Fante

by Dan Fante

  A few days after losing my career as a peddler, I was drinking coffee and reading the Times at a diner when I bumped into one of the cabbies I used to work with uptown: a big, acne-scarred cat we’d all nicknamed Fat Mel. A decent guy.

  As Mel and I shot the breeze, I told him what had happened with my peddler job and that going back to the cab was my last resort.

  Mel had an idea. A year ago he’d worked for a limo company on the East Side of Manhattan. He’d lasted three months and had to quit because the size of the cars and the long hours were too much. But he was still on good terms with the owner of Dav-Ko Limousine, David Kasten. Mel gave me Kasten’s office number and said I could use his name when I asked for a job. Then Fat Mel made me listen to twenty minutes of limo stories, one of which featured a famous macho actor having sex with his boyfriend in the backseat of the car. Getting Kasten’s phone number was worth it.

  Dav-Ko headquarters was gay swanky. Designer furniture and art filled the four-room apartment in a tall building at Sixty-fifth Street and Second Avenue. Kasten ran the whole deal from a black lacquered desk in the corner of his living room. He had six vehicles: four limos and two smaller town cars. They were all kept in the underground garage of the building.

  David was thirty years old and macho swish. His boyfriend, Pepe, was a slender, feminine-looking Argentinean kid in his early twenties with a heavy Latino accent.

  In my sports jacket pocket I’d brought proof that I had driven a cab for the past several years and also handed Kasten a motor vehicle printout containing my driving record. It showed no recent traffic tickets or accidents.

  My prospective boss had just caught one of his drivers smoking dope while waiting for his customers in the Broadway theater district. He’d bumped the guy on the spot. So, with my personal referral from Fat Mel, I was hired immediately.

  Kasten handed me a hundred-dollar bill as an advance and sent me to a clothing store in the Garment Center just below Times Square. I was told to buy a dark blue double-breasted polyester suit, a clip-on bow tie, and at least two drip-dry white shirts. I already owned an old pair of black shoes, so I had one less hoop to jump through.

  On the way to the store, I found out that Dav-Ko had a four-car film premiere order for that night, and David Kasten himself was attending.

  The guy who drove me to midtown was a kid Kasten had nicknamed Toad. Another chauffeur. Toad waited in the loading zone outside the suit store while I bought my uniform. By five o’clock that afternoon, I was a working chauffeur. The pay was five bucks an hour plus 15 percent of the total bill as a tip.

  I had a strong knowledge of the Manhattan streets and clubs and no life other than reading and writing my poetry, so I made myself available for whatever driving work came my way. This made big points with Kasten because on-the-spot night work came up all the time at Dav-Ko.

  At first I did mostly pickups at the airport. The Kennedy and LaGuardia runs were boring but easy. That was okay with me. I wanted to keep busy and not think too much.

  By the end of my first week, I had clocked seventy-three hours and earned four hundred dollars including cash tips. A good start.

  The long-hour schedule helped me to cut back significantly on my alcohol intake. For years I had managed, for the most part, not to drink while I drove. I was down to a few beers a day after I got home from work.

  It took several weeks until Kasten began trying me out on his first-tier customers. Eventually, I began to drive a guy named Marvin Affernan.

  Marv lived at the top of the UN Towers on Forty-ninth Street and had never driven a car in his life. He was the CEO of his own architectural design firm.

  Marv had a partner, his chief designer, a guy named Frank Di Bella. The two were inseparable. They were always dressed to the nines and wore custom-made suits. Their company was called Deziners Imperatives and was located behind the New York Public Library on Fortieth Street.

  Marv and Frank became my best customers. The two men used a limo at least three nights a week.

  There were theater runs, and dinners at the swanky Sign of the Dove on Third Avenue (where Jackie Onassis was also a customer). Marv and Frank frequented other high-end feed troughs in midtown, but the Sign was Marv’s favorite haunt.

