Fante

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by Dan Fante


  Buddy was half-drunk, dusted, and furious that the limos were not in front of the club while he and his band sat backstage after the gig smoking dust and getting drunk.

  It was two a.m. My drivers had already loaded the band’s instruments into the trunks of our limos and were waiting in a parking lot down the street from the club.

  Buddy, a nice-enough cat while straight, was off the deep end. He threatened Terri and said he would smash out the windows of our cars if they were not in front of the club in one minute.

  “Danny, come heah,” she yelled to me in the bedroom across the hall. “Dis muthafucka’s whacked-out. You gotta deal with him.”

  Taking the phone from her, I put the call on hold, then radioed the two cars, telling them both to pull away and return to our garage with Buddy’s equipment still in their trunk.

  “This is Dan, Buddy. I’m the owner. What the hell’s going on?”

  Buddy was not up for a reasonable conversation. “I want them cars in front of the club now,” he snarled. “Get ’em back here or I’ll be over there in ten minutes and shove my .45 up your ass. You juss fucked with the wrong nigga!”

  If anyone, an angry client or an exhausted driver, threatened me or gave me trouble, my reaction was to instantly up the ante. “Try me, you piece of shit,” I yelled. “I’m here. I’ve got my own iron. I’m waiting. No money—no limos. Fuck you, Buddy!”

  I hung up.

  For the next two hours, I sat in one of the drivers’ dark parked cars across the street from our building on Selma Avenue, my sawed-off on the floor and a loaded .357 in my hand. Buddy never showed up.

  The next day Champ arrived with a fistful of cash. He said Buddy was sorry. He’d had a bad night. That was the end for Buddy and Dav-Ko.

  My real trouble with Terri began when she discovered that I was doing trade-offs for payment with one of my clients, a Hollywood escort pimp who called himself David Davis.

  Davis ran a stable of high-priced girls from a penthouse in an apartment building behind Hollywood Boulevard. The Franklin Tower Apartments. I had developed a friendship with the pimp because he liked our cars and because our license plates had the words “Dav-Ko,” followed by the number, on each car. He’d started telling all his high-end Hollywood friends that he was a partner in the company.

  Soon I was at his place regularly. For a pimp, Davis was not the normal hard-assed hustler. Money and recognition were his priority. He saw himself retiring at forty and returning to New Orleans to open a restaurant.

  Our clienteles were similar, but unlike me and my customers, Davis refused to have anything to do with dealing drugs himself. He did keep a one-ounce stash of coke and a jar of Quaaludes on hand for in-house parties.

  He had five very pretty girls who would do anything if the price was right. His best girl, looks-wise, was a stunning twenty-year-old Asian runaway from Chicago. Davis called her Chink. I had never had sex with a girl of her beauty before and from that night on I became a regular client.

  The first time I met Chink, Davis and I were drinking bourbon at his place. Davis had just called all the girls out to greet his new trade-off partner. One service for another. Chink was tall for a Korean girl, with a great smile, and her hair was cut almost as short as a boy’s. When Davis saw that I had my eye on her, he dismissed the others.

  Chink stood alone in the living room wearing a short skirt and a bra-less halter top. Davis told her that she was to take special care of me.

  He motioned with his glass for her to get us a drink, and she went to the bar. When she returned with our glasses, Davis whispered to her, “Take your clothes off, angel.”

  They fell to the floor.

  “You like cock, don’t you, Chink?” he whispered.

  “That’s right,” she smiled. “I like cock.”

  “Not just mine, right? You like all cocks.”

  “I’m into guys. You know I like guys, D.”

  “Turn around and show Danny boy here what you’ve got.”

  Chink smiled and did as instructed.

  “If I wanted to hammer that beautiful ass right now, tell me what you’d say.”

  She turned toward us and whispered, “You know what I’d say, D.”

  Davis stood up and came around the coffee table to where Chink was standing. “Now,” he whispered to me, “my best bitch will show you what she likes me to do.”

