by Dan Fante
Seeing the place again in the darkness swarmed my mind with thoughts of another life. It had been thirty years or more since I’d lived in the place.
The old man had bought it because his agent, Harry Goldstone, had felt it would be a good address for a successful Hollywood screen-writer and because it was close to Paramount. Harry negotiated a great deal on the place.
The house was paid for entirely by Dante’s movie salary earnings. The old man had finally stopped turning down lucrative film assignments and had completely given up being a novelist. After years of writing straight fiction and nearly starving, it was an easy decision.
We moved to Malibu when I was still young, but I could vividly remember this house and his rages here. It was here that, day in and day out, he rewrote stacks of scripts and reworked scenes on shooting deadlines. Here he had begun to earn the big money. Success and rage stuck to every wall of the place like black jam.
In this house, I was to experience what happens when a passionate artist gives up what he loves and comes to detest himself. Here, I had witnessed my father’s drunkenness and seen him treat those closest to him with contempt and bitterness, while he’d watched his pay checks get bigger and bigger.
And now, sitting in the station wagon, it was Christmas time thirty years later. Looking at the house, I realized how Jonathan Dante might have spent summer nights pacing the master bedroom balcony, a glass of scotch on the rail, raising his rough laborer’s fists to the sky, and cursing himself and God for letting him piss away his talent for a Hollywood paycheck.
10
I DECIDED TO DRIVE SOME MORE. TOUR AROUND L.A. I’D BEEN hitting the Mad Dog pretty good, taking long pulls as I stopped at each traffic light. I rode through Hancock Park, Mid-Wilshire, then headed back toward West Hollywood. When I got to La Brea, I swung north again. My plan was no plan. Float. Drink.
At the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard, I stopped for the red. It was then that I saw them. Hustlers. Boys. In the deadness of my haze, I wanted to fuck them all, suck every dick in a frenzy.
A blond kid, about eighteen, in a red halter top and cutoff jeans waved at me from a stand-up pay phone. Seeing that I was watching, he grabbed his crotch and smiled.
I tried to pull the car to the side to talk to him, but my leg wasn’t listening clearly to my head’s motor instructions. Slow motion had inhabited my brain. I knew that my foot would eventually go from the brake to the gas pedal, but it was taking great concentration. When the light changed, I heard a horn honking angrily behind me.
While I was re-thinking the directions to make the gas pedal work, I realized that there was a young black guy at the passenger door holding up two fingers. “Two blocks man,” he leered. “Just ride me two blocks to Fountain. Okay?”
I nodded and spoke. “Okay, sure, get in.” My foot went back on the gas and started working okay again. The black kid got in, but the asshole motorist behind me kept honking and Rocco, who seemed passed out and unable to move across the seat, refused to budge. I had to drag him by his legs to make room for the passenger.
Once he was in the wagon and I had pulled away from the light, the black kid’s pitch changed. “So, what are you into?” he asked. “What’s your thing?”
“Tonight it’s sucking and fucking…and not thinking.”
“Your dog…is he dead?”
“He’s a sleeper.” I pointed to the bottle between my legs.
Looking around, he noticed the cardboard boxes in the back seat filled with cans and bottles and dozens of bags of junk food and cookies. “You’re into candy and potato chips big time, right?”
“Right.”
“I lied,” he said half-smiling, half-leering, “about the ride—I ain’t lookin’ for no ride.” He was tense. He acted as if he were high on “rock” or some kind of speed. The smile was a cheat on his face.
“What did you have in mind?” I asked, concentrating on the road to make sure that I was still steering the car okay.
When I looked back, he had unzipped his fly and was working his hand up and down a long, limp black dick.
“Want to suck me off?—Fifty bucks.” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I suck you—that’s fifty, too—want to fuck me, that’s a hundred—half-and-half is one-fifty—that’s the menu, baby.”
“Okay, good…” I said, lying, turned off, suspecting that what he was after was money for more “rock,” not sex. Suddenly, I wanted to get him out of the car so that I could go back to the boy in the red halter top or pull over to the side and sleep…
He saw me losing interest. “You like pussy, too?”
“A personal favorite.”
