Chump Change

by Dan Fante

  More and more words gushed forth, like subway passengers pouring into the trains at rush hour. It had been twelve weeks since she’d quit tenth grade and driven with her boyfriend, a greedy crack dealer, to Hollywood from Muncie. His nickname was “Limp” because his right leg was two inches shorter than his left, a result of a motorcycle wreck when he was fourteen. After Limp dumped her, sticking her with two days back rent in a rooming house on Selma Avenue and never returning, she and an older girlfriend started giving blow jobs to men in cars on Sunset Boulevard, where she met McBeth who let her stay in a spare room on a mattress at his house for fifty dollars a day. Limp had a cousin named Debbie whom Amy had met once at IHOP on Sunset.

  Every night, Amy tried to get by the restaurant to see if she could find Debbie and persuade her to get a message to Limp: She was sorry that he’d seen her talking to Boyd down the hall that one and only time, because it really had meant nothing, but it probably was the reason Limp left that night without telling her or ever saying goodbye.

  We drank more and I listened. The syllables came like desperate boat people begging for attention. She seemed to be trying to use every word she knew before she passed out, or got too drunk to talk.

  I learned about her barmaid mother and her older sister, who were both drunks. About her abortion. About all the sadness and brutality and stupidity that happens to people when they’re on the street and making it the best way they can—stories that I’d heard a hundred times in recovery programs or in hospital nuthouse lock-down wards. She talked and ate cookies, and we drank, while Rocco slept motionless at the end of the bed and I watched HBO with the sound off.

  Amy’d read everything to make up for being homely and unable to communicate: History. Poetry. Fiction. Non-fiction. Crap. From Richard Nixon’s memoirs to Donald Trump to Og Mandino and Irving Wallace. Two or three books a week since she was ten years old. Her passions were penises and books.

  She knew my guys too: Hubert Selby, Hemingway, Steinbeck, e. e. cummings, Eugene O’Neil. Her favorite writer was William Faulkner. When she was drinking, she talked like he wrote.

  After most of the first bottle was gone, she became grateful and wanted to oblige my sexual needs, even though I didn’t really have any. She was highly-skilled as a cocksucker and began performing energetically on me for a couple of minutes, and then stopped because she realized that the sucking interfered with what she wanted to say about how good she was at giving head, so the blowjob turned into a handjob to enable her to continue speaking.

  After a while, I talked about my wife’s credit card that was about to be cancelled, and she interrupted to explain to me how Limp would “work” his customers to help them get cash advances on their plastic beyond their credit card limit. She’d assisted him, and made several of the calls herself. She offered to do the same for me.

  Amy used the room phone to make the call, saying that she was Mrs. Bruno Dante and explaining to a local bank manager which honored the card about how much short-term cash we needed, because we wanted to buy a rare Queen Ann table for our living room but we didn’t have the money until we could get back to New York and transfer funds. I thought she was overdoing it when she told the guy about our bad luck with food poisoning on our first trip to Los Angeles, and about how we preferred Universal Studios to Disneyland, because it had more live attractions for the kids.

  He put her on hold and checked the payment history on the card, or whatever they do, then came back on the line and said okay. I got dressed and we drove down to the bank to pick up the twenty-five hundred in cash before it closed at 4:00 p.m.

  Because we got the money, I kept on with the wine three more days and stayed in the room trying to stop my brain. I was beginning to realize that my father was dead. I kept the blinds closed and the TV tuned in to HBO and the other movie stations.

  On the first afternoon, I tried to write a poem for the old man. It had been years. What came out was awful. No good. It had been too long. I stopped because the wine was a higher priority.

  Amy was too young to drive, but by checking the phone book, we found a liquor store around on Sunset that would deliver food and booze right away if we tipped good. She took charge of that, and walking Rocco too.

  Being in the room drinking Dog was all that I wanted to do. But on the second day, I began having time lapses again. Chunks of hours got lost, and I knew that the wine was turning on me again. But I was in too deep to back out. It got worse, and sleep became almost impossible, so I drank more wine.

