by Dan Fante
“Is there a rule that no dogs are allowed in the hospital?”
“Of course there is. This is a hospital. Have some black coffee, dear. Clear your mind.”
When I got to the closed door of Dante’s room, my fear rendered me unable to push it open. I was suddenly filled with the idea that he was already dead. I began to shake again. And sweat. Panicking.
Changing direction, I stumbled and walked as fast as I could down the corridor, making my way toward the cool darkness and safety of the garage, my head hammering.
After endless lefts and rights in the hallways, I got through the hospital’s double-doors to the parking lot and breathed in the gas fumes and fresh air. The coolness helped to steady me until I could find a quiet spot between two parked cars where I knelt down and slammed almost the whole pint of Jack that I had in my coat pocket. Again I breathed deep. In and out.
In a few minutes the head banging slowed enough for me to light a cigarette. Then I waited some more, hoping to feel the “click” from the Jack. I lit a second cigarette and smoked that too. No “click” happened, but gradually the edge was coming off.
I finished the bottle and scooted the empty under the dark green Benz I’d been leaning on. My shaking had stopped and I could stand, so I began searching in the garage for my brother’s Country Squire where I’d left my spare pint of Jack Daniels’ and my father’s dog.
I found the car quickly enough, but forgot that all the doors would be locked. I didn’t want to return to the waiting room, so I sat on the back bumper trying to decide what to do. The realization came that anal Fabrizio must have a hide-a-key somewhere under the car.
I was right. Feeling around under the bumper, it took a minute or two until my rattling fingers found a small metal, magnetized container with the spare keys in it.
Unlocking the passenger door, I looked through the back window and saw Rocco asleep with the dead lump of mangled hair and bones still between his legs.
He was awakened by the interior light, which went on when I opened the car door. Rocco raised himself to the level of the top of the back seat, where I could see his wide, shark-shaped head and the gopher once more dangling from his mouth. Then the impounded smell of the decomposing carcass hit me and my throat gagged shut from the intensity of the stink.
It was impossible to enter. I had to swing all the doors open and hold my breath long enough to climb in, start the engine, hit the air conditioner’s fan button, then hop out to breathe again.
When the rancidness was mostly gone, I was able to sit inside. I located my spare bottle of Jack from under the seat and took some long pulls, waiting once more for my pulsating brain to get quiet. My thoughts were always the enemy. That, and the headaches.
I needed time by myself, to escape. To take Fab’s wagon and get a hotel room and be alone. A quick check of my pockets told me I had sufficient money for several days. I’d find a porno movie and hang out and let the mouth of some stranger suck me off in the dark. I’d wait until Dante was buried deep, then go back to New York. Or somewhere. Wait until this shit was over. Just be anonymous. Not think. Not feel.
The booze had relaxed me enough to formulate that simple plan. First, I’d take Rocco into the hospital and deposit him at the old man’s bedside. There was no harm in that. Benny Roth and Fabrizio could deal with the dog by themselves.
When my head pounding had decreased, I made my move. Getting Rocco out of the back of the wagon was pretty easy. As before, he snarled and tried looking vicious, but I used the cheddar cheese hunks to distract him from the gopher, then snatched the dead fucker up by the tail.
Once I had the corpse away from the dog, I used the plastic supermarket bag to roll the body up, soaking it generously first with splashes of whiskey that countered its rankness. The result was satisfactory enough to make the thing less disgusting. Rocco dutifully followed me across the parking lot, then to the automobile entrance of the garage, always pressing his nose as close as possible to the bag containing the gopher.
Once inside the doors, we stopped at the first long corridor. I knew that, by having him with me, I would be breaking somebody’s sanitation rule, or pissing somebody off, but I had had enough Jack in me not to give a shit.
When the coast was clear, we started down the hallway. I gripped the bag with both hands high on top of my butt, so Rocco would stay directly behind me, bobbing up and down after the out-of-reach carcass. Part-way down the second corridor, a night cleaning lady with a pinched, get-even-looking Filipino face, rolled her cart out of a patient’s room and spotted us. She paused to make up her mind what to do. The look she hit me with required a defiant counter-glare. Luckily, she backed down and the dog and I continued to the end of the hall.
