distracted zombies. That’s what you get for your 10K a month. And Charles Street was cheap by comparison.

  But either way drunks simply don’t fit in. Me and the other boozer, Paul, didn’t relate to any of what was being said and our best conversations were between sessions when we talked about our favorite bars in L.A. and the nasty women we’d met. So, at least for me, “group” turned out to be a waste of time.

  My counselor was a guy named Armondo, a former Mexican gang guy who’d done a dime at Pelican Bay and a nickel bit in “Q.” He’d found God in recovery going to prison Alcohol
ics Anonymous meetings.

  Mondo was huge. He had a shaved head and his body was knife-scarred and covered with prison tats. Sitting behind his desk, the guy’s white, starched dress shirt and tie made me think of a chimp in a TV commercial trying to portray a human. I disliked the fat prick at first sight. His recovery philosophy could easily be summed up in a three sentences: I’m the MAN and you are shit. I hold all the cards and you are shit. I’ve been through it all and you cannot con me because you are full of shit. This attitude served only to cement my resistance.

  I was in his office for our second scheduled session. My first mandatory one-on-one meeting had been aborted after a six-hour group session in which all new residents, me included, went through the first three AA steps. Mondo and I were supposed to hook up then but I’d gone back to my dorm room claiming sick. I was desperate to get out. The place was a hell.

  The meeting with Mondo purportedly had to do with my past. My history. My written fourth step: “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”

  “First off,” Mondo said, “before we get down to it, what would you say is your main objective at Charles Street? What do you hope to gain from completing our program?”

  “Release,” I answered. “My hope is to return, in tact, to living my dreams.”

  “Bullshit, Dante,” he barked. “Let’s end the babysnot right up front.”

  The office we sat in was small and un-air-conditioned and it has always been my observation that fat humans perspire a lot. And big Armondo was the emperor of flop sweat. His bald dome and face were covered with it, yet the sun was barely up.

  He looked up from his photocopied form and glared. “Okay, let’s try again,” he said. “We’re gonna do this every day at five forty-five a.m., so if I were you, bro, I’d juss get used to the process.”

  “I’m court-sentenced, man. I’d like to tell you what you want to hear but I’m fresh out of fake it ’til you make it.”

  “Thaz good, my man,” whispered Mondo, “because either I get full cooperation and participation or you get an X on this intake form and off and you go back to County. So, we got us a door number one or door number two scenario here. Pick one. Truth is, it’s all the same to me. I cash my paycheck every Saturday.”

  It only took a second for me to respond. “Go ahead,” I said, staring at the floor, “I’m down. I’ve got zero interest in returning to jail. So let’s do it. Ask your goddamn questions.”

  Mondo wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his size XXL shirt then picked up a clipboard. “Question One: When you look back at your life, what memories are still uncomfortable or painful? What incidents make you feel dirty?”

  “Okay, look,” I said, my mind now on scream, “I just can’t do this. I can’t do it right now.”

  Big Mondo got to his feet. “Well, I guess that’s that. It’s your call, Dante.”

  “Okay, look, what about this: Can I take the thing back to the dorm and do it there? In private.”

  Mondo wagged his neckless head then sank back into his chair. “Yeah, okay, that’s allowed.”

  Then, reaching down into a drawer he handed me a yellow writing tablet, then a pen. “You got two hours, my man. Have it back here by eight o’clock. Complete. Answer all the questions. Understood?”

  “Okay,” I said. “I understand.”

  Back in my room, ten minutes later, sipping a mug of caffeine-less tea, sitting at the writing desk in my beige-walled dorm room, I made up my mind to complete the annoying exercise. For me, Charles Street was the last house on the block. Fuck it. I’d do what I had to do. I’d been eighty-sixed for the last time.

  Then, something startling happened: My hand began to write. My brain switched gears and submitted. Words began pouring out. They were mostly lies but that didn’t matter. I was doing it. Two pages later I was done with Question One.

  Question Two was: In what ways do you experience yourself as inadequate?

  No problem. Two more written pages. Boom boom boom. Again, the stuff I wrote was mostly made up, things like being a molested child and being beaten as a kid, and going deaf. But so what. I’d be okay. I could hack it. No more County Jail.

  Question Three: What people do you resent, and why?

  I began with David Koffman and listed every employer that I could remember going back as far as I could, and the reason why I disliked the pricks. It was easy.

  An hour and a half later I’d answered all ten questions and I was done. The relief was palpable.

  In the cafeteria I congratulated myself with three unsweetened jelly doughnuts and another cup of their best swill herbal tea. I could make it work. One day at a time. Fake it ’til you make it.

  thirty-three

  The death of my brain came two weeks later. By accident. There were only seven of us left from the original group and we were van-driven four hours north for a weekend retreat at a place called San Antonio Seminary in the hills, thirty miles inland from Santa Barbara. Rolling horse-ranch country.

