Spitting off tall buildings - By Dan Fante Page 0,27

coffee or to the movies. Being drunk helped me make the decision that now was the time.

She had just refilled my coffee cup, then smiled, with her even beautiful teeth that looked as white as a priest’s collar. Spinning away, holding the half-full pot, she was about to start in the direction of the two women customers at the table. I tried to speak, to catch her attention, but the words were slow in coming, derailed at some remote cerebral switching station. So I tried something else, plan B, spontaneously lurching a hand out to stop her. That didn’t work either because somehow the hand collided with her arm, the one carrying the glass pot. It fell and broke on the floor.

LaVonne jumped back. Surprised.

Then things in front of me began toppling over and falling; my own cup and saucer, the salt and pepper shakers, a napkin holder. They appeared to be self-propelled, upending themselves and plunging from the counter to the floor. The last thing down was a stainless steel cream container, exploding against the linoleum, soaking LaVonne’s legs and waitress shoes, dispersing a wave of milk on top of the lagoon of steaming coffee and broken glass.

Then she slipped.

Things got bad after that.

I wanted only to help, to steady her. One of my hands came to rest on her firm right titty. There was screaming.

The women customers at the table had me wrong too.

Mister Dave came out from the kitchen as LaVonne was pulling herself away from me. Dave was Israeli. In his sixties but still healthy and well over two hundred pounds. He had a low tolerance for anyone who would put their hands on his female help.

The wind-up was that I was pulled and dragged out the door of the restaurant.

Chapter Fourteen

THAT MONDAY I reported back to work. Broke. Hung over and shaking, but sober.

Me and Ben Flash had moved on to another smaller state job on Park Avenue South. The offices of Building & Safety Administration. One floor in a tall building.

Even though it was a flat-fee assignment, I was in training so Murphy decreed through my supervisor that I’d be paid by the window only, less the fifty dollars I had borrowed from Flash.

My second day of work I washed twenty-eight panes. Both sides. In and out.

At the end of the job, after we’d packed up and were ready to leave and move on to our next assignment, Flash decided to let me in on a ritual he practiced. I got on the elevator with him and we took the car up to the top of the building. The fifty-sixth floor. Flash knew where the roof access was located, so we climbed out.

I followed him as he crossed to the edge. It was bitter cold. We looked down. Then he spit over the side. A big glob of phlegm and saliva. After he’d spit he leered at me. ‘Okay, Dante,’ Flash said. ‘Your turn. Go ahead.’

I spit too.

‘How’s it feel?’ he asked. We’d watched my stream disappear out of sight. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘It feels okay.’

‘You bet your ass! It feels great!’

The weather improved and the temperature went above freezing. Mid-thirties. By Friday of that week we were on a semi-annual contract apartment house uptown off Madison Avenue; an old high-rise relic built during Prohibition, complete with mean-faced concrete gargoyles poised to leap from the cornice of every floor.

It was a massive structure; seventy-seven stories. Fat Murphy assigned three teams of two men to the job. We picked numbers in the office for the section assignments. Flash and me drew the top twenty-five floors.

But the weather was warm enough to snow, so it snowed. We lost half of the first day. The group of us, all six, sat in the basement with the building security guy playing nickel poker and drinking coffee with wine from styrofoam cups. We had reported at 5 a.m. so by 6 the coffee was gone and we were at the wine straight from the bottle - Boone’s Farm and Triple Jack.

Around nine o’clock the temperature warmed some more and the snow stopped, so we went up. Flash was okay because he was always okay but I was drunk. So were most of the other guys.

I started on seventy-six and Flash took seventy-seven. We’d decided to alternate floors as we worked our way down.

I did my first few panes, moving along. I was much better with the squeegee and pole now. More confident. But this was an old, privately owned