  With that he opened a drawer and removed a tube of jelly. He covered his fingers with the lubricant and then began to insert them one at a time into Chink’s pussy. When three fingers were inside her, he paused; then he began to work them in and out as she smiled and moaned.

  Finally, he turned her around, dropped his pants, and stuck his cock in her mouth.

  As she was on her knees performing the blow job, he turned toward me. “Whatever you like, Danny boy. No limits for my friends. Satisfaction guaranteed.”

  My late-night visits and scenes with Chink went on for a month. Her body was amazing and our sex was crazy and wonderful. What we had in common was whiskey and the pure enjoyment of each other. Chink’s favorite trick while we drank and screwed was to squirt half a gram of coke, diluted in water, up my ass using a turkey baster. Then do it to herself. The rush was mind-blowing.

  Late one afternoon one of Davis’s girls called Dav-Ko and ordered a car for him, breaking our deal with each other. My instructions to Davis had been to never book a car with anyone but me.

  I’d been out of the office and couldn’t take the call, and later found out that one of his girls had been arrested in a Hollywood raid and was in jail downtown at Sybil Brand.

  When Terri Rolla took the booking order, she’d asked about payment arrangements and the girl on the phone told her to speak to me. Smelling a rat, Terri checked our dispatch log for the past couple weeks. I’d faked several names and entered the word “complimentary” in the booking log but left the same pickup address for the client. The jig was up.

  That night when I arrived home, my girlfriend, who had retaliated by raiding the hiding place where I kept my money, was wearing an expensive gold chain with a diamond pendant hanging from it. I was drunk and furious.

  In the argument that followed, Terri picked up a thick wooden cane that had been left in a limo by one of our clients, and began smashing lamps and furniture. When I tried stopping her, she began swinging the thing at me. I was clipped in the head and shoulders and then, while I covered up, she slammed the wooden cane into my ribs.

  Standing over me, she was spitting and screaming. “Here’s a promise, mothafucka; if I catch ya with one of Davis’s bitches again, hookas ah whateva, you’ll come to one mornin’ with blood on ya cheets instead of piss kauz ya cock and balls will be in tha dumpsta out back.” Then she mimed a knife-slashing motion with her hands. “I dare ya to try me, ya juicehead prick. Ya fuck with me and ya pay with ya dick.”

  For the next week I had a large cane-shaped purple bruise across my rib cage. Terri made it her business to take over all the day-dispatching and the books, and stopped talking to me. She began to spend a lot of time on the phone with her girlfriend Ginger, a Bronx psychic and astrologer, and also began having occasional personal conversations with David Kasten.

  To make peace I offered to move us and the business into a new luxury building on Hillside Avenue a few blocks away. One of our customers had just built it and offered to wave the security deposit for the first tenant and give us ten parking spots in the downstairs parking garage. We had outgrown the Selma Avenue location and were now operating seven limos full-time, bringing in over ten grand a week, so even David Kasten supported the move.

  For the first couple months, the move worked. Terri Rolla loved stuff, glitz, and we were back in the sack again. She was still eating black beauties like M&Ms, but when she drank with me at night her disposition improved in direct proportion to her alcohol consumption.

  The new place was nice. Swanky. I’d rented four rooms of new furniture and three color TVs. Terri also wanted
a dog, so I got her one—a terrier mutt I named Banana who came to hate me and later bit me on the leg.

  Terri, ever the Bronx status mooch, decided that our bedroom should be mirrored, walls and ceiling, so I hired a guy and paid two grand in cash for that too.

  Because I was blacking out a lot and now frequently driving drunk, Terri was afraid I’d get a DUI and go to jail, and we would lose the business to David Kasten. To counter her fears, at night, after several drinks, I began to train for the police field sobriety test. I did this for a month, and in the end it got so that no matter what condition of drunkenness I was in, I could always touch my nose with either index finger with my eyes closed, and I could also walk the fifteen-foot straight line that I’d manufacture out of toilet paper on our hallway carpet.

  At work the problem was me. I was drinking pretty much nonstop, shitting or pissing our bed at least twice a week. Blacking out. While running the company during the day, I was unable to control my temper with Terri and sometimes yelled at our customers on the phone.

