Fante

by Dan Fante

  My dad had devised a cold-water drip method for brewing coffee that never varied. He had three identical beat-up coffee-pots that he alternated during the week. He survived on this brew and fifty cigarettes a day.

  By six a.m. he’d be having his first blast of coffee and reading the L.A. Times, waiting for his wife and kids to wake up.

  Full of Life, the novel, was published in 1952. It was my father’s only true literary-financial success up until that time. The book sold well, and a film package deal netted John Fante the equivalent of a million dollars in today’s money. Ironically, although the novel was well-written, funny, and insightful, it would echo like a watered-down sitcom version of one of Eugene O’Neill’s darkest family dramas.

  In 1951, more than disgusted with his proximity to Hollywood and the film business, my father decided to move our family from outside Hancock Park in Los Angeles up the coast to Malibu, forty miles from the nearest movie studio.

  Malibu in those days was not the celebrity who’s who it is today, dotted with seventy-grand-a-month recovery homes and the palazzos of Barbra Streisand, Mel Gibson, Cher, Bob Dylan, Julia Roberts, Anthony Hopkins, and the thousand other high-end, glossy folks who chose to retreat to the California coastline. That immigration was still years away.

  Point Dume was five square miles of weedy, overgrown plateau. The actual “point” in Point Dume is above the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Our house was half a mile away, down Cliffside Drive. Facing north from Santa Monica or Palos Verdes or Long Beach, Point Dume is the farthest land visible up the coast. As a boy fetching a stray baseball off our roof, I could turn my head three hundred sixty degrees and not see the roof of another house.

  John and Joyce bought the eighteen-month-old hacienda on Cliffside Drive at a bargain price. The owner/builders of the one-plus acre rancho were a middle-aged couple named Frank and Adele Kasala. Mrs. Kasala had somehow contracted TB and they’d already bought another home in Arizona, so the couple were motivated sellers.

  A six-foot-high cinder-block wall surrounded the one-acre lot. Just inside were a hundred newly planted fern trees. Twenty years later these stubs of growth would rise to sixty feet in height, and the property would take on the look of a fortress. Inside the walls were three large green lawns and a dozen flower gardens. Eventually, annoyed by blossoms that usually died (except for the geraniums), my father would plant indestructible cacti. Point Dume was just up the road.

  As a kid, my brother Nick, with me tagging along, would walk the mile from Cliffside Drive to the Pacific Coast Highway, then catch the school bus to John L. Webster Elementary School near the Malibu Colony. Then, a few years later, we attended Lincoln Junior High in Santa Monica.

  Nick, of course, was the family prodigy. He continued to excel at school. He could trounce almost any local Malibu movie bigwig at chess. At the age of eight he had become a car nut and had a passion for Jaguars, Buicks, and Studebakers. He sent a constant flow of professionally executed freehand designs to Jaguar and General Motors. My mother would type out the cover letters for him. Soon he would be given a scholarship to art school that he would ultimately piss away. Of course I was the opposite. Backward. Fat. A blockhead. The Fante family retard. I made no secret of hating school, mostly because my older brother was such a hotshot at it. I accepted my role and buried myself in my greatest passions: fantasy and baseball.

  At John L. Webster I was given the nickname “Short Fat Fanny” by a couple of my classmates. But never to my face. If one of them ever called me fat or stupid, I’d kick his ass.

  I was a loner from the beginning. I avoided my father and my older brother as much as possible. Both were trouble. My mother spent her time reading and acquiring expertise at her many hobbies: languages, stamp collecting, coin collecting, Italian Renaissance art, history, poetry, metaphysics, witchcraft, and tarot cards. If she wasn’t chauffeuring my kid sister and brother around, Mom had her face in a mystery novel. By the time she was fifty, she claimed to have read every mystery novel series ever written. Every one. Thousands.

  To entertain myself, before my teenage years, I spent most of my time alone in fantasy, inventing a world populated by cowboy villains and acts of bravery. After school I would strap on my holster and six-gun, go out to the back of our land near where the old man kept his flock of chickens, and shoot it out with whatever marshal was waiting there for me. My need to be alone kept me sane. I was always the bad guy.

