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  In a little while, I got up and made a tour of the plane, passing the galley and winding up at the aircraft’s rear bathrooms. There was a kid in front of me waiting his turn.

  We talked because he wanted to talk. He was twelve years old and filled with answers and statistics regarding all sorts of things about air travel. Flight time based on wind resistance, which planes had what passenger capacities. Idiot shit. Stuff that no one cares about except twelve-year-old boys. I listened to the poetry of his numbers, the DC-10 and the 747, the Stealth Bomber and the Space Shuttle. The magic of his first flight had his mind staggered with possibility and amazement. A DC-10 airplane was a love sonnet, a Degas painting.

  The kid seemed to be the ghost of my not-yet-dead father from the photograph, speaking back to me from fifty years ago, carrying some confused message to the present about energy and hope. But I knew it was probably the whiskey.

  The boy went on and on and I began to cry. I didn’t care.

  The same wave of terrible sadness hit me again. Grief for the defiant, uncrushed spirit of my old man as he was in the picture. Dante’s ghost resisting time and challenging death.

  Then the bathroom door swung open and a lady came out and passed us. The boy stepped inside but whispered back to me before he closed the door, “Mister, are you scared too? Of airplanes?”

  I looked at him. “I guess I am,” I said.

  “We won’t fall. I promise. My dad says it’s aerodynamically impossible.”

  “That’s good to know. Thanks.”

  I got back to my seat. The Jack had me now, fully, transforming the knives in my brain into pillows. I relaxed. The ride to L.A. would be comfortable. Aggie would sleep. Soon they’d bring the food, I could watch a movie and have a few more drinks. The rawness about Jonathan Dante had faded.

  Lorette was making her way down the aisle with the food service cart. She was ten or fifteen rows away, but I could easily make out her firm calf muscles flexing as she stooped down to fetch food trays and plastic cups and fill them with diet cokes or club soda. She had an abundant hipline and a firm-looking puff-butt. The top button on her blouse was still unbuttoned.

  I watched as she slowly worked her cart back toward my row, and I cleared off a magazine and some empty miniatures on my fold-down table to make room for my order of more drinks when she arrived.

  Her heavy wagon was half a dozen passengers away. A thought came to me, and I slid my wife’s coat across from her seat to cover my lap. Then, as I watched Lorette moved closer, I unzipped my fly. My dick was hard right away. As I worked my hand up and down, I watched Lorette being congenial and dispensing food and wine and diet soda and booze six rows away. Now five.

  Something distracted her and she looked back over the seat tops in my direction. She was smiling her accommodating smile. Our eyes didn’t meet, but I noticed to my pleasure that another of her blouse buttons had worked its way open. A lower button. Fifth from the top. My cock was iron.

  The sweetness of the Kentucky whiskey had me free from the fear that my wife would wake up and see me. There were four rows between me and Lorette’s cart. Rows without passengers. She was on her way back to me. The heavy cart clunked slowly. Three rows. Two. I had to grab the cocktail napkins off the tray and fan them open with my free hand. They were wadded around my dick when I came. Wham! Wham! Wham!

  A second later she was above me with the cart. “Lunch?” she said smiling, setting two plates of food down on the opened tray tables and counting out my change from the fifty that I had paid her with before.

  “Good idea. Thanks,” I said back with my own smile, feeling the relief of the orgasm.

  When she had rolled her cart past, I withdrew the soaked napkins from under the coat. They were heavy with cum. Then I moved my food and pushed the tray table up and checked for stains. There weren’t any, so I put my dick away and zipped up my fly.

  Next to me was my wife, asleep, peaceful, stoned, sucking air in and out through thick, parted lips. Then I was seized with a perverse idea. An even-steven for her and her boyfriend—for not having given me head in the last five years and opening her legs to a trespasser.

  I unfolded the saturated napkins with the goo in the middle and dipped two fingers into the wet paste. I brought them up quickly to Aggie’s mouth, then wiped the cum generously across her puffy lips, even rolling one finger around inside in the lower crevice between the lip and teeth. The action forced a reflex from my wife—she licked her mouth. After that, I buried the wet napkins in her purse and ate both lunches.