  In an effort to battle my toxic hangovers, I snorted coke with my coffee in the morning, backed up by a half pint of vodka and several gulps of Pepto-Bismol.

  One afternoon, without much provocation, I told off a client on the phone, then went outside and fired the two drivers who had driven the guy and his friends the night before.

  Terri intervened. She threatened to walk out and leave the company if I didn’t rehire the drivers.

  Things got worse. My girlfriend’s pressure and nagging for me to clean up were constant, and with the growing success of the business, I was becoming more out of control. I lived in fear that David Kasten would find out about me any day and the whole thing would fall apart.

  In an effort to make the situation better, I hired an in-house overnight limo dispatcher. Our office (formerly the master bedroom of the apartment), though large, was a constant zoo of frustrated drivers and emergency, troubleshooting hysteria. Peter Holloway was a fifty-year-old ex–daytime TV soap opera actor with a soothing British accent and an excellent phone manner. He became our ten p.m. to eight a.m. overnight guy.

  Twice in our first few months at the Hillside Avenue top-floor apartment, I had smashed into our closed sliding-glass balcony door and broken the thing. The third time I’d cut a deep gash into the side of my head.

  I’d become a jerk and a mean-tempered sonofabitch to those around me. I didn’t care. I now carried my gun full-time. After two fights on the streets of Hollywood resulting from road rage—mine and someone else’s—I also began carrying a sawed-off baseball bat under the front seat, a remnant from my cabbie days in the Bronx, where I had picked up the nickname Batman from the other drivers.

  One night four of my cars were due to return from a wedding in Palos Verdes. When the limos arrived back at the garage entrance, its automatic gate was blocked by a rented moving truck. It was Peter’s night off, so I had to get out of bed, get dressed, and go downstairs to deal with the problem.

  I told the drivers to park their limos two blocks away in a church parking lot and followed them there in one of the drivers’ cars. When we returned a quarter of an hour later, the truck was still there.

  After the drivers had gone home, I drank another tall glass of whiskey. Something had suddenly shifted. The booze-filled rage that came on was a kind of brownout—I knew what I was doing but could not stop myself.

  Entering the penthouse, I got my shotgun from the bedroom closet. Terri, watching TV from our canopy bed, looked on as I loaded it.

  I went back down to the garage and fired off two blasts. One blew out the windshield of the truck and the other exploded one of its tires.

  I hid my shotgun in the weeds of a vacant lot, then walked down to a Denny’s on Hollywood Boulevard and had breakfast.

  When I got back to the apartment, Terri was nuts: naked, afraid, shaking, and chain-smoking. The cops had come. They’d knocked on residents’ doors (not ours). Fortunately, no one had witnessed the incident. My girlfriend threatened to call David Kasten and the police and have me bagged as a 51-50 (a danger to myself and others), then demanded I get some kind of immediate treatment for my behavior and insanity.

  That afternoon she had one of her friends pick up my guns, drive to Venice Pier, and throw them into the ocean.

  I was in real trouble and I knew it. I had to agree to do something. To get help.

  Before trying any kind of therapy, I convinced Terri that what I really needed was to detox myself. To sober up on my own.

  We had all the Los Angeles phone books in our office, and I wanted to find a safe place far away from Hollywood where no one would bother me. I chose the Santa Monica Yellow Pages directory and began flipping pages. I soon found the name of a motel that sounded okay and dialed the number to book a room. The place was on Lincoln Boulevard.

  I threw some stuff into Terri’s small suitcase, then had one of our drivers drop me off three blocks from the L.A. Vista Motel. I paid the clerk for a week up front in cash.

  Once inside room #18 I unplugged the TV and closed the blinds.

  I took off my clothes down to my T-shirt and underwear, gulped as much water as I could, and then began walking the floor.

  By sundown, having not slept more than a couple hours in the past twenty-four, I was exhausted and lay down. But my eyes would not stay closed. I wound up pacing the room some more, soaked in sweat, beginning to shake badly.