  What I learned about San Antonio was that for a long time it had been a training compound for novitiate Franciscan brothers in long brown robes. Polished concrete floors and twenty stark, single rooms, with Jesus photos and religious statues and God paraphernalia everywhere. The place turned into an AA retreat house by accident when one of the senior brothers needed help with his booze problem. The guy who drove up from L.A. to get him and deliver him to an inpatient treatment program in L.A., where he got sober, was looking for a weekend facility for himself and his AA buddies to go over the steps and talk about recovery and hang out. Now, ten years later, San Antonio had become an AA oasis for recovering drunks. Their only business now was holding retreats two weekends a month. A bare-bones staff of brothers remained to oversee the place.

  The guy leading our thirty-man retreat was named Bob Anderson. He was seventy years old. A former biker and barroom pugilist with a huge belly and a bad temper, turned AA guru.

  For the first two hours in front of the group that Friday afternoon, in the small library hall with folding chairs, old Bob talked only about himself and his alcohol history. He talked about what it was like to be his kind of drunk and juicehead. But he also talked about pulling guys out of their cars on the freeway, even after years sober, to punch them out. About his ex-wives and lost jobs and brutal life. Sober. I’d never heard this kind of AA recovery story before. The party line was, you get sober then tiptoe through the tulips for the rest of your days. This guy was very different.

  In a way what Anderson said sounded like pretty standard stuff, but there was an honesty about him and a deliberate effort not to impress anyone. He wasn’t ranting about higher powers or being saved by AA from booze and a past life of destruction. He was talking about something different. He was talking about his life sober, about still being crazy after years off booze. That got my attention.

  But the other thing that impressed me about Anderson was what one of his friends—a guy named TJ—told me when we finally had a break: Seven years before Anderson had been given a death sentence from cancer after a five-hour surgery to remove his esophagus. He’d been told he had a 3 percent chance of living out the year with his stomach now attached to his throat. Time went by but Anderson didn’t die. Instead, he began leading AA retreats and speaking at meetings all over L.A. He always talked about the same thing: how to apply the steps to treat what he called the Disease of Alcoholism.

  He did this twice a month. The old guy stood in front of the room smiling and talking about himself while strapped with a chemo pack to his waist. The thing loudly hissed a dose of Drano into his system every two minutes, 24–7. And Anderson wasn’t selling Jesus, he just talked about himself and how he had changed his life.

  According to what TJ told me, Bob would speak on the AA steps, on his feet, for eight hours today, Friday, then twelve hours on Saturday, then another five on Sunday. The guy was such a medical oddity that a team of filmmakers had even done a TV documentary on him. There were
only a half dozen people in the world who had survived his kind of cancer and surgery. And most of them were in hospitals, dying.

  After the first four-hour session in the library, where old Bob never even sat down and answered written question that the guys passed forward, the group of us filed into dinner in the big retreat mess hall. A ninety-minute break.

  More statues and Jesus stuff. A big woven banner above the tables on the wall depicted St. Francis feeding a sparrow. The words sewn into the cloth beneath it read: You have not chosen me—I have chosen you. All of us, including the three brothers in robes who ran the place, began our meal by joined hands and parroting the Lord’s Prayer. But the food was okay.

  After the meal, while a lot of the guys were outside smoking and petting the four adopted stray dogs that roamed the grounds, I pulled TJ aside to ask him if it’d be okay for me to speak with Anderson privately. He said, “Sure, Bruno, I’ll talk to Bob and set it up.”

  Twenty minutes before the next session Anderson and I sat down in the library alone. The old man had been a line mechanic for Lincoln-Mercury for thirty years. I could tell by his manner that he wanted to be friendly, but he was an impatient-type person and his interpersonal skills weren’t too good.

  Bob was sitting on the corner of a table. He rocked forward then faced me. “TJ says you’re sober a few weeks.”

  “Right,” I said. “I’ve tried AA a few times, but it’s never stuck. Something always happens and that’s it.”

  “What happens?”

  “I usually get depressed or pissed off. My brother also died recently. That did me in. And I was in a job that I hated. But look, I heard you talking about your thinking, about being sober a long time and your mind still killing you. That rang my bell. I’m like that.”

  “Look kid, I got alcoholism, see. My trouble with the law and all of that stopped when I quit the booze. Right? I mean, I thought I was okay. Right? I thought I was what in AA they call a winner. I mean I was sober, right? So how come my wife left me? How come I kept getting fired from jobs because of my bad temper? Here I was twenty years sober but I wasn’t no winner. See what I’m saying?”