by Dan Fante
Willie was a manic whackjob. He developed an obsession for chasing balls of any size and shape, and a death-grip refusal to release them, a resolve not unlike his namesake Bill Saroyan, who, standing at a Vegas dice table, had manically refused to stop pissing away his money.
My father made dinner for these dogs every night—a foul concoction of dog meal and leftovers in a beef broth base. Pop prided himself on his relationship with a local supermarket meat manager named Don, who set aside stacks of special bones for his twice-a-week Point Dume customer.
My father was deeply affected by the loss of Rocco. His affection for the dog was no doubt the inspiration for his wonderful book My Dog Stupid.
Chapter Nine
Diabetes
In 1959, John Fante developed diabetes. It would change his life. After a night of drinking with his pals Frank Fenton, Sherman Miller, and Jack Leonard (who would soon die from alcoholism), he reported the next morning for work at the studio and had his usual pie and coffee with two teaspoons of sugar for breakfast at the commissary. Then he passed out and fell off his stool.
At the hospital they didn’t know what was wrong with my pop. He was incoherent and on the verge of a coma. A day or so later, after tests came back, he and Joyce got the diagnosis.
My father took his disease seriously and within a week he was off booze. He remained sober, off and on, for the rest of his life.
When John Fante was no longer in the grip of the teeter-totter of alcohol and its massive sugar intake and withdrawal, his life took a positive turn. His daily spontaneous temper fits decreased. His children no longer scattered when they heard him enter the house.
“Accommodation” is the best word to describe what eventually happened between John and Joyce Fante. Maybe “peace treaty” is a more accurate term. Mom and Dad began to tolerate each other more openly and soon appeared to be outliving their differences. My mother possessed a “silent scorn” disposition similar to that of her own mother, Louise. Absent Pop’s habitual boozing, things inevitably got better. Mom seemed to have made a conscious decision, if not a religious one, to stop reacting and carrying grudges. She picked her battles more wisely. It saved their marriage.
Pop began coming home after work, and for the next few years, and until I left home, John Fante shape-shifted into more of a father in attendance than a volcanic, juiced-up, bipolar nut. He would never evolve into a nice guy and still couldn’t bring himself to attend any of my school events or graduations, but if he wasn’t working at the studio or playing golf he was almost always home, planting cacti or battling a succession of failing, high-priced power lawnmowers, often lapsing into a string of snarling curses when one of them would quit. And now that the house was calmer, Mom became more tuned-in and caring as a parent, but displays of affection from her toward her children continued to be rare.
Since there was a wide age difference between myself and my younger sister and brother—I was five years older than my sister Vickie and six years older than my brother Jim—we eventually came to understand that we’d had very different sets of parents. The newer versions of John and Joyce Fante were an evolution of the couple that had married years before, parented Nick and me, and then stopped speaking.
Despite the changes, my relationship with my father was one of fear and awe, and we continued to grow further apart as people. I worshipped him but was beginning to hate him. We spent less and less time together.
Pop once offered to pay me if I would read—five dollars a book. He told me to pick a book from our floor-to-ceiling bookcase in the living room. I found The Call of the Wild by Jack London. I liked the colors of the cover. He pulled the book down, then handed it to me. “This guy was a great writer,” he said. “Good choice.”
Sixty days later I had gobbled up five of London’s books. I was hooked forever.
Chapter Ten
School and Baseball
When my brother Nick got his driver’s license at fifteen and a half, we would make the daily drive to Lincoln Junior High in Santa Monica in his four-door, repainted Studebaker, with me in the backseat. The forty-minute ride was almost always in dead silence.
Nick attended Santa Monica High a few miles away and he usually got a nice boost out of making me wait for him for half an hour or more every day at the blue bus stop in front of my school.