  2

  SEEING L.A. FROM THE AIR WAS MORE FRIGHTENING THAN memory permitted. Real, vivid, science fiction. It was just after sundown when we began to land. The natural light of day was gone, replaced by billions of smog particles that gave the coming darkness the hue of blood in a draining sink. This enormous, overfed, infected pink pig of a city rolled across the landscape as far as the eye could see, coughing, snorting and sucking up whatever was once natural and undisturbed.

  As the plane descended over the clogged freeways I felt eaten, swallowed within the canopy of filth. A primal instinct warned me that being here was a mistake. Demands would be required of me that I was unprepared to fulfill. The darkness here was too large to defend against.

  When we’d landed and I woke Agnes up, we got off the plane and made our way to the baggage claim turnstiles to wait for my brother, Fabrizio. I’d forgotten about the long halls and moving walkways. Suddenly, my mind clicked on like a screaming monkey. Then the body craved booze. I was starting to sweat and feel dizzy.

  I left Agnes there by the shiny rotating suitcase conveyor belt. In the bathroom, I pumped handfuls of water up to my face and felt the coldness counteracting my perspiration. Then I checked my appearance. What I saw made me sneer. The guy in the mirror was an impostor. The business suit and tie were absurd and excessive. I still could not give up trying to show them that I was okay. Why did I care? They already knew that my life was coming apart.

  I was decomposing from within, like this preposterous town. L.A. was the right place for me after all. I belonged here with the killers of my father: the mind-fucking twenty-two-year old movie producers and distribution gurus who’d dictated the course of his life. I was a true son of L.A.

  This was perfect. In a drunken sexual frenzy, I had disgraced myself, then cut my wrists in jail, and now I would show up to shake my brother’s hand and kiss my mother’s cheek.

  Standing there I made a decision. I didn’t care. There had been far too many stupid attempts to please others. There would be no more personal requital. My father had spent his life saying the right thing, and ass-kissing actors and Hollywood agents, and now he’d be dead for his trouble. It had never made him happy. I was what I was.

  I dried my face. I wasn’t sorry. Then I went outside to the baggage area to find my brother and my wife.

  The given name on his birth certificate was Fabrizio. My father immediately regretted the choice as too affected for a writer’s son and too ethnic for Southern California, so a few days later, he changed it to Thomas. Tommy. But they never changed it legally.

  I liked the name Fabrizio. It was off-beat and clumsy. I was twelve when he was born, and I chose to continue to call him Fabrizio when we were alone. Not Tommy. The old man told me to stop, but I never did. It stuck as a secret affection between me and the kid. To me, he was Fabrizio.

  We were opposites, physically. My hair was light. I was short and thick like my father, with his eyes and nose and chin, but fair-skinned like my mother. Fabrizio was dark like the old man, with wavy Wop hair, but with slim and gentle anglo features like his mother.

  We were amalgams of cross-breeding, what happens when a woman of English-German upper middle class ancestry marries an olive-skinned, thick-fingered, Italian bricklayer’s son.

  I had left Malibu for New York City when Fabrizio was twelve, and the kid had come to view me as kind of a half-parent. While he was growing up, I was frequently the subject of c
onversation at my family’s dinner table. He learned about the large amounts of money that I earned and spent in my varied telemarketing business ventures. Later, as reports of arrests and suicide attempts were repeated, his opinion of me changed. Now he would look at me much as my wife did, like a lab animal.

  Fab was twenty-five now and a USC graduate in economics. He still had the same car from eight years before. A 1970 Ford Country Squire wagon with the monster four-sixty motor that he’d rebuilt himself. He was dating the same two girls from high school.

  We loaded the bags into the Country Squire and headed north toward Malibu. From Fab I learned that my father’s condition was unchanged. His kidneys had failed irreversibly, and the doctors were predicting death within a day or two.

  It was seven p.m. and the heat from the day kept the air warm. Fab and Agnes talked while I smoked in the back seat with the window down.

