Chump Change

by Dan Fante

  Because Fab was returning to Malibu to pick up my wife and bring her to the hospital, I decided to have him take me back there. They insisted that Fab leave immediately and take me along.

  It cost five dollars to get out of the hospital parking lot. Fab paid. On the way down La Cienega toward the freeway he was excited about the fight and wanted to talk about what had happened. I didn’t.

  I had a desperate need for silence. To be alone. I wanted to catch the next plane for New York or Texas, or be dropped off in the desert. I was shaking uncontrollably and unable to calm down. To subdue my rattling hands, I pinned them under my arm pits. Then I demanded that he stop at the first liquor store.

  Fabrizio ignored me. He was popping out strings of syllables like an out-of-tune car that won’t stop running after the engine is turned off. On he went about my fight and then about a punchout of his own that he had with an ROTC guy two years before while on weekend maneuvers.

  Something, somewhere in Fabrizio’s history, had permitted him to conclude that anybody riding in his car must listen to what he was saying. Did I always react with violence? Did I have to fight a lot in jail and in my in-patient programs? Did the cops ever club me when I got arrested? Was it my experience that the majority of men turn queer behind bars?

  I grabbed his arm and squeezed the bicep as hard as I could. People like him, I yelled, always got butt-fucked first in jail by brothers named Bubba, because people like him were self-righteous, dickless punks. Easy targets.

  I was close to out-of-control again and he could sense it, so he pulled into the next liquor store parking lot.

  My mind was still racing and crazy as I got out of the car. I sensed that my body might be giving out too. The nausea was back. There had been only four or five hours sleep for the last few days. The feelings that I was having were too fast and too many. I hoped some drinks would push the head into relaxation and help the body not puke or die. I hoped this time I’d be able to calm down because, for months, whiskey had only been working irregularly.

  I got my bottle and a carton of Marlboro Red and when I was back in the car I told my brother that I was sorry if I’d scared him. I said I was sick and messed up these days and that I didn’t mean most of the things I did and that was why I kept getting locked up all the time. He made a face like he understood. Like I was a whacked out deranged fuck, but that it was okay.

  We headed south again on La Cienega. “You’re really shaking bad,” he said.

  “I know,” I said, cracking the bottle and taking several drinks from it. “It should be okay in a minute or two.”

  “Tell me why you punched that queer so many times. I thought you were going to kill him. Your eyes looked crazy. Do you always lose it like that when you get into a physical thing?”

  “It started out that he was out of line. Then I lost it.”

  “Did you know what you were doing?”

  “I think so. I didn’t care. Sometimes I don’t care what happens at all.”

  After another long slam on the jug, I passed it to Fab. I was sorry for what I had said to him and for grabbing him in anger and I was still not sure that I had been forgiven.

  It surprised me when he accepted the bottle and had a hit, then passed it back. My shaking was going away.

  “Right,” Fabrizio said, his tongue swamped with saliva from the stinging of the whiskey, “You inherited Dad’s meanness, that nasty temper.”

  “Correct,” I said, “the temperament, not his talent.”

  We took the Coast Highway. Not talking. Every time I passed the jug to my brother, he obliged and took a hit. At the area of the Malibu Pier, I suggested that we stop at a restaurant to make a phone call and see if Jonathan Dante was dead. I knew the answer. Fabrizio pulled in without argument. The whiskey had loosened his cork.

  Inside the restaurant, a section was closed, still being repaired from the last fire. We sat at the bar, looking out the bay window at the water and the surfers. It was hot for December. Seventy-five.

  The pretty girl bartender wore a starched tuxedo blouse, buttoned to the top, and a bow tie. She called herself Wilson and her black lacy bra with its doily pattern was visible, as her tits pushed against the inside of the front of the shirt. Her hair was black, too, and her lipstick was red-red and she free-poured a reasonable glass.

  Fab made the call about the old man. I would not. He went to the bathroom to use the pay phone, while Wilson poured me number two and I waited for what was coming.

