Fante

by Dan Fante

  She knew my name from the taxi license in the bracket attached to my cab’s dashboard. She lit a cigarette and passed it to me. Then she lit another for herself. “You’re Daniel, right?”

  “Dan’s good.”

  “They gave me three days off. All I have to do today is pick up some money. So, it’s okay for you to talk to me.”

  “Okay, sure,” I said. “What do you want to talk about?”

  “You. I want to talk about you. We never talked before, so I want to talk. Tell me what you do for Uncle. Just drive.”

  “Pickups and drop-offs. That kind of thing.”

  “What else ya do?”

  “You mean for work?”

  “No, when you ain’t drivin’ is what I mean.”

  “I like baseball,” I said. “I go to Shea when I can and watch the Mets.”

  “I’m a Yankees fan. My older kid’s a goof for the Bombers.”

  “I’m a writer too, sometimes. I try to write.”

  “What kinda stuff you write, Daniel? Books and that?”

  “Poetry. I’m working on some poetry now.”

  “Stick with it. You look like a good kid. I read people pretty good and you look and act like a good kid.”

  “Thanks. That’s a nice thing to say.”

  “Ya know”—a crazy laugh—“I been working for the guinea boys for twenty-three years. Do you believe that? Long time, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Hey, but the money’s good. I put both my boys through school.”

  “Look, do you mind? Can I ask you something?” I said.

  “Sure, Daniel, ask me whateva.”

  “Can I ask you why you talk to yourself all the time when you’re in my cab? It’s—an unusual habit.”

  Millie laughed again, an even crazier laugh, then took a deep drag on her unfiltered Camel. “You thought I was fuckin’ crazy an-all, right? Thatz funneeee.”

  “Not exactly. I mean, I know what you do for Uncle. It’s just an unusual thing to hear someone whispering to themselves for half an hour or forty-five minutes in a cab.”

  “Okay, sure, I’ll tell ya. The thing you gotta know is I been popped plenty in my time, like I said, ova twenty years doin’ this stuff.”

  “Sure, it comes with the job, I guess.”

  “I used to carry all the numbers, slips, and cash in my shopping bags, under empty cereal boxes and milk cartons. You know, like fake groceries. Like I’d just been to the market.”

  “Sure. Right.”

  “I kept getting hauled in and the bulls would find two or three hundred betting slips and use them for evidence. I got to hate going to the can. So, a few years ago, I taught myself how to remember all the bets, the numbers.”

  “You remember all the numbers every day?”

  “Right. And the names of the people who bet and how much they bet.”

  “How many numbers? How many bets?”

  “Ya know, hundreds. I just learned to do it. It ain’t that hard and it’s better’n goin’ to the fuckin’ can alla time.”

  “Jesus.”

  About a year later, after I’d proved myself with my Uncle Spit, from time to time I’d get a phone call, always on the pay phone at the taxi garage, always in the morning at the time I picked up my cab, for a different kind of run. These jobs almost always took place at night. I’d pick up two cousins and drive them to a bar or a club, usually in the Fordham Road section of the Bronx. These cousins were collectors. It was always the same two guys. They would talk very little and only in whispers to each other, but never to me, unless it was to give me another address.

  I’d wait down the block in my cab with my off-duty light on and the motor running while they went inside to settle up with whomever they were supposed to collect from. A couple times I had to clean blood off the backseat before turning in my cab.

  One night when I was home drinking alone and was nicely hammered and trying to write some poems, there was a knock at my apartment door. It was Spit himself. My one day off had turned into a two-day run with the booze and I’d called in sick that morning with the flu.

  Uncle Spit insisted that I make us some coffee. There was a Mets game on TV with Tom Seaver on the mound, and while the coffee brewed Spit sat silently on my couch smoking and watching Seaver pitch.

  When the coffee was done—an eight-cup pot—he told me to get one cup and bring it and the coffee to the table. Then he told me to drink the coffee. “How much do you want me to drink?”

  “Drink it all. I’ll wait. I’m watching the game.”

