by Dan Fante
I made a move on her and she began to spend her nights with me at my beach house impressing me with her sexual agility. A few weeks later, my coaching and help notwithstanding, Miki was fired from UCS for not meeting her production goals. Chakaris, over my objections, made the decision.
Duke’s company mind-set also did not allow for his sales manager to take a vacation. I’d never had one.
Miki was the opposite. With her last boyfriend, a rich heroin user, she’d traveled to Europe and the Bahamas and spent six months in Spain until his drug problem got out of hand and an arrest for possession put him in jail. Her sexual relationship with the guy had involved kinky sex toys and rituals. My new girlfriend was always more than willing to demonstrate her skills to me.
I went to Chakaris and demanded a vacation. He grudgingly gave me a long weekend.
After we’d returned from Cabo San Lucas, Miki moved her clothes and belongings into my beach house. The relationship was kept secret from my boss. Six months in I eventually co-signed for a car for my girlfriend and loaned her five thousand dollars to help her buy her own skin-care distribution franchise. After the makeup venture nose-dived, I paid twelve hundred dollars for a two-weekend executive transformation course.
The night Miki completed the course she arrived home and showed me her workbook and list of goals and liabilities. Under the columns titled emotional baggage and negative influences, I saw my name. She moved out the next day.
A week later, still under the crushing pressure of Chakaris’s work demands and upset about the loss of my relationship with Miki, I caved in. I had two glasses of wine while eating with an L.A. client at the Charthouse in Marina del Rey. By the end of the month, I was drunk every night and snorting coke in the bathroom at work.
I resigned my sales manager job at the end of 1985, just after I’d sold my house and sports car to cut down on my overhead. I did manage to keep up my hundred-dollar-a-day coke habit and my drinking. I had 50K in a bank account set aside for income taxes for that year. I decided to spend it on personal necessities: booze and drugs.
I took a trip to Cuba by way of Mexico to improve my Spanish. In those days the Havana beach resorts had the best teenage hookers in the world. Fifty bucks could buy three days with a beautiful girl. Full service.
By the end of the year I was broke again and borrowing money. I had moved into a cheap apartment across from Venice High School and had taken half a dozen jobs in phone sales but lost them because of arguments or not showing up.
Eventually, I wound up back selling cars. I could no longer afford coke, but my brain and its endless self-punishment for screwing up life necessitated almost continuous drinking. For a time I blamed Duke Chakaris and UCS for my failure. But Duke was sober and steamrolling through his life. I was a bottom-feeder again, a juice-mooch, sleeping in my clothes every night, full of rage and preoccupied by thoughts of suicide.
On New Year’s Eve of 1986 I had a gun in my mouth. I was alone in my apartment, drunk, sitting on my bed. By my feet was a suicide note. I held the .357 Magnum to my head half a dozen times. I’m not sure why I didn’t die. I wanted to kill myself but I could not pull the trigger.
Around two a.m. I called a friend from my UCS days. His street name was Freddy-Freebase. I asked Freddy to come over and get my gun. He was at my door in ten minutes.
I started going with Freddy to twelve-step meetings again. There are three thousand of them every week in Los Angeles for alcoholics.
A month later I asked a guy called Liquorstore Dave to be my sponsor. Dave was a hardass, a twelve-step Nazi. We didn’t like each other very much, but I did manage to stay sober and work the program as best I could. After the Wednesday night meeting at Roxbury Park, or at coffee at Denny’s with his pals, Dave would introduce me. He would point a finger at me and say: I want you guys to meet a perfect example of untreated alcoholism. His name is Dan.
Part of the twelve steps is called an inventory. Step four. It involves making a list of your personal secrets and resentments toward people and institutions, then owning up to your part in all of it. Step five is reading it to another person—usually someone also in recovery.
I did this written exercise according to a method created by a guy named Ken O’Banion. O’Banion’s way for writing the inventory was passed down to him from his sponsor, who was in turn sponsored by one of the founders of the program, Bill Wilson.