  In time I learned that my best customer had developed an eccentric and generous reputation when he left tips for waiters at the Sign. If the last number on the bill before the tip total was anything other than a zero, Marv would add on three of those digits as a gratuity. If the last number of the bill was a seven, the tip would become $777.

  The guy who owned the Sign of the Dove had his best customers sign a brick. He would later install that brick in the wall of the main dining room. Marv’s brick was prominent. That was Marv: a generous, decent, lacquered brick.

  On free weekends the two men would take excursions out of town. I drove Marv and Frank and whomever they had tagging along—most often it was Marv’s lady friend Anna, an architecture magazine editor.

  I was always put up in a first-class room and paid round-the-clock on those trips. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the two men were lovers. There was never any indication of their sexual relationship because they were old-school gay men, in the closet while in public, but two guys who spent that much time together had to be lovers.

  At the end of every week, on Sundays, Marv always handed me my bonus: usually two hundred-dollar bills. Sometimes more. This, according to my client, was not a tip. He called it a bonus. The normal 15 percent gratuity for driving him was always on my paycheck too.

  After a year in the limo business, I was still working seventy-five to eighty hours a week. I had no personal life, but that was okay with me. I had become one of the highest-paid chauffeurs in New York City.

  Eventually, wanting an apartment closer to my job, I bribed the apartment manager of an aging four-story brownstone near the Dav-Ko office, stuffing five hundred-dollar bills into his fist. The next weekend I moved into a four-room apartment on Sixty-fourth Street. The rent was $155 a month.

  Four rooms anywhere in the East Sixties in midtown were renting for ten times that amount. My apartment was what New Yorkers call a railroad. Each room in a line behind the other, running the length of the building. The building itself was over a hundred years old and my bathtub was in the kitchen.

  At night I’d wash out one of my white, drip-dry, cottonless shirts in the tub and let it hang on a hanger until morning. The socks and T-shirts I’d buy were worn once or twice, then tossed if I didn’t have time to wash them out and let them dry.

  Many of Dav-Ko’s clients were in the music business. Over the next eighteen months, when I wasn’t driving Marv and Frank, I drove Paul Simon, Elton John, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Carly Simon, Kiss, Leonard Bernstein, and James Brown, among many others. Dav-Ko had become the top limo company in New York City for concert and rock-and-roll work.

  Several more new limos had been added along the way and the cars were identifiable for their modified “stretch” exterior. David would buy them new, then have them delivered to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, where the interior and exterior modifications were made.

  During this time—the mid-seventies—cocaine was being sold in little gram bottles and becoming very popular in the music industry and New York society, replacing and/or augmenting heavy drinking. In twelve-step programs there’s a well-worn slogan for adding or switching addictions. It is known as changing seats on the Titanic. Cocaine would never replace my first love, blended whiskey or alcohol in any form, but it eventually began to cause me a serious problem, as it also did for my boss.

  The income potential from distributing coke to his music business clients was not lost on David Kasten. Eventually, some of his drivers became his mules. A couple times a week, I would be dispatched to pick up or deliver bulging brown legal-size envelopes from a friend in west Greenwich Village.

  My favorite customer of all turned out to be Bette Davis. She had the personality of
a snowplow, but her years of Warner Bros. training had put a nice sheen on it. Out of force of habit Ms. Davis always remembered the names of doormen and service people. To her I became Danny-boy. But that never stopped the tiny woman from leaning forward from the backseat to bark driving commands. “Gee-zuss, Dan-eee, I’m in a hurry! Make this left for chrissake! . . . That’s it! Just cut him off. Good good good. Now get into the other lane, then hook a right on Fifty-seventh.”

  I’d execute my maneuvers with a smile. “Okay, Miss Davis? How’s that?”

  “Goddamn Jersey drivers! That dummy shouldn’t be allowed to drive that heap in midtown anyway.”

  One morning, reporting for work at the Dav-Ko garage, I found half a dozen plainclothes cops in front of the building. Inside David Kasten’s apartment there were more. A few minutes later David and Pepe, in handcuffs, were led out of the bedroom to the elevators. Dav-Ko was out of business—for about a week.

