by Dan Fante
The unwanted interruption gave me pause and I decided to call my sponsor, Liquorstore Dave. He was home. His wife put him on the line. We yakked for a while about recovery stuff and I finally blurted out that I’d been about to kill myself until twenty minutes ago.
There was a long pause on the other end of the phone. Then Dave said, “Have you got a pen?”
“Sure. On my desk. Why?”
“Go get the pen and a piece of paper.”
I retrieved the stuff and came back on the line.
“Write this number down.” He recited Bob Anderson’s number and I wrote it down.
“Here’s some free advice,” Liquorstore Dave said. “Call Anderson and rework the twelve steps with him.”
“That’s it?” I said.
“You’ve been screwing around with recovery way too long, Fante. You’re a nut—a loose cannon. My advice: Make the call to Anderson or pull the trigger.” Then he hung up.
I made the decision to wait until the next day to kill myself. Instead, I kept my word to Freedom and went to the noon meeting and handed out a couple pamphlets and a Big Book. One of the newcomers was a movie actor who couldn’t stay sober. A very famous guy. He’d been arrested the week before for a DUI and was out on bail. Here was a guy who had everything and was down for the count—a shitsucking loser even in absurd financial success. Sitting there in the corner of the meeting, he had the eyes of a cornered stray dog.
By the time I arrived home, I had reconsidered killing myself. I telephoned Bob Anderson. I knew Anderson from my twelve-step meetings and I didn’t like him much. He had a huge truck-driver belly. A know-it-all ex-biker in his sixties who had just survived throat-cancer surgery and spent his days with a chemo pack strapped to his waist, preaching the twelve-step gospel at meetings to whoever would listen.
The next day I was sitting at his Formica kitchen table in Reseda, drinking coffee. We’d never really spoken before except to say hi. He was now fifty pounds thinner after his cancer operation.
Anderson was a very old-school twelve-step guy and had thirty-plus years off booze. He asked me some questions about my life—what was going on—so I told him. I told him I was nuts and sleepless and depressed most of the time and I didn’t give a shit about sobriety or anything else. I had just been considering the idea of killing myself.
Bob had been a line mechanic for Lincoln-Mercury for years. At one point before he got sober he had driven his Harley at a hundred miles per hour into a police roadblock and spent months in a hospital recovering.
Anderson pointed a bent, fat, old finger in my face. “You’re like me. Your mind’s killing you sober,” he said. “This disease we got, you and me, now that we’ve put the bottle down, stays in our thinking. It’s the untreated part. The poison brain part. The real cure for an alcoholic mind sober is an application of the twelve steps. Through the steps you find a Power that you can talk to all day long. A walking-around God of your own experience. A Power that can help you treat your thinking.”
“I’ve done the steps,” I said. “I did the inventory and made amends and all that stuff. Et cetera, et cetera.”
Anderson shook his head then pointed his fat finger in my face. “I’ve sponsored four men who killed themselves, sober. You’re a candidate to be number five. That ain’t it. What you’ve done was just enough to keep you away from booze. That’s all. There’s more. A lot more. You need to apply this stuff as a way of life to treat your thinking. You got a broken brain.”
“No argument there.”
“Look at me. I was twenty years off booze when I finally got this thing. I was a wifebeater and a hothead sober, still pulling guys out of their cars on the freeway and punching them in the face. That just ain’t no way to live.”
“I can’t disagree.”
“I was like you. Crazy. I was sober, a long time sober, but my brain was killing me, eating me alive all day long. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I was hurting people. People I loved. My wife and kids stopped talking to me. And I had no friends. I was supposed to be a winner. In the meetings they tell you if you didn’t drink today, you’re a winner. But me, I was no winner.”
“So what do I do?”
“What I’m saying is that it’s a lot different for me now. Today I got me a good life. I’m peaceful most of the time. I’m okay with myself.”
“I hear that you’ve got cancer. You’re dying.”