  There were cars and clothing named after Malibu. TV shows. Years before, when I first arrived in New York, people had odd reactions to the information that I was from Malibu. I learned that I came from a place that people went to, but weren’t supposed to leave. New Yorkers looked at me like I was an animated Disney character. After the first conversations, I stopped talking about where I was from. If somebody asked where I grew up I’d say, “L.A.”

  One night, two weeks after I’d arrived in New York, drunk in a bar on First Avenue, I bet a guy who had a sister in Pomona that there were statues of movie stars all over Los Angeles. The Emilio Esteves was in Santa Monica and the Peter Graves was in Glendale. Vincent Price, before he died, had a chain of California discount stores named after him.

  As we made the drive north up the Coast Highway I remembered things. Landmarks. I tried to estimate how many times I had passed Gladstones’ Restaurant. Five thousand times? Ten thousand?

  I recalled the photographs of what my father’s house had been like over thirty years before—a big Y-shaped ranch-style deal standing alone near a windy cliff eight miles past the Malibu Colony.

  There were no housing developments or banks out that far in those days, and the nearest market was almost halfway back to Santa Monica. I remembered noticing as a boy, when I scrambled up on the roof to shag a stray baseball, that the closest house was half-a-mile away. Our place was built on a spur of land jutting out into the Pacific Ocean where the Indians had buried their dead two hundred years before—named after the French explorer, Dume. Pronounced Doom.

  From Torrance or Redondo Beach looking north, the last point of land visible is the hill named Point Dume, flat-topped since WW II when the War Department gave it a crewcut in preparation to make it a strategic gun emplacement. But the “Yellow Menace” from the east never arrived, and twenty years later, Jonathan Dante bought one of the four haciendas on the barren land.

  In the 1950’s, the afternoon winds would howl across the flatlands and tumbleweeds blew off the cliffs and hang-glided to the sea a hundred feet below. You could hear seals barking on the rocks and from time to time, around the end of the point, a tribe of whales would chug by, gasping spray twenty feet into the air on their way to warmer waters in Mexico.

  Movie money had purchased the Dante home. My father, who at twenty-one had hitchhiked to L.A. from Boulder with three dollars in his pocket, had become a rich screenwriter. He had heeded the advice of his mentor, H.L. Mencken, who years before, had told him to “take every cent they’ll pay you.”

  After six months in L.A., young Jonathan Dante was rotting in a hotel room on Bunker Hill, unable to finish his novel, broke and weeks behind on his rent. Mencken exhorted him to take the gig.

  It was only a two-week assignment. A writer friend of my father’s who knew his short story work and was pulling down fat weekly paychecks at RKO, recommended they hire the old man to re-write a court scene in a John Garfield flick. The job paid five-hundred-a-week. Enough to finance Dante’s novel for another six months. He grabbed up the quick money and for the rest of his life served two masters.

  What happened to Jonathan Dante in Los Angeles is what happens to a man who falls in love with a beautiful, heartless bitch. Each time you touch her round hard breasts and press yourself deeply between her legs, rapture explodes your heart. Possessing her flawlessness fills you with a drug, a perfect divine bliss. You have a dick that never gets soft. The paychecks, the kisses fix everything.

  He didn’t look forward or back anymore because he’d learned that in Hollywood the now is all that counts. He forgot that his passion was writing novels. He took up golf. Covering the nut and nights drinking at Musso’s with his screenwriter pals, became what mattered. After that, his preoccupations became rewrite deadlines and stocks and real estate and the putting green at Fox Hills.

  L.A. was a flawless plum of a town then. Wonderful big open streets and crisp, dry air and an endless sun that filled the world with hope. Her people were open and friendly and the picture business brought a dream-come-true reality to the place that was unavoidable. It really could happen. You could move west to L.A. and change your life. Southern California was FDR’s prototype of the New Deal.

  A poor writer growing up in the poverty of the thirties, finding L.A. blooming, beautiful—an air-brushed kibbutz paradise—Dante knew he must have her and let his tongue penetrate her every orifice. At the time it didn’t matter too much that, in the essence of his bones, he knew he was licking the clit of the spider lady.

