Dan Fante - Spitting Off Tall Buildings

Mistofsky glared. ‘You know why. Your supervisor tells me that you’ve been fraternizing with a hotel guest. Miss Von Hachten. More than once. Please do not attempt to deny this.’

I didn’t talk.

‘You have until Wednesday to remove your belongings and yourself from my hotel. Under the circumstances, that’s more than generous. Anymore questions?’

I thought about it but I didn’t have any.

I MOVED BACK to the rooming house on West Fifty-first Street. Not my old room, but one floor up, same line, directly above where I lived before.

After a week it happened; a depression, covering me like a wet black towel. Staying drunk stopped it but I kept going too long, feeding another need; wanting to be out of control. Wanting oblivion.

It was a four-day. I slipped in and out of blackouts. I’d find myself walking down Broadway or in a record store arguing with the clerk about an album in the Blues Section, then the next thing I’d be in a porno movie looking down at some guy sucking my dick.

I remembered seeing the cuts on my arms and I remember the ride by cab to the emergency room but I don’t remember harming myself. One of the gashes was deep enough to need minor surgery to repair the tendon. The other ones were okay to just stitch up.

I lied to the admissions guy so they let me go the next day. I copped to being drunk but said I’d fought off a mugger. I was sent home with a supply of tape and gauze and some pills for the pain.

I promised myself that I’d quit this time for sure. Scared shitless by my own madness.

And I did. I stayed completely sober and without any alcohol of any kind for three days.

Early on the morning of the fourth day I was awake. Sweating. Uneasy. Five a.m. Sitting on the side of my bed, smoking cigarettes and waving my gray legs one at a time above the shadows on the linoleum, I knew. I was thirty-four years old and I knew; alcohol had become my medicine, the thing that kept me in balance. It was my wedge against my attacking, endlessly filibustering, condemning mind.

I realized that I was unable to stop. And at the same moment that realization came I also was aware that, if I continued, sooner or later I’d be out of control again, that one night in a blackout I’d find the razor again or maybe jump in front of the Eighth Avenue bus or a speeding cab. Considering both conditions, both sides, weighing out the pros and cons, I came up with what was the only decision possible; I had to drink. The rest was the tradeoff.

I got up, locating my pants in the street-light, my shoes and my shirt and my thick coat. Then I walked. Up Eighth Avenue, along Central Park South, Fifty-ninth Street, until 6 a.m. when the bars reopened.

THERE WERE A bunch of jobs in a row after that. Four. #1: Driver for a bootleg airport shuttle service operating out of the midtown hotels, #2: Peddling belts at lunchtime on Fiftieth Street by the Time-Life Building and around Times Square, #3: A ticket-taking gig at an after-hours club on Forty-sixth Street, and #4: A wacko stint as a window cleaner.

I liked the airport shuttle service best because I got to drive around the city and because they paid in cash at the end of each shift. Everything I earned was off-the-books with no deductions to the government.

I’d seen their advertisement under ‘Drivers’ in the Times and got hired on the spot because the morning of the day I walked in, one of their guys had called up and quit over the phone.

At first, because I didn’t know the city, I made constant mistakes and had the passengers pissed off at me. But the company had a high turnover and my dispatcher didn’t care about anything other than me showing up for work. When I’d get jacked up or in trouble about a destination, I would radio in and he’d give me directions.

Mostly, I spent my shifts bopping back and forth from La Guardia and Kennedy Airport and then back to the city. Pick ‘em up here – drop ‘em there. The tips were good.

Our barn was in the South Bronx and the service was owned and run by two Puerto Rican brothers, Alesandro and Hector. We were technically a gypsy cab and illegal because what the brothers had done was to make a back-door deal with the legitimate, larger services to carry their overflow without having to pay any of the heavy New York City licensing fees.

The problem was the equipment. Our vans were shit. The brothers owned three vehicles that stayed in operation fifteen to twenty hours a day. There was no towing insurance, and no back-up or contingency in the event of a breakdown. When one of the mini-buses would give out on an airport run, Hector would come out in his Chevy station wagon with the torn seats and missing headliner and complete the drop by delivering the passengers himself. Sometimes it would take him two hours to get back, attach a thick link tow chain to the front bumper of my van, and pull me back over the Tri-Boro Bridge to Gerard Avenue in the Bronx.

The brothers were both certifiable wacks and their operation ran in continual bedlam. Yelling was the only communication method. Also, they’d jerry-rigged and substituted so many parts under the hood of each van to save money that what had been fixed only days before almost always would re-break right away.

The best mini-bus of the three ran good but had no heater. The driver and his passengers would freeze their asses off but usually always get to their destination. The second one had a secret gasoline leak that stank up the vehicle and a weird alignment problem from an accident. It crabbed down the thruway at an angle and would wear out a set of front tires every couple of weeks.

The last one was the worst. I was low man so I was stuck with it. Two of the motor’s cylinders were inoperable and a billow of thick, uncombusted oil smoke trailed me through the New York streets like relentless fucking Jobert in Les Miserables.

Passengers griped constantly and self-righteous ecological motorists would honk and gesture at the virulent gray gook as it billowed out the tail pipe. Once, at a stop light, an indignant, coughing pedestrian with a metal-hilted walker cane put a crack in the driver’s side window by tapping too hard.

In my third week on the job my van’s engine finally seized up and quit. I was in rush-hour traffic on the Van Wyck Expressway five miles from Kennedy Airport. A sudden lurching occurred, then a clanking, then a thud. Ugly, black smoke and the stench of burning rubber began filling the interior of the van.

My passengers were forced from the vehicle and had to wait by the side of the freeway in twenty-degree weather until Hector arrived in his Chevy repair station wagon. They all missed their flights.

That night, when we finally got back, Hector gave me fifty dollars, laid me off, and confessed that they could not afford to have the van’s engine rebuilt anytime soon.

THE TICKET-TAKER DOORMAN job was from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. at an after-hours club called Ponce in Times Square. Tips only. I had been misinformed about the earning potential, retaliated by reporting drunk, and was let go on the third night.

It was lunchtime. I walked cross-town to the bank to cash an old Workpower company check for $16.23 that I’d been keeping in my wallet as a back-up. Eight people were waiting for service in the customer line and there were two tellers. Only two tellers. Lunch hour. I waited. Minutes passed but none of us in the line moved.

Then one of the tellers, a Middle Eastern-looking human, having finished with the patron she’d been attending, put her ‘NEXT WINDOW PLEASE’ sign up, and walked away.

I began yelling. I yelled at the official-looking assholes sitting behind the railing at the desks. The suits. There were two of them. I also yelled at the one remaining teller, a bald guy. What I yelled was as follows: ‘Hey goddammit, I’m a customer here! Hey! An American-fucking-citizen! Look at me when I’m talking to you!…Hey, goddammit! You’ve got people waiting here for service. Where are the tellers? Are you fucking blind? You need more tellers! Our money sits there in your fucking vault earning interest so you can live in New Rochelle and bribe union guys and invest in oil stocks but we can’t get a fucking check cashed in your bank or consummate a simple chickenshit transaction?…You sir, at the desk, does the word asshole hold any meaning for you? Oh sorry, how about rectum?…Hey, don’t you get it? Wake the fuck up! We need some service here!’