Dan Fante - Spitting Off Tall Buildings

Me and Brad drank and ate pretzels and did some math on a bar napkin. Between the two of us we’d torn apart about fifteen hundred reports. I held up the hand and showed him the blister on my thumb. Brad shook his head. By the time we were headed back from our lunch break, I’d decided fuck it.

Herrera at Olson’s Temp acted uninterested about me quitting Schwermann when I called her the next Monday morning. But then she began asking questions about what my boss had said when I said I was leaving. What I said. What Nancy had said back. That shit. I had to sell Herrera, convince her that I hadn’t been petulant or acted like an asshole, in order for her to trust me and send me out again.

While we talked on the phone she looked up my file. I’d come in on time every day except for a couple of times. She saw that there had been no supervisor complaints. After the interrogation it was determined that I would be eligible for reassignment.

I could hear her wheezing while she fidgeted through the files on her desk. ‘Okay, now I remember you,’ she gasped. ‘Dante! New in town. Right?’

‘Right.’

‘Still here, Dante? Still lost?’

‘Still here.’

‘That’s just swell, Dante,’ she said. ‘What I’ll do is go over the list of the new phone-in assignments that’ve come in. I do it once a day for each of our people calling in for reassignment. Once only. When you call in remember that. If you like something say “Stop” and I’ll stop while you write it down. I don’t go back once I’ve read off a job. Got a pencil?’

‘A pen. I’m ready.’

‘Remember, Dante, say “Stop.”’

‘Okay.’

She started reading the alphabetical list. Most of what she had sounded okay but not more than a couple of notches above the staple-puller deal. ‘Arcade Ticket Taker, Auditor’s Assistant/Collator, Assembler’s Helper.’

‘Keep going,’ I said.

The ‘Cs’ ‘Ds’ and ‘Fs’ weren’t much better; ‘Car Detailer, Dish Washer, Cook’s Helper, Fill-in Delivery Man. Fitter Assistant, Flyer Distributor.’

‘Well?’

‘Keep going.’

‘Garage Attendant, Label Sticker/Packager, Loading Dock Clerk…’

By the ‘Ss’ I could tell that Herrera was out of patience. ‘Survey Taker, Supply Room Stock Man…C’mon Dante,’ she said, ‘my gum surgery was more fun than this.’

She started on the ‘Us’. ‘Usher.’

I knew immediately. ‘I’ll take Usher,’ I said. ‘Theater usher?’

‘Movie usher.’

‘I’ll take it.’

She gave me the location and the name of the person to see. She waited, wheezing, tapping the phone with her pencil, while I wrote down her directions on how to get there by subway. The manager’s name was Mrs. Lupo. An Italian name. I was optimistic.

Herrera surprised me by saying something conversational. ‘So, Dante,’ she hissed, ‘did you get to the Empire State Building?’

‘I was a block away on one of my lunch breaks but I didn’t go in.’

‘Soo…what’d you think?’

‘Tall…I thought it was tall.’

There was a click on the other end.

I’D BEEN DRUNK most of the weekend for no reason other than boredom. Beer and wine. I like to walk sometimes when I’m drunk, especially when I’m in a new place. So I walked on Saturday. Uptown on Riverside Drive next to the frozen Hudson River. Up to Grant’s Tomb. Then down Broadway. Buying brown-bag short dogs of Triple Jack wine, stopping at the newsstands and used book stores. Paperbacks, three for a buck. Passed the Ansonia Hotel, Seventy-second Street, Lincoln Center.

On Sunday I was awake hours before sunrise. I tried to write before I drank, working on my play, then gave up and hit the wine to stop the head noise. I ordered eggs and toast when the luncheonette on Eighth Avenue opened. The waitress had the name tag LaVonne. Friendly. Pretty, even white teeth.

After that I drank some more in my room and read my ‘new’ used Hubert Selby until I couldn’t concentrate. Then I walked down Eighth Avenue. In Greenwich Village I passed chic outdoor cafés and people getting out of limos. It reminded me of L.A. and Beverly Hills so I turned west toward the docks and found a coffee house bookstore. A rummie with a ponytail was playing chess by himself. He had no cigarettes but he had a philosophy degree from NYU and said Edna Millay once lived on Hudson Street, e. e. cummings on West Fourth. He went on about dead Jesus until I got him off it and then about a trip he’d made to Alaska. What me and the rummie had in common is that we both had done a lot of walking. I bought us coffee and he pulled the cigarettes out of my pack one after the other and smoked them. When I left him I found Hudson Street but I never found Millay’s house.

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends-

It gives a lovely light.

I arrived late that Monday afternoon for my first day at the Loew’s Sheridan Movie – filling in for a man named Guido who was in Palermo for four weeks because his father died. I looked forward to the job because I always liked movies and because of the dark and the imaginary world and the smell of popcorn.

Herrera had told me that Mrs. Lupo was an old lady but a good client. Herrera’d said that she was ‘funny’ and ‘moody.’ A stickler.

The minute I saw Mrs. Lupo I knew that nobody in the theater but her could be the boss. She was small, under five feet and weighing less than ninety pounds. Her hair was pure white and she wore slacks and noiseless soft-soled black nurse’s shoes and she had an intense, bosslike, rat face. I pegged her immediately as a stalker. She was way past retirement age but it was evident from watching her that she could out-speed-walk any employee in her theater.

She had me follow her to the unheated men’s dressing area in the movie theater basement and pointed to a rack where there were white shirts and clip-on bow ties and parts of ten or fifteen beat-up old tuxedos. Lupo told me that when she was a girl first starting out as a vaudeville usher, Georgie Jessel had once changed his clothes in this very clammy, shitty, cold basement.

The black pants and jackets hung worn and shapeless like the abandoned uniforms of a defeated platoon of head waiters. Mrs. Lupo stayed outside the door while I tried on pants and tux jacket pieces until I was finally able to merge a combination that came close to my size.

When I opened the door of the dressing area, she looked me up and down, sucked at her teeth, then announced, ‘That’ll do. You’re responsible for the cleaning. That and the shirt laundering come out of your pocket. Personal expenses.’

Then she walked over to the clothes rack, grabbed the first two available beat-up tux shirts and passed them to me. ‘These’ll be yours. There’s a Chinese on the corner of Seventh Avenue. They charge a dollar a shirt. Don’t get the heavy starch, get light starch only.’

Then she snatched off a frayed, dirty, clip-on bow tie that swung from the triangle of a wire hanger with half a dozen others and tossed it to me. ‘You need this too,’ she said, looking me up and down again. ‘That’s it,’ she declared to herself. ‘You’re done. Let’s go. Change back into your street clothes. I’ll wait.’

I did. But when I came out carrying the usher’s uniform over my arm I hadn’t tried on the shirts. I held one up. ‘I can tell that these sleeves are too long,’ I said. ‘They won’t fit.’

Her eyes shone with haughty amusement. ‘We’re not auditioning here, Dante. We do the best we can. You wear the jacket over the shirt, right? Roll the sleeves up if you have to. Remember, I said heavy starch destroys the cotton. No heavy starch.’