Fante

by Dan Fante

  In my father’s note he mentioned a recent car wreck and expressed concern over my brother’s “ghetto companions.” John Fante was now over his long depression regarding a book rejection and not drinking—or so he said. He continued to rake in beefy movie paychecks, wanted me to know how well he was doing writing screenplays, and listed a few film projects he was working on. This is the reply note I wrote to him sometime in early 1964:

  Dad: I notice one thing immediately about your letters; they are flawless. My old man don’t make no mistakes in punctuation, grammar, spelling—nothing. Your letter reads like it is from the inside four pages of chapter six of a novel you never published. Good stuff. It flows almost flawlessly from your stubby hands. But my old man ain’t a boy anymore. And it ain’t 1938. He don’t write no books. He writes that shit I see that comes out of the skin mill. How come, Dad? . . . What gives?

  Of course, there was no reply.

  I kept going from one temp job to another. I didn’t like people and short-term work allowed me to stay anonymous and keep to myself. It was fun. A game. I became a master at making up job applications. I never did one the same way twice. SHENLEY PAPER PRODUCTS: Shipping Supervisor: Duties included overseeing a shipping department of five and writing daily evaluations to my supervisor. REASON FOR LEAVING: Company relocation. SEAGRAMS COSMETICS: Copy Room Assistant: Daily duties consisted of collecting all documents for duplication, copying these documents, and redistributing them to executive office staff. REASON FOR LEAVING: Slipped and broke my ankle.

  I could make up almost any nonsense work history on the spot.

  Over the next six-month period I probably worked thirty different jobs. I shuffled paper and sorted questionnaires and stamped envelopes and delivered office mail and swept hallways and handed out flyers in Times Square. Most of the gigs lasted no more than a few days or a week, and getting to them helped me learn the New York City subway system.

  My favorite assignment was at Schwarman Research. I was in a room with three out-of-work stage actors, Brad and George and Richard. Brad did the best imitation of Edward G. Robinson I’d ever heard. He’d memorized the guy’s dialogue and in the middle of sorting and decollating report binders he’d stand up and bust out with an Eddie G. monologue.

  Here’s a sample of one of Brad’s favorites, from the movie Key Largo:

  You’ll get rid of me and take all the money, is that it? Right, soldier? . . . You figure I got a gun so you can’t trust me. . . . Listen, you’re not big enough to do this to Rocco!

  Brad had us all on the floor laughing.

  He was a damned nice guy, but for some reason he couldn’t say anything without including profanity. His mouth was a big problem for his acting career. It eventually got him booted from our cushy staple-pulling gig.

  Over the next few years I’d bump into him from time to time outside the Broadway rehearsal studios in Times Square, and we’d stop into the Blarney Stone or some other saloon and have a beer. Later, in his fifties, Brad became successful as a character actor in films and several memorable TV episodes.

  I began to stay busy at night by attending poetry readings at coffeehouses around Manhattan. I had ambitions of becoming a poet, so I read as much poetry as I could, Lawrence Ferlingetti, Poe, William Butler Yeats, Tennyson, Allen Ginsberg, and even Shakespeare. I disciplined myself to write two or three nights a week, using a pen and notepad. What I came up with was what I considered to be awful—very bad poetry. After three drinks most of the stuff never made sense, although while I was writing it I’d concluded it was brilliant.

  At the time a boyhood friend from Los Angeles, Aram Saroyan, William Saroyan’s son, who now lived in New York, had just published a one-word poem that had won major literary recognition. ONE WORD. I figured if Aram could write stuff like that and win a prize, then there was hope for a guy like me.

  Sometimes I would walk forty or fifty blocks to a reading in the Village or the SoHo area, sipping from a pint bottle of bourbon in my back pocket, attempting to exhaust my brain so I could steal a few hours of rest.

  One night I heard a guy read a long poem. He was an older, big, heavyset man with a thick, scruffy white beard and matching slicked-back, ponytailed hair—Walt Whitman with flashy false teeth. He said his name was Johnnie Beard. Johnnie’s poetry wasn’t very good—a rambling, bad imitation of Rudyard Kipling or somebody even more pretentious. But the place was crowded with his admirers. To my surprise, after twenty minutes on the small stage there was lots of applause.