Ken was twenty-eight years without a drink or a drug and something of a twelve-step icon in Los Angeles. He sponsored many guys and had the reputation for being brilliant and merciless with his pigeons (newly sober drunks).
One day I heard him lead a meeting in Venice. After he spoke it was time for the collection. A basket goes around the room and those who have money can drop in a dollar or two to help pay the rent and support the meeting. The twelve-step format reads: We have no dues or fees but we are self-supporting through our own contributions. When O’Banion was done with his twenty-five-minute pitch, before me and about seventy-five other recovering drunks, he snarled: “If you didn’t get anything from what I said today, when the collection basket comes around, take a buck OUT.”
I liked O’Banion. I enjoyed his cynicism and his dry sense of humor. I had no interest in reading my secrets and resentments to my sponsor, Liquorstore Dave. I didn’t want the guy to have any personal information about me that he might spill out casually to his friends at Norm’s Coffee Shop. At the time I didn’t know how important the steps were to Dave and that he would never have taken that action, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I decided to do O’Banion’s style of fourth-step inventory.
In O’Banion’s printed instructions on writing the fourth step, I was directed to tell the story of my life (including all my resentments and all the secrets I’d sworn to myself that I would never tell anyone) in writing, for one hour a day—for twelve consecutive days. I was to write at the same time each morning and not reread anything I had written. On the thirteenth day, I was to call O’Banion and make an appointment to read the pages to him.
Everyone in twelve-step recovery work puts a great emphasis on step four, so I did the exercise as instructed and wrote thirty-one single-spaced pages on my typewriter over the twelve days.
When I was done I was excited to read the inventory and get on with the rest of the steps. I telephoned O’Banion to set up an appointment. When he answered the phone, I said, “Hi, Ken, it’s Dan Fante from the Roxbury meeting. We’ve met a few times. Liquorstore Dave is my sponsor. I’ve written my inventory according to your format and I’d like to read it to you. Can we make an appointment to do that?”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Finally, O’Banion spoke. “How long you sober, kid?”
“Just under a year this time. But I’ve been sober several times before. I’ve been mostly off booze for three years out of the last five.”
Another long pause. Finally, O’Banion spoke. “Ya know, that’s a decent average. In baseball you’d be a pretty good hitter. But this ain’t baseball, my friend. It’s about time you took your life seriously. As for hearing your inventory—I think I’ll pass. Find someone else.” Then I heard a click and the phone went dead.
What O’Banion didn’t know was that through his rude-ass attitude he had saved my life. It took me several years to get past the slight and my hurt feelings but, until we’d had that conversation, I’d still had one foot in and one foot out of sobriety. From that day on I stayed sober, if only to spite Ken O’Banion.
A few weeks later I found someone in the program I felt comfortable enough with to spill my shameful secrets and my list of resentments. The guy was named Eli. An older guy. I went to his house at the appointed time and we sat down in his living room.
As I read my thirty-one power-packed pages to Eli over two hours, he drank coffee, scanned the newspaper, interrupted me by taking a couple phone calls, and dozed off toward the end.
The party line is that you’re supposed to get some kind of spi
ritual jolt from doing the fourth and fifth steps. Not me. And for sure not Eli. But he congratulated me anyway when we were done.
All that I experienced was relief. I’d finished a big part of the twelve-step process. I was now a member in good standing. Again.
Liquorstore Dave was a good guy. Decent and honest. We just didn’t click as people. I went back to him and finished the rest of the steps and wrote letters of amends and called people and met with them personally to “clean up my side of the street” (step nine). In doing the step I realized that I had lied to at least fifty people a day for a long time. Thousands and thousands of customers.
At Liquorstore Dave’s direction I was told to limit my amends list to those people I knew directly. The ones I had screwed over and had stolen from face-to-face. There were many. I made agreements to pay back all the money.
