Mooch - By Dan Fante Page 0,2

Can I do that? On a man-to-man level? May I be permitted thirty fucking seconds of your valuable, priceless, sales-executive time?’

‘I’m busy, Dante. I’m in the middle of figuring the totals for all three teams. We’ll talk when you get here.’

‘You and I have spoken a lot on the phone, Mister Berlinski. Sometimes two or three times a day. Sometimes more if I got lost on my way to a demo and had to stop at a pay phone for directions. Okay? Correct or uncorrect?’

‘Bring the units in, Dante. I’ll make sure you get your check.’

‘I just wanted to say, Mister Berlinski, that almost every time after we’ve talked, after I’ve hung up, I’d get back in my car and I’d feel like I just finished interacting with a sour-faced sub-human cocksucker with the same empathy and interpersonal dexterity as one of the assholes behind the glass at the DMV Information Window. I regard you as a complete putz, Berlinski. I always have.’

‘No demo units, no check.’

I looked through my pockets. I had four dollars. Enough for a newspaper, a new pack of Lucky Strikes, and a container of coffee at the 7—11. I went back upstairs to my dorm room, took off my jacket and necktie and slacks, and threw them at the wall.

Yesterday’s shirt and my unwashed jeans fit my body like old friends.

On the floor in my closet on top of my father’s hand-me-down Smith-Corona portable typewriter I found my Yankees cap with the big ‘NY’ on the front. I slipped the hat on as protection against the heat. Jonathan Dante, my father, had been dead for eleven months. He died broke, broken hearted, collecting a stinking Writer’s Guild Pension and seven hundred and sixty-two dollars a month in Social Security. A forgotten screenwriter. I had returned here to L.A. from New York City to watch him die, to inherit this typewriter. Three months ago, my cousin Willie checked out too. Booze and an overdose. Crazy, fat Willie. Thirty-five years old. Two Dante funerals in less than a year.

Next to the typewriter, on the floor in the typing-paper box, was the only thing I had written and not thrown out since returning to Los Angeles: a short story called ‘Compatibility’. Twenty-five pages. I picked the story up and looked at the wrinkled title page, then back down at the typewriter’s bared black keys. They stared up at me like the eyes of frightened boat people. Hurling the pages back into the darkness, I slammed the closet door.

On the street, on my way to the store, I had an insight, a flash that penetrated my understanding. My real difficulty—my problem—wasn’t my depressions or my drinking or my job failures or even the unarticulated fear that I was a fucking insane whack. My problem was people. And they were located everywhere.

Chapter Two

IN ORDER TO live at the sober-living house where I lived, I had to not drink and attend three Alcoholics Anonymous meetings per week. At these meetings, I would hear reformed alkies stand up and blubber on about how great and miraculous their lives were without booze and drugs. How wonderful their new job was and what gifts from God and all manner of preposterous, come-to-Jesus bullshit. How they were now able to form lasting relationships or patch up the old ones with their separated wives and girlfriends and how their children had stopped darting behind furniture and fleeing to their bedrooms when they saw them coming through the front door. Tra-la-la. Etcetera. So forth. Not my experience. I was not what AA’s call a WINNER even though the WINNERS are supposed to be the people who haven’t had a drink all day. I was not some transformed, anointed, cured gimp, tap dancing my way through life and thanking God and the Twelve Steps for keeping him sober and saving his ass. Recently, I’d heard Chickenbone, our moron, sober-living house manager, giving an AA peptalk to one of the miserable new guys who was two weeks off alcohol and rock cocaine. At the end of his lecture, he looked the kid in the face and said, ‘You know boy, sometimes you’re the windshield and sometimes you’re the bug.’ I hate hearing pig snot like that. AA is full of that shit. Philosophical one-liners that imply that life on life’s terms has its ups and downs but will somehow all equal out in the end. Tell that shit to the guys collecting plastic bottles and soda cans pushing their