86'd (5 page)

W
orking in the limo business in L.A. is a bizarre way to make a buck. Like licking up wet dog shit for God. The clientele for Dav-Ko in Los Angeles was mostly made up of night freaks and zombies. Rich, cranked-out movie producers, spoiled rock star punks, gangsta rappers with their black Glocks tucked into the belts of their pants, alkie ex-actors with too many DUIs, and a gazillion wannabe high rollers. Human beings who exhibited the most unpleasant personality characteristics common to L.A.: Too much ego and way too much money.

People come to L.A. hoping to discover something out-pictured beyond themselves. Something they hope to name and believe in, some idea of satisfaction through success or accumulation or recognition. Of course it never comes. Then they buy a bigger house in Brentwood or another Benz or get more plastic surgery or smoke more amphetamine and marry someone they meet at the gym. Whatever’s next. Whatever it takes to hold on to the fantasy and avoid a hard look at what’s
missing within. Here I was among them. Front and center. My ticket got punched at birth.

Three weeks after the madness of my
accident,
Koffman and Francisco left town and he turned the day-to-day running of Dav-Ko over to me. Portia had kept her word about the incident and managed to contain my folly. And wisely, to cover my ass, I’d cut back on the booze.

In effect Portia and I were now nearly partners in running the company. As planned her dispatcher hours were expanded. Her new schedule was six days a week. Twelve p.m. to ten p.m. except for our busy weekend twelve hour shifts.

After the few days of us working at close quarters it became apparent to me that Darforth-Keats’s personality had two single overriding characteristics. The first one was the one I already knew about; a high-strung, gum-chewing, constantly talking, aristocratic weirdo, whose daily wardrobe consisted of nothing that wasn’t black. Though Koffman had been right about her polished English style and its positive effect on our phone clients, it was personality number two in particular that, over time, was getting to me. Portia Number Two appeared to have a preponderant and unmanageable attraction to guys. All guys. I’d overhear her flirting on the telephone like an 800 number call-in hooker while taking bookings for agents and managers. And if she happened to be on the line with anyone whose life had ever included strumming an electric guitar, listening to her sycophantic cooing would often force me to take a bathroom break. And she never failed to sweet-talk her favorite chauffeurs as they came in to drop off cash payments or credit card slips—telling them how “splendid” they’d done on this or that airport run—or making a big deal and complimenting them for remembering ridiculous
snot like emptying the ashtrays or vacuuming out the car, stuff that they were supposed to do anyway.

In particular she seemed to have taken a shine to Frank Tropper, our former male escort turned chauffeur. Frank was tall with red hair and blue eyes and nobody’s fool when it came to manipulating any human who pissed sitting down, especially Dav-Ko’s nicotine-gum-chewing dispatcher.

If a choice driving job came in from an e-mail or over the phone—an all-nighter with a rock star or a big money cash tipper—on too many occasions it was Frank who was somehow immediately available for the job, and got it. More than once I had to delete his name from the computer’s dispatch screen and let her know that playing favorites with chauffeurs was a bad idea. The fact that Frank was an arrogant self-consumed pretty boy asshole and had a variety of woman picking him up after work every night was apparently the only thing keeping Portia from jumping his bones. This was in stark contrast to big Robert Roller. Robert could pass an entire afternoon sitting in our chauffeur’s room with the TV on without so much as a glance from his
selective
dispatcher.

But, frighteningly, the other member of our company whom Portia appeared to have developed an attraction to, over time, was me. The closeness of us being stuck in the dispatch office together, when I wasn’t out driving or supervising an on-site limo job, allowed her to yammer away by the hour. In the past she’d had a female cyst removed and two miscarriages and somehow had given herself permission to yammer away at me on the minutia of each procedure. I got to hear endless details about sedation and the three doctors in white coats staring at her coochie and her being treated like a lab animal. And on and on about other stuff. Her victory over her eating disorder and then jogging and her bad back and the right running shoes and how she’d once played
the cello as a girl in some symphony in Glasgow. And her ex-husband’s propensity for Times Square hookers. Tiresome, endlessly, vapid crap.

