86'd Read online

  86’d

  A Novel

  Dan Fante

  For Hubert Selby, Jr. Without your heart and your truth, Cubby, I’d still be bumping into walls and trying to make bail. A mouth in search of a scream.

  You think you know but you really don’t know. Eventually—finally—you find out that what you think you know is nothing. What you really know amounts to shit.

  A. L. CATLETT

  Nice to see that you’ve finally gotten the monkey off your back…although, apparently, the circus has not yet left town.

  KEN O’BRIEN

  Contents

  Epigraph

  One

  A fucking cosmic shit shower.

  Two

  I have no idea why I am crazy and angry…

  Three

  The next morning, wearing the same puked-on tie from my…

  Four

  It took three full carloads in my Pontiac to get…

  Five

  I was beginning to see dead people. They were not…

  Six

  As it turned out I was more than half wrong…

  Seven

  Before dawn the next morning came the onset of the…

  Eight

  Working in the limo business in L.A. is a bizarre…

  Nine

  I picked up the phone after midnight thinking it was…

  Ten

  After returning to Hollywood it took me a week to…

  Eleven

  The next morning I picked up one of our freebie…

  Twelve

  I hate banks. And lines. I get uncomfortable and impatient…

  Thirteen

  The sex thing with Portia continued and I was becoming…

  Fourteen

  That night I got back to Dav-Ko after one a.m.,…

  Fifteen

  The towering white-haired figure that stood in the hospital doorway…

  Sixteen

  Dav-Ko’s senior partner apparently wanted to keep tabs on the…

  Seventeen

  Later that afternoon I got the number of AA and…

  Eighteen

  A week later David Koffman was gone and I was…

  Nineteen

  That night I got back to Dav-Ko after dropping Stedman…

  Twenty

  Back at the office in the chauffeur’s room, through the…

  Twenty-One

  By Friday that week the Malibu shoot with Stedman was…

  Twenty-Two

  It happened to me rarely these days. Working and making…

  Twenty-Three

  I’d never had two blackouts in a row before. Until…

  Twenty-Four

  The following week, Wednesday, mostly sober for four days except…

  Twenty-Five

  That Sunday morning at three a.m. a day later my…

  Twenty-Six

  It was one-forty-five in the afternoon several days later. Attorney…

  Twenty-Seven

  The next afternoon, following up on my plan to cut…

  Twenty-Eight

  The following day I was back driving Che-Che’s nana, J. C. Smart,…

  Twenty-Nine

  On my way back to Dav-Ko on Sunset Boulevard, after…

  Thirty

  In the end I served fourteen days in jail. The…

  Thirty-One

  That night, after I set up all the bottles on…

  Thirty-Two

  The first couple of days at the beginning of my…

  Thirty-Three

  The death of my brain came two weeks later. By…

  Thirty-Four

  That Sunday in the early afternoon, after the retreat ended,…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Dan Fante

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  one

  Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Bruno. Our new projects team met on Friday. Second quarter numbers for all Canonball Press editions are down. The decision was out of my hands, unfortunately. They are rescheduling your book and all new short story anthologies for next year at the earliest.

  My best advice is for you to look on this as a temporary setback and nothing more. I know we’ll publish UNTIL THE FAT LADY SINGS…eventually.”

  Evanston Wright, Senior Editor

  A fucking cosmic shit shower.

  Up to the minute I opened the e-mail from Canonball Press I’d thought the five years and three hundred pages it had taken to put my book together had been worth it. Only three months before the pricks had sent me their acceptance letter and a token five-hundred-dollar advance. I would finally be a published short story writer.

  Wrong.

  I printed out Canonball’s e-mail, underlined the word eventually in black marker, then taped the goddamn thing to the wall in my room, above my desk. Eventually I’d start fucking dead chimpanzee corpses too—eventually.

  Suddenly I realized how much I hated my goddamn computer and all computers for the ease with which they delivered such terrible news. Slamming my fist on my writing desk I cursed the day a year before that I’d allowed my friend Eddy Dorobek to flimflam me into buying a used laptop from him and giving up my dead father’s rickety old Underwood portable. Fuck Eddy Dorobek! and all software and DVDs and e-mail and instant messages that instantly ruined people’s lives. Fuck Google and MySpace too. And fuck fucking Evanston Wright at Canonball Press for not even conceding to me the courtesy of a goddamn stamp and a signature on a signed piece of paper.

  Still left on my telephone’s answering machine was a two-year-old message from Hubert Selby, Jr., my literary mentor, my favorite writer. Still un-erased. A thirty-second crack in time that had altered everything and changed my life.

  To heal myself and interrupt my brain’s fury I pressed the “Saved Messages” button on my phone.

  I’d heard his words a thousand times now, listened to them over and over like a hit song—from my writing table while eating dinner or reading the newspaper, or posing in the mirror or getting in and out of the shower. While jerking off or listening to a Van Morrison CD or doing leg-lifts on the floor. I’d even played the message for the old guy I rented my room from, Uncle Bill, and for my sister, Lucia. Selby’s words had saved my sanity.