“Listen to what I’m tellin’ you, I got me some sweet young white hole stayin’ at my place—pretty, too—tight little pussy—she from New York…she love drinkin’ too…she fifteen, no shit, I saw her ID—suck your dick till it fall off—do anything I tell her—just give her some of that mean red piss you been drinkin’ and let her pet your dog—she love to watch herself in the mirror take it up the ass and suck dick—nasty bitch—you can have her for all night…wanna go…?”
I hated his hustle. “How much,” I asked, bored.
“All night, two-hundred,” he said, his brain speeding and out of control.
“Let’s forget it.”
He was desperate and had no patience. “Fuck, man—a hundred, then—FUCK—I need the money—you lookin’ at me—you know I need the money.”
“Twenty-five,” I said, sure it would get rid of him.
“Okay—deal—FUCK…you too drunk, baby—fucked up—how I know you got any money at all?”
We were at Sunset Boulevard and La Brea, half a mile from where I picked him up. I didn’t want to drive any more. I needed to pull over and sleep. “OK,” I said, removing a fistful of fives and tens from my pants’ pocket. It was part of the cash from my last four unemployment checks. “I’m rich, see?”
“Let’s go to my place—it’s just five minutes—you can fuck her all night—it’s on Santa Monica, past Western—not so far—she take good care of your dick. First, you pay me the twenty-five.”
I bumped the big Ford against the curb when I stopped. “Bring her back here,” I said. “I’ll wait for you. Twenty minutes.”
“She won’t come out the house—you gotta go with me—she don’t trust nobody.”
I took a ten dollar bill from my pocket and handed it to him, then reached back and pulled three bags of Malomars and a couple of packages of the coconut chocolate chip cookies from the boxes and gave those to him too. “Give her this stuff and the money,” I said. “She’ll come. And tell her that Bruno said Merry Christmas.”
“Bruno?—bitch want money, Bruno—not no cookies.”
“Bring her back here. I’ll give you fifty more if you bring her here to me.”
“You fucked up, Bruno—you crazy—you look crazy—been suckin’ on that mean wine too long—don’t be sendin’ me to run down no pussy and not be here when I come back.” I handed him another five. “I’ll be here. What’s her name?”
“Amy.”
“Okay. What’s your name?”
“Call me McBeth, like the play.”
“Right,” I said.
A long time later, I woke up with Rocco barking and someone at my driver’s window. A girl. Young, fifteen or sixteen. She wasn’t pretty and she was very skinny, but she was smiling. I smiled back.
As my mind cleared, I saw McBeth at the other door, motioning me to let him in, so I popped the button. Rocco was snarling at him and he was afraid to get in. I held the dog by the collar.
“Sorry, Bruno, it take too long finding da ho—two hours.” By my expression, he could see that I wasn’t impressed with her. “Yeah, I know, she skinny as shit and she got a horse face, but she fuck you till you beg to get yo dick back and she smart too—whacchaamatta you dog, man—he like me before.”
“He was asleep before.” I hefted Rocco onto the floor of the back seat. He didn’t resist and c
urled up. They got in.
When Amy talked, it was with an acute stutter. “Is th-th-that animal va-va-vicious,” she asked.
“Is McBeth?”
“A pa-pa-putz, a ba-bad business man but na-na-not va-vicious.”
“You’ll have to take your chances,” I said.
She smiled again. “I la-la like Ma-ma-malomar ca-ca-cookies.”
At McBeth’s suggestion, I headed the Ford West on Sunset to Laurel Canyon, then north up into the hills. Looking over at Amy, I could see that she weighed under ninety pounds. A body of a child’s. Her Hollywood-hooker costume of black high-heeled boots and thigh-high tights and a halter top made her look like a pre-teen playing dress up. Her tits were two knuckle-sized protrusions in the elastic top. A mile up the canyon, McBeth directed me to pull in behind the parking lot of the Country Store Market, so we’d be in darkness and out of view of the street. I did what he requested, and parked the car.
“Give the girl some wine—she love to get stupid—she love the shit,” he suggested. I took a long pull at the jug and passed it to Amy. He was right. She hammered at it for half a minute with long, savage swigs.
“Fuck,” I said, “you are a drinker.”
