Dan Fante - Spitting Off Tall Buildings

‘I see Vic upstairs.’

‘Right. Now, as fah az I’m concoined, yahs fuckin’ trained,’ he jeered. ‘Now ya da fuckin’ vice president of Low-eeze Thee-ate-ers.’

‘Okay,’ I said, grateful to walk away.

‘Eh, hey,’ he called, ‘whaz ya name…Bruno?’

‘Right. Bruno.’

He looked at his watch again. ‘How come yahs late?’

‘I became delayed.’

‘She’ll can ya ass if ya get delayed tumorrha. Better not be fuckin’ delayed again tumorrha.’

Inside, I located the flashlight, found Vic in the balcony, and became an usher.

My second week on the job the theater began playing an Anthony Quinn festival that ran in the afternoon before the regular first-run movie started in the evening. La strada came on every day an hour into my shift. I’d watched the film a few times over the years and admired it very much. The mood, the enchantment of the music. Most people thought Fellini to be a genius. I’d agreed.

Near the end of the five-day run I knew everybody’s dialogue by heart and I began to hate Zampano and resent Giulietta Masina’s hamminess. I found myself angered by the banality of the screenplay and the oversell in Fellini’s direction. Sometimes I’d get pissed off enough at parts of the film that I’d have to duck out of my post and stand in the upper lobby.

As it turned out, I got fired over a triviality.

Vic, my partner and immediate supervisor, was an old guy. Sixty or so. Not as old as Lupo, but old and arthritic. He kept to himself. Our one bad moment had come when he’d discovered me sneaking a cigarette. He insisted the act jeopardized his authority in the loge. I’d made a remark back and we hadn’t spoken since.

Vic and I were approximately the same build and suit size. He’d called in sick and I was alone upstairs searching my mind for things to do while La strada was on, nipping from a short dog, a Cisco Wine Cooler, in my pants’ pocket.

I had the bad idea to switch tuxedo jackets with Vic for the day. His was nicer than mine because mine had missing buttons on the sleeve and had a permanent sticky stain above the elbow.

The part of La strada was coming on where Zampano kills Richard Basehart and the musical scoring swells portentously. I’d come to hate the scene because of Masina’s cartoon performance and the blaring of the moronic music. To avoid watching it I decided to go downstairs to the dressing area and exchange jackets with Vic for the remainder of my shift.

In the changing area there was a standing open cabinet divided into sections where the male employees kept their tuxedos. Each section was marked off with a piece of tape above the slot with the employee’s name written in pencil. Vic’s slot was at the opposite end from mine.

I slipped on his tux jacket and was pleased to discover that it fit perfectly. Forty, short. I made the substitution of my coat for Vic’s on his hanger.

Leaving the room, I took a piss, then used up more minutes by going to the storage box at the candy counter to swap my flashlight batteries for new ones. When I returned to the balcony I’d timed it right because Quinn had murdered Basehart and the imbecile scene was coming to an end.

My problem happened an hour later when Vic unexpectedly arrived sick to go to work. He’d gone for the last five years without missing a day and showed up out of a sense of duty.

In the dressing room when he realized that I’d exchanged jackets, he became nuts and unglued. He limped up the stairs and flung the loge doors open with a thud. To find me in the back row he began waving his flashlight beam in the faces of the balcony customers.

I tried to calm him down, offering to go downstairs and change back into my own jacket to settle things, but Vic had the flu or another disorder and had decided to make a big deal in front of the customers. One lady got up and reported the disturbance to Mrs. Lupo, who hurried to the balcony to demand that we follow her to her private office.

There, with the old Lupo in the role of hanging judge, Vic persisted in overdoing the deal, screaming words at me like ‘liar’ and ‘burglar’ and continuing to insist that I’d stolen his uniform jacket. He even stabbed my chest several times with his finger until I pushed it away and made him stop.

I explained that I’d picked the jacket off his hanger by mistake. But that only served to make him madder. He pounded her desk with a bony fist. I didn’t give a crap for private property, he screeched, for Loew’s Theaters. I was a punk, a hardened criminal type. One of us had to go. Him or me.

Copping a plea to save the gig turned out to be useless and stupid. I tried to put a more realistic spin on the deal by talking about my own uniform’s missing coat buttons and the sticky elbow, admitting that I’d simply wanted to ‘borrow’ his jacket for the day. Old Lupo might have been satisfied with that but Vic wouldn’t let up. The rant turned into a fit. Saliva flew, neck arteries throbbed. Stuff about my sneaking smokes on duty, sitting in the back row when I should have been doing balcony rounds, and leaving my post to take unauthorized piss breaks. He knew just what buttons to push to get Mrs. Lupo’s face wrinkles activated. I was dead. Bumped on the spot.

The next day I was in the ‘Cash, Ten-Items-Or-Less’ lane at a market and a lady in front of me had thirteen items in her shopping cart. A lady with a kid. A baby. Thirteen items.

While the line edged forward I counted her stuff over and over. The line was long and the closer we got to the checker the more edgy I got. When the woman set her groceries down on the moving ramp I informed the register guy that she had thirteen items, not ten as the sign specifically specified. I made the checker count the items, then I demanded that he not take her order. He smiled at the woman and the kid in the cart, made an excuse, then began ringing up her stuff anyway.

The deal escalated. I threatened the checker and started calling him fuck names. The child commenced to wail and a manager, complete with big smile and pocket pen protector, came over. He attempted to mediate but it was too late by then.

I swept the woman’s groceries off the counter onto the floor and on my way out I knocked over a tall display of Tropicana Orange Juice from Florida mounted on a vat containing a million little square ice cubes. Shit was everywhere.

AFTER LOSING THE usher job I hit a flat spot. Herrera at the temp agency told me that Olson’s had a rule about not reassigning persons who had been fired from their assignment for cause. No second chances. So, instead of looking in the Times want-ads for work or making the rounds of the other temp agencies in midtown, I decided to take a day or two and remain in my room reading, going back to Tennessee Williams’ plays and some of David Mamet, writing if the urge presented itself.

On the third morning I woke up with an idea for a short story. The words began coming out, jumping from my fingers. A tale about a deaf eight-year-old kid and his dog Bugs. The kid spends most of his days in his room in his imagination because he doesn’t attend regular school.

By mid-afternoon I was near the end. Twenty pages. The boy in the story, Bartholomew, has discovered a sorcerer living on a gleaming silver button in the corner of his toy box. The tiny sorcerer shows Bartholomew many tricks and proves himself to have great mind power, moving objects around the room, changing the colors of the walls, having stuffed animals dance and do flips, then magically growing Bartholomew’s feet a foot long. Bartholomew is awestruck and they become fast friends. He is shown how to tap his own indwelling powers. By himself he tosses a plastic truck out the window, then transforms it to actual size in the street. Then he raises himself off the floor until his head grazes the ceiling. Turning to look in the mirror, he sees himself wearing a thick silver astronaut’s suit, piloting a spacecraft. Bartholomew implores his mentor to show him more.