  I pressed play.

  …Dante? Bruno Dante? Cubby Selby here. You gave me your manuscript a few weeks ago…and the other day I finally had a chance to look it over. So, okay, first, let me say that I like your stories. As you might guess I get many requests from people to read their stuff. And most of it, truthfully, regretfully, is crap. Plain and simple. Just crap. But Until the Fat Lady Sings is the real thing. Stories from the gut and from the heart. I was moved—more than once. You can be proud of your manuscript, Bruno. I remember you saying that you got discouraged. Well don’t! You’re good and you’ve got what it takes. Keep writing no matter what. Never stop. Never give up.

  I hope we bump into each other again sometime soon.

  Thank Christ. Thank God for the miracle of Hubert Selby, Jr.

  I’d followed Selby around Los Angeles for months—stalked him even—gone to half a dozen of his readings and appearances—and finally, sober that night, I’d worked up the courage to ask the great writer to have a look at my story collection.

  After his reading that night, behind Midnight Special Bookstore, in the parking lot as he was getting into his car, I’d approached Selby with my manuscript and asked if he would mind taking a look. He recognized me from the audience that night. I’d been the guy who’d hogged the Q & A time, asking more than my share of questions.

  The thin old cynic smiled, patted my shoulder, then wheezing in a drag from his black Sherman. “Sure kid, I’ll read it over and
get back to you. Don’t worry. Your stuff’s in good hands.”

  Again I pressed the save button on my phone. Selby’s message was all that I had now, all that was keeping me from black madness.

  two

  I have no idea why I am crazy and angry and edged-out most of the time and why alcohol and painkiller pills and Xanax-type stuff are the only things that help to keep me remotely calm. I have no idea why I experience life as pointless and screwed and I know that most people don’t pour a cup of bourbon into their milk and oatmeal in the morning. That’s just how it is.

  After the publication of Until the Fat Lady Sings was postponed indefinitely I decided that I needed a change from the telemarketing industry. For months I had been hawking risk-free Pinkerton burglar alarm installs out of a cave: a windowless, industrial, cinderblock office in Manhattan Beach. A hundred calls a day to set five realistic sales appointments. Torturous, brutal shit.

  Behind the workload quota and hitting the juice too hard I’d developed attitude problems and begun showing up late for my 5:30 a.m. shift.

  Me and Kassim, my boss, had disliked each other from jump street. The prick was a former math professor from Tehran with a Godzilla ego. He spoke three or four Middle Eastern tongues but his combined English syntax and cultural grasp of anything American equaled shit. Each time—especially with other people around—when I’d ask the jerk if he wouldn’t mind speaking more slowly, or repeating what he’d just said, Kassim would consider that I’d challenged his authority or was somehow mocking him. His expression would blacken and he would glare at me murderously.

  Things came to a head near quitting time one Friday afternoon. The office’s ceiling intercom blasted: Bruno Dante—Bruno Dante—to Kassim’s office. Now. Strike one.

  Once there, I was ordered to sit in the outer waiting room for half an hour and watch as the rest of the staff came and went, picking up their paychecks. Strike two.

  Finally, in front of Kassim’s desk, his henchman, the telemarketing manager, Gretchen—the hugest deep-fried, ass-kissing, hogface, grease-soaked twat to ever sit in an office chair in Los Angeles—handed me my call records as evidence. Turns out that Professor Kassim and blubbergirl had been monitoring my phone work over the last several shifts.

  Kassim began waving his copy of my stats. “Dree bersonal kallz ober de lass doooo daze. Und fourrr dimez, diss sheeeef alone, jou hab borgodden do hoffer de flee Dizzylannn teekets ah de enn off your prezendadion.

  Gretchen stood by wheezing, nodding sycophantically at whatever additional unpronounceable broken English mumbo jumbo snot came from her boss’s mouth.

  I looked at her for a clarification. “So I’m fired, right?” I said. “Is that it?”

  “Correct,” she oozed. “Terminated, as of today.”

  Strike three.

  Refusing any more eye contact, Kassim handed pigass a sealed envelope. My paycheck. Blubbergirl passed it to me.

  Before leaving, I stuffed the check into my pants pocket then tossed my headset on to his desk. Then I leaned in close to his ear. “You and big Gretchen here must be having some pretty hot sex,” I hissed. “No kidding, I’d pay good money to watch you hump that shit.”

  Once outside in the parking lot, after hearing the steel building door hiss closed then latch behind me, I lit a cigarette and sucked the smoke in.

  The voice, the one always screaming in my head, telling me what a fool and an asshole I was, was getting louder. Worse all the time. Sometimes, like now, when I had quit or left a job or woke up drunk not knowing where I was, the goddamn thing was maddening—unstoppable. I decided that from now on I would give it a name. From now on I’d call the prick Jimmy.

