86'd: A Novel - By Dan Fante Page 0,2

in close to his ear. “You and big Gretchen here must be having some pretty hot sex,” I hissed. “No kidding, I’d pay good money to watch you hump that shit.”

Once outside in the parking lot, after hearing the steel building door hiss closed then latch behind me, I lit a cigarette and sucked the smoke in.

The voice, the one always screaming in my head, telling me what a fool and an asshole I was, was getting louder. Worse all the time. Sometimes, like now, when I had quit or left a job or woke up drunk not knowing where I was, the goddamn thing was maddening—unstoppable. I decided that from now on I would give it a name. From now on I’d call the prick Jimmy.

At least I was free and reeligible for unemployment. I’d already paid my rent two weeks before so I decided to splurge on a few extras over the weekend: A paperback or two. A couple of bottles of decent wine. Maybe a movie. So I tore open my pay envelope to verify the amount: Five hundred and eleven dollars.

That’s when the real curveball cracked me in the center of my forehead. The goddamn thing was unsigned.

Now, completely out of money, with the sun beating in through the window of my ratbox room in the Venice house I shared with my ex-girlfriend’s eighty-five-year-old uncle, hoping to counteract last night’s excessive gin and tonic with gulps of milk and spoonfuls of peanut butter, I sat at my writing desk staring at the computer keys.

Through money worries and too much down time and the almost constant boozing that’d been assaulting my health and sanity, I’d taken Hubert Selby’s advice to heart and kept my commitment to “keep going.” I had written one good page a day—no matter what—do or die. For the last few weeks I’d scribbled in my notebook while in my car or in a bar or a coffee shop, then transposed them to my laptop. But there they were. All there in front of me. I’d done it. I’d kept my promise to myself.

So what if I couldn’t pay my rent. So what if I had to go back to another boiler room gig or even the taxi business. So what if Canonball Press didn’t publish Until the Fat Lady Sings for another two years or another five even. So fucking what! Through my madness and boozing and the pain pills I’d kept my promise to myself. I was writing.

But with the loss of my job I was beginning to be scared. Afraid of a bad crash. Over the last year or so I had been working five different doctors to get my pills; my Vicodin, my Halcion, and my Xanax. When I needed the stuff or when I would overdo the booze for days or weeks at a time, I offset my alcohol use with the pills to get relief. But that option was running out. I could no longer afford my scripts and I was scared.

Shutting down my computer I flipped open the Sunday L.A. Times to the employment section. When I got to “Drivers Wanted,” I stopped. The company name at the bottom of the box surprised me. Dav-Ko.

David Koffman picked up the phone when I called in and remembered me right away. I had worked for Dav-Ko in New York five years before as a chauffeur and part-time night dispatcher. In those days his company was in its infancy and little more than a gypsy cab car service that did periodic chauffeur jobs. Koffman really only had two limos. One was an eight-year-old dented, black, stretch Caddy with over a hundred thousand miles on the odometer and the other was a big blue Lincoln sedan that was more for personal use than the livery business. We stored them both and a half dozen beat-up airport vans and station wagons behind a gas station and ran the whole deal out of a three-bedroom brownstone apartment on Sixty-fourth Street and Second Avenue.

Koffman was a speed-talker, an ace business guy, almost seven feet tall, and an unashamed homosexual. For a year when I lived in Manhattan me and David’s cousin Stewie split dispatch duty while he spent his days taking people to lunch and drumming up new clients. Stewie and me wore the same size chauffeur jacket, so at night we’d take turns playing chauffeur, putting on a black cap and clip-on bow tie, jumping out of the car to open and close