  If I did drift off, I would wake up in a few minutes, after having the same dream with the marching death squad in my brain—the same beaks of huge black birds on their faces.

  Twelve or twenty hours passed. I was awake, but not awake.

  Amy filled me in the next day. I had talked about death, and we had watched a Claude Rains’ movie. Also, I had called my ex-shrink in New York to say I was choking on my own gloom for the last time, but there had been no actual conversation because an answering service lady had picked up my call. Then Amy told me that we had walked to the newsstand, where I became a lunatic because I thought the guy had tried to shortchange me on a fifty dollar bill. I’d pulled down a rack full of magazines off the shelf and thrown them into the street. It all happened, but I recalled zip.

  Amy had become afraid and made me call Fabrizio later that night. Me and Fab had had a half-hour conversation in which I had made an admission and an apology for bashing his Country Squire, then a promise to return the car. She said Fab and I had discussed the funeral the next day and that I’d promised my brother I’d be there.

  My memory was a complete blank, but when it was light outside the next morning, Amy woke up and repeated to me all of what my end of the conversation had been and the other events that occurred. After the call, she made me stop the wine so I was able to take a shower. Then I drank several cold beers to prevent a slam.

  In a while, conscious, I started seeing a thousand evil snakes with human legs eating away the backs of my eyes and I felt a hot, jagged, twenty-two caliber bullet hole drilled through my head from temple to temple. The hole was being flossed by a bicycle chain.

  I puked for a long time, then took four aspirin and half a bottle of pink liquid for my gut. Amy force-fed me cold pizza and finally I slept okay for a few hours.

  While I was getting dressed to go to the funeral, Amy wanted me to talk about my relationship with my father since she had no memory of her own dad. What did it feel like to have a father and then have him die? I said that the old man and I were never close—that we lived three thousand miles apart, but that the space between us was immeasurable. We were composed of different colors: me, green; him red or blue. We had not ever connected, and I’d been a big disappointment in his life. I said that I didn’t feel anything, but Amy inspected my eyes and said that what she saw in them was pain.

  I left the motel in the Ford station wagon and followed Sunset Boulevard as it twisted and turned the whole distance to the Pacific Coast Highway. Then I headed north to Malibu. It was a slower way to go, but I didn’t feel solid enough to drive on the freeway. Amy stayed behind with Rocco and watched HBO movies.

  12

  OUR LADY OF MALIBU CHURCH IS A REDWOOD A-FRAME DEAL built up against the hills at the ocean end of Malibu Canyon in the late nineteen forties. When I was a kid, the hard oak pews were always stinging cold from the wet sea air, and the grey tile floor was waxed to an icy gloss. A perfect spot for God. And all the topics that were talked about from the pulpit by Father Brundage had only one thing in common—they were unrelated to the experience of regular human beings. As I drove by, looking for a place to park, I saw members of my family standing on the steps, in front, near the limos and the hearse. Not wanting anyone to see me, or the dents I’d put in my brother’s wagon, I located a spot on the street down the block behind an RV.

  I sat with the windows up and smoked until past the time for everyone to be inside. My mind had been critically missing the wine i
t needed to stay quiet, and now filled itself with thoughts of madness and imminent disaster. Panic glued me to the seat of the car.

  When I was finally able to go in, I stood by the holy water at the foyer entrance and let the iciness of the place mix with my sweat-soaked clothes. I breathed in and out and steadied myself.

  The mass had started, but the temple’s pews were mostly empty, except for the backs of the heads of a solid line of the Dante family and my wife Agnes. They occupied half a row up front near the coffin. My stomach wrenched at the sight of seeing my wife.

  There was a scattering of a dozen or so others in the church—I recognized some Malibu neighbors, a famous L.A. writer who admired my father’s out-of-print books, a sitcom director, and a few of my father’s screenwriter associates. I didn’t have to look to know that the expression on the cold meat in the open coffin would not be Dante’s, but some peculiar rendering of him that Mom and Fab and a bent ecclesiastical mortician had invented to mollify reality.