  When my brother came back and sat beside me, he was smiling. “He won’t quit,” he said.

  “He’s not dead?”

  “Not better, but not dead. He’s hanging on. No life support. Stein told Mom it’s his heart. It refuses to stop. It’s the only organ he has still functioning and it won’t give out. He’s like a miracle.”

  Then Fab began to cry. The booze had been a lubricant for him to finally love our father without restraint.

  He drank and wept. Half an hour later, he was out of control and in love with Wilson and talking philosophically about death. His American Express card was on the bar, so she kept pouring.

  He wanted to impress her, so he described how much he loved his father and what an unsatisfied poet’s life the old man had led. Of course, Wilson had never heard Jonathan Dante’s name as a writer of anything. Nobody had, except people in the film business, and most of them were dead.

  The Dante I was remembering was more prick, less poet. This bar reminded me of the time when I was twelve when my father had told me and my friends that he was taking me to a Dodger playoff game. Instead, he’d gotten drunk and staggered in the house long after the game had been over.

  My brother began reciting lines to Wilson from a poem he’d memorized long ago. I sipped my glass and listened. The words sounded familiar, like something clumsy out of my father’s early work, like a lyrical passage from one of his novels.

  Then, I realized, to my shock, that he was reciting my own work from twenty years before, printed originally in the Saint Monica’s High School newspaper. I’d written it as an English assignment and had eventually edited it and had it published in a Museum Magazine years later in New York.

  Hearing the recitation terrified and sickened me. I began grabbing his arm, but he wouldn’t stop. It reminded me of what a fake I had been as a writer. Pretentious, unskilled, shameless.

  I felt as if some drunken Italian uncle had stood me on a chair at a family gathering and loudly related the story of discovering me in a closet masturbating. I was lucky it wasn’t a long poem.

  I said, “Where did you learn that?”

  “The old man. He knew it by heart. He gave me the magazine.”

  “Don’t do that again.”

  Fabrizio leaned over to Wilson. “It was beautiful, wasn’t it?” he said. “A snapshot of a poem. Like haiku.”

  Wilson smiled, knowing that not talking was one of her best features. Fab put his arm around my shoulder. His speech was slobbery. “…a poet’s harp—syllables dipped in truth…he always said you had the gift…he loves you.”

  The year I had written the poem in high school, I had gotten a letter from my father addressed to me with Italian stamps on the envelope. He had been in Rome, rewriting scenes from a gangster show. It was the only letter I’d ever gotten from Jonathan Dante. There had been no mention of the poem but I knew that was why he wrote to me. It was his acknowledgement.

  I still had the letter. I kept it folded in the fly leaf of a book of Pirandello short stories.

  6

  IT WAS SUNDOWN WHEN FABRIZIO AND I ARRIVED AT THE Point Dume house. I drove because Fab was very drunk. I was blasted, too, and tired as death. As I eased his big Country Squire wagon through the back gate to the carport, I could see that the place was dark and abandoned. It meant my father must still be alive.

  I unloaded Fab and we made our way to the back door. He told me where to find the house key, and I remembered that it had always been kept on a bent nail under the
gas meter box outside the back porch. Propping Fab up against the rail of the house, I groped in the darkness until my fingers touched the key.

  Opening the back door, I heard a noise behind me. It was Rocco, old and friendless, his ribs bulging through his dirty, sagging coat.

  There was something in the dog’s mouth, but in the darkness, it was hard to make out what it was. I reached inside the house and flipped on the porch light. In the clear beam, I could see that it was an animal. Small, wet and lifeless. It stank too.

  He was emitting a high-pitched moan to get my attention. I closed the back porch door and descended the steps to where he was standing at attention. As I did, he dropped the corpse at my feet so that I would be better able to acknowledge his prize.

  The violated animal’s carcass had a large crushed head and a fat, little body with matted hair. It had rodent-like feet but its tail was too short to be of the genus Rattus. I assumed that it was a gopher because I remembered my father saying once that Rocco was good at catching gophers.

