Fante

by Dan Fante

  The second time I got badly clobbered was by Brother Chrysosdom, several months later. He’d called on me to read aloud and I began on the wrong paragraph. As a kid Brother Chris had been an amateur boxer in his spare time, so he made sure never to punch his students in the face. Instead, the hot-tempered welterweight employed alternative means of punishment. His best trick was to unload a flurry of hard face-slaps—six to ten in succession, usually—without any warning. Smiling benignly and casually, he’d walk down the row and request that his victim stand up. The slaps came at you so quickly and hard that you couldn’t cover up. Many of us, me included, caught on to his MO after the second or third episode, so when he’d start down our aisle we’d jump up and put a few desks and bodies between us and Brother Chris. Unfortunately, Brother wasn’t particularly selective. He’d unleash a combo of slaps on whoever else might be grinning at the mistake and was close by. The guy was an authentic badass in the Gene Fullmer tradition. The kids he’d slapped stupid were almost always awarded great respect by their peers because of Chris’s ex-boxer reputation. After you’d taken a beating from Chris, you were “the man” until the end of the month.

  Report cards came out every three months and mine were always bad. Out of necessity, I began forging my mother’s signature. I’d done a decent job of convincing her that the school had changed its report card policy to twice a year, and I was in the clear for a few months until my brother Nick, who was two grades ahead of me and attending the public Santa Monica High, informed her that I was a liar. Nick never missed an opportunity to zing me to our parents, and he’d always cover his tracks by convincing our mother to say she had discovered my deceptions on her own.

  In one memorable case he stole a cigar box full of rare coins Mom had been collecting—two hundred dollars’ worth of silver quarters and half-dollars—then blamed me. He’d spent the money on beer for his pals, but it was me who caught the rap.

  Nick also destroyed the property of his siblings for no apparent reason. My brother Jim’s choo-choo train was a prize possession. Nicky smashed it to bits with a hammer for no motive other than meanness and that Jimmy loved the toy.

  He’d wait until an occasion when we had family visitors with children of their own to the house, then blame the guests’ kids after they’d gone and the discovery was made.

  John Fante and I stopped communicating almost entirely when I was sixteen. Over the preceding few years there had been a few physical incidents between us. Nothing serious. A slap. A push. Once, when I was twelve or thirteen, he grabbed me by my neck, dragged me the length of the house, threw me out the front door, and then locked it. Other than those things there was no consistent pattern of physical confrontation.

  But now that I was a teenager I found it impossible to sit in the same room as him. Because I had come of driving age and had a license, I’d leave for school in the morning and not return until nine or ten at night.

  I was bigger than my father now, and I refused to put up with his nasty tongue or take his shit or back down. I stood my ground and yelled, “C’mon, old man. I’ll break your jaw right here. I’ll put you in the hospital.” The result was that John Fante stopped speaking to me entirely.

  My first arrest as a teenager happened when I was with my high school pal Wally. Walter Mulrooney was red-haired, tall, and Irish. We were in the tenth grade together. Wally had recently become famous in school after another badass clergyman, Brother Aloysius, had punched him out in the hallway, then attempted to jam his tall frame into a floor-level wall locker.

  Wally’s moms and pops were separated, and he would eventually begin to date a sweet, pretty girl from my Malibu neighborhood, Marilyn Torbuth. His old man caught his cab before we went into the first part of our freshman year. Then his moms received a small life-insurance settlement, and Wally conned this woman, who didn’t know how to drive and was working at domestic jobs, into buying him a year-old, shiny, two-tone Ford coupe. Wally’s okeydoke was to persuade her that he’d be able to take her back and forth to work and drop his younger brother and sister at school. She bought the scheme. Three months later the Ford was a mistreated wreck as a result of Wally’s drag racing and learner’s-permit motoring skills.

  My friend had been well tutored in street smarts and Catholic grammar school petty crime, and was a decent thief. One of his newest moves, out of necessity, was to siphon gas from parked cars.

