Chump Change: A Novel - By Dan Fante Page 0,2

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.