  Two innings later I was done.

  Spit said very little. He waited until I had finished the coffee.

  Then he told me to get up and take a cold shower, so I did.

  When I was out of the shower he was still watching the game. Seaver was pulled in the eighth and Tug McGraw was called in to mop up and get the save.

  Spit turned off the game.

  He got off the couch and stood above me. “Listen, Dan,” he said, “I like you. You always been a good kid and you know how to keep your mouth shut. You do what you’re told. But this ain’t me talkin’ to you now. This comes from up the ladder. You’re a problem. You’re a fuckup.”

  “I am? What kind of problem? What did I do?”

  “You’re a juicer. You ain’t good for business. I can’t trust you no more. This guy I know”—the phrase he always used to describe one of his superiors—“is a little PO’d. You missed a pickup.”

  “Christ,” I said, “I must’ve forgot about it. I guess it slipped my mind. Sorry, Uncle Spit.”

  Spit shook his head. “You didn’t forget nothin’, kid. You was drinkin’. Am I right?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Yes or no?”

  “Yes, you’re right. I was drinking.”

  “You do drugs too? Blow, or any of that hard shit?”

  “C’mon, you know me.”

  Spit stared at me for a long time. “Okay,” he finally said, “I get it. I understand.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “You’re off the books as of now. We’re done.”

  “It won’t happen again. You know me. You said it yourself: I’m a good worker. I’ve never made a mistake before. Can you talk to him for me? I need the extra money.”

  Uncle Spit shook his head. “Here’s the way it’s gonna go: You and me, like I said, is over. Tomorrow you quit your job and transfer to another cab company, a joint here in the city, one of the taxi garages on the West Side. Not in the Bronx. Understand?”

  “Am I in trouble?”

  Spit shook his head. “Just stay away from the Calhoun garage for now, kid. This guy don’t want to see you around no more. No more Bronx. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “That’s it,” said Uncle Spit.

  He started for the door then turned back. “You got a problem, Fante.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Handle your personal shit, kid. You and me are okay but don’t ever put me in the middle again. And for chrissake, make some changes. Clean up your act.”

  Spit opened the door and looked back. “Stay in touch, kid. Call me. Let me know how you’re doin’.”

  That was that. I was out.

  A great deal of snot has been written and said and filmed about the guys who make their living the way Uncle Spit and these cousins made their living. My take on the subject is based on my own experience. I was always treated well and paid well and my work for Uncle Spit ended quietly.

  Eventually, after transferring to a taxi garage in midtown, and still driving a cab eleven to twelve hours a day, something in me began to change. I was less nervous. Maybe it was because I was out with Uncle Spit and I had taken what he said seriously and cut back on my drinking for several weeks. I was less crazy and my internal screaming was lower than it had been in quite a while. At times I could even feel removed, disconnected from my endless self-judgment. While working my shift, I began to experience mysel
f becoming calmer. I sometimes felt like a witness to myself, as if the taxi I was driving were a bubble or a kind of safe, movable armor, roaming from street to street, carrying me along within it. I would look at my watch and six or seven hours would have passed. Sometimes, when I turned in my cash at the end of one of my shifts, I actually felt good.

  On weekend mornings or snowy days, when business was slow, I would roam the empty Manhattan streets for hours. Just drifting. I made a deal with myself not to do any boozing while I worked and I kept that deal. Sometimes I could go a day or two or three with only a few beers.

  While I drove I began to write more poetry in my loose-leaf notebook. I wrote hundreds of poems. If an idea came, I’d pull over and jot down the lines that came to me. At the end of the day, on my way home on the crosstown bus, then the subway, I’d read what I had written. I almost always destroyed the stuff by the time I got home.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Batshit Crazy and a Bad Leg

  © JOHN V. FANTE

  A few months later the peace I’d felt driving my cab had evaporated. I’d now been held up twice and stabbed once. I began hating my job. To make myself feel better, more secure, to protect myself, I got in touch with an uncle I knew in the Bronx who knew a guy downtown in Little Italy named Tito. Tito and I met for a beer and I bought an out-of-state cold piece: a stainless-steel .38 with black grips and no serial number. For the next several years, everywhere I went, when possible, the gun went with me.