Every once in a while I’d try to interject stuff about work but the topics always seemed to come back to her and her physical ailments and how many times she used to puke per day or some male gynecologist pig or other.

After many nights of this I eventually found an opening. It turned out that Portia was an avid reader and a mystery novel buff and had consumed all the works of Agatha Christie and Lynda La Plante and Stephen King. Of course she’d known about my computer crash and the loss of my months of work and writing, so books and literature gratefully entered our topics of conversations.

I had mixed feelings about discussing my writing but sometimes in the late afternoon, after I’d had a few drinks following my shift, I didn’t mind. Sometimes I even liked it. Talking about Kafka and Dostoyevsky and Henry Miller and Selby and Edward Lewis Wallant was a welcome relief.

One night when the dispatch desk was quiet, after half a bottle of Chianti and after her asking again and again, I did something I had never done before with anyone I had worked with: I showed Portia some of my work—a few poems and a short story I had just finished. The piece I gave her was about my working as an L.A. taxi driver. Over the last few days I had completed two stories on the idea and was deciding if I had enough to write a series. Maybe even a book.

Portia took my poems and one of the stories into the chauffeur’s room to read. The yarn I gave her was called “Happy Birthday Tuesday.” A true story. It happened on my first night as a cabbie in L.A. I had taken a radio call to go to Venice after a drop at LAX. My passengers turned out to be a pair of drunk and stoned out Latino drug dealers on their way to a
section of Venice that is known to the locals as Ghost Town. Five square blocks of crack houses.

One of the guys was on his cell phone threatening his girlfriend in Spanish. Somehow after the call, after he had hung up, the two jerks began to fight, punching and ripping at each other. I had to pull the cab over on Rose Avenue and get out, to make them stop. Their whiskey bottle had spilled on the rear floor and a brown bag that contained a couple of dozen gram bottles of white powder got strewn across the backseat.

After they left my cab, after paying me, the two assholes continued up the street shoving each other and yelling curses in Spanish.

At a gas station nearby I got some paper towels from the men’s room and began cleaning up the mess. That’s when I found the ring in the corner of the back seat. A two-karat diamond pinkie. With the money I received from hocking it I paid my rent for the month in advance and took my girlfriend Stinky to Lake Tahoe for a weekend.

Portia came back to the dispatch room and flopped my pages down on the desk. She stuck a fresh piece of Nicorette gum into her mouth and began swooning over my poem, telling me how much she admired my directness and brevity and passion.

But when we got around to my short story her face changed. “This,” she said, holding it up, “I truthfully found implausible and artificial. Unbelievable, actually.”

The words stung and I was instantly sober. It felt like a kick in the balls. “In what way?” I said.

“Wellllllll,” she whispered in her most melodious snooty drawl, “candidly, I found it’s preposterous. Sort of a cab driver’s old wives’ tale. More of a fantasy, actually.”

“The story’s true,” I said. “I found a two-karat diamond. It might not have belonged to one of the guys—it might have been stuck there in the crack of the backseat for days or months—but the story is true.”

“Perhaps. But it didn’t have the ring of truth. It rang of hyperbole. Exaggeration.”

Before I could stop myself the words had leaped from my mouth like some fool on a bungee jump off the Grand Canyon. “You mean…
exaggeration
like those two fake fucking water balloons you have implanted in your bony chest?”

Thirty seconds later she was gone. She’d wordlessly scooped up her purse and her black coat and was out the door.

It took half of the following day, after threats of calls to David Koffman and accusations of a sexual harassment lawsuit, and a ten minute apology, to talk her down and get her to come back to work.