  One Friday, after ditching school at noon, Wally and I found ourselves penniless with his Ford’s gas gauge on E. We were ten blocks from St. Monica in the upscale Palisades neighborhood of Santa Monica when the Ford ran dry and quit.

  We pushed the car to the curb of a wide residential street. Wally opened his trunk and came up with a length of plastic hose and a two-gallon gas can.

  He selected his target—a station wagon parked nearby. Ten minutes later, with me as lookout, Wally’s can was full and we were pouring gas into his Ford.

  We were pulling away when two cop cars screeched to a halt—one in front of us, the other against the rear bumper of the Ford.

  Three hours later my mother and father appeared at the Santa Monica Juvenile Detention facility. Joyce Fante had never whacked me as a teenager. That day, after the silent forty-minute drive back home to Malibu from the police station, she let me have it.

  To this day I can remember what she said, word for word: “You disgraced me. If you’re going to be a thief, be a good thief! Don’t get caught!”

  My pal Wally wasn’t so lucky. He already had a juvenile record in Santa Monica. He was given two options: #1, time in the slam; #2, a hitch in the military. Wally took #2. He had just turned seventeen and with his mom’s consent he enlisted in the army.

  I never failed a class in high school because kids like me with bad marks were permitted to attend summer school, which was where I spent my vacation every year. I was suspended twice, once for behavior and once for vandalism, but never expelled.

  My best classes were always history and English. I was good at padding writing assignments. I could vamp on a subject for a page or more in longhand. It saved me and helped me graduate from high school. Toward the end of my senior year, though, I was summoned by the principal and told I would have to attend junior college because I lacked math and science credits.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Working as a Carny

  My first sexual experience happened on my eighteenth birthday. My best pal Paul Finnigan put me together with his girlfriend, Ruthie Parker. Paul liked older women; Ruthie was twenty-seven and he was nineteen but claimed to be twenty-two. They were in bed in her Santa Monica bungalow, which was on Wilshire Boulevard behind Jack’s Drive-In on Tenth Street, where Ruthie worked as a carhop. The three of us had been drinking Country Club Stout malt liquor all evening. While I watched an old movie on her TV, Paul and Ruthie were screwing in her bedroom. She was squealing with joy. After they were finished, Paul called me in, got out of bed, and pulled back the sheets. “It’s your turn,” he said. “It’s your birthday.”

  That was it. Ruthie was mad at Paul for the imposition and wasn’t exactly an active participant. I’m sure I was done in less than three minutes, but to this day, the memory is still vivid.

  My brother Nick was beginning to drink more and smoke dope. A succession of traffic tickets and wrecked cars had replaced his 4.0 GPA. At the time, the civil rights movement was in full stride. Nick had recently developed a strong passion for black girls and had blown off all of his scholarship offers in favor of hanging out with his buddies. At twenty, he was arrested for possession. Drug arrests involving a kid from “a good home” were rare in the early sixties in Santa Monica, but Nick made the grade.

  My father hired one the best lawyers on the West Side, a guy named Edward Rafeedie. Eddie was brilliant, the forty-year-old son of Middle Eastern immigrants. He was huge, ugly, and bald, but possessed a sharp, cynical mouth not unlike John Fante’s. For three grand, Rafeedie had the drug charges reduced to a misdemeanor. Nick Fante go
t a walk.

  Knowing Eddie Rafeedie would change first my brother’s life, then mine. Before he went to law school, Eddie spent his teen years as a carny. During summers in the 1940s he’d been on the road with several traveling carnival shows in the Southwest. When he hired my brother he owned three attractions at a restored amusement park pier called POP—Pacific Ocean Park—near Santa Monica in the Ocean Park neighborhood.

  The pier had been at that location for forty-five years before being renovated in the mid-fifties. It sported a great old roller coaster and a decent merry-go-round and a few other attractions, but was badly run-down and had become a local eyesore.

  The Ocean Park section of L.A. was where you went to score dope and find hookers. There were bookie joints, and the oceanfront was lined with bingo parlors to attract the low-income retirees who lived in group homes on the nearby strand.

