86'd: A Novel - By Dan Fante Page 0,4

night life and years with the booze had taken their toll.

“Is that for me?” he asked, pointing at the brown envelope on the table.

I nodded and pushed it toward him. I couldn’t help but notice that this guy and his Buffalo Bill act were ideally suited to a city composed mainly of status junkies and now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t flimflam sincerity.

After ordering eggs and green tea and taking a quick cell phone call, Koffman gave my résumé a ten-second once over then looked up. “Soooo…you drove a yellow cab here in Los Angeles for over a year?”

“Yeah. Correct,” I said. “Long hours. Lousy pay.” Then I went on. “There’s a limo job there too—underneath the taxi job.”

“Right, okay, here it is. A private-party chauffeur position. Part-time. You drove for an ex-CEO?”

This of course was a lie. From here down everything I had written on the résumé was an exaggeration or outright bullshit. For me it had always been easier to make stuff up than to remember the sequence of an unimportant and ridiculous job or its dates in history.

“A retired guy,” I said. “He traveled with a large, stinky, fifteen-year-old Irish setter. The dog had a bladder problem and the old guy never bathed him. He died—I mean the guy died—probably the dog too. Anyway, I’m not a big Irish setter fan.”

Koffman seemed amused. “The important thing is that you know the L.A. streets.”

“Hey, I know the streets. No problem.”

“Okay, okay—here we go; you managed a staff of three to five at Kassim’s Worldwide Precious Metals and Rare Coin Consortium in…in Manhattan Beach.”

“Right. Correct.”

“Long name. What sort of consortium?”

“It wasn’t a consortium at all. This is L.A. I guess the guy just needed a flash title for his telemarketing boiler room.”

“Reason for leaving?”

“Reorganization, I guess you’d call it.”

“Reorganization? Ha-ha. You mean the place went tits up?”

Suddenly I had an overwhelming need for a drink. For the last thirty seconds I’d been controlling the onset of leg tremors by tightly crossing the fuckers at my ankles. Even now the heebie-jeebies appeared to be traveling their way up my body to my upper torso. Maybe I was about to get a sudden spell of the flyaways because my left hand had just begun to shake—my coffee cup hand. I slid it under the table then pinned the prick beneath my thigh. “Right,” I said. “Bad management.”

“I see,” said Koffman, whose hands never seemed to shake at all.

Now I was dizzy. My throat was dry and I needed air. My heart began slamming itself against the inside of my rib cage. The guy in the polar bear uniform leaned closer. “Are you okay?” he whispered. “You’re trembling.”

My mouth formed words but the lips refused the marching orders. I had to settle for wagging my head up and down. My full attention was fixed on the glove compartment of my Pontiac—parked at a meter fifty feet away—where I’d left my backup half-pint of vodka. I was now acutely aware that I’d be unable to endure another four seconds of this moron interview. I needed an excuse—any excuse—to get up and leave the booth.

“Bruno, what’s up? What’s going on? Are you…hungover?”

Unlike me David Koffman was an excessive episodic drinker and not a day-to-day juicer. There was no way he could not get what was going on with me. I thrust a trembling thumb down on top of the résumé and was finally able to blurt some words. “Bottom line,” I said, “that company was a total Chinese fire drill. If you want to know, the guy…the owner, was a foreigner. He spoke about five words in American. He wouldn’t know a cold call from the goddamn La Brea Tar Pits.”

“I see. I understand.”

“Swell. Can we move on?”

“Okay, but just below that in your job description you write that you ran a staff of three to five people? I’m confused. Was it three or was it five, or what?”

Sweat was now soaking my hair, forehead, and armpits. For some reason—beyond my control—my voice was getting steadily louder. I pointed back down at the page. “Confused! I was a supervisor,” I barked. “I managed trainees. Some weeks there were three and some weeks there were more than three—sometimes five. Sometimes more. Sometimes two. Sometimes one. Sometimes seven. Okay? Jesus Christ!”

“Okay, fabulous. And you did this supervisor job for how long?”

“It’s there in front of you typed out in bold New Courier twelve-point font!”

“Right, I see it. Two years. And what products did you sell?”

“Rare coins! Valuable! Rare! Coins!”

“Why are you