  The dog had patiently stationed himself near the back door to present his trophy. Waiting for the sound of my father’s voice.

  But I wasn’t Dante. I had no fondness for dogs. Although, for a moment, I felt bad for Rocco. But so what. I wasn’t going to congratulate him on murdering a gopher.

  We stood looking at each other. He continued humming his high-pitched falsetto and appearing tense. His whining stopped only when he took quick, short, deep breaths.

  I could see that he wanted a reaction, for me to scoop up the rodent, then pat him on the head and say, “goo-boy.”

  I didn’t. I turned and started back up the steps to the house. It was the wrong move and it pissed him off. The humming got suddenly louder until, when I didn’t stop, it became a snarl. I was afraid. Filled with whiskey, but afraid. He might attack me. There was a story the old man told about Rocco biting the gas man after he’d mistakenly patted my sister on the head. I wanted no trouble.

  What I did was stop, a compromise maneuver, halfway to the top of the steps. I had no skill at dealing with an angry dog. But he waited, too, studying me with intense concentration. It was a standoff.

  Something my father had told me years before came to me. A statement of how he dealt with meeting new people. To define his own territory, my father would insult the other guy in the first five minutes of conversation. It made me wonder if Rocco might not be imitating the old man and doing the same thing.

  When he didn’t charge, I felt braver and decided to sit down, even pulling my cigarettes from my jacket and lighting one up. His humming started again, but he didn’t advance. The stench of the dead carcass seeped past the haze of my booze, its foulness hitting my stomach and lodging there like the ache from food poisoning.

  Five minutes passed that way. Finally Fabrizio puked over the porch rail, a projectile stream that panicked Rocco. It caused the dog to snatch up the gopher and disappear into the night.

  Once inside the house, I put on some coffee and steered my brother into the bathroom where he cleaned himself up by splashing water against the puke on his “SC” sweatshirt and rubbing it in with a towel.

  My body was exhausted. Too tired to telephone the hospital and hear bad news. My own confusion kept my mind numb, under control. Walking Fab into one of the guest rooms, I sat him down on the bed where he fell back, rolled into a fetal position, and immediately passed out.

  In the kitchen, I poured myself a cup of coffee with four fingers of the whiskey in the mug and pressed playback on the answering machine next to the phone. If there had been a change in the old man’s condition, there would be a message.

  I was curious what the people who knew my father and mother were saying, so I listened to each message, peeping again into my parents’ lives for insights that had eluded me during my childhood. What were people’s expressions of hope and distress? What emotions were they reciprocating? Why did other people like these odd creatures?

  A dozen different calls had come in over several days and were being stored on the machine by my mother, Judith Joyce Dante. She was collecting them and I knew that she would answer each at the appropriate time. It was her way. She’d respond in order, systematically, like she did everything.

  There were upset friends from Northern California and Colorado, my mother’s sister and her husband, two Italian cousins expressing drama and sorrow, neighbors showing concern, and a few calls from movie people.

  One message in particular shocked me. It was from Phil Asner, a once famous TV producer-director and former poker buddy and friend of Jonathan Dante. His presentation of lamentation and alarm seemed completely genuine. I was surprised because I knew that he and Dante had not talked in years. My father’s cruel tongue had destroyed the friendship. Dante had the terrible knack of uncovering another person’s weak spot, then waiting for a vulnerable moment so he could crush that spot with an ax.

  Asner and the old man had pitched a film script/director package together fifteen years before. It would have been Asner’s first movie after a successful TV career. The deal had gotten funding but dissolved when the studio opted to do another project first. However, a close friendship had developed over time between the two men. Then, several years later, Dante sent his pal a manuscript of an unpublished novel he’d written that he thought had good film potential. Asner had been busy working and made the miscalculation of not getting back to my father quickly enough. Six weeks later, when Dante did get him on the phone, Phil said he thought the idea needed development, that he didn’t see it as a film. Dante’s reply had ended the relationship. He told Asner that the reason he’d never “made it” in movies was because the sitcom format was the only way he could ever recognize clever writing. Phil’s personal contribution to TV history, Dante had gone on, ranked on the list below the imbecile who had invented the laugh track. The two men never spoke again.

