by Dan Fante
Chuckles is coming up the walkway behind me to back me up.
Now I see what the guy’s hiding: a piece. A stainless-steel revolver, currently aimed at the sidewalk. “Hands in the air, punk!” he commands.
Chuckles freezes. “Look, mister,” he says, “you’ve got us wrong. My friend and I don’t want any trouble.”
“You! Shut up! Stand there next to your partner!”
With that the guy leans back inside. I can still see part of his robe and the side of his body but the front door is now only a few inches open.
“Chucky,” I say, “I’m outta here.”
He nods. “Right behind you.”
Picking up my demo packet I start down the walkway toward the street.
Captain Crazy swings the door open. There’s a telephone in his hand, and his robe is fastened. “Hold it, asshole! Hold it right there!”
He hangs up the phone. Instead of the revolver, now there’s a long metal flashlight in his hand.
He comes down the front steps in long strides. When he reaches me he grabs me by my shirt. I push his hand away.
He smashes my mouth with the thick end of the flashlight, breaking the glass.
Hands to my face, I watch blood drip from my mouth onto my shirt and tie. One of my teeth is chipped.
But the guy isn’t through. Using both hands, he jams me in the gut with the pole end of the light.
I’m down. Seconds later I’m puking up the beers I drank.
The guy in the robe turns out to be an off-duty LAPD cop. Neither Chuckles nor I knew a solicitor’s permit was a requirement to bang on a door in Westchester. None of our bosses had told us. But neither of us had been resisting arrest.
At the police station some higher-up cop in street clothes takes me into his office, tells me he’s sorry for the misunderstanding and the ass-kicking I received, and then gives me a song and dance about how two local guys matching our description have been committing robberies while impersonating door-to-door salesmen. Unfortunately, he says, Officer Goofshit overreacted when he smashed me in the face with his flashlight. He was only doing his job. Meanwhile Chuckie and I have to come up with the money to get the Bug out of the impound lot ten miles away.
Late that afternoon at the vacuum cleaner dealer’s warehouse in West L.A., after several beers on the ride over and with dried blood still on my shirt, I walk with Chuckles into the owner’s office. I ask the boss why the hell he’s sent us out without door-knocking papers, and I demand money from the company to pay for my ruined clothes and Charlie’s vehicle impound fees.
Jerry Decker, the owner, is large and fat and prone to pomposity and fits of sweating. He’s been a Kirby owner and dealer for fifteen years. According to Jerry, our “incident” is the first time one of his canvas people has been in any kind of physical altercation with a cop, permit or no permit. This, I am positive, is total crap.
Jerry lights a cigarette and rocks back in his chair. He straightens the wide silk tie that descends from his un-buttonable collar, then measures me and Chuckles.
“You boys been drinking on the job?”
“We bought a couple of beers on the way back,” I answer. “You would too. We’ve just spent three hours in the slam because your company didn’t spring for a canvassing permit and Chuckie’s Bug got towed. You might say we’ve had a lousy day.”
“Gentlemen, using alcohol while on assignment is a class-one infraction at this or any other Kirby dealer franchise. Grounds for termination.”
“Termination!” Chuckles yells. “You’re going to fire us?”
Now Jerry’s on his feet. Mr. Decker is a prosperous businessman, a calm professional, a credit to the Kirby organization. “Come back next Friday, on the fifteenth. See June in payroll. She’ll have your final checks then. You can leave your machines and sales demo kits in the stockroom. I’ll check them over and re-inventory the equipment myself.”
“Stick your Kirbys up your ass, Jerry,” I yell.
“You’re both intoxicated. I say good riddance to bad rubbish.”
Apparently Chuckles, who is drunker than me, is rendered speechless and/or no longer cares to respond.
“Kiss my ass, Jerry,” I say.
“No machines—no paychecks,” snarls Jerry.
Chapter Fifteen
New York City
Chuckie and I decided to go to New York a week or so after waiting half a day in the Kirby office to pick up our paychecks. The impulsive act was fueled by Country Club Stout malt liquor, the loss of nearly fifty bucks playing double-or-nothing pool at the Billiard Den in Santa Monica, and a serious case of the fuck-its. We agreed it was time to hit the road.