  Since moving to Malibu my father had begun to confine most of his poker playing and boozing to a ten-mile radius. The drive back from L.A. after a night of cards and whiskey was too far and too dangerous, and several fender benders were the evidence. The Malibu Inn and the Malibu Cottage were fast becoming his favorite watering holes. The local poker competition consisted of TV guys like I Love Lucy director Bill Asher and producer George Haight, along with local storeowners and a couple of once-famous movie actors.

  After one marathon weekend game, Pop was given a gun collection to settle part of a poker debt: a Winchester rifle, a .22 pump-action, a four-ten shotgun, and a nine-shot .22 pistol. All with ammunition. When I was alone at home, I would make a search of my father’s closets and hiding places, find one of his guns, and then go out to our open field and blast away. My preoccupation with guns continued until I was thirteen and discovered the open blouse and brassiere of Mary Birch one afternoon on the Lincoln Junior High school bus coming home from Santa Monica.

  After our move to Malibu, my father’s common sense regarding vehicles disappeared. He became a sucker for used cars. Twice a month, coming home from school through our back gate, I would find another “beauty” blocking the drive.

  During the first year we occupied the Malibu house, he’d been screwed badly when he’d bought the used Jaguar XK120 that had belonged to former L.A. Rams football star Bob Waterfield. This blue shitbox had only a few thousand miles on it and was “a great deal,” according to the salesman at the lot in Santa Monica.

  In the 1950s, if the first owner of a sports car didn’t “break it in” and drive the vehicle under fifty miles an hour for the first three months, the engine’s valves would not seal properly and eventually, as a consequence, the motor would begin to consume oil. The perpetual blast of gray-black smoke coming from the tailpipe of my father’s Jaguar was a testament to this.

  As it turned out, Pop’s salesman at the used car lot knew a thing or two about temporary repairs and disguising engine problems. Six weeks after the old man bought this blue turd and after its first oil change, he would discover the fatal problem: Bob Waterfield almost certainly did not read his new Jaguar’s owner’s manual and heed the caution to go easy when breaking in a motor. Old Bob had a lead foot. The car’s crankcase had been filled with the heaviest oil possible in order to hide the real condition of the motor.

  My father came to hate this Jaguar, Bob Waterfield, the L.A. Rams, and the used-car salesman who had talked him into the car with a passion not dissimilar to that associated with Islamic fundamentalist jihad. Whenever he would take the car to a mechanic, my mother would insist that Nick and I accompany the old man. She knew her husband. She knew that each time a new estimate for mechanical work was presented he would explode into a rant filled with “fucks” and “cocksuckers” that would continue for at least a minute. Her hope was that the presence of Nick and me would minimize his fits of rage.

  After eighteen months of misery with his car, John Fante had invested about half of what he originally paid for the vehicle in repairs. He finally gave up and traded it in.

  Over the next twelve years my father would purchase several dozen more cars. He almost always got screwed in one way or another.

  Once he somehow got talked into “trading up” for a five-year-old four-door ex-highway-patrol Ford complete with interior roll bar. He was delighted with the new paint job and tires and dismissed the fact that there were two hundred thousand miles on the vehicle’s odometer. When I came out to our garage to view this beauty, I h
appened to notice that it had no radio (police mechanics remove radios when they do their routine modifications). When purchasing the car my father had overlooked its absence. Pop was an avid Dodgers fan and would just as soon have his arm removed as not have a radio in his car. A volley of curses began that could be heard all the way to Trancas Beach. Then Pop got on the phone and ranted and raved for five minutes with the salesman at the dealership and used the word “cocksucker” eleven times in a single sentence.

  When, at the age of ten, I began to write stories by hand, it was to augment my gunslinging fantasies. These rambling tales were about renegade Indians, murder, shootouts, slashings, and beheadings. The stuff went on for pages and pages, unpunctuated and always in all caps.