  Then the audience began a Q and A session. The stuff they asked had nothing to do with poetry. How had Johnnie come to this new phase of his life? . . . Now that Kennedy was dead, what did he feel about the spiritual course our country was taking? . . . What about civil rights? . . . Bob Dylan? What about our military activities in Southeast Asia? . . . And what did Johnnie have to say about love? That kind of stuff.

  Johnnie Beard could yak with the best. He had reams to say about life and love and “letting it all happen.” Turns out the poetry-reading fluff was just his front, his warm-up act. Johnnie’d had this fundamental, life-changing, metaphysical experience several years before on Bali or an island somewhere, and the voices had told Johnnie to change his life, that now was the time. Right now! This moment. So he’d deep-sixed his advertising gig on Madison Avenue, given his clothes away, dumped his bloodsucking wife and his home in New Rochelle, and then moved to the Lower East Side and started a commune . . . and a religion. He called it Kamistra.

  Johnnie went on for the next half hour, always smiling, then stroking his long beard, and beginning almost every sentence with the word man, whether he was talking to a male or female.

  “Man, the power that is your being—who you really are—is limitless. Man, you gotta really get that. You’re the center of the universe.

  “Man, we gotta start tapping into that real power. You’re a love rocket. It’s all around you. The power is NOW!

  “You’re beautiful, man. You’re a beautiful cat. Stop fighting. Stop the struggle. Just BE. The secret is that you have all that you need already—right inside you. Just be beautiful. Don’t you get it, man?”

  Johnnie always maintained his huge grin and waved his robed arms a lot.

  At first I liked the guy. I was usually half in the bag, so I was relaxed and enjoyed his performance. He’d read all the books too, from Marx to Zola to Krishnamurti. Big Johnnie reminded me of a carnival guy I’d met when I worked at the amusement park in Santa Monica. They called him Bobby Boom. He’d been a tent minister on the road before getting hooked on China White and doing a nickel at San Quentin. When Bobby was “on” and not too loaded on smack, he could talk the hair off a black widow spider. Good stuff too. Half an hour after he began his spiel, people, on cue, would spontaneously rush toward the stage to receive salvation. Bobby’s hat was filled with donations. You’d feel as though you’d just had the best blow job of your life. He and Johnnie Beard had come from the same bag. Both were natural preacher-hustlers.

  Finally, Johnnie was done and somebody passed the hat for Kamistra.

  In the crowd that night was a pretty black-haired girl who, like me, had just heard Johnnie Beard for the first time. I said hi to her while we were waiting at the coffee counter during the break. Mo had a smart New York mouth and a great ass, and, as I found out later, had just quit her undergraduate work as a business major at NYU.

  “So,” I said, trying for a little chitchat, “are you here to see Johnnie? I’m just guessing, but aren’t you one of his followers?”

  “I’m not anyone’s follower . . . Ralph.”

  “My name’s Dan.”

  “To me you’re Ralph. You got it, RALPH?”

  “Sure.”

  “Are you drunk, Ralph?”

  “I had wine with dinner. What’s your name?”

  “Maureen. You a poet?”

  “Sometimes. You’ve got a great body, Mo. And world-class intelligence. I can tell.”

  “That’s
a lame come-on.”

  “Best I can do. Sorry.”

  “I write poetry. I’m here to listen. My friend is here to read. Are you reading any poetry tonight?”

  “Maybe. So you’re staying? That’s nice.”

  “Excuse me. I haven’t got time for this. I’m busy here.” Then Mo disappeared into the crowd.

  After the break everyone sat down again. Mo was apparently outside or in the lady’s crapper talking to her friend Kira. My name was called, so I went up onstage to recite a piece I’d written the day before. I introduced myself and the title of my poem and then went on for about a minute and a half. My stuff was dark and rhyming, a sort of fusion of Baudelaire and Johnny Cash. Pretty awful.