  I’d given the name of the motel to Terri, and when the phone rang after midnight and I answered, she wanted to know how I was doing. I hung up and unplugged the thing after threatening I’d go to the liquor store if she didn’t leave me alone.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Another Shot at Detox

  This cold-turkey detox in 1979 was a lot like the first one a few years before. By the middle of the next day, I had begun to see snakes and insects everywhere: in my bed, in the shower, popping out of the walls. There was a lot of whispering, too—people watching me. Finally exhausted, I dozed.

  On my second day, still gulping water, on a break from walking the room, I began to get the “flyaways”: one or the other of my arms would involuntarily swing out from my body in a wide arc. This went on for a couple hours.

  By now I was paranoid—hearing strange noises. Still very antsy, I began searching for cameras, recorders, and bugging devices. It took some time because of my trembling, but I managed to unscrew all the light fixtures and plastic electric-socket guards with a paper clip and a dime. The whispering got louder.

  The only thing left that I hadn’t checked was an AC vent near the ceiling. I pulled a chair over, steadied myself, and stood up on it.

  Two of its screws were loose and the frame itself looked to me as if it had been refastened with some kind of glue.

  I got the thing unstuck and discovered something inside the vent: a beat-up woman’s leather bag with a drawstring. Someone’s stash.

  At first I wasn’t sure if what I was seeing was real. The whispering was very loud, and looking around I was certain the bathroom had somehow been moved to the other side of the room.

  Climbing down with the bag in my hand, I spilled its contents out on the bedspread.

  I discovered several California driver’s licenses rubber-banded together, a brown envelope containing cash, and a pack of baseball cards, also rubber-banded together. There was also a clear plastic baggie a quarter full of something that looked like dope. White powder.

  I pulled the baggie open and tasted the powder, then spit it out. It was heroin.

  Sitting there I studied everything carefully for a long time, waiting to see if any of the objects moved or disappeared. They didn’t, and the bathroom was still where I’d last seen it too.

  I began looking through the other stuff. First the baseball cards. I fanned them out in front of me. The top several were almost all Yankees. Collector-type stuff. Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto, Mantle, Roger Maris, Babe Ruth, and Joe DiMaggio. Beneath those cards were the Dodgers:
Duke Snider, Carl Furillo, Campanella, Jackie Robinson, Johnny Podres, Junior Gilliam, and Gil Hodges. All from the Brooklyn team.

  The last card in the stack was a Red Sox Ted Williams from 1941. The year he hit .406. It was signed.

  Then I spread out all the IDs. The licenses had different names but they were all the same guy. His hair varied in many of the photos—longer or shorter, or shaved—and in one he had a mustache. But it was all the same guy. I recognized the name on one of the licenses: Raymond Thomas Sanchez.

  The Ray Sanchez I had known in my short career at college, years before, was a slender, handsome guy, a lady’s man and a dope dealer. The face on the license I was looking at was heavier, but it resembled the same guy, the same Ray Sanchez who had disappeared from my college campus years before.

  Then it came to me, an eerie recollection. I walked over and opened the door and looked at the brass numbers attached to the front of it. The room was #18. I was somehow renting the same motel room that I’d hung out in many years before with Ray Sanchez. In those days the motel had a different name, but it had not been remodeled.

  Then I felt panic. Something was wrong and spooky. I had to get out, to get away from the room.

  I stuffed the cards and dope and money back into the leather bag and put them back where I’d found them, in the vent, then shoved the louvered plate in place, not caring whether the thing was screwed on or not.

  Dressing as quickly as I could, I left the place. I had no car, so I walked to the liquor store down the block. It turned out to be the same liquor store where Ray and I used to buy beers years before.

  I bought two pints of Schenley Reserve and three packs of cigarettes. While the guy at the counter was tallying the items, he took a look at me, shook his head, and commented, “Tough day, huh?”

  “Spare me the chitchat, Skippy, and your fifty-cent diagnosis.”

  Back in the room after a few long hits from my jug, I was immediately more relaxed. I was pretty sure I’d be okay.

 

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