Dan Fante - Spitting Off Tall Buildings

The guard came over. A dildo wearing a gun with a different kind of foreign accent and enlarged pores on his nose. The guard put his hand on my arm and told me that I would have to quiet down. I yelled at him too and I continued yelling until after they called a beat cop to get me out of the bank. But they cashed my check.

THE BELT GIG was okay. My rooming-house neighbor, an actor queen named Dylan, who I always passed in the hall, had another friend in the building named Neil. A dancer. Neil’s room was on the top floor. Neil was a petulant, high-strung guy but very resourceful. When he wasn’t a gypsy in a show he would support himself by his street-peddling business or teaching dance. Neil had a team of six people selling leather belts on the street. They worked the lunch rush from twelve to two and the night rush at five o’clock when the midtown offices closed.

Neil put me on and supplied me with the belt rack. The split was fifty-fifty. It was just after Thanksgiving so business was good on the good days, and I would earn a hundred to a hundred and fifty dollars for three hours’ work. Tax free. But, because of the cold weather, the bad days outnumbered the good. I was drinking more too but I still managed to show up and I continued to work on my play in the morning.

One difficulty with being a street peddler of belts is that the rack is large and clumsy and easy to spot from a police car. And other than the cold, the main drawback to the job was the frequent arrests. Peddling anywhere in midtown New York is not legal so when the paddy wagon shows up and you’re a belt guy you are always one of the ones to get arrested because running with a seven-foot-high rack complete with dozens of leather belts is very difficult, especially on the wide avenue blocks, when the wind is catching the rack and billowing the goddamn thing like a sail.

The wristwatch guy had a light TV tray table and the girl who made the baby-bracelets used only a blanket that she spread out on the sidewalk and could easily pick up and run with. They usually got away. Not us. Me and the costume-jewelry peddler with his fold-up bridge table, and the stocking-hat guy with the big cardboard box, we’d get popped again and again.

The job lasted until a week before Christmas when Neil and I had a dispute. After one arrest they’d kept me twelve hours in a holding cell at the precinct for no reason other than to harass me. When I got back Neil insinuated that the arrest was my fault because I lacked the desire to run down the block with the full rack of belts. I got disgusted and decided to be sick and stay home and take some days off. Drink wine. Work on my play. Watch TV. Fuck Neil.

On his way out, he continued to knock every morning wanting me to come to work. I’d tell him to go away but he’d stand in the hall nagging at me through the door about how my not selling his belts during the holidays was screwing his business.

Finally, that Friday, three days before Christmas (and payday for most of the office secretaries at the Time-Life Building), he convinced me to come back.

I’d set up and been working for only twenty minutes when the cops came and I got popped. It was bitter and freezing on Fiftieth Street that day and all the best spots were taken by the other peddlers: the good doorway and building-entrance locations between Sixth and Seventh Avenue. Nothing was shielding me from the mean wind whipping in off the river from Jersey. I saw the squad car but I was too cold and numb to run.

Later that afternoon, in a lousy mood, I got back to Neil’s room to turn in my cash. The precinct cops had confiscated my rack again. And one of the hookers in the holding cell with me had a bad cold and had coughed and sneezed in my face non-stop for two hours. I’d convinced myself she had contagious TB. So I was pissed off. Ready for trouble.

High-strung Neil made a stupid mistake, again accusing me of being lazy and again blaming me for the arrest.

My problem is that I hold grudges. If you and I have had an argument and I’ve come out second or you are my boss and you’ve abused your authority in some way, I will wait, allow the annoyance to fester, even pretend that everything is okay between us, then, with what normally to others would seem like a minimum provocation, without notice, I will overreact and behave like a cornered snake. It’s a bad personality flaw and I’ve had to pay the tab for it again and again. I’d also been drinking on the way home to keep warm and prevent illness from the hooker’s coughing germs.

When pussy Neil started in and got hysterical about the impounded belt rack, my automatic first brain impulse was to punch him in his face several times, and that’s what happened.

After I’d left his room and got back to my room, after shattering his glass coffee table by kicking it and tearing my wad of dollar bills in half, I realized that I’d been out of line. Overreacted. But, of course, by then, being sorry didn’t mean shit.

I had eight hundred dollars saved so I remained at home most of the time. I’d see both Neil and Dylan going in and out of the building but they avoided me.

I got through all of Tennessee Williams’ plays again and all of Eugene O’Neill.

But the blackness started again. I drank more to fight it. Again too much. For too long. But I didn’t hurt myself this time. Nothing violent happened.

To break the cycle I rode the subway. For two days. The Woodlawn Line.

When that train gets to the Bronx it busts out of the tunnel into the sunlight and runs on the elevated tracks by Yankee Stadium.

And there you are. A few feet away. If you’re riding in one of the cars toward the end and you stand when the train is pulling into the One-sixty-first Street stop, you can make out home plate. Where Ruth and DiMaggio and Mantle and Yogi Berra and Reggie slammed the shit out of that pill. You are right there within touching distance of the shrine.

I rode to the end of the line both days. A couple of times. By Woodlawn Cemetery. Reading Hubert Selby Jr., The Time of Your Life by Saroyan, Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Reading those guys or staring out the window at the Bronx.

When I had to smoke I’d go to the last car. Usually it was empty. Sometimes I’d get off the train, stand on the platform, smoke my cigarette, then wait for the next Woodlawn Express. Then ride on.

By the first week in February I was completely broke so I had to start looking for work again.

WINDOW CLEANERS IN New York City are mostly wine drinkers and head cases, the ones that work freelance non-union on the high-up buildings. And fools too. They’re an overlooked demographic and someone should do a study.

I applied for the job cleaning glass with a firm called Red Ball Maintenance. The company held a contract to clean all the windows of all the state office buildings north of Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. They did apartment buildings too. Large buildings.

I got the interview because of Brad O’Sullivan who I had met at the staple-pulling assignment at the TV ad research place on Madison Avenue. Brad lived in my neighborhood in Hell’s Kitchen and it turned out that we were both boxing enthusiasts. Once or twice on Tuesday night, fight night on TV, I’d run into him at Gleason’s Bar on Ninth Avenue. The saloon showed boxing. Braddie’s uncle was Johnny Murphy. A huge guy with a great, protruding belly. Murphy was the shift manager at Red Ball.

When I came in and sat down in his office, Murphy glanced at me from across his desk, scooped up my job application and began reading. He knew already from talking to Brad that I needed the gig, that I’d been out of work for weeks.

He completed reading and looked up. Studied me. My face, my hair, giving me an embarrassing once-over. Then he glanced back down at the top of the application where my name appeared. It happened to me a lot at job interviews, especially in New York. My name, contradictory appearance and coloring would cause people to do double-takes. Murphy’s aggressive leer made me feel like a lab specimen.