That was the only incident.
When we had made it as far as the closed door of the waiting room, I stopped to peek through the window. Dr. Macklin was sitting next to Mom in a private-looking discussion, while the rest of the family waited across the room on other couches. No one saw me. I was full of booze, but I knew that if they did, my escape plan would be screwed. Rocco and I kept moving to the door numbered 334. Jonathan Dante’s room.
Having the dog with me this time, gave me the courage to not turn back. I got to the door and again waited. Finally, my body trembling, I thrust myself into the room.
At the bed, I again looked closely at my father’s gaping mouth as it continued to force air into the hollow body. He seemed to be dissolving in front of me, his breaths more shallow and further and further apart. It was macabre.
I didn’t want to stay. I wanted to leave the dog and close the door behind me and never come back. But I knew this would be my last chance, so I sat down on the chair next to the bed and took his cold palm in mine.
Oddly, he seemed to be repaying my grip, and I was startled by the strength of the pressure in his hand. Half of me dreaded the loss of my father, while the other half agonized over his suffering. I shut my eyes and spoke loud enough so that if God or some spirit were in the room, it could hear me. “It’s Bruno, Pop,” I said. “I’m here…Just let go. For Jesus’ sake, haven’t you had enough?”
Somewhere in the caves of his mind, he must have felt the words because it was then that his breathing did stop. His grip on my hand continued for a few more seconds, but I knew he was done. I closed my eyes again because I couldn’t bear to look.
After a long silence, I opened them and saw what I feared—his face going completely white. Translucent. The blood draining away from the front of his torso. Suddenly, Rocco was standing at the end of the bed. The dog knew. I was sure. For the first time, he’d stopped coveting the fucking gopher and his black eyes were looking from my father’s lifeless face to mine, as if we knew an answer.
I let go of the hand and lowered Dante’s wrinkled arm to rest on the bed covers. “He’s dead, Rocco,” I said. “Pop’s dead.” The bull terrier looked like a dirty white marine coming to attention, stiffening his body, listening to my words.
I would not be able to leave him alone with his dead master. Not now. I had no heart for it. In the confusion that was to come, there would be no one who would care for him. He was alone, too, like my father. He would have to come with me.
In the bathroom I found a white cloth hand towel I used to wrap up Rocco’s dead rodent for transportation, so that the dog would follow me back out of the building to the car in the parking lot.
Opening the towel, my hands shaking again from the desperate need of a drink, I quickly put the stinking, little carcass in one corner and started folding it forward, the way a deli guy rolls up a sandwich in waxed paper.
I was about to leave with Rocco and the wrapped gopher as a lure, when a perversity grasped my brain. Across the room I recognized my wife’s purse among the other handbags. I remembered that, in a wallet inside the purse, she kept several credit cards which still bore the raised letters that spelled out the name Mr. and Mrs. Bruno Dante. It was true that our marriage was over. That was what mad
e it easy to convince myself that the one final accommodation—the use of a credit card from her purse—would be my last requirement of her as a wife. The reasoning for the act was simple, it was: “fuck her.”
I opened the purse and sorted through the wallet with the see-through plastic sleeves where she kept all her credit cards, until I found a bright gold new VISA CARD among the others. I slipped it into the top pocket of my jacket.
As I returned the wallet to the handbag, another idea came to me. I should leave her an exchange, a memento, something for something. So into the purse, I dropped the towel containing Rocco’s gopher. Then, with my index finger and thumb, I pulled a corner of the towel that forced the cloth to unravel dumping the smelly little body into the center of the bag. She and the PE Teacher boyfriend could use it as a dildo.
Getting Rocco back out to Fabrizio’s car without the gopher was not too difficult, since I had bypassed trying to get him to cooperate. I just carried him.
We traveled over halfway to the garage until he got too heavy. Then I took a clean sheet from a linen cart and fashioned it into a kind of harness around his neck. I was then able to pull and haul him the rest of the way into the garage.