  When I was done a few people clapped and then I returned to my chair, which was near the stage. I lit a cigarette and sipped my bourbon and coffee.

  The guy at the table behind me nudged my arm. “Man, you’re beautiful. We’re on the same page, man. I really got you.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Didja hear Johnnie Beard? Didja hear where he’s comin’ from? The cat’s empowering, man. Beautiful.”

  “Right. Interesting stuff.”

  “Absolutely! Man, what a beautiful cat. Me and my pal Tommy moved into the commune on Suffolk Street. We’re from Poughkeepsie. We’re helping Johnnie raise money during the day. Next year, after we’ve raised enough bread, we’re all moving to Central America. Johnnie’s already picked out the land.”

  “Cool,” I said, trying to end it and turn back to the next reader onstage.

  “Man, Johnnie’s the real thing. He’s really beautiful.”

  “That’s a big word with you guys, right? Beautiful.”

  “It all starts from making the inner decision to open up your heart to what’s really important. Johnnie calls it awareness. The real self.”

  “Beautiful.”

  “Right. Beautiful.”

  “Look, do you mind? I want to hear the big girl’s poem.”

  “Groovy.”

  The people at my table got up to leave. Mo and her girlfriend Kira, who’d just finished reading a poem that was easily as bad as mine, sat down. Kira was a big girl. A very big girl.

  Mo was looking at me. “What?” I said.

  “I actually enjoyed your poem. It was morose. You have talent. Have you read Edna St. Vincent Millay?”

  “A little, I think.” This was a lie.

  “What about Hermann Hesse? Have you read him? His novels?”

  “No.”

  Bending down, she removed a hardback book from her purse on the floor. “Here,” she said, pushing it across the table at me. “Read this. I have another copy at home. It’ll change your life.”

  The book was Demian.

  “We’re leaving. Do you want to walk us to the subway?”

  “Sure. I mean, beautiful.”

  “Knock off the shit, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  That night, unable to sleep because of the neon flashing in my room, I drank wine and read Demian from cover to cover. Mo had been right. It was a great novel.

  A few days later Mo and I talked on the phone about books and politics and made a date for coffee. We started screwing at my pink and green circus-clown room. Mo thought the place atmospheric and said it was cool to be blasted by neon every ten seconds.

  She lived in the Bronx with her parents, and a couple nights a week we’d get it on. Mo had all the moves and her ass was a delight to behold. But for her the one glitch was my boozing. She didn’t like it and she wouldn’t put out if I had alcohol on my breath. So I made a decision and attempted to cut back.

  When we were together our conversations were about books and poetry and politics, topics I’d never discussed at length with anyone before. We began to have long discussions about what was going on in the country, about civil rights and the military-industrial complex.

  At least once a week I’d receive a quote in the mail, typed up or written in flawless hand script. Here’s one I saved from that time:

  When you meet your friend on the roadside or in the marketplace let the spirit in you move your tongue, let the voice within your voice speak to the ear of his ear; for his soul will keep the truth of your heart as the taste of the wine is remembered; when the color is forgotten and the vessel is no more.

  Kahlil Gibran

  It was September 1964. We started attending marches and other events on weekends in Manhattan. I’d stop drinking the night before we’d get together.

  Then I got sick. A cold turned into pneumonia. I cut back to a pack a day, but it went on for a week or more and I was unable to leave my room to go to my job.

  A day or so after I got sick, the rooming-house manager, dinky Frederik, got himself mugged when he came home drunk late one night. He went into a coma, then died. The cops apparently did very little to find the guys who shanked Frederik in the back on Ninth Avenue and then beat his head in.

  The new live-in manager in #1 at 332 West Fifty-first Street was a Puerto Rican dude named Pepe. An extreme shithead. I’d been able to work with Frederik on my rent because I didn’t make noise and he’d stuck me with the neon Jesus room—once, when he had an attack of improved English, he even told me that he felt bad about sticking me with the room. If I was a couple days or a week late on the rent, I’d pay him an extra few bucks and everything would work out.

  Not so with Pepe. When I eventually got better and my rent was overdue, I came home from work and found that Pepe had changed the locks that day. I’d been evicted. I had to move.

