Mooch

by Dan Fante

  I shoved mom’s note down into my pants pocket, then locked my P.O. box.

  Outside, at the top of the steps, I was hit by a blast of summer heat and dizziness, so I sat down. The mighty Pacific sun had worked its way above the buildings, blinding me. A dozen nearby roofs had become shimmering, punishing, mosks: vengeful fire gods reflecting their contempt on anything not young and tan and imbued with L.A.’s frenzied TV optimism.

  Below me were people, locals coming and going around the Venice Boulevard traffic circle. Skateboarders. Mothers pushing strollers. Rollerbladers. People attending to the business of Monday. Lighting a Lucky, I took a deep hit and leaned back out of the glitter. Soon the day would be swarming. Pizza stands and ten-dollar parking lots would fill with tourists and immigrants talking in thirty different languages. Another perfect, cloudless summer day in the endless California dream. And my brother Rick was dead. Insignificant by comparison. Nothing at all.

  A girl in a tight two-piece bathing suit skipped by me up the steps into the post office, her thighs brown and flawless. A depilatory commercial.

  I opened Cynthia’s envelope. Clipped to the cover of ‘Compatibility’ was a note on Victorian-looking pink paper telling me how much she liked the story. Little fat angels with roses in their mouths floated along the paper’s border. Cin’s telephone number was there too.

  The post office has pay phones in front, so I punched in the number and let it ring.

  I had forgotten Cynthia was deaf. When she answered, her voice had a distant, officious tone. She asked me to speak up and told me that an amplification gadget was attached to her earpiece.

  I immediately realized that the call was a mistake. I was unprepared for conversation. My brain began pounding. Cin started asking questions, normal conversation shit. Too much. How was I? Was I writing?

  ‘I’m sweating,’ I said. ‘My brother Rick is dead. How are you?’

  Speaking his name triggered a phantom. Suddenly Richard Dante’s sour face was in my mind: a sneering, twisted genie. Part hangover, part insanity from my motel room. It felt like the asshole was standing next to me on the concrete—in my face the way he used to be when we were kids.

  I began shaking.

  Attempting to save myself I hung up the telephone. But I could smell this ghost’s odious, stinking breath. To quell the stink I lit a new Lucky Strike, took a deep hit, and sat back down on the concrete.

  In a few minutes I was calmer, alone again.

  In my pocket I found more quarters, got up, and re-dialed Cin.

  ‘Bruno, you rang off.’

  ‘AT&T. The fucking telephone company. The Military-Industrial Complex.’

  ‘…Much better. I can hear you quite clearly now. Did you say someone died?’

  ‘You said you liked “Compatibility”?’

  ‘You have a great imagination. Have you written other things, more stories, more screenplays?’

  ‘I lied about the film script, Cin. I’ve never written a screenplay.’ (There he was—again—suddenly. Next to me. Less form than voice this time. About twenty years old, hissing in my ear…‘Wait! Ha-ha, my brother, a writer?’ he ridiculed. ‘When did that happen? Is this some kind of idiotic, witless, preposterous attempt at humor?’)

  I was shaking again. Dizzy.

  (‘Who is this twat? I know! This is the thick-thighed fat-ass blonde from the bar? That Australian bitch?’)

  ‘Bruno, you have to speak up. I can’t hear you.’

  ‘I’m not really a writer.’ (‘Whaddya know, the truth! Our father was the writer, a giant of words, a poet, a raconteur. Tell her that. What you are is a regurgitating, moron fuck. A pathetic outpatient.)

  ‘What, Bruno…I’m sorry.’

  I was dizzy, passing out. I had to hold on to the frame of the phone stand to keep myself upright. ‘Cin, I have to call you back.’

  ‘…Why? What’s wrong?’

  ‘I’m a telemarketer…An unemployed boiler room phone guy. I’m not a writer. Not really.’

  (‘Thanks for the honesty, bitch! What you are is a loser. A Twelve-Step recovery-home cripple. Now tell this deaf kooze about the twelve hundred dollars you lost gambling at that fucking video game. Tell her, cheese dick!)

  ‘Please don’t hang up. “Compatibility” is your story? It’s a good story. You wrote it, correct?’