  My hand was shaking and resisted dipping itself into the clammy wetness of the holy water urn, but an instinct of compliance made me do it anyway. As I did, someone behind me put his fingers in too.

  Turning, I recognized my father’s old neighbor, Townsend O’Hagen, wearing an out-of-date pin-striped business suit and a red-band fedora in honor of the occasion. Seeing him, helped calm me down.

  During the anti-communist McCarthy hearings in the fifties, Townsend was blacklisted as a screenwriter and then made it worse for himself by naming names in front of the committee on TV, to save his own ass. According to Dante it ruined his movie career forever.

  I’d thought him dead, because no one in my family had mentioned his name for years, ever since he had moved out of Malibu and opened a used bookstore in Santa Monica. He looked swell. Prosperous. He was at least eighty. He smiled at me and I smiled back.

  He even managed to remember my name from when I’d gone to grammar school with his daughter, Kerry. “You’re Bruno,” he whispered. “Know who I am?” I smiled and nodded and said, “Sure, Towny O’Hagen.”

  He extended his condolences about my father, then followed behind me down the center aisle, where I sat next to my sister and Benny Roth in the family row. Towny occupied the next pew back, across from Paul Matsumoto, my father’s movie agent.

  The whole thing was over in half an hour, with everyone’s thoughts and Brundage’s prayers bouncing off the varnished casket. When the sad family, all dressed in black, had filed out down the aisle and stood outside in front of the church, the other attendees came up and gave Mom and my sister hugs. Fabrizio stood up tall in his Armani suit ($900 at May Company) and shook people’s hands.

  I stayed to the side, cowering, smoking cigarettes and talking to Townsend and my cousin John, a helluva film cameraman as well as a crackerjack auto mechanic. John gave me some mechanical pointers about what to look for in buying a used American car. Talking with them helped a little to quiet the jeering, critical voices in my mind.

  Standing there, too near my own feelings, close to panic, I impulsively hugged mother and lied, saying I had an appointment about a job and was not going with them. Then I kissed my sister, Maggie, and shook Fab’s hand and apologized again. He took his car keys back but wouldn’t meet my eyes or talk to me.

  I was about to walk away, not considering my mode of transportation back to L.A., when Townsend mentioned that he was living in a rented duplex up in Benedict Canyon, “near the precise location shown on the Maps Of The Stars Homes where Valentino publicly inseminated his first horse.” He asked if I wanted a ride.

  As we were leaving, my wife confronted me, insisting that I explain my absence from her over the last four days. While my mother and my family looked on, she loudly hissed her demand for a divorce and accused me of being a drug addict and an AIDS carrier, stealing her credit card and ruining her life.

  It was cause enough for me to lose control, scream, and act crazy on the front steps of the church. My brother-in-law, Benny Roth, stepped in to calm me down, and Agnes backed off, realizing that she’d picked the wrong time, politically, to start any shit.

  In a few minutes, she and my family were packed aboard the limos, ready to go to the graveyard. I located Townsend across the parking lot, waving me toward him from behind the wheel of his old Caddy convertible. I got in and we headed back toward Hollywood.

  Being away from the coffin and the church made me feel better. Near Topanga Canyon, I asked Townie to stop for cigarettes at a liquor store. I came out with the smokes and a jug of Shenley’s for the two of us. At first, he turned me down, but after a couple of nips on the bottle, he was in a good mood and started singing, “Tura Lura Lura” and the Latin version of, “Oh Come All Ye Faithful.” He did them both in a heavy Dublin accent, as we passed the whiskey bottle across the seat to each other.

  The whiskey made him chatty, and he had lots of stories he wanted to tell me about the famous actresses and production secretaries he and Robin Hood had partied with.

  Townie was a wonderful storyteller and his voice reverberated like an announcer on a old-time radio drama. Fights, week-long drunks, ex-wives with knives, lawsuits, jails. He filled the car with poetry. Most of what he said was exaggerated, but it was magic.