At this time an event happened that changed my life. My mother had a doctor’s appointment in Hollywood and brought my brother Nick and me along with her. Afterward, we went to a movie at the Ivar Theatre. Sidney Lumet’s film version of Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece Long Day’s Journey into Night was playing. From the beginning I sat stunned and mesmerized. I had never heard dialogue of such honesty and intensity. I was overcome by the power of the dialogue. From that day on I had to write like that. I had to be a writer and a playwright.
By age fourteen I’d quit growing and started to thin out a little. I was five foot three and one hundred sixty pounds, a fat kid with a big mouth, a bad attitude, and a bizarre, tireless imagination. Most days I needed to masturbate three times in order to avert insanity.
Physically the worm had turned for me. The guys I’d been able to bully and push around a couple years before were now five or six inches taller, and I began to get my ass kicked in school regularly.
At Lincoln Junior High, in order to survive my mouth and personality, I eventually transformed into a cagey street fighter and learned to do whatever it took to win a school punch-out. Many years later the fine writer and penitentiary hardass Eddie Bunker told me how he himself employed a similar strategy in and out of the California prison system. The basic principle is simple: When you know you can’t bluff your way out and the other guy is about to clobber you, you use the “first punch” alternative.
Because I was always pretty sure I would lose, getting in the first punch of the fight helped a lot. I would make it the best blow I had, usually a hook, and I aimed at my opponent’s nose and front teeth. No matter if I won or lost the fight, the other guy always had damage.
Later, when boozing became a more constant factor in my life, my tactics were less skillful and winning any bar battle was rare, but in junior high and high school, my opponents were always bigger and I was able to pretty much break even in the fistfight department by getting in that first punch.
Another interest had developed in my life to augment books and masturbation. It was an increased passion for baseball. As a kid in my teens, I became pretty good. Because I was short and stocky, I was a hard target for opposing pitchers and hit a good many home runs.
The middle-league baseball field was less than a mile from our Malibu house, and John Fante, who had been a star at high school ball, actually attended the last two innings of one of our team’s championship games. One game in two years.
I was pitching that day. I was four and one for the season and had a decent, popping fastball, but that day I was pulled during the eighth inning because we were losing six to four. As a hitter, trying too hard—shocked because I saw my father in the stands—I struck out my last at bat to end the game and lose the championship.
A few minutes later, when I searched the grandstand area to see where my father was, I couldn’t find him. Then, in the distance, I saw him walking up the road, my little brother Jimmy behind him, kicking the gravel.
In the late fifties, my father began taking his sons to Dodgers baseball games at the L.A. Coliseum, then later to the new stadium at Chavez Ravine. In those days the ride was made without freeways—down the Pacific Coast Highway and then across Olympic Boulevard to downtown. It took an hour and a half to get there from Malibu in the afternoon traffic. My brothers and I all loved baseball and Pop would not have a son who didn’t. Baseball was a religion in the Fante family.
Unfortunately, Pop’s bad temper and intolerance accompanied us to those Dodgers games, and many of our visits to the ballpark were aborted suddenly. If the Bums hadn’t scored by the second or third inning and got behind, John Fante woul
d unleash a string of profanity under his breath, snatch a hot dog out of one of our hands, and utter the words, “Let’s go. Get up. We’re leaving.”
For us boys the long drive back to Malibu would be a silent one. None of us dared to speak when Pop was upset about a baseball game. Spending father and son time at social events with Pop might have gone easier had his habit for abrupt departures not extended to movie theaters and social gatherings as well.
On the rare, twice-yearly occasions when we drove the twenty-two miles from Malibu to Santa Monica as a family to go to the movies, my father always picked the film. These movies were often written or directed by someone Pop knew or had worked with at the studios.
The six of us would be situated in the back row, where my father always sat. (John Fante had lived through the 1933 Long Beach earthquake and had developed a lifelong fear of being caught in an enclosed space during a quake.)
The theater would go dark and the film would begin. The half-hour mark was the crucial point for Pop’s wife and family. We would all sneak glances at the old man for incipient signs of distemper. If John Fante made it past thirty minutes, the chances were pretty good he’d stay until the end, or almost the end.