“So what? A broken brain is worse than cancer. The cancer I got’s in my body—not my heart—not in my thinking. Today I’m okay with me. I talk to God and not to me. My family loves me. My girls send me cards on my birthday and people don’t leave the room when they see me come in. That’s the message of the twelve steps. I got a good life, cancer or no cancer. Look, if you’re willing I’ll show you a way to take the bumps out of the road. I’ll show you how to heal your thinking, the mental part of alcoholism.”
No one had ever talked to me that way before. Or, if they had, I wasn’t listening.
I began to show up every week at Anderson’s kitchen table. There were a few of us: a bigmouthed disbarred attorney, a biker or two, a guy named José who owned a restaurant, and a very smart guy with several degrees named Ted. All of us sober. A kitchen full of broken dreams.
After several sessions with Anderson and the guys talking about applying the twelve steps to treat the mental disease part of alcoholism, my ruminating daily mind-chatter began to ease up a little and I decided to take another whack at writing my novel.
I’d bumped into Richard the magazine writer guy who had read my manuscript weeks before, at a meeting, and we’d had a very uncomfortable exchange. I didn’t blame him for not wanting to talk to me. When I told Bob Anderson about seeing Richard and what I’d said to him, Anderson suggested that I make a formal apology—make amends. So I did. When I saw Richard at another meeting, I said I was sorry for leaving the angry telephone message. Richard shook my hand and said he understood; he, too, was thin-skinned about his work.
I still remembered most of what I had written in my first draft of the book. Some of it word for word. The plot was embedded in my mind. So I began writing the thing again.
I enrolled in a creative-writing class at Santa Monica College a couple weeks after restarting my novel. The teacher’s name was Jim Krusoe, a poet and author. Jim had a way of getting the best work out of his students. He could read your manuscript, make one or two undamaging suggestions, and put a writer back on track.
After reading my pages over the weekend, he asked me to wait after class. He told me how much he liked my stuff, then said, “Try writing it in first person rather than third person. It’ll give your main character and the narrative more power.”
At first, after returning home and looking at my manuscript, I thought Krusoe was nuts. But I was willing to experiment, so I changed the first few pages to first person, and the voice of my main character Bruno Dante began to rage and scream. His problems with booze and relationships and madness and his insane thinking began to jump at me off the page. Bruno had found his voice. One five-minute conversation with Jim Krusoe changed my life.
Five months after restarting my novel, the new draft was complete. One of John Fante’s old movie and TV writing pals was still alive: a writer-director named Buddy Black. Pop had always said that Buddy was one of the only men in Hollywood who knew good writing, so I took my manuscript to him after I made a photocopy.
Buddy telephoned me a week later and said he was mailing the pages back. “The writing is okay, decent enough,” he said, “but what you have here is mostly a rant in the form of a novel. I don’t think it’s publishable as serious fiction. Not the way it is.”
After that conversation I quit writing. I’d had enough. I realized that my stuff was too extreme. Too crazy. The work of a whacked-out raging madman.
I continued seeing Anderson every week, but the stuff he talked about was no longer working. My rages were back and I began having continuous thoughts of suicide.
I was hitting a new crazy bottom, sober.
Then came Anderson’s Retreat. Every year he put on a twelve-step workshop/retreat that he would always lead himself. A group of twenty or thirty guys would spend the weekend, Friday through Sunday, at a monastery above Santa Barbara in the hills in Santa Ynez. The place is called San Lorenzo and is located on about ten acres of land in the middle of nowhere, near the town of Solvang.
The point of the retreat is to go over the twelve steps with Anderson—get deeper into the process—and hang out with other recovering men for three days.
San Lorenzo has about twenty-five stark rooms, along with a church for Sunday mass and a little chapel. The place is perfect for men studying to be priests or religious brothers—guys wearing long brown robes who pray and meditate most of the day and consider Jesus and their sexual fantasies and their sinful, shit-filled lives.
