Chump Change
A Novel
Dan Fante
This book is dedicated to:
Freddie Free Base
Liquor-Store Dave
TJ Bratter
Bob A.
and all the gentlemen who congregate at Roxbury Park.
And, of course, to John Fante, my father, whose brilliance and memory
are my constant inspiration.
Special thanks to C. Emmets
“Think dyin’s tough…
Dyin’ ain’t shit
The hard part is living
While the dying’s going on.”
Something I heard TJ say
M
Y
N
AME IS
B
RUNO DANTE AND WHAT
I’
M WRITING ABOUT
here is what happened. On December 4th, the St. Joseph of Cupertino Hospital alcohol and nut ward in the Bronx, on Mosholu Parkway, let me go. Released me, again. Each time I took their 28-day cure I found out how much their in-patient charges went up. This last time, I stabbed myself in a blackout and they almost wouldn’t accept me as a patient. This last time was the worst, because all that I could remember seeing when I came around was the blood gushing out of my stomach onto my clothes.
My first recovery at St. Joe’s was paid for by my wife Agnes’s insurance from her job. It worked okay. Then two years went by, with some shrink work, and it happened again—a ten-day drunk and another suicide attempt. Booze and coke. By the second stay, the cost had increased from eighty-five hundred dollars to twelve thousand dollars, and that time
the fee came out of our pocket—thought we still had money in the bank then. I stopped the shrink because I was still drinking and not getting any better. With this cure, the third, I was a charity case. It would have cost twenty-five K.
When I drink for too many days in a row, especially wine, I think too much and my mind wants to kill me. This last time, in a county shithole, my bed was bolted to the floor and I was strapped to it. Normal people don’t get locked up in detox. And the average person won’t end up with a knife is his stomach tomorrow morning. But I have these consciousness lapses, and more and more in those lapses, I do behavior that I can’t remember. They’re blackouts. I know what they are. Then Agnes had me transferred to St. Joe’s.
My behavior is often extreme and destructive and happens because I am unable to tolerate myself when I’m sober—after I remember or find out what I’ve done on a binge. So I drink again to fix that. Like I said, mostly wine because regular alcohol stopped getting me off quite a while ago. I only drink regular booze to maintain. The last year or so it’s only the wine that gets me to the other side.
This time, wine and sex set off the insanity which led to the suicide attempt. I’m not a homosexual, but I was out of control, blasted on Mad Dog 20-20 in a porno movie on Fourteenth Street. I allowed two guys to watch while I fucked this other guy. They were jerking each other off. Stuff like that. I was in and out of consciousness but I remember most of what took place. I don’t know why I did it, except that I must have wanted to. That night I used the steak knife on myself.
The cures have no lasting effect. They’ll help for a while. I’ll stay away from wine for weeks or months and just drink
booze, but then something will happen in my head and I’ll be off again.
What I want to say here is that there is a place beyond control and beyond concern that people can go, where the values and the needs of everyday life change completely. Where what matters is moment-to-moment survival to avoid mind pain.
Delbert was in the nut house with me. I’ll tell about him here. We were roommates there for three weeks. He’s a guy from Lubbock, Texas who ended up in Accounts Payable in a Wall Street company. He has this family with 2.1 kids and a wife that cooks dinner. How it happens in specific detail is not important, but Delbert comes home every day and goes to work like he is supposed to, and he does this for ten years or so. He is unhappy with problems like everybody gets, so he drinks at lunch sometimes and then goes home and sits in front of the TV at night and drinks some more. On weekends he drinks too. But it stayed under control for many years. Delbert is like everybody else. He is no different. He is a working guy. A family man. One day, he notices that he needs to drink in the morning just to keep his nerves steady. He doesn’t want the lady at the ticket booth in the Long Island Railroad to see him shake when he buys his ticket, or the secretaries at the office to notice he has a problem when he pours his office coffee. So he becomes a morning drinker out of necessity.
Then, after work one night, Del comes home a bit toasted and has another argument with the old lady about his drinking. (What I’m saying here is average stuff. It happens to normal people.) He leaves and goes to the bar and comes back
completely shit-faced at 2:00 a.m. and gets in bed with his ten-year-old daughter, Melissa. He doesn’t know the difference. Awake and sober, it would be incomprehensible to him to be on top of his own daughter, fucking her and hurting her. The wife hears the noises and finds them there.
Delbert is sorry and his insurance pays for him to come to Saint Joseph of Cupertino’s detox. He didn’t know that he had let it go this far. Didn’t really think himself capable of sliding his dick deeply into his daughter’s little body.
Can Delbo forgive himself? Apparently not, because he hung himself last week and is now dead.
That night I had dozed off and woke up again at four-thirty to take a piss. Delbert was not in his bed across from mine. I walked down the corridor past the rec room to the bathrooms. I knew that he was upset working through the shame and the truth that he was a daughter-rapist and an alcoholic.
The rec room door is always kept closed because patients are not allowed in, except when the room is supervised. There’s Delbert. He’s slashed his wrists and hung himself at the same time. Blood everywhere. Before lights-out, we were discussing the playoffs. He was a committed Cowboys fan. So long, Delbert.
My wife, Agnes, arrived to pick me up in a cab. Two days early. She hates me and our marriage, but is never late for anything. It was a checker taxi and it was waiting outside with the meter running.
I said goodbye to Ed D., Capgun Steve and the other guys standing around while the cabbie slammed my stuff in the
trunk. Ed made “V’s” with both hands and held them up like an imitation of Nixon. We shook hands and said, “see ya.”
Agnes didn’t talk at all as we drove. I smoked and watched the Grand Concourse roll by for ten minutes before she told me that Jonathan Dante, my father, was dying in L.A. from failed kidneys and diabetes and that was the reason I was released early from treatment. He’d been at home in my mother’s care after a second leg amputation, when his old, abused, blind diabetic body decided to give out and quit. His remains were in ICU at Cedars in serious condition.
Agnes and I had been married for eleven years. She was a teacher and the daughter of Jewish parents from the Bronx. Black eyes and black hair and a wonderful ass like the pillow of an angel. We met one night at a poetry reading on Second Avenue when I was still writing.
I had read two of my published things, short angry pieces. She found them good and had asked a colleague literature teacher to put us together, which she had. Aggie thought that poets drinking tequila were romantic, so we went back to my room to discuss W. B. Yeats.
We lived together after that, and I worked and she worked, and for most of the time, while I was still writing at night, things were okay. But I had frequent headaches and depression about my poetry and low income from dismal-paying shit jobs. I was overly critical and cruel to Agnes, so I self- prescribed whiskey to pick up my spirits, and discovered that the depressions lessened when I drank and didn’t write. I stopped criticizing Agnes, but I also stopped caring.
About that time, I got a temp job in telephone sales and found I had a knack for it. Soon I was bringing in good money.
It changed everything. The depression and migraines subsided, cured by the excitement of success. I forgot about writing altogether.
In a year, I had opened my own phone room selling porno videos with a partner. One weekend, Agnes and I got married in Maryland. I promised her that I would go back to writing, which was a lie because, by then, I was pulling in five grand a week, sometimes more. I burned out at selling porn videos and eventually moved on to feature knockoffs. Six months here, one year there, working the phone four or five hours a day. I always became a top guy wherever I went. My worst month, I brought home twice what Aggie made as a teacher.
Over the next few years, I sold office supplies, computer ribbon, cable and wire, guaranteed loans, tools, ad space, and oil and gas leases. When one deal got slow, I went on to the next.
At the end of my shifts, in the afternoon, I got in the habit of stopping at the bar. At first it was with the other phone room people, out-of-work actors and musicians, people like me making their living hustling. We snorted a lot of coke and pissed our money away. Then gradually, over time, the depressions came back, the boozing got worse, and I became a morning drinker too.
I opened another bucket shop. This time on my own. Office supplies. After three months, my top guy sent an eight hundred dollar, 27″ color TV to a department manager of a company. He got caught receiving the bribe by his supervisor. His boss told the Attorney General’s office, and three weeks later we were shut down. They locked my door and seized my inventory. I lost sixty thousand dollars.
That was the year I started entering treatment facilities for alcohol and insanity and I had my first suicide attempt.
The marriage had been over for a while, but neither one of us talked about it. Aggie began paying the apartment rent by herself. I tried boiler rooms again, but I was drinking hard and I would come in late, lose time from work, and eventually get fired. After that, I stayed home collecting unemployment when I could get it.