“I ca-ca-ca-can pa-party,” she said back. Then she opened a purse that was crammed full of unwrapped Malomars, removed one and took a big bite.
I began to laugh from somewhere deep in my guts. Being with her and McBeth and my father’s old bull terrier in a deserted parking lot in the Hollywood Hills in the Santa Ana wind, eating cookies and drinking Mad Dog struck me funny. It was like listening from outside my head. I passed McBeth the bottle and asked him if he wanted a hit.
He pushed it back. “I want my money, man. Fifty bucks. We doin’ binnes. You gonna fuck this ho? Yes or no?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, still laughing, heavily under the numbness of Mad Dog wine, indifferent to whether I got fucked or not. To make McBeth happy, I started pulling clumps of wadded-up bills from my pants’ pocket and setting them on the seat for sorting. Amy took this as a cue, and bounced over Rocco into the cargo area in the back of the wagon, a Malomar in each hand. Half a minute later, she had managed to get her clothes off without having to set either of the cookies down. She was bony and pale and without embarrassment. Like a ten-year old boy.
I was having trouble separating the money and watching her antics. To me, everything she did was funny. She reached back over the seat and began petting and feeding Rocco part of her Malomar, her narrow ass jutting into the air. That was funny too.
McBeth was quick. With one hand on the door knob, he scooped up and grabbed all the bills that he could, then jumped from the car and ran. When I looked over, he was gone. All I could hear were his footsteps. That was funny too. I yelled, “McBeth, you thieving nigger fuck, take her too…Don’t leave her here.”
Outside in the blackness, the footsteps came back to the rear of the car by the cargo door. “Okay homie,” I heard him yell. “You right. Fair is fair.” Then the tailgate door of the wagon popped open and he was inside next to Amy.
They grappled, but though she attempted to stop him, he was too strong and too fast, and he snatched up all her clothes and her purse, jumped out, slamming the tailgate door closed again. “Now she all yours, white boy—crazy motherfucker,” he yelled. “You so smart Bruno, you figure this out. I’m done with both you now. Fuck you!”
I struggled out of the car, but he was gone into the hot night wind with my money and her stuff. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. The wine had done its job.
In the dome light from the car’s interior, she looked bewildered, her thin arms and legs crossed across her pale torso. Like the boat people. Naked and luckless. Removing my jacket, I handed it back to her. Then I needed a few deep pulls at the jug—not to consider the situation, but because there wasn’t anything else left to do.
We were a long time like that. Her in the back and me behind the wheel. I lit a cigarette. Then another. I could see her eyes studying me, expressionlessly, in the rearview mirror.
Finally, self-consciously, I smiled at her. It took a few seconds, but then she smiled too. I reached back and passed her the jug of Mad Dog and a fresh bag of Malomars. I figured, fuck it!
When I woke up, I was sweating. The pains above each eye were not synchronized. One stabbed, the other jabbed. I was being punched by different-sized staplers at half-second intervals. Someone was near me—above my head, breathing hard. Panting. I remembered Rocco.
I had been sleeping on something hard and gravelly. When I squinted my eyes, it was against airless intense sunlight and suffocating heat. I realized then where I was—the rear storage area of my brother Fabrezio’s Ford Country Squire Station Wagon.
I had no idea where it was parked, but I knew that this wasn’t jail. Looking further, I could see mounds of groceries all around me on the floor of the car. Food everywhere. Opened luncheon meat packages and piles of spilled corn flakes. Slices of bread and ruptured cookie boxes stewing in scattered soap powder. My pillow was an open bag of Fritos’ chips. Crumbs of the stuff clung to my hair. I peeled something sticky off my sweating chest. It was a section of crushed Malomar cookie, chocolate and marshmallow stuck to my skin.
Next to me was the skinny body of a boy without a dick—segments of the memory of the night before were coming back in grey flashes—Angie?—Edith?—Amy!
The immediate problem was the brutal heat and sunlight. With effort, I raised my head and looked backward above the window line and out the glowing, flat rear glass of the wagon. We appeared to be parked in a parking structure. The back of the car was engulfed by the angle of the brutal sun. The front was not. It looked much cooler up front.