  In the fifties, when Disneyland caught on sixty miles away in Anaheim, a group of investors had the notion to transform the rickety old pier into an upscale Magic Kingdom clone and rename it. Bad idea.

  A few years later, after millions were poured into a renovation, the “park” had a brief heyday, then rapidly became sleazy again, as well as overpriced. It was like giving a wino a shower and new clothes and then handing him a fistful of money for more wine. The investors had done nothing to renovate the neighborhood around the pier, and the same seedy element remained.

  POP and another amusement park in Long Beach called the Pike still had the best roller coasters in California, but the income needed from Pacific Ocean Park to sustain operations didn’t come close to covering its maintenance and mortgage expenses. Attendance was down and ex-carnies now took over the pier’s day-to-day operation. All the rides and games were stationary, but POP had transformed back into a seedy traveling carnival without wheels.

  Before TV became the national opium, many rural Americans spent their summer weekends at traveling carnivals. In the forties and fifties, these “shows” always featured a midway that had portable rides as well as a section for fortune-tellers; geeks (guys—usually deteriorated alcoholics—who bit the heads off live chickens in front of the paying crowd); a fat lady; conjoined, deformed twins; mutated embryos in huge jars; and a nudie harem act. Add to that an array of rip-off amusement games, and you have an idea of what POP had become.

  Eddie Rafeedie’s main pastime, other than being an attorney, was owning and managing his attractions at Pacific Ocean Park. Eddie had graduated from this second-rate trade, but once carny gets into your blood it stays like a bad case of herpes. Rafeedie still kept his hand in the carny jar by owning the Derby, a racehorse game at POP, along with two smaller games. The Derby brought in serious money.

  Players at the Derby would sit at semicircular glass-topped pinball-type tables facing a twelve-foot-high multicolored lighted board. There were twenty tables. The player would shoot his pinball, and when it went through his table’s bumpers and returned to the bottom, he’d shoot again as quickly as possible to make his horse dash faster across the big board above him. The horses’ names were those of the famed champions of the time: Round Table, Seabiscuit, Swaps, Nashua, Man o’ War, etc. After the blast of the loud racetrack starting buzzer, the game was on. Next to the big board was the prize booth, its walls festooned with dozens of four-foot-high stuffed animals.

  Beneath the board sat the caller, the man announcing the race, barking into a mic. His job was to maintain the game’s excitement and keep the mark in his seat spending his dimes. The intended effect was to duplicate the thrill of being at a racetrack. It worked like magic if the game had a good caller.

  Each race took thirty seconds and the first-, second-, and third-place players received coupons they would cash in at the prize counter after they’d pissed their money away playing the addictive game.

  Both Nick and I were fascinated by the lives these strange carny gypsies had led. Most of them were dope smokers, drunks, gamblers, addicts, and perverts. Carnival tradition dictated that employees be paid in cash at the end of each day, and most carnies squandered their wages at night indulging their bad habits. There was usually a boozed-up wife or sister or girlfriend around to administer an inexpensive after-hours blow job. The fast buck—make it and piss it away—became an addictive lifestyle for both me and my brother.

  A few months after Nick became a successful employee at POP, I joined him there. It was unlike my brother to do anything for me, but Rafeedie needed reliable, inexpensive help, and Nick grudgingly passed the word along to me. I’d just graduated from high school and had enrolled at Santa Monica City College. Eddie Rafeedie apparently saw talent in both of us, and a naïve John Fante had no objection to his sons’ working at the guy’s flimflam carny operation.

  I started as a flat-store pitchman. Both Nick and I were first taught the skill of duping marks at the ringtoss game and the goldfish bowls before we could move on to the Derby. A flat store was typically a twelve-foot-wide midway game manned by a floor agent. The player will stand behind a waist-high, wide wooden counter and attempt to pitch a six-inch-wide wooden ring (or a coin or token) at a field of stuffed birds or rabbits or two-inch-wide goldfish bowls eight feet away. The area ahead of him, the playing field, where he will toss, is always horizontal to his body, and it is nearly impossible, because of the angle, to win anything. The operator’s goal is to keep the mark spending. Your spiel of carny jokes and rapid one-liners has to be funny, and you have to let your man win—a little—so he continues to spend.