  I’d been at the hobby for several weeks when Mom discovered the shoe box under my bed where I kept my notebooks. The first story in the stack was called “Three Dead Men.” Joyce asked me to read it to her. I refused at first because I didn’t want any feedback or criticism. I was self-conscious and a miserable speller, and knew nothing about syntax.

  After I’d finished reading she suggested that I share the story with my father too. This was something I absolutely did not want to do. But I was trapped and had to agree.

  The three of us sat down one evening after dinner and I opened my notebook and began to unload one of my yarns of bank robbery, murder, and gunslinging. When I was done and looked up, my mother was smiling. “Good for you, Danny boy. You have a great imagination.”

  John Fante, sitting with his arms folded, flicked the ash off his cigarette. “Look, kid,” he said, “you need to concentrate on your goddamn schoolwork. Your mother tells me that you got four D’s on your last report card. That’s an abomination. Face it, you’re no genius. My recommendation is that you forget about this crap and concentrate on getting passing marks in school.”

  So I did.

  But it was the first time I’d heard the word abomination. A great word. To this day it’s still one of my favorites.

  Pop had me pigeonholed as an academic failure and a scholastic knothead. It would be many years before he saw anything else I had written.

  Chapter Eight

  Rocco

  The former owners of our house, the Kasalas, had left behind two ten-pound Chihuahuas as part of the transaction. To this mix the old man eventually added white, shark-faced Rocco, a bull terrier. This thick, sixty-five-pound animal was great with both adults and kids and romped about our acre-sized property with the other dogs, but as it turned out, the old man had selected a four-legged manifestation of his own personality. Rocco was Mike Tyson. Al Capone. A beast prone to overreaction and multiple animal homicides.

  The dog’s bloodlust showed itself during his first week at Rancho Fante. At the time we owned two dozen chickens. Being the family dunce, it was my task to feed them. One morning I went out back and discovered four mangled, featherless corpses.

  To cope with the problem, my father had a newer, stronger fence installed, but it too failed to avert his puppy’s murderous propensity. In another week or two, Rocco had chewed through the posts and dug under the tightly wired mesh to continue his rampage. Eventually an even more expensive, wood-slatted barricade was erected and half a dozen of the pea-brained birds managed to survive.

  A few months later when Rocco was no longer a puppy, on walks along the nearly deserted Point Dume cliffs, with either myself or my brother Nick in charge, our pooch commenced to maim and dismember other neighborhood dogs: Weimaraners, Irish setters, a collie or two, a mastiff, and finally a champion show boxer.

  The Point Dume section of Malibu was now a thriving community and it took a few months, but people in an ever-widening arc, our neighbors, banded together and drew up a petition to put a stop to the bullet-nosed white menace behind the tall stone walls.

  One of these neighbors, Bill Melber, had recently moved his wife and kids into a spanking new house next door. Self-defensive Bill purchased a rifle after Rocco mangled his Airedale.

  By the time Rocco was eighteen months old, deep scars were visible all over his face and body.

  John Fante was hardly a people person and he began to revel in the role of bad guy. Pop was a master of the stinging one-liner. When outraged area residents would bang on our front door, indignant and red-faced after their pet had encountered Rocco, they’d almost always leave our property the worse for the visit, sputtering curses and vowing retribution or police intervention.

  Two incidents endeared Rocco to my father for life. The first happened one afternoon when Nick and I were in the front yard helping Pop pull weeds. By now Rocco was prone to repeated escapes from our yard, almost always motivated by a passing animal—sometimes even a jogger.

  A horn began honking furiously outside our wall. When we got to the front gate, we saw a frantic horse galloping by. Rocco was clamped to the animal’s throat.

  The second incident occurred at almost the same spot. We were getting into the old man’s white-repainted, secondhand Cadillac convertible for a trip to the store, when again we heard the blast of a horn. This was followed by a noise—a resounding thud—and the sight of Rocco airborne after being hit by a pickup truck.

  Getting out of Pop’s sputtering Cadillac, we ran to the dog’s aid. Rocco lay at the side of the road, motionless, his pink tongue dangling from his open mouth. He wasn’t breathing. His body was lifeless.