Step nine of the twelve-step program always takes the longest to do. Sometimes it takes years to pay back all the money. In my case, especially with the IRS, I was no exception.
In my fourth year of sobriety, in 1990, my life took a bad turn again. I’d returned to the telemarketing business after talking my way into a job with a big, posh computer company named Camino Electronics in Woodland Hills, California. I set up their telemarketing department and hired and trained a staff of people and came to work in a suit every day. I was back! In no time I had a place at the beach, a new car, and a new girlfriend to help me spend my money. Blue skies and green lights.
My life was okay except for me. I still had long spells of depression and sleeplessness and there were incidents of arguments and rage and a fight or two, and some pretty crazy behavior. My only medication was twelve-step meetings and twice-a-week five-minute phone conversations with Liquorstore Dave.
Finally, in a conversation with Dave, I said I was afraid I was going to drink. Dave told me that, in his view, I was an egomaniac with an inferiority complex and was an incurable nutcase. He said I should rework the steps again.
I got a shrink instead and spent the next two years on a couch trying not to drink or kill myself. It didn’t help. During the time with my therapist, Alexandra, at her suggestion, I became involved in personal-growth stuff. I did some Rolfing and got Rebirthed and did Reichian therapy and EST and some more pointless stuff. No soap. In the end I was still nuts. A ticking bomb.
One day at Camino Electronics, after a disagreement with one of my bosses, I walked into his office and told him to go fuck himself, then quit.
Six months later my money, my apartment, and my car were gone. I had tried half a dozen new jobs, including getting financed to open another telemarketing operation. Nothing worked. I was terminal. Unemployable and crazy.
Chapter Thirty-nine
An Unwanted Lodger
I arrived back at my parents’ Point Dume home in Malibu on a weekend. After losing my last car-sales gig I had no car and had to talk a twelve-step friend into giving me a ride from Santa Monica. I tugged three plastic garbage bags filled with all that I owned up the front walkway of my mom’s house. It was the fall of 1991. I was forty-seven years old.
Joyce’s greeting wasn’t joyous. She was now the matriarch of Rancho Fante and was intimately familiar with her ne’er-do-well son’s recent history. But for me and my life, such as it was, her home was my last stop. I had nowhere else to go.
Continuing our family’s tradition, my mom owned too many cars. At breakfast the next morning, she tossed me the keys to one of them—an eight-year-old Chrysler. The clunker hadn’t been driven in months and apparently had become a seven-cylinder Chrysler. Because I was broke and jobless, I usually walked the half mile to my noon twelve-step meeting at the community center on Fernhill.
One afternoon, with nothing to do but read, or walk the beach rehashing my history and particularly stupid recent career choices, I began rummaging through the family garage. It was there that I located my father’s dusty old Smith Corona portable typewriter. Near it on the shelf, in a torn supermarket plastic bag, was half a ream of yellow typing paper. I remembered seeing the paper before. My father, while he still had his sight, had written his last manuscript on this same paper. I took it and the typewriter inside the house to my room.
The next day, after my twelve-step meeting at the community center, sitting in front of the machine, I wrote the sentence my father had always written whenever he was testing a typewriter for the first time: Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.
I wrote that sentence perhaps twenty times while getting used to Pop’s machine. Then an idea to write another kind of sentence occurred to me. So I wrote that, too. Then I wrote a few more lines that weren’t particularly coherent and continued on down the page until I got to the bottom.
I cranked the paper out of the carriage, sat down on my bed, and read what I had written. It wasn’t very good. My spelling hadn’t improved in the years since I left school, and I had no idea where to put in punctuation. But all that seemed okay because an important piece of knowledge had come to me while I’d been typing: I realized that I wasn’t thinking about my life and how it had gone to shit. I was just typing words on a sheet of paper. I was thinking only of what I was writing.
So, after trying a few different ideas, I decided to write something about my life. I didn’t want to be profound or literary because I am not a profound guy. Literary pretentiousness has always annoyed me. I am a reader and I like books, so I decided, well, why not? Why not me? I’ll write something about my life.