Chuckles’s motive for leaving Los Angeles was romantic. He’d attended a boys’ academy somewhere in Manhattan and told me he had an old girlfriend there who had a Greenwich Village apartment and would put us up. This girl, Chuckie claimed, after a few drinks and some tokes of pot was prone to screw any bozo capable of grunting his name.
My reasoning was a bit more career-driven: I’d had one small acting success in community college and New York in those days was the best place to study theater.
My brother Nick volunteered to be our chauffeur to the eastbound freeway interchange in downtown Los Angeles. He was now a consistent heavy drinker and getting his ass kicked regularly by his black girlfriend. The morning we left he sported a nasty black eye. Asking Nick not to rat out my plans to our parents was, of course, pointless.
My brother dropped us off at an on-ramp to the 10 freeway and we stuck out our thumbs.
It took seventy-six hours for us to hitchhike from Los Angeles to New York. We had a total of four rides, two of them over a thousand miles each. We slept in the cars of the guys who picked us up.
Gallup, New Mexico, was the worst stop on our trip east. We got stuck beneath a freeway overpass on a cold and windy March night and stood there for almost eight hours. Our next ride came from a short Latino dude who was heading for a town somewhere in Ohio.
On the second night, while I slept, the driver stopped on the side of Route 66 somewhere in Ohio to relieve himself. Charlie joined him. They were taking a piss when the guy began massaging his own cock and asked my friend if he would like to be sucked off. Charlie woke me up, we pulled our stuff from the car, and that was that.
We spent eight hours standing in the rain without cover, drinking beers purchased using my friend’s fake ID, with me arguing that Chuckles should have talked the driver out of wanting to suck him off and not botched our transportation. Chuckie would have none of it. When my friend drank too much he either became sleepy and silent or militant and disagreeable. That day he was militant and disagreeable.
We lucked out on our next and last ride. It took us all the way to Millburn, New Jersey.
We arrived in Manhattan via the Hudson Tubes late the next day. When we got to Chuckie’s old girlfriend’s apartment, she was shacked up with a big Puerto Rican kid just out of Riker’s Island. Chuckie was incensed, called her a few names, and stormed out, rendering us SOL for a place to stay. It was April 1, 1964. I had just turned twenty that February.
The Sloane House YMCA on Thirty-fourth Street became our crash pad. Seven bucks a night or thirty-five a week. Chuckles got antsy right away because when he arrived at the communal showers the first night, two guys were washing each other’s backs.
A couple days later, almost broke, we both scored jobs at Olsten Temps on Forty-second Street. For the next couple weeks we traveled from company to company around Manhattan doing clerical work on short assignment. The pay was hourly, and our take-home, between us, was seventy-five bucks a week. Chuckles would return to the Y on his lunch breaks to take his shower alone.
Two weeks later we’d put enough money aside to look at a big weekly single at a rooming house on Fifty-first Street in Hell’s Kitchen. It was a forlorn old brownstone that was at least a hundred years old. The manager who rented us the room, a midget-prick named Frederik, was a very cagey guy. He wa
s Ukrainian and pretended little knowledge of American English.
We were shown the fourth-floor walk-up and rented it on the spot. It had two beds, high ceilings, and a table and chairs. Facing the street were two eight-foot-high curtainless windows. There was no kitchen or hot plate, just a rattling old sink in one corner. The community bathroom for all residents of our floor was down the hall.
What Frederik did not disclose to us was the reason the place was less expensive—only fifty bucks a week—than the others on the fourth floor: the building our room faced across Fifty-first Street was a converted mission for homeless Christian drunks. Against the side of this mission was mounted a tall cross that was perhaps twenty feet high by twelve feet wide and extended out over the sidewalk. Seeing it for the first time in daylight made little impression on me and Chuckles. So what, we figured. We needed the room. The big cross outside the window wasn’t bothering anybody. No big deal. As long as Jesus stayed over there and left us alone, we’d be okay. Live and let live.
