by Dan Fante
John Fante had returned to writing fiction and he seemed more at peace, despite his worsening diabetes. This was a different man than had raised me.
I’d gotten pretty good at cooking pasta for myself, and for dinner, at my mother’s urging, I cooked linguini with clam sauce, al dente. The old man loved it. The recipe had been given to me by a guy from Little Italy who tended bar on the West Side.
My father, my brothers, and I drank Cribari rosé wine and got along well. After the meal in the big living room, my father and I sat watching 60 Minutes, his favorite TV show. The old man admired Mike Wallace’s annoying and aggressive style.
As we watched the program, our conversation turned to my writing and my life on the East Coast. I related the story of my radio show failure and the time I had spent writing and directing the production each week.
“Why the hell did you give it up?” Pop asked.
“They tried to screw me. They offered me next to nothing to syndicate. I got pissed off.”
“The imperative in a situation like that is as follows: See the big picture, do not lose your cool. Let go of the bitterness. You can learn from the mistake.”
“It was definitely uncool.”
“Listen, I saw one of the radio scripts, Dan. It wasn’t that bad.”
“You’re the author, Pop. I got lucky with a flimflam radio show. I saw my chance and I took it. That doesn’t make me a writer. Anyway, now I’m making decent money at my peddling gig.”
“A gig? Pardon me, but what the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“A job. A business.”
“Speak English for chrissake.”
“Right.”
“Look, I’ve said it before, give it time, kid. A man has to mature—to discover himself. I wish to Christ I’d started later—that I hadn’t derailed my life at the studios.”
“You made a damn decent living.”
“The point is not to quit on yourself. If it’s there, you’ll find it. All I’m saying is give it time, capisce?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Don’t patronize me, for chrissake. I’m trying to help you. I don’t appreciate being spoken to like one of your exalted street-merchant companions.”
“Sure, Pop. I’ll think it over.”
The next day we were eating my mom’s hamburgers in the living room as the World Series was about to get under way. Vin Scully would do the play-by-play for NBC as the Dodgers battled the American League champs, the Oakland A’s.
Before the game, the host, Joe Garagiola, was interviewing a player. Garagiola was a veteran television baseball announcer who had once been a journeyman catcher with a mediocre lifetime batting average. John Fante became pissed off every time Garagiola’s face appeared on a TV screen. He considered the guy to be a poor example for Italian-Americans. For Pop, Garagiola’s ex-jock, man-on-the-street style and repeated inane remarks insulted the Italian people. My father instantly became angry when Garagiola, who grew up on the same street as the Yankee great Yogi Berra, made reference to their friendship. Berra, according to John Fante, was a credit to the Italian people. Garagiola was a grinning goombah moron. Pop had nicknamed the guy Joe-the-Garage.
During a commercial my father glared toward the kitchen where my mother was cooking. “Honey,” he snarled, “bring me the phone!”
“What’s up, Pop?” I said. “Can’t it wait? The game is coming on.”
“Mind your own business, kid. I’ve got something to do.”
A minute later Mom carried the phone with its long cord into the living room and my father dialed Western Union. After connecting with the operator and giving the address where he wanted the message to go as the World Series NBC broadcast booth, John Fante dictated the following telegram to Garagiola: “Do your good deed for the day, Joe. Shut up!”
The Dodgers won that day.
Later that week at breakfast, Pop hobbled to the table with some typed pages in his hand—a manuscript he had been working on. The completed novel would later be titled The Brotherhood of the Grape and would mark his comeback as a published author.
Slapping the pages down on the table, he lit a cigarette, then sipped his coffee. “Here it is, kid.”
“So you’re working on a new novel?”
He smiled. “Can’t get anything past you, can I?”
“You want me to read it?”
“You mean as opposed to wiping your ass with it? Yes, that would be my intent in showing it to you.”
I lifted the inch of typed pages and held it up. “What’s it called?”
“The Last Supper, I think. That’s what I’m calling it now. It’s about the death of my father. Your grandfather. It’s set upstate in the Sacramento Valley.”
“I’ll have a look at it.”
“Read it now—before you start getting drunk for the day.”
“I’ve got some stuff to do in Santa Monica. I’m meeting a guy.”
John Fante snatched the pages off the table. “No problem. I know you’re a busy man with pressing obligations. Fuck it.”
“Okay. I’ll read it now.”
“Your forbearance is humbly appreciated.”
“Okay, okay.”
After breakfast, which began with another father-and-son exchange, this time over what my mother would cook that morning—eggs with hash browns or scrambled eggs with bacon—I took my father’s pages out onto the back patio. The rear of the house faced a quarter-acre mowed lawn that ended near a line of huge fern trees. Behind the trees was the six-foot-high cinder-block wall. The Fante fortress.
I am not a fast reader, so it took me almost two hours to complete my reading. It was John Fante at his best: irony, bittersweet humor, and fast-reading, lean prose.
