Dan Fante - Spitting Off Tall Buildings

IT WAS RAINING so I had my jacket on and I was on my way out to a hypno appointment with Harry when I opened my door and saw Bert moving the twins’ mattress and two boxfuls of clothes up the stairs.

He was real bad: shaking, hung over, his dick in the dirt. But he had a plan.

Angel’s welfare check had just come in the mail; two hundred and ninety-seven dollars. Bert had signed his wife’s name on the back and cashed the check at the liquor store on Ninth Avenue where they knew him. He handed the wadded up allotment money over to me. Mostly all twenties.

That morning he had quit his manager’s job. He was setting out to find Angel and bring her back. Part of his plan was for me to look after the girls for a couple of weeks.

I watched him shake, then took the money. Together with the girls we moved the mattress and the boxes the rest of the way into my room.

But Bert was gone longer than two weeks and my own checks were barely enough to cover expenses. It was almost a month before we even received a call on the hall pay phone. Two hundred and sixty of the two hundred and ninety-seven dollars had gone out immediately to pay for an emergency room visit when I came home buzzed, tripped going up the stairs, and hit my forehead on the banister. Twelve stitches.

I had the key to the building’s storage room and Bert’s permission, if necessary, to sell or pawn his stuff, whatever was there. Twice that first month the girls and I had to appropriate one of D’Agostino Market’s shopping carts and wheel a load down Ninth Avenue to the hock shop. First thing was their dad’s big TV and speakers, then a VCR and a fax machine with the dial buttons missing.

There was more stuff but when Ed Dorobek, the new rooming-house manager, discovered me going into the storage room, he replaced the padlock. I was denied further admittance unless Bert was present.

I KNEW EXACTLY nothing about eleven-year-old girls.

It was summer. The end of June. Having twin girls around, out of school, in and out of my room, was annoying at first. The up side was that with less time by myself my drinking and my mind’s raging and crazy self-talking stayed pretty much under control. They were good kids so I made the adjustment. The hardest thing for me was the heat at night and not sleeping.

During the day I maintained on cheap whiskey and the occasional short dog of Mad Dog 20-20. I worked on my play as much as I could, and I always kept my appointments with Harry.

Sometimes, in those first weeks after the girls moved in, the sweltering afternoons were so fierce that sitting around in the closeness of the rooming house induced my brain’s software to thoughts of suicide and homicide. My solution was for the three of us to walk to Times Square to play video games or go to the $2 air cooled movies on Forty-second Street.

The twins would skate down Broadway on their rollerblades with me following. They were heartbreakers, always cheerful, friendly to everybody, with beautiful smiles and big eyes like their mom’s. The tourists and the people on the street loved them.

The only real children’s book I owned was The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz. At night Carrie was having bad dreams, being terrorized by spiders and two-foot-high red insects sucking her face off while she slept so, before lights out, to get her and Connie to relax and drift off, I began reading out loud from Oz. One chapter a night. They loved it. Right away the magic of the story had us all under its spell. When I’d get tired or too drunk to do a good job with the reading, one of the girls would take over. It became a nightly ritual.

Then our finances got worse and I had to pawn my electric typewriter and my own TV to raise money for food. I’d fallen two weeks behind on the rent for the second time. Dorobek, the manager, a jeweled scumbag at heart, exalted in his moment of victory by sneering as he delivered a pink, legal, three-day eviction slip to our room.

It was the next morning, early, when we heard a noise – the girls heard it. It woke them up. A scratching and a sort of whimpering drifted up from below, through our room’s two big open windows by the fire escape, then skidded across to their sleeping bags. The source appeared to be the garbage cans outside the first floor that Dorobek kept stacked near the rooming house’s entrance.

The girls shook me awake wanting permission to go downstairs to investigate.

Six kittens were the origin of the disturbance. Gray tabbies. The entire litter less than a week old. They’d been dispatched by their passing owner in a brown, taped-up grocery bag, then dumped in one of the heavy metal garbage cans. A cowardly act. And maybe a fatal crime too except that the perp lacked the balls to smother his victims by sealing the can’s lid.

The cats were orphans like the twin girls who would save them from the trash. Abandoned Munchkins. I never had a chance to say no.

Having more new roommates only worsened the financial deal. We were nearly penniless. My next Workman’s Comp check was still four days away and it had been weeks since their dad’s last phone call.

I decided to convene a house meeting. Each of us took a pen and paper and wrote down suggestions; every way we could think of to bring in some money. Connie acted as recording secretary for the best ideas.

We were unanimous. The proposal we all chose as number one was the one that would provide immediate cash. My idea. A street hustle. A way to use the twins’ personalities and little-girl appeal to mooch the New York tourists. I was sure it would work.

The story I made up for them was simple; the girls would say that their mom and dad had just been in a car wreck. The parents were driving back to the city from a weekend trip visiting family upstate. They’d run into a sleet storm on the thruway in their old Ford wagon with the bald tires. The car slid across the roadway head-on into a retaining wall. Both Mom and Dad were in the hospital in Albany. ICU. One (they chose their mom) had a punctured eye and grievous internal organ damage. She might also never walk again. But Dad was much worse off. A coma. Over the phone the ER doctor had mentioned the prospect of aneurism and extensive brain damage.

The scam went as follows: the twins would work their way up and down Broadway and Seventh Avenue in Times Square stopping to pitch anyone who was well dressed or looked like an out-of-towner. They’d act upset and show a palm-full of crushed bills, ones and fives, saying all they needed was twenty-two dollars and eight cents more to have enough money to catch the six o’clock (or four-thirty or two-fifteen or whatever) Greyhound leaving from the Port Authority Bus Terminal for upstate. It was vital that they get to the Albany hospital ICU as soon as possible to see their dad for maybe the last time before he went into the probably-fatal brain operation. Carrie, always the more dramatic of the two, volunteered to be the one to start out doing the pitch. Connie would back her up with nods and whimpers. When they both got good at presenting the hustle, they’d switch off.

The twins loved it. The only adjustment I had to make was allowing them to use their rollerblades instead of walking.

We spent three hours that night, between chasing kittens, flattening out the details. I pre-asking all the questions I could think of that the tourists might have. We rehearsed everything. Carrie wanted to use the name Dorothy and take one of the kittens along and call it Toto. Connie and I vetoed the idea. Her tendency was to overdramatize. By the third dry run she’d already taught herself a way to sob and tear-up every time she or Connie used the word ‘aneurism.’