That day I began a story about myself on the same paper my father had used, on his old portable typewriter.
Six months of typing later, I had over two hundred pages. I’d known from the start that I couldn’t write a book. But I wasn’t trying to write a book. I was just writing a little every day like I had done with O’Banion’s inventory process. What I had come to understand through that writing process is that the pages pile up and pretty soon you can have a manuscript. That was the backdoor gift I received from Ken O’Banion. A powerful revelation. One page a day.
I didn’t want to show my pages to anyone, but I knew that I needed feedback on my work. I had to find out if I was wasting my time or not.
A guy I knew from my noon twelve-step meetings was a former reporter and feature columnist for several major magazines. His name was Richard. Richard had destroyed his life and career with alcohol and cocaine. Now sober a few years, he was writing again and getting back on his feet. He had moved to Venice Beach but returned to Malibu twice a week to attend the noon meetings.
After one of the noon meetings, on his way to the parking lot, I stopped Richard and asked if he would mind reading my manuscript. He said sure, and we set up a time for me to drive to his place.
The following Saturday I brought my manuscript with me to Richard’s Venice Beach apartment. My bulky pages were wrapped by two thick rubber bands.
Richard and I sat down on his couch that had a view of the Pacific Ocean, and he began to read. I drank his coffee and smoked cigarettes on his balcony.
An hour later he called me into the room and I sat down on his couch.
“I’ve read enough,” he said.
“Tell me the truth, Richard. What did you think?”
“Look, here’s the thing,” he said. “There’s no question that you have talent. You can write. But this stuff is pretty crazy and rambling and unformed. It’s not pornography, but it’s pretty close.”
“Should I keep going?”
“My suggestion is to set it aside for a week or two, then reread the manuscript. See what ideas you come up with. You can call me if you want to.”
I got up and put the rubber bands back around my manuscript. I thanked Richard for his help, then went down to my mother’s old Chrysler, got in, and drove home.
When I got back to my mother’s house, I went to my room and reread the first fifty pages of my manuscript, decided it was worthless dog shit, walked out to the garbage bin near my mom’s back gate, and threw t
he manuscript away.
The next day I called Richard. He wasn’t home, so I left a message on his answering machine. “Richard, this is Dan. I’ve been thinking about our conversation and your suggestions regarding my manuscript. It occurred to me that the reason you’re not a real writer, the reason you’re back to being a second-rate magazine wannabe hack, is that you don’t have the balls to write real fiction yourself. If I were you I’d stick to what you do best: feature stories about rock bands and boob-job celebrities going to rehab. That’s your métier. Not real literature. Thanks for the two-bit insight. Go fuck yourself.”
A few days later, one night after a meeting, I returned home. My mom was four rooms away on the couch in her den working on her needlepoint. I went into her kitchen pretending to make some food. When Mom got up to go to bed, I opened the closet where my father had kept his guns. On the top shelf was a long-barreled pistol. After checking to make sure it was loaded, I returned to my bedroom with the gun.
The note I typed and left in the typewriter carriage at my desk said simply, “I’m sorry for the mess, Mom. This is best for everybody. I’m tired and I can’t do this anymore. Dan.”
I went to my bed and sat down. I put my gun in my mouth and pulled the hammer back. Then the phone rang, so I uncocked the gun, set it down, and went to answer it.
The caller was a local Malibu guy I knew from my meetings. He called himself Freedom: an ex-junkie and drunk with long braided hair who had once owned a thirty-foot python.
Freedom wanted to know if I would substitute for him and do his literature commitment the next day at the noon meeting, handing out free twelve-step materials to newcomers. I said I was busy. Instead of hanging up, he went into a rant about how his boyfriend was a cunt and had thrown him out and how his life was so fucked up. Ten minutes later he asked me again about doing the commitment the next day. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll do it. What the hell.”