But that night when the sun went down we came to understand the real meaning of the phrase caveat emptor. The huge cross became neon, alternately pink, then green. One side of the damn thing, the pink side, spelled out the words SIN WILL FIND YOU OUT. The other side, the green side, read GET RIGHT WITH GOD. Each side flashed alternately every ten seconds.
I lay on my bed after dark watching our room get blasted by pink light, then drenched in green. This went on for the next twelve hours, until dawn. The only way to get any sleep at all was to drink and pass out. Charlie handled it better than I did. The guy could fall asleep in a phone booth.
A couple weeks passed. My roommate, after half a dozen threats from his mother over our hallway pay phone, had decided to pack it in and end his New York City escapade. His moms was an ex-Hollywood actress named Priscilla Tomlinson who had appeared in twenty movies in the forties. She was still very pretty for her age, but as it turned out, she was a master ball-breaker and had three ex-husbands. Pris’s favorite hobby was to torment her baby son, Chuckles. Every time he would return to our room after a conversation with “Mom,” his face would be pale.
During our time in Manhattan, Chuckles and I had made it to a play or two, hung out with some girls from Queens in Times Square, and, as tourists, visited the Empire State Building. At night we’d hit the local Eighth Avenue bars.
When it came time for my roommate to tell me he was going home to L.A., he had to be drunk to do it. Our deal had been to spend at least three months together in New York—win, lose, or draw. Chuckles had given me his word. Now Mama insisted he return to la-la land and all bets were off. His bus ticket to L.A. had arrived in yesterday’s mail.
It was not a good scene in our room. Chuckie knew he’d jacked me up. He knew I had no plans to return to California, but he was shoving off anyway—leaving me stuck with the rent and expenses. We had some more to drink and began pushing each other around. One of our neighbors, an out-of-work actor named Dylan, pushed our door open and broke up the fight.
The next morning when I woke up, my roomie was gone. Later, in a phone call, I found out he’d walked to Ninth Avenue and taken the bus nine blocks south to Port Authority Bus Terminal. That morning there had been no “so long” or “kiss my ass.” He’d simply skulked off. On the table was enough money for his half of the next week’s rent.
Being alone began a period of heavy drinking for me. At night I roamed the Times Square area bars, stopping to talk with hookers and street people. In those days, anarchists and evangelists and crackpots preached from almost every corner of Broadway. In the bars I was many things to many different people: a young journalist on a crime story, a political organizer, an assistant to a New York politician, a movie stuntman, an actor who’d just gotten a part in a Broadway show, a long-haul truck driver, and a hot new novelist. It all depended on whom I was talking to.
One night I was drunk and began arguing politics on the street with a Jesus Nazi wearing a sandwich board. It wound up in a pushing match. A while later I was chatting up a street girl, flirting. I remember that she was a teenage kid from somewhere in Maine, with a heavy New England accent and bad teeth. I knew I was making a pest of myself but I didn’t care. When our conversation got loud, her pimp appeared. He had two guys—his muscle—with him.
They pulled me down a flight of basement stairs and began going to work on me. The pimp had a razor and held it to my throat. What money I had was ripped from my pants pockets, and then, with the fat pimp giving orders to hold my arms, I was punched in the face a few more times until I fell to the pavement. He pulled his cock out and demanded that I suck him off. I fought to get away, but one of his pals removed my belt from my pants and began to choke me with it, using the buckle as the noose.
Finally, the pimp’s boys held me while the fat man stuffed his cock in my mouth. When he ejaculated I vomited again and again. It was the blackest night of my life—up until then.
Sometime later, still bloody, I made my way up the stairs but collapsed on the street. I was helped to my feet by a stranger. He hailed a cab, gave me a few dollars, and had me driven to Bellevue Hospital, where I was bandaged, given pain medicine for my neck and cuts, and then released a few hours later. I had no wallet or ID so, out of shame, I gave a fake name.
I called in sick to work the next day from the hall pay phone at my rooming house. At the time I was a movie usher in Sheridan Square. My manager, Mrs. Lupo, told me I would be replaced if I didn’t show up but when she saw my face the next day she gave me time off and sent me home.