  My body was breathing hard, sucking air in and out, half-coughing words into the phone. ‘Let’s get together for a drink, Cin. I want to see you.’ (‘Drink? What drink? You want pussy. Say it! Pussy, pussy, pussy. You can smell the tangy stink of her snatch right here over the phone. Tell her that.)

  ‘Please slow down. I’m losing what you’re saying.’

  I formed the words carefully. ‘I want you to ask me over to your house. Can we get together?’ (‘Now it comes! The begging! Shit-pants little Bruno.)

  ‘That’s sweet.’

  ‘Is today okay?’

  ‘You sound…a bit odd, Bruno. Are you alright?’

  ‘I said my brother’s dead…I just found out.’ (‘What happens when you’re in the sack with this fat kooze and you decide you want a blow job? Think about it! What do you do, use fuckin’ sign language?’)

  ‘I’m terribly sorry, Bruno.’

  ‘Cin…I like you. I like watching your eyes move while you read my lips. I need to talk. To be with someone. Do you mind?’ (‘Fuck you! You don’t give a rat’s dick about my rotting body. You want pussy!’)

  ‘I’ve got appointments and errands to run until this afternoon.’

  ‘I remember Cin, you like tequila. I’ll pick some up on my way. Okay?’

  ‘About three? I’ll be home at three.’

  ‘I want to kiss you, Cin.’

  ‘You’re very impulsive.’

  ‘You want to kiss me too—don’t you?’ (‘I’m about to shit myself here…’)

  ‘…Okay. But Bruno, only to talk. I’m quite serious. I don’t like moving fast when I first meet someone. Please understand.’

  ‘I know your address. Laurel Canyon, right?’

  ‘I’ll see you at three.’ (‘Outstanding, dickless! You have the verbal acuity of a Central Avenue crack dealer.)

  There was a homeless guy at the bottom of the post office steps. Young and drunk. In his twenties. Toothless gaps when he talked. Seeing me smoking, he waved his hand, pointing at my Lucky cigarette.

  I handed him one. When he saw what it was—that it had no filter—he tossed it over his shoulder into the street. ‘Got anything else?’ he cracked. ‘I smoke filters.’

  Cin’s house on stilts and her big red cat named Camus had come in a divorce. Gerald, the ex-husband, was an important corporate guy in the London/L.A. music business. Nineteen years into the marriage, one night at dinner over a bottle of Pouille Fousse, Gerry let Cin know that he took it up the ass. He’d decided to go full-time gay with his Puerto Rican lover, Ugo. Along with the house and Camus and a permanent case of the empties in the divvy up, Cin got four thousand a month in alimony.

  It took me two hours, a shower, a Burger King Whopper and half the quart of Stoli, and blasting my car radio, to quiet my brother Rick’s voice. My Chrysler was running good except for a funny engine smell, and the A/C was blowing cold. I took Venice Boulevard east toward downtown L.A. When I got to La Cienega, I turned left to Pico, then over at Crescent Heights. Crescent Heights turns into Laurel Canyon Boulevard when you get into the Hollywood Hills.

  Chapter Twelve

  CYNTHIA’S HOUSE WAS two miles up Laurel Canyon in the hills. On stilts. Wonderland Avenue. The back of the place, the garage, was against the road on the land side, and the front deck extended out over the canyon’s sheer wall. In L.A., the term for that is ‘cantilevered’. From inside, at an angle, when I looked out below, I could see the long poles that anchored the bottom of the place to the side of the hill. Then—a hundred foot drop—straight down. My mind reported to me that any minute the whole deal would give way and cascade my ass to the bottom of the gully. In
the old days in Hollywood—the 40s and 50s—according to my father, Jonathan Dante, who worked as a contract screenwriter at Columbia and MGM during those years, Laurel Canyon was where all the brothels were located. Gambling and hookers. Many nights, rather than drive north on the Coast Highway to Malibu, Pop would shack up and play poker in Hollywood at The Garden of Allah Hotel at the mouth of the canyon on the L.A. side. Nat West. Scott Fitzgerald. A.I. Bizzarades. Bud Schulberg. Faulkner. Willie Saroyan—all came and went at The Garden of Allah.

  There were two copies of my story ‘Compatibility’ on her piano. One was mine, and the other one was a Xerox duplicate Cynthia had made for herself on the copy machine in her den/office. She had all the gadgets an animator needs to work at home—an oversized computer, a printer, a fax machine, even a scanner.