  Now, during the day, while I was driving, I began to get violent hangover tremors. Sometimes I would put my hands to my face, find it wet, and realize I had been crying without knowing it. Other times I’d get an impulse and yell something out loud. Often there would be a passenger in the cab. I began having more and more blackouts, waking up on the floor of my room or on a bench in some shitty park. I was going nuts and I was aware of it.

  Finally, unable to deal with myself and the madness, I found a shrink through my taxi union. The first three sessions were covered by medical insurance, so I decided to give therapy another try.

  The psychiatrist’s name was Mel Wolf. His office was on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Eighty-sixth Street. Mel specialized in treating cops. According to him those guys were crazier than anyone. Wolf had a dark, sarcastic sense of humor and had grown up on the streets of Manhattan and attended night college for ten years to become a shrink. When he eventually learned that I carried a piece, he refused to treat me unless I got rid of the gun so, two days a week, I left the .38 under the seat of my cab before I went to his office.

  Wolf walked me through several months of what he called emotional fatigue. I finally copped to how much I drank and one day in a session when I asked him for a diagnosis he shook his head. “You want the clinical term?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You’re batshit. Nuts. You’re barely functional. Your next step is inpatient, where you won’t be able to drink yourself to hell every day.”

  “Not possible,” I said.

  “Keep going and you’ll find out. That’s a personal guarantee.”

  We compromised. I said I’d cut back on the drinking and he upped my office appointments to five times a week, reduced my fee, and gave me open credit.

  While I was seeing Mel I had to agree to take courses at Hunter College three nights a week. He wanted me out at night with people other than hookers and drunks. I’d read a lot of plays so I decided on acting and writing classes. That’s where I met Vonnie Washington, a black twenty-year-old singer-dancer from Connecticut.

  One night Vonnie and I were paired to do a two-person scene in the acting class. We were given Stella and Stanley from A Streetcar Named Desire, a play I had done before in my brief career at college. Vonnie was easily the prettiest black girl I’d ever met. She had a perfect body and wonderful, perfect skin and a sexy smile. Her parents were strict Christians and she had been educated in private schools. Mostly white private schools.

  After our performance the acting teacher critiqued the scene and liked my work. He complimented me in front of the class, saying I had talent as an actor.

  Vonnie was at my apartment a week later. I found out that she’d never been to bed with a white guy, or any guy, before. There was blood everywhere. I was her first sex partner.

  That December I made a trip back to L.A., the first in several years. It was Christmas 1969.

  To my surprise John Fante and I could actually spend time in the same room. We discussed books and I read him a few of the short things I hadn’t thrown away.

  When I was done he rolled his eyes and smiled at me. “Stay with it, kid. The more you write the better you’ll get.”

  Then he looked away and his expression changed. It was as if he were collecting words. John Fante was always precise when he spoke, even in casual conversation. “Give it until you’re fifty, Dan. You might be a writer too. Just don’t rush it. Let it come to you. Keep trying.”

  That was it. The first supportive thing my father had ever said to me that I could remember. I felt as if I’d just been handed a sliver from the cross of Christ himself. From then on our relationship began to change. My father began to treat me as more of an equal, as another writer.

  On that same trip I also discovered that my mother had taken up ceremonial magic. Wicca. It had become her new passion. Over the years she’d taught herself German and become a meticulous stamp collector. She also sketched, wrote poetry, and had other hobbies. When she wasn’t reacting to her husband’s personality, Joyce could be a good friend to me and was the best-read person I’d ever met.

  Along with ceremonial magic Mom’s newest passion was for tarot-card reading. She had become an adept fortune-teller, and we spent our evenings sipping wine while she explained card readings and interpretation. To this day I still do tarot readings for my friends.