The floors and hallways of San Lorenzo are polished concrete. Each tiny room is bare bones with only a desk and a bed. The showers are community showers. The only art on the dimly lit walls is religious stuff: paintings and a few statues of saints.
There is a dining hall with long wooden tables for meals and a good-sized “library” containing the kind of books that are read by the kind of people who inhabit the place. A few dozen folding chairs are brought to the library and that’s where the retreats are held.
Because I was nearly broke and collecting unemployment and couldn’t afford the weekend or the transportation north from Malibu, I was a scholarship case. A freebie. Anderson and some other guys chipped in to pay my way.
Bob, still dying from cancer, with his hissing chemo pack strapped around his belly, spoke for ten hours on his feet the first day, covering six steps and hammering away about the treatment for the mind-powered disease of alcoholism—the sober aspect of the thing that no one in meetings really talks about.
If Bob Anderson was on his last legs, as everyone said, his doctors had done a bad job of convincing him. He never stopped. Somewhere around the third or fourth hour, sitting under a painting of St. Francis next to my pal Terry Hart, who kept getting up and going outside to smoke, I began to cry convulsively. As far as I could recall, I hadn’t cried in twenty years, not even when my father died, yet there were snot and tears running down my face. My mind was aware of what I was doing, but I felt as though I was outside myself observing the process. I just kept going.
When I stood up and opened my eyes to get ready for the lunch break, something had changed. Everything had changed. Only minutes before there had been no God in my life. Now everything was God. I looked out a window across the open, rolling hills of Santa Ynez, and it was all different. The landscape was the same but it was as if I were seeing color for the first time. And there was an overwhelming feeling of being safe and loved. Completely loved.
After lunch with the guys, I went alone into the chapel and near a statue of St. Francis I came apart again, crying and slobbering, snot running down my face onto my shirt. The love feeling was stronger than before. It was overwhelming.
Alone on my knees on the chapel floor I remember asking out loud, What’s going on? What is this? Again I felt another overwhelming rush of love hit me, swallowing me.
When I could finally get up, I left the chapel and looked around for Anderson. I was still dazed and crying.
Bob was with a group of guys in the cafeteria talking about their untreated alcoholism, battering away at them as usual.
“Can I talk to you for a minute,” I said.
The old guy looked up and could see there was something wrong, something going on. He excused himself and we went outside onto the big lawn.
“Look,” I said, “something happened. I can’t really explain it but something happened. An experience. It’s like I now have God or something.”
Anderson looked me up and down, then whispered, “If I were you, Dan, I’d go with it. You’ve got something. Let it happen. It can’t be bad.”
Back at Joyce Fante’s home in Malibu that Sunday night, I decided that I would ask old Mom to read my manuscript and get her feedback. My mother was an English literature scholar and knew good writing. Throughout their marriage, Mom had frequently edited my father’s work. I trusted her skills and integrity.
Months before, when my mother found out I was working on a novel, her reaction hadn’t been good. “I was married to one egocentric writer for almost fifty years,” she snarled. “I don’t want another one under my roof.” From then on there were frequent nasty comments about me getting a real goddamn job and not wasting the best years of my life.
“You’re kidding,” she hissed, hefting the pages I’d dropped on the couch next to her.
“I need you to look it over. I need a favor. I don’t know whether to keep going with it or dump the thing. You’re a good editor, Mom. I need your help.”
She looked up at me from the couch over the top of her glasses, then put down her mystery novel. “So . . . this is a crossroads? You’re either not a writer or you are?”
“Yeah, I guess so. Will you just read it, please? Tell me if you think it has any potential. By the way, I sent it to Buddy Black a while back.”
“Buddy? Why? Why would you send anything to that fool?”
“I wanted an opinion. Buddy said it was too crazy. Too intense, too much of a rant.”
“I’ll look it over,” she said. “You should have brought it to me first.”