  3

  TWENTY MINUTES PAST SUNSET BOULEVARD, WE TURNED OFF the Coast Highway onto Heathercliff Road. The personalized license plate on the Benz convertible in front of us read, “SE ME WIN.” I knew I was home.

  When we pulled into the driveway we could see that the house was completely dark. Fab said Mom was at the hospital with my sister and my sister’s husband, Benny Roth.

  I got out to open the big iron gate and flipped the latch and pushed it open a few feet, less than wide enough to admit Fab’s station wagon.

  A rusty hinge creaked in the darkness. A kind of low groan. Something within made me restrain myself from opening it all the way.

  Then a second later, I knew why. In the distance I heard growling and the moonlight revealed a hairy white torpedo of a dog coming around the corner. It was my father’s pride and joy, his husky fourteen-year-old bull terrier, Rocco. What Jake La Motta had been to middleweight fighters, Rocco was once to other dogs. As he got closer I could see his limp, and the ancient, jagged scars covering his face. Dried rivers of pain from a hundred wars.

  His head bore the marks of the population growth of our family’s neighborhood. Like the rings of age in the center of a tree, each scar corresponded with the new arrival of a Doberman, a rottweiler, a German shepherd or a Great Dane. He’d fought them all as their masters built homes and eventually made the error of letting their dogs pass the perimeter of my father’s driveway. Rocco’s face was the record.

  The dog got to within a couple of feet of me, then stopped and stood his ground. He was checking me out. I waited. He wasn’t growling any more, so I tentatively reached out to pet him.

  Rocco grabbed my sleeved arm playfully, like a Kung-Fu master demonstrating a lethal thrust to an eight-year-old. Then he let it go. I allowed him complete control.

  Aggie and I got inside and unpacked in the bedroom that had once belonged to Fabrizio and me. There were still two double beds in the room. Not joined. Agnes was content with the sleeping arrangements.

  Fab wanted to know if I was going to return to the hospital with him that night to be with the old man. I did not want to go and my kid brother, knowing that I’d just come out of a treatment facility and trying not to pressure me, gave me the option of staying at the house. I didn’t want to see the old man. Not yet. Rather than be with me, Agnes decided to accompany my brother to the hospital. I would have the house to myself.

  After they’d gone, I went into the kitchen to check the liquor supply. There was a counter-top full of whiskey and vodka bottles. I poured myself a glass and walked out on the clif
f to smoke and drink with the night. The ghosts of dead dogs and the whispering of my old man’s voice in my head kept me company.

  One hundred feet below, I could make out a waveless beach in the moonlight and feel the dry breeze of a Santa Ana wind moving in from the east.

  I was sure that I didn’t belong here, and I recognized that the familiarity of that feeling repeated my sensation of strangeness and separateness, one I always had in the hospital treatment center. It was the same experience I had been having in my own apartment with my wife. I understood that I had become uncomfortable with all of my life, everywhere.

  It was surely part of the reason that my drinking had gotten out of control. Knowing that information made me further realize that I had come to completely not give a shit about anything. The Jack Daniels and the wine took the edge off that truth. It was why I was unwilling to quit.

  The smell of the ocean was everywhere, as I stood on the cliff looking out. Nothing was really different here, except everything. It all looked the same, except it had all changed.

  In the morning Agnes was asleep and I found a note from Fabrizio. She and my brother had returned after midnight from the hospital, then he had gone home to Santa Monica.

  The note said that the old man was worse, being kept alive by a drug that made his kidneys function, but pneumonia had set in. Our mother had spent the night with him at the ICU. Jonathan Dante would not live another day.

  I had been up since before dawn, sweating and smoking cigarettes, roaming the large empty house with the peopleless rooms. When the daylight came, I was standing at the kitchen sink making coffee, looking north out the window. In the half-light of day I could see that there was even more new construction. The housing depression of the nineties had avoided Point Dume. Squinting to see further down the road, I recognized where a large gully and a creek bed with boulders and jagged rock formations had once existed. It was gone. Covered over. A green-mirrored house on stilts was in its place. Expensive.