  One warm California Saturday around New Year’s Eve, at my parents’ swimming pool, my brother Nick and I, with our younger brother Jimmy watching, were matching each other drink for drink. Our competitive sneering and sniping led to a diving challenge. A front-flip competition on the pool’s rickety diving board.

  Nick tried one that almost succeeded, and then I made mine—sort of. Young Jimmy joined in and was a better diver than either of us. Sober. He executed his flip effortlessly.

  John Fante had been watching from a chair in the shade petting his big Akita, Buck. He disappeared inside for a few minutes, then stepped out the door in his ten-year-old swimming trunks. “You guys know exactly shit about diving,” he snarled. “Let your old man demonstrate the finer points of the board, hopefully without breaking his neck.”

  My brothers and I lined up for another try, and when it came to Pop’s turn, he ran the length of the board, then missed getting the bounce at the end. His flip ended with him somehow scraping his calf on the tip of the diving plank.

  We didn’t know he was hurt until he called for help. “I smashed my leg, boys. Help me. Get me out of here.”

  There was a small wound on his shin. He limped inside the house and continued favoring his other leg for several months. Over time the sore became worse and refused to heal.

  This marked the beginning of John Fante’s circulatory troubles from diabetes. My father was sixty years old at the time. It would be a long, grisly battle with a very bad ending.

  Chapter Twenty

  Smoke and Sexy Vonnie

  Vonnie moved into my apartment in the East Village. Since I’d relocated to the neighborhood it had become even worse—a cesspool of crime and drugs. It was okay for me because I came and went to work by subway, but for Vonnie, who spent more time at home, it was dangerous even to walk to the store a block away. Because of the number of burglaries in the area, she was scared all the time.

  I continued driving a cab and had involved myself with two different theater groups at night, doing scene-study and showcase acting work, sometimes writing original material. Eventually, because of my mounting therapy debt, I qui
t Mel Wolf, the shrink. Having a girlfriend helped calm my mind for a time and being busy at night helped me cut back on the booze.

  One evening at a rehearsal studio on Broadway, in midtown, where I was preparing for a showcase piece I had written for the acting group I was in, a guy stopped me in the lobby. His name was Art Wilson. We’d passed in the lobby several times and had become friendly. Having beautiful Vonnie with me always got Art’s attention. Vonnie turned heads.

  Art was a black DJ and a songwriter. He had a program on a small FM station in Manhattan, WHBI. He also had a small production company. Art told me he had some ideas for a radio show.

  I skipped my rehearsal and sent Vonnie home, then Art and I adjourned to the Blarney Stone around the corner on Eighth Avenue and began drinking, shooting the breeze. It was Tuesday at the Blarney Stone, two-for-one night.

  A couple hours later we were both hammered. Art offered me free airtime on the radio after his DJ show, an hour a week. His idea was for me to find a few actors and do scenes from Broadway plays over the air, to add class to the station and his show.

  I had no idea how to run an acting group and I knew less about radio. I did have a little experience with live theater and had written a one-act play that I had also directed. The play was showcased by the Cosmos Theater Company in New York. But ignorance or lack of experience had never stopped me before. After a few drinks I convinced myself and Art that I was Sidney Lumet. I jived and shucked my way into a deal.

  I named my acting ensemble the Dante Theater Group and for a few weeks we did established theater scenes over the air. Then I soon tired of finding dramatic material every week, scuffling around Manhattan to get broadcast permission to do readings. I decided to write something original. It was easier and more fun. Art Wilson liked the idea too.

  The show was named Smoke, and it featured the first black superhero in America. What had begun as an hour of live dramatic readings turned into the only radio drama then being produced in America.

  I spent two weeks listening to old radio dramas and studying sound effects. The Lone Ranger and The Shadow were the ones I liked the most and emulated to an extent, though my intent was to update the ideas with modern situations and more believable characters. The intro to Smoke had as much dramatic flair as I could give it. I even cast myself as the show’s announcer. Here is what I read, as the announcer, at the beginning of every segment: