Chump Change: A Novel - By Dan Fante Page 0,1

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