I can remember only one occasion on a movie outing where I watched an entire film with my father. The film was Francis Coppola’s The Conversation, with Gene Hackman. 1974. I was thirty years old at the time and visiting from New York City for a week. My parents now had the big Malibu house to themselves. I had long since given up attending baseball games or films with my father, but the notion to “go to the movies” seized him one morning at breakfast and Pop suggested he treat me and my mom to a matinee. My father and I crossed swords on almost every subject and I tried all morning to convince Mom that the adventure was a bad idea, a setup for another argument between me and the old man. I was certain he’d leave the theater during the first reel and there might well be yelling between us. I’d probably wind up hitchhiking home.
Outside in the parking lot, when the film was over, I heard John Fante utter the words “good movie” for the first time in my life.
Chapter Eleven
Zanuck and Saroyan
In the late fifties, John Fante came to renew his acquaintance with the well-known producer Darryl Zanuck, who liked my dad’s work and had proposed a couple film projects in the past. Months went by but nothing happened. Finally, Zanuck gave my dad an assignment to write a screenplay called The Fish Don’t Bite.
Zanuck had moved to Paris by that time. So had my father’s old, close pal Bill Saroyan, who had hightailed it out of the country, the IRS hot on his heels to collect a huge back-tax debt.
My father was summoned to Zanuck’s Paris office, presumably to deliver his first draft of the movie script. But in Pop’s version of what happened, his new boss had another motive: Zanuck had a fondness for a particular brand of Cuban cigar that was unavailable in France and had given my father instructions to bring along several boxes in his luggage.
The reason Zanuck, who had recently retired as head of Columbia Pictures, was in France at all was Juliette Gréco, a beautiful French actress/singer. Coincidently, Saroyan was also involved with Gréco, and a triangle of trouble was in the wind.
Saroyan met my father at the airport. He was broke as usual and explained how Zanuck had paid him to write a play for Gréco, then written a large check for his two weeks of sloppy work. (William Saroyan was in the habit of writing his plays in less than ten days.)
Zanuck’s check was not even cold in the bank’s till when Bill blew the money in Monte Carlo. He was now desperate to make the rent at his Paris hotel. As he and my father drove toward the city, Saroyan, chain-smoking, began removing manuscripts from the pockets of his overcoat. My father’s carousing pal was notorious for his short attention span. “Whaddya think of this, Johnny?” he’d ask, passing a typed manuscript across the backseat of the taxi.
Pop would read a few lines or a page, hand the piece back, and say, “It needs work, Bill,” or, “It’s not believable.”
As John Fante returned each story, Saroyan threw it out of the car’s back window. Finally, after four discarded manuscripts, he was through, and he slumped in the backseat. Then, a moment later, he was grinning at my father. “Paris is a kick, Johnny. You’ll love it here. The women are incredible.”
The next day at Zanuck’s office, my father delivered his screenplay and the cigars. Zanuck thanked him, then handed Pop a manuscript. “I paid Saroyan to write this for Juliette,” he hissed. “The sonofabitch has been banging her. The only way I could get rid of him and keep him away from her was to hire him. Do me a favor, John: Go sit in the other room and read this play, then tell me what you think. I’ll have the girl bring you lunch.”
My father spent the next two hours reading the play. When he returned to Zanuck’s office, he handed his boss the manuscript. “Well,” said Zanuck, “good or no good? Yes or no?”
Pop was on the spot. Saroyan was an old friend and a gambling buddy and occasionally a brilliant writer. My father had a literary code he tried to live by: Never criticize another writer’s work or damage his reputation in front of his boss.
“In my opinion,” my father said, “it’s a good idea but it can use some revision.”
That was all Zanuck needed to hear. He said “thank you,” spun around in his swivel chair, and dumped the fifty-thousand-dollar manuscript in his trash can.