  Then he got serious, and said it was important for me to know how it was for movie writers like him and Jonathan Dante fifty years ago in L.A. So he filled me in about how the contract system at the studios worked, and how the producers were permitted to mistreat the in-house screenwriters before there was a union. Writers had no say whatever.

  When I asked about the black list, he didn’t want to talk about it at first. Then, he took a big snort, changed his mind, and started in. He had gone to two or three “sympathetic” meetings because he’d been invited to attend by an actress with big tits whom he’d been trying to date. According to Townsend, these gatherings were 80% cocktail party and 20% talk. Harmless stuff, a threat to no one. But names were taken down, and later that list got people into trouble.

  He said that Dante was lucky, because he had always refused to join groups and did not want to be identified with the Hollywood egos, insincerity and bullshit. The old man never got involved.

  After World War II the film business hit a slump. Influence, and whom you knew at the studio, were important in getting the good writing assignments. My father was what Townsend called, “reverse-blacklisted.” It happened because he refused to be part of any “in” groups or hang out socially with the “right” people. Townsend laughed and said that my father’s “good luck” was that he’d been too blunt with people, had changed agents a lot, and had a reputation for a bad temper. Kissing ass was impossible for Dante. Once, he’d even punched out the producer, Val Lewton.

  Townsend remembered that my father had spent the next couple of years, until 1951, writing a novel, without a screen assignment. But eventually, a desperate producer with a handful of money and a tight shooting schedule called, needing a “safe” screenwriter to rework a botched script.

  When we crossed Sunset, heading north on La Brea, I showed Townsend where to drop me off by the Starburst Motel. I handed him the jug, and when he took a last, long pull and brought it down, I saw tears in his eyes. He and my father were from the other city. The L.A. that was gone forever. “You remind me of him,” he said. “You have his disposition…May the road rise up to meet you.”

  I said, “Thanks for the ride.”

  By the time the car door swung open, he was smiling again and shook my hand. When he pulled out, his driver’s window was down, and I heard him start to sing the first notes of a Christmas tune from a mindless forties movie whose name I couldn’t remember.

  Rocco was sick. He snarled when we tried to pet him or come near his food dish. Amy said that he hadn’t eaten much of anything since his fight, and that most of the time he was just sleeping. I went out again and walked to the liquor store, where I bought a carton of milk and some Mogen David wine and a the quart size of Ja
ck Daniels’. I remembered that dogs like milk.

  On the shelf with the magazines was a whole section of newspapers and fold-up publications that advertised used cars for sale. I purchased the thickest one, containing the most ads.

  When we tried to get Rocco to drink some of the milk in his bowl, he refused. Then Amy heated a pan-full on the stove, put whiskey in it, and he drank over half the contents before going back to asleep. Her mother had owned dogs, and Amy said that she could tell from experience when something was wrong. “Ha-he’s in pa-pain,” she said. “Th-th-that’s wh-wh-why he da-dada-da-drank th-tha-that sha-shit. Da-dog’s da-da-don’t na-normally da-drink wa-wine or wha-wha-wha-wha-whiskey. Ha-he’s sa-sick.”

  When I opened a new bottle of Mad Dog, she told me that she would leave if I wouldn’t promise to stay off wine. I agreed that I would, which I knew was a good thing anyway. I tried to read an old novel by Daniel Mainwaring but my mind kept drifting to thoughts of my father. It had been a long time since I’d thought seriously about writing a poem, but I wanted to try. Half an hour later, pages from a yellow legal pad littered the motel room floor. The stuff was pretentious and self-conscious. Not poetry. Worse than Ferlinghetti’s worst, most contrived, pompous, insane, drug-crazed nonsense drool. It confirmed to me that I was a liar and an imposter, certainly not a poet.

  Amy was sure that I was too critical and wanted me to read one of them to her and bribed me with the promise of a blow job. I attempted a delivery of the best one out loud but it was so bad that I stopped in the middle in disgust and threw the torn shreds of it across the room. She laughed at me, but she sucked my dick anyway, with long, tingling, deep up and down gulps until I blasted off to Mars.