That night, following more drinking, I did everything I could to pass out, trying to suffocate my screaming brain, but nothing helped. My mind was yammering out of control. Sleeping became impossible. Booze numbed the sharpness of the craziness but the terror and self-disgust kept coming. Finally, desperate, I swallowed the vial of pain meds in an attempt to kill myself and stop the noise in my head. I wound up vomiting on my bedsheets and shitting myself. It would be the first of several suicide attempts triggered by out-of-control self-hate and alcohol.
A week or so later, back on the night shift at Loew’s Sheridan in Greenwich Village, one of the guys I worked with—an odd, skinny cat named Melvin—pulled me aside in the balcony. We were both working four to twelve, the shift with the fewest customers.
Melvin was pimply and about my age and from Long Island. He’d worked clerical jobs since coming to the city, and he considered his movie usher gig a step up. He wore the same stinky secondhand black suit, bow tie, and shirt to work every day and talked with a bad stutter if he wasn’t on his meds.
Melvin could see I was having a bad time. I drank on the job, ducking into the bathroom for a snort and not caring who saw me do it. He began giving me two Valiums every afternoon, one to get me through the shift and the other to help me sleep that night.
It took Melvin thirty seconds to form a complete sentence. I finally learned that he had mood swings too and was probably crazier than me. He was being treated at a clinic on Fourteenth Street. The clinic was free if you qualified as low-income. Melvin was tired of me demanding pills from him every night, and he assured me that I would qualify for treatment and could get my own prescription at the clinic. He gave me the address and phone number and directions on how to get to the office by subway from Fifty-first Street.
A few days later I went to the clinic and met the intake woman, who gave me three hours’ worth of tests and long questionnaires to fill out, then set a follow-up appointment for me in two days.
When I arrived for my first session, it was with a bald, middle-aged guy named Dr. Geoffmoff. He reviewed my folder and the results of my Rorschach test, where you’re shown a series of ink stains and asked to make up a story for each picture.
Geoffmoff delivered his diagnosis. He folded his arms across his chest and said, “You have a multifaceted psychological profile. On one hand you have a provocative mind and a vivid imagination. On the other you are angry, aggressive, and severely depressed
.”
When he wanted to know if I drank or used dope, I told him that I did, in moderation. Geoffmoff smirked. He said that a person of my emotional makeup should be cautious with alcohol and depressants, that I should not take meds and alcohol simultaneously. I rightly assumed (and later confirmed) that Melvin had informed him about my drinking at work. Then the jerk did something that nearly queered me on shrinks forever. He told me about Melvin: his problems with his older sister, who had raised him and touched his private parts, and that he had been institutionalized twice as a teenager for vandalism, attempted suicide, and general antisocial behavior. Even I knew this was information that should not have been divulged—not to me, anyway. Melvin and I weren’t even friends. I assumed that Geoffmoff was trying to create rapport or some kind of bonding nonsense with me.
Before I left I was prescribed some mild sleeping pills that Geoffmoff said would help. I took the meds for two days and drank without results. On the third day I took three of the pills before going to my job. That helped. A couple days later, when the meds were gone, I decided it wasn’t worth going back to the clinic. I had no intention of ever talking to Geoffmoff again.
Looking back from the perspective of years of sobriety, I realize it was then, with my first suicide attempt, that I crossed the line into alcoholism. I had developed a ruminative, self-talking, obsessive mind. Managing this mind—treating my thinking—by using alcohol had now become a necessity. The mental part of alcoholism would follow me years into my recovery, untreated, until I found a way to deal with it.
Chapter Sixteen
Mo and Johnnie Beard
By now I’d been gone from California for three months. Every couple weeks I’d discover a letter from home in my downstairs hallway mailbox. They were always from my mom and written in longhand, and sometimes contained a check. On one occasion there was a typed addendum from the old man, stuffed separately into the envelope. Since I’d left home my father had begun to take an interest in me, especially after he learned of my assault and beating in Times Square. (I kept the real facts to myself for the next twenty years.) John and Joyce Fante had already had a number of scares with my brother Nick, who continued wrecking cars. His body-shop bills were in the thousands. Strangely, Pop continued to accept my brother’s excuses and preposterous explanations. Nick apparently could convince the old man of just about anything.