Fab’s wagon had power windows but the journey and effort to travel to the ignition switch next to the steering column was out of the question. It might be possible to make it to a shaded area in the rear seat but I was still incapable of attempting anything. My body wouldn’t obey. I settled for wetting my raw throat with several swigs from the bottom of the Mad Dog bottle. It helped.
Gradually, I became aware of the sounds of car doors opening and closing. Footsteps. Voices. Amy’s bony knee was resting in my crotch. Her body was sweating too. Naked. Shining in the heat.
When I moved her knee off my balls, her eyes opened and she smiled. I was forming a thought to make a sound to talk, when a security parking attendant guy in a uniform and white shirt with patches began banging on the hood of the station wagon. “Hey,” he yelped—he had epaulets like the cops on the Garden State Parkway—“You are directed to move this vehicle immediately. Impeding access to an entrance is a violation.”
Rocco charged the glass and snarled until the dickhead backed off. I covered my genitals with my free hand, leaned forward above the seat, and waved and nodded YES up and down to make him go away.
Then I tried looking through the back window again, squinting past the pitiless glare to see what was making the guard guy so aggressive. The rear of the wagon was a few feet from a door. The lettering on the door read, “Cedars Hospital. Morgue Entrance.”
The car had a quarter of a tank of gas left when we headed west on Sunset out of Hollywood. It was the wrong direction to buy something to cure my headache, but I wasn’t thinking good yet.
Driving slow, I slammed the last of a pint of Ten High and felt nothing. Amy sat quietly against the passenger door, naked except for my green army jacket, which she wore unzipped and wide open. She was eating handfuls of chocolate chip cookies, feeding some to Rocco. I could tell that she avoided conversation because of her stutter. That was okay with me.
She found a brush in the glove compartment and began to rake it through her hair, using Fab’s sun visor mirror, humming, unphased by the prospect of a new day. Then she did talk: “You ra-rich, Bruno ba-baby?” she said.
I wanted no conversation. “Just Bruno, no baby,” I said back.
“I wa-would la-la-like you to ba-b-ba-buh-buy me a Ka-ka-kup of ka-ka-c
offee and pa-pa-pay meee for la-la-la-luhh-hhlast na-night. Is tha-tha-there a pa-pa-potential of tha-that?”
“Maybe,” I said, struggling self-consciously to get my rattling fist into my pants’ pocket, “I’ll see.” Then I remembered McBeth sweeping my wadded-up bills off the seat and running away.
I checked the other pocket, the left one, where I usually kept the bigger bills. (That was because, sometimes in bars, I would forget that I had my money in the left side, too, and I could trick my mind and not spend that pocket.) I felt a bulge and knew I was okay, surprised that she hadn’t gone through my pockets and ripped me off while I was asleep. “Looks like we’re in luck,” I said, patting the pocket. “It’s pay day.”
She saw my expression. “Da-da-da-did you tha-think I ta-ta-tahhhh took ya-your mah-mah-money? La-la-like Mmmm-mmmmaaaack-Beth?”
“I wasn’t sure.”
“I’m a ka-ka-cock sa-sucker fa-for ma-money, na-not a tha-thief, tha-there is a da-da-distinction.” She slid her hand between her thighs and thrust a wet, smelly finger under my nose. “Pa-pa-pay me now,” she demanded. “I uh-uh-earned it.”
“Jesus, how much,” I said, reacting with nausea to the smell.
“Ta-ta-twenty fa-fa-five. I ba-ba been ga-getting fa-fifty but sa-since la-Lady MamaMc-ba-Beth ta-took ya-you off la-la-last na-night all ya-you na-need to pa-pay is ta-ta-ta-twenty-fa-five.”
I handed her my folded money, unable to peel any off because of my shaking. “Take fifty,” I said, my head hammering.
She peeled off the bill and handed the money back. “Tha-thanks,” she said wearing a big smile, “fa-fa for the gra-gra-gra-gra-grat-tuuuu…the tip.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“Wa-want me ta-ta-to ga-give ya-you ha-ha-ha-ha-head ra-right here in the ka-car wha-while ya-you da-drive? I na-na-know I ka-kan ma-make you ka-come? Ya-ya you’ll fa-feel ba-better.”