  Cin’s hearing aid was on, and we drank more tequila sunrises and sat outside reading my story to each other while Camus the cat lolled between us alternately demanding affection, then displaying fat indifference.

  By the end, on page twenty-five, the place where the guy selling the dating service leaves and never comes back, Cin was drunk and had tears in her eyes. She put her hand on top of mine. ‘Wonderful,’ she whispered.

  ‘Thanks,’ said I.

  ‘You’re better than Raymond Carver.’

  ‘Raymond who?’

  She handed me a pen. ‘Autograph it, please. Inscribe the following: “To Cynthia: In appreciation of our new and wonderful friendship.” Then sign it, “Your devoted, Bruno.”’

  It was my first autograph of anything, to anybody. I dumped fat Camus off the couch and was about to write on the cover when Rick Dante’s voice began clanging in my head, louder now: (‘Hey pussy, wait! Write this: “I will do anything for a piece of ass.” Then sign it, “Love always, Approval-drooling Twatbrain.”’)

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Cin wanted to know, her thousand-year-old eyes watching my lips.

  I handed the pen back. ‘It’s devoted,’ I said. ‘Devoted is excessive.’

  ‘One day The New Yorker or L. A. Magazine will publish this story. You’ll be famous, and all I’ll have are these scraps of paper.’

  ‘I’ll never be famous.’

  ‘I want to commemorate this afternoon. Is that so fucking excessive?’

  Camus the cat was waddling toward a corduroy chair in the living room. I pointed at him. ‘That’s devoted,’ I said.

  She handed me back the pen. I finished my drink then wrote, ‘For Cynthia, devoted best wishes. Bruno Dante.’

  She read the inscription then grinned. ‘Splendid. Date it too.’

  I did, then looked around in my head for Rick Dante. He was gone.

  ‘You’re the Shake-fuckin’-speare of West Hollywood,’ Cin slurred. ‘You’re Tennyson. John-fucking-Fowles.’

  ‘I’m Stan Laurel…Will you suck my dick?’

  Cynthia laughed. ‘Absolutely.’

  For thirty years I’d had the dream off and on. After Cin fell asleep I eventually dozed off and had it again that night: at Saint Monica’s Grammar School when I was eleven, mean-assed Sister Sirenus caught me and Paul Foley in the back of the room fooling around, having fun at the expense of weird Rudy Espinoza.

  Sister had ordered Espinoza up front by the blackboard to give the answer to a history question. On his way up our row Paul chanted, ‘Rudy, Rudy why so fruity?’ Hearing it, I chimed in. The class laughed.

  Espinoza was a simple kid, a fact that was common knowledge to all including Sister Sirenus who liked to use him when she felt the need to illustrate how stupid American students were as compared to the more precocious Catholic-educated kids in the Ireland school system where she grew up.

  As usual, Rudy had been daydreaming and blew the history answer and was given five demerits. Everybody laughed. Once again SS had demonstrated how stupid and miserably feebleminded us American kids were.

  He marched back past me to his desk.

  It was then that I made the mistake of getting caught making a jerk-off gesture—pounding my doubled fist against the crotch of my school-blue slacks. More class laughter. SS saw me do it, and then saw Paul Foley imitating my hand movement.

  She squelched the room’s sniggering by loudly slapping her pointer against the top of her desk. She had not traveled seven thousand miles to be saddled with a room full of hypnotized, drooling buffoons—dim-witted, mannerless hooligans. She slapped the desk again and again with her ruler. Our fifth grade class had just born witness to the commission of mortal sin. Full stop. This was no laughing matter.

  Justice was swift for me and Foley. Our lesson was humility. The room was deadly silent as he was ordered up front and given six whacks across his open palms—three on each hand. Zing, zing, zing!!…Zing, zing, zing!! And twenty-five demerits; the most any of us could remember one kid getting, all at one time.

  I got twelve whacks—six on each hand. Then Sister let the class know that she was reserving the full measure of my penance until after school. She needed time to confer with her Lord and Savior.

  At five exactly, I waited alone, scared shitless, in the cold classroom for Sister Sirenus. It was getting dark, and the ticking of the wall’s ancient clock continued to remind me that I was missing the last bus back up the Coast Highway to Malibu.