  My boss came from a well-to-do family. He’d immediately transformed into the hurt, astonished young man, rolling his eyes and doing a classic Who, me? with the best. “Dan, call my sister. Tell her I’m in jail,” he barked as they pushed his head into the rear passenger seat of the unmarked cop car.

  His mother hired an office full of lawyers who talked with the arresting officers and the assistant district attorney, who eventually talked with the judge, who then granted bail. With less than a hiccup, ten days later Dav-Ko was back in business.

  Kasten finally appeared in court. Little Pepe was deported long before that. My boss was sentenced to a year of weekends in jail for simple possession. David wound up doing eighteen hours on Saturday and Sunday at a posh midtown holding cell with telephone privileges. That lasted six months, and then he received restrictive probation. A felony conviction for a pound of coke that would send anyone on the street to the slam to do at least a double-dime became a slap on the wrist. No big deal.

  Marv and Frank bought a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse in Pound Ridge, New York, near Bedford Hills on Eastwoods Road. One hour from New York City. My weekends were spent chauffeuring them. I’d drive them up to their house on Saturday and spend the day on their property helping set up for their guests, who were usually other heavy-drinking architects and designers.

  After cocktails on the huge shaded lawn, Marv would lead his visitors through the house, from room to room, getting suggestions on materials and hand-sketching designs to rebuild the place.

  Marv had also purchased his own Benz sedan and had it repainted a Rolls Royce forest green. I began driving the two men in their personal car while still being paid the same amount by my boss Kasten, with a company check at the end of the week.

  For me, every weekend driving the two guys upstate was a relief. I was treated well and always dined with my clients at the best restaurants. When offered wine with dinner I always declined. Weekends became a vacation from my war-zone mind.

  During our time at the retreat I ran errands and drove Marv and Frank to lunch. They would attend art shows and any local activities, with me tagging along. In just over a year, their circa 1776 farmhouse became a palazzo known as Shepherd’s Lair, complete with custom-made furniture and raw-silk-upholstered walls in every room.

  On Saturday nights when I got home after midnight, I would park Marv’s new Benz in front of my apartment on the street. The next morning I was back at Pound Ridge by ten a.m., a one-hour drive.

  Knowing Marv and Frank was the best time of my life in New York City. I became exposed to well-educated, decent people. I met artists and the best architects, builders, and designers in America. I read their books and was always treated as an equal, never a gofer.

  I got drunk after work a few times on out-of-town trips to Washington and Philadelphia. Marv rolled his eyes once or twice, but he and Frank never made an issue of it.

  Neither of my clients knew that I wrote poetry, but when the remodel of Shepherd’s Lair was complete, I wrote them a poem to dedicate the house.

  If

  for each man

  there could be one special time—one space

  where the footprints of his seasons meet

  by design

  on a rocky, wind-swept point

  above a faultless meadow

  exploding each summer’s seed in hews of reds and greens

  to be splashed against a perfect sky

  and there

  on the porch of a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse

  sip

  friendship

  quietly

  like serenity

  If such were possible

  If each burning bush,

  each quiet stream

  each ancient stone wall

  each gust of embarrassing beauty

  could be made true

  chiseled by the curator of time

  with exquisite care

  I’d call that place

  Shepherd’s Lair

  Marv liked the poem. Enough so that he took it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. There he hired the head calligrapher to inscribe the words on parchment. He then had the museum seal the page between two pieces of unbreakable glass. He was guaranteed that the poem would be preserved, intact, for five hundred years.

  Later, at Shepherd’s Lair, my poem was mounted over the downstairs fireplace in a three-inch steel frame.

  It was during this time of mostly enforced sobriety that I had a startling experience. One of my clients, an actress, was in a show on Broadway. She had been referred to a guy who called himself a psychic, in Yonkers, New York. I drove her to a session with Vincent Ragone and waited ninety minutes for her to come out.