  These flat stores were highly profitable, because even a skilled player would need to throw fifty or sixty rings or tokens, at twenty-five cents a pop, to get the hang of winning a prize. Ideally your mooch has his girlfriend with him and wants to become her hero. This type of client is usually good for fifteen to twenty dollars in less than half an hour.

  Both my brother and I were quick learners and graduated to caller at the Derby after we’d each apprenticed for a month or two at one of Eddie’s two flat-store games on the midway. We were taught to call by a guy named Eddy Melvin, a fifty-five-year-old ex-middleweight from Venice who had spent twenty-five years on the road as a carny. Eddy with his snarling baritone could captivate a crowd and build the excitement of the Derby to a fever pitch. Carny magic. Spectators would often stand three deep waiting for a chance to grab an empty seat and play the Derby. Eddy was the reason. Eddy was king.

  Because the Ocean Park section of L.A. was next to Venice, biker bars, hookers, street gangs, and drug dealers continued to populate the beachside area. Police patrolled the neighborhood in double-squad car teams—when you could find them. The admission price to the amusement pier wasn’t cheap, so customers entering without paying became an ongoing headache.

  Because we made our money in cash daily, many of us carried some form of protection as we walked to the dark parking lot next to the pier after work. Mine, tucked in the rear waistband of my pants, was the cheap .22 pistol that had belonged to my father. He kept the gun on a closet shelf with several others but rarely checked to see if it was there.

  From time to time the Derby game could get rowdy. We always had a pretty girl working the prize booth in order to draw in the male customers, and POP’s uniform for all employees, both men and women, was a white shirt or blouse and black pants or a skirt. The girls at Eddie Rafeedie’s concessions always wore the most revealing blouses. Large breasts and frilly bras for our female employees were a must.

  If a biker gang member, a drunk, or a hot-tempered customer came on to one of our prize girls or attempted to muscle his way into a chair at the Derby before it was his turn, Eddy Melvin was quick to take action. I worked the game off and on for a year as Eddy’s relief man, and I never saw him lose a fight.

  Melvin was a quiet guy, but he liked having an audience. At his age Eddy wasn’t tough-looking, but he still had quick moves and fast hands. Like Wyatt Earp keeping the peace, he’d stop the game and climb down from his caller’s table next to the big board, in front of
as many as a hundred spectators, and ask a troublemaker to leave, nicely. If things went downhill and the chump threw a punch, Eddy had dozens of witnesses in his corner. He was well-schooled at the three-punch combination. The scuffle would be over as quickly as it had begun.

  In my first year at POP, when summer began and the discount-ticketed schoolkids began storming the pier, Eddy, for family reasons, cut back on his working time and became a weekend employee. Both my brother Nick and I graduated to full-time callers at the Derby. Nick worked the game ten hours on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I covered his breaks while manning the ringtoss across the midway and filled in on his days off. Eventually, Nick and I became the top callers at Pacific Ocean Park.

  At twenty-one, my brother was promoted to manager at Rafeedie’s three concessions, and was making $500 a week tax-free. Big bucks in those days. I was still paid by the hour and made a couple hundred less, but for a kid I was rich, knocking down as much as a middle-class family man twice my age.

  Because of the seventy- to eighty-hour workweek, both of us got apartments in the Ocean Park neighborhood close to the pier. My place was less than a block away. Thirty-five bucks a month for a clean one-room apartment, plus kitchen. After a couple months, I had enough saved to buy a red five-year-old Chevy convertible.

  Then my nightlife began to be a problem. I was boozing too much and smoking opium.

  Tootie Walsh, a middle-aged ex–road carny, had a place we called the Box underneath the roller coaster. It had formerly been a large two-room mechanic’s shop. Tootie and his helpers had constructed interior walls, and unknown to POP’s management, the rooms were now a bookie parlor and a living space at night. While Tootie was managing the roller coaster, or High-Boy, as it was called, he made a damn decent buck with his side action.