  The last voice on the machine was my mother’s. Dante was still holding death off on sheer self-will, without the aid of machine or drug. Why the old body wouldn’t give up could not be explained by his doctors. My father, somehow, was reserving the extinguishing of life’s last embers to his personal time table. Dictating terms again. His pride was remarkable.

  I decided to leave a message on the old man’s behalf. I knew that my mother would pay more attention to a request from me if I were one of the voices on the answering machine. She’d have to. It would be a recorded message requiring a response. She’d take my name down and deal with me like she dealt with everything else on her “to-do” list.

  I pressed the “memo” button and started talking. “Hi Mom,” my message began. “Bruno Dante here with something to say; when Pop’s gone, I hope somebody will be taking care of Rocco. I know you’ve got a lot to deal with now, but I’m worried about the dog. He’s bewildered and gaunt and fucked up. He’s abandoned and half-dead. I know that Dad would want him looked after. Okay? Tommy (Fabrizio) is too occupied with his corporate financial mental shit and Maggie keeps herself hysterical running around kissing Benny Roth’s ass but I think the dog should be a priority somewhere. That’s my opinion. Thanks, Mom.”

  Then I hit the stop button on the machine and took the last swig of my coffee.

  Recovery had given me some coping skills. Hot showers sometimes induced sleep in me, so I decided to take one. I was smart enough to know that if I didn’t rest soon, I’d get drunker, maybe find some wine, then black out and stick a butcher knife into my stomach.

  I undressed in the bathroom and stepped into the shower and turned the water on as hot as I could take. I lathered up and washed my hair and even tried jerking off with the soap suds, but lost interest when my dick wouldn’t stay hard.

  Then I let the water run on me for a long time, while I leaned against the wall of the shower to steady myself. When I could feel my body loosening and my mind quiet, I got out. At ease. Feeling ready for sleep.

  Because of the hot shower, my mind was gratefully omitting its persistent r
eruns of me coming out of blackouts with my cock going in and out of other men’s assholes, and memories of me waking up in my bed, choking on the stench of my own diarrhea, infested by a bestial depression until I drank again. Being alive to face the terrors and pictures of those moments was what made my death more and more necessary. But for now, I was safe with my secrets. I could rest. I lay down on the bed in the empty room and let blackness swallow me.

  7

  IT WAS STILL DARK WHEN I OPENED MY EYES AGAIN. LOOKING at the lighted digital clock on the nightstand, I could see that over three hours had passed. Down the hall, I heard the water in the shower running and I knew Fabrizio was awake too.

  I dressed in the blackened bedroom, not wanting to see myself in the mirror, fumbling into my clothes. In the smogless, clear Malibu night, the light from a big, powerful full moon surprised me with its brightness and caused me to walk to the window.

  Outside, I saw Rocco once again near the back porch steps. He was where I had left him hours before, still facing the door with the gopher body between his forelegs, waiting for the approval of a master who would never return.

  After taking a piss, I made my way down the hall toward the kitchen. The door to my father’s study was closed. I paused. Nobody ever entered except with the old man’s permission. Swinging the door to the dark room open, I waited for his demons to leap on me. None did, so I hit the lightswitch and let the incandescent light from his desk lamp assault the walls.

  The room was unchanged from the last time I’d entered it to talk with the old man—seven years before. The furniture was old, sturdy office stuff. Heavy dark oak and mahogany with fat, solid legs. Each piece had been picked from one of the used furniture stores on Western Avenue.

  On the far wall above a bookcase was a large, grainy, old framed photo of H. L. Mencken, his hair parted severely down the middle and his shirt collar heavily starched. The great iconoclast was scowling.