  On our way back to Manhattan, the actress was raving about Ragone’s skill as a seer. She gave me his telephone number and demanded that I call him. She said she would pay for my session.

  Two weeks later I was sitting on his couch on my one day off and he was about to do a reading for me. The guy waved his hands across my torso for about a minute, then began mumbling and rolling his eyes. What he finally said was remarkable considering that we had never met before and he knew nothing about my past. Ragone said he saw my body. He said that I processed alcohol differently than other people, that booze was, in effect, poisoning me and affecting my mind. He told me that my habit when drinking was to become as numb as possible, to shut off my mind. He also said that if I continued my lifestyle, I would bring great pain to myself, possibly a transition (death). Then he said something positive. Ragone said that I was the first reincarnated Roman poet he’d ever met and that I would be moving back to Los Angeles and would have a business that involved driving people—mostly successful people—to and from the airport. He said it would be a very good business but that I was in danger of destroying the opportunity or even killing myself. I was stunned. This man knew things about me that no one else knew. I believed him.

  Chapter Thirty

  A Novelist Again

  In 1975, John Fante signed a contract with Bantam Books and received a check for his novel The Brotherhood of the Grape. He was delighted at the prospect of being back in print. For years my father had cursed publishers and doubted himself and faced consistent failure as an author. Because he was no longer an A-list screenwriter and lacked the distraction of hustling for movie deals, he had gained the ability to focus on what he did best. His diabetes had worsened, and he now limped badly and was losing the vision in his only good eye, but that did not minimize his pleasure at the prospect of having a new book on bookstore shelves.

  Robert Towne, who had won an Oscar for his Chinatown screenplay, liked the novel enough to take an option on the film rights. Towne then brought Brotherhood to his friend Francis Ford Coppola, who “fell in love” with the book and said he wanted to make it as a movie.

  My father was optimistic, but he had gone down this road before. Also, in the past, Towne had made promises that, from Pop’s point of view, he had not kept. As it turned out, the two men began a relationship of hide-and-seek. To John
Fante’s annoyance, Towne would wax enthusiastic about the prospects for my father’s work when they spoke, then disappear and not return a phone call for months at a time.

  Even so, during those days the goose hung high. Coppola decided to publish The Brotherhood of the Grape in four installments in his new magazine, City of San Francisco, and talks about a film deal for the book eventually got under way. Sadly, like so many other done deals that my father had been involved in, this one hit a snag too. Coppola was in the middle of making his colossus Apocalypse Now, and soon all bets would be off.

  The following year, 1976, brought mixed health news for my dad. Ulcers on his feet were not healing, but an eye operation to save his sight did work.

  In January 1977, my father held a hardcover copy of The Brotherhood of the Grape in his hands for the first time. His first book published in twenty-five years. Pop was very pleased.

  One afternoon during that time, in a phone conversation, we were discussing his success with the novel. I had been writing poetry again and was very discouraged. My father gave me some advice. “Don’t give up, Dan,” he said. “I remember when I was a young guy. I was broke all the time and every once in a while I’d pull the cushions off the couch and dig down in the lining for enough change to pay for a pack of cigarettes. Funny thing happened: I usually got lucky. Just put your work in your desk drawer, kid. Remember it’s there. One day something you write will get published and you’ll go back to that drawer. That old work will be the boost you need.”

  John Fante never knowingly discouraged or said no to another writer who was trying to get into print or peddle a screenplay. There were many he encouraged. Pop always helped when he could.

  A couple months later he was admitted to the hospital, where his devoted surgeon was generous enough to take the morning off from Ranch Park Golf Club to hack off two of Pop’s toes.

  A few weeks later this same diligent medical practitioner elected to lop off my father’s leg below the knee, always mindful to dispatch his bill for services in a timely fashion. That my father was undergoing repeated physical trauma somehow escaped the doctor’s practiced self-interest. The sawbones managed about the same degree of empathy for suffering as, say, the meat manager of the local Safeway where my father purchased his dog bones in bulk.