I was thirty years old at the time, an avid reader of modern fiction—guys like J. P. Donleavy and Edward Lewis Wallant. I was also a radical political nutjob. At the time I could easily plug myself into a five-minute harangue on the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon and Robert McNamara and that evil Machiavellian asshole Henry Kissinger. So, in fairness to my own stupidity, what I read was filtered through the screen of that mind-set.
It was late morning when I was done. A perfect fall Malibu sky. I’d sneaked two tall glasses of rosé wine and smoked half a pack of Luckies while I sat in the sunshine.
I brought the pages into the dining room where my father was snarling to himself about a story he’d just read in The New Yorker. I held his manuscript out to him.
After he looked up he flung the magazine to the floor. “They call that pompous shit fiction? Geezus! What is it, kid?”
“I just finished this.”
He took the manuscript from me and carefully placed it on the couch’s arm next to his coffee cup. “So,” he asked.
I knew I had to be careful “Well,” I said, “it moves really well. The characters are funny and dead-on.”
“. . . You been drinking?”
“Not really. I was sipping a glass of wine in the sun.”
“Jesus, two sons in their thirties and they’re both ne’er-do-well boozers.”
“A glass of wine, Pop. C’mon. No big deal.”
“Okay, let’s hear it. Your feedback.”
“Well, look, I mean, what you’ve got here is a story about you and your father. The son coming to help his old man build a stone smokehouse.”
“Go on.”
“A comfortable, successful, middle-aged writer leaving Malibu to visit his papa because he’s afraid the old man’s going to die.”
“I’m familiar with the plot, kid.”
“Well, like I said, it reads very well but I’m not sure about the commercial possibility of this kind of book. I mean, who’s your audience? What publisher is going to take something like this seriously as marketable fiction?”
John Fante glared at me, then lit a cigarette. “Listen closely. There’s a remote possibility that you might learn something: First, I don’t give a damn if my work is commercial or not.”
“C’mon, of course you do.”
“Silence, please. I’m the writer. If what I write is good, then people will read it. That’s why literature exists. An author puts his heart and his guts on the page. For your information, a good novel can change the world. Keep that in mind before you attempt to sit down at a typewriter. Never waste time on something you don’t believe in yourself. So, did you like what you read?”
“Sure.”
“Did it involve you? Did it have an impact?”
“Sure. Of course.”
“End of discussion.”
I never forgot the conversation.
Years later, in my own work, I came to realize my father’s advice. Sadly, most of the publishing industry in America for years had been a glut of tell-all and entertainment and romance novels, motivated almost entirely by bottom-line profit. Good literary fiction has become harder and harder to find. Fewer writers willing to expose themselves and write about their own experiences in a way that contributes to the human condition—that speaks to the soul of the reader—are on the bookshelves. For me, the privilege of possessing the reader’s mind with my words in a novel for hours and days at a time, sharing my personal truth, is a great gift. As it was for my father, John Fante, being a writer is not simply a job. It is an extraordinary and precious calling.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Dodging the Bullet
It was a few days before Christmas. Just after twelve p.m. Our peddler stocks and display tables were overflowing with seasonal trinkets and junk. We were waiting for several thousand secretaries and female office workers from midtown to swoop down on us wielding their handbags. That’s when the biggest police roundup of the year took place.
A train of six gray paddy wagons rounded the corner on Fiftieth Street just as we were being smothered by female shoppers.
About thirty of us, along with our merchandise, were hauled away. But this arrest was different: Instead of being carted off to a precinct house nearby, we took the long ride downtown to the central jail. The Tombs.
My cell was twenty by thirty feet with a seatless metal toilet in the center of the concrete floor. There were three adjoining holding tanks containing about two dozen peddlers each, from all over the city.
During processing our sale merchandise was confiscated and, as we later found out, would not be returned. Because our arrest was regarded as less than felonious, before we were put in the slam, we were allowed to keep our wallets. The bulls did take my box cutter, along with everything else the peddlers had that looked as though it could be used as a weapon.
The following day was cold. There was a long line of us outside the courtroom in the hallway. Luckily, when the roundup began, I’d had on my heavy blue peacoat. I’d slept in it that night.
It took over an hour for my group to finally make it inside the courtroom, where it was considerably warmer.
The swift sword of the New York City justice system was coming down hard. Heads were rolling. We watched from against a wall as other peddlers were led out on their way to do time back in the Tombs.
Eventually, in groups of six, we had our turn and filed before His Honor, a bald, hawk-faced old black-robed coot who clearly had little time for foolishness.
Opposite His Eminence’s raised throne, about six feet away, were large oak tables placed end to end, approximately eighteen feet long by six feet wide. On these tables were stacked piles of unpaid, unanswered warrants. Each group of peddlers was made to stand before the judge and then briefed by the court clerk, a large black lady with a holster and sidearm wearing some kind of brown cop-looking getup.
Her statement went something like this: “New York City is overrun by illegal street peddlers. Any and all commercial merchandise will not be returned, including display tables, racks, and signs. Those items will be held in evidence. If you have any questions, you can address them to His Honor.”
Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor, would read out the name of a peddler, and his clerk would then find that person’s stack of tickets on the table and hand them up to His Honor, who would in turn count the summonses, multiply the numbers on a notepad, and dispense the sentence: “Four hundred dollars or forty days, two hundred dollars or twenty days,” etc., etc. One day in jail or ten bucks per ticket.
Many of the peddlers I watched face the judge that morning complained about the harshness of the penalties and tried to bargain. The street peddler’s style is to jive and shuck. We were all more than capable when it came to pleading with cops and attempting to finagle our way out of a ride to the precinct holding cell. It came with the territory. Occasionally this tactic even worked.
Not today. Hawk-face almost never looked up. He’d announce the terms of the sentence and then, more often than not, be forced to listen to a couple minutes of whining about injustice, or some weak-ass yarn about how that peddler had moved from his old address and was never notified or how he’d misplaced his court summons or even how his name was spelled incorrectly on his documentation. It was all my dog ate my homework kinda stuff. No soap.
When the accused was done with his spiel, His Highness would abruptly repeat the sentence and slam down his gavel. Case closed.
A few of us had money in our pockets when we were arrested. A couple guys in front of my group who’d already faced the judge had over a hundred dollars on them. Depending on how many tickets they had accumulated and how much money a guy had in his pocket as a large down payment, a peddler might be allowed to negotiate. It was all up to the judge. One thing was sure: If what you had in your pockets was under a hundred bucks, then your ass was off to the slam.
Clearly I was screwed. I had less than twenty dollars in my pants. Nineteen, to be exact. My habit was to carry change for a twenty before I started work during the noon office lunch breaks on Fiftieth Street. It was nowhere near enough.
We stood behind the big table waiting for our names to be called. It had been over twenty hours since my last drink and my body had already notified me that I was in trouble. I’d been shaking and sweating for the past couple hours. Now came the onset of dizziness. The temperature change from the hallway to the courtroom was doing me in.
With nothing else to do until the ax fell except feel my nerves disintegrate, I began looking down at the dozens of stacks of summonses, trying to see my name and maybe calculate what was coming.
That’s when I saw my own pile. In the second row of tickets, just a couple feet away from me, there were approximately two hundred of my summonses in a rubber-banded stack.
The clerk turned her back to hand the judge several piles of tickets, and with my hands jangling, I snatched my stack off the table. I pulled it apart and began stuffing wads of tickets into the inside and outside pockets of my coat. I did this as quickly as possible but, because of my tremors, I was unable to grab the whole stack. A few of the yellowed tickets were left behind.
The guy next to me saw what I was doing, searched crazily, finally located his own stack farther over on the table, waited until the clerk turned again, and then grabbed them up. He had no coat pockets and was wearing a thick knitted sweater. He had to stuff his clump down his pants. Like me, he’d left a few on the table.
The heavyset clerk turned back to us just after my companion had shoved in the last wad of paper. We were almost caught.
A minute or two later our names were called together and we walked around the table and stood before the judge. My sentence, for two non-misdemeanor summonses, was twenty dollars or two days.
“Your Honor,” I said, “I’ve got nineteen bucks in my pants. Can I bring in the other dollar tomorrow?”
His Eminence was unmoved. “No, sir, you may not! Pay ten dollars to the cashier. One day in jail. Next.”
From behind me I felt something being jammed into my hand. The dollar I needed.
“Wait, Judge,” I said, “I have the other dollar! Right here. I found it in my pants.”
His Honor looked down and eyed me suspiciously. “Yes
or no, sir? Either you have twenty dollars or you do not.”
I waved the money at him.
The gavel slammed. “Pay the clerk. Next.”
Outside the courtroom there was a group of half a dozen peddlers standing together, steam coming from their mouths as they rehashed what had just happened to them in court. I knew a couple of the guys from the streets.
The conversation going around was about how our merchandise was gone and we were all out of business at the best money-earning time of the year. One of the guys knew a cop who’d been sitting in the courtroom gallery. He’d been told by the cop that from now on the laws had teeth and the arrests and detentions would be much more frequent, at least until mid-January, when the crowds thinned out again.
One of the cats I knew was named Freddee. I tapped him on the arm and asked to bum a cigarette.
He eyed me up and down. “You’re in bad shape, guy, all shakin’ and shit. What’s up?”
“Just cold,” I said.
Freddee handed me a square and a book of matches. I tried to light the smoke but my hands were out of control and I finally gave up. “Listen,” I whispered, “can you front me a few bucks? I’m hurtin’ here.”
Freddee rolled his eyes. “And when-da-fuck do I get da bread back?”
“Next time I see you,” I said.
“Ain’t gonna be no next time, dog. We’re done. We’re screwed. We’re SOL.”
“A couple of bucks is all I need.”
Freddee backed away and looked me up and down. Then, in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, he said, “Man, get back. You workin’ me like some kinda street trick. I just got jacked for four hundred in cash. No fuckin’ way.”
Then he turned and walked away.
I was in for a long day.
Chapter Twenty-nine
The Limoscene
I got lucky and caught a break. I phoned home after my day in jail and the old man agreed to wire me three hundred dollars. It kept a roof over my head.