I had never stolen anything from my brother before. I told myself that as soon as the dog and I had a room someplace, that I would call Fabrizio and let him know where to pick up the car.
9
L.A.’S WEATHER IN DECEMBER IS PARTICULARLY NUTS. THE night had brought in more dry Santa Ana winds from the desert. The last few years, at Christmas time, people drive to the canyons to start fires hoping to burn the city down and see the disaster they’ve caused reported on the TV news that night.
As I left the hospital parking lot, great waves of black dust splashed tree branches and brittle shards of paper bags against the windshield of the Ford. I found Santa Monica Boulevard and headed west in search of an open liquor store, while Rocco dozed on the seat next to me. I wanted only to be numb and buying two bottles of Mogen David Mad Dog 20-20, would make sure I got there.
For hours after the liquor store, I glided along the near empty side streets and dark avenues with my head sorting and clicking through impulses and conclusions. The more gulps of Mad Dog I consumed, the more reasonable my thoughts became. I wanted only the aloneness and the humming of the tires.
By the end of the first bottle I was okay. I’d made it to sundown.
I got to Ocean Avenue and the beach and turned left to Venice Boulevard, then left again heading back toward downtown, continuing to let the world blow by in silence. From time to time, great gusts of hot air like giant cotton balls thumped the car in the darkness.
At Sepulveda, I went north again toward the mountains, until I crossed Pico and felt the tires hit what still remained of the shiny tracks from where the old trains had run. The rails popped up in places through the worn asphalt. The moonlight would hit the exposed metal for a few yards at a time, then the tracks would disappear back under the pavement, like the backs of eels gliding beneath the surface.
I drove more. Another ten miles. Fifteen. This time taking Olympic Boulevard downtown and back, passing “Nickel Street,” City Hall and Chinatown.
Near Venice Boulevard and La Cienega was a mini-mart liquor store. Rocco was awake and antsy so I pulled into the parking lot assuming that he was hungry.
A young Mexican clerk behind the register watched me coming in. I speculated that he pegged me in the category of jerkoff or wino bum because his attitude was cocky and nasty when I asked where the dog food was. He spoke bad American, snarled something, and pointed to an aisle. As I walked away, at the end of his side of the long counter, I saw a woman sitting on a stool and almost hidden. His lady.
She was Asian and older than the kid. Vietnamese or Cambodian. And very sexy. Red-red lipstick and long black hair and a black doily see-through blouse. I saw her face fully as she glanced up from her magazine. Our eyes locked for a second. Hers were hard and beautiful. Freeway eyes. I knew that mine were empty. Then, when I looked too long, she turned away. I always looked too long.
In the canned goods aisle, I picked up a few tins of inexpensive dog food and was about to return to the counter, when I remembered that I had my wife’s credit card tucked in my pants’ pocket. I had the revelation that I could afford anything I wanted. I wasn’t just another shit-sucking loser off the boulevard.
I put the cheap dog food cans down and walked back to the register and picked up a plastic shopping basket while the clerk’s eyes followed me. He could tell that something was different as I started randomly choosing packages of potato chips and cheese puffs and throwing them into the basket.
I grabbed many cans of good dog food, and several bags of Fritos, and a new can opener—not the cheap-shit metal kind that hurts your fingers, but the $9.98 kind with the wide plastic handles. From there I moved on: a Genoa salami and ten kinds of frozen dinners and crackers and mayonnaise and salad dressing and a dozen brands of plastic-wrapped cold cuts were next.
Now I was having a shopping spree. Carried away by my good fortune and the Mad Dog 20-20, I returned to the counter to drop off my full plastic basket and pick up two more empties, piling my purchases next to the register.
The mean-spirited young storekeeper’s full concentration was on me, but I didn’t look up or stop to make eye contact.
As I proceeded to the hardware area, I felt his glare, while I loaded up a few packages of light bulbs, telephone cords, and plastic-wrapped flash lights. When I changed aisles, he moved too, along the back of the counter to where he could watch me. He was making it hard to concentrate. To retaliate, I decided to buy everything in the lane I was in. The cookie lane.