I wanted to write, but there was nothing there. No interest. And I had lost the ability to concentrate. I was a drunk. I knew it and there was nothing I could do about it.
As the cab headed south on the Grand Concourse, Aggie presented me with the information about my father, like a reporter doing a toxic waste story for a TV news broadcast. She had begun to enjoy delivering me dispassionate facts about my life, wearing rubber gloves as she discussed anything to do with me. The death data about the old man came rattling out, and I learned all the medical terms and probabilities for his survival. It was cold stuff. I could tell that she hated my guts and wanted no more of me.
Aggie had discovered that the way to cope with me was through Valium. I could always tell when she was whacked because her speech was thick and her spit pasty.
I tried looking at her, but she wouldn’t look back. She was talking to the rear of the driver’s seat, below the bulletproof partition, where there were theatre posters displayed. Her words were coming out in measured, fortified calmness, and she seemed to be absorbed in the old City Of Angels ad more than the other two signs.
She’d been having an affair with a colleague for almost three years. A PE teacher. I knew about it. His nickname was Buddy. Bernard Williams. An ex-basketball nigger from NYU. Six-foot-five-inches tall. I didn’t mind the black part that much, what I hated was the mendacity and deception. The ease with which she backed away from our marriage.
Agnes started with the guy while I was in the hospital for my second trip. I got home after 28-days and was instructed to sleep in the living room on the hide-a-bed. She’d lock the door to our bedroom as she’d go in and out. She announced that she had taken a job at night and would be coming home late.
In a few days, I figured the deal out, but the shame of a beaten dog kept me quiet. I was the reprobate husband. The bad guy. Agnes was paying the bills so I’d lost my right to complain. It was my choice, I could sleep on the couch or in the street.
At first, watching her affair tore my guts out. But then it became a reason to drink. I knew she was getting even, like the time she burned the only copies of several dozen of my original poems because, once more, on a binge, I had stayed away for a week.
There was rage and depression. Once or twice, drunk, I confronted her about Buddy, but all she did was lock herself in the bedroom and call the police.
We crossed the bridge at the end of the Grand Concourse and the cabbie swung onto the Harlem River Parkway, then picked up the FDR Drive. Ten minutes later, we were at Sixtieth Street and Second Avenue, a cross-town street, two short blocks from our apartment.
I wanted to
feel
about my old man. To have a reaction to the news of his imminent death. I waited for an emotion, but it didn’t come. I was surprised by my numbness. Then I realized that I had come to care about nothing.
The cabbie pulled to the curb and got out to get my bag from the trunk. Agnes was keeping the cab and going on to work. “Do you realize that you haven’t spoken a word to me this whole ride?” she said.
I got out, too, but before I closed the door I leaned my head back inside. I said, “Thanks for picking me up.”
The cabbie was behind the wheel again.
“That’s it?” she said.
“I said ‘thank you.’”
“Fuck you, mister.”
I watched the cab pull away and picked up my bag and walked back uptown toward our apartment.
It was cold for December. Maybe fifteen degrees. I didn’t want to call California to find out if my father was alive or dead. I didn’t want to know. I hadn’t had a drink in twenty-six days.
I dropped my stuff and walked back across town toward the Lexington Avenue subway and the liquor store. There was a choice to make—I was owed two checks at the unemployment office, but I was almost out of cigarettes and there wasn’t enough money in my pocket for subway fare to go downtown, get cigarettes, and also buy a half pint of Ten-High to hold me over until I got the checks. I needed the drink right away, cigarettes could wait. No choice after all.
I phoned. Jonathan Dante wasn’t dead yet. We would make the trip.
Agnes took her Valium for air travel too. Planes scared her, so out came the blue bombers. By the time our cab had gone from mid-town to Kennedy Airport for the 10:00 a.m. flight to L.A., the two she’d taken with breakfast had kicked in. Wobbling and walking, she followed me through the terminal, then nodded off while we were waiting to board the plane.
As soon as we were in our seats and the plane was off the ground, Aggie was asleep again. I knew that she’d be out for hours. It was fine with me. I folded both trays down and ordered two sets of double Jack Daniels’ and paid with a ten dollar bill from my wife’s purse.