  At least I was free and reeligible for unemployment. I’d already paid my rent two weeks before so I decided to splurge on a few extras over the weekend: A paperback or two. A couple of bottles of decent wine. Maybe a movie. So I tore open my pay envelope to verify the amount: Five hundred and eleven dollars.

  That’s when the real curveball cracked me in the center of my forehead. The goddamn thing was unsigned.

  Now, completely out of money, with the sun beating in through the window of my ratbox room in the Venice house I shared with my ex-girlfriend’s eighty-five-year-old uncle, hoping to counteract last night’s excessive gin and tonic with gulps of milk and spoonfuls of peanut butter, I sat at my writing desk staring at the computer keys.

  Through money worries and too much down time and the almost constant boozing that’d been assaulting my health and sanity, I’d taken Hubert Selby’s advice to heart and kept my commitment to “keep going.” I had written one good page a day—no matter what—do or die. For the last few weeks I’d scribbled in my notebook while in my car or in a bar or a coffee shop, then transposed them to my laptop. But there they were. All there in front of me. I’d done it. I’d kept my promise to myself.

  So what if I couldn’t pay my rent. So what if I had to go back to another boiler room gig or even the taxi business. So what if Canonball Press didn’t publish Until the Fat Lady Sings for another two years or another five even. So fucking what! Through my madness and boozing and the pain pills I’d kept my promise to myself. I was writing.

  But with the loss of my job I was beginning to be scared. Afraid of a bad crash. Over the last year or so I had been working five different doctors to get my pills; my Vicodin, my Halcion, and my Xanax. When I needed the stuff or when I would overdo the booze for days or weeks at a time, I offset my alcohol use with the pills to get relief. But that option was running out. I could no longer afford my scripts and I was scared.

  Shutting down my computer I flipped open the Sunday L.A. Times to the employment section. When I got to “Drivers Wanted,” I stopped. The company name at the bottom of the box surprised me. Dav-Ko.

  David Koffman picked up the phone when I called in and remembered me right away. I had worked for Dav-Ko in New York five years before as a chauffeur and part-time night dispatcher. In those days his company was in its infancy and little more than a gypsy cab car service that did periodic chauffeur jobs. Koffman really only had two limos. One was an eight-year-old dented, black, stretch Caddy with over a hundred thousand miles on the odometer and the other was a big blue Lincoln sedan that was more for personal use than the livery business. We stored them both and a half dozen beat-up airport vans and station wagons behind a gas station and ran the whole deal out of a three-bedroom brownstone apartment on Sixty-fourth Street and Second Avenue.

  Koffman was a speed-talker, an ace business guy, almost seven feet tall, and an unashamed homosexual. For a year when I lived in Manhattan me and David’s cousin Stewie split dispatch duty while he spent his days taking people to lunch and drumming up new clients. Stewie and me wore the same size chauffeur jacket, so at night we’d take turns playing chauffeur, putting on a black cap and clip-on bow tie, jumping out of the car to open and close the back door for David while he passed out business cards and acted the role of the big shot limo owner in front of the gay after-hours clubs below Fourteenth Street. But as the company grew so did my personal clientele. In the end I had no life other than the East Side Saloon on First Avenue and spending twelve hours a day behind the wheel. My writing was out of the question. I’d return home only to sleep and shower, then take the IRT subway uptown back to the office. The money was decent and in those days I was less insane. So eventually I packed it in, leaving on good terms to take a four-hour-a-day bootleg DVD phone sales gig at an office building in Times Square. There were no hard feelings.

  Koffman hadn’t changed. He’d never been much for telephone chitchat so he came right to the point and wanted to know my work history since I’d been with Dav-Ko. Had I, over the last few years, had any experience managing people, overseeing a staff? Work other than chauffeuring?

  Without hesitation my lips composed the necessary lies. “Sure. Absolutely,” I said. “It’s right on my résumé. I can show you.”

  My reply caused him to shift gears. He immediately
began “selling” me, reciting the statistics of how successful and hip Dav-Ko had become since I’d left. The company now operated ten new stretch limos and another half dozen town cars out of a three-story Midtown New York garage. They had a full-time mechanic, fifteen drivers, and an in-house training manual. All the chauffeurs wore Greek seaman’s caps and vested blue suits as a uniform. Dav-Ko’s “hip” trademark was a red hankie in the breast pocket of each chauffeur’s suit jacket. Koffman bragged that his current customer base consisted mainly of celebrities and rock stars and New York-L.A. entertainment big shots.

  For the last week he’d been renting a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel and intended to be in town for as long as it took to make Dav-Ko Hollywood a turnkey operation.

  Trust was important to Koffman. I could tell that he liked the idea of having a known quantity—a former dispatcher-driver like myself—working with him again. For David, us having refound each other after so long was a kind of sign. A good omen. He had been a heavy social drinker with his gay buddies when we had worked together. I assumed that was still the case.

  I’d gotten lucky and I knew it. The longer we stayed on the phone the closer I was to being offered a job. Before hanging up he and I set up a breakfast meeting for the next morning at the Formosa Café on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood.