Dan Fante - Spitting Off Tall Buildings

The next morning at eleven o’clock, check-out time at the mid-town Manhattan hotels, the girls began skating around Times Square going up to anyone who appeared to be a mooch or an out-of-towner with luggage.

It was a strong scam. Sometimes the kids raked in as much as two hundred a day. Twenties and tens. The tourists and the mid-town shirt-and-tie crowd were unable to say no to twins in pigtails.

WE HAD BEEN through The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz three or four times. I’d tried to introduce other stuff, some Brontë, Margaret Mitchell, even some creepy Ann Rice but they would have none of it. Oz was too powerful. And, of course, the kittens were living proof of the existence of Munchkins.

Most days, in the afternoons, after their Times Square hustle, because of the sopping heat, we’d walk cross-town to our rooming house on Fifty-first Street, pick up the cardboard TV crate with the holes in it where they housed their kittens, mount the box on a supermarket shopping cart, then roll up Eighth Avenue to Central Park. I’d count the day’s cash while the girls played with the kittens and had a contest to see who could eat the most Eskimo Pies and Orange Sherbet push-ups. They’d made a rule for me. It was based on an incident I’d had with an asshole clerk at the video arcade. I’d argued and gotten punched and inadvertently misplaced a hundred dollars in cash. The rule was: no wine drinking in public.

We met Elizabeth in Central Park. She was pushing a stroller along the walkway. The twins ogled anything that was a baby, anything in a diaper, so meeting her was as unavoidable as breathing smog.

Her job was being the full-time nanny to a baby named Sven, the eighteen-month-old son of a European magazine CEO guy who lived in the Essex House on Central Park South for four months out of every year. Sven had a seven-year-old brother named Erik. He had a spinal disease and stayed at home at the apartment most of the time with his mother while Elizabeth spent the afternoons wheeling baby Sven around in the park.

Elizabeth was Cuban. From a town outside Havana. She was smart and spoke decent American. Twenty years old and she had already had three children of her own that she’d left with her mother back on the island. Elizabeth was a bit overweight and she had sad eyes but the twins, who were always good at deciding such matters, liked her right away. And Elizabeth’s smile was like a beam from Venus.

It turned out that she loved whiskey too.

After the first day or two, the two of us sat on a long bench, laughing and sipping Ten-High out of Coca-Cola cups while Carrie and Connie played with Sven and the kittens on the grass.

By the end of the week I’d asked Elizabeth in her white nanny uniform with the white panty hose and two-tone oxford shoes if she’d like to take an hour off and go for a short cab ride with me back to my rooming house to look at a poem I was writing honoring Carmen Miranda and Fidel Castro. It made her laugh. She took a big hit from her Coca-Cola cup and then smiled her remarkable smile.

We left Sven and the Munchkins in the care of the twins.

At the rooming house, when we began fucking, Elizabeth made her pussy clamp down on my dick as if she’d decided to keep it inside her body forever.

A few afternoons later, we’d been madly humping and rolling around for half an hour, when I heard the floor creak across the room. I looked up and saw the twins standing a few feet from the bed. They’d been watching.

Connie talked first. ‘That’s sex, right? Intercourse? You guys are having sex.’

‘Right,’ I yelled. ‘Correct. Go away!’

‘And that’s what happens? That’s how you do it? You climb on her and then you both push and grunt?’

‘Pretty much. We’re not done yet. Go away!’

The girls looked at each other, then back over at the naked bodies of me and Elizabeth, then back at each other. They both yelled ‘Yuck’ at the same time.

THE FIRST WEEK of September, a week after Elizabeth and Sven and the Swedish magazine family had left town, we got a letter from Bert. He and Angel were back together at a motel outside Boulder. The insurance settlement money was long gone but so was Tall Jimmy. The twins’ daddy had been sober, off coke and in an out-patient program, for over a month. Angel was dancing again and Bert had found himself a night watchman job.

In the letter there was a money order for three hundred dollars, enough for bus fare and expenses for the twins to join their parents in Colorado.

The next day was a Tuesday. Thundershowers all morning. Big fat drops. Their Trailways bus was scheduled to depart at one o’clock that afternoon so they got me up early. I sipped beer until my shaking stopped, then helped them pack their stuff into cardboard boxes. They would have to leave their kittens with me until their parents got a big enough place for everybody. Leaving them was the hardest thing either of the girls had ever done.

At the International House Of Pancakes on Broadway we ordered the restaurant’s biggest pancake deal with a tall orange juice for each of us and a milkshake back. After breakfast we walked to Seventh Avenue and waited for passing cabs until we found a Checker because a Checker was the only taxi big enough to handle all the boxes.

When we got to Port Authority I located a shipping guy with a dolly who helped us arrange to send their stuff. Then we played video games until it was time to walk to the gate to wait for their bus to depart.

Of the two girls Carrie was my favorite. She had always reminded me of myself when I was her age; emotional, impulsive, more outgoing than her sister but more self-conscious too.

When the bus driver opened the doors and the kids were ready to get on, we hugged goodbye. I’d given them The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to keep them company on the trip.

Carrie was crying. She got back off the bus and ran up to me and hugged me again. It was hard for us both to let go. Then she handed me back the book. ‘You take it,’ she said. ‘Promise me you’ll find Oz.’

Out on the street after the bus left it had stopped raining. It was ten blocks back to my room. I had a pocket full of money and I could have taken a cab, but I decided to walk. The rain had cooled things off.

Dan Fante was born and raised in Los Angeles. At twenty, he quit school and hit the road, eventually ending up as a New York City resident for twelve years. Fante has worked at dozens of crummy jobs including: door to door salesman, taxi driver, window washer, telemarketer, private investigator, night hotel manager, chauffeur, mailroom clerk, deck hand, dishwasher, carnival barker, envelope stuffer, dating service counselor, furniture salesman, and parking attendant. Fante is married and has a two year old son named Michaelangelo Giovanni Fante. He hopes eventually to learn to play the harmonica.