“You’re not exactly a big supporter of my literary aspirations.”
“I’m your mother. You come to your mother first. That’s how it’s done, Daniel, not to some Hollywood flimflam B-movie guru.”
“So you’ll read it?”
“I won’t pull punches. I don’t mince words. Is that what you want?”
“That’s what I want.”
The next day, in the morning, after coffee and eggs that I cooked alone in the kitchen, I walked to a noon twelve-step meeting at the Point Dume Community Center. Mom was still in her room at the other end of the house. The door was closed.
After the meeting, I drove with a neighborhood guy I knew from recovery down to the end of Cliffside Drive, and we walked the beach from Point Dume to Paradise Cove. He yakked about his ex-wife and how she stole all his money in their divorce and we smoked a pack of cigarettes between us. I knew Mom was reading my stuff, so I was staying away from home as long as possible.
When I returned to the house it was sundown. Joyce was heating up a frozen dinner for herself and feeding her cat, Tahuti. “Sit down,” she said. “Let’s talk.”
I sat down.
On the table was my manuscript. On top of it were several pages of notes from a yellow lined pad. She handed the manuscript back with the stack of notes. “Those are my comments. Read them.”
“What did you think?”
“Your spelling is preposterous. Didn’t you ever open a book in high school?”
“I guess not. You know I hated school. So . . . what did you think?”
“Your typing needs work too. Think about a typing course at that City College in Santa Monica. Anyway, your manuscript is not crazy. Buddy Black is an imbecile. It’s quite good in fact. You have talent. You’re a good writer.”
“No kidding?”
“That’s my opinion.”
“Thanks, Ma.”
“If I were you, I’d look over the notes I’ve made and fix what needs fixing, then I’ll do a retyping for you. Then you can send it out.”
“No kidding?”
“Yes, no kidding.”
“Mom, I love you.”
“I’ll bet your father is chuckling out loud in his grave. Christ, another writer! God help me. Maybe destroying your life and disgracing your family will have a happy ending after all. Then again, maybe not, if you’ve chosen writing as a career.”
“Thank you.”
“On second thought, I’ll do the corrections myself. Presentation is too important. I don’t want this novel rejected because you’re illiterate. I
’d better write the submission letter too.”
Several days later Mom handed me a spotless finished copy with a cover letter. I had titled the book Chump Change.
Chapter Forty
A Published Author
I was about to start a new job and decided to move in with a roommate in an apartment in Santa Monica. The day I left Mom’s house she was smiling. For the first time in years, we were civil to each other again, even friendly.
I was getting up at five a.m. every morning to write for a couple hours. The experience I’d had at the San Lorenzo retreat was still with me. The madness I had lived with all my life had been replaced by a form of silence and surrender—sometimes even gratitude.
After sending my manuscript out by myself for a few weeks, I found an agent through another recovering friend, Terry Ross. My novel was rejected everywhere the agent sent it, by perhaps thirty publishers. The agent finally gave up and mailed me a note telling me how she’d done her best but that my manuscript was not, from her point of view, commercial fiction. “It’s too edgy and crazy,” she wrote. “Too hard-core.”
So I began sending Chump Change out myself again. Every week on my lunch hour from my job, I went to the post office and mailed out two copies of the cover letter and the manuscript to more publishers around the country. More time passed. Nothing happened.
Then a fan of my father’s work, a French singer named April March who had a good following in Europe, read my manuscript, liked it very much, and, with my permission, sent it off to the Parisian publisher Éditions Robert Laffont. Three weeks after that I got a contract and a check in the mail. I became a French writer. That was the fall of 1996.
Chapter Forty-one
Dealing with a Family’s Alcoholism
© MICHAEL NAPPER
Alcohol has caused a lot of damage to the Fantes.
My grandfather’s and his father’s before him and my own father’s lives were ravaged by booze. And of course my brother’s life was destroyed too.
