Dan Fante - Spitting Off Tall Buildings

She was whispering. She wanted me to know how very happy she was to see me again. She giggled about missing me and my funny jokes.

Then she kissed me again, harder this time, deeper, sliding her tongue under my tongue. After the kiss she looked up at me – she had big eyes. Sandy wanted to know if I would mind coming back later that day, or maybe even later that night. She was sorry, she said, the man in the suit was a very big tipper. Japanese. He didn’t like waiting. If she didn’t take him right away ahead of me he would leave and she would lose a very big and impressive tip. Then she kissed me again and handed me back my massage fee – a twenty and a ten; ‘You come back later. Okay, baby?’

I looked up at the guy, standing there with his arms crossed staring at the ceiling, impatient, like some spoiled jerkoff waiting in front of the Plaza Hotel for his limo.

My mind started talking. First it suggested that I act nice and just get up and leave. Be a good guy. Walk out. No problem. Sandy would be grateful and when I came back next time she would demonstrate her thanks by doing some special sexual favor for me. But that message was overridden by a second quick message. The new message said: ‘Fuck these cocksuckers! Fuck them for embarrassing you and treating you like a second-class piece-of-shit trick.’ Added to this message was the information that within a few minutes after I’d gone the other man – the rich Japanese guy – would be licking and kissing Sandy, fingering her pussy; maybe even feeling her tongue on his butthole. I began to experience a wrenching in my stomach accompanied by the bite of something sour in my throat.

I looked over at Sandy. Then at the face of the partition lady and then over at the big tipper. It didn’t matter any more. None of it. Fuck it!

I stood up and unzipped my pants and pulled out my dick. Sandy stood up too. They looked surprised but no one did anything because they didn’t know what to do.

First I urinated on the couch where I’d been sitting, then I twisted my stream to the floor by Sandy’s feet. She stepped back. Then I pissed on the coffee table and the magazines.

When I was done I zipped up and walked out, slamming the door behind me.

Two blocks down Broadway there was a ginmill off the corner of Forty-fifth. A spot where during the day you could get one-for-one until 5 p.m. It was hot outside and the Clint Eastwood movie didn’t start for at least another hour.

I went in, found an empty stool and put a twenty-dollar bill face up on the deck. I ordered three shooters with a beer back. The bar guy had the Yankees on. New York at Baltimore. Third inning. The goddamn Orioles were already ahead six to one.

He set up my beer and whiskey and I tried my first sip in almost three weeks. It was awful, like the taste of cigarette ashes in an inch of water at the bottom of a glass. Stale. Stabbing. Heinous. A taste completely unlike any whiskey of any kind.

I knew it was the hypnotism. Some fucked saboteur reprogramming message Harry had pumped into the depths of my brain through the earphones.

I didn’t know what else to do so I hammered the rest of the shooters and gulped down a swig of the beer. It was rank shit too. Disgusting. Like kerosene or liquid rat poison or dwarf piss. Awful.

I waved for the guy and when he came over I switched to vodka shooters, plain water back.

He set me up again and I hit the first sip hoping the vodka would at least taste different from the whiskey. But it didn’t. It was the same. I tried the water. Only it seemed uncontaminated.

When I’d finished the drinks I ordered more. My head pounded and my heart raced like the way you feel when you’ve just mainlined half a gram of coke.

The second vodka shooter wasn’t as bad as the first. Like before, like rancid wet ashes but not quite as bad.

It took another fifteen minutes and two more sets of shooters until the stuff tasted halfway normal.

Then I was okay again.

I continued going to the hypno because I had to in order to stay qualified to receive my Workman’s Comp checks. But I kept on with the booze too. I just didn’t tell Harry. The adjustment was simple: on the days I had my sessions I’d hold off getting drunk until after I left his office.

I STARTED TO become a more frequent visitor at Bert’s downstairs manager’s apartment. We were both sports fans and his most recent and prized possession was a big-screen TV – a forty-six-inch job he’d confiscated in lieu of back rent. Sometimes it happened that when a roomer got locked out or vacated suddenly, Bert would procure his belongings: a racing bike, boom-box radios, a computer. Sometimes he’d sell the stuff if it was electronic, sometimes he’d give it to one of his kids, and sometimes he’d lock it in his storage room in the basement. Bert excelled at fist fights which helped if the ex-tenant returned for his stuff and began complaining regarding who was entitled to what.

Angel-Lee was working nights waitressing at her titty-bar job and Bert knew I followed the Yankees and Mets and liked boxing so I had an open invitation to drop in. I was okay. We’d sip Bert’s beer and watch the game on his monster TV. Sometimes during the commercials he’d mute the sound and dispense advice about my case and brag about outsmarting the Workman’s Comp people and the welfare department.

It would be me and Bert and the twins, Carrie and Connie. After the girls fixed dinner and did the dishes they would confine themselves to their big bed in the rear area of the apartment. They had learned to keep a low profile around their daddy when he drank, which was mostly day and night. He could easily become a mean-spirited and belittling prick when it came to criticizing his wife and kids.

The twins liked having me around. I’d make up preposterous yarns about their favorite TV actor or rock star and say he was my cousin or I went to school with him or I’d once driven him to the airport in my cab. When they would challenge me I’d concoct a personality characteristic or a tattoo the guy had and go on about it until they were convinced that I was really telling the truth. Then I’d make a face to let them know that I’d fooled them again. Then too, me being in their apartment made it easier with their dad because it took some of the heat off.

Bert’s three-year Workman’s Comp lawsuit finally got settled and the amount came out to be forty thousand dollars. Robert Edward Francis Duffy took his one-third off the top which was the agreed split but Bert was left with almost twenty-seven K, which, according to him and Bob Duffy, was a decent hit.

He celebrated by staying drunk and snorting coke and vanishing from the building for seventy-two hours. After he sobered up and got contrite he bought rollerblade rollerskates for his girls and a pearl necklace for beautiful Angel-Lee.

One morning several days after the check was safely in his bank, I accompanied Bert to the OTB on Broadway. It was not yet 10 a.m. but he was half drunk and snorting crack again.

He wasn’t much of a gambler and due to his coke and booze problem his relationship with his family had gotten worse. The next day when he came to with a new hangover he discovered that Angel was gone and his savings account was at zero balance.

She’d had enough. It turned out that her and Tall Jimmy, the bartender at her job, had been having a thing and what was left of the settlement cash had provided them with the motivation to relocate together to the southwest.

Bert stayed drunk and high on coke for another week, ignoring his manager’s job and his kids. When he was completely broke and his credit was gone, he started in on wine. The girls, in fear of their dad, came up to my room. At night they slept on my floor in their sleeping bags.