I
picked up the phone after midnight thinking it was one of the limo drivers calling in to report his hours at the end of a job. My sister, Liz, was crying softly. Whispering the words. Rick Dante, Jonathan Dante’s firstborn son, his favorite son, a chess expert at ten years old and one of the precision toolmakers who designed and fabricated the landing feet of the Mars rover, was dead. He had boozed himself into the emergency room after his ulcer exploded onto the beige carpet of his bedroom in Roseville. His wife, Karin, found him there doubled over and moaning.

This time he and Karin had been separated for three weeks. When he failed to answer his phone for a couple of days she set her anger aside and drove to the house with their daughter.

Rick was forty-six years old and a 24–7 drinker from the age of thirty. A guy filled with demons and genius and bitterness and rage and isolation, tortured by his own failures, a man whose feet and spirit never really connected to solid land.

The news of his death hit me like a club. I’d seen his strange look-alike sitting at the bar the night I’d cut my throat. Another coincidence in a series of weird coincidences I’d been experiencing lately. An omen perhaps. But this time it turned out to be one that was real. The recollection sent a cold chill through my body.

The next day I left my limo office and took a plane from LAX to Sacramento airport, then drove the twenty miles to Roseville in a black sedan furnished by one of our Northern California affiliate limo companies. It was 103 degrees outside while I smoked and sipped from a pint bottle of Schenley, watching the Sacramento Valley go by.

For the last few years Ricardo Dante had been the general manager of a factory that manufactured shipping pallets, a grunt job he’d taken for money to support his family after drinking himself out of the aerospace business.

At Rick’s home that afternoon I met a dozen people; friends and neighbors and a couple of my brother’s coworkers. They sat in the living room while the air conditioner screamed, sipping wine and ice tea and eating from two prepared supermarket trays of cheese and salami and crackers. There were no televisions in my brother’s house. All his life he’d detested their presence.

His best drinking buddy was an older guy named Cecil, a car collector and retired auto mechanic wearing overalls to a wake. He and Rick met at a Sacramento memorabilia trade show.

Cecil was working on a wine buzz and sported the red face of a lifelong juicer. He poured me a tall glass of the rosé then insisted we go outside to the shed behind the garage.

There it was. My brother’s pal pulled the tarp away to
reveal a 1957 Studebaker Golden Hawk, complete with new paint and swooping fins and dripping with gaudy, replated chrome and a gleaming rebuilt motor. The two guys had spent the last eighteen months as partners working on weekends to restore the car. The only thing still left undone was to reupholster the seats.

Cecil located a small metal box hidden beneath the workbench, then grinning, tossed me the keys. “Start her up,” he said.

I thought about it for a few seconds. “No thanks,” I said finally, aware of the presence of my brother’s bad-tempered ghost. “Maybe some other time.”

The day of the dead tour continued. Back in the house Cecil directed me to a room on the ground floor at the end of a hall. Its door was made of thick wood and armed with a double lock denying access to his wife and daughter and any other uninvited meddler.

Inside was a sort of half museum, half shrine where Rick alone was boss. Everything in the room, even the stale cigarette smell, enforced the personality of its excessive, troubled occupant. I felt him there behind me—leering—furious with me for encroaching on his privacy.

Across the room in one corner was his large drawing board, its surface a disorganized collage of unfinished automobile sketches and clipped newspaper articles. From the age of eight, even before he could type a letter for himself, our Mom had sent his designs off to automobile makers. The practice had become a lifelong obsession with only rare acknowledgments.

One entire wall of the room was filled with Nazi biographies and World War II literature. Cecil told me something
about my brother that I had not known: In the last few years he’d taught himself to read and speak German.

Another wall was filled with photographs of the Reich elite: Erich von Manstein, Heinrich Himmler, Erwin Rommel, and Martin Bormann. It felt like I was exploring my brother’s decomposing asshole.