Oreos and Malomars went in and chocolate chips by the dozen. Bags and bags. Peanut butter and oatmeal and even twenty packages of coconut macaroons that I knew I’d never eat. I had a mission.
The Asian girl was watching now, looking from me to her boyfriend, to the growing mountain on the counter, fully involved in the exhibition. When he saw me smile at her, it was the last straw. He snapped, “Okay majn. Bum. Jou ga monee to pay?”
I had him and I knew it. I was in no hurry. An American citizen in possession of a gold Visa card with a $5,000 limit doesn’t have to rush. Purposely, I again glanced down the counter at the Asian girl to be sure I continued to hold her interest, then I smiled back at him. “Right in my pocket, amigo!” I shot back.
“Shjo me,” he sneered.
“When I’m done, senor, you’ll be the first to know. You need have no fear regarding full payment. American pesos for American products. Esta bien, amigo?”
I didn’t wait for a reply. I wheeled around and made a beeline back to the cookie section, a little out of control from the effects of fortified wine and giddy at my own dialogue.
I swept two more shelves full of Ring Dings, Twinkies and cup-cakes into my baskets. Each one weighed thirty to forty pounds, minimum. I had to drag them the last ten feet to the counter.
When I began to dump the stuff on the counter he grabbed my arm. “Hole it, majn,” he said. “No more.” He leered at me.
I shook him off, leering back. I was bigger. A coward, but bigger.
“Jou put heem all bak, majn,” he said. “Jou krazee. Jou done want disa chit! Jou too drunk to pay. Done make too much trubl in diza store or I goin’ to fuk you up!”
My wife’s Visa card slid easily from my pocket and skidded across the counter to him, the way a crap shooter throws a come-out seven. Leaning over, an inch from his face, I yelled, “Ring it up, Ace. Ring it all up! And keep your fucking hands off me. As far as you’re concerned I’m Donny-fuckin’-Trump.”
The kid couldn’t decide whether to fight or take the plastic. Finally, reluctantly, he picked up the card and made a kind of spitting, throat-clearing noise, then phoned the Visa number to see if my card was stolen. He even repeated the process a second time to make sure. Then he wanted to double check my driver’s license ID before adding up my purchases. I passed
the license over with a smile. I had nothing to hide.
Totalling everything up took him twenty minutes. I watched the register tape get longer and longer until it touched the floor. While he did it, his sexy girlfriend went back to reading her magazine.
Then I remember making a cocky, stupid decision, one that always made me end up the same way. After the kid had added everything up, I told him to throw in two bottles of Mad Dog 20-20. Hitting the wine too hard is when I start having problems.
The bill came to $619.00 for everything. There were seven full cardboard boxes to be carried out to the car. I signed the credit card receipt with a flourish, big circles and loops, “E.E. Cummings.” The kid didn’t notice.
As I was starting the motor, I took a last, long look back through the window at the girl. She was still on her stool at the end of the counter. Still reading her magazine. I knew she knew I was watching her, but she wouldn’t look up. The complete ice queen.
Unscrewing the cap on the Mogen David, I toasted her holding my bottle up and taking a long, deep wallop. Her haughty attitude didn’t matter. Mad Dog takes all the bumps out of the road.
I’d forgotten that the “Dog” ride I was beginning was my first since getting out of the hospital. For me, a run on Mogen David was like starting to fuck a five hundred pound female gorilla. All choice is gone. The gorilla lets you know when it’s time to quit. Sweet wine is like that.
Rocco was licking the cap, so I emptied the contents of the Milkbone box on to the blacktop in the parking lot and tore down the container and used it for a bowl. I poured a finger’s width on the bottom and he licked it up.
I kept heading east on Venice Boulevard in the hot night wind, sipping wine and watching pieces of L.A. blow across the windshield. When I got to Western Avenue, I turned north and continued until I passed the Wiltern Theatre at Wilshire. I’d thought I was simply driving, cruising aimlessly as before; but when I saw the Wiltern, I knew I was only a few blocks from the Dante family’s first house in L.A., outside Hancock Park on Van Ness. It was the first home the old man had purchased on income from Hollywood. Movie money. Blood money. I found the house and stopped in front.