  My father got down on his knees, as did Nick and I. No animal could survive a front-end collision and the forty-foot punt of his body into a pile of weeds.

  The old man began to stroke his bull terrier’s thick, white body, tears welling in his eyes. Then the miracle! Half a minute later Rocco emitted a low wheeze. Then another. His eyes opened. He saw his master above him. More coughing. He got to his feet, unsteady and dazed.

  A few seconds later there was a rustle in the nearby weeds. A self-protective lizard was departing the scene. Rocco jumped up, chased it down, scooped it up, and crushed it between his jaws.

  His owner’s grin spread from ear to ear. Pop declared his bull terrier immortal. St. Jude, thank you.

  The dog’s demise came when he was four years old. By this time our family had attained a neighborhood status similar to that of the Manson Family. But John Fante didn’t care. He was Dr. Frankenstein. Quasimodo’s sneering keeper.

  Now, outside our gates, bike riders, strolling couples, and joggers accompanied by their pets detoured, cutting across the wide-open fields rather than risk proximity to the evil beast residing at the corner of Fernhill and Cliffside Drive.

  With one exception: A rich stockbroker guy had just built his big new house at the end of Cliffside in the cul-de-sac. The house was the first of many that would eventually block my sexual education and access to the cliffs where, in the afternoons, I could view nude female sunbathers in the arms of their happy boyfriends sixty feet below in the cove.

  Our neighbor’s hacienda had three floors. It was a misconceived neo-Renaissance something or other, complete with a statue of Cupid pissing into a fountain. The joint was surrounded by a high stone wall, and featured a big swimming pool and tennis courts. When the broker guy moved in, he also brought along his two champion Doberman pinschers.

  On his first weekend morning in the Malibu sun, he was strolling up Cliffside Drive with his wife and children—and his dogs, which weren’t on leashes. When they arrived at the corner where the Fantes resided, a white, torpedo-faced bull terrier appeared. Rocco had scrambled out through his newest, undetected escape route. He attacked both hundred-pound Dobies simultaneously and an appropriate amount of bloodshed and anguished human screaming began to take place.

  Hearing the commotion, I ran toward our wall, boosted myself up, and then watched helplessly from fifty feet away. In the middle of the battle the frantic mom and dad waved down a passing motorist, a guy in a Jeep, begging for aid. Mister Jeep took one look at the dogs ripping at each other in the weedy field, then punched his gas pedal and sped off.

  The
se Dobies, Hans and Fritz or Martin and Lewis, or whatever they were called, were would-be show dogs and no match for Rocco. While one of the animals gnawed on him, my papa’s pet bull terrier crushed its sidekick’s front leg. More blood flowed, but it wasn’t Rocco’s. His thick white head and body were covered with it.

  With one Dobie mutilated and disabled, Rocco briefly set upon the other, but Number Two was a fast runner and managed to escape.

  John Fante made a decent buck as a screenwriter but was not a rich man. His new neighbor was. Lawsuits were filed and court appearances ordered. My father refused to yield. In the end, after months of bitterness and confrontations in front of the Santa Monica Courthouse, the matter was settled. Because our neighbor had been careless and had not leashed his would-be champions, Pop had to settle for payment of the vet bill only (not a paltry sum), augmented by a fat check for destroying the dogs’ future show potential.

  To my father’s great sadness, he had to concede to put down his dog. One afternoon a few weeks later he told his kids that Rocco was going to a new home and loaded him into our station wagon (a bargain shitbox the old man later found out had a faulty transmission).

  The picture my father described was more alluring than the four thousand years in purgatory Rocco deserved and the lethal injection he actually received. Pop said our doggie would go to a spacious ranch in the country above Santa Barbara where the owners loved bull terriers. There he would be able to play with other dogs of his own breed and romp to his heart’s content. Done deal.

  Rocco’s death triggered a curious reaction in my father. Perhaps to compensate, he began to acquire more dogs. Over the next few years, we had as many as ten roaming the property at Rancho Fante at one time. They were mutts mostly, but there was also an Akita and a half–pit bull named Ginger and a crazy shepherd my father named Willie (after William Saroyan).