Dan Fante - Spitting Off Tall Buildings

‘What?’

‘That…human.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, skewering my check on the paper spike by the register, ‘Claire quit. Moved to Fort Lee. Better schools for her kids. That’s Betty.’

‘Okay, but why…why did you hire…that?’

‘That’s name is Betty.’

I leaned toward him to speak confidentially. The thing was traversing the counter a dozen or so feet away, grunting and snorting, refilling a customer’s coffee cup, raising and lowering its eighty-pound arm to reveal a huge dark circle of sweat. Beads of moistness coated its massive cheeks and hog snout. ‘Milt,’ I said, ‘Your Betty is the fattest fucking bloated distended pile of living waste I have ever seen. What the hell is she doing here…around normal people?’

‘She’s my niece.’

I had to go on. It was impossible to stop myself. ‘There should be fucking legislation about keeping something that sickening out of sight.’

‘Soo…you don’t like fat people?’

‘That’s not people, that’s oil mountain! That huge bitch is a rolling vat of bacteria, a living, wheezing, farting health department violation. Man, don’t you know that it’s physically impossible for a fucking hippo her size to reach her feet with a bar of soap, let alone her twat and private parts?’

Milt pushed my change across the counter. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘don’t come back in here again. Take your coffee business somewheres else.’

I scooped the coins up. Consciously, somewhere in my brain, I was aware that I’d lost it completely. ‘Let me ask you a question,’ I bellowed. ‘What the fuck do you think a lard-globe that huge has to do to have sex? To procreate. How does it fuck? A person would have to have a twenty-inch dick to have intercourse with an elephant brontosaurus of her dimensions.’

Milt was walking away.

‘Hey,’ I yelled again, pushing the paper bag containing the coffee and bagel back across the counter and off the end so that it fell to the floor, broke open and spilled, ‘fuck you, zoo keeper! Fuck you and her and all the pig-animal infected human hogs everywhere!’

Milt perused me, untying his apron and coming around from behind the counter. But I was too quick; out the door and down the street to my taxi.

A COUPLE OF days later, after the diner deal, I’d knocked off early and pulled into the mechanics section of the Rodney garage to have Hot Rod work on my front brakes. Another driver, a night-shift guy everybody knew, Al Bridhoff, was there too having some tranny work done. Al had once gone to law school upstate. Albany or somewhere. He was now the garage shylock. Because he had power and controlled money, many of the Rodney cabbies went to him for advice.

We were talking and drinking vending-machine coffee when I decided to mention the telephone incident and Betty at the diner and some of the stuff my mind had been saying to me.

But right away I regretted bringing it up.

Bridhoff was a pipe smoker. I began telling him what had happened and he began trying to light his fucking pipe. I’d say something, then he’d start to reply but stop in the middle, attempt to relight the pipe twenty-eight more fucking times, then nod that we could go on. I felt like the chump, the mooch, groveling for this asshole’s magical syllables of insight. In less than five minutes I hated him and hated myself for initiating the conversation.

When I’d said what I had to say, Bridhoff sat down. He could see that I was annoyed at having to watch him with his moron pipe. He scratched his cheek thoughtfully and attempted to give the appearance of contemplation. ‘Well, sport,’ he said finally, playing with the lid on his Zippo lighter, clicking the top up and down, ‘it sounds like you’ve been overdoing it just a bit.’

I didn’t answer. A dented cab fender had more intelligence than this shylock imbecile fuck.

Disgusted, I threw my half-full coffee cup in the garbage, and began walking away. Bridhoff stopped me, putting his hand up like a crossing guard. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘tell me what you did with all the telephone parts, the receivers and cords? Still have that stuff?’

‘No. It was broken junk. I threw it away.’

‘Evidence, huh?’

‘No. Junk. Not evidence of any kind. Useless fucking junk.’

‘Yeah, well, that wasn’t very good thinking, was it? Telephone equipment has value. I might’ve been able to help you there.’

‘There’s a dumpster in the alley behind my rooming house. The valuable telephone shit you’re looking for is under a cat carcass and six feet of garbage. Help yourself, sport.’

A day or two later something else happened. More insanity.

I was hacking. On Madison Avenue in the Eighties about to pull over and pick up a guy hailing me, when another hack in a Checker cab cut me off to get to a fare. I had to slam on my brakes to avoid hitting his taxi.

The fare got in the other guy’s Checker.

I pulled up next to the cabbie and yelled something and he mouthed ‘Fuck you’ and gave me the finger.

No big deal. Normally I’d just let it go. It can happen a couple of times a week when you’re hacking but, for some reason, I flipped out and lost control.

I followed the other taxi, yelling shit, tailgating, screaming out my window.

After a few blocks he swerved between cars and I was forced to stop for a light. Seeing that I’d caught the signal, he went ahead to his destination, assuming that because he’d gotten away the incident was over. But I kept my eyes on his taillights. Saw him turn. I caught up.

He had pulled to the curb after making his drop on Sixty-first Street, around the corner from the Pierre Hotel.

That’s when we settled up.

A lot of cab drivers I knew carried weapons; guns or mace or pepper spray. I didn’t. I carried a baseball bat under my front seat. A Louisville Slugger.

I walked up quickly. The other guy was looking down, still filling out his trip record. I attacked his window. Slam! Slam! Slam! putting a million spiderweb cracks in the windshield’s safety glass. Then I did the back and the side glass.

There would have been no witnesses too because the prick couldn’t see me through the opaque glass, and he was too shocked and scared to do anything about it but, as I was getting back into my cab, looking around, I recognized one of the drivers from my garage waiting alone in his cab at the hack stand in front of the Pierre. He saw me too, then he looked away.

A couple of nights later I was checking out with Shorty Smith, leaving the dispatch window, counting my tips, when Al Bridhoff patted me on the back. ‘Hey, “Batman,”’ he said. ‘Take it slow out there tonight.’

There were a dozen guys standing around the shape-up room. They all laughed. From then on I had a new name at the Rodney garage.

THE GOOD PART was that hacking kept me constantly busy. I was making money. I’d acquired a new electric typewriter to work on my play, a color TV.

Then something happened that triggered something else that put me over the edge: Shorty Smith had graduated me to what in the taxi business they call a ‘single’ – one long twelve- to fourteen-hour shift. No night guy. Just me. I was allowed to choose my own time slot; 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., six days a week. Sundays off.

It was early June, 8:30 a.m., drizzling a smelly rain in stop-and-go traffic. I was maneuvering my cab back up Eighth Avenue in the Thirties after a drop at Penn Station, staying to the east side of the street, barely making the staggered lights, preparing to avoid the stampede of commuters who would be flagging me down as I approached the Port Authority Bus Terminal at Thirty-ninth Street.