Cecil drained his glass then slid open a plastic closet door to show me Rick’s two favorite German trophies: Von Ribbentrop’s SS dinner jacket and his cap. They hung there in a thick, see-through plastic garment bag below the guy’s scary WWII photograph. His son’s uniforms were on either side. I was overcome by the need to get very very drunk.

We were about to leave the den when my guide stopped me at the door. “Wait. There’s one more thing I want to show you,” he half-whispered.

Cecil slid open the top drawer of a tall brown filing cabinet. “Here are the two things your brother loved more than anything.”

I was handed two typed and bound manuscripts. My father Jonathan Dante’s first-draft originals, yellowed by time. One was
Ask the Wind
and the other
Brotherhood of the Vine.

It was like a punch in the face. Cecil had no way of knowing that our mother had guarded these manuscripts with her life and that she had never allowed them to leave the storage case in the basement of her home. Only a month before she’d given in and been persuaded to donate all Jonathan Dante’s original work to a local university. Somehow, in a crack in time, these two manuscripts had been pirated away by Rick Dante and then tucked neatly into his Nazi time capsule.

I’d had enough. I dropped them back into the file cabinet then slid the door closed. I looked at Cecil. “My brother was a real piece of work,” I said.

“You bet,” Cecil said. “Rick Dante was one of a kind. Let’s go get another drink.”

“Good idea,” I said back.

We drank the rest of that day and into the night, Cecil killing me with endless chatter about my brother and his strange obsessions.

In the morning I found myself asleep in my clothes on Rick’s living room couch, my brain half crazy. To fight off my hangover it was more of the same—three fingers of bourbon with my coffee. Then a half-pint from my suitcase.

Outside the church I was introduced to Rick’s secretary, a pretty rosy-faced forty-year-old who shook her head and filled me in. Rick’s doctor told him, she said, that if he kept on drinking and didn’t cut back he’d be gone in a year. Then, a couple of weeks after he’d returned to work from his near-death stomach surgery, she began discovering his empties under the daily newspaper in his trash can. Rick Dante lasted another six months.

I had a decent buzz going as I sat with Mom and Liz and Rick’s wife, Karin, and their daughter, Mindy, in the front row of Our Lady of the Bleeding Armpits. Mom and I hadn’t talked for months but for once she smiled and gave me a hug.

We were inches away from a body that—paint or no paint—had aged fifty years since I’d last seen it.

Then a Mexican priest who’d never set eyes on my brother delivered long measured doses of sweetened snot about Jesus and eternity and a good Christian life to the fifty distracted attendees. Excluded from his homily was any mention of
weekends in jail or rehabs or an enraged, penniless wife and teenage kid, or the casual theft of his father’s most famous work.

Then, without warning, three feet away, the corpse in the box sat up and glared at me. Rick Dante was dressed in a black SS uniform and helmet. “What’s your problem?” the Nazi sneered.

“You, asshole,” I heard my voice report. “You’re my goddamn problem. You and your double-locked mausoleum where you boozed your life down the shitter.”

“Sieg heil!” the Gestapo corpse screeched back.

Liz was grabbing my arm. “Bruno! Stop it for God’s sake. You’re yelling. What’s wrong with you?”

“Him!” I said, gesturing at the body in the box, getting to my feet.

“Sit down,” Liz scolded. “Everybody’s looking.”

I sat down.

“You’re drunk,” she said.

“I guess you’re right. I guess I must be drunk.”

Then it was over. My brother’s entire life had been neatly dispatched in twenty-five minutes.

We drove the three blocks to the Roseville boneyard and then got out.

The only surprise in the day’s festivities came as our group of mourners walked across an acre of manicured graves and up to the top of a small hill to discover the gleaming Golden Hawk standing alone in the openness on the other side. Old Cecil was passed out behind the wheel while two caretakers were trying to wake him up. Tire tracks and skid marks ran in a circle around the tomb. The right front wheel of his Studebaker had gotten stuck in Rick’s unfilled grave.