Dan Fante - Spitting Off Tall Buildings

Now the sorcerer runt knows that he’s got the kid. He bestows an enchanted black robe on the boy and crowns him with a velvet fez adorned with the seven precious jewels. Bartholomew is told that if he truly desires entry into the deaf wizards’ magical cult he must first make a gesture to prove his commitment, trust, and worthiness. A five-quart jug of yellow, sweet-smelling antifreeze is materialized by the elf, who demands that Bartholomew let his dog Bugs drink from it.

But the kid isn’t stupid. He knows that if Bugs licks up the engine coolant it will poison him and he will die. The sorcerer says, ‘Not so,’ that he personally can cast a protective spell that will render the dog immune. This is an initiation. Bartholomew must trust him.

The boy is afraid and hesitant. The light on the wizard’s glowing button is fading and when it vanishes he and all his magic will be gone forever. Bartholomew must have faith, act immediately or forever lose his power…

I couldn’t make up my mind how to end the deal. Does the kid get chumped by the wizard and let his dog die? Is the wizard a friend, a kind of guardian angel, or a malevolent, pernicious little fuck manipulating the boy to acquire the soul of his spaniel? I came up with two or three endings but found them all deficient. Frustrated, becoming pissed off, I decided to take a break and let the answer come by itself. For the next half-hour I lay on my bed with the window open, smoking cigarettes, sticking my toe in the cloth circle at the end of the shade cord, pulling the blind up and down, permitting my brain to go to other things.

A mistake.

Soon it was assuring me that my story was puke, worthless cockshit. Another moron idea I’d left incomplete. A failure.

I got up and went to my writing table, looking down at the pages and pages of words. It was true. I saw the misspellings, the hurried errors, my hopeless, inaccurate punctuation. Slobbo! I flung the pages in the direction of the trash can. I was talentless. No wonder I drank and let queers suck my cock. Loser! Stuck with no job, near penniless, walled in like a cockroach surrounded by a rooming house full of junkies and perverts. I was finally where I really belonged.

I tried to stop it. To distract myself and give myself something to do, I went out to the market for cigarettes and Fretoz but returned with a half-gallon jug of Mad Dog wine.

In my room, unscrewing the cap, I let the first few wallops hit my stomach. I knew instantly I’d be okay. I’d done the right thing. Fuck the story. What mattered now, the important thing, was to defend against the noise.

Around dark I was drunk and going in and out of awareness with a crazed need for sex. I walked the ten blocks to the pornos in Times Square. I remember being in the back row of the theater, the guy next to me loosening my pants and letting them slide to the floor. He sucked me off.

A while later, another guy, a kid, got on his knees on the filthy carpetless concrete, licking my balls and fingering my asshole, massaging my cock with his hand until I was ready to come. Forcing his head down on my dick as far as I could, I blasted off. Hours later I remember being in a hotel room with an older guy – a black man wearing a tie. More wine. More sex.

The run lasted three days after that. When I finally sobered up my mind began mercilessly replaying some of the flashes, the unquenchable need for sex and depravity. The thoughts evoked so much disgust that I had to stop them – shut them off – there was a terrible need to kill myself; cut or stab my flesh. To die immediately.

I had to sell some things to pay my rent and the other bills. Family stuff. My mother’s carved-ivory family heirloom scrimshaw pillbox that one of her uncles had brought around Cape Horn to San Francisco Bay in 1850; a ring bearing her father’s German coat of arms, a gold chain my father’s father, Nick, had kept his pocket watch on. Handmade in Abruzzi. The chain brought in the most. Two hundred dollars.

DURING THE NEXT few weeks I went to work for another office temp place that I found in the want-ads; Workpower. I was drinking like always but the depression was okay, under control. I showed up for my assignments on time and didn’t lose any days.

I like change. Workpower sends its people all over New York for its temp gigs and I began to learn how to get around the city; Wall Street, Union Square, Hunts Point in the Bronx, downtown Brooklyn. I became familiar with the important bus routes and began to get a functional knowledge of the subways.

Edna Green was my contact at Workpower. She was better than Herrera with the nicotine fingers. Calmer. If I’d call in to quit a deal Edna never pressed me for excuses or asked about what the supervisor said that made me want to leave or what I said back after what they said or what I did then. That crap. If she received no serious complaints on the employer-return-form everything was okay. I needed work. Edna needed to fill jobs.

I like to come and go. Nothing else. I don’t want to hold stock or participate in the goddam profit sharing, or be groomed for something, or climb someone’s rectum company ladder. The personality puke that always seems to go along with a regular gig – the pissing matches and favoritism, the politics, like what happened so quickly at the movie theater job – can nearly always be avoided if you stick to temp work; one call and a request for reassignment usually repairs any fucked circumstance.

But even with somebody nice like Edna you don’t want to get bumped working temp. Getting bumped creates problems.

I did okay for a while, did half a dozen assignments without incident, then because of drinking and miscommunication, I got blown out twice in a row.

Number one was when I was a fill-in night dispatcher for a ten-truck twenty-four-hour commercial plumbing service. It was supposed to be a month-long post but I got canned after the fourth day because the boss’s wife disliked me and said that I appeared to always look sleepy when I came to work.

Number two happened back to back with number one. Edna sent me on a high-stress mail sorter/collector gig at an office building cattycorner across the street from Carnegie Hall. I’d had a couple of shooters on my lunch break the second day. Just enough to take the edge off. I was bumped for making a mouth gesture to the lesbian Puerto Rican amphetamine-sucking freak supervisor everyone on the staff had nicknamed ‘Duke.’ ‘Duke’ embarrassed me in front of a pretty secretary. She loudly reproved me for not being fast enough when making the rounds with the mail cart. I put my hand to my face and made a licking motion, forcing my tongue in and out between my fingers.

After ‘Duke,’ when I’d call in, Edna would tell me that business was quiet or some other shit which I knew was code for ‘Take a walk, asshole.’

For a week I stayed in my room and worked on my play. It had a new direction and a new name, Calliope. About an intense, selfish carnival barker on the Southern circuit who wants to become an evangelist. Better than Elmer Gantry because my guy discovers that he really has powers to heal. But he’s also a selfish scumbag which makes for a nice twist. Act II, Scene i.

THE EAST END Hotel/Apartment is located on the east side of Manhattan on Fifty-first Street between Third Avenue and Second Avenue. Nowhere near East End Avenue.

It is a small, fifty-room deal that serves free rolls and bagels and coffee in the lobby to its guests every morning from seven to ten o’clock. It was once remodeled, years ago, and needs it again.

The ad I saw in the Sunday Times read: ‘Rsdnt Nt Mgr Est Sd Htl Slry+Furn Apt. Snd Res.’ The ad gave the address of an office building on Second Avenue and a suite number where the Res should be mailed. I’d lived at hotels and I once knew a guy with cancer named Phil who owned a fifteen-unit motel on Ocean Avenue in Long Beach in L.A. called The Captain’s Lodge. For years old Phil had been on tour with Johnnie Ray and saved enough money playing the piano to retire and buy the motel. When his cancer got bad and he had to take his heavy pain meds, he paid me to cover for him at the desk three or four nights a week. I’d check people in and out, light the pilot lights for the gas heaters in the rooms, change the sheets in the shack-up fuck rooms, put towels in the bathrooms, and run the vacuum in the lobby when Phil told me to. I knew just enough about the motel business to apply for the East End Hotel’s Night Manager job.