Two weeks later, after nightly carousing with his pal Saroyan, falling off the wagon badly, and getting mugged outside a Paris bar, John Fante delivered his completed rewrites of the screenplay The Fish Don’t Bite to Zanuck. A week of anticipation went by with no phone call from the producer or his office. Finally, Zanuck’s assistant called. “Mr. Zanuck asked me to thank you for your contribution to the film script. At present he has decided to reconsider the project.” Months of John Fante’s work were in the crapper.
At lunch a day later with Willie Saroyan, my father told his friend the bad news. When the subject of Saroyan’s financial problems came up, Willie smiled. “I’m on Zanuck’s payroll again—sort of,” he said. “He’s paying me to read for him. A grand a week. Film scripts and various folderol, anything to keep me away from Gréco. Matter of fact, I read one last week. I forget the title. But it was a real piece of shit. I told Z to take a pass.”
My father was curious. “What was it about?” he asked.
Saroyan went on to explain the plot. When he was done, John Fante was stunned. “That was my script, Bill.”
“C’mon, Johnny, you’re kiddin’ me.”
“My name was on the title page. Didn’t you read the goddamn title page?”
“I never read the title page. I don’t care who wrote it. Christ, Johnny, I’m sorry.”
The two men did not speak again for five years.
Chapter Twelve
The Tailenders
The friends I chose at St. Monica Catholic High School in Santa Monica were guys like me: non-studiers and screwups. The longtime dean of the boys’ school, a tall, black-haired, hellfire-and-brimstone bipolar whackjob Ireland import called Brother Daniel, nicknamed the group of us “the Tailenders” and made sure to let us know as often as possible that we were candidates for expulsion.
Brother Daniel, like his clerical sidekicks, always dressed in black robes. He was athletic and a former soccer player. He was also a show-off and a bully. He presided over the school’s monthly assemblies on the basketball court in the boys’ gym. Brother Dan was all about jumping his victims in front of an audience.
He would select his prey just before the assembly began. While everyone in the student body was goofing off in the stands as we awaited the opening prayer, Daniel would single out some unsuspecting chump and summon him down to the floor.
In front of the entire student body, this direct descendant of Jesus would stab the kid in the chest with his beefy forefinger, then slap him with a couple lefts and rights until he covered up or went down. Brother Dan wa
s a master at the cheap shot. Throughout my four years of high school, his performance would be repeated again and again.
One of Daniel’s favorite stunts was to ambush guys from behind in the crowded halls between classes, when pushing and shoving was a necessity in order not to be late and therefore sentenced to after-school detention. The varsity football players and seniors were almost full-grown men, and Brother Daniel was their size. The jerk would notice two guys “playin’ the part of the fool,” sneak up behind them, grab them by their shirt collars, and slam their heads together.
All of our teachers at the boys’ school were men. Some were laymen, but most were Brothers of St. Patrick (bad-tempered Irishmen and nighttime boozers who’d bartered their sex drive for a green card in order to move to America). Probably a few of these guys were closet cases, but in those days, as teenagers, we just assumed they were misguided weirdos.
My first personal thumping at the hands of a brother happened when I was a ninth-grader. I came up with “a smart-ass fool’s answer” in an oral English exam, and after my classmates stopped snickering, Brother Serenus (a guy my height) caught me flush with a right to the jaw.
It was early in the semester and it was the first attack on any of us that year. Soon, being punched out by a brother became a badge of honor. You could brag about it for a week. A few of us even began to do it intentionally. We liked provoking our favorites, usually the smaller, thinner brothers.
Most of the physical discipline at St. Monica occurred in the hallway or at lunch break in the yard, opposite the girls’ high school, when the upperclassmen would show off. Correct Christian deportment and “acting a gentleman” was a big deal to the Brothers of St. Pat, who’d spent their teenage years before coming to America in some gloomy, unforgiving Irish seminary hellhole.