  Sister Sirenus shuffled in in her black Zorro getup half an hour later. I kept my eyes on the linoleum, but I could sense the fury of saved-up convent rage. Did I know precisely what I had done?

  I nodded.

  Was I aware of the seriousness, the evil, of the hand gesture I had used in her classroom that day? Did I know what that hand gesture really meant?

  I nodded again.

  I could feel SS’s face getting redder. Did I know that every time a boy like me committed the sin of masturbation, it was the same as murdering one baby. God saw everything. God was watching me right now. Did I know that me and every other boy who masturbated was no different than Adolph Hitler? Did I know what abortion was?

  I shook my head. I wasn’t sure what abortion was.

  Sister wrote it on the blackboard in big capital letters; ‘ABORTION’, then snapped her chalk, drawing a thick line beneath the word.

  Masturbation was a form of abortion. Murdering the unborn was called abortion. The corpses of the babies I had murdered would gnaw the flesh from my skin for all eternity in the fires of damnation. Sister wanted a note from my mother verifying that I had told her precisely what I’d done. Sister wanted it on her desk by the following morning. I was to go to confession on Saturday, inform Father Burbage of my sin, using the word ‘masturbation’ in a complete sentence, and ask for his and God’s forgiveness.

  It was over thirty years later. Satan and I had become old buddies, but I still hated the fucking dream.

  In the morning, she was gone while I stayed in bed. Off to submit a portfolio full of sketches for a walking toothpaste tube to some guy at Paramount TV. A big, sad woman with wonderful fat tits. So needy. Wanting somebody to replace the vanished husband and fill the hole in her heart that she could not fill herself. Her paintings and sketches were full of it; the house was full of it. Emptiness.

  There was no tequila left in the kitchen, so I switched to scotch with my coffee and ate microwaved English tea cakes in bed. An hour later, I realized I had overdone the scotch when I started making phone calls to Jimmi’s sister’s number. Hitting the re-dial button again and again. Hanging up when her machine came on.

  My room at the Prince Carlos was paid for the next five days and I had plenty of money in my pants, so, feeling good about what Cynthia said about my story, I decided to try some more writing.

  On my way back to the motel, still drunk on the Australian girl’s scotch, I pulled into a big liquor store deal on Robertson Boulevard to stock up. Benny J.’s Wine & Spirit Mart.

  The place had everything: a toy aisle, greeting cards, even a vitamin section. I bought a carton of Lucky cigarettes, three quarts of vodka, cranberry juice, orange juice, and cold cuts and m
ayonnaise for my motel room’s little fridge, beer, several jars of cashews for breaks and watching TV, a jigsaw puzzle, and a pack of 100-sheet, 20-lb erasable typing bond. The excursion took an hour. Up and down the lanes, pushing a red plastic cart.

  When it came my turn in the check-out line, the clerk eyed me and made a face. He seemed to disapprove of the slow way I was unloading my purchases on to his conveyor belt. A gay kid, college age, impatient. American Philippine, with a ring through his pierced eyebrow and dyed white blond hair and barbed-wire tattoos around each wrist. His name tag read, ‘Todd—Assistant Manager’. I grabbed two tabloids off a rack and tossed them on the moving counter.

  ‘Will that be all?’

  I nodded ‘yes’ but threw on two king-size Snickers bars from a candy display.

  ‘Sir, will that be all?’

  ‘Yes Todd, that will be all.’ Then I changed my mind and tossed on an additional pack of Life Savers and a pouch of Red Man chewing tobacco. Impulse purchases.

  ‘Cash or charge, sir?’

  I peeled off a hundred and put it on top of the rolling twelve-pack of beer. ‘Cash, Todd.’

  As he was feeding my stuff through the register’s scanner he hesitated while swiping the peanut jars. ‘Sir, the sale is on the beer nuts only. The Benny’s Beer Nuts.’

  ‘I don’t eat beer nuts. I don’t like the skins.’

  Todd huffed and rolled his eyes. ‘Okayyyy—sooo…which jars of nuts do you want, sir?’

  They all looked the same to me. ‘The cashews,’ I said. ‘I only eat cashews. I don’t care about the sale.’

  ‘Sooo, no Benny’s Beer Nuts?’