  One of the Kamistra people had kept in touch with Mo and we’d attended a couple more of Johnnie Beard’s Man, you’re beautiful hourlong riffs at coffeehouses in the Village, and we’d eventually visited the commune on Suffolk Street. For economy, Mo suggested that we move in there together.

  This was a bad idea. Not my idea. Very soon we discovered that Johnnie Beard had another side—a darker side. Mr. Enlightenment was of the mind that banging a different female resident two or three nights a week, in order to share himself, was “beautiful.” It had become his custom. But the guys who were involved with these girls—their boyfriends—weren’t particularly knocked out about his being beautiful.

  Big Johnnie, of course, had a solution. Naturally, his best skill was taking care of Johnnie. At our daily six a.m. debriefing and roll call, where those not employed would receive their marching orders for the day, Big Johnnie had instituted a sort of Kamistra loyalty oath. He would start off by picking someone out. Almost always a guy. He’d tell them how “beautiful” they were and go on for thirty seconds about some good characteristic they had and how their presence contributed so powerfully to Kamistra and to changing humanity. Then he’d lower the whammy: “You’re a dynamite cat, ——. But now I have to ask you, are you one of us? Really with us? Do you stand for what we stand for: the idea that this is one family, that our unity and common good and a new way of living in a new society is what this gig is about?”

  The oath and syrup varied a bit, but it always contained the same pledge demands.

  That night or the next, when Johnnie would choose his female companion for the evening, it was almost always the same guy’s old lady. A nice coincidence.

  Mo’s turn came up the second week we lived at the commune. That morning at roll call Johnnie pointed at me. “Dan, you’re an amazing new addition to Kamistra. A shining beacon. A beautiful cat. I feel the love. I’ve heard you read your poetry, and man, I was blown away! You’re beautiful.” Etc., etc. Then he went into the oath.

  I nodded at everything he wanted me to nod at, then pointed out the stinking ten-thousand-pound blue elephant in the room. “Johnnie,” I said, “I know you’re the leader and all, and I know where this is going. But I gotta tell you, bottom line, my girlfriend is off-limits. She sleeps with me only.”

  Later, around noon that day, Johnnie and two of his loyal male disciples, both carrying cardboard boxes, knocked at the door to our room. Mo
had been smoking a joint. I opened the door. Johnnie let Goon #1 do his talking.

  “We’re here to assist you in packing up your clothes and belongings,” Goon #1 said.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “What’s up?”

  Goon #2 was holding a typewritten piece of paper. He read it. “Removal notice! Dan Fante, you have violated Kamistra’s conduct bylaws. The committee has voted. You are hereby removed from the commune. You will be permitted one hour to pack and leave. Maureen, of course, will be allowed to stay on at Kamistra if she so chooses.”

  “We’re together . . . What bylaws?” I said.

  “An empty pint bottle of whiskey was found in the trash in this room.”

  “So?”

  “Kamistra’s bylaws forbid the use of alcohol.”

  “Nobody ever showed me any bylaws. This is the first conversation I’ve had about bylaws.”

  “You have one hour to pack up and leave,” Goon #1 said.

  “What about pot and sunshine? Everybody here’s using that shit. What about that?”

  “Alcohol is not okay at Kamistra. You have one hour.”

  Then I looked over at Big Johnnie Beard and said, “This wouldn’t have anything to do with you wanting to jump my old lady, would it?”

  For once Johnnie wasn’t smiling. “Our committee has spoken. I’m a member just like you. I abide by their decisions.”

  “You ARE the committee, Johnnie. This is pig snot. Backlash for me not allowing you to screw my girlfriend.”

  After two weeks in a hotel on Houston Street, Mo and I moved to an apartment on Jerome Avenue beneath the elevated subway tracks in the Bronx, near what New Yorkers called the Yankee Stadium. At night when the train roared by, the sound was deafening. Everything in our place rattled and occasionally an ashtray would fall to the carpet. Conversations stopped, as if choreographed, then got picked up again after the train passed.